Security and Diplomacy Shabbaton

I'm very far behind in my blogging, and haven't been as responsible as I could have been.  I'm going to try to shore up my long silence by describing this week's MASA Shabbaton in Jerusalem.

Thursday was a fairly ordinary day.  There is a substitute standing in for one of Rambam school's two regular English teachers with whom I collaborate at work.  Sadly, the substitute does not speak any English; although this did not at all impede our own communication, I find it rather irritating that the school could not even get a substitute able to communicate ever so slightly in the language which she is teaching to my students.  Anyway, I still did my best to teach my students; I do, however, miss Chani, who is not only good at teaching, but also an excellent English-speaker.  Only Veta and I showed up for Ulpan, and I think that we had a very constructive session.  I learned the verb "להתעטש," which is the verb "to sneeze," which I have been needing to do quite frequently all week.  I've been off-and-on sick for three weeks now, and really just want to be fully healthy again.  It's been over three weeks since I've exercised, and my body is feeling it; I'm not nearly as strong or energetic as I ordinarily am, and can feel myself losing muscle mass, and gaining abdominal fat.  That evening, I Skyped with two really wonderful people in the U.S., back-to-back.  I Skype regularly with Rachel (less than a chapter left before we finish reading Sefer Zecharya!), but I haven't spoken with Rav Ami in months, and was very glad to have the opportunity to do so.

I was up at 6:20 am on Friday.  After my morning routine, I was out the door, and just barely caught the 7:57 am train to Tel Aviv, where I was scheduled to meet the Masa bus.  There was no electricity running in the train station, reminding of the fact that, although Israel is in many ways just as much a developed nation as France or the United States, not everything always works as efficiently as the Paris train system, and in no way is this more clearly manifest than in public transportation.  Before I decided to take the 7:14 am bus every day to work to avoid such problems, I was used to my bus to work frequently driving past my bus stop, because it was full, and the bus company did not adjust its schedules in order to compensate for that.  Likewise, boarding a bus traveling to Jerusalem requires that one uses ones elbows to block others, or jab them out of the way.  I'm completely serious; there is no such thing as an orderly queue in this country.  On the other hand, the water system is excellent, and Israelis never need to worry about turning on their kitchen faucets and see nothing come out, as they do in Israel's friendly neighbor Jordan.  The train ride was easy; I spent it reading Mishneh Torah, Hilchot Shegagot on the way (later that weekend, I finally finished Sefer Korbanot!  Woohoo!  Now I'm beginning Tahara!).  Outside Tel Aviv's Arlozov Train Station, I ran into Coco, and the two of us located a large mob of people our age (בחורים) speaking in English, waiting outside of a parked bus.  It seemed that we had found the group, but that they were confused about the bus; the bus outside of which they were standing was actually driving to a cemetery, according to the driver (I spoke to him in Hebrew, which most of the others could not do).  Coco and I found the correct bus in time, as did the rest, eventually.  We both read, but also tried to take in the Jerusalem landscape.

