In Israel, Purim is practically a two-week holiday. When returning from Yeshivat Ohr Sameach on the first night of Adar II (March 1st), I already saw children in costume, out on the street. Since, then, I don't think that a day has passed without me seeing someone dressed up for the holiday. Unfortunately, I missed three days of school the first week of March, because I caught a virus from a student when teaching him at his house (he covered his mouth with his hand when he sneezed).
Nevertheless, I still managed to teach the Purim shiur for my corps of volunteers. I love teaching, in this or any capacity, and, even though I was as sick as a dog (and therefore couldn't eat any of the hamentaschen or drink any of the wine that Carmel had brought), did my best to introduce the basics of the holiday, and to facilitate the rest of the group presenting thematic sources. Veta and Hannah in particular did an excellent job with the wine and drunkenness sources -- it's easy to have fun with such topics, including such sources as the narrative about Rabbah and Rav Zeira getting drunk together. Anyway, I think that the shiur was a success, despite my own health.
On my week back at school, my school held an all-day Purim carnival, or shuk as they called it, for the students. All of the teachers manned (or womanned -- almost all of the teachers at my school are ultra-orthodox women) stations in the different classrooms, students accrued points, and exchanged them for prizes. Some prizes, I will admit, were rather meager. One student succeeded in winning a gluestick, for instant, which he didn't even bother to take with him. More interesting prizes included a few soccerballs, a ceramic salt shaker in the shape of a chef, stuffed animals, and a set of wineglasses (still uncertain about this last one). Fewer than half of the students, I would say, were in costume. Most who were in costume had very minimal costumes; the older girls, for instance, mostly just wore more colorful skirts than usual. I haven't mentioned it much, but there's a quasi-dresscode at my school. All students wear the school emblem on their shirts and hoodies, the girls wear medium-length skirts, the boys wear kippot, and that's about the extent of it. Very occasionally, I see students come to school out of uniform, but this doesn't seem to really be a problem, so long as the boys keep their heads covered. I think that a few of the older girls would prefer to wear more revealing clothing, and I saw some of that on Purim. However, the number of store-bought costumes was very, very low, and restricted to the younger grades, whom I don't know as well as the older students. I would say that there were no more than ten or so such elaborate costumes. I attribute this, again, to the low-income status of the families of my students. Some of the students, after all, can't even afford schoolbooks. To my great surprise, at the end of the day, during the presentation of mishloach manot to the school principal, secretary, custodian, etc., I received a basket, as did the Sherut Le'umi women! I completely fudged my response (in my defense, I was quite surprised), and exclaimed that I was shocked (nid'ham) rather than surprised (muf'ta), but at least didn't misspeak (I think) when I explained "lo tzafiti," I didn't expect it. I shared the gifts with my housemates, along with the leftover falafel from the carnival that I had received. We're in a very sharing house; Veta and Alex shared the contents of their pre-Purim basket with me, which I greatly appreciated.
The Fast of Esther was even easier than usual. I typically have almost no difficulty with the half-fasts, although the thirst does tend to get to me by the afternoon. It was a very rainy day, a nice change from the dry winter that we've been having so far. I took a nap before Ulpan, which helped, too, and the time elapsed without my noticing it, Coco bringing to my attention that I could drink water again. That night, most of the other volunteers attended a party at Samir's restaurant; I had my chevruta with Josh, in which we read about twice as much as is typical. Quite fittingly, we're studying Megillat Esther right now, which is helping to familiarize me with the text more. Meanwhile, it seems, the volunteers in my group were winning prizes with their costumes. Alex came in 3rd place as a Roman, and Perrin and Devin won 2nd prize, free tickets to the next concert, in their joint salt-and-pepper costume.
I saw Asaf at Minchah on Shabbat, and he told me that the Megillah reading would occur at 6:40 pm in the evening, at the synagogue. So I returned for Arvit, after seeing Alex off for Tel Aviv, and listened to Asaf recite beautifully, carefully enunciating every ayin and chet correctly. Although there were a fair amount of people in the sanctuary with me, most of them were significantly older than I am, and only two or three were beneath the age of Bar Mitzvah. This was surprising for me; back home at TBE, there are always tons of children in attendance on Purim for the evening Megillah reading. Also, noise-making at the reading of Haman's name is much less enthusiastic here in Israel. I don't think I heard a single traditional noisemaker (or ra'ashan, as it's called in Hebrew -- gragger is Yiddish, I think) in the crowd. Anyway, I went back happy, read and sent e-mails, cooked up a large (meat) stew to give as mishloach manot, and had an enormous amount of difficulty falling asleep.
On Purim itself, although I had set my alarm for 6:30 am, I overslept until about 6:48 am. I hurried to the synagogue, desperately hoping that I would not miss the reading. Luckily for me, when I entered, the congregation was just beginning the recitation of the Shema, but I managed to catch up by the end of the Torah reading (thank goodness for that!), and listened, again, to the whole Megillah. I really love the story of the Megillah, and I'm glad, that, for the first year ever, I can understand most of it. Afterwards, I delivered my mishloach manot to the other volunteers in the Veradim House, arriving at 9:15 am or so. The rest of the day was, sadly, uneventful. I never received the expected invitation from my teacher, so had no real se'udah. I also received some very unexpected negative news. When I walked around the city, there was almost no sign that it was Purim. There were some bored-looking kids wandering around outside without costumes, and I saw a few costumes, but, for the most part, the theme of the day seemed to be "business as usual."
