Recap of my week:

So, it's been a little while since I've posted about what I've been up to, so here's my past week/week and a half:

Last thursday after ulpan me, Kira, Amelia, and Erica went to Tel Aviv for the night. It was actually my first time in Tel Aviv so that was pretty cool. We stayed at a hostel that was only mildly sketchy and had a nice time! The first thing we did once we were settled was go down to the beach right in time for sunset. Actually, we missed the sun by like a minute, but it was still beautiful. It was really nice to be in a city by the water, it felt like we could have been anywhere. (This is one of my favorites from that night at the beach)

Later that night we went out to dinner with a friend of Kira's from Pacific and two of his Israeli Volleyball playing friends. It was actually really nice! It was good to talk to people and be normal teenagers out for the night. Unfortunately, when we tried to actually go out for the night, we found that most Tel Aviv clubs are 22-23+ which we, 18 and 19 year old girls, couldn't pass for (the guys were older, but they still couldn't get us in). On friday we ran some errands, had an absolutely delicious breakfast, went to a craft show, and spent an hour or so on the beach. Then we came back to Jerusalem in time for Shabbat.

We decided to do another home stay shabbat, and it was another interesting experience. We met up with our host, Reb Chaim, at the Kotel. Reb Chaim is quite a character. He's american orginally, and he's actually from Minnesota which was exciting, but immigrated to Israel about 5 years ago. He opens his home for shabbat every week. He had 15-20 guests that night, almost all pretty young people like my age. Half of the group were these girls from a Yeshiva in the south. They were all very sweet, but I couldn't believe some of the things they said. For example, at one point during the meal Reb Chaim made each of us ask a question, any question, as long as it wasn't related to Jewish Law. And one of the girls asked: "Reb Chaim, which do you think is worse: a Black president or a Woman vice president?" all of us on the other side of the table almost choked and died and Amelia muttered to me "How about the racist sexist person sitting across from me". Oy, statements like that really make me miss Carleton.

Reb Chaim also gave each of us a blessing, his blessing for me was that I should always have Peace in my family and that my parents should trust me and stop nagging me (sorry Mom and Dad!) There were many more awkward, outrageous, and interesting moments, which added up to a pretty entertaining evening and a unique way to spend a friday night.

I'm sure that I spent saturday doing what I always do: Sleeping, Cleaning my room, and doing work. I'm not sure what I will do when I go back to carleton without these completely down days, it might be rough.

The school week started pretty normally but I got sick starting sunday night and at it's worse on monday. I skipped class which was a tough decision since missing 5 hours of Hebrew kind of sets you back... I also missed class on Thursday to make my second trip into Tel Aviv to get my Tourist visa for Jordan and to pick up a package.

The mail system here is horrible, basically, any package that contains electronics, DVDs, or other expensive things gets held up in Customs in Tel Aviv, so basically, don't send me those things ever. While in Tel Aviv we also went shopping! That was ok, but a little scary. I find Israelis intimidating to begin with, but they're worse when they're trying to help you in a store. I just like to be left to shop in peace! oy.

On a really good note- I had a semi-light-bulb-aha moment in class on thursday, and I think I might actually be understanding the material! (a really good thing considering I have a 5 or so hour final on thursday...)

This weekend has more or less been boring. We had a very frustrating night out on Thursday, stayed in all day yesterday, and have been home today. Is it bad that I really like weekends like this? Last night we went to another home shabbat. This time it was within the walls of the old city- it was really powerful. For some reason as we walked out of the home where we ate and down towards the Kotel I just had a grin on my face. My roommate claims it was a side effect of the half-shot of whiskey I did with everyone else, but I think there really was something nice about being in the old city on shabbat. The coolest part was walking down to the Kotel at 11:30pm on Shabbat. It was virtually empty and silent. We got to walk right up to the wall, press our hands and our foreheads against the stone and have some time for silent prayer, really cool.

I'm about to start up the most hectic week ever- which will involve lots of cramming and studying for our final and planning the details of our trip to Europe! I really can't wait, it should be a really great time!

