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

Discipline in School

The more I teach, the more I learn about how children think and understand.  Nearing as I am the end of my first month of teaching, I'm daily coming into new situations, etc.  Every day, I teach with students who want to study and learn.  Many of them are successful; others are not.  Sometimes, students have bad days, and the same student who memorizes the English names for the numbers up to 100 in a single day will be unable to remember what "garden" means.  Sometimes, students encourage and learn from each other, and two good students can become a couple of great students when paired together.  More frequently, one boy or girl among three or four others will distract his or her classmates, and make it difficult or impossible to concentrate.  Speaking of concentration, in a stroke of luck, the electricity in the English room is malfunctioning, and although the ceiling lights work perfectly, the computers do not function.  Some of the students are in denial about this, but it is easier to convince them to sit still and pay attention to their English lesson.

I am learning to be a disciplinarian, which is not fun for me.  Marsha, my ITF supervisor, watched me conduct some classes on Monday, and gave me some advice.  She told me that the students here expect to be yelled at and told what to do, and that I should worry less about individual students bearing grudges against me for being strict with them.  If it helps, she told me, I should imagine that I am playing the part of a strict teacher; the way I act towards misbehaving students does not existentially define who I am.  Moshe and Chani's supervisor, who visited last week, told me almost exactly the same thing, when she saw me offer no resistance to a group of boys who ran in during a break between classes, in order to play on the English Room computers.  She told me that I need to learn to "wear my Spiderman suit," and put on a tough exterior with students at the school, or else they'll walk all over me.  Once on Wednesday, and once on Thursday, I needed to act stricter than I really was.  On Wednesday, I was playing basketball with a group of boys outside, trying to teach them basketball terms, and, with time, get them to speak to each other in English when on the court (they found that saying "back," as in "[pass the ball] back [to me]" is preferable to the Hebrew equivalent).  Another boy, who arrived late to school, walked over, and insisted on playing with us.  He is one of the more severely learning-disabled students in 8th-grade (which is saying something); I suspect Aspergers syndrome, based on the way he interacts with others.  After a couple of minutes, I managed to convince him to leave.  My Hebrew isn't great, which I know hinders my ability to get my point across.  I felt the same feeling of frustration at my own lousy Hebrew, a few minutes later, when one of the students punted the basketball over the barbed-wire fence surrounding the school; after we had managed to get it back, I tried to tell him, clearly, that although I wasn't angry with him at the moment, if he or any other student ever do that again, they will never play basketball with me again.

My second time enforcing discipline this week involved a very disrespectful girl whom neither TZ nor I had ever taught before.  She was acting incredibly rude towards us both, and actively trying to distract other students.  So I told her, emphatically, in Hebrew, to leave, and to return to the teacher.  She pretended at first that she couldn't understand my accent (How hard is "צאי" pronounced "tzei'i," to understand, given my tone?), but within a minute, she stomped back to the classroom.  I didn't know whether to feel as if I had successfully encouraged an atmosphere conducive to learning through discipline, of if I had just acted as a complete bully.  After the fact, both Moshe and TZ told me that I had done the right thing in sending her back to her classroom; learning in the English room with the two of us is a very special privilege, in theory; we don't have time to teach everyone, and, therefore, we should not take students who are going to be disruptive in class.  That, anyway, is how I justify my actions.

