Never Forget

Has it been another week already?! I am definitely having an internal conflict right now, where I want time to fly until I get home, but I want to drag my feet a little and enjoy the last almost-month here before life intrudes again when I get back home. I like it here, and I miss home a lot. If only I could take my favorite parts (and people!) from both places and combine them…and leave out the stuff (and people?) I don’t get excited about…

Yom Hashoah, Holocaust remembrance day, was on Monday. In Israel, it is taken very seriously. For the 24 hours from Sunday evening until Monday evening, life is different. Radio stations play only sad music, if any at all. Many restaurants and entertainment venues are closed. Television stations mainly cover various Yom HaShoah related events. For a day, the whole country mourns the senseless loss of life. The most amazing part of the day came at 10:00 Monday morning. At school, we were scheduled to have a ceremony starting at 10:05. A couple of minutes before 10, most of us went out the front gate of the school and onto King David Street, a busy street through Jerusalem. At 10:00 precisely, the siren started. A horn-sounding alarm sounded around the country, from 10:00 – 10:02. Everything stops for 2 whole minutes. It seems like an insignificant amount of time, but it does not feel that way. People stop their cars in the middle of the road, and nobody honks at them. Most people that we saw actually stepped out of their cars and stood still for the two minutes, even the taxi drivers. Especially the taxi drivers. One came to a screeching halt in front of HUC when he realized the siren was starting. For once, all construction ceased. I could see construction workers on the top of an unfinished building, just standing there for two minutes. The only people moving, sadly, were the tourists with their cameras. I was not excited about their walking around, taking pictures of the indescribable scene, but I stood there and took in the moment. Two whole minutes of silence, to commemorate 11 million people slaughtered, 6,000,000 Jews. Two whole minutes of what felt like the whole world standing still, standing at attention.

The siren stopped, and I don’t think I could have counted to three before I heard a car honk. Apparently someone took in the moment for a moment too long. Life restarted. Traffic began creeping again. Construction noises overcame the city. But the mood had changed noticeably. We went back inside the gates and sat down in the courtyard for a ceremony with the entire HUC community: American students, Israeli students, faculty, staff, people I had never seen before. The readings were appropriate, there was a surprisingly long reading of names of people related to those in the HUC community, and there were some somber songs. But I do not think that the ceremony would have had the same impact if it had not started with two whole minutes of national silence.

Later that afternoon, we noticed that the day had turned beautiful and sunny, as are an increasing number of days here this spring. My Hebrew class plotted, and when our teacher walked into the room, we asked whether we could have class outside in the sun. Never one to turn down an opportunity to be outside in the fresh air (read: be able to smoke during class), we relocated to my favorite courtyard on campus. Unlike what happens too often with outside-in-the-sun classes, we really worked well, we just also got to enjoy the beautiful day. We read, analyzed, and discussed. I was also impressed by another move by this teacher right after we got outside. She started passing out the poem we were going to read, and we hesitantly mentioned that we had read it in our regular Hebrew class with a different teacher. She shrugged her shoulders, put it away, and pulled out a different poem. Amazingly, we had read that one as well. She hesitated for only a second, and told us to sit tight and she would be right back. She ran up to her office and came back to the courtyard 2 minutes later with another reading: an entire packet on Hatikvah, the national anthem. Of course, we all know this one, but there was a lot more to it than just the song we all know. We compared the original and modern versions of the poem, and various other aspects of the author’s life. I was really impressed at how well she was able to change the plan at the last minute, both relocating the class literally to make us more comfortable and changing the entire lesson plan to adjust to what we had already covered.

Grandma is here! She arrived with her synagogue trip in the middle of last week, and came to Jerusalem on Tuesday, but not before running into two of my classmates at Shabbat dinner in Haifa. (Monica will take this as further proof that I know 10 percent of Jerusalem, and maybe even Israel. I will continue to disagree, except perhaps in a 5 minute walking radius.) I went to do homework in the lobby of the hotel where Grandma’s group was due to arrive, so that I would be there with a hug when they walked in. Since Tuesday, we have gotten to spend some time together and share some of my favorite restaurants. As I’ve said a few times before, it’s always so nice to have someone from home come visit! I feel so much less far away with visitors.