Oh my goodness! I almost forgot about the most important part of our weekend last weekend, our apartment flooded! Something under the sink broke and water poured out everywhere. We had standing water in almost every room- and one of my roommates had to run to security to get help. It was absolutely wild. Luckily I don't think anything was destroyed, but we have had many a joke about the "Great Flood" of apartment 151

Scaredy Cat

I feel like I'm letting fear overrun my life right now.

My fear of rejection, or, even worse, awkward and repetitive introduction conversations keep me from socializing much beyond my apartment. (Please, just don't make me repeat that I'm from Baltimore, Maryland- and yes, I may or may not know your Jewish friend that lives there, that I'm a junior, just here for a semester, not a year, I go to Carleton College, never heard of it? yeah, it's in Minnesota, yeah, it does get pretty darn cold up there and I'm in the third level of Ulpan, yes, I can understand everything pretty well, no, my verbal skills aren't quite up there, etc. etc.)

Worse than that, though, is my complete fear of speaking Hebrew. To be more specific, it's really more a of a fear of making a mistake. I know enough Hebrew to know when I'm saying something wrong. So, instead of asking a bus driver a rough translation of "do you walk/"go" to Mount Scopus" because I don't know the words for "do you stop/drive/does your route include Mount Scopus", I just won't ask. I'm more afraid of being the idiot who messes up her Hebrew phrases than just being the American tourist. The worst thing is when I know about half of the words in hebrew, so I start up in hebrew and then get stuck and have to switch to English. Wouldn't it just be easier to start in English and save myself the embarrassment?

But how can I not have this problem? I'm trained in Hebrew, sure, but it's academic Hebrew, not Hebrew for the market on Ben Yehuda. I can write a 10 page paper in Hebrew about the influence of Holocaust survivors on their children in Israeli literature and film, but I can't name all of the ingredients I want in my salad at lunch. I can read articles in newspapers or listen to an entire lecture and take out the main points, but I can't ask someone on the street how to get on a bus to get to the central bus station. I have no worries about my writing, Stacy's class more than prepared me, and it's shown by my essentially constant A's on all written assignments here. But I do this well because I understand construction, and I've mastered the dictionary. On the streets, in the market, on the bus, I can't write out a rough draft- I get one chance, and if I do it wrong I end up in Elat instead of Tel Aviv, with a pet chicken instead of a chicken sandwich for lunch. But at least when I get there I can tell the first Israeli I find the story we learned in Ulpan yesterday, of Alegra and Jabra and their forbidden Jewish-Christian love?

On Monday I went on two field trips: One with my Ulpan class and the other with a group of other sudents.
With my class I went to Mount Herzl. First we did a tour of the museum, which was actually really cool. We had a tour guide and we basically moved through all of these different rooms and screens came down from the ceilings and played movies and we had to keep turning around to watch different screens. It was very engaging. I think my favorite room was one set up to look like where the first Zionist Congress was held. It was 2 stories and we entered at the top and had to walk down and sit among these plastic figures. There were chandeliers hanging from the cielings and it was just really cool. But I was constantly worried that one of the plastic people was going to move and grab me, luckily they were not motorized.

It was cool because the entire tour was in Hebrew, the movies didn't even have Hebrew subtitles. While I'm sure that I missed some details, I got the main points of the tour. And I understood enough to be inspired to take a course on the History of Modern Israel.

Mount Herzl is also the home to a huge cemetery and Yad Vashem, the Holocaust Memorial (but we didn't go there). To the right is Herzl's grave, he is buried at the highest point on the 'mountain'- so that he can look out into the country he worked so hard for.


After Herzls grave we walked through the graves of important political figures like Golda Meir and Yitzhak Rabin. Rabin's grave is on the right, and it's different than the tombstones marking everyone else's graves because he was assassinated and did not die of natural causes. His gravestone is in Black and his wife's is in tan. They make a half circle to remind passersby of his unfinished life and work. Mt Herzl houses a large military cemetery as well as memorials for other groups of people (I'll get more into that later)
















Above are pictures of Hannah Senesh's grave. She is a very well known Israeli parachuter and poet. The story goes that she was captured and tortured and her mother (who was not even living in Israel) was also captured and tortured, but she would not reveal information about Israel, and she was killed. When we got to her grave we all got together and sang her most famous poem "Eli, Eli" which roughly translates as: "My God, My God, I pray that these things never end: The sand and the sea, the rush of the water, the lightening in the sky, the prayer of the man". It's really a beautiful song. I also really loved how adorned her grave was.





