Freedom!

Another whirlwind week, but now I’m on vacation…for two weeks! There are most definitely perks to a Jewish school!

A fun fact I learned this week, in my ongoing amusement with the Hebrew language: the word for “tie.” (As in, Israel and England played their soccer game to an exciting 0-0 tie.) The word for that outcome is “teekav.” I know that doesn’t seem that amusing. But you might remember that I have previously laughed at this country for pronouncing their abbreviations. It turns out that teekav is an abbreviation, for the phrase “Tishbi y’taref koshiot v’she’eilot.” Meaning, “Elijah (the Tishbite, as you might recognize from the Havdalah song) will decide difficulties and questions.” That’s right. It doesn’t get much less religious than international soccer, unless you consider it a religion unto itself, but nonetheless the word for an equal outcome has incredibly religious overtones. I’d be curious to know how many Israelis know that the word is an abbreviation, and what it really means.

This past Tuesday turned out to be our last week visiting our Ethiopian family. We realized that our Tuesdays for the rest of the year are quite limited, with two off for Passover, and another off for Yom Ha’atzmaut, Israeli Independence Day, another HUC program the next Tuesday, and then exams! We decided that the rest of our Tuesdays would be so interrupted that it would be better to finish before Passover. I do not think any of us realized how hard it would be to say goodbye! It was really sad to say goodbye to this family who we have gotten to know and spent so much time with this year. It was also hard, because we aren’t sure that all of them understood that we are not coming back. Karen took a bunch of pictures the last night, and once they are posted, I’ll pass them along.

I felt my Hebrew improving somewhat, but this week was still stressful. I had three papers to get turned in before Passover break. All three of them had to be written in Hebrew. None of them were long papers; I think they ranged from 250 to 500 words. Nonetheless, they took me a long time! Among other things, I learned that my spelling is fairly atrocious. Happily, I got a Hebrew word processing program, so that I no longer have to handwrite, edit by hand, and rewrite. Even better is that the program is for English speakers, so all of the menus are in English, and there is a Hebrew-English dictionary built in. Needless to say, my Hebrew typing is rather slow. That’s pretty frustrating, but after typing so much in the last week, I’m getting a little better. I got confused when I was typing in Hebrew, and then someone would IM me, and I would be typing in English, and then going back to the Hebrew, where the letters are in completely different places. I prefer the speed of typing in English.

Wednesday we had our weekly Israel Seminar. We started with a somewhat depressing speaker who discussed the value of the contact theory. She basically told us that the idea that Arab and Israeli or Jewish groups spending time together will eventually bring peace has not proven even a little bit true, and that for even a little bit of progress, the groups need to spend huge, ongoing amounts of time together, for at least a year. After the speaker, we had a group of Arab women who came to the school to meet with us, of course. About a month and a half ago, we visited the Arab village of Baka al Garbyiah and met with students there. This week, they returned the favor and came to our campus. Apparently HUC goes to visit them every year, but this year was the first time that a return visit was arranged. A couple of groups met with the same people as last time, but most of us were in different groups with different people. Last time, we were explicitly told to ask hard questions and really ask about one another’s political opinions and takes on issues. This week, we were given no such instructions, so most groups did not really get there. We had a great time! My group was four HUC students and two Baka students, Fatima and Iman. Both of them were religious, wearing head scarves and full length dresses, so many of our questions were about religious differences. We took a walk through a pretty neighborhood, sat in a park, and when we got cold, went to a coffee shop. Among other things, they told us that they only dress in this fashion when they are out in public. At home, “we dress like you, without the scarves, and in jeans.” That was so interesting to hear! They also passed around pictures on their cell phones of themselves without the headscarves, when the one guy in our group went to the bathroom. It’s apparently not a problem for any woman to see them that way, only men, so they wanted to share the pictures with us. They also said that any discrimination against women does not come from religion, but rather from tradition. The women have their place in their culture, and it is not mandated by religion, but it is very deeply entrenched in their culture. They are Israeli, with Israeli citizenship and passports. I asked one of them while we were walking about identity. Did she consider herself Israeli, Arab, Palestinian, or a combination? She sees herself as an Arab who lives in Israel. She loves this country. It is her home. We also talked about relationships, kissing boys (only in private, and only after engagement), family (one of them is one of eleven siblings!), and lots of other things. It really felt like an afternoon of getting to know new friends, and was definitely a highlight of the Israel Seminar program! We all exchanged email addresses and hugs before they got back on their bus.

Everyone in Jerusalem is now deep into Pesach cleaning. A lot of kosher restaurants will close for Shabbat tonight, and reopen on Passover, with newly cleaned kosher for Passover kitchens and menus. Even the bakery where I bought my challah this morning is cleaning out for Passover. Apparently they do kosher for Passover baked goods! The challah and other bread products were all being sold from a table outside the door to the bakery. Inside there was a lot of cleaning going on.