I've unfortunately had a rather frustrating weekend.  TZ left school early on Thursday, following which my Ulpan was cancelled.  I had a good Chevruta session with Rachel, but on Friday morning, I realized that my wallet had gone missing.  I believe that I lost in on the bus home on Thursday (the last time I saw it was when I got on, and I was a bit agitated when I boarded), which is very frustrating.  All of my ID cards other than my passport, including my drivers' license, Cornell Student ID, Sorbonne Student ID, Israel bus pass, Israel Klalit insurance card, American insurance card, credit card, debit cards, Red Cross donor card, bone marrow donor card, and TCAT bus pass, were all there, in addition to about ₪75 and $5.00.  This kept me from really being able to relax after Shabbat started, my mind was in such agitation.  Furthermore, I finally had the chance to Skype with my Mother for a short spell of time, and I was unsuccessful, because she has bought a new computer, and had not installed Skype on it, so we were unable to actually talk.  Except for a 10-minute session right after Sara's Bat Mitzvah that was cut short, I have not been able to speak at all to any members of my family back in the U.S.  I had set aside the entire afternoon to being at the computer at the right time, and accomplished exactly zero that day.  On Saturday, I hoped that I would be able to visit some friends and talk about something else, but I found that most of our conversation immediately returned to the missing wallet and my unsuccessful call with my Mother, and the complete mess in which I dunked myself.  The same goes for today.  I've been studying Hebrew, but my heart really isn't in it, because I had such a feeling of unfulfillment.  I just heard that the police stations of Ramla and Lod, as well as the bus station, have not found my wallet, and I'm fairly certain, by now, that it's not under a cushion somewhere in my house.  I'm just not myself right now, and hope that it doesn't adversely affect my teaching tomorrow.  Or today.  I'm about to walk over to Galit's house, and help Tamir.  I know that it's adversely affecting my writing -- this is not my usual style.  I was going to blog about my group's visit to the Rabin center on Wednesday, but I can't concentrate.  I need to settle down, as my Mother would say.

Also, here's some interesting news from the IDF, for those of you interested in Israel's minority populations...

Also, I thought that perhaps this might interest some of you, maybe you Drisha Institute folk...
"כִּי תָצוּר אֶל עִיר יָמִים רַבִּים לְהִלָּחֵם עָלֶיהָ לְתָפְשָׂהּ לֹא תַשְׁחִית אֶת עֵצָהּ לִנְדֹּחַ עָלָיו גַּרְזֶן כִּי מִמֶּנּוּ תֹאכֵל וְאֹתוֹ לֹא תִכְרֹת כִּי הָאָדָם עֵץ הַשָּׂדֶה לָבֹא מִפָּנֶיךָ בַּמָּצוֹר"

~JD

Jerusalem Mountains Tour

Thursday, rather than teaching at Rambam as I ordinarily do, I visited the mountainous region around Jerusalem with the rest of the Oranim participants in Ramla.  This was actually not an Oranim-scheduled tour, but, rather, organized by the city of Ramla, and offered to Oranim for free.  For this reason, half of the people on the tour were Israelis from Ramla.  They were in their 50s and 60s, and I'm not exactly certain whether they constituted some sort of organized group, or whether they had individually signed up to participate in the tour.  The bus showed up around thirty minutes late, due to a general shortage of buses in Israel today, caused by the Hajj, I believe.  Anyway, the tour guide, Noam, switched between Hebrew and English when he spoke, doing his best to please both audiences.  I did my best, throughout the day, to understand what he said in Hebrew, although I'll admit that it wasn't always easy.  I thought back to France, again, where I could understand all of my lectures at the Sorbonne upon arrival -- it just isn't as easy, this time.  The two Alexes and I are all at about the same level of Hebrew proficiency, and we have all been grouped into a single Ulpan class.  The three of us worked on our homework together at the short rest stop.

