I am going to veer from my ordinary policy of describing events chronologically in order to let you all know the good news: that there is no cataclysmal Breaking of the Fellowship, in which TZ and I float off alone on our little raft towards Mordor, while our various Elven, Dwarven, Hobbit, Wizard, and Human friends all encounter various challenges in various parts of Middle Earth. Hey, speaking of which, how well do the 12 of us match up with the 9 members of the Fellowship? Well, let's see:
Natalie & Perrin -- Merry and Pippin (that was easy)
Becky -- Legolas (again, that was easy)
Harry -- Gimli (stoicism and interest in exploring)
TZ -- Samwise (loyalty and dedication, at least from my point of view)
One of the Alexes -- Frodo (just because)
Hannah -- Strider (kind of a stretch, maybe, but, hey, I don't need to explain these rationally)
Devin -- Gandalf (maybe? Kind of? In the sense of being older and wiser?)
Noah -- Boromir (um, for better or for worse)
That leaves Veta and me... Maybe we can add Carmel as Treebeard? And Ben Feldman as Tom Bombadil, in his role as a detached observer? C.J. is kind of like Bilbo, in that he's already had an adventure much like this one, and Eli is maybe just a little bit like one of the unnamed wizards, in that he's important, but people don't really ever see him. How would people feel about comparing Noa to Galadriel? And Sarumon would be -- but I digress.
This Friday, I got up after Alex, Becky, and Veta had all gone to work, completed my morning routine, and took the 9:45 train from Ramla station, bound for Jerusalem. Jerusalem is quickly becoming my most-frequent out-of-town weekend destination, but every time I've visited in the past, I've taken the bus. So, this time, I decided to try the train instead. A modestly-dressed Israeli grandmother asked me on the train if I wasn't cold, after I peeled off my sweatshirt. I told her that I wasn't, and she muttered something about my being young, before asking me about what I was up to in Israel. Like many others, she thought that I might be an oleh chadash, and I explained to her that I was just a volunteer, here for one year. She was very sympathetic. For the rest of the very scenic ride, I read the copy of the Concise History of the Catholic Church that Eli lent to me (I reached the chapter about St. Jerome, who produced the Vulgate translation of the Bible). The train was good for an adventure for me, but it dropped me off at entirely the wrong side of Jerusalem. The train station is located next to Teddy Stadium, while the Central Bus Station is not far from the Machanei Yehudah shuk, Davidka Square, Ben Yehudah Street, etc., and not even terribly far from the Old City or from Har Hatzofim (Mt. Scopus), where Hebrew University is located. That is the region of town which I know relatively well. I'm used to walking along the light rail tracks to my desired destination (that's how I found the bookstore that sold me my Hebrew grammar book). So, I decided to take a bus to the city center. An oleh gave me the right directions, and, despite my continued attempts, I never managed to actually pay the bus driver my fare, because he kept on shooing me off, until it was time for me to get off. I walked the rest of the way to Machanei Yehudah, where I was planning to meet both Rav Ami and Susan, the first around noon, and the latter, at around 2:15 pm. I bought some persimmons and dates to munch on while I waited, and kept on reading, and studying my vocabulary list. I always keep a vocabulary list with me (called an "אוֹצַר מִלִּים" in Hebrew, translating to something along the lines of "treasury of words") in order to learn new words in my spare time. While strolling around the shuk, whom should I meet but Ezra Sultan, one among many of the very smart people whom I met at Drisha Institute this June! He told me that Raymond (another Drisha friend) Anyway, Susan sent me a text instructing me to meet her at an organic bakery across the street from Machanei Yehudah, which I did, and, about 12 seconds before catching sight of Susan, I saw Rav Ami! I was so excited to