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!