We also walked through the memorial I have pictured to the left. This is probably my favorite picture from the day. This is a memorial for sailors lost at sea when an Israeli submarine disappeared. It was only actually found recently.
The layout of the memorial is really cool, though, because it's underground and kind of looks like a submarine. And every person from the submarine has a remembrance plaque, since the bodies were never found.






To the right is a picture of a memorial for people killed in suicide bombings. It was an incredibly powerful memorial because of its size. Imagine long walls filled with black plaques inscribed with hundreds of names, it's horrible.

There was even a plaque honoring those killed in 2008, it's scary to think about people still dying so much after the establishment of Israel, simply because they are there and there are people around them who don't want them to be.






To the left is a memorial that really caught my eye because of the projects I did last winter in Hebrew and Jewish Ethics about the Holocaust. This is a memorial for survivors of the Holocaust who were then killed as soldiers in the War of Independence. It's shaped like an upside down house, to symbolize the hope these survivors had of finding home and safety in Israel, that was then lost when they were killed defending it.


The second field trip of the day was to Hebron. I was really excited to go to Hebron because I did a report on it in Hebrew Class last year. It's also an incredibly important city for Jews, so much excitement.

Hebron is a very controversial city, however. It has a rich history of Jews settling and then being kicked out, and then coming back, etc. Right now there are 87 or so Jewish families living in Hebron. They live in the 20% of the city where Jews are allowed. The other 80% is run by the Palestinian Authority, and Jews cannot enter.
To the left is a picture of one of the many Israeli soldiers we saw in Hebron. They are everywhere. Since the Jewish population there is spread out into 4-5 different neighborhoods, there are guards everywhere making sure that things remain calm between the Jews and there Palestinian neighbors.

To the left is a picture of some Jewish boys playing. I thought it was pretty cute. It's really incredible that those 87 or so families equal over 1,000 Jews in the city. These are huge families and people are incredibly devoted to living in Hebron. Hebron is known as the place where Abraham and Sarah once lived as well as, much later, King David. Exciting stuff.


The big sight to see in Hebron is the Maarat Ha'Machpela (which I'm sure I am butchering in English, but I could write it in Hebrew, but then you wouldn't get it). Maarat Ha'Machpela is the supposed burrial place of the mothers and fathers of Judaism: Abraham, Sarah, Isaac, Rebecca, Jacob, and Leah. It is mostly controlled by the Palestinian part of town, but Jews are allowed into a small section, including where Abraham is supposed to be buried. The picture to the right is Abraham's grave. It's a little confusing, because in fact, all of these people are actually buried underground, these shrines are built over their supposed burial spots.
Jews believe that about 7 steps up, next to the cave, is directly next to where the mothers and fathers are buried. (This comes from a whole lot of stories including Jews sneaking past Arab guards to go down into the cave and look for the graves). Many Jews gather to pray there, at the spot of the 7th step, to honor them. On the right is a picture of a man doing just that.

Our field trip also took us to the sight of Rebecca's grave, in Bethlehem. This was probably the weirdest experience because Bethlehem is right on or in the Gaza Strip. So, we entered the building with the grave, but outside were huge fences with barbed wire and guards. It was eerily quiet and, for me, just strange. It was weird to think of a whole other world beyond those walls, but still in the same country. The other weird thing was that we took a bulletproof bus for the entire field trip. The bus itself wasn't really all that different, except for the double glass in the windows, but it was just weird to feel like we needed to be in it.

Travel Plans!

We're now in week 5 of Ulpan and, to be honest, I think we're all about ready to be done. It's pretty exhausting.