Our hike was only about five kilometers long, but we stopped very frequently, so it felt as if we were walking for longer than we really were.  The sun was hot (this is a desert, remember), and I was glad that I had my hat, sunscreen, and water bottle.  The memories of a sunburn on a certain Lake George outing are, of course, still fresh in my mind, and I have no intention of repeating that affair.  Rabin Park, the location where we hiked, is an area controlled by the Jewish National Fund.  Throughout the day, we heard a fair amount about Rabin's past and legacy.  For better or for worse, I was already quasi-familiar with most of the story.  Rabin is a very polarized figure.  In historical memory, there is a certain category of historic leaders who are almost universally regarded as heroes (at least within a particular country): Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr., Sukarno, Gandhi, Kemal Ataturk, and Sun Yatsen are all examples of people with this legacy.  There is virtually no figure in Israel (or, for that matter, Russia), except maybe Chaim Weizmann, who has this kind of legacy.  Yitzchak Rabin belongs to a different class of leaders -- the kind that many remember fondly, but whose legacies are simply too controversial to transcend existing political boundaries.  Although I can't think of as many good examples of leaders who fall into this category, I'd say that maybe Winston Churchill and JFK fall into this category (sorry for my lack of females among these lists -- I'm doing my best, really).  Yitzchak Rabin falls into the latter category -- there is a political bumper sticker in Israel that reads פושעי אוסלו לדין, literally "[Bring the] Oslo criminals to justice," a reference to the Oslo Accords of 1994 that made peace between Israelis and Palestinians, and established Palestinian governing authority.  Then-Prime-Minister Rabin and PLO Chairman Yassar Arafat signed the agreement (you may recognize a certain famous photograph of the signing), and the next year, 1995, Rabin was assassinated while leaving a pro-peace political rally.  The assassin was an ultra-Orthodox Jew who, like many other religious Zionists, opposed surrendering any territory in the Holy Land in return for peace with the Palestinians.  It's still only 18 years after the assassination, and there are enough people who still consider Oslo to have been not just a mistake but a great sin and crime for Rabin to be universally loved and accepted by Israelis (not even taking Palestinians or foreigners into account).

The other part of Yirzchak Rabin's career for which he is remembered, his role as the Israel Defense Force's Chief of Staff in Israel's lightning victory in the 1967 Six-Day War is somewhat less controversial among Israelis, but the territorial gains that Israel made in that war are too divisive on the world stage for that to completely uphold his legacy.  (The fact that Rabin was Ambassador to the U.S. in 1973 when Israel was hit so hard in the Yom Kippur War, and therefore had nothing to do with the greatest military loss Israel has ever suffered, protected his reputation as a first-rate general.)  Also, in an incident I didn't know about, Rabin got in big trouble with the ultra-Orthodox parties in his Knesset coalition, when a delivery of F-15 jets from the United States arrived during Shabbat.  This, compounded with the discovery that his wife had a bank account open in the United States, illegal at the time for Israeli citizens, forced his resignation as Prime Minister in 1976.  This might have been before I or any of my brothers were born, but it's still all recent history to my parents' generation.

One of the best parts of this trip was talking to Carmel along the hike.  I had saved up a few questions for my Ask-The-Sabra session, some socio-political, others linguistic.  I finally figured out, for instance, that I shouldn't say "מאשר" in my comparative sentences while talking on the street.  More importantly, though, I think that I got a slightly better handle on the Israeli political center than I had in the past.  When I was in 4th grade, and my (horrible) Hebrew School teacher had my class learn about the Israeli political parties.  I remember that the centrist party at the time was called גֶּשֶׁר, Gesher, being literally the "bridge" party between Labor and the Likud.  This party is since long gone, but there were a few more short-lived centrist parties, such as the Kadimah (קדימה‎) party of Ariel Sharon and Ehud Olmert, which won a plurality of Knesset seats in both the 2006 and 2009 Israeli elections.  Thank you, Carmel, for being awesome, and for answering all of my questions!

