Tag Archives: ancestors

Paying a price

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From my blog:

This week, in Israel, has been particularly focused on the costs of establishing an idealist state in a previously inhabited plot of land. I’m not trying to dig too deep into the politics of it; rather I’m interested in the idea of the prices we pay to live where we do.

After all Carlos Arredondo, brought back into the public eye by the current tragedies in Boston, has paid high prices. It is not an infrequent thing, the terrible burdens families bear on their backs for their communities, for their countries.

This past Sunday, at my Yeshiva, we had a panel of faculty speaking about their personal Israel narratives. They spoke as individuals and then in a dialogue. In light of today’s theme, I’d like to highlight what Leah Rosenthal said.  Continue reading →

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The Place We Pray For

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A post from  my Cowbird
in honor of the new semester:

x

Early on the third day, the sun comes over the houses to the east of us. I open my eyes, kick sticky blankets to the floor. How was last night so cold? The glass on my window is hot when I touch it. My skin is darker here. The sky is pinker.

The Psalmists sing: “If I forget thee, O Jerusalem…” It echoed from father to son, mother to daughter. It found me in Ohio. What is this Eastern place we turn to when we pray? This place that is so old and so foreign. Where conflict and peace prayers compete. All these pieces of this broken world, all these pieces of all of us, together.

It’s 7am, and I have overslept. I can’t find my prayer book, can’t find my homework, can’t find my shoes. Dear Place That My Mothers Prayed For: How am I so lucky to wake up and walk your streets to school? My greatest worry that I won’t get to morning prayers on time.

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[Alumni Guest Post] Shira Abramowitz – The Burden of Legacy: It is no dream.

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Shira has left us for another adventure, and we miss her...
But her insightful writing continues (x-posted here below)!
Shira Bee

Shira Bee

Legacy.

A pretty big word around here.

Here being Jerusalem, a city that many nations hold dear due to its history and importance in relation to their people, their culture, their religion. As a proud member of the Jewish religion and culture, I find this place resonates with me on an impossibly deep level. I feel the ties to the land, not magically or mythologically, but rather in a historical sense; with understanding and awe that my ancestors have considered this land sacred for longer than I can truly comprehend. That this land has served as a place of refuge and of tragedy, of life and of death. And that the experience I have today while living in Jerusalem is inextricably tied to the experience my ancestors had in this land so long ago. Continue reading →

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New day, New adventures, New post

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Originally posted on my blog in Oct.:

So I decided today to go to the botanical garden in Jerusalem. I have always wanted to go, but have never found the time, well now I made the time!

So I brought my map, and the multiple bus directions that I looked up and hoped I would find it. Well I did but it was not as easy as I thought it would be. I ended up getting off the bus too early, walked for about 30 minutes and finally found a sign for the botanical gardens. But you got to love Israel and their lack of signs, I could not find the entrance!! I was so close, I could see the garden, but I couldn’t find a way in. It reminded me of Kafka’s Before The Law. A short story I read in high school.

This fence, where i couldn’t even find an entrance, was there for a reason.

So I ended up pretty much walking almost the entire circumference until I found the entrance! I have never been so happy to find an entrance sign in my life!!

Continue reading →

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My Spiritual High at Zorba

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Do you ever feel like there is a cage around you? Like you can carry it around but sometimes it gets heavy and tires you down. Perhaps it restrains you from moving in a comfortable way or running to what you really desire. I hadn’t really thought of myself in a cage at all before going to Zorba, a Festival in an Ashram in the Negev. I was unaware of this weight and constraint. Unaware of the energy I was wasting on thoughts and worries and food that are toxic to my being.

The music was pounding and my heart beat was in sync as my arms flowed freely and I felt my feet discover new bumps on the desert ground. I was blindfolded from seeing the outside world and forced only to look inside. To feel the music pulsing through my body, to feel the tension of being nervous and shy, to feel my muscles tense when I felt maybe I would bump someone. I looked deep inside myself as if my thoughts were separate from my rhythmic body movements. That is when I felt it, I swear I could even see it. My cage was opened and my body and mind were free and relaxed. Tension turned into excitement. Stiff calculated movements flowed as if I had been moving this way since birth. We did this dance practice for an hour. During that hour of dancing in the dark I dug deep and felt completely open to my emotions, good and bad as they rushed around. After the music stopped and we laid on our backs looking towards the sky I felt freer than I have ever felt. I felt connected and light. This was the true start of my spiritual high at Zorba.

