My first Shabbat in Israel was pretty uneventful. I slept until noon, but could have slept much later. I spent the rest of the day making my room beautiful. I put up pictures, cleaned, and made my very handy calendar. It was a good day, but in general I don’t really like sleeping in that late because it makes me feel like I have lost a whole day.

(pretend that there is a picture of me and my roommates here, I've tried to upload it 3 times, but I think I need a stronger internet connection to do that... oy)

I suppose now that pictures are here it is a good time to talk about my apartment-mates. First there’s Kira- she’s the slightly short one with long dirty blond hair. Kira was the first person I met on this trip, she stood in front of us while we were in line to check in. Pretty exciting. She’s quiet but very sarcastic, and she’s a junior studying international relations at the University of the Pacific in California. Next there’s Erika, the one with short blond hair, who I also met in the airport before we left for Israel. Erica is from Tokyo, and everyone here gives her this really weird look when she tell them that, like it never would have crossed their mind that though she’s obviously not ethnically Japanese, she or her parents have lived there for some amount of time, she goes to school there, and thus she is from Japan. I’m surprised she puts up with it so well. Erica is taking a gap year between high school and starting College at Oberlin next fall. My third apartment-mate is Samantha- she has long brown hair and bangs. Samantha is originally from California but lives in North Carolina now and is going to be a junior at Syracuse. Fun fact: me and Samantha have the same Hebrew name, Shimona! Lastly there’s Amelia- she joined our apartment late, but we’ve been getting along well. Amelia is from New Jersey, she spent last spring’s semester on another program in Israel, and she’ll start at Brandeis for second semester this year.

I like my apartment-mates a lot because their very chill and we have a lot of fun together. They are all very sweet, and also have their specific quirks, which keeps things interesting.

So I’m sitting alone in my room unsure of what to do with my Saturday night. To be honest, there’s not much to do tonight, because right as Shabbat ended, Te’sha be’av started. I’m not incredibly familiar with Te’sha be’av, but from what I’ve figured out it’s the day that marks the destruction of the second temple. A group of people were going down to the kotel (western wall) tonight to welcome Te’sha be’av in, but Samantha and I decided to skip that activity. I know it’s a holiday that religious Jews take very seriously, but it’s not one I grew up with and don’t really feel a connection to it.

Tonight we went to dinner at the Jewish Student Activity center place and one of the adults there gave a d’var Torah (commentary on the weekly Torah portion). He ended his talk with a comment about the day the messiah will come, which he hopes will be very soon. This interested me, because I feel like I practice a form of Judaism that rarely if ever mentions the coming of the messiah. I understand the concept, and know that as Jews we are still waiting for the coming of the Messiah (unlike Christians, for example), but it is not a thought that ever really enters my mind, nor do I remember talking much about it at Schechter. I don’t think I even fully understand the concept of the messiah. Will he/she come when the world is at it’s lowest, or when we’ve “proven” that we deserve his/her arrival? Why would anyone come to save humanity now, when we are so undeserving- or is that the point exactly?