Words of Torah

This year, each of us is required to give one D'var Torah, basically a sermon on the weekly Torah portion. Mine was today. I thought it went well, and I got lots of really positive feedback from my classmates. The professors/rabbis who critique us gave me some interesting things to think about; their suggestions mainly related to ideas I could have included if I did not have such a short time restriction, and the place of pop culture on the bima. (I maintain that it has one.) Because I have had a few requests (some of them from classmates!), my words are posted below. It's long, so I'm going to let it speak for itself. But if you have LOTS of time on your hands, my friend and classmate Michal and I just added links to each other's blogs. She updates frequently, always has interesting insights, and is heading to Cincinnati with me next year! Enjoy...!

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בקש שלום ורדפהו. In Psalm 34, we are instructed to seek peace and pursue it (Psalm 34:15). The judge Gideon tells us that one of God’s many names is Adonai Shalom, God of peace. Masechet Derech Eretz Zuta tells us: Great is peace, because all blessings and prayers conclude with peace. We are a people obsessed with peace. We like to make peace, keep peace, and even run after peace. In Divrei HaYamim alef, we learn that God did not permit King David to build the Temple in Jerusalem, because he was constantly at war; peaceful King Solomon built it instead. Even the patriarch Jacob fled from his home rather than face the possibility of war with his brother Esau. And here in this week’s Torah portion, Be’shalach, we arrive at the pinnacle of the Exodus story. The people finally escape from Egypt, cross the Sea of Reeds to safety, and sing a song of Thanksgiving to God: אשירה ליהוה כי גאוה גאה; I will sing to the Lord, for He has triumphed gloriously (Exodus 15:1). And then the Israelites move on, wander in the desert, leaving peace in their wake and eventually settling peacefully in the Promised Land. Except…that’s not exactly how the story goes. In the midst of the Song of the Sea, praising God for rescuing the Israelites from their Egyptian oppressors, we heard today: יהוה איש מלחמה - יהוה שמו. Adonai is a warrior. Adonai is His name! All of a sudden, after receiving one miraculous rescue from the peace-loving God, this peace-loving people lauds Him as a great warrior. A man of war! Our teachers have long struggled with this militaristic aspect of Shirat Ha Yam. How can we seek peace and pursue it while we are praying to God the warrior? Why is being a strong warrior suddenly a good thing? Maybe it is precisely out of this contrast that God’s divinity emerges. Although God is a warrior, God does not fight dirty. According to Rashi, the second half of this verse, Adonai shemo, teaches us that God does not fight with traditional weapons of war. God uses only God’s divine name, and the battle is won. Except that with all due respect to Rashi, God’s name alone seems to be quite destructive on the shores of the Red Sea. After all, as we read today, “Pharaoh’s chariots and his army He has cast into the sea; and the pick of his officers are drowned in the Sea of Reeds.” Whether the Egyptians were defeated by traditional weapons or the terribly awesome divine name, they did not fare so well. The God of peace and compassion has seemingly been replaced by the vengeful God so rejected by the Reform movement. In all daily Jewish prayer, including Mishkan Tefilah, God has another warlike name, Adonai צבאות, literally God of armies. Open Mishkan Tefilah to Tsur Yisrael, Kedushah, or Ma’ariv Aravim. Read the English translation of these prayers. Notice the italics in the middle of the translation where it translates “Adonai Tzvaot” so literally as “Adonai Tzvaot.” Every single day, although we may not realize it, we continue to pray to this God of war. We have prayers for peace interspersed throughout our service, but the heart of the tefilah includes more than one mention of God’s warlike attributes; we simply choose not to acknowledge them. But this verse from Shirat Ha Yam, Adonai ish milchama, Adonai shmo, shows us a way to come to terms with this violent image of God. God is not only a warrior. Masechet Sanhedrin (39b) gives an interpretation of what happened after the Israelites were safely across the Red Sea onto dry land. The Egyptians have just been swept up in a massive tidal wave, and the angels begin singing God’s praises. God stops them. “מעשי ידי טובעים בים ואתם אומרים שירה לפני?!” “The works of my hands are drowning in the sea, and you sing a song before Me?!” God is not impressed. Sure, God just killed an entire Egyptian army to save the chosen people, but that doesn’t mean God is happy about it. Sometimes even God has to do what has to be done. And so the words Adonai ish milchama are followed by Adonai shemo. Adonai is God’s name. And the rabbis teach that the name Adonai, in contrast to Elohim, encompasses the attribute of compassion. S’forno teaches that this battle between God, fighting for the Israelites, and the Egyptians, was ultimately a fight between good and evil. If not for the destruction of the Egyptian army, the whole world would have been destroyed. In this case, the destruction was actually a necessary element showing God’s great compassion. יהוה איש מלחמה - יהוה שמו. In Biblical writing, we are constantly looking to see what is not written. Here, it’s a conjunction. God is a warrior, BUT God is His name. Or alternatively, God is a warrior, AND God is His name. But there is no conjunction in this verse in the Torah, and it is troubling to us. It is disconcerting, because showing several opposing qualities at once is something humans have not figured out yet. But God is always a few steps ahead of us. Unlike a human king, Rashi points out that God can embrace two attributes at once, even when they contradict, as the attributes of רחמים and דין, compassion and justice. God can make war compassionately, or remain merciful in the midst of an ugly battle between good and evil. In a moment of insight from a more recent source, DreamWorks studios, Shrek tells Donkey that ogres have layers, like an onion. Similarly, humans have layers and facets, revealing different parts of ourselves at different times. And if humans and ogres have different attributes that show themselves under different circumstances, then God, in whose image we were fashioned, how much the more so. But unlike our one-at-a-time layers, God’s facets can sometimes shine all at the same time. Ultimately, the Song of the Sea is full of tension, as Aviva Zornberg points out. The people are overwhelmed by the experience, thankful for their freedom, mournful of the loss of everything familiar. The Mekhilta, our most ancient midrash on Shemot, reports that even the slave women, those Jews who were the least enlightened and educated, saw more on the shores of the Red Sea than the prophet Ezekiel saw in his lifetime. But the Israelites saw good as well as evil, death and life, a warring God and the hope for peace. We praise Adonai Tzvaot. We pray for peace. It does not always make sense to us, but we have to get beyond our human perspective and try to look at life from God’s point of view. There is always more than one side to the story. There is often more than one right answer. So God can be simultaneously the warrior and the peacemaker. We should absolutely seek peace and pursue it. We never know when God will decide to jump in and fight for us, as at the walls of Jericho, or when God will let us fight it out for ourselves. We run after peace, even though war sometimes pursues us, and we are hopeful and grateful, in awe of every aspect of God’s presence in our lives. We praise יהוה איש מלחמה, God the warrior, we pray for Adonai shalom, and we remember יהוה שמו, that even in the midst of conflict and destruction, God’s compassion is always lingering just under the surface of our lives.