Let me rewind a bit. Zorba is a festival that is held twice a year. The Ashram Bmidbar (In the Negev) also has other weekend workshops. Naomi Zaslow and I had heard from students last year how amazing the festival was so we excitedly signed up to go over Sukkot. The ride down rt 90 along the Dead Sea was breath taking. We arrived at the Festival set up our tents and went to explore.

Laura (L) and Naomi (R) at Zorba.

The grounds consist of a multitude of tents which they call “Olamim,” worlds. There is a Yoga world, a rebirthing world, a Buddah stage, a healthy eating world, a mystical world and many more. All throughout the day and night you are free to decide which lessons to attend. I was lucky enough to attend two amazing sessions at the healthy eating tent where I took lessons on the benefits of adding more raw food to your diet as well as having a love relationship with your hunger and food. I also took a few free dancing and meditation sessions as I described in the beginning. These were probably the most impactful because the was no real language barrier with dancing and I was able to just let go and feel uninhibited in front of strangers. It was in the dance sessions and the chakra breathing that I discovered what it means to be spiritually high. Our body and mind does not need any substance to feel incredibly good and free. After some of these sessions I felt such intense changes of being recharged spiritually and energetically. I think it is sad that our society runs so fast to using substances to achieve this feeling when there are natural and healthy ways to achieve it.

Lately I have been struggling with the intense sadness of loss because of the passing of my Uncle. It has been physically painful for me to recite the mourners Kaddish with meaning. Sometimes I feel like it comes out robotically and on these days I am grateful because I didn’t have to feel. During a music meditation I had a breakthrough with the mourners Kaddish and tefillah in general. I was standing eyes closed breathing to the music when I had the urged to recite Mincha. Under my breath I went through the service as best as my memory served me. Pausing from traditional text in my head and switching to personal prayer with ease. I was so grateful of the baby steps I have been taking to make prayer meaningful so I would be able to experience such a reward. I came to the time where I would be saying Kaddish in a minyan. A release shot throughout my body as tears rolled down my face and I recited word by word with each breath the mourners Kaddish. Though I was only whispering and no one was answering me I felt as though I was in the presence of a minyan that was also connected to themselves and G-d. I felt the pain more intensely and real than I had expected. When I finished I was out of breath and my body felt like it had run a marathon. I laid on the ground and felt my heart beat against the ground, as it soothed me into a meditative state.

On Shabbat I felt so connected to myself and to Israel. Naomi and I sat in front of our tent dressed in white flowy dresses and lit Shabbat candles that we placed in the center of a rock heart pattern. As people passed, some completely unaware that Shabbat was upon us, we wished them a Shabbat Shalom. There warm smiles and returned wishes were beautiful. The majority of people at the festival were very secular Israelis, but we were all still Jews with a spiritual connection to something. Some people gathered together to make Kiddush and we swayed to drum beats of Shabbat zmirrot. That night I layed out in the desert and stared at the expansive sky. I felt like I was lying amongst my ancestors who wandered the Negev during Biblical times. It was almost like that part in the Lion King when Musafa tells Simba that they can see their ancestors in the stars if they just look hard enough. I felt that laying there open to feeling the energy of the ground I was able to connect with generations of Israelites.

I have so much more I would like to share about this amazing experience. If anyone is interesting in going I would love to talk to you. I see though that recharges like this festival are needed in our busy lives. This was an extreme example, camping for three days at an ashram. In smaller doses though I think even going alone to the park and sitting with yourself and your thoughts can give you the recharge we need in our lives. I hope to take the idea of balance, openness and energy from my experience at Zorba.

I hope everyone had a very Happy Sukkot vacation and I look forward to dancing forward in life with you all.

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The Land of my Foremother

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Hello Pardesians and World,

For the first time in over a decade, Pardes took a tiyyul to the city of Hevron. It was a visit filled with mixed emotions. We examined Hevron from many different angles in order to assess the situation that is in Hevron today. While there are many things I could discuss, I am not going to speak about the controversial topics we encountered. Rather, I want to tell you all about my experience in Maarat HaMachpela, the tomb where the Avot and 3 of the Imahot are buried.

While we were climbing the steps up to Maarat HaMachpela, it occurred to me that Leah, my namesake, is buried there. I mean, think about it, this is the original Leah, the Leah that all other Leahs are named after and I, one who bears her name, was going to visit her gravesite. It was mind boggling. I’m not really sure I understood how I felt about it.