Our bus's guide, a young American-born עוֹלֶה (immigrant) named Benji brought us to several locations in Jerusalem, in order to highlight certain security elements in place in Jerusalem.  Our first stop was in the suburb of Giloh, specifically rechov Arlozov.  Just on the opposite side of the Green Line from the Arabic neighborhood of Beit Jala (for those of you paying attention, "جالا ," Jala, is an Arabic corruption of the Biblical Hebrew "גילֹה‎").  During the Second Intifada, the apartment buildings on this road in this section of this suburb in Jerusalem were most infamous among Israelis for being the target of sniper-fire from the adjoining Arab neighborhood.  The exact Arab-Israeli borders in Jerusalem had been drawn up pretty much by a couple of Israeli generals in 1967, following Israel's victory in the Six-Day War.  For this reason, there were a lot of divisions that resulted in unfavorable border lines for local Arab residents; one man's orchard was cut from his house, and he needed to spend more than an hour in border-crossing checkpoints in order to visit his property.  We took a look at some of the out-of-use old concrete watchtowers that had been manned by Israelis to watch border-crossings.  Since the towers' original construction, there had been an attempt on the part of the Israelis to automate border security.  The idea is that the fewer IDF soldiers Palestinian Arabs see actively patrolling the border, the less resentment the Arab population of Jerusalem will feel towards Israel.  The guard pointed at the separation barrier; yes, the barrier which Israel insists is a temporary security measure, but which is the UN's pretext for calling Israel an "apartheid state."  The holes which are meant to be used to hoist up the walls and drag them away all clearly visible, even from a distance.  At one point, the course of the separation barrier made a clear swerve, in order to include Rachel's Tomb on the Israeli side of the border, which the guide described as an unequivocal Israeli land grab.  Also visible from this vantage point was the shielded highway leading to Gush Etzion, the physically largest Jewish settlement bloc in the West Bank.  The term "גּוּשׁ" in Hebrew means "bloc," and the Gush Etzion is geographically the largest of the three West Bank settlements, the other two being Ariel and Ma'alei Adumim (the latter of which I passed through with the rest of the Ramla Oranim folk on our trip to the Dead Sea, when our guide Stav pointed out the red soil for which the region is named, adding the apocryphal legend that the name originates from the region a place where bandits waylaid and spilled the blood of many travelers).  Although Israel did bulldoze settlements following the signing Oslo Accords, much to the grief of many ultra-Zionists, the bulldozing of such cities as Ariel, with a population of nearly 30,000 people, is completely off the table for consideration, even by the far left.  This of course raises the question as the eventual shape of what will likely eventually become a sovereign Palestinian state.  Will it just have little pockets of Israel infiltrating it like fingers through playdough?  This shielded highway that we see would make up one of the tendons of such a "finger."  It is covered with sloping walls on both sides so as to protect vehicles from sniper fire.  It's a sad reality that such a thing is necessary.  The second location of our bus tour of the city, very close to the UN embassy, was a housing complex, נוֹף צִיּוֹן, planted very deliberately in the middle of an Arab neighborhood by Zionists.  Nobody wanted to live in the buildings, but the company nevertheless resisted attempts by wealthy Arabs to re-purchase the land.  There was a police station planted right next the border crossing.  Just imagine all of the resentment brewing among the Arabs, who need to pass through lengthy border checkpoints, and feel as if they are under police surveillance.  Whatever eventual peace settlement is reached (and I hope that it will be reached soon), Israel is, for better or worse, going to need to maintain some kind of border patrol, humiliating as it is.  Otherwise -- think about it, geographically -- it would be possible to drive a car from Iran, Israel's greatest international enemy, through Iraq and the very lousy border patrol in Jordan, directly into Israel.  That is simply too great of a threat; the other borders are simply too permeable for Israeli to feel safe trusting traffic to enter its borders without a very diligent border patrol.  As Israelis say, "מה לעשות?," what are you going to do?  The final location on our bus tour was an observation platform overlooking the old city, with the Temple Mount front and center in our line of vision.  Benji, our guide, asked us to compare the state of the buildings and landscape to the wast of the Temple Mount (our right) to everything to the west (our left).  The west, the Israeli side, was scattered with trees, with brighter and more modern houses, and quite a few skyscrapers.  The PA side of the border, the east, had far less greenery, had very run-down looking houses, and had none of the impressive, metropolitan architecture of the Israeli side.  There's an argument to be made that this juxtaposition alone should indicate to all the world that the onus of the peace process rests on Israeli shoulders.  I'm somewhat skeptical as to how far this argument can be carried, but the economic disparity is quite clear, just to the naked eye.  Benji explained to us that current Finance Minister of Israel Ya'ir Lapid sees economic disadvantage among Arabs as a sort of opportunity.  If he can build an economy, and have individual Arab citizens prefer having good jobs and feeding their families to becoming suicide bombers, then Israel will be a more secure state.  That, anyway, is a simplification of his logic.

We arrived at our hotel, ate some sandwiches (this is where I spotted Ramla's own Max and Gabbie, who had been riding a different bus, with the same script), and settled down in the hotel's library for the first speaker of the day.  By this point, it was around 1:30 pm.  The speaker was Colonel Bentzi Gruber, a sub-commander in the IDF Reserves who has around 20,000 soldiers serving under him.  His talk was about "Ethics in the Field," and he tried to give the audience an idea of what it is like, as a soldier and officer in the IDF, to be in charge of protecting Israel from rocket fire, suicide bombs, and other terror threats.  Bentzi was a highly competent communicator, and although he was clearly convinced of the importance of his work, he did not present himself as overtly emotional.  He spoke on a number of points (it was very clear that he had given more or less the same talk many times in the past), beginning with some of the wilder conspiracy theories spread by Israel's unfriendly neighbors blaming the IDF for their problems.  Some of the other topics that he discussed included the blockade of Gaza, Gaza's economic reliance on Israel, Israel drone strikes and the warnings it gives beforehand, Israel's policy regarding demolishing houses, the use of U.N. ambulances by terrorists, PA and Gaza school curricula, medical treatment of terrorists, Israel's targeted assassinations of terrorist leaders, the IDF's anti-suicide-bomber-car tactics, the media war, and his own treatment when abroad as an international war criminal.  One particular issue, which reminded me of my time on Birthright in Sderot, was the psychological impact of missile strikes and sirens in towns bordering the Gaza Strip, and how large numbers of children from these towns suffer post-traumatic stress disorder.  There were a number of video clips; perhaps the most striking, though, was one of a man with an assault weapon over his shoulder searching for a child to use as a shield, and eventually grabbing one by the loop of his knapsack, and half-dragging, half-carrying him through the street.  I don't think that that video (apparently taken by a fellow Arab with a smartphone) is going to disappear from my memory for a while.  After the talk, I asked Bentzi whether people were ever injured in the "knocking on the roof" policy that he had described to us, and he kind of equivocated.  I kind of interpreted his response as "sometimes, but not usually."