I’m on vacation! We had daylight savings last night, and finally sprung our hour forward, so I'm back to being 7 hours ahead of the east coast. The weird part about daylight savings here is that you lose an hour of sleep, but really do gain an hour of day, and with the clocks changing on a Thursday night, I already feel it. The day is an hour longer, which means that Shabbat starts an hour later. Because all the synagogues here really start Shabbat services around sundown, service times change every week. I start an hour later today, so all of a sudden my short Friday afternoons have stretched out, and I'll be back to having a long afternoon, snack before services, and dinner at 8:30 or 9. I'm excited! I promise lots of stories and pictures when I return from my Passover adventure!

Hebrew Table

Back to back posts! I guess that by this point in the year you should know that that means one of two things. Either I have something really interesting that happened, and I don’t want to wait almost a week to write about it, or I have a lot of work to do and I don’t feel like doing it. In this case, it’s both.

For Shabbat dinner last night, I was invited to my friend Kim’s house. She warned me that it might be a Hebrew-heavy dinner. I’m not sure I fully grasped that idea. I arrived, and was greeted (in English) by Kim, her boyfriend, who is also in Jerusalem on an American program studying to be a rabbi, and a friend of hers from a college year abroad in Israel program. The friend made aliyah several years ago and now lives in Israel. We spoke in English, and I doubted Kim’s warning a little bit. Then the next guests showed up, two friends of Kim’s boyfriend from his summer ulpan. They came in and we introduced ourselves in Hebrew. That was the end of speaking English. They are studying to be ministers, and I was impressed with the breadth of their Jewish knowledge. Another friend from Kim’s boyfriend’s classes came a few minutes later. It turns out that these three friends were from Switzerland and Germany, and also studying here for the year. I never found out whether they spoke English well or not, but I’m guessing not. Hebrew was the common language, so that was the language used throughout the evening. Conversation flowed pretty freely, with some fumbling for words on all parts, some laughing corrections of grammar on all parts, and lots of patience, especially by the friend who has lived here for years and is really fluent in Hebrew. There was no sense of awkwardness that we were holding an entire evening in what was a foreign language for every single one of us. Even when Kim and I spoke to each other in our own conversation, we spoke in Hebrew, probably partly out of respect for the company, and partly because it is hard to switch back and forth! Either way, we never mentioned that we were speaking to each other in Hebrew; it just happened that way! We covered all topics. We tried to solve the peace process. We talked about families. We discussed our programs and classes in Israel. We talked about food. It was a typical Shabbat dinner, aside from the Hebrew thing. I was almost home when I realized that I was still thinking, more or less, in Hebrew.

Shabbat shalom!

Exhaustion

This week pretty much tired me out. I even skipped my early morning shuk trip this week for some extra sleep! (Well that, and I’m going away soon, so I decided I would finish what’s already in my kitchen instead of buying more this week.)

Sunday morning started the week with a celebratory sendoff. The annual Ride for Reform began that morning, and we sent off about 55 people who were going to bike the country spreading knowledge and raising money for the reform movement in Israel. 6 HUC students from my class participated, some Israelis, some older HUC students who came back for the week, and some rabbis and other people who flew in from the states. We sang some songs, blessed them, had a cute ceremony with the kindergartners, and went outside the gate to cheer them as they got on their bikes and started down the hill, en route to the first day’s destination, the Dead Sea. Unfortunately for them, the Dead Sea is the lowest place on Earth. Which means that much of the rest of their trip (which ended Thursday in Haifa) was uphill. It sounds like it was an amazing experience, and I look forward to hearing stories and seeing pictures from my friends who rode!

Tuesday afternoon, I had a meeting with one of my professors. We talked for about a half an hour, and the entire meeting was in Hebrew! Somehow now that I’m less than eight weeks from coming home (!), the Hebrew is really starting to come together. I’m getting more comfortable speaking it, marginally better at understand it, and I’m a big fan of that. One day this week in Hebrew class, we had very few people there. (Ok, that’s not quite accurate. For most of the week, there was fairly pathetic attendance.) On this one particular day, it just happened that the mix of people who showed up was the quieter people in the class. I loved it. It meant that we all really spoke a lot more than usual, and it was a nice change. I do like my whole class, but sometimes just having a small intimate class (I think there were six of 12 that day) can be a great change of pace.

Tuesday night I got to have dinner with Melissa, a friend from college, who was here on about a 4-day trip for work. It’s always nice to catch up with people from home, and I haven’t had any visitors for a month, so that was fun too. I’m looking forward to one more visitor in about a month!