Our Israel seminar this week was Presenting Israel. The idea was that we have been studying here and living here for almost a year, and when we arrive back in the US, we will have to find ways to share what we have learned. We visited the Ministry of Foreign Affairs and saw their Situation Room. There were 5 televisions on the wall, all tuned into different channels. Two of them were showing sports. In the conference room part of the Situation Room (Suite), I had a Dad-moment looking at the clocks. They had a wall with digital clocks and a city name below each one: Los Angeles, Washington, GMT (no cities there?!), Jerusalem, New Delhi, Tokyo, etc. I’m sure I’m missing a few (although I’m also sure there was nothing between LA and DC). I looked up at the 8 or 10 clocks and noticed that in addition to showing lots of time zones, the minutes were not all the same. I stared at them for a whole minute, and found that the ones furthest apart were about 57 seconds apart, and the others were spread out in between. I thought it was funny that in this very serious room in the Ministry, the clocks are apparently set manually. I’m sure it’s a pleasure to adjust for daylight savings, since each country seems to move time on a different day! We also had a speaker from the Shalem Institute talk about conflicts within Israel and how to deal with them. He basically acknowledged that there is an essentially unsolvable paradox in Israeli society.

In between, we were in our classes talking practically about how to teach Israel in the US. One of the most interesting parts of the discussion centered around what to teach. Do we act as ambassadors, discussing only the good parts of Israel and skipping over the problems? Do we talk about how the problems are being solved? Should we compare the problems to things going on at home? We all had different answers. I think that many of Israel’s problems are issues of any modern society: an income gap, minority issues, religion and state. The difference is that because this is Israel, the Jewish state, they also become Jewish issues. If Israel cannot figure out how to make sure that Holocaust survivors are not living in poverty, is that similar to America not taking care of its veterans, or is it a problem of greater Judaism? In giving a speech to a congregation, should we talk about the conflict between Secular and Reform and Orthodox, or pretend that a Jewish state is as ideal as it may sound? It was an interesting discussion, which has clearly generated more questions than answers.

Last night was fun. We had an HUC student-faculty soccer game. The students appeared to have the advantage at first, in both ability and numbers. Then one of the maintenance guys seemed to have called some of his friends, and 5 or 6 young Israelis in soccer jerseys showed up and joined the faculty team. There was no recovery, but there was a lot of fun. It was great to just stand on the sideline and watch and cheer. It was great to see the staff out of their regular roles. The Dean was the faculty goalie. It was fun to hang out with people who I don't often see outside of school. It was a good break. Towards the end, a few students decided to go distract the (reminder: Dean) goalie. They went to stand directly behind his goal and started singing at the top of their lungs. First up: "Echad, mi yodea? Echad, ani yodea...!" It is a very long Passover song, which apparently a lot of people learned all the words to after doing several years' worth of seders in the Former Soviet Union this year! Partway through the song, the students came down the field and scored our first goal. Success!! The cheering was loud, as if we had tied up the score in an important game, rather than making a small dent in the score at a fun activity. It didn't matter. A few minutes later (and after the faculty team scored again), the singers went back behind the goal. They started with "this is the song that never ends..." and moved onto "99 bottles of beer on the wall..." They hadn't made it very far into the song before the student team scored again. I was impressed! After the game a few of us went out for hot chocolate to warm back up. It's spring here, but only during the day! Nights are still pretty chilly.

I looked at my to-do list recently. I think that at this point at least half of it, if I include both the Homework side and the Other Things side, involves things that are oriented toward home. Making appointments for the summer, dealing with my summer job, and settling in Cincinnati (after the summer) have become real priorities, up there with writing three papers and doing my biblical grammar homework. I guess this really is the beginning of the end of the year.

Shabbat shalom!