We had time to prepare for Shabbat.  I shared a room with two other men, one of whom knew my friend Veta from Birthright.  I showered, changed my shirt, etc., and, after first lighting candles, walked to the synagogue-room in the hotel for Kabbalat Shabbat with the other guests.  There was no Shir Hashirim, much to my disappointment.  Nevertheless, I still thought of מַה יָּפִית וּמַה נָּעַמְתְּ אַהֲבָה בַּתַּעֲנוּגִים זֹאת קוֹמָתֵךְ דָּמְתָה לְתָמָר, as I always do.  I really missed this as part of my complete Shabbat experience.  Following services was Shabbat dinner.  I sat fairly close to Gabbie and Max.  I should add here that I felt completely outclassed by most of the participants.  It was a feeling very similar to that which I had felt when I attended the Institut de Touraine more than two years ago.  I was surrounded by ultra-smart, highly-educated, highly-mature, super-polyglot Europeans.  Many of the participants spoke a few languages on top of English and Hebrew (Russian was particularly common); one woman I met, who had her Master's degree and was doing security work in the Israeli Ministry of the Interior, was a doubly-native speaker of Hungarian and German.  She was rather special, but, nevertheless, I felt much, much less informed about current events, as well as much, much worse at multilingual communication, than those around me.  I sometimes felt a little bit like this at Drisha Institute back in June, in the sense that my Hebrew and Aramaic skills were so deplorably lower than those of everyone around me, but the feelings of being entirely behind academically and intellectually were made up for by the fact that everyone around me was so warm, friendly, and accepting.  There was no time for this kind of friendliness at the Shabbaton; most of us would never see each other again in our lives, and there was no motivation to build friendships.  Some people socialized between classes (there was, unfortunately, a fair amount of unused time between sessions), and I tended to read, either the book that I had brought with me (Mishnah Nezikin, flipping around) or from the books available in the hotel synagogue.  Following dinner, we had a group discussion about ethics and security, addressing questions of sacrificing liberty for the sake of security, responsibility for the lives of others through action and inaction, etc.  I was thinking very hard about the odd collection of ethics that's fallen into my head over the past few years.  Over the course of the evening, I think that I had scrambled in my mind the competing opinions of Socrates in Gorgias, Cornell University's Professor Matti Eklund, Hippocrates, my older brother Andrew, and Rava as quoted in the Talmud Bavli, 74a ("A man came to Rava and told him that the governor of the city had ordered that he slay a certain man or himself suffer death, and Rava said to him: 'Rather than slay another person, you must permit yourself to be slain, for how do you know that your blood is redder than his, perhaps his blood is redder than yours?'").