Looking Forward

I’m now two weeks into second semester, and I think I’m ready for another vacation. Happily, the upcoming visitors should help me get through the almost-spring stretch more happily. I was outside this morning, enjoying the beautiful weather: today it’s sunny and cloudless, and somewhere around or above 60 degrees. I noticed that at the same time, it’s about 14 degrees at home. Granted, it’s the middle of the day here already and it was still earlier than anyone should be out-and-about at home, but still…that’s farther apart than our weather has been this year that I can remember. (Yes, Dad, I know you were at work already. I don’t really count your waking hours as normal though.)

My Google countdown tells me I go home in 109 days. As I was sort of hoping would happen, I’m having mixed feelings about those 109 days. I really, really am looking forward to going home and seeing everyone and being back in the US. But 109 days doesn’t seem very long, and there’s also still a lot more I want to do here. I guess I should get down to enjoying my next 109 days and getting everything out of this year that I want to.

That said, I’m also already looking forward to heading to Cincinnati at the end of the summer. The HUC deans of each of the campuses just visited us here in Jerusalem. We had more time divided by campus than we have yet this year, and I really enjoyed it. The dean of the Cincinnati program is great; he’s friendly, helpful, and easy to talk to. The group of us heading to Cincy is an amazing group; I like all of them, and I’m really excited that I’ll be spending the next four years with such a great portion of my classmates. There are also frequent discussions about visiting NYC and LA, to see my friends on those campuses, of course. When I met with the Cincinnati dean, he pulled out a goody bag that he had brought for each of us. I am now the proud owner of an HUC Cincinnati t-shirt, at least until I find someone who might fit into it more effectively; a Cincinnati Reds bumper sticker, which I would be really excited about if I liked baseball…or had a car…; a packet of chili mix, which I will definitely be making use of; a Procter and Gamble stress ball; and a piece of Grater’s chocolate. Which reminds me that I’ve been meaning to eat that chocolate. In a visit of a few days, we got excited about where we’re headed in the fall and got more information on the city that will be my home for four years. I’ll be leading Rosh Hashanah and Yom Kippur services at a congregation somewhere in the middle of the country. I’ll have a student pulpit, where one weekend a month, I’ll visit and be The Rabbi. I’ll be teaching Religious School again. I’ll also be taking lots more classes, which I have heard are much more intense than the Year-in-Israel program, but also in English. Not to wish away the rest of my time in Israel or the summer, but I’m also excited for everything that awaits me in Cincinnati. I guess it’s good to have lots of things to look forward to.

I also have one more thing to get excited about, that’s also in the future but not quite as far away. I’ve mentioned my Passover trip to the Former Soviet Union, at least once or twice. I got my group assignment and location assignment! My immediate group is my friends Josh and Hayley. Josh was in the Barcelona group in August and headed to Cincy with me, and Hayley is another fun friend who will be a great travel buddy. We are psyched to have been grouped together. They’re the people I will be leading seders and programs with, but we also get a couple of touring days at the end of the program with the other people in our country. There are about 12 of us going to the same country, and they’re all great! I know that sounds silly, but I’m looking forward to touring around with people who I don’t often spend tons of time with, but who I really like from the little time we have spent together. Where am I going? I am in the Polotzk-Vitebsk group, traveling in Belarus. Our free days at the end will be in Minsk. Feel free to start passing on suggestions of things to visit, and any information you may have on Minsk family history, PLEASE share!! There will be lots of pictures and probably lots of stories.

Now that I have about an hour before I have to get ready for Shabbat, I’m considering attacking some homework. Or responding to some of the zillion emails I have been neglecting. Or one of the other things on the page long to-do list. Shabbat shalom!

Birthday Special

A quick early morning post. HAPPY BIRTHDAY MICHAEL! Hope it's a great one, even though I'm on the other side of the world.

And...off to school.

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!

Feeling Rabbinic

Most importantly, after spending LONG periods of time on the phone, we have our internet back. It turns out that we’re supposed to have a static IP address, but the cable company decided it would be fun to change it anyway. At least the tech guys spoke English!

On Tuesday night, I stayed up late to greet Saroj! A good friend from college and post-college in DC, Saroj had just finished her Birthright trip and extended her trip for a few days to visit me and have more time on her own in Jerusalem. Even though both of us were completely exhausted, we hadn’t seen each other in the more than six months since I left, so we stayed up far later than we intended, just talking and catching up. Unfortunately for furthering my tour guide skills, she was about to be on her own for a few days.

HUC decided to ease us back into school this semester. We had to be back at school this past Wednesday, but classes don’t start until Sunday. Wednesday, Thursday, and Friday morning were spent in a colloquium discussing issues of Reform Judaism in America. Many people in the class, myself included, did not have high hopes for these few days. Happily, I was far wrong. In the last couple of days, it has finally felt like I am in rabbinic school! We spent our days listening to engaging speakers and discussing big issues in small groups. We talked about issues of Jewish affiliation, non-Jews in Jewish life, the past and future of Reform Judaism, and the formation and development of our own Jewish identities. In small groups, we discussed huge issues and discussion questions. What has been my most significant experience in shaping how I think about the meaning of being Jewish? Who has been the most significant influence on my Jewish development? How has Israel impacted my sense of Jewish identity? What are qualities that stand out in outstanding Jewish leaders we have known personally? How can non-affiliated Jews be encouraged to become part of Jewish life? How can non-Jews in Jewish families be integrated into the synagogue? Where is Reform Judaism in America headed? How can the increasing individuality of religion be combated by the synagogue community? I know that these questions may not sound that exciting to you, but for many of us here, it reminded us of why we came here in the first place, and it was hopefully a taste of at least some of what we will be doing when we get back to the program in the States. It may have been the first time this year that discussions from the classrooms spilled over into lunch time, dinner time, and other free time. It has really made us all think and get excited about our futures, and that has made me very happy!

The colloquium continued on Friday morning, which broke my usual Friday schedule of running errands in the morning and attempting productivity in the short afternoon before Shabbat. Instead I went to the end of colloquium in the morning and relaxed for the afternoon. Friday evening Saroj and I headed to HUC for student-led Shabbat services as a class with lots of visitors. The service was great. HUC does not hold Friday evening services most weeks, so my class scatters over Jerusalem, each of us attending the service we have grown accustomed to this year. For the last few weeks we have been on vacation. Friday evening, though, we gathered together at school for our own service, and it was really comforting. It was nice to be all together praying and celebrating Shabbat as a group, and I was definitely content for the moment to be exactly where I was.

