סַמְּכוּנִי בָּאֲשִׁישׁוֹת רַפְּדוּנִי בַּתַּפּוּחִים כִּי חוֹלַת אַהֲבָה אָנִי
In Israel, you really mean it when you say "מה נשתנה הלילה הזה, מכל הלילות." That's because, unlike the Jews who live everywhere else in the world, Jews living in Israel celebrate the Jewish festivals only one day; "הלילה הזה" really does mean "הלילה הזה" (this night) rather than "הלילה הזה וגם המחר." (tonight, and also tomorrow). I know that I've mentioned this fact before on my blog, but it makes an even greater difference on Pesach, which is probably the most ritual-laden of the Jewish festivals. This year, for the first time ever, I performed the seder only once. I was invited by Galit (my host-mother from Rosh Hashanah) to celebrate the first night and day of Pesach at her parents', which was very generous of them. The invitation made me feel as if there really are Israelis other than my students who are happy that I am spending the year here, and who enjoy my company.
Alex is traveling in Europe, and Veta is with her family and friends in Chaifa, leaving me alone in the apartment to hunt for Chametz. I'm a very hungry person, and happy to report that I had already eaten virtually all of the chametz. I swept up the rest, and while I did so, thought about past years' searches for chametz, back when I was house manager at the CJL at Cornell. One year, I remember, Peninah and I found a whole loaf of bread in the lounge downstairs.
Galit picked me up from my apartment on Monday afternoon, and I went to the local Sepharadi synagogue with Micha'el, her husband, and Saba Eliezer, her father. We returned to Saba and Savta's house at a little before 8:00 pm, and began the seder. There were about twelve of us seated around the seder table. For the first time, I met Galit's younger brother and sister, the latter of whom got married in August only a little bit after Andrew and Allison. As the only guest present, I received a lot of attention. The others were genuinely interested in learning about where I was from and about what I was doing in Israel. I managed to get by on my Hebrew, which felt fantastic. The Haggadah was, of course, entirely in Hebrew (except for the occasional Aramaic passages), and I could feel my practice paying off, although I did stumble when it was my turn to read. Peninah once told me before that the Jewish regional and family traditions manifest more visibly during the seder than during any other time of year, and I think that she's right. For instance, there seems to be an annual joke in my host family about on whose turn the passage about the Wicked Child falls (Galit's younger sister read it this year), and even though Shiloh, the youngest, recited the Four Questions, the rest of the table sang along with him in order to help him learn the words. Tamir complained to me that he never has never found the afikomen before (he subsequently found it in the laundry basket this year), and Or complained to me that, last year, even though she found the afikomen, she didn't receive any prize (apparently, they don't engage in the fierce bargaining that goes on in my house). Whereas American Jews tend to use horseradish as maror, this year, I consumed -- lettuce. Yes, that's right, lettuce. I do not know who decided that lettuce is a bitter herb. My only guess is that whoever made this decision made it long before the modern, bland strain of lettuce was bred, because, my friends, lettuce does not remind me of the bitterness of slavery. Nothing reminds you of the pains and hardships of forced labor quite like a eye-watering, face-reddening, throat-burning, palate-peeling, mouthful of freshly-ground horseradish, especially if your Mother pounded it out of a root that she pulled out of the garden just a couple of hours ago.
Also, for those of you who remember the slight misunderstanding that occurred back in Rosh Hashannah concerning my, er, dietary choices, I'm past the point of no return, and ate more meat during the festive meal than I have in the last several years combined. Yes, I've been a vegetarian since the end of Middle School, but if I now express this view to my host family, it will become very difficult and embarrassing to explain everything. Again, I'm just trying to prioritize politeness and good behavior, and if that happens to mean that with this one family, on Jewish holidays, that I will be eating meat, so be it. As it is, it turns out that I really, really like the taste of cooked vegetables wrapped in cow intestines.
The last words of the hagadah, recited annually, are "לשנה הבאה בירושלים." This year, those words had special significance to me. I managed to make it all the way here, to Israel, from the United States. I had hoped to be able to spend more time here, continuing to work as a teacher and educator. Unfortunately, I was recently turned down by the program that I had hoped would give me an opportunity to continue my work here. In other words, with no job, I have no future here in Israel, and must return to the United States, where it is equally unlikely that I will manage to find a job for this coming year. When I said "לשנה הבאה בירושלים," it felt more like an exceptional request than like a prediction, or even a reasonable suggestion. Next year, maybe, just maybe, I'll still be in Israel, and, even if so, I probably won't be in Jerusalem (in fact, I'd rather like to be back with Saba and Savta -- I have an open invitation). But if I am in Israel, it's because I'll be making something of myself. I'll be working a real job, speaking Hebrew, and making a real difference with my students. So I repeat, with emphasis, "לשנה הבאה בירושלים."
After the seder's conclusion, Micha'el and Saba Eliezer recited all of Shir Hashirim, making me reminisce, of Shir Hashirim at second seder two years ago, the most memorable recitation of my life (מַה יָּפִית וּמַה נָּעַמְתְּ אַהֲבָה בַּתַּעֲנוּגִים זֹאת קוֹמָתֵךְ דָּמְתָה לְתָמָר). Then, Galit and Micha'el, with Shiloh in tow, brought me nearly all the way back to my apartment on Yoseftal, so that I wouldn't get lost trying to find my way. It was nearly midnight by this time, but there were plenty of people out. On the way, I thought about how comforting it feels to be in a country where most of the people around me are celebrating the same holidays, and that my late-night walks home fall on the same nights as everyone else's.
The next morning, I walked to the synagogue, and arrived at Ashrei. Synagogue had begun "late" at 8:00 am, because of the seder the night before, as opposed to the regular starting time of 6:30 am. By pure coincidence, I ended up sitting next to a seventeen-year-old boy whose family was hosting my fellow volunteer Harry for Pesach! Afterwards, I walked back to Saba Eliezer's apartment, and spent time with the family until lunchtime. Once again, excellent food; once again, lots of meat. At one point, the conversation turned to how much Americans love meat (Israelis perceive Americans as subsisting mostly on hamburgers), and I demurred from commenting. I returned back to my apartment for some reading of the book of moral philosophy that Eli lent to me, which is slow going, but enjoyable. I passed out while reading, but woke up in time for minchah. After arvit and the beginning of the counting of the Omer, I returned to my hosts' house. They had more guests for their (I was very happy to see) dairy dinner. Before we ate, Saba asked me to read the label on a bottle of medicine treating low blood-sugar. I was incredibly happy to be able to put my English-fluency to good use. Even though Galit and Micha'el speak excellent English, this was all medical English, partly in fine-print. I'm amazed that it's even possible to sell medicine with labels in foreign languages here. Using medicine incorrectly because of a language barrier could cause serious harm, even death. I wonder why the pharmaceutical industry works this way? The point is, I read that the medicine did indeed do what Saba had been told that it did, and also told him the dosage size, and the number of doses. Meanwhile, the children were playing video games, all of which were in English. It's now easy to see why some Israeli children are able to pick up English so easily from the media around them. Galit drove me home afterwards, at around 10:00.
It's now Chol Hamo'ed, and I'm enjoying some time to rest. I've made some surprisingly good egg salad, thanks largely to the dill that Alex left in the refrigerator, but I am nevertheless very much looking forward to being able to eat lentils, chickpeas, and rice again. It's hard to be an Ashkenazic vegetarian at this time of year, especially with my income so modest.
And, meanwhile, it seems as if one of my favorite people back in Ithaca was hospitalized over Pesach.
רפואה שלמה לך ולכל החולים בעולם.
~JD
Thursday, April 17, 2014
Monday, April 14, 2014
Sar-El: Maps, Paratroopers, and Chumus (and Superstrings)
I've recently returned from five days' volunteering at Beit Lid army base, located not far from Netanya. During this time, I was part of the Sar-El corps, working for the Logistics division of the Israeli Defense Force (known in Israel by its Hebrew acronym צה"ל), in a base for members of the Paratroopers (צנחנים in Hebrew). We were scheduled to leave from Ramla mid-morning on Sunday, but ended up leaving late-morning, because of a confusion of where we were supposed to meet our guides. "We," by, does not include all of the (already severely-diminished) members Israel Way's ITF and Community Involvement volunteering groups from Ramla, but includes just Ari, Florencia, Julia, Juliana, Shira, Melisa, Noah, and me. We picked up Veta on our hour-long trip to the base (I cheered as she got on the minibus), bringing us to a total of nine volunteers: seven women and two men.
On our first day at the base, we were introduced to the soldiers with whom we were assigned to work, fed, given our bunks and uniforms, and told the basics of our task. We also began our work, which I'll presently describe. It felt unusual for me to be putting on a uniform. Although my paternal grandfather was a mapmaker in World War II, and one of my maternal ancestors had the unpleasant job of collecting Confederate corpses from the battlefields of the American Civil War, I don't come from a military family, by any stretch of the imagination. True, I wasn't a soldier, I was just wearing the uniform, and, even more true, not everyone who wears the IDF uniform is involved some way in combat, let alone a combat solider, but the uniform still didn't feel right on me.