Later on Friday evening evening, we had what was for me one of the most enjoyable sessions thus far, optional, so that people could be free to go to bed early.  It was pretty much a question-and-answer-plus-discussion with one of the seminar's organizers, Calev, whom I had coincidentally met earlier in synagogue.  According to his online profile, Calev "currently works in the Policy Planning Department of the Ministry of Foreign Affairs, which has been tasked to plan and design long term foreign policies for the State of Israel," and I found him to be very well-informed.  I shot him three questions throughout the session.  The first was about a figure that Benji had cited on our bus tour, of a 90% reduction in terror attacks coinciding with the construction of the separation barrier between East and West Jerusalem.  The reply was that although the figure was accurate, there were two competing narratives seeking to explain it.  The first, the Israeli version, is that the wall made it much harder for would-be Arab terrorists to slip across the border, and deterred terror attacks.  According to the Palestinian interpretation, however, the reduction in terror attacks was a positive choice made by the PA following the death of Yassar Arafat, and his succession by Mahmoud Abbas, who was extremely sensitive to how terror attacks hurt the Palestinian cause in the international media.  My second question to Calev concerned Iran; to what extent do Israelis perceive Rouhani as being fundamentally different from Ahmadinejad.  This question had special importance to me; my brother Sam has a very good friend Persian friend, and I feel responsible for collecting information about Israeli public opinion about Iran, seeing as the competing interest of those two countries in particular are playing out on the world stage.  I remember that, following President Obama's threats of force against Syria and subsequent inaction, the Israelis with whom I spoke were very disparaging of his lack of a strong show of force.  If he wanted to solve the Syria situation diplomatically, he should not have been so openly threatening (I, personally, blame our Secretary of State for a fair share of belligerence in this respect), and if he wanted to solve it violently, he should have carried out his word.  He did neither, and attracted not only the ire of the Israelis, but also that of the Saudis, the Kuwaitis, and probably the rest of the Gulf States.  Calev's answer to my question was more or less what I had expected: many Israelis feel just as threatened by Rouhani as they did by Ahmadinejad.  Rouhani, after all, was the chief nuclear negotiator for Iran for a number of years, and, in his 2011 book, bragged about how effective he had been at stalling and fooling the Europeans while simultaneously enriching yellow cake.  I unfortunately cannot find the excellent video clip of Rouhani nearly losing his temper at the Iranian news anchor who suggested that he, Rouhani, might have been compliant with international nuclear regulations (the video was a few months before the election, and therefore presents Rouhani when he was trying to present himself favorably to the Iranian public; I saw the video with English subtitles which I hope to be accurate).  However, I did manage to find this minute-and-a-half clip of the current Israel PM speaking to the U.N. about this same question of Rouhani's dependability regarding the nuclear project, and it very well presents Israel's feelings of apprehension.  Calev explained that, unlike Ahmadinejad, with his blatant anti-gay rhetoric and Holocaust-denial, Rouhani charms the international media.  Calev also pointed out that most Iranians do in fact support a nuclear program of some sort (I'm slightly suspicious of how and by whom such a poll was conducted).  My last question regarded Sisi in Egypt, who, though portrayed in the media as a "Nasserist," has not really done anything threatening to Israel.  Instead, he began his time in power by attacking Hamas's smuggling tunnels leading to the Gaza Strip, doing the IDF's job for them, it seems.  Hamas does have Muslim Brotherhood ties, after all, so it makes sense, given the anger against the Muslim Brotherhood right now.  The response was that Sisi seems very unlikely to threaten Israel, and is much more of a threat to Gaza.  Ironic, how dictators threaten Israel's security less than democratically-elected leaders...

The next morning, I was up for 8:15 am Shacharit.  I even had time to study a little bit before Tefillah, which always makes me feel good.  Because of the tight schedule, following the Torah reading, I needed to recite Mussaf by myself during the Haftorah reading.  I ended up not getting any breakfast, anyway, because of a misunderstanding, but I survived.

At 10:15, we had the opportunity to join one of five in-depth discussion sections, led by the different seminar organizers.  I joined Benji's group on "Iran and Israel's Existential Threats."  Again, on the theme of trying to get Israel-Iran relations figured out.  We discussed Iran's danger to Israel, not only in its nuclear potential, but in its funding and arming of terrorist organizations, such as Chamas in Gaza and the Hizbolah in Lebanon.  The concluding activity involved ranking Israel's existential threats -- corruption, delegitimization, demographics, Iran, Jerusalem, and terrorism -- in groups.  It was quite interesting to see how some groups came up with completely inverted threat-pyramids.  To some extent, the wording of the activity caused this.  According to some, terrorism might be a constant threat, but not an existential one, capable of destroying the state of Israel, or even severely destabilizing it.

Following this was the talk that had the most potential to be amazing, but fell short the most.  Omer Bar-Lev, the Labor Party MK, who is a major peace advocate addressed us.  He has also had an incredibly interesting career, which included taking part as a commando in the hostage-rescue counter-terrorism Operation Entebbe, back in 1976 -- yes, the one in which Yonatan Netanyahu, the current Israeli PM's older brother, was the only Israeli death.  However, despite his passion for a new peace proposal, his English was indecipherable, to the point of it being painful to listen to at times.  I wanted to hear him out so badly, but the language barrier was too thick.

Finally, at noon, I had something to eat.  I also got to talk to Coco a little bit.  I asked him to try to read the first Mishnah of Pirkei Avot, in order to test how well someone who knows modern Hebrew at about my level can read the Mishnah.  He got most of the words, although words such as "מסרה" and "מתונים" were new to him.  I really can't blame him.  Still, this just encourages me to work harder on my own Hebrew.  I ended up playing Jewish geography with some people whom Rozeeta had met.  I turns out that Michael Hollander's brother Sam is studying at Pardes thanks to a MASA grant, which is pretty cool, I think.