My roommate Ben's favorite part of the day was our visit to a small domed structure beside the cemetery in Rabin Park.  It was built as a non-denominational prayer structure for people of different beliefs, and several of my peers began to meditate inside.  Some of the Israelis from Ramla were Kohanim, and needed to skirt around the edge of the cemetery.  This prompted Veta to begin asking me about Kohanim, as well as the notion of טֻמְאָה, "ritual impurity," which I did my best to answer.  It's been a while since I first needed to wrap my head around this concept (what was it, Peninah, four years ago that you first explained that to me?  Gets me nostalgic).  How do you explain that there's no stigma to being טָמֵא, when you first begin by defining it as "impure?"  It evokes all sorts of ideas of Hindu untouchables, etc., when, in fact, everybody went through periods of being טָמֵא, until they took the opportunity to immerse themselves (or be sprinkled), therefore becoming טָהוֹר again.  Maimonides admits in his the introduction to his commentary to סֵדֶר טָהֳרוֹת that nobody really intuitively understood what טָמֵא and טָהוֹר meant, even in his time.  According to Eli, who can read Judeo-Arabic, following this is the best explanation of these tricky concepts.  As the ITF participant recognized as being observant, this is not the first time in which I have felt obligated to explain a difficult Jewish concept, that I myself don't know very well, to another, so as not to leave him or her wondering.  Again, I think that I left more questions than I did answers.  Shortly after this conversation, we arrived at a pavilion where a trio of Israel actors put on a very amusing 5-minute drama of Yitzchak Rabbin's life.  I learned some Hebrew words and idioms (there was no translation available), and a little bit more about Rabbin's life.  I also learned a little bit better about how Israelis think about (and recognize through his signature eyepatch) Moshe Dayan, another name in the Zionist canon.

Following this was a performance in honor of Rabin, put on by schoolchildren and IDF soldiers.  It was kind of like the one at Rambam, but better-rehearsed, and with better AV equipment.  We ended up waiting for maybe forty minutes for the setup, during which some of the ITF members and I discussed our opinions of our experiences so far.  I think that I'm enjoying myself more than most of the others, even though I'm not leaving Ramla as frequently to visit Tel Aviv, Jerusalem, Rechovot, Chaifa, etc.  One of the others hasn't really enjoyed the enrichments so far (liking, incidentally, the only one that has bored me), and feels that they're a waste of time.  I feel again a little bit the way I felt when I was at EDUCO in Paris, where I suddenly realize that I have been obliviously enjoying myself, while many of the people around me are miserable or frustrated (later that day, another Oranim participant told me quite glibly "I hate Ramla").  I've always been into learning about hard-hitting politics, history, etc.  I really regret missing Harry's guided tour of the Tel Aviv museum, but my visit to the Israel Museum with Eli, or Stav's explanation of the economics of the Dead Sea, are exactly the kind of things that I really enjoy.  I slept through a portion of the performance, by the way, tired out by all the sun.  I think that I bumped into Alex's shoulder a few times.

We again had to wait uncomfortably long in the heat for our return bus, long after most of the school children (for whom this presentation was really designed) had left.  I was so buy helping Noah with Hebrew, that I didn't notice that Ben and Noach had gotten off of the bus at Yoseftal, and got off at the City Hall, instead.  I walked to my apartment, then to the campus, to help Noah again through Ulpan.  Then I had my own Ulpan class, with the two Alexes.  I swear, Coco is going to be teaching me Hebrew within more six weeks, he's learning so quickly.  Really, he has taken in the equivalent of at least a college semester's worth of Hebrew in just a scant six weeks.  I walked back to Yoseftal, took a run, and then had my weekly chevruta with Rachel.  I'm still thinking about the relation between אַבְנֵי קֶלַע and אַבְנֵי נֵזֶר, and about the versions of the Septuagint in which הָמוּ was apparently translated as if it were דָּם instead.