When we were free to wander the halls of the me’ara, I wandered from room to room until I finally found the room that held Jacob and Leah’s tombs. Leah’s tomb was on the men side of the mechitza. A fellow Leah, Leah Kahn, and I were forced to stare through the mechitza at Leah’s tomb and weren’t able to get close enough up to look through the grated iron bars over the window into the tomb. We were both frustrated, because we wanted to get closer to the very person who gave so many little girls her name. Finally, we decided that we would take a chance, and we crossed over to get a closer look. Thankfully, no one minded and we both walked out happy.

I’m not sure exactly what I felt looking into the room and seeing the tomb of my foremother and namesake. I felt a connection, but not the emotionally strong one like I expected. Considering my previous reactions at the kotel, I barely let out any emotion. If anything, it was just extremely cool that I, Leah, was visiting the grave of THE Leah, the Leah who was married to Jacob, the Leah that gave birth to 7 of the 12 tribes of Israel.

I’ve thought about my connection to Leah. For most of my life, I was the Leah in a sea of Rachels, always the odd one out. It reminded me how we talk about how Rachel was the one that Jacob loved and that Leah’s marriage to Jacob was a result of Lavan’s trickery. It reminded me how the Torah points out that Leah had weak eyes but Rachel was beautiful. It’s very clear from the text that Jacob loved Rachel more than he loved Leah. Leah had to bargain with Rachel in order to spend time with Jacob and spent much of her time trying to please Jacob by bearing as many children as possible. It’s clear that Leah had a very difficult life.

For a long time, I wondered why anyone would want their child Leah, the unloved one. In fact, I wondered why anyone would name any of their children after Biblical characters, so many of whom did terrible things or had terrible things that happened during their lifetimes. Then I thought about my own name and how I received it. My maternal great-grandmother’s Hebrew name was Rahel Leah, but everyone called her Leah instead of Rahel. When my parents named me, they switched around her name and gave me the name Leah Rahel instead of Rahel Leah.  After many years, I thought about my first name and realized how similar my personality was to the personality of Leah. Leah might have had a difficult life but she was strong. She had so many odds up against her and yet she overcame them.  She took joy in naming and raising her children. And in the end, she has the honor of being the mother of 7 of the tribes. Her hard work paid off in the end.

I, too, like Leah, am a fighter. I have had difficult obstacles in my life that I have had to overcome. And yet, no matter how tough it gets, I keep on pushing through, because I know there is something greater for me on the other side. And I know in the end, that the thing on the other side will make me stronger. I now realize why we choose to give our children names of Biblical characters. We are acknowledging that while these people are the pillars of our Judaism, they were also human beings; like us, they too made mistakes. But each of them had a special quality that we want to pass on to our children. We want to be human like them, we know we will make mistakes. But we also know that with the passing on of their name, the quality and essence of their character will be passed on to future Leahs and Rachels.

Every Friday night, girls are blessed by their parents saying, “May God make you like Sarah, Rebecca, Rachel, and Leah.” As I stood beside my foremother’s grave, I was proud to be a Leah.  I knew I was fulfilling that blessing in my own way. Though we may be generations apart, I know that my foremother and my great-grandmother for whom I was named would be proud that I am carrying on their name and blessing. May all of us have that honor to carry forth the blessing of our namesakes and transmit it to future generations.

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לך לך

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This week’s parsha contains many famous and thought-provoking stories, but I would like to focus on what I see as an emerging motif in the Rashbam, where he criticizes his grandfather’s reading of a verse before offering an alternate interpretation which he sees as sticking more closely to the pshat, the simple reading of the text.  In the blessing that Hashem gives Avram regarding the sojourning of his descendents in Egypt for 400 years, which will be followed by inheriting the Land of Cana’an, Hashem says: “And the fourth generation will return here because the sin of the Amorites is not complete until now [then]” (15:16).  Rashi explains that the fourth generation refers to B’nei Yisrael (the Children of Israel), as after they are go down to Egypt, there will be three generations, and the fourth will inherit Cana’an.  Rashi explains his theory by saying that Yaakov went down to Egypt, and Calev – the only other person besides Yehoshua to enter the Land who came from Egypt and did not die during the forty years in the desert – is four generations removed from Yaakov.  However, the Rashbam does not think the verse is talking about Israelites here.  There is a simple flaw with Rashi’s logic, in his mind: if the text just finished saying that the Israelites will be in Egypt for 400 years (15:13), why would it then also explain how many generations that works out to – in any case they will be there for 400 years!  So instead, the Rashbam sees this verse as referring to the inhabitants of Cana’an, who will be driven out of the land after four generations.  Yes, it’s true that B’nei Yisrael will return after four generations, but our verse is speaking from the perspective of the nations (specifically the Amorites) who dwell there currently.  And why is it important that four generations go by between B’nei Yisrael going down to Egypt and the Amorites being kicked out of the Land?  The Rashbam sees this as Hashem treating all peoples the same.  In Shmot 20:5 it says that Hashem “visits punishment on the sons from the fathers for four generations to those who hate me,” which the Rashbam interprets as Hashem giving all sinners four generations to change their ways before punishment is visited upon them.  So Hashem, though expecting that the Amorites would be kicked out when the time came, still gave them four generations with the chance that, if they changed their ways, they would not be expelled from Cana’an.  I think that this interpretation is all the better because the Rashbam thinks that this is the simplest way to read the verse.