Today, Shushan Purim, has likely been slow and uneventful. I will be teaching Underground tonight, which will be fun. It's a Jewish holiday, but most of my students are Muslim; it's not their holiday, and so I asked Carmel to ask them if they still wanted to come. One did; I just hope that she shows up. As a Jew growing up in a country where Jews are the majority, and my own holidays never aligned with those of the majority, I was always frustrated at missing school on days that were important for me, while I was left with many breaks on days that had no special significance (some, of course, did have significance, such as MLK Day and Thanksgiving). So now, it's my turn to have revenge on the stupid system by refusing to deny my Muslim students their weekly class, just because it happens to be a Jewish holiday in a few cities here. I hope that it's time well spent.
I'm very deeply missing home, my friends, my books, my favorite running paths, my favorite library nooks, and my studies right now.
Love, always (from Israel),
~JD
Monday, March 17, 2014
Wednesday, March 12, 2014
December, January, February
The following blog post is an attempt to get everyone caught up with the past 2 months of my life. The short version is that I continue to teach, and that I find my job hard, but frequently rewarding. The long version is too lengthy for me to commit to this format. The medium version is as follows.
Alex, Veta, and Becky moved into my apartment on Thursday night, the 19th of December, the night that we returned from Jerusalem with the rest of the Ramla delegation, and the same night that my previous housemates, Ben, Ben, and Tznoach. My roommate had already left the apartment, but I did, to my delight, have the chance to say goodbye to Ben Feldman and to Tznoach. Then, Carmel and I drove to Gil'ad, and helped Alex, Becky, and Veta pack their things together, and bring them to our apartment here on Yoseftal. I think that the first impression was quite good.
That Friday (December 20th), which I had off of school, the two women had left to spend the weekend in Chaifa, and Alex and I were left together in Ramla. Before they left, though, we received a visitor from the MASA administration, Enav, who came to apologize about all of the housing-related problems from which the other three (especially Veta, whose respiratory system has been suffering since her arrival in Ramla) had suffered. Evan made a great effort to mollify my new housemates, and, I thought, did a very good job of ensuring their continued participation in the ITF program with assurances of improved conditions, etc. She even brought over a bag full of snacks and chocolate, and a bottle of wine much higher in quality than the kind which I am accustomed to use for kiddush, as a sign of her interest in our continued occupation of the apartment. Alex and I cooked our first Shabbat dinner together; I made sweet potato stew, and Alex made a kind of curry with potatoes and other vegetables. I was quite impressed with his cooking. I had a good, restful Shabbat (which is just what I needed, after all of my accumulated sleep debt in Jerusalem), and was glad to hear Shir Hashirim at my usual Sepharadic synagogue at the end of the week (מַה יָּפִית וּמַה נָּעַמְתְּ אַהֲבָה בַּתַּעֲנוּגִים זֹאת קוֹמָתֵךְ דָּמְתָה לְתָמָר). Since that weekend, I've seen (and smelled :)) a lot more of the food that Alex prepares, and my initial feeling was correct -- he is very good at cooking! Alex has spent time in Japan
On Sunday, December 22nd, the ITF Ramla and Ashdod groups toured Jerusalem (yes, already back in my favorite city in Israel). We toured the Church of the Holy Sepulcher in the morning. This was my first time actually entering this site, although I had gotten lost in this quarter before, when I had been unable to find my way to the Kotel amidst all of the winding passageways that make up the Arab Shuk. Anyway, we traveled very slowly through Jerusalem. We got right up close to the Temple Mount, and looked up the staircase to the Muslim-only area, and then turned back. We arrived at the kotel, where Shmuel and I joined a minyan for Minchah Gadol. I think that it was the first time that I had ever prayed a non-Friday-afternoon minchah at the Kotel. It was surprisingly quiet. Afterwards, we had a short amount of time for people to buy lunch. I wasn't interested (I had brought with me some persimmons, one of which I shared with David), and visited a bookstore instead. This is the same bookstore, by the way, where I had asked about copies of Mishneh Torah with nikkud several weeks before, and the storekeeper had told me that they only had copies of Sefer Mada in such a format. Much to my surprise and delight, when browsing through the halachah section of the store, I found not just one, but two different editions of the entire Mishneh Torah with nikkud! One of them was the copy that Eli and Isaac use, which I admired every day when I sat next to Isaac at class at the Drisha Institute in June. Without going into detail, it is a printed version of the most authentic uncensored manuscript of the Mishneh Torah, as desired at the end of his life. It even has a few quirks that reveal how old the manuscript is; the preposition "שֶׁל," for instance, is actually added as a prefix, whereas in modern Hebrew and in most printed editions of medieval Jewish texts, it is separated as its own word. I'm extremely excited to now own my own copy of this book, never mind that it's easily the most expensive book which I've ever purchased. Towards sunset, we visited the apocryphal King David's tomb, where we lounged on the roof and enjoyed the view; afterwards, I said a Tefillah inside, and then we left for Machaneh Yehudah, the Jerusalem shuk. I enjoyed some dates and persimmons that I purchased there. I also had enough time to browse in some nearby bookstores for a copy of another book for which I have been yearning. I managed to find a copy of the same Hebrew verb book that Ben Feldman owns, the one with 501+ Hebrew verbs arranged my shoresh, again, much to my pleasure. Several people on the trip were equally excited about the book's thoroughness in verb tables. Again, the book was expensive, but I consider it to be a learning tool, and, moreover, one that I can freely share with my fellow ITF participants. Afterwards, our group approached the Temple Mount (we could not, of course, ascend to the Al-Aqsa mosque, for reasons of security), and spent time near the (apocryphal) tomb of King David. Later that same evening, though, as fruitful as my own adventures were, there was a major negative turning point, as our group met with Benny, who is the director of Israel Way. We met him at a Bukharian restaurant (the first, and, as of March, the only time I've eaten in a restaurant since arriving in Israel) which the program paid for (money ill-spent, in my opinion). Unfortunately for everyone, Benny made a series of diplomatic blunders, and succeeded in offending both of my female housemates enough to make them want to leave. Veta was not able to leave, luckily for me, and has continued to live with Alex and me in Ramla :). Becky, however, after a couple of weeks of uncertainty, decided to leave. Although I was sad to see her go, I would rather that she return home than that she remain here and be miserable. (Thinking of you, Becky!) The same is true for the group's more recent member who has been forced to leave for medical reasons. TZ has been unable to come to school for around a month and a half, and will finally be leaving Israel on the 17th of March. When TZ gave me her deck of Uno cards, I felt like Sam taking the One Ring from Frodo in Shelob's lair.