As I mentioned before, we worked for the Logistics division while on base. Inglorious work, but important for military preparedness, etc. The task that the base had ready for us was -- folding maps. That's right; we had literally several thousand maps, printed on poster-size laminated paper, that needed to be neatly folded, stacked, bagged, tagged, and transported to their holding space. There were far too many rolls of maps for the nine of us, plus the group of soldiers who intermittently worked alongside us, to have any hope of finishing by Thursday morning, the set time of our departure. The way we would agonizingly turn a pile of tightly-rolled sheets of a paper into orderly stacks, only to have another pile of rolls dropped off in its place at times made the entire task feel Sisyphean. We tended to work in teams of two or three, in which the first person made the initial fold or folds, and the second and third completed the work. Creasing the folds became quite difficult by the end, and I saw several people around me using their cellphones to press down the maps' edges, in order to keep them flat. I had some very good conversations with the other volunteers, particularly Florencia, as well as with the soldiers, during this mind-numbing task. At one point, one of the group-members got a call from a friend in the army, who said that what we were doing was pointless, and that nobody cared about our work. This really made me doubt the value of my work. The work, I know, would have been done anyway, but my members of the Reserve forces rather than unpaid volunteers. In my mind, that at least means that I saved the IDF a few shekels in Reserve pay, and some miluimnikim the bother of hauling themselves out to base in order to perform an insipid task.
Some of the soldiers with whom we were working, such as Nir and Noam, spoke English quite well. Other soldiers, as well as most of the soldiers with whom we spoke around base, did not. I spoke in whatever language made the Israelis most comfortable. I got in quite a few funny conversations in Hebrew. I hope that my conversational Hebrew is improving; sometimes I'm not so certain that I have enough Hebrew-language interactions outside of school. Most of these conversations took place in the mess hall, which was also in the process of purging itself of all chametz in time for Pesach. I ate better at the mess hall than I had in weeks (months?). It's really hard for me to complain about all-you-can-eat chumus and Israeli salad.
Sar-El evening activities were interesting, and I wish that I had had the opportunity to be around for more of them. On Monday night, Suzi, our madrichah, put us through a couple of hours of imitation tiranut (basic training), which was not nearly as physically demanding as the real thing. Sure, the very first thing, Noah and I needed to do push-ups for looking in the wrong direction, and there was some running around involved, but nothing too severe. On Tuesday night, after Suzi helped us sort out our different divisions of the IDF (the organization is rather different than the tri-fold Army-Navy-Airforce division of the U.S. armed forces'), the paratroopers with whom we had been working performed some combat drills for us, showing us how they take cover, move tactically, shoot in different body positions, etc.
Throughout my time at Sar-El, Noah coached me through better forms of upper-body exercises. He's quite knowledgeable about such things, and I think that I'm going to be able to get at least slightly stronger. Pretty much, I've been doing what I always do, and have been working harder without working smarter. No, I'm not going to be as muscular as Noah anytime soon (or ever), but I'll have a little bit more upper-body strength, with patience. As an example of the intensity of these workouts, my the soreness in my legs resulting from from Wednesday's squat sets did not subside until Monday morning. I guess I need to spend more time strengthening those muscle groups.
On Thursday morning, after breakfast, Roi, the officer of our group (who spoke with flawless English, by the way), kindly drove us off base, where we caught first a bus, and then a train, to arrive back at Ramla. Veta and a few of the other volunteers headed off in other directions. I'm now sitting in my apartment, alone, preparing for Pesach. Veta is in Chaifa, and Alex is in Europe, as are many other members of our group. I'm looking forward to Seder tonight, which will be my first in Israel. Galit and Micha'el (Tamir's parents) have invited me to come with them to Galit's parents' seder. This should be fun (note: this is the same family who welcomed Rose, Ben, and me to their house on Rosh Hashannah and on Yom Kippur break-fast).
By the way, the entire time at the base, I was burrowing my way through Brian Greene's The Elegant Universe, which Eli had lent to me two weeks ago. It's very hard to put down, and I very frequently found myself thinking about general relativity, quantum mechanics, and vibrating strings while I was busy folding maps. Eli asked me for a review of the book, and I thought that as long as I was writing it, I might as well share it with the rest of you on JDWrit. The book argues for the acceptance of Superstring Theory, especially as modified by M-Theory in 1995, as the most likely theory explaining the working structure of the universe. The way we are used to being taught is based upon the Standard Model, and the main difference between superstring theory and the Standard Model is that the superstring theory replaces the Standard Model's point particles with tiny, vibrating strings. This causes some key differences, such as the fact that this model offers a "bouncing" theory of the Big Bang because it prevents the universe from shrinking below Planck Length, that it unifies quantum mechanics and general relativity, that it "postdicts" gravity, that it can allow for superstrings to get "wrapped" around spacial dimensions at key points in the evolution of the universe, etc. Unfortunately, the book was first published back in 1999, and a lot has happened in the past 15 years of physics! Even someone outside of the world of physics such as myself heard about the discovery of the Higgs Boson a couple of years ago, for instance. According to the Preface to the 2nd edition (written in 2003), some of the less extended spatial dimensions described in the book (M-Theory explains the universe as having 10 spatial and 1 time dimension) are not as "small" as believed when the the book was written. Also, it helped me sort out some of my more basic physics, such as special and general relativity, and quantum mechanics. The last book that I read about q.m. was very poorly written, and I walked away with very little information. There's a lot of good stuff, well worth the ride, although, I admit, I still don't fully understand things like the space-tearing coniform flop-transitions of Calabi-Yau spaces. Highly recommended for style and content, although the content might by now be slightly dated.
Chag Sameach and love from Israel to you all!
~JD
On our first day at the base, we were introduced to the soldiers with whom we were assigned to work, fed, given our bunks and uniforms, and told the basics of our task. We also began our work, which I'll presently describe. It felt unusual for me to be putting on a uniform. Although my paternal grandfather was a mapmaker in World War II, and one of my maternal ancestors had the unpleasant job of collecting Confederate corpses from the battlefields of the American Civil War, I don't come from a military family, by any stretch of the imagination. True, I wasn't a soldier, I was just wearing the uniform, and, even more true, not everyone who wears the IDF uniform is involved some way in combat, let alone a combat solider, but the uniform still didn't feel right on me.
As I mentioned before, we worked for the Logistics division while on base. Inglorious work, but important for military preparedness, etc. The task that the base had ready for us was -- folding maps. That's right; we had literally several thousand maps, printed on poster-size laminated paper, that needed to be neatly folded, stacked, bagged, tagged, and transported to their holding space. There were far too many rolls of maps for the nine of us, plus the group of soldiers who intermittently worked alongside us, to have any hope of finishing by Thursday morning, the set time of our departure. The way we would agonizingly turn a pile of tightly-rolled sheets of a paper into orderly stacks, only to have another pile of rolls dropped off in its place at times made the entire task feel Sisyphean. We tended to work in teams of two or three, in which the first person made the initial fold or folds, and the second and third completed the work. Creasing the folds became quite difficult by the end, and I saw several people around me using their cellphones to press down the maps' edges, in order to keep them flat. I had some very good conversations with the other volunteers, particularly Florencia, as well as with the soldiers, during this mind-numbing task. At one point, one of the group-members got a call from a friend in the army, who said that what we were doing was pointless, and that nobody cared about our work. This really made me doubt the value of my work. The work, I know, would have been done anyway, but my members of the Reserve forces rather than unpaid volunteers. In my mind, that at least means that I saved the IDF a few shekels in Reserve pay, and some miluimnikim the bother of hauling themselves out to base in order to perform an insipid task.
Some of the soldiers with whom we were working, such as Nir and Noam, spoke English quite well. Other soldiers, as well as most of the soldiers with whom we spoke around base, did not. I spoke in whatever language made the Israelis most comfortable. I got in quite a few funny conversations in Hebrew. I hope that my conversational Hebrew is improving; sometimes I'm not so certain that I have enough Hebrew-language interactions outside of school. Most of these conversations took place in the mess hall, which was also in the process of purging itself of all chametz in time for Pesach. I ate better at the mess hall than I had in weeks (months?). It's really hard for me to complain about all-you-can-eat chumus and Israeli salad.
Sar-El evening activities were interesting, and I wish that I had had the opportunity to be around for more of them. On Monday night, Suzi, our madrichah, put us through a couple of hours of imitation tiranut (basic training), which was not nearly as physically demanding as the real thing. Sure, the very first thing, Noah and I needed to do push-ups for looking in the wrong direction, and there was some running around involved, but nothing too severe. On Tuesday night, after Suzi helped us sort out our different divisions of the IDF (the organization is rather different than the tri-fold Army-Navy-Airforce division of the U.S. armed forces'), the paratroopers with whom we had been working performed some combat drills for us, showing us how they take cover, move tactically, shoot in different body positions, etc.
Throughout my time at Sar-El, Noah coached me through better forms of upper-body exercises. He's quite knowledgeable about such things, and I think that I'm going to be able to get at least slightly stronger. Pretty much, I've been doing what I always do, and have been working harder without working smarter. No, I'm not going to be as muscular as Noah anytime soon (or ever), but I'll have a little bit more upper-body strength, with patience. As an example of the intensity of these workouts, my the soreness in my legs resulting from from Wednesday's squat sets did not subside until Monday morning. I guess I need to spend more time strengthening those muscle groups.