see him, hugged him, and then spotted Susan and her boyfriend, יגאל (Yig'al). Rav Ami had to leave almost immediately, but we promised to see each other again (while I was introducing myself to Yig'al, Rav Ami was telling Susan how to send me to the synagogue that he was likely to attend for Kabbalat Shabbat). I walked a short way with Susan and Yig'al to Susan's apartment. I was very happy to see Susan. Over the next few days, we reminisced a fair amount of time over our not-too-far-gone college days. I think that Yig'al must have gotten the impression that Victor is the most unfortunate of all people, given the number of pranks that Susan and others pulled on him during our last year, without either Victor or I ever catching on to who was perpetrating them. To those of you who weren't living in the CJL, there were a series of pranks, most of them set in the men's bathroom, including the rubber monster under the toilet seat, the inflatable clown on the toilet seat, and the audio recorder disguised as a toilet paper roll, but not the annoyotron planted behind the filing cabinet that prevented Victor from sleeping for five nights. Yeah, I think Elliot got surprised by one of these, but poor Victor was the main target. Oh, well. I was also introduced to Susan's pet cat Newman. Newman is a kitten whom Susan literally saved from the jaws of a dog a few weeks ago, and has since been the worst-behaved pet Susan has ever needed to deal with, which is quite impressed, because this girl takes in all kinds of animals (I think that she would have gotten on very well with Rose, if the two had ever met). Anyway, Shabbat fell very early, so after showering, etc., Yig'al and I headed off to the small synagogue located a few blocks away, where Rav Ami had told us he would be visiting friends. The synagogue was locked, and while Yig'al and I waited outside for someone with the key to arrive, we met a very unusual ultra-orthodox Teimani man outside. He seemed slightly confused: he refused to shake Yig'al's hand, didn't have a job or anywhere to stay that night, and wandered off, saying that "everything always worked out." He was also smoking after candle-lighting time, which was unusual, and articulating his ayins very gutturally; there are people in Jerusalem like this man, that is all that I can say. Anyway, although we barely had a minyan for minchah in the tiny synagogue, before long it filled up. It was a very Rav Ami kind of atmosphere; I could tell almost immediately that this is the kind of place where he would fit in. People took their time to pray and to sing and to dance, there was a mix of Israelis and Americans (and French men), a mixture of Ashkenazim and Sepharadim (I think), and although there was a vaguely-Chasidic euphoria about everything, you couldn't really point to anyone and call him a Chasid. There was, however, no Shir Hashirim (I still thought of מַה יָּפִית וּמַה נָּעַמְתְּ אַהֲבָה בַּתַּעֲנוּגִים זֹאת קוֹמָתֵךְ דָּמְתָה לְתָמָר, though). Rav Ami was there, along with some Cornellians, including one whom I remember meeting, quite positively, at a pre-frosh Shabbaton for the CJL. Yig'al and I walked back to Susan's house. We all ate together. I felt a little bit bad, because my combined kashrut preferences and vegetarianism meant that I wasn't really sharing the same meal with the others. The chickpeas in my stew were kind of underdone; I really need to work on boiling my dishes more fully. Oh, well. Much more important than the food was the time that the three of us spent with each other; Yig'al has been all over the world, and has had some incredibly interesting experiences in his lifetime. He's slightly older than I am (a little bit younger than my older brother Andrew), but has also done a lot with the time that he's had in this world. I really hope that, looking back in a few years, I'll be able to say the same thing about myself. We were all exhausted, and went to bed early. I had completely misused the timer with which Susan had provided me, and it shone on the night through. I didn't care; I was exhausted, and slept, regardless.