After lunch, I had another choice of in-depth sessions, and I choose to take part in the one focusing on the Arab Spring, which interests me intensely.  We made a full course of the countries affected by the Arab Spring: Tunisia, Egypt, Syria and Lebanon, even Jordan.  One of the speaker's arguments, though, was that the Arab Spring does not truly have an Arab origin -- that we must look to the protests in Iran to understand the revolutionary movements of the Middle East.  I got a lot more information about the Egyptian Constitution as proposed by Morsi's government, and why exactly it failed.  By the way, here's an excellent clip of an incredibly eloquent 12-year-old Egyptian boy explaining why he thinks that Islamism is a swindle.  The presenter was an excellent speaker, and knew his facts very well, but a few, I thought, were a little bit off.  For instance, he said that the border with Syria has been one of Israel's quietest, not disturbed since the Yom Kippur War, back in 1973.  While this is technically true, it is also true that the IDF engaged the Syrian army in the 1980s; Syria was busy trying to conquer Lebanon, and Israel also found itself in Lebanon, trying to put an end to the strikes of Hizbolah, which operates out of southern Lebanon.  Coco noticed a few holes, too.

Following Havdallah, we had our final speaker, Jerusalem Post editor Gol Hoffman, easily the most right-wing presenter of the entire Shabbaton.  He positively gloated about the number of Syrians killed by chemical weapons in the process of explaining that these weapons would otherwise have been used on Israel.  When I raised my question and asked about Rouhani, he told me that the only difference between Rouhani and Ahmadinejad is that the latter hates homosexuals just as fiercely as the latter, but keeps it to himself.  Although I was glad that he had come, and I do believe that I learned a few things from his presentation (although more about people like him than about the actual subject-matter of his talk), he made me feel all the more acutely what was missing from this weekend -- the voice of an Arab.  I mean that; not only was everyone a male, but they were all Israeli Ashkenazi Jews.  Sure, some had slightly different leanings, but there was a decided lack of diversity.  Why couldn't a journalist from Ha'aretz have come instead, Coco wanted to know?  They, at least, are liberal-leaning, unlike the rest of the presenters. 

That was the end.  It was an excellent weekend.  Now I'm about to have another, also in Jerusalem.

Happy Chanukah, everyone!

~JD

Best Shabbat in Israel -- Jerusalem with Josefin and Eli

Ironically, the only reason that I am able to write post is because I'm home sick today with a cold.  I don't know where I picked this up; as you'll read, I've been around many people recently, and I could have contracted this microbe just about anywhere.

On Thursday, I had a terrific day at school.  My pupils were very attentive and interested, and had a lot of energy to work.  I'm really beginning to learn the different students' personalities, and to figure out exactly how strict I need to be with whom.  Usually, with most students, all I need to do is ask them once to put away their soccer cards, and when they give me the "shnia fingers," insist that, no, I mean now.  That doesn't really work with the 8th-graders, who tend to be more resistant to requests than the other students, but it works with even the more mischievous 6th- and 7th-graders.  When I returned home from Lod that afternoon, it wasn't the end of my day, however.  Ordinarily on Thursdays, after returning from school, my day consists of teaching Tamir English, attending Ulpan, with Alex, Alex, and Veta, arvit, running and exercising in the park, and studying Trei-Esar with Rachel via Skype.  This last Thursday, however, I had been invited to Moshe's young daughter's Bat Mitzvah, which was celebrated in the Ram"a synagogue in Lod.  I didn't exactly know where this was, but I brought the invitation with the address on it with me to Lod, and hoped that people would know where Rechov Plomnik was.  Unfortunately, nobody did, and I was directed in the exact opposite direction when I first began inquiring where to look.  Personally, I would have expected groups of old Sepharadic men sitting on benches together to have the best idea of where to find a Sepharadic synagogue; not so.  It was actually the young Russian-speaking chilonit Israeli mother with a stroller that correctly showed me the way.  I thanked all of my vocabulary practice that allowed me to understood what she was using, when she used such terms as "רַמְזוֹר" (traffic light) and "כִּכָּר" (traffic circle) and "כְּבִישׁ" (street).  I arrived about an hour after the event started, and without TZ, who was feeling incredibly sick, and was unable to attend.  I handed TZ's card to Rivkah, the Bat Mitzvah girl, and found Moshe in the crowd of relatives and friends.  He was very happy to see me.  I realized how special his invitation had been; almost everyone else in the room was either a very close relative, or else another member of Rivka's Bat Mitzvah class.