Also, since I know that several of my readers have a very deep interest in Iran-Israeli relations, I thought that I'd give quick summary on what I've read about the allegations that Turkey blew some Mosad agents' cover.  More than a year ago, back in 2012, around 10 Iranians working in Iran for Mosad agents had their cover blown, according to a story was recently published in the Washington Post, which cited "knowledgeable" (but unmentioned sources).  The Turkish foreign ministry initially made no comment, as did the Israeli government.  However, former Mosad chief Danny Yatom told the press that, if this report were correct, it would be a "despicable act" on behalf of the Turks.  Please note that, because the Turkish government has fairly good relations with both Israel and Iran, the Mosad runs many its Iranian activities from Turkey, which gives the Turkish government a greater capacity to monitor these espionage activities.  Yesterday, Turkish Foreign Minister Ahmet Davutoglu denied that Turkey had ever committed such a breach of Israeli trust.  Journalists who suspect that Turkey is not being honest cite the Mavi Marmara incident of 2010, in which Israeli commandos boarding a blockade runner headed for Gaza became involved in a fight with passengers on board, killing nine, all of them Turkish citizens.  So far, it isn't certain whether the allegations against the Turkish government are true; there has been, to my knowledge, no official Israeli voice on this issue.  U.S.-Turkish relations, have been fairly cordial, and to my knowledge, the blockade runner incident didn't do any lasting harm to them; I can't say whether the same holds true for Turkish-Israeli relations.  Let's wait and see for more facts to materialize.

Congratulations to my cousin Sara on her Bat Mitzvah, this week, reading Pareshat Vayeira!  I wish I could be in Silver Spring with you, and help you celebrate!

Thank you, also, Raymond, for your sweet comment on my last post!  I am a very big fan of yours <3.

Also, for those of you with the time to read it, recent news might completely change the story of human evolution, at least as I learned about it in school.

~JD

Birthday Weekend in Ramla

As those of you who have been reading my blog for a while may have realized, the tightness of my schedule is indirectly proportional to the amount of time that I devote to writing about my experiences on my blog.  Therefore, I hope that you'll realize that the reason I haven't spent time blogging daily about my experiences in the Rambam school in Lod is not because I have nothing interesting to say, but rather, because I have a very busy schedule.  In addition to my position at Rambam, which is an 8:00-2:30 school day Monday through Thursday for me, I am participating in various supplementary volunteering opportunities, enrichment activities, and Hebrew lessons.  Also, to round out my Wednesday and Thursday nights, I am continuing chevrutot with two particularly cool people, and hope to have a third, very soon.

My job is, I'll admit, quite hard.  I have virtually no experience teaching, and I'm experiencing mixed results.  Part of this is due to my inexperience, part of it is due to the fact that my students and I share no language in common in which we can both fluently communicate, and part of it is due to the inherent difficulty of teaching.  I am teaching grade levels from 2nd to 8th grades, and many of the students are Special Ed (although none as severely so as some of the children with whom I have worked in the past).  I am not, as one of my close acquaintances suggested I would become if I became a teacher, simply a babysitter, although my job does border on this during a few of my classes with young Special Ed students.  Sometimes, I am in control of what I teach my students.  For instance, with one 6th-grade student, who is about eleven years old, I am essentially a private English tutor, and teach him what he wants to learn.  I had the idea of teaching him to tell time, and quickly realized that he had not learned the names of the numbers beyond ten.  So I set about teaching him eleven through twenty, and he showed remarkably good learning skills (this is after we set aside the textbook reading exercise about the Tower of London, interesting as this was).  While excellent at math, especially given the fact that I am quizzing him in a foreign language, this same student is almost illiterate.  When I played Memory with him the other day (in which he had to match the card with the English word to the card with the picture on it), he could actually remember the English word when he saw the picture cards than when he saw the English word cards, even though the words that he was trying to pronounce were printed on their backs.  Moreh Moshe, obviously, wants me to teach him to read, and I'm hoping to simultaneously do this, while also teaching him what he wants to learn.  To give another example, I have been trying to teach a group of 7th-grade girls how to distinguish between "same" and "different," and teaching them a lot of adjectives (big/little, light/heavy, hot/cold, sweet/salty, happy/sad), trying to get them to practice speaking aloud, and giving them the opportunity to draw the things that we are talking about on the whiteboard (this is a greater reward than I initially would have thought).  However, no matter how many times I repeat, and they repeat (willingly -- they're quite well-behaved, and genuinely interested in learning), they cannot yet either consistently correctly pronounce the words "same" and "different," or even remember which of these terms correspond to the Hebrew equivalents, דּוֹמֶה and שׁוֹנֶה.  However, they told me that they would very much like to learn the lyrics to a One Direction song (yes, Lani, you read that correctly!), so tomorrow, TZ will be teaching them a One Direction song of her choosing.  To give another example, on Monday, first thing in the morning, I sat down with an 8th-grade girl, and walked her through a worksheet on the present simple.  In the process, I needed to re-teach her how to conjugate and pronounce verbs "to be" and "to do" in English.  I think that she made enormous progress, but it was simply with the assigned textbook work.  Meanwhile, with the Special Ed 4th-grade class, TZ and I taught the English words for colors by playing Memory, and although by the end of the game, most of them could accurately identify the words and match them to the correct pictures, I am not certain if one such session per week is really enough to let such lessons sink in.  There is another 6th-grade boy who loves World of Worldcraft, and I am hoping to be able to craft some sort of game for him, in order to allow his interest in fantasy games to propel forward his studies in English.  I taught him a few words that I thought he would like to know, such as "magic," "wizard," and "fire."  He tried to ask me to define words like "Paladin" and "Worg," and I did my best to explain.  In all of these examples, I'm doing my best to try to find the best ways to teach students in ways to which they will be receptive. 