After services, we were all going to different professors’ and administrators’ houses to be hosted for Shabbat dinner. Along with Saroj and a few of my classmates, I was heading to the home of one of the Hebrew teachers, a woman I had never met, although she will be teaching my class once a week this coming semester. I had heard that she was a tough teacher, but a great one, but nice with a great sense of humor outside of class. While I’m going to have to wait until Monday to validate the in-class part of that description, the other half is exactly right. We were warmly welcomed into her home, and had a delicious meal, learning that Jewish mothers are the same across the world. There was more food on the table than twice as many of us could have eaten, and she pressed containers of leftovers on all of us to take home. I have big tupperwares of chicken and potatoes and sweet potato soup in my refrigerator, and I’m kind of excited about it. The food was delicious! In addition to our hostess and fellow HUC students, her oldest son, out of the army for a week now, was there, and her daughter, who is currently in the army but serving in Jerusalem, was also there. The younger son is still in the army and wasn’t there. After dinner we stayed at the table, and then in the living room, talking for several hours. There were family stories about universal subjects: losing track of children (in amusement parks and at gas stations), traveling, and other things. We talked about school and told our teacher about how much we enjoyed the colloquium. We talked about Hebrew. We talked about differences between the United States and Israel, and since this family has spent time living in the US, they had some very interesting opinions! We talked about Reform Judaism in Israel, army life, and so much more. We finally all realized we were tired and should head home around 11, and our teacher even called the cab company for us, and handed us our bags of leftovers, and sent us on our way. It was a really fun evening, and very different from the usual routine!

Today, Saroj is exploring the Israel Museum and making one more visit to the Old City, and I’m having my last real lazy day of vacation, because I’m back to classes tomorrow. Have a good long weekend at home, and sleep a little bit extra for me!

Vacation from Vacation

My internet seems to be down right now, so I will write in the meantime and hope that it’s back up for me to post. And check my email. And read the news. And sign onto IM and skype. And, well, to have internet. Sadly, the guest blogger had to head back to the states to go back to school. So while he may provide a nice long comment, you just get my side of the story for now.

New Year’s in Jerusalem was fairly uneventful. I had heard that it was really not celebrated here, so I didn’t even make dinner reservations. That might have been a mistake. It turns out that it’s not really celebrated here by Israelis, but it’s still during the time when Israel is filled up with Americans on vacation, so restaurants are booked. We did find one eventually, and had a good dinner. The rest of the night was quiet and very low-key. Among other things, we packed for our trip to the Dead Sea…

Monday morning we woke up far earlier than planned to the sound of my landlord banging on the (bolted shut) door. He wanted to fix something in the apartment, and when he said he would come by on Monday, I assumed it would be in the evening as usual, or at least after 9 am. Apparently I was wrong. I went to the door and explained that I was still sleeping, and asked him to come back later. He agreed, although I don’t think he apologized for waking me. I guess I can take that as proof that New Years really isn’t an Israeli holiday. Around lunchtime we made it to the rental car office to pick up our car that we had reserved online a few days earlier. They informed us that they didn’t have the car we reserved, but they could upgrade us to a minivan (thanks, guys) or downgrade us (and we would pay less) to a Getz. We really didn’t want the minivan, but the Getz was one of the smallest cars I had ever seen. Michael went outside to look at the two cars and decide, and when he came back in, announced that he had seen a sedan close to what we had reserved, sitting in the lot. They told us they couldn’t give us that car, because someone else had reserved it. That seemed a little illogical to us, since we had also reserved a car, and it wasn’t there. Ultimately, they gave us the car we wanted. As we were filling out the paperwork, another group came in. From their conversation, it was unclear whether they were the ones who had reserved the car we had now claimed, or whether they simply had more claim to it than we did, being part of their frequent rental program or something. In any case, we apparently did a good job of arguing. They told the other group that the car was not available. They could have a minivan or a Getz. We finished as quickly as we could and drove away! Among other things we found in the car was a booklet of Israeli driving laws, at least the ones that are different from the US and Europe. The most random may have been that it is illegal to turn left into a parking lot. I guess I was comforted knowing that in contrast to what I see on the roads, there are, in fact, driving laws in Israel.

The drive to the Dead Sea is on a (perfectly safe) road through the West Bank. (Seriously, there are tourist stops on the way there.) The views of the Judean Desert are amazing. It’s not desert like I would normally picture a desert, but instead hilly and mountainy and rocky and gorgeous. I tried to take some pictures as we drove, but they are mainly blurry and/or have my finger over the lens. But a couple of them came out. We also had to stop once to let a herd of camels cross the road. There were 8-10 of them. We have a picture of the last few going by. It definitely made for good entertainment on the way there, and a definite realization that we were in the middle of a desert.

Our hotel was very…Israeli. And it was filled with lots of…Israelis. They tried to make people stand in lines, but that concept still hasn’t caught on so well in this country. It was a hotel where there were only rooms on one side of the hallway, and the middle was open from the top floor to the bottom, so when there were kids racing up and down hallways and shrieking a few floors away, we heard it. Frequently. There were signs not to drink the tap water, because it’s salty. It’s ok to shower in and brush teeth with, but not so good for large quantities of drinking. The signs said there was drinking water available at a designated location on each floor. We expected a water cooler of some kind. That was a silly assumption. No, there was a tap sticking out of the wall, but instead of being labeled “salty water, not for drinking,” like the rest of the taps in the hotel, this one was labeled “drinking water.” Was it really any different? We’ll never know.

We went to Masada, of course, and debated hiking to the top (supposedly about a 45 minute climb) or taking the cable car (a 3 minute ride). We decided to hike it. It was beautiful outside, and how bad could a 45 minute hike really be? After you’ve committed to the hike and gone well past the ticket counter and cable car entrance, you see the sign at the beginning of the hike, saying it’s a steep climb that also includes about 700 stairs. And they’re not even stairs; they’re uneven stone ones, and some of them should definitely count as two, especially for someone my size! A little over an hour later, we did make it to the top. At the top, I found the ticket counter and upgraded our ticket down to the cable car. It suddenly felt like 700 stairs down was a bad idea. We wandered around the top of Masada for an hour or two, looking at all the ruins of Herod’s palace and the Jewish fortress that used the mountain many years later. It’s a beautiful site, and a fascinating story of the Jewish rebellion and mass suicide that occurred a few years after Jerusalem was conquered, in 73 or 74. Everyone believes the story, the Israeli army brings many of their soldiers to Masada to basically swear that Masada will never fall again, and most tourists stop by to pay homage to a group of rebels who decided to kill themselves rather than become Roman slaves. The story is all written down by Josephus, who apparently got it from a couple of women and children who survived. Archeologists have found a lot of evidence, including the storerooms that contained enough food to survive months or years on the mountain and the stone shards with names carved into them, apparently used for lots to decide who would kill the others. But…they never found the one little piece of evidence that you would think people would need to believe a story about a mass suicide of almost one thousand people: there were never any human remains found at Masada. Weird. I guess everyone likes the story anyway.