To correct our ways

We are all equal to God:

Four generations

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Hello to Israel—Notes from a First Time Visitor

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Here’s something I wrote on my first day in Israel, standing at the Kotel, my hand pressed against the stones and clutching my steno pad.  I couldn’t seem to let go of the ancient wall.  I thought I’d publish this on These&Those, and challenge y’all to share your own first impressions of the country.

On Sunday, June 1, 2008, I left Atlanta for my first trip to Israel.  The initial half of the trip is to be a media fact finding trip to the South—Sderot, Ashkelon, Beersheva, days and  nights filled with speeches, tours, visits to schools, municipalities, places to make us comprehend the constant threat the residents live under.  Perhaps we can come back home and describe their plight in a way to make people in the States take notice that the Palestinians are not the only ones suffering in this miserable conflict. We landed.  The airport could have been in any big city. But the road to Jerusalem—arid hills laced with ancient stone terraces, olive trees and other bits of greenery, sudden Arab towns, a security wall to keep Palestinians from shooting at cars, Israeli soldiers, guns slung over their backs and of course the signs in English, Hebrew and Arabic.  I’m determined to improve my reading ability in this old and new language.  My driver, Ron, pointed out which areas were Jewish, which Arab.  That is, when he wasn’t trying to drive his van into some other car’s trunk as he fished in his pocket for a notebook or talked on the phone or found some other reason not to pay attention to his driving.  Who worries about Kassams or Grad missiles when they’ve got Israeli drivers to contend with?

 Suddenly he pointed ahead and said, Look, Jerusalem.  And there it was, sprinkled across the landscape, not the picture postcard of the Temple Mount, the Dome of the Rock, but a mass of ecru buildings seemingly tossed at random across the hills. Seeing so many Israeli flags flying caused a thrill I never expected to feel—today is Yom Yerushalayim, the anniversary of the date Israel reunited Jerusalem and reclaimed the Western Wall, which had been in Arab hands since 1948.  It’s a big day.    Will the tears of joy ever stop?  Walking down to the Kotel surrounded by tourists from the US and many other countries, with Africans in tribal garb, Haredi Jews, some religious men in knee pants and long socks, some in every shape of fur hat, and marching students and soldiers, I, the rationalist, the one who still balks at the faith that is trying to creep into my spirit, cried and pressed my hands, my lips and my forehead to the ancient stones, echoing the memories and hopes and prayers and devotion and despair of centuries of Jews before me.  Is this how Christian pilgrims felt at Canterbury, or crawling up cathedral steps in Mexico on their knees?  I don’t think I’ve ever before truly contemplated the effect of place on human reactions.   I marveled at the fervor of women young and old as their prayers poured out to the silent stones.  I looked at a tiny girl tucking a carefully folded sheet of paper with a prayer written on it into crevice after crevice until she found a sticking place for her words to God.  I saw the old women begging and I remembered the homeless on Atlanta’s city streets, people crying for a pittance from those of us who have so much.  And I, who disdained those who beg instead of working to support themselves, found myself pulling out my wallet.  How much did they need compared to what I have?  I don’t face the possibility of bombs every time I enter a market or a restaurant.  My only fear in boarding a bus is the driver’s skill. People have told me I’d have a hard time leaving here after a week, that I’d be changed by my visit.  It’s happening already, and the woman who used to be angry when a Jewish organization dared suggest dual loyalty by opening a meeting with Hatikvah finds herself wishing she could transport all Jews, especially the skeptics, here for one day, one afternoon, one Yom Yerushalayim—to see the flags proudly waving, the soldiers sauntering along, tall and strong and confident, the students vibrant with the anticipation of life yet to come, not focusing on the possibility of death or injury, and the rest of the people of this glorious land taking for granted what I hold so newly and gently in my heart, a precious gift of love and dedication and belonging, not just to the land, but to all it stands for—history and faith and blood and hope and even death. And perhaps most of all, continuity, a people that has survived against all odds, persevered and thrived on less than nothing in this world, but everything possible in the world of the spirit. That one person would die for this hot, dusty desert is incredible.  That an entire nation gives its beautiful, hopeful youths for it is just a fact of life.

