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!