The next day we went to Ein Gedi, a nature reserve in the same area. It’s gorgeous. In the middle of desert, there is this area with naturally occurring waterfalls and plants and really pretty things you wouldn’t expect in a desert. And also cute animals that don’t seem so afraid of people. We have some pretty close up pictures of some of them. We did a short hike through the reserve that went to a few waterfalls, each bigger and more impressive than the one before. The last one before hiking back, of course, was beautiful. There was a couple around our age who was hiking right in front of us, then they would stop and be behind us, then in front of us again, and we kept sort of acknowledging each other quietly. We all ended up stopping at the same end waterfall though to take pictures and enjoy its prettiness, so we talked some. One of them was American, went to Penn, lives on the west coast now. She was Israeli. We left the waterfall at the same time and basically hiked back together, pointing out good pictures to one another on the way back. Then we wanted to go see the ruins of a synagogue a short walk away, so we all walked over together. It was entirely random, and I’m sure I’ll never see either one of them again, but it was an amusing way to spend an afternoon.

The trip back from vacation was…well looking back, it was pretty funny. We were in a rental car. We walked back to the car on the last day, about to drive back to Jerusalem. I noticed that something was hanging down in the front. Basically, the front part of the undercarriage is made of cheap, thin plastic. So if you pull all the way into a parking space, it doesn’t always hold up. It didn’t on this car. Michael pushed it back up into place, and we went on our way. A couple of kilometers down the road, it definitely sounded like it had come down again. So we pulled over into a spa parking lot (on the right, of course). Clearly as we were about to drive into the West Bank (a safe part, but still…), we didn’t want to have to stop again. So Michael took a shoelace from one of his shoes and tied the piece back up, wrapping the shoelace around the grill of the car. There were several knots and it seemed very secure, although he mentioned after we were back that he wished he had used both shoelaces; he was worried about it the whole way back. (The drive was about an hour and a half.) We arrived back at my apartment, and still had several hours before the car had to be returned. We debated what to do. Michael wanted his shoelace back, so the piece was going to be hanging down. On further inspection, there was more of the plastic piece missing right behind where it had broken, probably damage that was done before we ever had the car. So we really didn’t want to be charged for something that wouldn’t have happened if the car hadn’t been broken in the first place, although we of course didn’t know that the piece was missing until the little piece that was left broke. So we did what any good Israeli would do. We walked up to a hardware store, debating ethics the whole way there. We decided this was, in fact, taking responsibility: we were fixing the car so that the same thing wouldn’t happen again any time soon. We bought a roll of black duct tape, came back to my apartment, and fixed the damage. Michael got his shoelace back. The car rental place got their car back. Everybody was happy. Hopefully including whoever has that car next…!

Friday morning Michael was a trooper and got up to go on my way early morning shuk run. We bought yummy things and spent the day walking around Jerusalem and not doing a whole lot more. We had a quiet Shabbat dinner at home and enjoyed the treats we had bought ourselves at the bakery in the morning. Eventually his airport shuttle came…at 2 in the morning. An amazing vacation. But always too short.

Now I’m gearing up to go back to school and have lots more visitors. I have a D’var Torah (sermon) to give to my class the end of the month that needs to write itself, travel agent work to do for my parents' trip, some reading to do, and various other errands I would like done before classes start again. I also am (as expected) pretty homesick again. I know that once classes start and I’m busy I’ll do better with that, but right now, I really just feel far away again. So as not to end on a sad note, here’s a link to Michael’s pictures from his trip. I haven’t posted mine, mainly because they’re the same pictures, and also because I haven’t had internet all day. I’m at a friend’s apartment mooching internet for an hour! Talk to you soon…

Playing Tourist

Another guest blog, with my (Jessica's) comments in blue. Michael wrote first, in black. This week the time finally came to play my role as a proper tourist in Israel, which can generally mean only one thing: museum time! Since Jessica had only been to the Israel Museum to see one or two exhibits, I did not feel too guilty about bringing her back there to do some more exploring. I actually wanted to go back. And I still haven't seen the whole thing, so I'm looking forward to having more visitors to "drag" me back there! The Israel Museum is a large campus containing a main exhibit hall as well as a few smaller buildings for temporary or special exhibits. The first building we hit contained an exhibit of an odd sort: bread. Actually, first we hit the cafe, which was very good by museum standards. We had been warned by friends to go to the bread exhibit on full stomachs. But I digress. The entire building (2 small floors) was dedicated to exhibiting the breads used by different cultures for holidays, religious events, and milestone occasions. For example, there were parts devoted to challah, matzah, and Easter bread. It turned out to be a fascinating exhibit, since I had never given much thought to the significance of bread from a religious perspective (contrary to a good kugel, which has always held a special place in my heart—and stomach usually around Rosh Ha’shana). I thought it was interesting that while bread has always been important to Jews and Christians, it is only now in modern times gaining importance in Islamic culture. I also found it amusing that on every display showing a different type of bread, all real-but-preserved, there were signs in Hebrew, English, and possibly also Arabic warning that the bread was preserved and poisoned, so we shouldn't touch it or eat it. Mom and Dad, this one closes before you get here. Sorry.

The next stop at the museum was an enormous model of Jerusalem around the time the Second Temple was still standing. Even having visited the Old City and Western Wall in the last several days, it is hard to appreciate the significance of a walled city and the Temple without seeing the role it played in that era, both religiously and geographically. The Second Temple occupied an enormous part of the city, and the rest of the city was basically designed around the Temple. Without seeing a model, it is easy to visit the Western Wall without understanding why it is such a sacred location. Don't get too accustomed to having links in blogs. Or else demand that Michael shows me how to do it...if it's not complicated.

The third destination at the museum was a special, permanent exhibit on the Dead Sea Scrolls, the oldest known surviving Biblical documents written before 100 CE. The museum hosts this exhibit in a unique structure that looks almost like a giant Hershey-kiss from the outside. Chocolate analogy. Bonus points! As you enter the building through a wide tunnel, you come to the center of the “kiss”, where a round fire-place-like structure sits in the center of the building. Wrapped around this structure, against a white background, is an enormous piece of the Scrolls. Sort of. Upon closer inspection, I found a caption reading “Above is a facsimile of…” At first I was a little disappointed that this grand structure was dedicated to displaying just a copy of the Scrolls, but fortunately, there were several equally interesting and original objects also on display including the Aleppo Codex, believed to be the oldest complete manuscript of the Hebrew Bible (and by complete, we mean ignoring the huge chunks that have been lost including almost the entire Torah! The last couple chapters of Deuteronomy are apparently there. And a small scrap of Exodus is in the wallet of someone in New York.)