I awoke on Saturday morning at around 8:00 am to Yig'al gently shaking me, telling me that it was time to get up. I dressed quickly, hurried off to the synagogue without getting lost (incredibly), despite the winding streets. In fact, I'll tell let you in on a secret: in the two and a half years of this blog, this is one of my few travel posts involving me visit to a big city that does not involve me getting lost there. Well, then, I arrived at the synagogue when they were nearing the end of Pesukei Dezimra. It was, as I had expected from the night before, very energetic. One young American man (maybe 19 or 20, by my guess) had his first aliyah to the Torah, ever, and the congregation broke out into a wild dance. I left at around 10:50 am, and the other men were still in the midst of Musaf (remember that they did not even begin until 7:30 am). Susan, Yig'al, and I walked to Susan's friend/lab partner's house, a very enjoyable 30-40 minute walk, for Shabbat lunch. The walk was really one of the best parts. It's amazing for me to come to Jerusalem, because I hear so much English spoken on the street. In Ramla, I hear very little other than Hebrew and Russian, with only the occasional sprinkling of Amharic and Arabic, and in Jerusalem, the streets are full of anglophones, and even a few francophones. Anyway, there were about eight frum girls at this apartment, with Yig'al and I as the only men there (neither of us being available, although for entirely different reasons). The food was great, but there was a lot of girl talk going on, and, apparently, none of them knew that Fili and Kili die after the Battle of the Five Armies at the end of The Hobbit. Afterwards, Yig'al pretty much admitted that he might have imploded if I hadn't been there. Tamar (Susan's friend) and the girl closest to the three of us were both friendly, but I think that a few of the other ones ground on his nerves. I felt a little bit uncomfortable, too, to be honest. The three of us returned to Susan's neighborhood, and although it was my first instinct to walk to a synagogue, none of them seemed to be open (I think that I was too late, and that it was too close to shkiah). So I said Minchah and Arvit at Susan's house, in between which I read a little bit about the extermination of malaria in Palestine (fact: Allenby's troops decisively defeated the Ottomans while the British troops were in the incubation period of malaria; had the offensive been delayed for two weeks, enough might have been dead to have swayed the odds sufficiently in the favor of the Ottomans, and changed the course of history). As soon as Shabbat was over, I jogged over to the Crown Plaza Hotel, where Rav Ami told me that he was staying with Taglit. I managed to find him, although we both needed to sit through around an hour of Taglit's scheduled speaker (who went way over his time limit, anyway) about the history of Zionism. Afterwards, Rav Ami and I had what is probably the most important conversation about my future that I've had since I graduated college. I really don't know where I'm going to end up in life, and I have several options on the table. I will let you all know what my eventual decision is, but I really don't even know in what country I'll be living one year from now. Also, very intriguingly, Rav Ami gave me the same advice concerning certain sensitive issues that my three new housemates gave me. (Also, I just learned that Hannah was staying in the Crown Plaza Hotel at the same time that I was meeting Rav Ami, and that she even saw the back of my newly-shaved head, but assumed that the person whom she saw couldn't be me.) Rav Ami also gave me a very warm hat, which I am going to hold onto. I eventually needed to leave, after sharing my thoughts, and getting advice, in order to avoid missing the meetup at the pizza parlor on Emek Refa'im. I made it there at around 9:30, and saw Jonathan, Rachel, Josefin, Eli, Hillel, and Moshe! I'm used to seeing Eli and Josefin, and I know that I'll see Rachel again soon, but I really wasn't certain when the next time I would see Jonathan, Hillel, or Moshe would be. I explained to all of them that Susan and Rav Ami wanted to come, but couldn't. Several of them wanted to see Rav Ami (and other people on Taglit), so several of us packed onto bus 21 to Ben-Yehuda street, which I don't think that I've ever visited before. On the way, Eli engaged a pre-frosh in the correct way to pronounce the letter ח in Biblical Hebrew. Apparently, some scholars believe that, like ש, it was once a letter with a single morphology but two separate, non-interchangeable sounds. Eli, as usual, actually made a very good argument, knew his sources, his evidence for and against; one interesting fact that I did not previously know is that ח is transliterated two different ways in the Septuagint, the earliest translation of the Hebrew Bible. Anyway, it turns out that there are tons of Cornell people whom I know in Jerusalem for Taglit. I had seen Rebecca Etessami from behind, and I think carried her several meters backwards when I hugged back, as I did several minutes later to Rebecca Stambler. I got to tell her how proud I am of her :). Aaron Match was also there, and Hillel and Moshe pretty much carried away Adam Sleeper when they found him. Jordana was there, too, for some reason (I never really got to interact with her; she was busy with other things). And, most surprising of all, I found Raymond Habbaz! Finding him was really the grand prize of the evening, even though I knew that he was in Jerusalem, thanks to seeing Ezra Sultan the day before! So many Jewish people! At the end of the night, it was past midnight, and Eli and I bid everyone else goodnight before staggering back to Susan's apartment to spend the night. Eli told me the story of the 20th-century secularization of the Iraqi Jewry on the way. We also discussed how strange to both of us the apparent discomfort of sharing beds with other men is to straight American men of our generation. We crawled into bed, and I fell asleep almost immediately.