This land is mine.  God gave this land to me.  Not to someone else, not just to some anonymous Middle Eastern Jew with curly hair and dark eyes and a guttural language spilling from his or her lips, but to ME, to every Jew who has ever lived or who ever will live. Would I fight for Israel?  That’s a tough question.  I feel a strong national allegiance to the United States of America.  Always has been that way for this Navy brat with veins brimming with saltwater. But Israel’s claim on my heart is different.  Not my country in the same contemporary political sense, but mine by right of birth, by rite of history, by write of Torah.  Not just my blood, my physical heritage, but the peoplehood in my very DNA, in every fiber of my physical, spiritual and emotional being says if I am a Jew, if I define myself by this millennia-old tradition, then I accept Israel as part and parcel of that, as the core of my belief and faith system, of myself. Will this feeling last?  I can’t know.  But I do know that Israel has made an indelible impression on me.   Walking where our patriarchs walked, feeling the golden glow, the holy aura of Jerusalem, seeing places memorialized in the Bible, just being in the land so many of my ancestors were willing to die for, has created in me a yearning to return, to be a part of this endless continuum of Jewish life and Jewish history.  I begin to understand the prayer we repeat every year during Pesach, “Next year in Jerusalem.”

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נח

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The end of this week’s parsha, like last week’s, details the lineages leading to the main protagonists of Bereishit, mainly those of Noach’s children.  Unsurprisingly, for those who know the story that comes next, the lineages rush through the generations in between Noach and Avram and then slow down just in time to talk about where Avram comes from.  Rashi brings a parable to explain this phenomenon (beyond the obvious explanation that the narrative is focusing in on the protagonist-to-be): It is like a person who lost a pearl in the sand.  She will dig through the sand with a sieve looking for the pearl, and when she finds it, she will discard the pebbles and other ‘stuff’ that she went through in her search, and focus on the pearl.  So too, the Torah sifted through the generations looking for a ‘pearl’ – and when it found that pearl, namely Avram, it slowed down and focused on it.  The editor of this comment of Rashi added an unexplained citation to Bereishit 37:1, which confused me for a while, since no verse was quoted.  With some help from those wiser than me, I learned that the connection is that there, too, the parable applies.  The verse in question begins the story of Jacob’s descendents, and in a similar fashion, discards most of his children and focuses most of the story on one child, namely Joseph.

Sifting through the years

Highlighting the best among us

To be a lesson

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Week 1: Orientation

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(First published on my blog for “The Jewish Chronicle” of Pittsburgh, Yinzer in Yerushalayim, 9 September 2011)

Sunday was orientation at Pardes. The getting-to-know-you introductions at the beginning made one thing clear straight-away—this is a place of diversity. The students at Pardes range from future Open Orthodox, Conservative, and Reform rabbis, to a dude who’s a few weeks away from becoming a Reconstructionist rebbetzin (and with all due respect to Dave Barry, “The Reconstructionist Rebbetzins,” would be an excellent name for a rock band), to middle-aged people, to camp councilors, to current and future Jewish day school teachers, to people like me. The ideological diversity is matched by the geographic—we have students from Canada, Australia, Russia, Argentina, New Zealand, Germany, Hungary, the Netherlands, all-over America (including another Pittsburgher), and new olahs. The teachers stress that Jewish texts are the inheritance of every Jew regardless of personal belief—more important than observance is literacy: Read the texts and draw your own conclusions. Also strongly emphasized is the importance of learning in chevruta, or pairs. And it only took one chevruta session to experience how right they were: Learning a text through a respectful but honest back-and-forth with someone else lets you better express, accept, reject and invent ideas and textual interpretations, and it’s a great way to form intimate relationships, not only with your chevruta, but with the text. One person alone cannot handle the Rambam. Two can’t either, but it’s still twice as good as learning alone.