The rest of the museum was a more traditional display of Judaica items and an impressive collection of art including original works by Cezanne, Pissaro, and Gauguin and a sprinkling of Monet, Warhol, and more. While much the Judaica exhibit was predictable (candlesticks and Torah covers spanning 100s of years and several continents), there were a few intriguing items. My personal favorite was the candelabra-cube, a metal cube with holes carved on each side to hold candles for six different occasions including Shabbat, Chanukah, a normal dinner, and a wedding. Seemed like a pretty clever invention to me—one “candlestick” for every occasion—now if it had candles secretly stored inside, I would have been extremely impressed. One of my favorites was the "prayer ball" which appeared to be essentially a swiss army knife of prayers. It was the size of a slightly overgrown baseball, with about 5 or 6 silver sheets that came out with different prayers on them. The future rabbi in me thought it was cool!

By far, the most interesting exhibit on display in the museum was . . . wait for it . . . a Hebrew Union College diploma! In an exhibit about the role of women in contemporary Jewish life, alongside a special headcovering for women rabbis that looked like a kippuh with a pony-tail, the diploma from the 1980s was somewhat tucked away in a corner, but easily represented the most recent advancement of women’s roles in Jewish religious life. Go, Jessica! Most of the exhibit, placed upstairs in a small hall overlooking a replica of a synagogue, showed more "traditional" aspects of Jewish women's lives: head coverings, Shabbat candlesticks. The "progressive" corner was just that: a small corner including the kippah and diploma in a small, not well lit part of the display. Maybe it will expand eventually.

In addition to our museum time, I dragged Jessica back to the Israel Supreme Court for a tour, to satisfy the inner-law-student in me. The Supreme Court is just across the way from the Knesset (Parliament) and the future site of the Prime Minister’s office and lives in a modern building flooded with natural light. For the most part the Israel Supreme Court (ISC) functions in a similar manner as the US Supreme Court (SCOTUS) with a few exceptions. First, the ISC does not always sit as a full panel of 15 justices; rather, most cases are heard by a 3-judge panel much like the Appeals Courts of the US but as few as 1 judge or as many as all 15. Second, ISC justices face mandatory retirement at age 70 unlike SCOTUS justices who serve life sentences terms. Third, the ISC hears petitions directly from any Israeli resident who claims his/her human/civil/natural rights have been violated by a government policy (and has $400). In the US, claims of violations of constitutional rights go through the same court system as any civil lawsuit and rarely advance to the SCOTUS. Fourth and most significantly, the ISC hears ~15,000 cases per year versus the SCOTUS’s ~70 cases per year. Stats like that make the SCOTUS look just as productive as Congress, but I digress. . . . Also, there are 5 women currently serving on the ISC, including the current Chief Justice, who is chosen purely on the basis of seniority, politics (for once) aside.

The third tourist attraction for the week was the Old City, a must-do for every visitor. If you're keeping track, we actually did the Old City a couple of days earlier. In many ways, one of the most awe inspiring parts of the Old City is simply walking through one of its gates. Seeing the city’s walls from far away and then walking through them gives you a sense of entering a grand castle or fortress (though the taxis driving in and out of the gates lessen that impact slightly). Inside, the Old City is a mix of tourist traps, private residences, religious institutions, and sacred sites. Oh yeah, and hundreds of tour groups. I think there are more English speakers there right now than Hebrew speakers. Ick. In some ways, the Jewish Quarter reflects the layout of the rest of Jerusalem with stretches of shops and restaurants (e.g., Ben Yehuda Street) and religious neighborhoods and institutions (e.g., Mea Sharim). However, the grounds of the Western Wall are second-to-none in religious significance, as demonstrated both by the number of people praying at, kissing, and simply visiting the wall as well as the security presence controlling access to the grounds. There is also a strong religious presence: the men and women are separated to approach the wall itself, women are required to be dressed "modestly," men must have their heads covered, cameras are not allowed on Shabbat or holidays, and the list goes on. It is governed right now like a very traditional synagogue. It also took me longer to finish my time at the wall, because I had trouble actually approaching it. The women's side is much smaller than the men's side, and therefore always crowded. It can take a while to actually get through the crowd and close enough to touch the wall. My biases aside... The most striking part of the Old City is how each of the city’s quarters (Jewish, Christian, Armenian, and Muslim) are strictly divided, yet visitors flow seamlessly from one to the next. One minute we were walking along a string of Jewish shops selling expensive talit and artwork and the next minute we were surrounded by small vendors selling spices, cheap souvenirs, and employing high-pressure sales tactics. Passing neither a sign nor security, we had leaped from the Jewish Cardo shops to the Arab shuk all in a matter of a few steps. Not a security problem! The Arab shuk in the Old City is also a tourist site and a cool place to wander, but not for too long for the claustrophobic. Mom, you'll love the fabrics. We wandered around three of the four quarters before treating ourselves to the obligatory falafel pita and heading back from Old to New.

Just realized after re-reading that there are several feminist rants from me in this one. Heehee. Oops. Didn't mean for it all to come out at once. :) Saroj: safe travels and see you soon!!

Shabbat Shalom and happy new year!!

Lessons Learned

So I thought that once I was done with exams and on vacation, I would be done learning for a few weeks. But as you might expect, somehow when I get out of a classroom, the learning starts. Things I’ve learned this week:

Freeze yummy cookies so that Santa won’t eat them. I guess I didn’t really learn that one, but that was my observation when I woke up the morning of the 25^th and realized that I had put my delicious box of cookies from home in the freezer before going to bed the night before. The thinking was really that they had been out for a week and it was time, but I suppose maybe there was some subconscious Santa-prevention going on. Sort of like the board that used to be in Grandma and Grandpa’s fire place in Great Neck. In reality, I am not sure there’s a city that notices Christmas less than Jerusalem. I played tour guide on Christmas day in the Old City, admittedly not all that well, but I did talk to some shopkeepers in Hebrew. While we didn’t make it more than a few steps into the Christian Quarter, there were no signs of Christmas anywhere else, other than the massive numbers of American Jews visiting on their vacations.

Storm drains are an amazing invention. We took a day trip to Tel Aviv on Tuesday, hoping to get to an arts fair that they have twice a week and that I can’t really do when I’m in classes. By the time we arrived there late Tuesday morning, it was raining lightly. The fair was okay, but it seemed that a whole bunch of the vendors didn’t come because of the weather, and most of the ones who were there had their tables covered in semi-transparent plastic, and would lift it if you looked interested. The street the fair was on was a pedestrian street, closed all the time to traffic. It also appeared to be the garment district of Tel Aviv, but none of the garments were made yet. As in, there were at least two dozen fabric stores down this one street. Maybe more. Mom, you were missed. (Well, sort of. We would have been there a lot longer if you had been there! Perhaps Dad and I will drop you off and meet you on the other end.) Eventually, we got hungry and headed to a street with a bunch of restaurants, including one where we were hoping to go again. Walking down the street was a challenge though. It started raining harder, and we noticed that Tel Aviv streets don’t have storm drains. This is a problem. It means that in a downpour, the water all rushes down the sides of the streets, but there’s nowhere to go except downhill. We tried crossing one street, only to realize about two-thirds of the way across that without an ark or bathing suit, we weren’t going to make it the rest of the way. That’s right, we turned around and just couldn’t cross the street at that corner! We had to go across the other way, and essentially cross the other three places at that one intersection instead. When we finally saw Max Brenner’s across the street, the restaurant we had been aiming for the whole time, we were sadly disappointed to realize that the entire block of the restaurant was surrounded by a 4-6 foot wide rushing moat. (It was literally the width of the cars parked on the side of the street!) Unfortunately, sacrifices must be made for a good meal, so we had to splash through the ankle-deep water to earn the deliciousness awaiting us inside. We sat there for a good three hours, not wanting to deal with the storm drain lacking city outside. But we learned another good lesson! Dress for the weather? Not exactly.