On Thursday morning, after breakfast, Roi, the officer of our group (who spoke with flawless English, by the way), kindly drove us off base, where we caught first a bus, and then a train, to arrive back at Ramla. Veta and a few of the other volunteers headed off in other directions. I'm now sitting in my apartment, alone, preparing for Pesach. Veta is in Chaifa, and Alex is in Europe, as are many other members of our group. I'm looking forward to Seder tonight, which will be my first in Israel. Galit and Micha'el (Tamir's parents) have invited me to come with them to Galit's parents' seder. This should be fun (note: this is the same family who welcomed Rose, Ben, and me to their house on Rosh Hashannah and on Yom Kippur break-fast).
By the way, the entire time at the base, I was burrowing my way through Brian Greene's The Elegant Universe, which Eli had lent to me two weeks ago. It's very hard to put down, and I very frequently found myself thinking about general relativity, quantum mechanics, and vibrating strings while I was busy folding maps. Eli asked me for a review of the book, and I thought that as long as I was writing it, I might as well share it with the rest of you on JDWrit. The book argues for the acceptance of Superstring Theory, especially as modified by M-Theory in 1995, as the most likely theory explaining the working structure of the universe. The way we are used to being taught is based upon the Standard Model, and the main difference between superstring theory and the Standard Model is that the superstring theory replaces the Standard Model's point particles with tiny, vibrating strings. This causes some key differences, such as the fact that this model offers a "bouncing" theory of the Big Bang because it prevents the universe from shrinking below Planck Length, that it unifies quantum mechanics and general relativity, that it "postdicts" gravity, that it can allow for superstrings to get "wrapped" around spacial dimensions at key points in the evolution of the universe, etc. Unfortunately, the book was first published back in 1999, and a lot has happened in the past 15 years of physics! Even someone outside of the world of physics such as myself heard about the discovery of the Higgs Boson a couple of years ago, for instance. According to the Preface to the 2nd edition (written in 2003), some of the less extended spatial dimensions described in the book (M-Theory explains the universe as having 10 spatial and 1 time dimension) are not as "small" as believed when the the book was written. Also, it helped me sort out some of my more basic physics, such as special and general relativity, and quantum mechanics. The last book that I read about q.m. was very poorly written, and I walked away with very little information. There's a lot of good stuff, well worth the ride, although, I admit, I still don't fully understand things like the space-tearing coniform flop-transitions of Calabi-Yau spaces. Highly recommended for style and content, although the content might by now be slightly dated.
Chag Sameach and love from Israel to you all!
~JD
Saturday, April 5, 2014
Unexpected Surprises in Israel
"וְסַבּוֹתִי אֲנִי לְיַאֵשׁ אֶת לִבִּי עַל כָּל הֶעָמָל שֶׁעָמַלְתִּי תַּחַת הַשָּׁמֶשׁ"
There's a large laminated map of the world in my English room, attached to the wall with Velcro, which I frequently detach, place on the table in front of my students, and use in order to show them world geography. My first question is always "איפה ישראל, where's Israel?" I have received a large variety of responses, but the most common one is one of ignorance. Some of them not only don't know on which continent Israel is located, but don't even know to which continent they are pointing on the map. A few of them can find Israel after a minute or so, but I don't think that a single one knows where it is located ahead of time. Once I do eventually point it out to the students, about three-fourths of the time, the response is the same: "איזה קטן, how small!" The students at my school do not realize just how tiny a country Israel is, in the wide, wide world.
According to 2012 statistics, Israel accounts for only around 0.1% of the world population; comparatively, China accounts for 19.2%, India for 17.6%, the United States for 4.5%, Russia for 2%, and Argentina for .58% Another statistic might help: when Ovadiah Yosef was laid to rest back in October, the crowds at his funeral might have made up as much as 10% of Israel's population (20-25% of which is non-Jewish). Related to this ignorance of Israel's size is the fact that many of my students do not realize how few people in the world speak Hebrew, and, therefore and how little the language is worth when traveling internationally and when interacting with non-Israelis. (Note: to be fair, American college students don't know too much about Israel, either, but to be fair, it was quite complicated when I left for Israel in the summer of 2013, and I don't expect anything to become any simpler anytime soon).
The story of the map is just an anecdote, and it would help to put things in perspective. My students are 3rd-8th grade students in a National Religious school located in a small, backwards town in Israel's Mercaz (מֶרְכָּז), or Center. The Mercaz is a very politically conservative region; most of the political posters that I saw were for the Likud party or the Shas party (it's an interesting feeling to be confronted with the late R. Ovadiah Yosef's intense gaze, magnified several times over in size, every time you exit your apartment building). Around 50-60% of the students, who are without exception Jewish, are of Ethiopian heritage, although most of them do not speak Amharic. Although all of the students at the school are expected to adhere by certain modes of dress (as I mentioned in my last blog post), do not imagine in your minds the black hats, coats, and skirts of Me'ah Sha'arim. Although many of my students are at some level observant (their schoolday does begin with communal prayer, for instance), I know for certain that a few of them are not from Shomer-Shabbat households. Non-observant parents' reasons for choosing to send their children to a religious school that is one of the lowest-performing in the country is a point which I will address later. Many of my students have very traditional Biblical Jewish names: I lot of my male students have names such as Yitzchak, Ya'akov, Avi, Yosef, Natanel, Yonatan, etc. When I fist told Eli about this, he was amazed, until he remembered that most of my students are Ethiopian Jews, who are apparently the only group of Jews among whom such names are still common. This fact is very much in accord with a joke told to my group of volunteers by R. Sharon Shalom (see two posts ago), that when Ethiopian Jews made Aliyah, immigration officials counted them off in groups of three, naming them "Avraham, Yitzchak, Ya'akov; Avraham, Yitzchak, Ya'akov; etc." Still, many students have names that are slightly more "Israeli," such as Orel, Aviel, Maor, Nitai, etc. Still, I see "-el" appearing in names much more frequently than I see, say, "-tal," probably because this is a religious school. Among the staff, the most common name is probably Tzipi, short for Tzipora (two teachers plus the principal all go by Tzipi).
Among most of my school students, I notice a real lack of ambition, and I am not the only one. One of my former housemates, Tznoach, had the same feeling at his school. This is not universal; one of my favorite students, a seventh grader of an Ethiopian family, has told me that he wants to be the best soccer player (he didn't specify whether he meant the best in Israel, the best in the whole world, or the best ever, and I don't care); I think that that is a wonderful dream, coming from a 12-year-old. However, most don't feel the same way. Tznoach always told me that most of his students are happy to work at a falafel stand in Ramla. I do not want to criticize this job; there's nothing wrong with working retail, or working at or managing a restaurant, but it's surprising to hear such unambitious self-expectations from kids; Israel has produced some amazing minds over the last few decades (if you have a smartphone, try counting how many of your useful apps were developed by Israelis; you might be surprised), and these students have the potential to become the next generation of engineers, doctors, scientists, educators, and writers. I want them to have that opportunity (that's why I'm volunteering in a school), but they need to want it, too. At one point, a student complained about studying with me to his family members, and, when one of them encouraged him to try to listen so that he can learn English, and one day travel the world, he responded that he never intends to leave his country. Passing over the myopia and provincialism of this comment, I'd like to state that knowledge of English can be an invaluable skill, even if one never leaves Israel. For instance, most educated adult Israelis can speak English quite well, and many of them need it for their jobs, even if their jobs never involves them leaving Israel. Carmel (האהוב), for instance, has never visited the United States, but because his job involves shepherding around a bunch of clueless Americans (such as myself), needs to (and does) speak fluent English for his job. Carmel's job is exceptional, though (so is Carmel, by the way <3); most Israelis don't need to work with silly anglophones every day, but their jobs still require them to have such a skill. Galit, for instance, the mother of my host family, works in the police department here in Ramla, and needs to be able to speak in English frequently enough that its a job requirement for her. Israelis living in such cities in Tel Aviv and Jerusalem, especially if they work in places frequented by foreigners (such as bars and restaurants), need to be able to speak at least passable English, and many Israelis find it personally beneficial to be able to speak English, whether it be to acquire significant others from America, or to enjoy English-language movies, television, and news. The point is, my student's comment that he is never intending to leave Israel, from my point of view, is illogical and meaningless; English can be valuable to him, even if he never leaves his hometown, let alone Israel. Knowledge of English can empower; this is the reason that I came halfway around the world in order to volunteer to teach it. I'm also, here, however, to inspire and to encourage. At my job interview in Chaifa on Wednesday, the presenter, Yoni (a woman's name, coincidentally the same as what my students call me) expressed this common phenomenon among Israeli students: when asked by a teacher to name their dreams and ambitions, most of them can't come up with anything. Everyone applying to that job, myself included, was there to change that; we all want to our students to ask instead, if they can write down two or three dreams, instead of just one. Maybe, I'll be lucky enough to do just that next year.