This was my first orthodox Bat Mitzvah; at every Bat Mitzvah that I have attended in the United States, the Bat Mitzvah reads from the Torah scroll, and the ceremony and its significance are the same as those of a boy who is becoming Bar Mitzvah.  This was much more like a very large birthday party, in comparison.  Many of Moshe's family members are from the United States, and although some (such as his adult niece, whose daughter is one of TZ's best students) found it easier to communicate in Hebrew with me.  Although I would like to eschew using English when speaking with Israelis in Israel, because an event such as this is such a perfect opportunity for me to practice my very-limited Hebrew, I was trying to be personable, and decided to speak with others in the language which was best understood by both.  There were speeches by family members which I unfortunately did not understand as well as I would have liked, some so-so performers, and a slideshow at the very end.  Moshe's father gave the first speak.  Moshe's niece's husband, who was sitting across from me, told me that Moshe's father was a Rabbi, and a student of the famous American orthodox Rabbi, Rav Soloveitchik.  Lani and JP-RP, I thought that you would be interested by that.  I made certain to bring back the commemorative benchers that were handed out, one of which I set aside for TZ, and gave to her on Sunday morning.  On my way to Lod, I had asked the bus driver when Bus #13 stopped running, and he replied that it would stop around 10:30.  The party was out slightly before 10:00 pm, and, luckily, I had misgivings.  So, I correctly predicted that the bus had stopped running, and that I would miss my scheduled chevruta with Rachel.  So I ran all the way back to Ramla, and never once saw the Bus #13 running anywhere.  I wasn't back until past 11:00 pm, and got into bed relatively quickly.

Friday morning, I was up at around 7:20 am, and was a little bit slow to get ready for my expected trip to Jerusalem, to be spent with Josefin, who is currently pursuing her Master's degree at Hebrew University.  After my (somewhat lengthy) morning routine, I packed up, and walked to the bus station behind Ramla's kenyon, the mall.  I took the 9:00 am bus northward, and didn't even need to elbow any elderly Israelis out of the way to get on.  For those of you who don't understand that last reference, Israelis are notoriously pushy in crowds, and orderly lines simply do not exist in this country.  I read Rambam's Mishneh Torah on the bus.  I'm still working my way through Sefer Avodah, which is also where I was at the end of last summer.  Although this section is of historical interest of me, understanding the functioning of the Temple is something so distant from my own life, that much of the interest flows in one ear and out the other.  A few details here and there stay with me, but I really don't understand many of the rules of, say, sacrificial animals being mixed up at various stages of the process of offering them on the altar.  This is the kind of text to which I hope to return when I am older and (if I am so lucky) more learned.  I arrived at the Central Bus Station at around 9:50 am, incredibly happy to be in one of my favorite cities in the world.  I love Paris and Ithaca, but for entirely different reasons.  There is no Louvre in Jerusalem, but there is no Har-Habayit in Paris, and no Olin Library in either one.

Josefin had an allergist's appointment, so I walked along the sidewalk beside the light rail tracks to the Machaneh-Yehuda shuk.  Jerusalem's shuk is several times larger than Ramla's, of course, and although both sell fresh fruits and vegetables, bread and pastries, eggs, dried fruits and nuts, etc.  There is also Judaica for sale in Jerusalem, and I picked up a few items for some special people back in the U.S., although I am still looking for just the right gift for a few people, including one Special Someone.  I bought some (persimmons) for a very good price, and munched on a few while enjoying being part of the crowd.  It's been quite a while since I've heard English spoken by passers-by on the street; in Ramla, beyond Hebrew, one hears Arabic, Russian, Amharic, Hindi (?), or even Spanish more frequently than English.  It's such a shock; Jerusalem is such an international junction.  In the Judaica shop, the woman behind me was speaking in French, and I turned to her, asking her, in my rather rusty French: "Vous parlez Français?"  To which she replied, with some surprise "oui, je suis française," to which I in turn babbled "אפרסימונים
en fait, j'ai fait mes études en France; cependant, je suis américain."  I met Josefin by the light rail station, and gave her a big hug.  I hadn't seen her since the end of May, when we walked together at graduation, and I met her parents, brothers, and grandparents.  Together, we picked up ingredients for Shabbat lunch and seudah shlishit.  There's no shortage of good things in the Jerusalem shuk.  Josefin bought everything except the bread, and the persimmons that I had already bought, because she knew about my financial predicament, the result of my having lost my wallet (no, it still hasn't turned up, and I'm planning on buying a change purse on Rechov Dani Mas in Ramla).  With full bags, we took the light rail several stops.  An elderly woman snapped at Josefin for being too noisy on the light rail; it's just the way things are in this country.  After a stop at the local supermarket for hummus, matbuchah, wine, and a few other items, we returned to Josefin's apartment, where I met Josefin's roommate, Jannet, who is a very knowledgeable person.  Eli arrived at around 3:00 pm, and I nearly jumped on him, I was so excited to see him.  We only had about an hour before Shabbat fell.  We all took our showers, and prepared.