If you’re going to get stranded somewhere, do so in a chocolate shop. Max Brenner’s is a chocolate shop first of all. They also have real food, and the soup we started with was delicious (although it didn’t dry my socks or my shoes). But for the next three hours, we sat and talked and watched the other diners around us and inhaled the aroma of chocolate. And then when we were hungry again after lunch, we had some chocolate fondue. They bring out fresh fruit, marshmallows (kosher ones, but covered in chocolate it doesn’t matter as much), and “cake” which was more like pieces of churro, or sugar coated bread. They also bring you two separate fondue bowls, so you can choose two types of chocolate: dark, milk, or white. “Dark and dark, please.” I knew there was a reason Michael and I got along so well.

Bureaucracy is awful, but more bearable in English. We took a trip to the municipality office this morning to deal with a student reduction in renters’ property taxes that we were notified about during exams, and which had to be done before the end of the calendar year. We arrived as recommended, a few minutes before the offices opened at 8 am. We left around 10:30. In between, we dealt with several clerks who all gave different answers and couldn’t or wouldn’t speak English, wrote out an affidavit of monthly expenses, all in Hebrew, and successfully pulled a very Israeli “I was here earlier, so even though I left in the middle to go take care of something that wasn’t ready when I walked in, I’m not waiting in the over-an-hour-long line again so I’m next.” But we also succeeded in getting the reduction we came in for! Yay. It might have taken just as long in English, but I wouldn’t have misspelled every couple of words in my affidavit or had to have things explained to me quite as many times, quite as slowly. Success in a foreign language might be even sweeter though.

If you measure snow in millimeters, it sounds more impressive. We had heard that Jerusalem shuts down in the snow. The student services coordinator for my program warned us that the city shuts down, and when there was a little snow in the forecast, she even sent an email to the whole class, much of which is on vacation in America right now, advising us to stock up on necessities. It started snowing this afternoon! For the first few hours, it was really just pretty, but sticking on nothing but the trees. Later it made the sidewalks slushy and the streets a little slick, but the cars all pretty much disappeared. On the way to meeting friends for dinner, two double-length Egged buses drove by. Early evening, they’re usually packed. There were about five people on each bus. Everyone must have gone home early! Why? THERE WERE 10 MILLIMETERS OF SNOW!!! That’s right. An article on Ha’aretz online said that, in early evening. (There’s more now.) But doesn’t 10 millimeters sound a lot more threatening than one centimeter? Or less than half an inch? Maybe the DC area wouldn’t get so much crap for shutting down for an inch of snow if it was reported as 25 millimeters instead. Especially because Americans don't understand the metric system.

The guest blogger is too tired to add his opinions tonight (probably because he was up and at the municipality with me at 7:50 this morning), so expect some edits or a long comment tomorrow!

Guest blogger!

This message is brought to you by a special guest blogger (and the letter “C” for Chanukah). (And by Jessica as usual, in blue.) Chanukah in Israel has been a wonderful and delicious treat, except for one slightly ironic feature: exams. As much as we like to claim that Hanukkah is not the Jewish Christmas, it really seems to function that way here. All the decorations in stores and on the street are for Hanukkah; the restaurants and shuks have abundant platters of sufganiyot; and Israelis take their winter vacations during Hanukkah—except for HUC students. This seems to be the one time of the year that the HUC-Jerusalem program reverts to American practices for scheduling and instead of having HUC students go on a Chanukah vacation like the rest of the country, they stress over final exams, so many of them can travel home or abroad on (cough) Christmas vacation. (Or have visitors come to us! About half the class is around this break, with lots of visitors.) I only spent about 2 and a half hours at the airport waiting for my visitor's late plane, but I brought a paper to edit, and ended up talking to an Israeli grandfather for a good half an hour, all in Hebrew! Visitor and bags arrived, fully intact!

Notwithstanding the studying, reviews, and exams, this week has been a great chance to hear everyone’s exciting plans for break (and having just finished my own exams, to laugh at those still seeking the light at the end of the tunnel). And of course, finishing exams was a huge relief for everyone until they realized they are now a whopping 10% finished with school. Oh, to be in law school…but I digress… Exams were...well, they're over. I got both my 10-page papers turned in a day early, a take-home exam (hand written, 5 sides-of-page, in Hebrew), and three exams allllll finished. And help carrying more than a dozen books back to the library. You're welcome. Keyboard thief! A couple of people in the last exam, Thursday afternoon, even brought some wine to open when we finished. And then we realized we have to do this nine more times. Except that most of them will be in English.

On night 6, Wednesday night, HUC had a Chanukkah gathering, with "significant others" (SOs) invited. They got to experience what we're getting used to: every occasion is reason to study some ancient text at least tangentially related to the topic. This time it was camels, flax, and responsibility. With rabbinic mentions (incorrectly) of torts and class action lawsuits. (Oy!) They also gave us sufganiyot and we sang songs. The life of a rabbinic student is never dull. And I'm the editor, so it's hard to disagree:) We did wonder a little about the scheduling on a night when most of us had at least one exam to study (cram) for the next day. On the seventh night of Hanukkah, one of the HUC rabbis led an oversized group of SOs and a few HUCers through Mea Sharim, an ultra-orthodox community, to see all of the Hanukkiyot in the windows and in front of the gates to their homes. The ultra-orthodox community is less a single group of religious Jews and much more a conglomeration of groups of mostly immigrant Jews whose clans collectively form a patchwork of ultra-Orthodox styles somewhat identifiable by variations in dress or custom. While it was interesting to learn about their community, to see their homes, and observe families together for the holiday, it was also a little surprising to see how unwelcome a probably-too-large group of 20 students was while wandering through their streets. Whether they all constantly feel like a tourist attraction or just a few outliers chose to express their annoyance (to understate it), it was not quite the “welcome a stranger to your home” attitude that I expected from the ultra-Orthodox. We were asked by one man to move on or leave, and we walked away, further into the neighborhood. We were asked by another one, less nicely, to please leave. We continued walking. The third person made no effort to be nice. He told us to leave, and then when our professor wished him a happy holiday, he started screaming. He pointed and started yelling "rasha, rasha, rasha!" (Evil one, evil one, evil one.) Many of the people who lived right there came out, but they neither joined him or stopped him. It was a frightening and somewhat depressing experience. We did leave after that, stopping on the way back to the twenty-first century to have a debriefing (in a church courtyard, actually). We debated whether we have more in common with these people or with non-Jews in our communities at home, and with whom our futures are more attached. Somehow, it all makes it back to rabbinic questions.