כִּי מֶה הֹוֶה לָאָדָם בְּכָל עֲמָלוֹ וּבְרַעְיוֹן לִבּוֹ שְׁהוּא עָמֵל תַּחַת הַשָּׁמֶשׁ
One of the most prevalent problems I've seen, and students' principal blocks in their learning, is a certain mentality that they have, an unwillingness to admit that they don't know something. If I ask a typical student "do you understand," I will always receive the answer "yes," even if the answer is really "no." This makes it impossible for them to study, because they claim (and, I think, truly believe) that they are already fully fluent in English, even if they cannot even spell their own names in English, let alone understand anything that I say to them. This unwillingness sometimes achieves ridiculous proportions; I once sent a student back to class because he was acting up, but he reported to the teacher (and, I think, believed) that the reason that I had sent him back was because he already knew everything. In another case, a student refused to read a book that I gave to him, because he told me that he had already read it. Upon further investigation, he proved unable to either sound out a single one of the words written on the pages, or tell me what any of them meant (including such words as "the," "a," and "in") when I read them aloud to him. Again, I think that if he had been hooked up to a lie detector machine, he would not have tested positive when he told me that he had read and understood the entire book (which is indeed what he told me, in Hebrew). As terrible as it sounds, and in seeming opposition to my goal of improving students' confidence, feelings of self-worth, and independence, I first need to convince students that they have much to learn, so that they will be willing to work with me. I am thinking about asking the school Rabbi (with whom I am on good terms) to teach his students about Hillel's teaching from Pirkei Avot 2:5 -- "לא הבישן למד," "a person who is easily embarrassed cannot learn."
Another unexpected surprise in Israeli schools is the attitude towards cheating. Every school in which I have studied has anathematized cheating and plagiarism to the highest degree. Being caught cheating on a test would result in a score of zero on that test, plus a call home and possible suspension from school, in the case of grade school and high school; at the college level, plagiarism could result in expulsion from the university. Back at IHS, someone I knew was caught texting in the middle of an important standardized test, and received a zero. My advisor in college, the estimable Prof. Hull, once told me about a tribunal she had sat on for student who had cited a source accurately, but (quite unintentionally) had placed quotation marks too early in her own text, thus implying that some of the source's words were really her own. In contrast to this rigid nonacceptance of cheating in American education, Israeli students cheat quite frequently. They do this mostly by (quite unabashedly) solutions while in the middle of taking a test. There is even a feeling of obligation among stronger students to "help" other students in this way; one of my strongest students once complained to me about how busy he was "helping" other students after he had finished his own test; another time, a student yelled at me for trying to take his test away. He had been feeding answers to his classmate, and, when I told him that that was unacceptable, he replied to me that the other student had asked (as if he were therefore obligated to give his classmate the answers). I have had students not just become angry and upset with me, but genuinely yell at me, when I don't give them test solutions. I have seen students rag on teachers for solutions or hints, because they know that, sometimes, teachers simply cave in (and, really, what teacher wants his or her students to fail? You need an iron will to teach). My roommates do not encounter this level of absurdity at their school, I know, perhaps because their school is at a somewhat higher academic level than mine (theirs is not a religious school). For me, days on which tests are given are the worst, because I am in constant antagonism to the widespread cheating that goes on throughout the testing period. Test days bring out the worst in my students, which is painful for student and teacher alike. By contrast, Veta has told me that the days on which she gives tests to students are the easiest, because even students who normally behave poorly act docilely.
וְשָׂנֵאתִי אֶת הַחַיִּים כִּי רַע עָלַי הַמַּעֲשֶׂה שֶׁנַּעֲשָׂה תַּחַת הַשָּׁמֶשׁ כִּי הַכֹּל הֶבֶל וּרְעוּת רוּחַ
Of everything I see at my school, though, nothing is as painful to me as the self-loathing in which some of my students engage. I see it only among the eighth-grade males, and it probably has something to do with going through puberty. One student, for instance, upon my suggestion that he could do well on the next test, if he studied, insisted that he never does well, because he is stupid (in response, I had him write "I am smart" for himself on the first and last pages of his notebook). I have seen other students act rather cruelly to this student in particular, making fun of the fact that he is fat (which led me, at first to very strongly identify with him and his problem -- I was also fat when I was in middle school). Still this is individual self-hatred, and it is an entirely different scale than the self-hatred that I see among this student's Ethiopian Jewish classmates. Before I go any further, I need to clarify something: in my experience, my Ethiopian Jewish students are just as likely to be strong or weak as the others. I really can't notice any social or academic difference between students of different regional descent in any of my grades. Sometimes the Ethiopians are closest to other Ethiopians; at other times, they are closer to non-Ethiopians. Bear in mind that even though they have different skin tones all of the students in Rambam are Jewish, and all of them are at least partially conscious of their shared Jewishness. The eighth grade male Ethiopians, however, have formed an almost gang-like consciousness; part of this consciousness is that they treat themselves as if they are animals. Quite recently, I had one of my eighth-grade student stare me down, snarl at me, and try to intimidate me, and I was quite worried that he was going to try to bite me. He did not, but he, as well as his classmates, are frequently found wandering around the halls of the school picking fights, frequently with students younger and smaller than themselves. They see themselves as sub-human because of their skin, and refer to each other by the Hebrew slur Ethiopian, sometimes also using the American slur, too, the only English that some of them seem to have absorbed. I worry constantly about what is going to happen to these students when they get older, when they join the army, and when each one of them finds himself with an M-16 slung over his shoulder. Will they do the right thing with that power? Will they even have a concept of "the right thing" left in them four years down the road? I have tried sometimes to spend time with them, to make them feel less miserable in school, and have usually had my offers thrown back in my face. At this point, they don't want to have anything to do with me, and I can't force them to do so. Meanwhile, I look at my seventh-graders, and hope desperately, that they will not adopt the same attitude. I'm not just hoping, though; I'm also teaching them English.
"אֱלֹהִיםשׁוֹפֵט צַדִּיק וְאֵל זֹעֵם בְּכָל יוֹם"
If many of the students in this particular cross-section see themselves as "animals," then many of the other Jews with whom I meet in Israeli society view Arabs as "animals." I am not using this term idly; I have heard an adult man (for whom I have respect) exclaim that the Arabs are animals. The younger generation has picked up on this sentiment from their elders; on my first day at school, while we were waiting at the bus stop for TZ to arrive, a student told me that the Arabs are the cause of the problems in Lod. I know that at least a couple of my students attend Rambam because their parents do not want them to come in contact with Arab children. I cannot fully express how upsetting this is. Because I work at an all-Jewish school (for the record, not by choice, but because it was decided by my program that TZ and I were the best Fellows to teach at Rambam), my main interaction with Arabs here is at the Underground club on Monday evenings. About half of my regular students are Arabs, and my interaction with them differs in no way from my interaction with my non-Arab students. As I mentioned in the last post, I even had a moment of "revenge against the system" when I insisted on holding classes for my Arab students, even though it was technically a Jewish holiday (Shushan Purim), because I'm so sick of not having my own holidays recognized back in the U.S. Perhaps it's because I'm not Israeli, and not as emotionally invested in the country that I can afford to feel this way; I have no grudge against Arabs or against Muslims (most of my Muslim friends from High School and Cornell are non-Arab), yet I am surrounded by a society that does. I have never served in the IDF; nobody in my family has ever been murdered by terrorists, or fallen in one of Israel's historic wars with its Arab neighbors. I'm proud to be a strong Zionist, but this nauseating anger isn't Zionism; it's just hatred.
וַיַּעֲבֹר יְהֹוָה | עַל פָּנָיו וַיִּקְרָא יְהֹוָה | יְהֹוָה אֵל רַחוּם וְחַנּוּן אֶרֶךְ אַפַּיִם וְרַב חֶסֶד וֶאֱמֶת
I don't know how to solve this or any of the other problems I am confronted with daily. Right now, I'm continuing to teach, and hoping to open students' minds, just a little bit. It took students long enough to even accept me as Jewish. They had never met (or, I suppose, conceived of) Jews who hadn't already made aliyah to Israel, and, for my first months here, my Judaism was suspect among the students (for instance, they didn't know whether to count me for a minyan, and asked me questions such as "אתה גוי?," and not in the friendliest manner, either). It's not a lot of progress, but it's something. If I am lucky enough to be accepted to the job to which I applied this past week, I will have two to three more years left to make a difference. But I will need to use it well.
חג שמח!
~JD
There's a large laminated map of the world in my English room, attached to the wall with Velcro, which I frequently detach, place on the table in front of my students, and use in order to show them world geography. My first question is always "איפה ישראל, where's Israel?" I have received a large variety of responses, but the most common one is one of ignorance. Some of them not only don't know on which continent Israel is located, but don't even know to which continent they are pointing on the map. A few of them can find Israel after a minute or so, but I don't think that a single one knows where it is located ahead of time. Once I do eventually point it out to the students, about three-fourths of the time, the response is the same: "איזה קטן, how small!" The students at my school do not realize just how tiny a country Israel is, in the wide, wide world.
According to 2012 statistics, Israel accounts for only around 0.1% of the world population; comparatively, China accounts for 19.2%, India for 17.6%, the United States for 4.5%, Russia for 2%, and Argentina for .58% Another statistic might help: when Ovadiah Yosef was laid to rest back in October, the crowds at his funeral might have made up as much as 10% of Israel's population (20-25% of which is non-Jewish). Related to this ignorance of Israel's size is the fact that many of my students do not realize how few people in the world speak Hebrew, and, therefore and how little the language is worth when traveling internationally and when interacting with non-Israelis. (Note: to be fair, American college students don't know too much about Israel, either, but to be fair, it was quite complicated when I left for Israel in the summer of 2013, and I don't expect anything to become any simpler anytime soon).
