Resettled

Well I’ve made it through the first week of classes, and now I can officially say…116 days to go! That’s right. After a couple of weeks of being pretty homesick (visitors, while wonderful to have, tend to have that effect on me after they leave), I finally got on top of things and my friend Cassi and I booked tickets home for the same day. I’ll be home mid-May, and chose to land at JFK in the middle of the afternoon instead of before 6 am. Somehow I see that as more pleasant for all parties involved in picking me up. I know I seem excited to come home, and I’m definitely psyched that I have less than four months left until I get to go home. But at the same time, now that I have that ticket in hand, I think I’ll be able to enjoy the last almost-four months even more. I know exactly how much time I have left, there is an end in sight, so now I can (hopefully) buckle down and focus on school and friends here and enjoying the opportunity I have to live over here. Temporarily. (For the record: Google does the countdown for me.)

I really like my classes this semester so far. Not all that much changed, but it feels very different. Instead of having a rabbinic literature history lecture and two rabbinic literature classes every week, we have Bible three times a week. I think my bible professor is one of the best teachers I’ve ever had, and I am so excited to have him so often now. He’s also my biblical grammar teacher, so everything is finally coming together. The grammar made sense to me last semester because I can follow specific rules and logic, but now we’re actually applying everything, so I am, of course, really enjoying that. The class is also what I’ve been waiting for since college. In college, I took “faith busters (that's the nickname),” a course on early Christianity that approached the development of the religion and the New Testament from an entirely historical point of view. I loved it, and was disappointed that there was no parallel class on Judaism. I finally have it! It is definitely a bit jarring to be sitting in rabbinic school and dissecting bible text without mentioning God, but it’s also fascinating to delve into the text and think about how it all came together. Also, the bible we use for class is Hebrew-only. It’s pretty exciting that in most places, I can understand most of what’s going on! The professor’s favorite exercise when we start a new passage is to read it verse by verse and translate from biblical Hebrew to modern Hebrew. (Think: translate from Shakespearian English to normal American English.) It’s an amazing way to reinforce the grammar we have learned and to see the weird way the bible phrases things, but it’s also really nerdily cool that I can understand both biblical and modern Hebrew!

I also have a new history class that I think I’m really going to enjoy, because it’s a subject I really haven’t had before. I’m taking a class on Islam and the Arab world, and it’s being team taught by two professors. One of them I had as an educator on one of our trips, and I know he’s great. The other I had for the first time on Tuesday, and I thoroughly enjoyed the class. Basically it’s going to be two separate classes on sort-of-alternating weeks. One professor is teaching about the religion of Islam and its history, and the other is teaching about the Arab world from a sociological-political point of view. I’m really excited!

My other new class is a once-a-week Hebrew literature class. I am still on the fence about it, although I think I’ll come around. The teacher likes to move at lightning speed, which I think will be a theme of the semester, since my bible/grammar teacher does so as well. But even though I felt almost out of breath at the end of class, I realized I did understand what was going on, and that is always nice. We’re starting with children’s stories, and reading them, discussing them, and talking about what makes a story a children’s story. It’s not just the level of Hebrew, although that helps. But reading a story in rhyme in a foreign language is not easy. It’s hard to stay in rhythm when struggling to read words correctly!

Our Wednesday Israel Seminar this week focused on Reform Judaism in Israel. While it is now the largest Jewish movement in the US, it is a small fraction of Israeli society and struggling for recognition and its place here. After a lecture by our dean, we got to split off to go on different field trips to see different Reform communities first hand. I went to a synagogue in Mevasseret, in a Jerusalem suburb. Coincidentally, it is the same area where I volunteer with the Ethiopian absorption center every week, but the groups are almost entirely separated. The whole area of Mevasseret used to be cheap land, close but not too close to Jerusalem, very close to the pre-1967 border with Jordan and therefore less desirable, and where the government built lots of low-cost housing for immigrants. But after gaining Jerusalem, there was lots of urban sprawl, and it became a much more attractive location. The immigrants were slowly replaced by upper-middle class Israeli natives and Anglo immigrants, and costs went way up, and it’s now a really nice neighborhood. Except that there is still this absorption center right next to the expensive housing, and the two populations more or less ignore each other. So I was excited to see the rest of Mevasseret. The contrast is fairly unreal.

We got off of our bus to be greeted by the community’s rabbi, who happens to be the first native Israeli woman to become a rabbi, and she had quite a story. She took us first to the preschool/kindergarten, and the kids were of course adorable. It is exactly as one would expect a Reform preschool to be, with lots of Jewish content on the walls, a basket of kippot that the kids and their families decorated, and that they all, girls and boys, wear when they’re doing specifically Jewish activities, and lots more. Amazingly, because it’s not an Orthodox school, this school is classified as secular by the Israeli government. Israel is not so good at a middle ground, which is part of why Reform Judaism struggles here. The most fascinating part of the preschool was the bomb shelter. I know that sounds weird. Schools here are required to have them, and they are frequently part of a tour. (We had a tour of the HUC shelter over the summer. I sincerely hope I will never need to be in there again.) Over the summer, during the Lebanon war, the school had to have bomb shelter drills, and the kids freaked out. They were being packed into this little, undecorated room that was generally just used for storage. It was scary for 3, 4, 5 year olds! So the synagogue realized that they needed to make it a less scary place, and they have certainly done an impressive job. The room now has several murals on the wall, with more to come. There is a big Noah’s ark that the kids can play in, a TV with movies, and lots of pillows and blankets. They also have started using the room regularly, so that it’s not a new place if it ever becomes necessary to use it: they have some quiet time in there almost every day, so it has become a haven for these kids even though hopefully it will never need to become a physically safe space for them. It was fascinating to hear about the process of making it into an attractive place and seeing how successful they had been.

I think I’m now all the way back into my routine, although my study skills, as usual, could still use some work. Hopefully this weekend, now that I have a really long to do list again, I will get back on track and remember that I’m a student with lots of work to do. At least until the next waves of visitors show up in a week and a half! Thanks for all the comments on the last post:)

Shabbat shalom!