Wednesday’s Israel Seminar this week was about the Israeli Knesset, their parliament. The Israeli government, in addition to all of the issues going on right now, is just structured very weirdly. There are 120 seats, and they is proportional representation, so a party who gains five percent of the vote across the country will get something like 5ish seats. The big parties these days have somewhere around 15-30 seats, which means parties have to work together to get anything done. It’s a very different and weird system. At the beginning of a term, the party with the most seats has to make a coalition, gathering other parties with not-too-different ideas to agree to mostly vote as a block. The coalition has to be formed, with at least 61 seats, before the government can do anything, and then that coalition tries to basically push through as much legislation as possible. Except that it’s still made up of all different parties, so often one party gets upset about something and leaves the coalition, and they have to scramble to make a new one all over again, or there have to be new national elections. Like I said, it’s a crazy system. To learn the system, we had mock-coalition building. We were assigned to parties, did research, and when we started the simulation, we were told the election results and set about making coalitions. It was pretty intense in the room, with everyone getting into their roles pretty quickly. There was eye rolling at presentation of agenda, complaints of back stabbing, and marginalization of fringe parties. Ultimately, we formed the scariest coalition possible, an extreme right-wing collection of parties which included all of the religious parties. I was part of one of those. It was fun, but we were all a little terrified of what would happen to Israel if that coalition really happened.

Last night, to end the week, I got together with a couple of friends. We made mom’s recipe macaroni and cheese, which came out good, if a little weird, given that there’s no such thing as good cheddar in this country. We sat and talked for a while, and then went out for a good, rich, chocolatey dessert. A good night!

Up this weekend: a Hebrew-speaking Shabbat dinner that I was invited to and am a little terrified of, but excited about, and lots of homework. Somehow I have three essays due this week. All three are supposed to be in Hebrew. Sigh. But…Four more days of school, and then I’m on a two-week Passover vacation! Belarus is just over a week away! Wow.

Another important thing: Happy birthday, Grandma! A big birthday hug in less than a month!

Surprise Understanding

Isn’t it nice when things just come together? My Hebrew teacher decided that it would be fun this week to bring in one of the students from the Israeli rabbinic program and let us “interview” him. It turned out to be someone who had run a program for us over the summer and who we had all met at least once or twice, which was nice. The even better part was that he was a native Israeli (and therefore inherently harder to understand) and not a teacher (and therefore not accustomed to speaking at a lower level or more slowly) and I understood a good eighty percent of what he said! I realize that he was trying to slow down somewhat for us, but by the end, he was excited about what he was saying, and he sped up a lot. And I still caught it! The next day the news on the radio kicked my butt yet again, but I’m sure that comprehending a real live Israeli must mean something. It did for me, at least!

Tuesday I gave a Hebrew presentation. Our teacher basically wants us to prepare a short speech, and then lead into a class discussion. They usually relate to something Jewish, because we’ve all realized at this point in the year that those are the topics that are going to get the class talking. The exciting part was that when I get my every-other-weekly essays back, they’re generally covered in red (or green or blue) ink. But when I finished the speechy part of my presentation, she told me I had done a great job! And Hannah doesn’t really dish out the praise so easily. So that was two points for Hebrew class this week.

Wednesday’s Israel seminar was a good one, talking about women’s issues in Israel. At this point in the year we’re all a little burnt out on the seminar, so it’s great that they found another good topic and a set of good speakers/visits. We first had a guest speaker from the Israeli Religious Action Center. (The center has the unfortunate acronym IRAC. Israelis pronounce acronyms as if they are words. It sounds a lot like a less-than-neighborly country in the area.) She was a great speaker. She talked about the place of women in the country, how they are treated, and about what would be expected, but she was incredibly engaging. One of the things she discussed was the group “women of the wall,” which is a group of women that has been struggling for years to be allowed to pray aloud, wear tallit and kippot, and read Torah at the Western Wall. Because it is an area controlled by the Orthodox, this is incredibly not-allowed, and it has been a fight. She described the current state of affairs as not so bad though. The group meets once a month, to pray really early in the morning at each new month. She said the police officer who watches them said that they can wear a kippah if it is one that resembles more of a hat, so they wear their giant kippot. They can wear their tallitot if they wrap them around more like scarves, so they do. And the group gets together to pray as proud women once a month. Unfortunately, a friend of mine has been going with this group, and she said afterwards that it is not quite how it was described. She said that anyone wearing a tallit wears a jacket on top, and that prayers are spoken incredibly quietly, as if whispering, with women huddled together and constantly looking around them to make sure they are safe. I agree with the group’s message, but it sounds that they are not having the most positive experience, and because they do everything they can to avoid conflict, one wonders whether anyone outside the group knows that they are there, and whether that spreads their message at all.

After the speaker, we split up to go to different sites to talk about more specific women’s groups. I headed to an organization that deals with issues of Jewish divorce in Israel. The problem, of course, is that issues of personal status (marriage and death being the big ones) are controlled by the ultra-orthodox rabbinate. Therefore, they decide who is Jewish. They also decide who can get a Jewish divorce. If there is no religious divorce, the couple is considered still married. Under Jewish law, neither part of the couple can get married again, but the man can father other children and carry on with his life anyway, whereas if the woman is with another man, she is committing adultery. The related problem is that men control who can get a divorce. A man can basically refuse to divorce his wife so that he does not have to give her any financial support. If the issue goes to court, it goes to rabbinical court, which is, of course, all men. All very conservative men who don’t like divorce, who don’t like to push other men to get divorced, and who don’t seem to have much respect for these women. We watched video footage of a rabbinical court telling a woman that the physical abuse she was receiving must not be that bad, or that while her husband had threatened her with a knife, he never did anything with it. It wasn’t a pretty movie. It’s not a pretty situation.