The story of the map is just an anecdote, and it would help to put things in perspective. My students are 3rd-8th grade students in a National Religious school located in a small, backwards town in Israel's Mercaz (מֶרְכָּז), or Center. The Mercaz is a very politically conservative region; most of the political posters that I saw were for the Likud party or the Shas party (it's an interesting feeling to be confronted with the late R. Ovadiah Yosef's intense gaze, magnified several times over in size, every time you exit your apartment building). Around 50-60% of the students, who are without exception Jewish, are of Ethiopian heritage, although most of them do not speak Amharic. Although all of the students at the school are expected to adhere by certain modes of dress (as I mentioned in my last blog post), do not imagine in your minds the black hats, coats, and skirts of Me'ah Sha'arim. Although many of my students are at some level observant (their schoolday does begin with communal prayer, for instance), I know for certain that a few of them are not from Shomer-Shabbat households. Non-observant parents' reasons for choosing to send their children to a religious school that is one of the lowest-performing in the country is a point which I will address later. Many of my students have very traditional Biblical Jewish names: I lot of my male students have names such as Yitzchak, Ya'akov, Avi, Yosef, Natanel, Yonatan, etc. When I fist told Eli about this, he was amazed, until he remembered that most of my students are Ethiopian Jews, who are apparently the only group of Jews among whom such names are still common. This fact is very much in accord with a joke told to my group of volunteers by R. Sharon Shalom (see two posts ago), that when Ethiopian Jews made Aliyah, immigration officials counted them off in groups of three, naming them "Avraham, Yitzchak, Ya'akov; Avraham, Yitzchak, Ya'akov; etc." Still, many students have names that are slightly more "Israeli," such as Orel, Aviel, Maor, Nitai, etc. Still, I see "-el" appearing in names much more frequently than I see, say, "-tal," probably because this is a religious school. Among the staff, the most common name is probably Tzipi, short for Tzipora (two teachers plus the principal all go by Tzipi).
Among most of my school students, I notice a real lack of ambition, and I am not the only one. One of my former housemates, Tznoach, had the same feeling at his school. This is not universal; one of my favorite students, a seventh grader of an Ethiopian family, has told me that he wants to be the best soccer player (he didn't specify whether he meant the best in Israel, the best in the whole world, or the best ever, and I don't care); I think that that is a wonderful dream, coming from a 12-year-old. However, most don't feel the same way. Tznoach always told me that most of his students are happy to work at a falafel stand in Ramla. I do not want to criticize this job; there's nothing wrong with working retail, or working at or managing a restaurant, but it's surprising to hear such unambitious self-expectations from kids; Israel has produced some amazing minds over the last few decades (if you have a smartphone, try counting how many of your useful apps were developed by Israelis; you might be surprised), and these students have the potential to become the next generation of engineers, doctors, scientists, educators, and writers. I want them to have that opportunity (that's why I'm volunteering in a school), but they need to want it, too. At one point, a student complained about studying with me to his family members, and, when one of them encouraged him to try to listen so that he can learn English, and one day travel the world, he responded that he never intends to leave his country. Passing over the myopia and provincialism of this comment, I'd like to state that knowledge of English can be an invaluable skill, even if one never leaves Israel. For instance, most educated adult Israelis can speak English quite well, and many of them need it for their jobs, even if their jobs never involves them leaving Israel. Carmel (האהוב), for instance, has never visited the United States, but because his job involves shepherding around a bunch of clueless Americans (such as myself), needs to (and does) speak fluent English for his job. Carmel's job is exceptional, though (so is Carmel, by the way <3); most Israelis don't need to work with silly anglophones every day, but their jobs still require them to have such a skill. Galit, for instance, the mother of my host family, works in the police department here in Ramla, and needs to be able to speak in English frequently enough that its a job requirement for her. Israelis living in such cities in Tel Aviv and Jerusalem, especially if they work in places frequented by foreigners (such as bars and restaurants), need to be able to speak at least passable English, and many Israelis find it personally beneficial to be able to speak English, whether it be to acquire significant others from America, or to enjoy English-language movies, television, and news. The point is, my student's comment that he is never intending to leave Israel, from my point of view, is illogical and meaningless; English can be valuable to him, even if he never leaves his hometown, let alone Israel. Knowledge of English can empower; this is the reason that I came halfway around the world in order to volunteer to teach it. I'm also, here, however, to inspire and to encourage. At my job interview in Chaifa on Wednesday, the presenter, Yoni (a woman's name, coincidentally the same as what my students call me) expressed this common phenomenon among Israeli students: when asked by a teacher to name their dreams and ambitions, most of them can't come up with anything. Everyone applying to that job, myself included, was there to change that; we all want to our students to ask instead, if they can write down two or three dreams, instead of just one. Maybe, I'll be lucky enough to do just that next year.
כִּי מֶה הֹוֶה לָאָדָם בְּכָל עֲמָלוֹ וּבְרַעְיוֹן לִבּוֹ שְׁהוּא עָמֵל תַּחַת הַשָּׁמֶשׁ
One of the most prevalent problems I've seen, and students' principal blocks in their learning, is a certain mentality that they have, an unwillingness to admit that they don't know something. If I ask a typical student "do you understand," I will always receive the answer "yes," even if the answer is really "no." This makes it impossible for them to study, because they claim (and, I think, truly believe) that they are already fully fluent in English, even if they cannot even spell their own names in English, let alone understand anything that I say to them. This unwillingness sometimes achieves ridiculous proportions; I once sent a student back to class because he was acting up, but he reported to the teacher (and, I think, believed) that the reason that I had sent him back was because he already knew everything. In another case, a student refused to read a book that I gave to him, because he told me that he had already read it. Upon further investigation, he proved unable to either sound out a single one of the words written on the pages, or tell me what any of them meant (including such words as "the," "a," and "in") when I read them aloud to him. Again, I think that if he had been hooked up to a lie detector machine, he would not have tested positive when he told me that he had read and understood the entire book (which is indeed what he told me, in Hebrew). As terrible as it sounds, and in seeming opposition to my goal of improving students' confidence, feelings of self-worth, and independence, I first need to convince students that they have much to learn, so that they will be willing to work with me. I am thinking about asking the school Rabbi (with whom I am on good terms) to teach his students about Hillel's teaching from Pirkei Avot 2:5 -- "לא הבישן למד," "a person who is easily embarrassed cannot learn."
Another unexpected surprise in Israeli schools is the attitude towards cheating. Every school in which I have studied has anathematized cheating and plagiarism to the highest degree. Being caught cheating on a test would result in a score of zero on that test, plus a call home and possible suspension from school, in the case of grade school and high school; at the college level, plagiarism could result in expulsion from the university. Back at IHS, someone I knew was caught texting in the middle of an important standardized test, and received a zero. My advisor in college, the estimable Prof. Hull, once told me about a tribunal she had sat on for student who had cited a source accurately, but (quite unintentionally) had placed quotation marks too early in her own text, thus implying that some of the source's words were really her own. In contrast to this rigid nonacceptance of cheating in American education, Israeli students cheat quite frequently. They do this mostly by (quite unabashedly) solutions while in the middle of taking a test. There is even a feeling of obligation among stronger students to "help" other students in this way; one of my strongest students once complained to me about how busy he was "helping" other students after he had finished his own test; another time, a student yelled at me for trying to take his test away. He had been feeding answers to his classmate, and, when I told him that that was unacceptable, he replied to me that the other student had asked (as if he were therefore obligated to give his classmate the answers). I have had students not just become angry and upset with me, but genuinely yell at me, when I don't give them test solutions. I have seen students rag on teachers for solutions or hints, because they know that, sometimes, teachers simply cave in (and, really, what teacher wants his or her students to fail? You need an iron will to teach). My roommates do not encounter this level of absurdity at their school, I know, perhaps because their school is at a somewhat higher academic level than mine (theirs is not a religious school). For me, days on which tests are given are the worst, because I am in constant antagonism to the widespread cheating that goes on throughout the testing period. Test days bring out the worst in my students, which is painful for student and teacher alike. By contrast, Veta has told me that the days on which she gives tests to students are the easiest, because even students who normally behave poorly act docilely.
וְשָׂנֵאתִי אֶת הַחַיִּים כִּי רַע עָלַי הַמַּעֲשֶׂה שֶׁנַּעֲשָׂה תַּחַת הַשָּׁמֶשׁ כִּי הַכֹּל הֶבֶל וּרְעוּת רוּחַ
Of everything I see at my school, though, nothing is as painful to me as the self-loathing in which some of my students engage. I see it only among the eighth-grade males, and it probably has something to do with going through puberty. One student, for instance, upon my suggestion that he could do well on the next test, if he studied, insisted that he never does well, because he is stupid (in response, I had him write "I am smart" for himself on the first and last pages of his notebook). I have seen other students act rather cruelly to this student in particular, making fun of the fact that he is fat (which led me, at first to very strongly identify with him and his problem -- I was also fat when I was in middle school). Still this is individual self-hatred, and it is an entirely different scale than the self-hatred that I see among this student's Ethiopian Jewish classmates. Before I go any further, I need to clarify something: in my experience, my Ethiopian Jewish students are just as likely to be strong or weak as the others. I really can't notice any social or academic difference between students of different regional descent in any of my grades. Sometimes the Ethiopians are closest to other Ethiopians; at other times, they are closer to non-Ethiopians. Bear in mind that even though they have different skin tones all of the students in Rambam are Jewish, and all of them are at least partially conscious of their shared Jewishness. The eighth grade male Ethiopians, however, have formed an almost gang-like consciousness; part of this consciousness is that they treat themselves as if they are animals. Quite recently, I had one of my eighth-grade student stare me down, snarl at me, and try to intimidate me, and I was quite worried that he was going to try to bite me. He did not, but he, as well as his classmates, are frequently found wandering around the halls of the school picking fights, frequently with students younger and smaller than themselves. They see themselves as sub-human because of their skin, and refer to each other by the Hebrew slur Ethiopian, sometimes also using the American slur, too, the only English that some of them seem to have absorbed. I worry constantly about what is going to happen to these students when they get older, when they join the army, and when each one of them finds himself with an M-16 slung over his shoulder. Will they do the right thing with that power? Will they even have a concept of "the right thing" left in them four years down the road? I have tried sometimes to spend time with them, to make them feel less miserable in school, and have usually had my offers thrown back in my face. At this point, they don't want to have anything to do with me, and I can't force them to do so. Meanwhile, I look at my seventh-graders, and hope desperately, that they will not adopt the same attitude. I'm not just hoping, though; I'm also teaching them English.