I should make a few notes here about my teaching thus far. I've taken on what feels like a lot of teaching responsibility. In addition to my workweek, I've been visiting students' houses three days a week in order to teach them privately at their homes (for free), so that they can get additional help. I also teach adult classes at the local campus once a week, and have my Ulpan classes twice a week. (I've also led two enrichment sessions to the rest of my team of volunteers, one about Chanukah, and one about Purim, and I might end up doing one about Pesach, too.) Mondays tend to be pretty hectic for me, because after teaching a private lesson and my adult class, and arriving at my apartment at around 8:20 pm or so, I still have my my wonderful Skype-chevruta with Rachel (currently struggling through Shirat Devorah and its very complicated Hebrew poetry). Teaching my students is fun, challenging, and rewarding, but it can also be frustrating. The biggest obstacle is discipline, and it is not even the discipline of the students whom I am teaching, but that of other students who constantly wander into my English room in order to hassle my pupils. I can's solve that, and sometimes I find it necessary to lock the door; when other teachers are using the English room, I do not have this luxury, and am not always able to keep my students attention. There are a number of remarkable incidents. Recently, one fourth grader who was lagging behind became the star of the class seemingly overnight. I am teaching his group phonics, and was able to give him some very long and difficult words to sound out, which he did with pride (often interjecting "eizeh kal," or "how easy," as he grew excited with his proficiency). I even got him to read, without errors, the sentence "The rain in Spain falls mainly in the plain" for Chani, the English teacher. This is something that none of my fifth graders, and only the best of my sixth, seventh, and eighth graders could do. Another remarkable story is of the oldest student in the school, who must be at least fifteen (he has facial hair already), who has been extremely resilient to being taught in class by Moshe (or even listening to his directions), but works with impressive focus and concentration when I teach him privately. We are making our way through reading a beginner-readers' version of Robin Hood, and also practicing spoken English. Now that TZ is no longer a volunteer at my school, I have begun to teach more girls than I did previously, and have begun to realize the large skill differential between boys and girls among my seventh graders and eighth graders (but not among younger students). The number of students with whom I am able to at least partially communicate in English has risen now that I am spending more time among the girls. This is a very pleasant surprise, and I am glad to say that I am enjoying teaching many of the girls (none of the students whom I tutor at home are girls, I'd like to add, but all of my regular Underground students are women). I've found that some of my creativity seems to be paying off with my students. I've made several customized activities since I arrived, including two special decks of English-language Memory (one with adjectives and one with nouns); copies of famous paintings for students to describe; and a sentence-rearrangement game inspired by magnetic poetry. My picture-description activity has been extremely good at getting quiet students to be less bashful about speaking in English. I print out and laminate copies of famous paintings, usually those with a lot of action, and ask students to describe to me what they see. The goal here is to teach the active skill of speaking and articulating, without giving the students the burden of coming up with a topic, or something new to say, and also sparking their imaginations. I've found students' imaginations to be surprisingly barren. More than one student so far has told me that he does not know how to make up a story, something that I find very surprising. These students ranged from 8th to 10th grade. I distinctly remember writing my own stories in elementary school and middle school, and in high school I wrote a very long and serialized science-fiction story (formerly available on Facebook) in my spare time, so I'm very prepared by these students telling me, bluntly, that they don't know how to write a story. I decided to make the sentence-rearranging game when I realized that not a single student in sixth grade and below grasps basic English syntax. The correct usage of such basic things as the definite and indefinite article, the placement of adjectives before the nouns that they modify, basic prepositions ("to," "from," "for," etc.), and even the correct placement of capital letters, are all missing from students' understandings. So I take complete sentences with words color-coded by type (nouns are dark blue, verbs are red, adjectives are green, articles are black, prepositions are purple, etc.), mix it up, and ask students to rearrange the pieces for me. Then I ask them to make it plural by adding another subject (and remembering to change the verb's conjugation, simultaneously), or to add an adjective to describe the object-noun, or to choose a new verb to replace the current one, or to reverse the subject and object, etc., and see if they understand. Success rate is still very low, which means, at the very least, that I've identified a very real problem that needs to be addressed. One of the hardest things for me is to explain English prepositions, which do not line up well with Hebrew prepositions. I am still reminding my students in the 8th grade that there is no English equivalent of אֶת, for instance, Hebrew's direct-object preposition. Also, there are no real good Hebrew equivalents of "at" and "for." The best I could do to explain "for" was to give the sample sentence "I bought the gift for you," which my Underground student perfectly understood. "At" is tricky though; how do I explain the difference between throwing the ball "to" someone and "at" someone? Why do we look "at" people, and arrive "at" places? Just because, I suppose. To be fair, a lot of Hebrew prepositions seem non-intuitive. For example, it seems to be that a lot of hitpa'el verbs take "ב" (normally translated as "in") as their governing preposition, such as "לְהִשְׁתַמֵשׁ," the verb "to use." I'm getting a little bit intricate here, but I think that I'm conveying to you how difficult it is for me, a stranger trying to help close the education gap in Israel, to teach English, when I myself am struggling with Hebrew.