I awoke the next morning at around 5:25, Susan awaking me in order to prepare to leave with Yig'al. I grabbed my belongings (for the second time, leaving my Hebrew vocabulary-list at a friend's house in Israel), left Eli asleep in bed. Yig'al and I walked maybe 10-15 minutes to his parked car. We had a very easy, quick drive to Ramla. It turns out that we both like the same kind of Israeli music, including Hadag Nachash! I was very thankful to both Yig'al and to Susan for being such good hosts. I arrived at the door of my apartment at around 6:45 am, did my morning routine, and nearly passed out the moment my tefillin were off. I crawled into bed (as I am about to do right now), woke up again at around 12:15 pm, where I met Becky, who had just returned from her run. She told me the good news that both she and Veta are going to be staying in Ramla. This made me very, very happy! I ran, and, in the evening, my ITF group met with Anna Zinger, the director of ITF across Israel (remember that that's over 160 participants -- that's a big deal). During the meeting, I quite honestly expressed my feelings of the lack of apparent impact upon the English education in Rambam, where I work. I stressed that these observations did not apply to TZ, who does observe progress among her pupils, and are furthermore by no means the fault of my students. To be honest, I attribute the lack of progress to my own inexperience in teaching. Anna Zinger told me not to worry, because I was in the weakest school in the district, which is one of the weakest schools in the country, and that I should not base my judgment of my impact purely upon the continuing lag in test scores among my students. I also hasten to add that most of my peers seem to be making progress with their students, while I am still teaching my eighth graders how to read three- and four- letter words. We also discussed our lack of satisfaction with many aspects of our training. A sentiment that I felt, which I heard reflected in others' statements as well, was that most of the pedagogical training we are getting from Talpiot is irrelevant and unhelpful, and that the resources used to force us to spend the entire day listening to classes that are unhelpful to our specific classroom situations would be better spent increasing our Hebrew ability (and therefore our ability to communicate with our weaker pupils whom, for me anyway, make up virtually the entirety of the students who study under me) in our one-month preparation period. On the other hand, I was surprised to hear that others do not enjoy the tours and enrichments as much as I do. I really do learn something new at every single one, and, even if they were to be made optional (as several people suggested), I would nevertheless choose to attend all of them, because I find traveling around and learning about Israel to be so interesting and educational for me. As I mentioned to TZ today, sometimes others' knowledge about things about which I am ignorant make me feel like, as Winnie the Pooh put it, "a bear of little brain." Oh, well. At least, after the meeting, I was happy to spend the evening with my still-roommates, and even to Skype with my Mother (and show her my roommates). We agreed that all of them are agreeable people. And Alex and I are watching Pan's Labyrinth tomorrow night, which should be fun.
Today, one of my students posted in WhatsApp how incredibly bored he was learning with me. He even recorded a four-second sound clip of me in order to emphasize the point (I didn't even see his smartphone out). I really don't think that my lack of teaching skill is just my own imagination; I legitimately think that I have an enormous amount to learn about working with children, and with teaching in general, and that, moreover, my continued difficulties with Hebrew only exacerbate my shortcomings. I've spent the past several years of my life experiencing how difficult it is to learn; now it's my turn to experience how much harder it is to teach.
~JD