The most exciting thing about this past week has been finalizing plans for traveling in the end of september/october. Here's my itinerary:
- Thursday September 25th is our last day of Ulpan. We have a final exam that day until 1pm. The we'll go home, pack, party, whatever, and at 7am on Friday we'll leave Tel Aviv for Vienna, Austria.
- We'll spend the weekend in Vienna touring around and staying at a really cool looking Hostel then on Monday afternoon we'll leave and fly to Copenhagen. We'll be there monday night, tuesday, and wednesday (which is perfect because Chuck and Lynsey- and the rest of DIS don't have classes on wednesdays) and on thursday morning we fly out to Paris.
- We'll spend the weekend in Paris and fly back on sunday morning.

Here's where the month gets interesting:
-We fly in on October 5th and have our first classes on the 6th and 7th. Then we are off on the 8th and 9th for Yom Kippur. Then it's the weekend.
- We have classes on sunday the 12th and then we are off from the 13th-the 23rd for Sukkot.
- My dad flies in on sunday the 12th and will chill in Jerusalem for a day or so.
- On monday we'll drive down to Petra in Jordan and see the sights there for a day
- On tuesday night we'll fly to Cairo and tour around there.
- On friday we'll board a nile cruise until sunday/monday then fly back to Tel Aviv!

I'm so excited. No wonder I can't wait for Ulpan to be over...

Reincarnation

So as promised, here is my post about the Jewish view of reincarnation:

On sunday the speaker at ortho house talked about reincarnation. Every week there is a speaker there for their dollars for learning program (which we fondly call dollars for brainwashing). Basically, if you sign up and agree to go to their weekly lectures and spend an hour talking to a tutor and write up what you learned, they will give you money. I find the whole thing kind of sketch and I don't really agree with some of their views, so I don't do the program. Also I just don't think brainwashing is as fun as everyone says it is... Anyways, they always have a free dinner and a speaker and since this out sounded interesting and there was chinese for dinner, I decided to go.

The speaker told us about the mystic view of reincarnation in Judaism. Some Jews believe that souls are reincarnated into new bodied to fix a mistake made in a previous life or to improve themselves from their previous life. Reincarnation is not ideal- you don't want to be reincarnated multiple times because it's painful to the soul to watch its body decompose. Once the souls have done everything they have to they will not be reincarnated and go to some higher unknown realm and that is what our souls strie for. The idea is that each new soul has 3 lives to do something right, if in one of those lives something improves then the soul has an infinite number of chances/lives but if nothing improves in those three lives then something bad happens- he didn't really go into it.

Scholars claim that the soul has a knowledge of what it must do, fix, or improve and we can see it in a certain unexplained draw to study something or do something- that unexplained draw is out soul yearning for what it lacks or has lacked in the past. Also, if we have a problem or tendency to do something bad our soul could be showing us what its weaknesses are, what it needs to overcome.

I think the part that I found most interesting was that he told us that there is a finite number of souls in the world and that everyone alive now is a reincarnation. The belief is that once every soul has done what it has to it, it stops being reincarnated and the Messiah will come. The idea of a finite number of souls is what really intrigues me, though. I aksed about it, because it seems to me that if we believe that then we are believing that this world is full of souls that couldn't get it right. We're the screw ups- shouldn't that have an effect on the mystical veiw on today's society? I'm not sure that knowing that, I would have faith in the people of this world to bring about the Messiah. When I asked that question he didn't really have an answer except to say that instead of seeing this as a world of screw ups he sees right now as the epitome of God's forgiveness- at the point where he's given us the most chances.

I'm not sure that I buy that. I'm not sure that I buy any of it, actually. But it's interesting to think about, especially after learning and fighting with the Buddhist concept of rebirth all of spring term. Really it's closer to the Mahayana than the Theravada definition of reincarnation, but I won't go into all of that.

I've realized, as I always do, that I don't completely worry myself about life after death, I simply believe that there is something. I believe we can't know, and this guy and his misticism and reincarnation is just as likely to be right as anyone else. Amelia and I had a whole conversation about the speaker: she thought he was crazy- I didn't have a problem with him.

We believe what we can, we believe what we can imagine and feel- so I do what I can, and I focus on doing good things. In the end, I hope, I will learn what is true and what is right and I might be completely wrong. I guess I just don't think it will matter what I believed but how I lived it.