Earlier in the week, we had beautiful weather. It was in the 60s and 70s and beautiful. I was warm outside! I had my windows open! I was psyched that it was spring. Apparently I was wrong. This morning, before I had even gotten toothpaste onto my toothbrush, my roommate Karen was knocking on the bathroom door. “Jessica! It’s snowing!!” She did forget one vital step in the get-excited-about-snow procedure though: she hadn’t checked email to find out whether we still had school. Sigh, we did. The snow was beautiful, though, as I was looking out my window getting ready for school. It was less beautiful as it turned to a sleety mess just in time to walk through it. It continued changing from snow to sleet to rain to snow to random bursts of sunshine and back to rainy grossness all day long. It’s still going. It’s supposed to keep going, on and off, until about Sunday. I’m hoping this is Israel getting the last bit of rain out of its system until the fall. I understand the same weather pattern (beautifully and amazingly warm and sunny, followed by cold-rainy-wintry-gross) is about to turn on the east coast. Stay inside. Also, in the spirit of spring that I was feeling a few days ago, I posted some pictures of Israel looking springlike. The flowers don't look as pretty surrounded by slush.

Talk to you soon!

Vegetableier?

It’s Saturday night, and I go back to school tomorrow morning. Thinking back, I had a really good weekend! With Purim, I only had a three-day week, which is always nice.

Wednesday’s Israel seminar had an unexpected highlight. We were talking about poverty and food insecurity (a fancy word for hunger) in Israel and how it is approached in current times. There are so many more NGOs in this country than one might expect of a teeny country. I don’t remember the exact statistic, but it is something like a ratio of one per 200 people or so. There are a lot. It is partly because there are so many religious institutions, but it is also a reaction from the country’s socialist founding. In any case, we were looking at different approaches to poverty and more specifically food insecurity. We saw several different solutions: forming NGOs to address the problem, trying to solve the problem from the top, making it go away completely, and treating the symptoms, giving people food so that they are not hungry today. One place we visited was a private high school that runs a soup kitchen. The two high school seniors who spoke to us were quite possibly the most well-spoken teenagers I have ever seen, and their English was fairly amazing. It’s a safe bet that my Hebrew will never be that good. I think many of us were more interested in their school than in the soup kitchen. It is a religious school, but somewhat open: there are both religious and secular students who attend the school. The students (both wearing jeans) told us that they must attend services every day, but that they do not have to pray. They study Jewish topics, in mixed-gender classes, but being religious is not forced on them. They focus strongly on community service. We were intrigued. It sounds like a school we could visit as a study in its own right, rather than just as a sidebar on the study of a bigger topic.

Friday morning I broke one of my own rules. I tend to stay out of the Old City on Fridays. It is more crowded, because it is Islam’s day of gathering, similar to our Shabbat. But one of my classmates organized a tour of Christian sites, given by the director of the NFTY in Israel program, who recently earned his tour guide license. I decided that these are sites I would love to visit, and should visit with a tour guide because I don’t know them at all. So I went. About a dozen of us met in front of HUC, groggy, and started the day. (Well, technically my day had begun two hours earlier when I left for the shuk and supermarket. But I was still tired.) First fun fact of the day: in Israel, tour guides must be licensed. I knew that. But apparently, especially in the Old City, some Powers that Be walk around looking for guides who are guiding but not licensed. They can get in trouble. Guiding is serious business around here. We went first to a Russian church that apparently was the original entrance to the Church of the Holy Sepulcher. With various natural disasters, wars, and history in Jerusalem over a couple of thousand years, the church has been destroyed and rebuilt a few times, and one of them turned the church’s entrance around completely. After that, we visited a Protestant church, but we really just went to the courtyard. The point was to differentiate between the incredibly ornate, graphic depictions in one church and the beautiful, quiet spaces in another. Then we walked to the Church of the Holy Sepulcher. (All three were within 5 minutes of one another.) This is the site believed by most branches of Christianity (Protestants excluded) to be the spot where Jesus was crucified, buried, and risen. There has been a church of one kind or another on the site since around the mid-300s, although much of the current structure is “only” about a thousand years old, from around the time of the Crusaders. The church is fascinating. I had visited with Monica, but we really didn’t know what we were looking at, and it was nice to go with a guide. It was also a Friday though, apparently the day that Jesus died, and a popular day for pilgrimages. It was packed. The church itself is owned jointly (and in pieces) by all different sects of Christianity, many of which don’t largely exist in America: Catholic, Orthodox, Coptic (Egyptian), Ethiopian, and I don’t remember what else. The groups don’t always get along. In order to change anything, all the groups have to agree. There are numerous stories or legends about ladders that haven’t moved, light bulbs that haven’t been changed, and repairs that haven’t been made, simply because the groups cannot agree on who should do it. The building is amazing. Having visited so many synagogues, there are some aspects that are similar, like the hanging lamps. Those make sense from a time before electricity. But the figures and paintings and human images in a space of worship are incredibly foreign to me, and especially noticeable in a place like this one.