"אֱלֹהִיםשׁוֹפֵט צַדִּיק וְאֵל זֹעֵם בְּכָל יוֹם"
If many of the students in this particular cross-section see themselves as "animals," then many of the other Jews with whom I meet in Israeli society view Arabs as "animals." I am not using this term idly; I have heard an adult man (for whom I have respect) exclaim that the Arabs are animals. The younger generation has picked up on this sentiment from their elders; on my first day at school, while we were waiting at the bus stop for TZ to arrive, a student told me that the Arabs are the cause of the problems in Lod. I know that at least a couple of my students attend Rambam because their parents do not want them to come in contact with Arab children. I cannot fully express how upsetting this is. Because I work at an all-Jewish school (for the record, not by choice, but because it was decided by my program that TZ and I were the best Fellows to teach at Rambam), my main interaction with Arabs here is at the Underground club on Monday evenings. About half of my regular students are Arabs, and my interaction with them differs in no way from my interaction with my non-Arab students. As I mentioned in the last post, I even had a moment of "revenge against the system" when I insisted on holding classes for my Arab students, even though it was technically a Jewish holiday (Shushan Purim), because I'm so sick of not having my own holidays recognized back in the U.S. Perhaps it's because I'm not Israeli, and not as emotionally invested in the country that I can afford to feel this way; I have no grudge against Arabs or against Muslims (most of my Muslim friends from High School and Cornell are non-Arab), yet I am surrounded by a society that does. I have never served in the IDF; nobody in my family has ever been murdered by terrorists, or fallen in one of Israel's historic wars with its Arab neighbors. I'm proud to be a strong Zionist, but this nauseating anger isn't Zionism; it's just hatred.
וַיַּעֲבֹר יְהֹוָה | עַל פָּנָיו וַיִּקְרָא יְהֹוָה | יְהֹוָה אֵל רַחוּם וְחַנּוּן אֶרֶךְ אַפַּיִם וְרַב חֶסֶד וֶאֱמֶת
I don't know how to solve this or any of the other problems I am confronted with daily. Right now, I'm continuing to teach, and hoping to open students' minds, just a little bit. It took students long enough to even accept me as Jewish. They had never met (or, I suppose, conceived of) Jews who hadn't already made aliyah to Israel, and, for my first months here, my Judaism was suspect among the students (for instance, they didn't know whether to count me for a minyan, and asked me questions such as "אתה גוי?," and not in the friendliest manner, either). It's not a lot of progress, but it's something. If I am lucky enough to be accepted to the job to which I applied this past week, I will have two to three more years left to make a difference. But I will need to use it well.
חג שמח!
~JD
Monday, March 17, 2014
First Purim in Israel
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
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
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
Sunday, February 16, 2014
Cool People in Ramat Gan
I couldn't think of any other title for the post, OK? I think that it fits. The reason being is that several weekends ago (January 10th-11th), I met four Cool People from Ithaca in Ramat Gan!
Unfortunately, when I began this post more than a month ago, I was already severely backlogged. The situation is much worse now, in mid-February. I'm therefore going to quickly end the post, acknowledging that I forgot a lot of detail in the month that has passed, so I can hurry to work on a catch-up blog post for next time.
I had been looking forward to this meeting for a couple of months, ever since I learned that Rachel was planning a trip to Israel. I knew that I would want to see her, and that so would Eli and Josefin (the three of us are all her chevrutot, i.e. learning buddies), and expected to see them all. Eli suggested his maternal grandparents' apartment in Ramat Gan (right next to Tel Aviv) as a gathering place. The day before, Thursday I had left school early because I felt absolutely terrible. When I ended up sleeping for about 4-5 hours on our couch, I was so exhausted. Of the four of us in the apartment, Becky was the only one to go to Ulpan that afternoon -- the rest of us had varying combinations of exhaustion and illness. I guess that Coco was alone again for the whole period. That's been happening a lot, recently, it feels like (to me, anyway).
I struggled out of the bed the next day, feeling better, but still not exactly excellent. Eli's grandmother didn't want us using her dishes, so it was my job to bring a cooking pot; I grabbed it along with a bunch of sweet potatoes as I ran out the door, following my morning routine. On the way to the train station, I met not only Tomas, from the new group of 5-month Community Involvement volunteers, but also Becky and one of her friends, Dudi. As a result, I arrived at the train station literally as my train arrived, and the conductor yelled at me to get on, even though I didn't have a ticket (they opened a gate for me so that I wouldn't need to hop to turnstile). All of this I thoroughly did not deserve -- in honesty, the train should have continued without me, but, in Israel (unlike, say, in France), there is some amount of sympathy for travelers. Speaking of sympathy for travelers, when I arrived at the train station in Tel Aviv, I was able to get directions to Ramat Gan from a friendly soldier who was returning home (Tel Aviv, that is) for Shabbat. As an example of Israeli interactions, he was the first to address me, while we were walking over a bridge, as the only two pedestrians. I've actually given a fair amount of thought to just how interested he was in who I am. Some of my friends have complained that the Israelis whom they have encountered are unwilling to make the initial interaction with strangers, and that it is up to us, the Americans, to try to make friends. This way well be the case, all other things being equal. However, my own experience is that, among observant Jewish men, anyway, there is a sort of instant rapport. Men wearing kippot see other men who are wearing kippot, and feel an instant affinity towards them. This is not the first time that I have experienced this instant warmth of recognition; I tend to get it whenever I enter a synagogue, especially if the men around me realize that I'm struggling to speak in Hebrew, even though I'm not Israeli. It's not just men, either; Israeli women, religious or otherwise have a tendency to describe me (or even address me) as "חָמוּד," when they hear my accent. I had a conversation today (Shabbat, the 25th of January) about what Americans tend to interpret as Israeli rudeness, which I have really only experienced in the shuk and other commercial settings. Regardless, I followed the directions given to me by the soldier, which required a bit of backtracking, but, before long, arrived at Eli's apartment building. Based on the apartment number, which began with the digit "6," I assumed that I would only need to climb to the sixth floor. I was wrong; Eli's grandparents' apartment is on the top floor of the apartment. For some reason, you cannot ride the elevator upward from any floor other than the ground floor, so I ran up the remaining ten flights or so (not the first time I have done something like this, nor, as the rest of the weekend revealed, the last). I knocked on the door, and found Eli :). We were both happy to see each other, and, after Eli had fed me some breakfast, we decided on a plan of action. We thought of all of the ingredients that we would need for the food that we wanted to prepared, and of where it was best to buy them. We went to a few different stores, picking fruit, vegetables, challot, meat (for Eli, Eliana, and Josefin), wine, dates, and some very interesting Iraqi pastries known as Bhabha (very poor transliteration on my part of a hard-to-pronounce Arabic word). I started the pot of stew, throwing together the vegetables and other ingredients that we had. Fairly close to sunset, the three women -- Eliana, Rachel, and Josefin -- arrived. They had all been in Jerusalem the night before, and, because Rachel was traveling with her suitcase, needed to take a taxi from the central station at Arlozorov. Eliana (whom I don't know as well as the others) gave me the spices that Eli had requested, and I threw them into the pot. We spent a few moments preparing, showering, etc., recited Minchah (due to lack of time) and headed off for a Libyan synagogue around the corner. On the way down, we took the stairs We arrived too late for Shir Hashirim, but I enjoyed the experience (and I still thought about מַה יָּפִית וּמַה נָּעַמְתְּ אַהֲבָה בַּתַּעֲנוּגִים זֹאת קוֹמָתֵךְ דָּמְתָה לְתָמָר). I've begun to notice that Israeli synagogue decoration tends to include the motifs of the seven species and/or the twelve tribes (there are other motifs, too, such as the decalogue and the holiday cycle) Both of these form recognizable patterns, but I wonder why these two in particular? The twelve tribes is rather important, but the seven species is just based on a single verse in the Torah, but it makes me wonder why the seven species and not, say, the utensils of the Temple, the garments of the kohen gadol, the orders of the Mishnah, etc. I guess that I expected more variety and creativity, that is all. Perhaps the popularity of the twelve species is a reflection of religious Zionism? Could that be it? After Arvit, Eli and I rejoined the three women (who had been upstairs in the women's gallery), and walked back to the apartment. We just barely made the Shabbat elevator, which took us directly to the top floor of the apartment building, and had Shabbat dinner, complete with good food, conversation, and singing. Eli has an enormous range of Sepharadic songs at his disposal, and Eliana also knows a great deal of zemirot. We completely finished the stew that I had made (and it was a full pot), as well as the dates and the Bhabha. I was the main reason for the dates' disappearance, as might be expected. We fell asleep while talking to each other, Eliana on a bed and Josefin on a mattress in one room, and Rachel on a mattress and Eli and I on couches in another.