On a lighter note, yesterday was a much more appropriate way to conclude one holiday and immediately begin another one. It started with an early morning trip to the shuk to stock up for a big dinner. (Yes mom, I was out the door at 7:15am). (Jessica’s mom, I’m always an early riser and out the door early). (Jessica, OK, I’ll stop pretending). I was up first. But not by too much. The shuk was surprisingly empty, and some of the vendors were even closed, possibly due to Hanukkah vacations. Those that were open were stocked with Sufganiyot and Hanukkiyot in addition to the endless mountains of produce and other foods for sale. I was happy and grateful to have the help and company! We got more than a shuk-cart-full, and it was far heavier than usual. Potatoes, chicken, and veggies for 11 are not light. And obviously some treats: challah for french toast, chocolate-filled sufganiyot...

As soon as we returned home it was time to start the mad preparations for dinner in a race against the clock. I had to do some convincing that we really had to start right away. We did. The menu for the night included the traditional latkes, Israeli salad, chicken, veggies, pasta, and challah in addition to other things our guests contributed. And even if you recall Jessica “politely dissenting” (i.e., whining) from her lack of a food processor, don’t think for a minute that she caved and grated our ten potatoes by hand—I had to earn my accommodations! It's true. He did the potatoes and one of the onions, while I cleaned the living room around him. But I did the other onion after watching him cry like a baby through the first one. I cried too. Plus, considering neither of us had ever actually had to make latkes before that night, it was a mini-miracle of Chanukah that they came out just fine and a bigger miracle the apartment didn’t smell like latkes for the rest of the weekend. Grandma, we used your recipe, thanks! We finished making dinner just in time to meet up with our guests to walk to Shabbat services.

Unlike some other holidays, the Friday evening service does not change much for Hanukkah. However, the number of people in attendance certainly does. With an influx of visitors for the holidays, Shirah Chadasha was pretty packed with standing room only available shortly after we arrived. After another wonderful Kabbalat Shabbat and the rest of the service, we ran (not true) back to the apartment to heat up the food for dinner.

Our guests for dinner included both friends and their family, including a rabbi and his wife from Birmingham, Alabama. My friend Aaron's parents, not a random rabbi. We started the night by lighting a few Hanukkiyot (yes, that’s right—we went to Shabbat services, then lit the Hanukkiyot, then lit Shabbat candles. shhhhh.) , but I was mighty disappointed that this cadre of a rabbi and almost-close-to-being-almost-rabbis (10% rabbis?) didn’t break into a round of Chanukah songs, though I didn’t exactly volunteer to lead either. The conversation was a lively discussion of changes in reform Judaism, ways of keeping Jewish youths engaged with their religion, and the perks and hidden challenges of being a rabbi. Trivia for the night included the significantly growing number of women pursuing the rabbinate and becoming engaged in temple leadership and the benefits of tax breaks for clergy. Among the key pieces of advice we received for surviving as a rabbi was this: when entertaining a large group for Shabbat dinner, always hire help. Thanks for telling us that after the meal!

Good company, good weather (it's cloudy and gross looking today), and of course, great food (and tons of leftovers!) —a perfect conclusion to Hanukkah and a perfect start to Shabbat. Chag Samayach, Shabbat Shalom, chodesh tov (a good month) from the clerk at the supermarket, and Happy Holidays! From me too:)

Chanukkah Everywhere!

A bonus blog! I don’t think I’ve ever done two days in a row before. It sort of figures that it would happen in the middle of final papers and exams.

A few observations from this morning’s shuk trip. Chanukkah is everywhere! Every bakery had piles of sufganiyot, jelly donuts, displayed this morning. A week from now, and for another 50 weeks or so, you would be hard-pressed to find any kind of donut in Israel. This week, they’re hard to avoid. The various stores that sell assorted Judaic items and housewares usually have piles of kippot in the front of their booths, or at least that’s what I usually notice. Today, they were all Chanukkah. They were selling menorahs of all kinds, a whole range of candles, and lots of different dreidels. I’m sure I’ll be back there during the holiday to get myself a few Israeli dreidels, with the Pei, for “A Great Miracle Happened Here (Poh)” instead of the American “A Great Miracle Happened There” (Sham, with a Shin). What fun!

I also noticed some extra-special menorahs. They sell oil menorahs in Israel! I know they sell them in the states also, but only from a few places (as in, a few wholesalers. I guess I would know that. Thanks Mom!). I’m sure most people have never seen an oil menorah. Actually, I’ve never seen one lit. But at the shuk today, mixed in with the tables full of menorahs, were oil menorahs of all designs, and probably, of all prices. Mixed in with the piles and displays of candles were packages of wicks for oil. I was caught off-guard by it all! As someone a little afraid of fire, I won’t be lighting one of those, but the idea of it is so much cooler than the regular menorahs.

Even the supermarkets are full of Chanukkah. I’m sure the ones at home now are all decorated for Christmas, with special Christmas packaging on everything. (I saw a small Christmas display yesterday! The first one! Then I realized it was a Russian store. Of course. Then I moved on.) The supermarket here is selling cheap menorahs, a few kinds of candles, and lots of Chanukkah candy. I bet you didn’t know there was Chanukkah candy! There is gelt, of course. But in addition, there is the equivalent of all the different candy canes of candy, trees of candy, Christmas-dressed stuffed animals holding bags of candy… It’s all here, but for Chanukkah!

Yes, I’m easily entertained.

I saw one other thing today on my way home from the shuk that made me laugh really hard. It was a poster advertising some sort of lecture: adapting to life in the 20^th Century. Um…remember the year 2000? The debate about whether the 21^st century really started in 2000 or 2001? (Well, maybe that one was only in my house.) In any case, Israel being a century behind the rest of the world explains a lot.

I ordered my airport shuttle this afternoon (to pick me up and take me to the airport tomorrow afternoon!). I did it all in Hebrew, and the person on the end was responding in Hebrew! I suppose I shouldn’t get excited about this until it really shows up when I think it will. Shuttles don’t run very often on Shabbat. I’ll be sitting at the airport (homework in lap, probably being ignored in favor of stellar people-watching) for quite a while. But what do you expect out of the 20^th century?!

Shabbat shalom, happy Chanukkah, and goodnight!

Visitors galore!

I really can’t wait to be done with the end-of-semester work! Also, my current-favorite-people list keeps growing, which is a nice way to get through papers and exams. Up there right now: Michael, arriving in a day and a half, Saroj, coming in January, Monica, coming the end of January, Mom and Dad, coming in February, and Grandma, coming in April. There’s still time to come visit in March! It may be a little nuts to have constantly revolving visitors for almost two months straight, but I am definitely looking forward to lots of love from home. And perhaps some cookies.