After our morning of church, the student who had organized the tour was heading to his favorite hummus place in Jerusalem, in the Muslim Quarter, on the Via Delarosa. A few of us went along for the experience…and food! It was delicious. It was a place where you tell the waiter more or less what you want (in a mix of Hebrew, English, and a few words of Arabic that Jon knew): falafel, kibbeh, and hummus. There are five of us. The waiter brought out the food a few minutes later, and a few minutes after that, it was demolished. It was fabulous. We also looked around when we finished. When we arrived at lunch, the restaurant was fairly empty. But if you measure restaurant quality by the number of locals who eat there, this one certainly rated highly; it was completely full when we left. We realized that the noon Muslim service must have ended while we were eating, and then everyone came in for lunch. I was full and ready for an afternoon of cooking…

Amy and Mary, two of my classmates, really like the cook Rachel Ray, and Amy has a stack of her magazines here in our apartment. They decided to have “Rachel Ray Shabbat,” where everyone coming to dinner would be given a different Rachel Ray recipe to cook. It was happening at my apartment; I decided to join the fun. I made “not-zagna,” which was basically lasagna ingredients (including a béchamel sauce!) but with regular noodles in a bowl, not layered in a lasagna. It was more vegetabley than I ever make, but it came out delicious. [For the record, Microsoft Word would prefer “vegetableier” instead of “more vegetabley.”] The rest of the meal was also impressively good. Everything was a fancier dish than most of us would normally make (fennel salad, salmon in a complicated sauce, squash and ricotta pizza, individual cakes with chocolate sauce and crushed candy topping…), but everything was delicious. I spent the afternoon in the kitchen with my roommates, who were also cooking for this dinner, and it was a lot of fun. And now I have leftovers for the week!

Today was a good Shabbat. I did lots of nothing in the morning, a little work in the afternoon, and then went to a wine/cheese/havdalah afternoon hosted by two visiting rabbis. It was a fun break to hang out with friends, catch up, and eat lots of delicious cheese. I made it a point to try each and every one of the cheeses. I still haven’t met a cheese I didn’t like. An afternoon/evening well spent! I then went out for dinner with a few friends, which I have decided I like doing on Saturday evenings before school on Sunday. (Equivalent: Sunday night dinner out at home.) It’s a nice way to stretch the weekend out a little before going back to the craziness of the week. And a great way to put off the last bit of homework just a little longer!

On that note, I need to go to sleep so that I don’t start the week too sleep deprived. Shavuah tov, have a good week!

Another Novel: Frustration and Fun

I’m on Day Four of my four-day weekend, and I’m going to be a little sad to see it end. But it has definitely given me much-needed time to catch up on sleep, work, blogging, and me-time. I think it might have given me the energy for the next push: make it to Passover. I’m going to Belarus in less than a month! Time is definitely flying. But not to get ahead of myself, the last week.

I had been saying for over a month that if I could make it to March, I would be fine. Regardless of number of days, February was a long month for us at HUC. The trip south was absolutely amazing and a great break, but we got back to one last week of complete craziness before things appear that they are going to calm down a bit. The trip south was incredibly relaxing, but it left us returning to school Sunday morning without a productive weekend. None of us had had any downtime or self-time for over a week, and that was going to become a problem.

Monday afternoon and evening HUC had committed all of the rabbinic students to attend a United Jewish Communities (UJC) program and dinner. As of Monday morning, we still knew nothing about the program except that it would run from 2:30 until 9, leaving us very little time to get anything done. During our class service Monday morning, someone asked for details on the program. The unsatisfactory answer told us about some of the work of the UJC, which was nice, but still told us nothing about what we would be doing for 7 hours later in the day. So we met on the HUC steps that afternoon with no clue what was in store for us. We walked over to the UJC building and took our seats, learning for the first time that we would be joined by students from other American seminaries in Jerusalem, including Conservative, Orthodox, and Reconstructionist students. After they arrived, we were spoken to for a while about the work of the UJC. They consider themselves to be a pluralistic organization that works with the different streams of Judaism and does a lot of philanthropy and outreach. It sounded like they raise a lot of money, much of it from rabbis, which was why they wanted to talk to us and make sure that UJC was on our minds from before we have money to give. They do a lot of good with their money. The talk was not particularly exciting, but we did get the impression that they were a positive organization.