After lighting candles, we walked downhill towards a synagogue, where Eli, Jannet's friend Ivri, and I helped make a very small minyan for minchah and arvit.  During kabbalat Shabbat, it began to rain.  Rain comes in bursts in this country, so by the time that we left the synagogue, following behind Binyamin, the Israeli man who had agreed to host us, the rain had already ceased ("וְתֵן טַל וּמָטָר לִבְרָכָה").  We walked, right along the line that divides Jerusalem into the zones controlled by Israel and by the PA, respectively, to his house, where his wife and four children were waiting.  His wife's English wasn't as good as Binyamin's and she mostly spoke to us in Hebrew, but understood our English or Hebrew responses.  Again, it would have been best for my Hebrew for me to demand to speak only in Hebrew with the others, but, to be honest, this would not have been the friendliest thing to do, and I already felt as if I were taking liberties, because I'm a vegetarian, which I hadn't been able to communicate to our hosts ahead of time.  No worries; I had enough to eat.  We talked a lot about Hebrew language, Eli at one point getting into a vocalization debate with Ivri, as well as jokes and riddles that we knew, intrafamilial marriages, the weekly par'shah, child-rearing, etc.  We stayed for a few hours, then Binyamin walked us most of the way back to Hebrew University, to ensure that we could find our way.  We spoke a little bit before heading off to bed, planning the next day, but I was completely exhausted, and preferred to go to bed early, which ended up being a little bit before midnight.

The next morning, Eli woke up first, and we were out of bed at 6:40 am, preparing to take an expected 30-minute walk to find a Yemenite synagogue.  We walked downhill, wearing our tallietot (I haven't mentioned it, but I've begun to adhere to Eli's more stringent definition of what constitutes an acceptable eiruv, and am therefore likewise stricter about not carrying my talleit under my arm).  We kept on asking directions; one old Charedi man, who was surprisingly friendly, directed us.  Then, Eli spied a man who he thought looked Yemenite, and asked him.  He was spot-on; the man was indeed headed towards a Yemenite synagogue, and was overjoyed to find two additional adult men to help fulfill the minyan.  As it was, a minyan would have been possible without us, but barely.  We prayed in a congregant's apartment, in a room only about the size of my family room.  Eli was almost ecstatic at the degree to which the minyan was Maimonidean.  Let's get a (limited) list going:

- Begin with בָּרוּךְ שֶׁאָמַר; no korbanot whatsoever, and all birchot hashachar recited at home.
- Very short pesukei dezimra without even הודוּ לה' קִרְאוּ בִשְׁמו, the recitation of which I think I've read dates back to the early Ga'onic period.
- No אֵל אָדוֹן, one of my favorite piyutim, because it interrupts the berachot preceding the שְׁמַע.
- No separate chazarat hasha"tz; all congregants recite the entire amidah, including kedushah, together with the sh'liach tzibur.
- The Sefer Torah was beautifully written on reddish klaf, which is the only acceptable kind of klaf acceptable, according to the Mishneh Torah, Hilchot Sefer Torah 7:4.  Also, a very high diameter-to-height ratio, according to Ga'onic tradition (and, of course, Mishneh Torah, Hilchot Sefer Torah 9:1).
- When one receives an aliyah, one reads directly from the scroll, rather than having another person, who has prepared, read in one's stead.  Eli read sh'lishi this week.
- The corresponding verse in Targum Onkelos after every verse of the Torah.
- No additional prayers for the IDF, etc., following the reading of the Haftorah.
- No recitation of עָלֵינוּ לְשַׁבֵּחַ at the end.
- Communal cyclical readings from not only מִשְׁנֶה תּוֹרָה‎ but also from מנורת המאור.