Saturday morning, we all got up at a fairly reasonable hour, and once again experienced the adventure of running down all of the stairs in the apartment building to reach the bottom floor. We developed a strategy in which the person in front (usually me) would fling open the door on each landing, in order to illumine the otherwise dark staircase, then run down the next two flights in order to reach the next doorway. This usually gave those following behind enough light to continue safely. Anyway,we made it down, made it to synagogue and back again, and, after climbing the stairs to Eli's grandparents' apartment, made some cold salads together for Shabbat lunch. Eli and I also ended a discussion of ours concerning MT Hilchot Shabbat 30:9. For the rest of the afternoon, we explored Ramat Gan, and spent time in a nearby park. We even found an enormous playground, complete with swings, zip-lines, jungle gyms, etc. We made it back to the Moroccan synagogue for a late Minchah, then had third meal in Eli's grandparents' apartment again. We said Arvit and made Havdallah, and then we all walked Josefin and Eliana to the train station (Rachel was spending the night). On the way back, I discussed some of my plans for next year, and tried to get some valuable feedback from my friends. For better or for worse, I really think that I need to decide between mutually-exclusive priorities, and that nobody but me can make that decision. I ate through a lot of the food in the refrigerator, hungry as I was, despite all of the eating that I had done over Shabbat. Then, the two walked me to the train station (again), and I caught a train back to Lod, and walked from there to Ramla.
That was it for that Shabbat. Since the last time I've blogged, I've also worked hard at school, taken on an additional pair of pupils at their home, experienced Rambam Day and Hebrew Language Day, visited the local Ethiopian Jewish cultural center on Tu B'Shevat (and planted a tree), visited Haifa, hosted Eli here in Ramla, struggled enormously with Hebrew, felt the squeeze of living on a tight budget, taken some heat for something I wrote in a past blog post, been frustrated by difficult days at school, dealt with the coming of the dreaded inspectors, listened to a lot of hateful and obnoxious words coming from the people around me, continued teaching my weekly adult class, had a couple of job interviews in one day, bid farewell to Becky (who ended up leaving after all, much to my disappointment, without my even having a chance to really say goodbye to her, because I had a job interview scheduled during the time of her goodbye party), dealt with sickness (both my own, and TZ's), and been so exhausted by the time Shabbat arrives at the end of each week that I spend most of the day sleeping, involuntarily (and sometimes doze off during Shir Hashirim).
~JD
Unfortunately, when I began this post more than a month ago, I was already severely backlogged. The situation is much worse now, in mid-February. I'm therefore going to quickly end the post, acknowledging that I forgot a lot of detail in the month that has passed, so I can hurry to work on a catch-up blog post for next time.
I had been looking forward to this meeting for a couple of months, ever since I learned that Rachel was planning a trip to Israel. I knew that I would want to see her, and that so would Eli and Josefin (the three of us are all her chevrutot, i.e. learning buddies), and expected to see them all. Eli suggested his maternal grandparents' apartment in Ramat Gan (right next to Tel Aviv) as a gathering place. The day before, Thursday I had left school early because I felt absolutely terrible. When I ended up sleeping for about 4-5 hours on our couch, I was so exhausted. Of the four of us in the apartment, Becky was the only one to go to Ulpan that afternoon -- the rest of us had varying combinations of exhaustion and illness. I guess that Coco was alone again for the whole period. That's been happening a lot, recently, it feels like (to me, anyway).
I struggled out of the bed the next day, feeling better, but still not exactly excellent. Eli's grandmother didn't want us using her dishes, so it was my job to bring a cooking pot; I grabbed it along with a bunch of sweet potatoes as I ran out the door, following my morning routine. On the way to the train station, I met not only Tomas, from the new group of 5-month Community Involvement volunteers, but also Becky and one of her friends, Dudi. As a result, I arrived at the train station literally as my train arrived, and the conductor yelled at me to get on, even though I didn't have a ticket (they opened a gate for me so that I wouldn't need to hop to turnstile). All of this I thoroughly did not deserve -- in honesty, the train should have continued without me, but, in Israel (unlike, say, in France), there is some amount of sympathy for travelers. Speaking of sympathy for travelers, when I arrived at the train station in Tel Aviv, I was able to get directions to Ramat Gan from a friendly soldier who was returning home (Tel Aviv, that is) for Shabbat. As an example of Israeli interactions, he was the first to address me, while we were walking over a bridge, as the only two pedestrians. I've actually given a fair amount of thought to just how interested he was in who I am. Some of my friends have complained that the Israelis whom they have encountered are unwilling to make the initial interaction with strangers, and that it is up to us, the Americans, to try to make friends. This way well be the case, all other things being equal. However, my own experience is that, among observant Jewish men, anyway, there is a sort of instant rapport. Men wearing kippot see other men who are wearing kippot, and feel an instant affinity towards them. This is not the first time that I have experienced this instant warmth of recognition; I tend to get it whenever I enter a synagogue, especially if the men around me realize that I'm struggling to speak in Hebrew, even though I'm not Israeli. It's not just men, either; Israeli women, religious or otherwise have a tendency to describe me (or even address me) as "חָמוּד," when they hear my accent. I had a conversation today (Shabbat, the 25th of January) about what Americans tend to interpret as Israeli rudeness, which I have really only experienced in the shuk and other commercial settings. Regardless, I followed the directions given to me by the soldier, which required a bit of backtracking, but, before long, arrived at Eli's apartment building. Based on the apartment number, which began with the digit "6," I assumed that I would only need to climb to the sixth floor. I was wrong; Eli's grandparents' apartment is on the top floor of the apartment. For some reason, you cannot ride the elevator upward from any floor other than the ground floor, so I ran up the remaining ten flights or so (not the first time I have done something like this, nor, as the rest of the weekend revealed, the last). I knocked on the door, and found Eli :). We were both happy to see each other, and, after Eli had fed me some breakfast, we decided on a plan of action. We thought of all of the ingredients that we would need for the food that we wanted to prepared, and of where it was best to buy them. We went to a few different stores, picking fruit, vegetables, challot, meat (for Eli, Eliana, and Josefin), wine, dates, and some very interesting Iraqi pastries known as Bhabha (very poor transliteration on my part of a hard-to-pronounce Arabic word). I started the pot of stew, throwing together the vegetables and other ingredients that we had. Fairly close to sunset, the three women -- Eliana, Rachel, and Josefin -- arrived. They had all been in Jerusalem the night before, and, because Rachel was traveling with her suitcase, needed to take a taxi from the central station at Arlozorov. Eliana (whom I don't know as well as the others) gave me the spices that Eli had requested, and I threw them into the pot. We spent a few moments preparing, showering, etc., recited Minchah (due to lack of time) and headed off for a Libyan synagogue around the corner. On the way down, we took the stairs We arrived too late for Shir Hashirim, but I enjoyed the experience (and I still thought about מַה יָּפִית וּמַה נָּעַמְתְּ אַהֲבָה בַּתַּעֲנוּגִים זֹאת קוֹמָתֵךְ דָּמְתָה לְתָמָר). I've begun to notice that Israeli synagogue decoration tends to include the motifs of the seven species and/or the twelve tribes (there are other motifs, too, such as the decalogue and the holiday cycle) Both of these form recognizable patterns, but I wonder why these two in particular? The twelve tribes is rather important, but the seven species is just based on a single verse in the Torah, but it makes me wonder why the seven species and not, say, the utensils of the Temple, the garments of the kohen gadol, the orders of the Mishnah, etc. I guess that I expected more variety and creativity, that is all. Perhaps the popularity of the twelve species is a reflection of religious Zionism? Could that be it? After Arvit, Eli and I rejoined the three women (who had been upstairs in the women's gallery), and walked back to the apartment. We just barely made the Shabbat elevator, which took us directly to the top floor of the apartment building, and had Shabbat dinner, complete with good food, conversation, and singing. Eli has an enormous range of Sepharadic songs at his disposal, and Eliana also knows a great deal of zemirot. We completely finished the stew that I had made (and it was a full pot), as well as the dates and the Bhabha. I was the main reason for the dates' disappearance, as might be expected. We fell asleep while talking to each other, Eliana on a bed and Josefin on a mattress in one room, and Rachel on a mattress and Eli and I on couches in another.
Saturday morning, we all got up at a fairly reasonable hour, and once again experienced the adventure of running down all of the stairs in the apartment building to reach the bottom floor. We developed a strategy in which the person in front (usually me) would fling open the door on each landing, in order to illumine the otherwise dark staircase, then run down the next two flights in order to reach the next doorway. This usually gave those following behind enough light to continue safely. Anyway,we made it down, made it to synagogue and back again, and, after climbing the stairs to Eli's grandparents' apartment, made some cold salads together for Shabbat lunch. Eli and I also ended a discussion of ours concerning MT Hilchot Shabbat 30:9. For the rest of the afternoon, we explored Ramat Gan, and spent time in a nearby park. We even found an enormous playground, complete with swings, zip-lines, jungle gyms, etc. We made it back to the Moroccan synagogue for a late Minchah, then had third meal in Eli's grandparents' apartment again. We said Arvit and made Havdallah, and then we all walked Josefin and Eliana to the train station (Rachel was spending the night). On the way back, I discussed some of my plans for next year, and tried to get some valuable feedback from my friends. For better or for worse, I really think that I need to decide between mutually-exclusive priorities, and that nobody but me can make that decision. I ate through a lot of the food in the refrigerator, hungry as I was, despite all of the eating that I had done over Shabbat. Then, the two walked me to the train station (again), and I caught a train back to Lod, and walked from there to Ramla.