After the talk, we were divided into three groups to go visit sites in Jerusalem that receive UJC money. One group went to see work an organization has done to make Jerusalem more handicapped-accessible, and it sounded like a worthy project. One group went to an absorption center to see what they do to make the process of moving to Israel easier, which also seemed like a good project. The group I was in went to learn about an organization that coordinates conversions for immigrants who are in the army. I had no opinion going in. It seemed like a weird program, but I didn’t know what to expect. We piled into an auditorium, and the facilitator started telling us about the program. Soldiers who have immigrated to Israel and want to convert are permitted to complete this course while they are in the army. It is an intensive process, they take time out of their service to do it, and they are never coerced. The conversion is through army rabbis, so while it is an orthodox conversion, they told us, it is significantly easier than converting in Israel outside the army. No red flags yet. The facilitator then told us about one of the graduates of the program. He told us to think about the movie “Schindler’s List” (which I still haven’t seen) and specifically, the scene near the end where two survivors get married at a concentration camp. This couple’s granddaughter, he told us proudly, is a graduate of this conversion program. SPROING! Red flag. He was telling us, with pride, that the granddaughter of two holocaust survivors converted to Judaism?! I immediately realized that I would hate the rest of the program. I tried not to hold it against the program itself that there were Jews being converted to Judaism, because Israeli law is Orthodox Judaism’s law, that Judaism can pass only through the mother, not the father. (In the Bible, it passes only through the father. Hence, Reform Judaism recognizes the Judaism of both parents. If either parent is Jewish, Jewish child!) They brought in a group of soldiers who were nearing completion of the program as a panel to answer our questions. As they were telling us about themselves, and soldier after soldier was telling about his or her Jewish upbringing, Jewish father, non-Jewish mother, I got upset. I hated this country for telling these kids that they were not Jews. I knew that I should not be upset with the UJC for supporting a program that tries to make the conversion process easier in Israel, and for going along with (ridiculous) Israeli law. Then the soldiers kept talking. We had been told that this conversion included information about all streams of Judaism, not just orthodoxy. Then we heard the soldiers speak. When asked about different streams of Judaism, one of them answered that although he grew up as a conservative Jew, he now sees Reform and Conservative Judaism as less legitimate forms of Judaism. When asked about the pluralistic nature of the program, one soldier answered that it was definitely pluralistic. Going into the process, he thought there was only one way to be an Orthodox Jew. Now that he was almost done with the course, he realized that there were many different types of Orthodox Judaism. Needless to say, the HUC students did not leave this part of the program very happy. But it was only about 6:00 and we had another few hours to go.

We were put on a bus to go to Yeshiva University, the Orthodox school, who was hosting us for dinner. We had already been told quietly that there would be an evening service, and there would only be a service with separate seating for men and women, not one with mixed seating as we pray in the Reform and Conservative movements. Well after the conversion program we had just experienced, that was definitely unacceptable. We arrived at YU before the other two buses, and were told that there was time for an evening service for anyone who wanted to pray, with instructions to head to the sanctuary with its separated seating. A group from HUC and JTS (Conservative) immediately decided we were having a mixed service in some way. To her great credit, a wife of one of the YU students went into the women’s side of their sanctuary and borrowed a big stack of prayer books for our service. We looked for a place to pray together, and we were told that we could not, under any circumstances, have a mixed-seating service in their building. Feeling incredibly welcomed and embraced, we shrugged, took the prayer books, and went outside. It was dark and raining. But we were not welcome to pray in our way inside, so they left us no other choice. We prayed outside in the dark, in the rain. As a reminder, this was a program that was supposed to bring us all together. Oops.

Around the dinner table, things improved somewhat. We were sitting with people from each of the schools, and we had pleasant enough conversation, once we all realized that we should stay away from topics with religious significance. A rabbi from YU got up to welcome us to their school. It was a little late for that, but a nice effort. Except that he wanted to extend a warm welcome to the “future spiritual leaders” of the Jewish community. A not-so-subtle reminder that not only was our prayer not welcome in their building, but he would also not recognize us as future rabbis. Needless to say, it was not a positive day or a positive introduction to the UJC.

The next day, I had made an appointment with the rabbi (and HUC alum) who ran the program the day before. I was so angry with the whole thing that I wanted to talk to him. It was an interesting meeting, but I can’t say I was entirely satisfied. He did say that the program would not be held at YU again, and that next year, there would be a space for different types of prayer. I still do not know why nobody thought of that before this year’s program. He tried his best to defend the conversion program, saying that he had talked to some soldiers in the program as well, and that they were not as extreme as what we had seen. Unfortunately, he also talked to people who were much earlier on in the program than the group we spoke with, which may account for the major differences. He defended the program as supporting an easier conversion in Israel, even if it was not perfect. (Perfect was his word.) I disagree. Why should money from a pluralistic organization go to fund Orthodox conversions, even if they are somewhat easier Orthodox conversions? Why couldn’t that money go to an organization working to change Israeli conversion? There was, and still is, ongoing conversation at HUC about this UJC program, and the fact that it may have sparked in us the opposite of what was intended. The UJC has a long way to go with our class.

Our Wednesday Israel Seminar was not particularly notable, but it was long. They took us to Tel Aviv to see how art shows impressions and definitions of a country and community. It was an interesting premise, but we spent far too long in the first museum, we were given an hour-long coffee break, and then went to another gallery late in the afternoon. Many of us felt that there was not nearly enough content in a day that stretched into the evening, when many of us were already feeling low on time and energy.