Sunday night, a visiting faculty member from the Cincinnati campus sponsored a dinner for the Cincinnati-bound students. There are twelve of us, plus a bunch of husbands/wives/etc. It’s a great group! Also at the dinner was a fourth year student who is studying in Jerusalem this year, but has been at (and will be returning to) Cincinnati, so he was also great to talk to about the city. I’m really looking forward to starting the program in the States, where the focus is really on studying to become a rabbi more than learning Hebrew. As we’ve been told by numerous students ahead of us, once we get back to the states, it will really feel like rabbinic school. I’ve also been told to enjoy the pace of academics in Israel (well, except for this week), as it picks up a lot next year.

Monday was a day I wasn’t really that worried about until late Sunday night, when it occurred to me that HUC more or less does its best to make me stressed out. Everyone in my class has to co-lead, with another rabbinic student and a cantorial student, one service this year. Almost all of them are weekday morning services. (Yes, and then we’re considered prepared to lead Rosh Hashanah services when we return, and hopefully to have a monthly Shabbat pulpit all year long. We’re still a little puzzled too.) They make the one service leading opportunity into a big deal, requiring lots of supervision and preparation, and after the service, there is a formal service review with some of the faculty, where they offer suggestions. I have led plenty of services before though, and from going to Shacharit almost daily for six months now, I also know the service itself more or less inside out. Except that when a dozen different people ask you whether you’re nervous about leading services, eventually something inside kicks in and decides to get nervous. Awesome. Happily, everything in the service I had any reason to be nervous about was right at the beginning. I wrote the service introduction, about trying to find 100 blessings in every day. It seemed to go well, and I will include the text of it, if you’re interested, at the end of this posting. I also led Ashrei, which is a lot of Hebrew and a lot of singing. I got through it without a problem, which is always nice. The service itself went really well, with only one little hiccup in the middle which had nothing to do with us. In the middle of the Torah service, an enormous news camera came into the sanctuary. After some nervous moments, a couple of faculty members went to go kick out the camera crew, who of course refused to leave. A cell phone rang. The video-sidekick answered it. Dave continued chanting Torah, without noticing the chaos to his left. Eventually the crew was more or less dragged out of the sanctuary, and it was discovered that they were supposed to be filming the Israeli rabbinic students’ service. Thanks, guys. Our review was fairly painless. Most of the comments included the disclaimer “it will come more easily with practice.” How I wish we had the opportunity for more practice! But I know I have more than enough coming to me eventually.

Wednesday is our Israel Seminar day. This week we were studying the Haredim, the ultra-orthodox. We had a speaker who is an anthropologist who has studied Haredi women specifically. As she spoke, and things sounded really familiar, I realized that I had read her book for a class in college. (Debbie, you did too. Educated and Ignorant.) She spoke mainly about how Haredi women are educated, but their education also includes some indoctrination, so that they maintain the lifestyle. It is as if they are educated to be as ignorant as their ancestors, at least in some ways. It was actually an interesting lecture, which is always a plus! After the speaker, we divided into two groups to go on field trips. My group went for a walk in Mea Shearim, the main Haredi neighborhood in Jerusalem. I had been there before, but our guide took us on back streets and into neighborhoods where I had never been. The poverty in the neighborhood is incredibly striking. Many of the men study during the day rather than working, so they live off of child-benefits and welfare, in small apartments, in neighborhoods where the houses resemble the inner city, but the residents are all incredibly religious. The neighborhoods are fairly segregated. The different groups of immigrants settled together, so we walked through “Poland,” and our guide pointed out “Russia,” “Hungary,” and some others. For the most part, it seems that although from the outside we group Haredim together, they are in reality separate groups that don’t mix all that much. Most of them don’t own computers, televisions, radios, or receive newspapers. It makes it a more interesting process to find out the news, but it also makes it easier to keep out the modern world and any news you don’t want to hear about – or don’t want your children to hear about. Instead there are huge notice-boards lining the streets, and anyone who prints anything can plaster it up there. They were mainly advertisements for lectures, some major news stories (major, like boycott El Al because they flew on one Shabbat recently to clear their backlog of flights from a Friday strike), and notices of funerals. It is so insular and so amazing to see what a completely different world lives only a 15 minute walk from school.

Today was the last day of classes! I celebrated tonight, by doing my liturgy take-home exam. I actually also had a Hebrew in-class essay today and a Development of the Alef-Bet exam today during class, with a rabbinics class in between. Neither of them was painful, but it made for a long morning. I went shopping with friends for a little while in the afternoon, and I have been home since then, working, doing laundry, and trying to get myself organized for the last week’s push of work. Hopefully I’ll manage to get a lot accomplished in the next 40 hours or so until Michael shows up:) But with my Friday track record, that would be a major accomplishment. It’s a better-than-usual incentive though, so we’ll see what happens.

I have gotten a few email updates from my mom that she has heard from some people who have received Pesach Project letters. At some point the people in charge will give me official notice and you’ll get a real thank-you, but it will probably be a while still. So for now, THANK YOU!!

Off to bed. Eeeek! Except I just looked behind me and realized I have three loads of (clean) laundry to deal with first. Don’t think my life in Israel is too exciting!



My service intro follows...

היה רבי מאיר אומר: חייב אדם לברך מאה ברכות בכל יום.

In Bavli Menachot, we read that Rabbi Meir said that a person is obligated to recite a hundred blessings every day. It seems like a lot of blessings, especially on those days that seem more filled with homework and stress than happiness and praise. The way I see it, there are two ways to go about finding 100 blessings from the time we wake up until the time we go to sleep.

There is the route that Rabbi Meir intended, starting with about 50 blessings in the Shacharit service, and adding all the required brachot throughout the day.

As Reform Jews, however, we may have to look a little harder for our hundred blessings. Instead of praying formally, using words that are hundreds and thousands of years old, we can challenge ourselves to thank God in our own words for ordinary things. A blessing, in essence, makes something ordinary into an extraordinary moment of holy time. Even waking from a night’s sleep and emerging from the bathroom are moments worthy of praising God and offering a blessing. By not always engaging in formal prayer, we have this challenge of finding one hundred such ordinary moments every single day and thanking God for each and every one of them.

As we pray together this morning, try to think about the meaning of each blessing. Pay attention to how each ordinary moment is transformed into something holy. And as you go on your way after services and for the rest of the day, try to find the remaining 50 or so blessings for today. A good conversation with a friend, a funny email, a thoughtful listener, a well-melted bagel toast, a moment of clarity in Hebrew class, a happy memory you had forgotten about. All of these times could be moments of blessing, times to remember God, and an opportunity for holiness as we go about our days.