Recently, one of my friends on the program, knowing that I teach at a religious school, mentioned my student wearing pe'ot (sidelocks). Let me be clear -- none of my students have pe'ot. Not all of the boys even continue to wear their kippot after they leave school, and I'm fairly certain that at least some of the older girls change into less modest garments after arriving home. They do, however, pray tefillat hashachar every morning, with tallitot and tefillin (those above Bar Mitzvah age, anyway). They're still getting over the fact that someone (i.e. me) who isn't Israeli and doesn't speak Hebrew could possibly be Jewish, but today (Tuesday, March 11th), they unhesitatingly (and without rabbinic guidance) counted me in their minyan (the ten-man quorum necessary for the recitation of certain liturgical elements), which bodes well. Ignorance of the world outside Israel, or even outside Lod, is quite high, and there is universal shock when I point out to them how small Israel is on the map of the world hanging in the English room (eizeh katan, how small!). Racism is a different issue, and I've accumulated quite a lot of anecdotes. I plan to write a separate post about that.
Throughout January and February, there have been too many ITF events for me to fully list and detail. Some of the highlights that , however, have been our trip to the Carmel region and Haifa, accompanied by Stav again; our visit to South Tel Aviv; my own visit to Yeshivah Or Sameach; Tu Beshevat at the Tabeja Center (I plan to devote my first up-to-date post about Purim). I'll try to summarize them all here.
The visit to the Carmel region focused on the different minority groups with ties to that region, namely, the Druze, the Bahai, and the Ahmadiyyans. The day began with tour of the Druze community of Osafiya, which was my favorite part of the day's adventures. The Druze are really a national community; you can't marry out or join voluntarily. Very interestingly, Druze can choose whether or not to be ritually observant or not, and this choice does not in any way divide society; families stay together, even though some members might be observant, while others are not. All of the Druze people on the streets wearing traditional religious garb were women, and our guide grudgingly admitted that, yes, women are more likely to be observant than men are. The Druze don't actually call themselves the Druze -- they refer to themselves as "al-Muwaḥḥidūn," meaning "Unitarians" in Arabic; I remember that they ask Hebrew-speaking Israelis to refer to them as the "B'nei Chesed," or "Children of Compassion." In late morning, we drove to Chaifa, which I closely associate with the Technion Institute (and, therefore, with Elliot) and with Veta. I hung out with Noah near the shore, and then our group walked to the Bahai Gardens, home of another monotheistic minority group. The Bahai Gardens are remarkably verdant, and I am speaking as the son of a botanist when I say that the flowers and landscaping were quite beautiful (landscape architecture students -- note well!). The Bahai group was started as a synthesis of monotheistic beliefs, begun by an Iranian-born 19th-century prophet known as the Bab. "Bab," according to our guide, means "gate" in Persia, presumably the cognate of Aramaic "Bava," which also means "gate" (as in Bava Kamma). The gardens were planted in order to accord with a prophecy made of such a place by the Bab (or, possibly, by his successor -- I don't quite remember). After the gardens, we visited an Ahmadiyyan mosque. Although they consider themselves to be Muslims, the Ahmadiyyans have been declared heretical by Sunnis, and the Saudi Arabian government, which controls pilgrimages to Mecca, does not consider them to be truly Muslim, despite their adherence to the Five Pillars. They do a lot of proselytizing work, mostly among their fellow Muslims, and have a very pro-peace agenda. I made certain to treat our host with the deepest respect, and I read his entire pamphlet. Not everyone in our group of volunteers was as carefully polite as I was, though, and one volunteer of Christian persuasion from another town Israel got in an argument about Jesus, to the consternation and embarrassment of the rest of us.
Our visit to Tel Aviv was excellent, although the best and most fulfilling part of the tour, that of the African asylum-seekers' neighborhood in South Tel Aviv, was unfortunately cut short. Yaffa has an even longer history than I had realized, dating back to the first (i.e. pre-Canaanite) colonization of the Levant region by the Egyptians. As was the case of others who have conquered the land of Israel, the land and resources are not themselves of great importance; however, Israel lies between the important regions of Mesopotamia and Egypt. Why else would the mighty Babylonians bother to conquer the otherwise politically-insignificant kingdom of Judea? Anyway, we visited the oldest neighborhoods of Tel Aviv, and talked a lot about the image of the chalutz, or pioneer (JPS translates the word as "shock troop" in Bamidbar 32) in Zionist thought. We heard the narrative of a man who escaped from conscription, and how he went through hell crossing the Sahara, spending time being beaten in prisons in various countries, etc., in order to escape to Israel, just for basic human rights. This was one of the most moving narratives that I've heard since I arrived in Israel, and in a context for the most part unconnected to the Israeli-Palestinian conflict.