But I made it to March! Reward: Purim. As with many of the other holidays, Purim in Jerusalem is something completely different. To begin with, it is a day longer in Jerusalem than anywhere else in the world. (Jerusalem is a walled city. See the book of Esther, chapter 9, for the explanation.) So our Purim stretched out, and today is actually the extra day, Shushan Purim. The megillah reading was Sunday night, not Saturday night as it was in the rest of the world. But that did not stop people from celebrating early. Thursday night, the beginning of our weekend, there were already people out in costume. Saturday night, there was more of the same. And last night we were celebrating as well. We had a megillah reading at HUC, which was great. People really got into it and dressed up, and Phil and Josh did an amazing job of combining the service with the ridiculousness of Purim. A bunch of students learned the Esther trope to chant the megillah, and I was impressed as always. The megillah has a weird tune that doesn’t seem easy to learn. After the reading, HUC had a falafel dinner waiting for us, and then a Purim Shpeil, which was basically a series of skits about HUC not really relating to Purim at all. It was hilarious and so much fun. Highlight: footage of a lot of people taking turns pretending to be Seema, a professor with many notable mannerisms and a great sense of humor. She was there, and laughing hysterically the whole time as people imitated her ever-present unlit cigarette, the strong pronunciation of certain letters, and her ability to write on the white board and erase what’s coming at the same time. It was a lot of fun. Afterwards many of us went out to a bar to continue celebrating. I haven’t been out that much this year, but it was a great change of pace, and so much fun to see my classmates in a completely different setting.

Today: relishing my last day of freedom before going back to school tomorrow. That means doing the homework I have been putting off for a few days. And laundry. And other fun activities. I guess I should get started.

Also, pictures of my parents’ trip are posted here. Everything except “fall pictures,” which were a treat for me, are from their trip here. Enjoy!

South

I am way behind here. Michal and Mara have been on my case. (We motivate each other. Michal even dedicated one blog to me and Mara after we bugged her about not updating!) But…I am on a 4-day weekend, so get ready to read a lot. I’ll try to keep posts to short-novel length, so there should be at least a couple of them this weekend. First up: the HUC trip to the Negev.

We left for the south early last Wednesday (as in, a week-and-a-half ago Wednesday, the same day my parents headed back home). We drove south, sleeping on the bus as much as possible, stopping briefly at Ben Gurion’s grave, mostly to pick up our guides for the next few days. We went down to visit the grave; Ben Gurion wanted to be buried looking over his beloved Negev Desert, rather than on Har Herzl, which is like Israel’s Arlington Cemetery. Most insightful comment during our 10-minute see graves, bathroom stop, stretch your legs stop, although I don’t remember who said it: I wonder how Ben Gurion’s wife felt about being buried here. She hated the desert. She’s now stuck there for eternity. In truth, the desert is incredibly peaceful. Forget everything you think you know about deserts though. The Negev is not sandy, flat, or uninhabited. It is rocky, mountainous, and filled with desert animals and plants, and scattered kibbutzim and Bedouin villages. We also took a short 2-hour hike on the way south, getting us ready, sort of, for the next day’s hike.

We arrived at Kibbutz Yahel, our home for the next few days, in time for a brief tour, shower and dinner. The kibbutz is beautiful and remarkable. It’s one of the Reform movement’s two kibbutzim in Israel. (The other is Lotan, which we also visited. I’ll explain further down.) Yahel calls itself a desert oasis, and it truly is. There are flowers, trees, grass, and all kinds of plants growing on the kibbutz. I’m sure it would be easy to tell from above exactly where the kibbutz ends, because it goes back to looking like desert. They proudly told us that Yahel is a multi-million-dollar business. They grow pomelos, peppers, melons, onions, dates, and raise lots of dairy cows. We got a tour of the pomelo grove. What’s a pomelo? It’s the biggest of the citrus fruits, a little larger than a grapefruit. They have never been popular in the US, although they are here. They have an incredibly thick (at least an inch) skin. I had never tasted one, but did so out in Yahel’s field! It was really good, like a grapefruit but much sweeter; we were also eating the ones leftover from the harvest, so they were overripe and therefore sweeter. The desert kibbutz also feels like the last refuge of early Zionism. These people settled in the desert and literally made it bloom. They settle right on the border, and the location of several of the kibbutzim did help define Israel’s borders after some of the wars. While we were in the pomelo grove, we were told not to step on the road that is about 6 yards outside the pomelos. On the far side of the one-lane road was a dust track. If there are footprints on the dust track, the Israeli investigates them. On the other side of the dust track is the barbed wire fence marking one side of the border with Jordan. (There is a no-man’s land before Jordan’s fence.) That was the first time this trip that I could see into another country.