Classes at Pardes are nearly all based around chevruta. In my thrice-weekly Tanakh class, and twice-weekly Mishna, Social Justice, and Rambam classes, we come to class, get introduced to the texts and ideas for the day, then get assigned texts, go to the Beit Midrash, and learn them in chevruta for about an hour and fifteen minutes. Then we come back to the classroom and have deep discussions of them. I guess this is as good a time as any to tell you my schedule: Sunday, Tuesday, and Friday, I have Tanakh level Bet, where we will be spending the year studying the Book of Exodus in Hebrew. Sunday and Tuesday afternoons, I have Social Justice, where we learn and discuss how Jewish texts from all eras relate to various social justice issues. This class also includes lots of guest speakers and field trips. Monday and Wednesday mornings I have Mishna, where, until after the holidays, we will be learning Tractate Rosh Hashana. After Mishna I have Turning Points in Modern Jewish History, the one class without chevruta. Monday and Wednesday afternoons I have Rambam, where we’re learning the laws of teshuva. It’s wearing, but rewarding. Tuesdays before lunch we have a school-wide speaker, Thursday afternoons (but not this week) we volunteer in Jerusalem. This week it felt like more chevruta time was spent looking up Hebrew words in the dictionary than anything else, but after class, damn if my chevruta and I didn’t feel like we accomplished something. The teachers are amazing: They are all knowledgeable, open, challenging, fun, and above all else, passionate and that passion rubs off on us even when lack of Hebrew skills gets frustrating.

 

The Pardes Beit Midrash seems so much like a dream of Jewish unity, it’s sometimes hard to believe it’s real: where else do guys in kippot and tzitzit and girls in tank-tops and shorts learn in chevruta as equals? You would expect there to be some kind of animosity between the various factions, but, at least in the first week, there honestly doesn’t appear to be any. Personally, I like everyone, and that’s saying a lot. I am a very peevish person: In almost any group of any size, there is bound to be someone who annoys me, but not here. I think the reason for the unity is mutual respect: You may believe differently than I do, but you obviously respect the text and the tradition otherwise you wouldn’t have chosen to be here, and how can I not respect that? Plus everyone’s just so damn nice, helpful, honest, polite, and friendly it’s impossible not to like them.

This became emphasized in a big way during our tiyyul or field trip Thursday. We had the option of going one of three places, and I chose the City of David. It was incredible: We saw places straight from the Bible, sloshed through Hezekiah’s Tunnel and walked part of the way up the steps leading from the communal well to the Temple. This was especially jarring: These steps were just rediscovered and just three months ago weren’t even open to the public. To walk on the exact same steps my ancestors walked on over 2,000 years ago on the way to the Temple Mount is an experience I can’t easily describe. It’s so hard to fathom that Jerusalem is a real place, that I’m actually standing in that place I constantly read about in prayers and psalms, that when a teacher says “right over there in the Temple” they actually mean right over there.

I’ve been trying to go to the Kotel as much as possible since I’m in the Old City anyway for another week. Since I was so tired and out of it on my way down to the Kotel Wednesday night, I decided to read some psalms from my siddur on the walk down to help restore my concentration. As it turns out, that night, and Thursday night too, induction ceremonies for new members of different brigades in the IDF were being held in the plaza before the Wall, making it absolutely swamped with people—newly minted soldiers and their kvelling families and friends. As it happens, after I pushed my way past all the people and made it to the Wall, I got to this psalm: Psalm 124. I will never read it the same way again.

This brings up something important I’ve noticed after only one week: There is no past and present here. William Faulkner’s epigraph to our Turning Points in Modern Jewish History syllabus, “The past isn’t dead. It isn’t even past,” is absurdly true in Jerusalem. Most of the Psalms of Ascent are so relevant, they could have been written yesterday. A 2,000 year old road to the Temple is brand new and exciting. Liberal-minded, moderns spend hours wrestling with ancient texts (as one of my peers put it, “Will anything we write still be discussed 2,000 years from now?”) Most of the ancient-looking Jewish Quarter was built after 1967. Yesterday, I stopped by my apartment to ask the guy who owns the apartment something. After he answered my question, he asked if I was going back to the Arona (Jewish Quarter). I said I was and he asked if I could be a witness to his wedding at the Kotel. I said sure, so we took a taxi to the Wall, found a yeshiva bochur to be the second witness, and signed a paper certifying that his second marriage, to a recent convert from Korea, was valid under Jewish law, then drank some grape juice and ate some rugela to celebrate. Israel.

Speaking of which, my feet are so blistered from walking to and from class everyday that when I passed a Crocs store on the way home from class Wednesday, I stopped to consider buying some. Then I figured that if I was going to buy Crocs, I might as well make aliya while I was at it so kept moving.

 

Hebrew word of the week: לפגוש (“leefgohsh”) – To meet

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