ITF Ramla spent Tu B'shevat at the Tabeja Center, planting trees, and learning about the Center's community vegetable garden. More interestingly, the week afterwards, we returned to the Tabeja center to hear a presentation by a leading rabbi of the Ethiopian Jewish community, Rabbi Sharon Shalom. Rabbi Sharon told us about his own journey from Ethiopia to Israel, beginning with how he fled from the civil war in his home country, and ended up as a respected religious authority, lecturer at Bar-Ilan University, and rabbi of an Ashkenazic synagogue (made up mostly of Holocaust survivors) in Kiryat Gat. He is also the author of a book that describes as the Ethiopian equivalent of the Shulchan Arukh (the 16th-century code of Jewish Law compiled by the eminent Rav Yosef Karo). There are some photos of me wearing an Ethiopian cloak around my shoulders available on Facebook, for those of you interested. Oh, yes, and the kind Ethiopian women also fed us :). There are many Ethiopians in my neighborhood in Ramla, and about 60% of my students in Rambam are Ethiopian. Some of the generation of grandparents struggle with Hebrew. It's very painful to see these venerable elders of the Nation of Israel struggling to be able to communicate in the language of the State of Israel.
Most recently, the Shabbat of February 28th-March 1st, I had the honor of being a guest at Yeshivat Ohr Sameach. I was invited by Rabbi Brickman, who is Howie Beigelman's brother-in-law, and who also ranks as one of the most enthusiastic and generous hosts that I have ever had. I thoroughly enjoyed being back in a Beit Midrash, and did my best to dig into Mishneh Torah, and to listen to rabbis' shiurim while I had this rare opportunity. The Rabbis were friendly, knowledgeable, and all desirous that I decide to spend my next year (or three) studying with them full-time. Yeshivah sounds like fun, but I question whether I have it in me to be a Yeshivah boy. Which brings me to the fact that many of the students whom I encountered were academically and personally rather unimpressive. There was a lot of immaturity, drunkenness, laziness, and disrespect. I should not be too negative; there were students who allowed me to stay the night in their room, which was very generous, and even lend me a towel for the evening, which was even more generous. I think that my idea of a yeshivah graduate is too much influenced by my friends from Cornell such as Ezra, Josh, Aaron, and Harry. I think I expected most of the students in the Derech program to share the kind of focused mindset that most of them have (focused on different things, but, nevertheless, working incredibly hard at them, and achieving above and beyond). This was not the case. I still loved my time in the Beit Midrash, though, and might accept Rabbi Brickman's offer to return to study over Pesach.
That concludes my attempt to catch up. I missed quite a lot, including Eli's visit to Ramla, our goodbye to beloved Becky, a lot of details of Rambam and Underground, all my fun with Shmuel and Eliav, a litany of Carmel's virtues, and ITF group dynamics. I think that In case you can't tell, I recycled an unpublished post back from the end of December.
Next up: Purim!
~JD
Alex, Veta, and Becky moved into my apartment on Thursday night, the 19th of December, the night that we returned from Jerusalem with the rest of the Ramla delegation, and the same night that my previous housemates, Ben, Ben, and Tznoach. My roommate had already left the apartment, but I did, to my delight, have the chance to say goodbye to Ben Feldman and to Tznoach. Then, Carmel and I drove to Gil'ad, and helped Alex, Becky, and Veta pack their things together, and bring them to our apartment here on Yoseftal. I think that the first impression was quite good.