On Thursday, we were given a choice of two hikes. On our itinerary, they were billed as “medium” and “hard.” Apparently they decided the hard one wasn’t hard enough, so they made that the medium hike, and added a harder one. I went on the harder one. It was a great hike! We were hiking for 7 hours. We went up a mountain, across a mountain-time barrier, up some more, and then down for several hours. The time barrier was basically that there was one mountain range, but somehow through geological processes that are foreign to me, two parts of the range were offset from each other (possibly through an earthquake), leaving the newer rock exposed on one part, and the older rock on the other part. We were literally hiking on reddish-tannish sandstone, took a step, and we were on black granite/igneous rock. And then we kept going. On the top of the mountain, we could see down into Eilat, across the Red Sea into Jordan, and a little further down the Red Sea, into Saudi Arabia. By turning slightly, we could also see into the Sinai Desert of Egypt. We also proved, yet again, a universal truth: food tastes better on top of a mountain. Lunch wasn’t that remarkable, but it tasted SO GOOD. The hike was a challenge, especially for those of us who aren’t so excited about heights. On the way up, there were places where we were walking along a narrow ledge. There was a railing on one side to help. Except, the railing was on the mountain side, not the cliff side! The idea was to lean toward the railing, but I got pretty freaked out during that part of the hike. I had no idea what was coming. Parts of the walk down were through dry waterfalls. Water tends to fall in the most direct way, though. Straight down. There were places where we had to use handholds or steel rope to help navigate the way down or across the side of the cliff. I had a lot of trouble on one of them, when I realized that I was holding a rope on my right, I could not find where my feet should go next, and turned to see that a wrong step or letting go of the rope meant a really, really long fall with an ugly splat at the bottom. But our guide was amazing, and she took me through it, helping me find the invisible places for my feet. And since I was right near the front, she then helped the next 40 people through it as well. We stayed there for a while, until everyone got across and down this one part, which was certainly the hardest part of the hike, although it was not the only place where we waited for everyone to get through before moving on. We felt good and tired after this one!

And then we arrived at our next destination: the fake Bedouin tent. The idea of the tent was to get an idea of Bedouin culture. Except that this tent is a tourist site, run by Jews. The food is kosher, there was a bar with alcohol and ice cream, there were bathrooms right outside the tent with toilets and showers and a sink, and there was a mezuzah on the door. That means there was a door. And walls. Their food was really good, but the floor for the night was not all that comfortable. There were about 75 of us sleeping in one room. Most of us got up in the morning and decided we were too old for that.

Friday we visited the other Reform Kibbutz, Kibbutz Lotan. Lotan is an environmentalist’s dream. (Monica: you might have just stayed.) They run a lot of Israel’s recycling. They have a whole eco-village where they are trying new ideas. They have buildings and playgrounds made of trash. Seriously, they are trash covered with mud, and sealed with used falafel oil. We got to have the experience of making mud bricks. Dirt + sand + straw + water = gooey mess that actually dries into bricks. They have composting toilets. There is a toilet seat on top of a really deep pit. You do your thing, and then throw in some straw. And that’s it. There’s no flushing. The most amazing part: it doesn’t smell at all. And also, that someone thought this was a good idea. On our tour of Lotan, it sounded like they had a lot of amazing ideas. They are really trying to change the world, and you can smell the idealism in the air. (No, it’s really not the composting toilets.) But the pessimist – or the realist – in me is skeptical of how well it will work. Unlike Yahel, they don’t really make all that much money, and they keep the kibbutz running in part through government subsidies and donations. And yet, what they are doing is so admirable. I’m torn.

We left Lotan and its idealism and headed to Eilat, the city at the southern tip of Israel. We had a couple of hours to enjoy the beach and go snorkeling at their coral reef. I had never been snorkeling! The water was freezing though, and almost prevented me from getting in. The coral was beautiful, if a really small area for so much cold water effort. Aside from that, it was really nice to be on a beach for a little while. Even with the mild Jerusalem winter, I’m ready for spring! (Our whole trip south, it was warm, probably low 80s, during the day, and cool but beautiful at night. Jerusalem is still its confused mix of beautiful sunny days and cold rainy ones.)

Shabbat on the kibbutz felt like what Shabbat is supposed to be. We had a nice service, dinner with kibbutz members, although at separate tables, and an inspiring (if a little cheesy) evening program. Two visiting rabbis who both have prominent URJ positions talked to us about their lives and their journey and advice for the future. The whole thing was also interspersed with songs. Saturday was so relaxing. We spent the afternoon sitting outside, playing cards, reading, and just enjoying a day of rest. A lot of us wish our Shabbats in Jerusalem were so relaxing, but the unfortunate reality is that when sitting in our apartments, with school the next day, it is really hard not to do work, and we tend to have enough due on Sundays to make it feel nearly impossible. Being away was a great break though.

Getting back to Jerusalem late Saturday night was almost disappointing. It was great to be back at my computer and in touch with the world, but we realized how stressed we all were when we left, and how relaxed we were when we returned. And then we got back, and everything we had to do came rushing back. But that’s another blog. Pictures are now posted of this trip! I didn't take all that many; I was concentrating a lot on not falling off of a cliff and things like that. Some of the pictures are from Michal and Mara. I'll add more if I find others. Pictures of the parents' trip will be posted once they get them to me!

Shabbat shalom!