We finished at around 10:00.  Afterwards, Yosef, the man whom we had followed to the synagogue, conducted us back to his house, where he very proudly introduced us to his wife and mother.  He even invited us back for Pesach, which isn't for another few months.  I think that the reason he was so excited was because there are relatively few young, engaged Yemenite Jews like Eli who had furthermore just made aliyah from the United States, and was therefore doubly a wonder.  The invitation was directed towards me, too.  If Eli ends up accepting, I will, too, I've decided, but, friendly as Yosef was, I know that just another American Ashkenazi (albeit one with Maimonidean leanings) spending 10 months in Israel isn't nearly as special as Eli is.  Eli and I walked back to the Hebrew University campus.  We got directions along the way from a man named Moshe, who happens to have been born in Ramla, and who has family living on Rechov Weizmann, which is about five to ten minutes' walk away from my house.  They are Tunisian, and it is entirely possible that they attend the same Sepharadic synagogue on Bar-Ilan street that I do.

Eli and I got back to Josefin's room, where Jannet was just leaving, and she let us in.  We studied for a little while, going over a passage from Melachim Bet that I had wanted to discuss, and also reading from Eli's Mishneh Torah that he had brought.  Josefin appeared shortly; she had also had a good morning.  We made a big salad together, then ate it for lunch, along with the other wonderful things that we had purchased from the shuk.  I was ravenous, and probably ate as much as the other two put together.  We had all missed each other, and realized, for instance, that we are all studying via Skype with Rachel, who never ceases to amaze us all with her energy and passion.  Wow.  We talked a great deal about our own experiences in the past.  We've only really been close to each other beginning the second semester of our Junior years at Cornell, although we had all had varying levels of interaction before that.  Josefin and I are at about the same level of Hebrew right now; hers is a little bit better, though I think, and I compound my own problems because of my perfectionist-paralysis when it comes to grammar.  I try very hard to get my tenses, binyanim, and gender all correct when I speak, which sometimes results in my not speaking as readily as I might if I spoke with more abandon and less inhibition.  Still, I think that I'm getting there, and, furthermore, this awkwardness in no way hurts my oral comprehension, which is sometimes quite useful.

Josefin took a nap, and I ate almost all of the cookies that were left in the tin that we had purchased together, while speaking with Eli about my experience thus far in Israel.  It suddenly occurred to me that I have been feeling the acute sting of library withdrawal.  In Ithaca, I always had access to a vast array of texts; I could pick up a volume on just about any era or region of the world, and study some history.  Here, not so.  I just really, really want to sink my teeth into some scholarly history, in print format, and can't.  Iranian history is what I feel acutely lacking in right now, but, at this point, I'd take a nice, thick, well-written book on any number of topics beyond history, which if you know me you know well is a very real passion of mine.  Speaking about studying history and politics in Israel, here's a fascinating New York Times article about the Hamas-printed textbooks used in Gaza.

Josefin and her roommate had invited several friends over for seudah shlishit.  Again, we prepared a big salad together, this time for the guests as well as for ourselves, which was lots of fun, as expected.  There were a total of seven of us, and the others made good, friendly, intellectual company.  As I've mentioned before, I love being around people who are more knowledgeable than I am.  After our meal was over, we recited arvit and made havdallah together (Eli recited, as expected).  I had to leave almost immediately, but the Josefin, Eli, and Jannet accompanied me to the light rail stop so that I wouldn't be lost.  On the ride back, I read more Mishneh Torah, and tried to listen in on French and Hebrew conversations, in order to practice my skills in both languages.  At least French words and phrases still plug directly into clear meanings in my mind when I hear them, which is more than can be said for Hebrew speech, which remains something of a puzzle.  I walked through the front door of my apartment a little bit after 9:00 pm, which wasn't so bad, and spent the rest of the evening working on the new-and-improved Memory game that TZ and I have prepared.

On Sunday, I went for more teacher training at Talpiot college.  I didn't learn so much, but I got to use a very high-quality color printer and laminating machine, and produced a very nice set of memory cards.  Also, when I expressed my thanks in Hebrew to Batsheva, the woman who helped me, she thought that it was incredibly cute, and rushed over to her colleagues to exclaim how חָמוּד I was being.  Oh, well.  When I returned, I was amazed at how exhausted I was, and ended up going to bed very early, getting up at 10:00 pm very briefly, then falling back asleep until the next morning, when I arose feeling rather sick, and texted TZ, Moshe, and Carmel.  Since then, I've been stuck in my apartment, without very much to do.  I've been drinking plenty of water, and hope that I'll be able to return to school tomorrow.  I feel particularly bad, because on Mondays I'm supposed to come to the house of one of my students, to give him private English lessons, and I don't want to lose the momentum of last week.  He was doing so well...

Thinking of you all, cool people!

~JD