That Friday (December 20th), which I had off of school, the two women had left to spend the weekend in Chaifa, and Alex and I were left together in Ramla. Before they left, though, we received a visitor from the MASA administration, Enav, who came to apologize about all of the housing-related problems from which the other three (especially Veta, whose respiratory system has been suffering since her arrival in Ramla) had suffered. Evan made a great effort to mollify my new housemates, and, I thought, did a very good job of ensuring their continued participation in the ITF program with assurances of improved conditions, etc. She even brought over a bag full of snacks and chocolate, and a bottle of wine much higher in quality than the kind which I am accustomed to use for kiddush, as a sign of her interest in our continued occupation of the apartment. Alex and I cooked our first Shabbat dinner together; I made sweet potato stew, and Alex made a kind of curry with potatoes and other vegetables. I was quite impressed with his cooking. I had a good, restful Shabbat (which is just what I needed, after all of my accumulated sleep debt in Jerusalem), and was glad to hear Shir Hashirim at my usual Sepharadic synagogue at the end of the week (מַה יָּפִית וּמַה נָּעַמְתְּ אַהֲבָה בַּתַּעֲנוּגִים זֹאת קוֹמָתֵךְ דָּמְתָה לְתָמָר). Since that weekend, I've seen (and smelled :)) a lot more of the food that Alex prepares, and my initial feeling was correct -- he is very good at cooking! Alex has spent time in Japan
On Sunday, December 22nd, the ITF Ramla and Ashdod groups toured Jerusalem (yes, already back in my favorite city in Israel). We toured the Church of the Holy Sepulcher in the morning. This was my first time actually entering this site, although I had gotten lost in this quarter before, when I had been unable to find my way to the Kotel amidst all of the winding passageways that make up the Arab Shuk. Anyway, we traveled very slowly through Jerusalem. We got right up close to the Temple Mount, and looked up the staircase to the Muslim-only area, and then turned back. We arrived at the kotel, where Shmuel and I joined a minyan for Minchah Gadol. I think that it was the first time that I had ever prayed a non-Friday-afternoon minchah at the Kotel. It was surprisingly quiet. Afterwards, we had a short amount of time for people to buy lunch. I wasn't interested (I had brought with me some persimmons, one of which I shared with David), and visited a bookstore instead. This is the same bookstore, by the way, where I had asked about copies of Mishneh Torah with nikkud several weeks before, and the storekeeper had told me that they only had copies of Sefer Mada in such a format. Much to my surprise and delight, when browsing through the halachah section of the store, I found not just one, but two different editions of the entire Mishneh Torah with nikkud! One of them was the copy that Eli and Isaac use, which I admired every day when I sat next to Isaac at class at the Drisha Institute in June. Without going into detail, it is a printed version of the most authentic uncensored manuscript of the Mishneh Torah, as desired at the end of his life. It even has a few quirks that reveal how old the manuscript is; the preposition "שֶׁל," for instance, is actually added as a prefix, whereas in modern Hebrew and in most printed editions of medieval Jewish texts, it is separated as its own word. I'm extremely excited to now own my own copy of this book, never mind that it's easily the most expensive book which I've ever purchased. Towards sunset, we visited the apocryphal King David's tomb, where we lounged on the roof and enjoyed the view; afterwards, I said a Tefillah inside, and then we left for Machaneh Yehudah, the Jerusalem shuk. I enjoyed some dates and persimmons that I purchased there. I also had enough time to browse in some nearby bookstores for a copy of another book for which I have been yearning. I managed to find a copy of the same Hebrew verb book that Ben Feldman owns, the one with 501+ Hebrew verbs arranged my shoresh, again, much to my pleasure. Several people on the trip were equally excited about the book's thoroughness in verb tables. Again, the book was expensive, but I consider it to be a learning tool, and, moreover, one that I can freely share with my fellow ITF participants. Afterwards, our group approached the Temple Mount (we could not, of course, ascend to the Al-Aqsa mosque, for reasons of security), and spent time near the (apocryphal) tomb of King David. Later that same evening, though, as fruitful as my own adventures were, there was a major negative turning point, as our group met with Benny, who is the director of Israel Way. We met him at a Bukharian restaurant (the first, and, as of March, the only time I've eaten in a restaurant since arriving in Israel) which the program paid for (money ill-spent, in my opinion). Unfortunately for everyone, Benny made a series of diplomatic blunders, and succeeded in offending both of my female housemates enough to make them want to leave. Veta was not able to leave, luckily for me, and has continued to live with Alex and me in Ramla :). Becky, however, after a couple of weeks of uncertainty, decided to leave. Although I was sad to see her go, I would rather that she return home than that she remain here and be miserable. (Thinking of you, Becky!) The same is true for the group's more recent member who has been forced to leave for medical reasons. TZ has been unable to come to school for around a month and a half, and will finally be leaving Israel on the 17th of March. When TZ gave me her deck of Uno cards, I felt like Sam taking the One Ring from Frodo in Shelob's lair.
I should make a few notes here about my teaching thus far. I've taken on what feels like a lot of teaching responsibility. In addition to my workweek, I've been visiting students' houses three days a week in order to teach them privately at their homes (for free), so that they can get additional help. I also teach adult classes at the local campus once a week, and have my Ulpan classes twice a week. (I've also led two enrichment sessions to the rest of my team of volunteers, one about Chanukah, and one about Purim, and I might end up doing one about Pesach, too.) Mondays tend to be pretty hectic for me, because after teaching a private lesson and my adult class, and arriving at my apartment at around 8:20 pm or so, I still have my my wonderful Skype-chevruta with Rachel (currently struggling through Shirat Devorah and its very complicated Hebrew poetry). Teaching my students is fun, challenging, and rewarding, but it can also be frustrating. The biggest obstacle is discipline, and it is not even the discipline of the students whom I am teaching, but that of other students who constantly wander into my English room in order to hassle my pupils. I can's solve that, and sometimes I find it necessary to lock the door; when other teachers are