In all of this, TZ, my teaching partner, is absolutely integral.  When I was placed with her, I really, really felt as if I had won the ITF lottery.  TZ is one of only two participants with prior experience in teaching, is very sweet, very hard-working, and is the kind of person to whom young children will easily form a strong emotional attachment.  Every day when I see one particular 8th-grade boy during tefillat hashachar, he asks me, in the best English that he can muster, "TZ, she is coming today?"  Likewise, yesterday, when I was leaving the school, one of the Special Ed girls who had grown particularly fond of TZ asked me "איפה המורה, where is the [female] teacher?"  Really, TZ is phenomenal, and can control students much, much better than I can.  My Hebrew is slightly better than hers, at the moment, but in a few weeks, we'll both be equally capable of communicating with the students.

In fact, my slight advantage in (archaic) Hebrew is sometimes a disadvantage.  The students know that they can "cheat" with me, and slide into Hebrew to get their points across.  7th-graders habitually respond to my questions, posed in either language, entirely in Hebrew, and don't seem to understand that I am trying to get them to become used to pronouncing English words, not simply understanding my translations, and moving on.  The 8th-graders mostly haven't discovered my secret, but it's no secret among the 2nd, 3rd, and 4th graders, whom I realize would understand nothing of what I try to tell them, if I just spoke to them in untranslated, natural English.  When my Hebrew falls short with the 3rd graders, though, there really isn't anything I can do; how can I expect a student still learning the Roman alphabet to be able to understand the details of an activity?  Nevertheless, I feel deeply unsatisfied when, after a class, I realize that I have really just been speaking Hebrew until my face turns blue, without giving the students the actual benefits of having a native English speaker as their instructor. 