Rabbit Rabbit Rabbit

Wow, it's September!
I didn't even think about it until someone mentioned it on the way to class today. I've been here almost a month and I should be on my way home in almost exactly 4 months. 5 months seemed unbearable, but 4 will be 3 before I know it- especially with travel plans at the end of the month. And 3 will be 2 super fast since our semester will have been about 10 days long by the time October is over- then is will be 2 months which seems like a small amount of time, weird. Follow that train of thought?

This weekend was pretty chill and relaxing- exactly what I always feel like I need at the end of a week of Ulpan. On Thursday night we decided to be social and go to the Jerusalem Beer Festival. It was pretty fun- we mostly just hung out with other Ulpan people and I got to meet some new people including a girl from Canada who had a whole conversation with me about accents and weird American phrases- for example: She asked us what 'quarter of seven' meant. We told her it meant 6:45 and she said she didn't think that made sense- a quarter of an hour is 15 minutes so a quarter of 7 should be 7 and a quarter- 7:15. She may have had a point there. I also met a guy from Emory and we talked about how it's changed since my parents were there.


(this is me and Kira at the beer festival, the one picture that I actually like from the night)

A couple highlights from the Beer Festival:
- Erica was looking for a particular beer and saw a man with it. He happened to be a huge tattooed man but she asked anyways. Once she got what she wanted she went back to him to say thanks. She asked where he was from and he said Holland, when he asked back she said Tokyo to which he replied "you don't look very Tokyo-an" and she said "yeah, you don't look very Dutch" and he answered "touche" and they clinked glasses. It was great.

- Peach Beer! It is so good and kind of tastes like ginger ale (or maybe was a really expensive peach flavored ginger ale? hm)

- Lo mein! They had a stand there selling lo mein and egg rolls and it was delicious.

- While me and Erica were eating our lo mein sitting to the side on the ground a photographer came up and started photographing us- I wonder if our picture is on the website.

- At the bus stop on our way back I met a guy who lives one street up from us (in Baltimore) and went to my lower/middle school. Craziness!

On friday we almost did an outdoor tourist activity but then we realized it was 95 degrees outside so we went and bought a toaster over instead. Of course, the one day we were lugging around a toaster oven was the day there was an outdoor concert on Ben Yehudah Street... we wondered around for a bit and then went home to chill. That night we caught a taxi to the western wall to meet up with the family we were set up with for Shabbat dinner. It's a shabbat hospitality program and we thought we'd give it a try. We met at the wall and 3 of us along with 4 other people we didn't know were sent to follow a semi-orthodox looking man. He was really nice and spoke English (I think he was originally from the US) but walked really fast. We walked from the kotel through part of the arab quarter of the old city including the arab marked and into downtown Jerusalem and beyond. We walked for about 45 minutes, it was intense. When we arrived we were greeted by a giant dining room table with room for 25 or more. There were children everywhere and adults from all over the world too. We talked to some other Americans who made aliyah (immigrating to Israel) about 10 years ago. They talked a lot about how it's really difficult to make a life in Israel- and I find that so interesting. One man runs 3 bussinesses to survive. I find it really inspiring that people put themselves through so much hardship to live in Israel- and they do it because they believe so strongly that they should be here. It's neat. There were also some people from the neighborhood and some random Australians, I'm not really sure where they fit in.

It was a really great dinner- and the food kept coming! If you recall the drunken rabbi story, there was only one food course in that shabbat dinner- but in this one we had a salad/fish/hummus course then soup then meats and vegetables then dessert. But, surprisingly (to me at least) they did the shot thing at this dinner too! I really need to do some research about the drinking during shabbat dinner. It's interesting because it's not like an adult glass of wine thing, it's honestly shots of scotch or vodka in between courses. This family even had a giant bottle of smirnoff with a pump at the top (like a soap despenser). Really different. I will research and let you know.

Saturday, as usual, we hung out, watched movies, did homework, and cleaned. It's a nice routine, but I think we're going to try to go to Tel Aviv or Hertzlya this weekend. We'll see.

Another weekend over!

For the next post: Judaism's veiw on Reincarnation