using the English room, I do not have this luxury, and am not always able to keep my students attention. There are a number of remarkable incidents. Recently, one fourth grader who was lagging behind became the star of the class seemingly overnight. I am teaching his group phonics, and was able to give him some very long and difficult words to sound out, which he did with pride (often interjecting "eizeh kal," or "how easy," as he grew excited with his proficiency). I even got him to read, without errors, the sentence "The rain in Spain falls mainly in the plain" for Chani, the English teacher. This is something that none of my fifth graders, and only the best of my sixth, seventh, and eighth graders could do. Another remarkable story is of the oldest student in the school, who must be at least fifteen (he has facial hair already), who has been extremely resilient to being taught in class by Moshe (or even listening to his directions), but works with impressive focus and concentration when I teach him privately. We are making our way through reading a beginner-readers' version of Robin Hood, and also practicing spoken English. Now that TZ is no longer a volunteer at my school, I have begun to teach more girls than I did previously, and have begun to realize the large skill differential between boys and girls among my seventh graders and eighth graders (but not among younger students). The number of students with whom I am able to at least partially communicate in English has risen now that I am spending more time among the girls. This is a very pleasant surprise, and I am glad to say that I am enjoying teaching many of the girls (none of the students whom I tutor at home are girls, I'd like to add, but all of my regular Underground students are women). I've found that some of my creativity seems to be paying off with my students. I've made several customized activities since I arrived, including two special decks of English-language Memory (one with adjectives and one with nouns); copies of famous paintings for students to describe; and a sentence-rearrangement game inspired by magnetic poetry. My picture-description activity has been extremely good at getting quiet students to be less bashful about speaking in English. I print out and laminate copies of famous paintings, usually those with a lot of action, and ask students to describe to me what they see. The goal here is to teach the active skill of speaking and articulating, without giving the students the burden of coming up with a topic, or something new to say, and also sparking their imaginations. I've found students' imaginations to be surprisingly barren. More than one student so far has told me that he does not know how to make up a story, something that I find very surprising. These students ranged from 8th to 10th grade. I distinctly remember writing my own stories in elementary school and middle school, and in high school I wrote a very long and serialized science-fiction story (formerly available on Facebook) in my spare time, so I'm very prepared by these students telling me, bluntly, that they don't know how to write a story. I decided to make the sentence-rearranging game when I realized that not a single student in sixth grade and below grasps basic English syntax. The correct usage of such basic things as the definite and indefinite article, the placement of adjectives before the nouns that they modify, basic prepositions ("to," "from," "for," etc.), and even the correct placement of capital letters, are all missing from students' understandings. So I take complete sentences with words color-coded by type (nouns are dark blue, verbs are red, adjectives are green, articles are black, prepositions are purple, etc.), mix it up, and ask students to rearrange the pieces for me. Then I ask them to make it plural by adding another subject (and remembering to change the verb's conjugation, simultaneously), or to add an adjective to describe the object-noun, or to choose a new verb to replace the current one, or to reverse the subject and object, etc., and see if they understand. Success rate is still very low, which means, at the very least, that I've identified a very real problem that needs to be addressed. One of the hardest things for me is to explain English prepositions, which do not line up well with Hebrew prepositions. I am still reminding my students in the 8th grade that there is no English equivalent of אֶת, for instance, Hebrew's direct-object preposition. Also, there are no real good Hebrew equivalents of "at" and "for." The best I could do to explain "for" was to give the sample sentence "I bought the gift for you," which my Underground student perfectly understood. "At" is tricky though; how do I explain the difference between throwing the ball "to" someone and "at" someone? Why do we look "at" people, and arrive "at" places? Just because, I suppose. To be fair, a lot of Hebrew prepositions seem non-intuitive. For example, it seems to be that a lot of hitpa'el verbs take "ב" (normally translated as "in") as their governing preposition, such as "לְהִשְׁתַמֵשׁ," the verb "to use." I'm getting a little bit intricate here, but I think that I'm conveying to you how difficult it is for me, a stranger trying to help close the education gap in Israel, to teach English, when I myself am struggling with Hebrew.
Recently, one of my friends on the program, knowing that I teach at a religious school, mentioned my student wearing pe'ot (sidelocks). Let me be clear -- none of my students have pe'ot. Not all of the boys even continue to wear their kippot after they leave school, and I'm fairly certain that at least some of the older girls change into less modest garments after arriving home. They do, however, pray tefillat hashachar every morning, with tallitot and tefillin (those above Bar Mitzvah age, anyway). They're still getting over the fact that someone (i.e. me) who isn't Israeli and doesn't speak Hebrew could possibly be Jewish, but today (Tuesday, March 11th), they unhesitatingly (and without rabbinic guidance) counted me in their minyan (the ten-man quorum necessary for the recitation of certain liturgical elements), which bodes well. Ignorance of the world outside Israel, or even outside Lod, is quite high, and there is universal shock when I point out to them how small Israel is on the map of the world hanging in the English room (eizeh katan, how small!). Racism is a different issue, and I've accumulated quite a lot of anecdotes. I plan to write a separate post about that.
Throughout January and February, there have been too many ITF events for me to fully list and detail. Some of the highlights that , however, have been our trip to the Carmel region and Haifa, accompanied by Stav again; our visit to South Tel Aviv; my own visit to Yeshivah Or Sameach; Tu Beshevat at the Tabeja Center (I plan to devote my first up-to-date post about Purim). I'll try to summarize them all here.