I am encountering several additional problems.  One of the greatest of my recurring dilemmas is preventing students from being distracted by the computers in the English Room.  As someone who was once a preteen boy, I understand how incredibly captivating electronic games are (I still remember my first, magically-hypnotic glimpse of Super Mario 64).  In my opinion, trying to teach the students English with the computers in the room is like trying to get a young child to eat his vegetables (again, been in that position), while in the same room is a large batch of freshly-baked cookies, by promising him that he may have one cookie (and only one) after, and only after, he eats all of his vegetables.  Some children like vegetables, so this isn't an issue.  But others will simply ignore me (I have no disciplinary powers, remember), and, figuratively speaking, eat the entire plate of cookies.  I have tried to tell students that they may not play with the computers until after they are finished with their work, and the result is that they become infuriated with me, and begin shouting at me in Hebrew that I can't understand.  I tried hiding the computer mice, and, as a result two of the students figured out how to open game applications using only the computer, while another (Special Ed) student went absolutely berserk, TZ tells me, when I was out of the room.  TZ convinced me to put the mice back, and, at the end of the day, exactly the same thing occurred; students ignored me and their work, and played games, for the entire class period.  When I try to show them English-language sites, they immediately close the windows, and head straight to YouTube, Facebook, or, most commonly, gaming sites.  I have yet to find a way to solve this problem.  I am being lenient with students, because this is the beginning of the year, and if they decide now that they hate me, I won't be able to redeem myself, and be able to be an effective teacher.  I've already, despite all of my efforts to never show the slightest hint of meanness, anger, or annoyance, had one student call me a Nazi.  I just don't know what I've done wrong.  I even tried to correct his swearing (all students know the terms "F--k, M----rf----r, sh--, and b--ch, even if they can't spell their names; I blame the pervasive venomous cruelty of American culture for this), but even that didn't interest him.

That, anyway, are the joys and frustrations of teaching, as of right now.  Ulpan has finally begun, and, if we can convince the instructor to allow Coco and Veta to participate in the Advanced course, I will be at ease. The truth of the matter is, everyone gives me far too much credit for understanding Hebrew; I'm completely out of my league here in Ramla, and am struggling just to get by.  Obviously, this is the best situation (short of having Israeli roommates), but everyone around me seems to think that I'm some kind of Hebrew expert when, in fact, I can scarcely explain to a 2nd-grader how to fill out a simple English exercise.  It looks as if I'll need to re-learn how to make adjectives comparative and superlative, as well as the pi'el binyan.  And learn all five remaining binyanim while I'm at it.  Oh, man; I wish I were as good at this stuff as Peninah, or Avital, or Eli, or Lani, or Ilan, or Julian, or -- someone.

On the brighter side, for those of you in the U.S., my Oranim friends made a real effort to give me an enjoyable birthday party on Saturday night, after Shabbat had ended.  I had thought that there would be some low-key hanging out at the house on Haveradim, and that would be all; in fact, my roommate Ben, and the folks at Gil'ad, did a first-rate job of fooling me into coming to Gil'ad first, on the pretext that they needed me to walk them over to Haveradim.  So, in fact, the party was at the house on Gil'ad all along!  Noah had followed my date-buying instructions that I gave him during our recent outing to Ein Gedi and the Dead Sea, and the entire group had pitched in to buy me -- you guessed it -- about three kilos of dates.  I love these fat, chewy, flavorful Israeli dates, along with the rest of Israeli produce, and finished them tonight (I did share a lot with the others on the first night, but I still destroyed them incredibly quickly).  Devin even put birthday candles in a couple of the dates.  I had thought that that was all, but, later, my housemate Ben showed up with a (pareve) chocolate birthday cake!  Who would have guessed it?  There was dancing, etc., and nobody got sick (happy about this last one).  Some super-cool people who had been in Tel Aviv and elsewhere during Shabbat even showed up in time, which was wonderful!

The next day, Carmel and a local Ramla tour guide led us on a tour of notable tourist cites in Ramla, including the Ramla museum, the Pool of Arches, and the White Tower.  I had an enjoyable time, and only wish that I could give a fuller description; however, I took too long, and the memories are no longer so fresh in my memory...  The important thing is that I learned more about Ramla, and that Carmel continues to keep us all happy.  I want to see more of the museum, though; I only really saw a very small portion of the exhibits.

Also, Becky gave me a fantastic haircut on Friday afternoon, just in time for my birthday.  The students at Rambam admired it enough that they managed to tell me that they thought that it was a "good haircut" in English!  Great job, Becky!  Another person who deserves a special shoutout here is Carmel, who helped me overcome some upsetting incidents that occurred last Monday.  I'm really grateful, and think that I'm entirely back on track now, back in harness.

Thinking of you all!

~JD