The visit to the Carmel region focused on the different minority groups with ties to that region, namely, the Druze, the Bahai, and the Ahmadiyyans. The day began with tour of the Druze community of Osafiya, which was my favorite part of the day's adventures. The Druze are really a national community; you can't marry out or join voluntarily. Very interestingly, Druze can choose whether or not to be ritually observant or not, and this choice does not in any way divide society; families stay together, even though some members might be observant, while others are not. All of the Druze people on the streets wearing traditional religious garb were women, and our guide grudgingly admitted that, yes, women are more likely to be observant than men are. The Druze don't actually call themselves the Druze -- they refer to themselves as "al-Muwaḥḥidūn," meaning "Unitarians" in Arabic; I remember that they ask Hebrew-speaking Israelis to refer to them as the "B'nei Chesed," or "Children of Compassion." In late morning, we drove to Chaifa, which I closely associate with the Technion Institute (and, therefore, with Elliot) and with Veta. I hung out with Noah near the shore, and then our group walked to the Bahai Gardens, home of another monotheistic minority group. The Bahai Gardens are remarkably verdant, and I am speaking as the son of a botanist when I say that the flowers and landscaping were quite beautiful (landscape architecture students -- note well!). The Bahai group was started as a synthesis of monotheistic beliefs, begun by an Iranian-born 19th-century prophet known as the Bab. "Bab," according to our guide, means "gate" in Persia, presumably the cognate of Aramaic "Bava," which also means "gate" (as in Bava Kamma). The gardens were planted in order to accord with a prophecy made of such a place by the Bab (or, possibly, by his successor -- I don't quite remember). After the gardens, we visited an Ahmadiyyan mosque. Although they consider themselves to be Muslims, the Ahmadiyyans have been declared heretical by Sunnis, and the Saudi Arabian government, which controls pilgrimages to Mecca, does not consider them to be truly Muslim, despite their adherence to the Five Pillars. They do a lot of proselytizing work, mostly among their fellow Muslims, and have a very pro-peace agenda. I made certain to treat our host with the deepest respect, and I read his entire pamphlet. Not everyone in our group of volunteers was as carefully polite as I was, though, and one volunteer of Christian persuasion from another town Israel got in an argument about Jesus, to the consternation and embarrassment of the rest of us.
Our visit to Tel Aviv was excellent, although the best and most fulfilling part of the tour, that of the African asylum-seekers' neighborhood in South Tel Aviv, was unfortunately cut short. Yaffa has an even longer history than I had realized, dating back to the first (i.e. pre-Canaanite) colonization of the Levant region by the Egyptians. As was the case of others who have conquered the land of Israel, the land and resources are not themselves of great importance; however, Israel lies between the important regions of Mesopotamia and Egypt. Why else would the mighty Babylonians bother to conquer the otherwise politically-insignificant kingdom of Judea? Anyway, we visited the oldest neighborhoods of Tel Aviv, and talked a lot about the image of the chalutz, or pioneer (JPS translates the word as "shock troop" in Bamidbar 32) in Zionist thought. We heard the narrative of a man who escaped from conscription, and how he went through hell crossing the Sahara, spending time being beaten in prisons in various countries, etc., in order to escape to Israel, just for basic human rights. This was one of the most moving narratives that I've heard since I arrived in Israel, and in a context for the most part unconnected to the Israeli-Palestinian conflict.
ITF Ramla spent Tu B'shevat at the Tabeja Center, planting trees, and learning about the Center's community vegetable garden. More interestingly, the week afterwards, we returned to the Tabeja center to hear a presentation by a leading rabbi of the Ethiopian Jewish community, Rabbi Sharon Shalom. Rabbi Sharon told us about his own journey from Ethiopia to Israel, beginning with how he fled from the civil war in his home country, and ended up as a respected religious authority, lecturer at Bar-Ilan University, and rabbi of an Ashkenazic synagogue (made up mostly of Holocaust survivors) in Kiryat Gat. He is also the author of a book that describes as the Ethiopian equivalent of the Shulchan Arukh (the 16th-century code of Jewish Law compiled by the eminent Rav Yosef Karo). There are some photos of me wearing an Ethiopian cloak around my shoulders available on Facebook, for those of you interested. Oh, yes, and the kind Ethiopian women also fed us :). There are many Ethiopians in my neighborhood in Ramla, and about 60% of my students in Rambam are Ethiopian. Some of the generation of grandparents struggle with Hebrew. It's very painful to see these venerable elders of the Nation of Israel struggling to be able to communicate in the language of the State of Israel.
Most recently, the Shabbat of February 28th-March 1st, I had the honor of being a guest at Yeshivat Ohr Sameach. I was invited by Rabbi Brickman, who is Howie Beigelman's brother-in-law, and who also ranks as one of the most enthusiastic and generous hosts that I have ever had. I thoroughly enjoyed being back in a Beit Midrash, and did my best to dig into Mishneh Torah, and to listen to rabbis' shiurim while I had this rare opportunity. The Rabbis were friendly, knowledgeable, and all desirous that I decide to spend my next year (or three) studying with them full-time. Yeshivah sounds like fun, but I question whether I have it in me to be a Yeshivah boy. Which brings me to the fact that many of the students whom I encountered were academically and personally rather unimpressive. There was a lot of immaturity, drunkenness, laziness, and disrespect. I should not be too negative; there were students who allowed me to stay the night in their room, which was very generous, and even lend me a towel for the evening, which was even more generous. I think that my idea of a yeshivah graduate is too much influenced by my friends from Cornell such as Ezra, Josh, Aaron, and Harry. I think I expected most of the students in the Derech program to share the kind of focused mindset that most of them have (focused on different things, but, nevertheless, working incredibly hard at them, and achieving above and beyond). This was not the case. I still loved my time in the Beit Midrash, though, and might accept Rabbi Brickman's offer to return to study over Pesach.
That concludes my attempt to catch up. I missed quite a lot, including Eli's visit to Ramla, our goodbye to beloved Becky, a lot of details of Rambam and Underground, all my fun with Shmuel and Eliav, a litany of Carmel's virtues, and ITF group dynamics. I think that In case you can't tell, I recycled an unpublished post back from the end of December.
Next up: Purim!
~JD
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