That was it for that Shabbat. Since the last time I've blogged, I've also worked hard at school, taken on an additional pair of pupils at their home, experienced Rambam Day and Hebrew Language Day, visited the local Ethiopian Jewish cultural center on Tu B'Shevat (and planted a tree), visited Haifa, hosted Eli here in Ramla, struggled enormously with Hebrew, felt the squeeze of living on a tight budget, taken some heat for something I wrote in a past blog post, been frustrated by difficult days at school, dealt with the coming of the dreaded inspectors, listened to a lot of hateful and obnoxious words coming from the people around me, continued teaching my weekly adult class, had a couple of job interviews in one day, bid farewell to Becky (who ended up leaving after all, much to my disappointment, without my even having a chance to really say goodbye to her, because I had a job interview scheduled during the time of her goodbye party), dealt with sickness (both my own, and TZ's), and been so exhausted by the time Shabbat arrives at the end of each week that I spend most of the day sleeping, involuntarily (and sometimes doze off during Shir Hashirim).
~JD
Monday, January 6, 2014
The Preservation of the (IT)Fellowship
I am going to veer from my ordinary policy of describing events chronologically in order to let you all know the good news: that there is no cataclysmal Breaking of the Fellowship, in which TZ and I float off alone on our little raft towards Mordor, while our various Elven, Dwarven, Hobbit, Wizard, and Human friends all encounter various challenges in various parts of Middle Earth. Hey, speaking of which, how well do the 12 of us match up with the 9 members of the Fellowship? Well, let's see:
Natalie & Perrin -- Merry and Pippin (that was easy)
Becky -- Legolas (again, that was easy)
Harry -- Gimli (stoicism and interest in exploring)
TZ -- Samwise (loyalty and dedication, at least from my point of view)
One of the Alexes -- Frodo (just because)
Hannah -- Strider (kind of a stretch, maybe, but, hey, I don't need to explain these rationally)
Devin -- Gandalf (maybe? Kind of? In the sense of being older and wiser?)
Noah -- Boromir (um, for better or for worse)
That leaves Veta and me... Maybe we can add Carmel as Treebeard? And Ben Feldman as Tom Bombadil, in his role as a detached observer? C.J. is kind of like Bilbo, in that he's already had an adventure much like this one, and Eli is maybe just a little bit like one of the unnamed wizards, in that he's important, but people don't really ever see him. How would people feel about comparing Noa to Galadriel? And Sarumon would be -- but I digress.
This Friday, I got up after Alex, Becky, and Veta had all gone to work, completed my morning routine, and took the 9:45 train from Ramla station, bound for Jerusalem. Jerusalem is quickly becoming my most-frequent out-of-town weekend destination, but every time I've visited in the past, I've taken the bus. So, this time, I decided to try the train instead. A modestly-dressed Israeli grandmother asked me on the train if I wasn't cold, after I peeled off my sweatshirt. I told her that I wasn't, and she muttered something about my being young, before asking me about what I was up to in Israel. Like many others, she thought that I might be an oleh chadash, and I explained to her that I was just a volunteer, here for one year. She was very sympathetic. For the rest of the very scenic ride, I read the copy of the Concise History of the Catholic Church that Eli lent to me (I reached the chapter about St. Jerome, who produced the Vulgate translation of the Bible). The train was good for an adventure for me, but it dropped me off at entirely the wrong side of Jerusalem. The train station is located next to Teddy Stadium, while the Central Bus Station is not far from the Machanei Yehudah shuk, Davidka Square, Ben Yehudah Street, etc., and not even terribly far from the Old City or from Har Hatzofim (Mt. Scopus), where Hebrew University is located. That is the region of town which I know relatively well. I'm used to walking along the light rail tracks to my desired destination (that's how I found the bookstore that sold me my Hebrew grammar book). So, I decided to take a bus to the city center. An oleh gave me the right directions, and, despite my continued attempts, I never managed to actually pay the bus driver my fare, because he kept on shooing me off, until it was time for me to get off. I walked the rest of the way to Machanei Yehudah, where I was planning to meet both Rav Ami and Susan, the first around noon, and the latter, at around 2:15 pm. I bought some persimmons and dates to munch on while I waited, and kept on reading, and studying my vocabulary list. I always keep a vocabulary list with me (called an "אוֹצַר מִלִּים" in Hebrew, translating to something along the lines of "treasury of words") in order to learn new words in my spare time. While strolling around the shuk, whom should I meet but Ezra Sultan, one among many of the very smart people whom I met at Drisha Institute this June! He told me that Raymond (another Drisha friend) Anyway, Susan sent me a text instructing me to meet her at an organic bakery across the street from Machanei Yehudah, which I did, and, about 12 seconds before catching sight of Susan, I saw Rav Ami! I was so excited to see him, hugged him, and then spotted Susan and her boyfriend, יגאל (Yig'al). Rav Ami had to leave almost immediately, but we promised to see each other again (while I was introducing myself to Yig'al, Rav Ami was telling Susan how to send me to the synagogue that he was likely to attend for Kabbalat Shabbat). I walked a short way with Susan and Yig'al to Susan's apartment. I was very happy to see Susan. Over the next few days, we reminisced a fair amount of time over our not-too-far-gone college days. I think that Yig'al must have gotten the impression that Victor is the most unfortunate of all people, given the number of pranks that Susan and others pulled on him during our last year, without either Victor or I ever catching on to who was perpetrating them. To those of you who weren't living in the CJL, there were a series of pranks, most of them set in the men's bathroom, including the rubber monster under the toilet seat, the inflatable clown on the toilet seat, and the audio recorder disguised as a toilet paper roll, but not the annoyotron planted behind the filing cabinet that prevented Victor from sleeping for five nights. Yeah, I think Elliot got surprised by one of these, but poor Victor was the main target. Oh, well. I was also introduced to Susan's pet cat Newman. Newman is a kitten whom Susan literally saved from the jaws of a dog a few weeks ago, and has since been the worst-behaved pet Susan has ever needed to deal with, which is quite impressed, because this girl takes in all kinds of animals (I think that she would have gotten on very well with Rose, if the two had ever met). Anyway, Shabbat fell very early, so after showering, etc., Yig'al and I headed off to the small synagogue located a few blocks away, where Rav Ami had told us he would be visiting friends. The synagogue was locked, and while Yig'al and I waited outside for someone with the key to arrive, we met a very unusual ultra-orthodox Teimani man outside. He seemed slightly confused: he refused to shake Yig'al's hand, didn't have a job or anywhere to stay that night, and wandered off, saying that "everything always worked out." He was also smoking after candle-lighting time, which was unusual, and articulating his ayins very gutturally; there are people in Jerusalem like this man, that is all that I can say. Anyway, although we barely had a minyan for minchah in the tiny synagogue, before long it filled up. It was a very Rav Ami kind of atmosphere; I could tell almost immediately that this is the kind of place where he would fit in. People took their time to pray and to sing and to dance, there was a mix of Israelis and Americans (and French men), a mixture of Ashkenazim and Sepharadim (I think), and although there was a vaguely-Chasidic euphoria about everything, you couldn't really point to anyone and call him a Chasid. There was, however, no Shir Hashirim (I still thought of מַה יָּפִית וּמַה נָּעַמְתְּ אַהֲבָה בַּתַּעֲנוּגִים זֹאת קוֹמָתֵךְ דָּמְתָה לְתָמָר, though). Rav Ami was there, along with some Cornellians, including one whom I remember meeting, quite positively, at a pre-frosh Shabbaton for the CJL. Yig'al and I walked back to Susan's house. We all ate together. I felt a little bit bad, because my combined kashrut preferences and vegetarianism meant that I wasn't really sharing the same meal with the others. The chickpeas in my stew were kind of underdone; I really need to work on boiling my dishes more fully. Oh, well. Much more important than the food was the time that the three of us spent with each other; Yig'al has been all over the world, and has had some incredibly interesting experiences in his lifetime. He's slightly older than I am (a little bit younger than my older brother Andrew), but has also done a lot with the time that he's had in this world. I really hope that, looking back in a few years, I'll be able to say the same thing about myself. We were all exhausted, and went to bed early. I had completely misused the timer with which Susan had provided me, and it shone on the night through. I didn't care; I was exhausted, and slept, regardless.
I awoke on Saturday morning at around 8:00 am to Yig'al gently shaking me, telling me that it was time to get up. I dressed quickly, hurried off to the synagogue without getting lost (incredibly), despite the winding streets. In fact, I'll tell let you in on a secret: in the two and a half years of this blog, this is one of my few travel posts involving me visit to a big city that does not involve me getting lost there. Well, then, I arrived at the synagogue when they were nearing the end of Pesukei Dezimra. It was, as I had expected from the night before, very energetic. One young American man (maybe 19 or 20, by my guess) had his first aliyah to the Torah, ever, and the congregation broke out into a wild dance. I left at around 10:50 am, and the other men were still in the midst of Musaf (remember that they did not even begin until 7:30 am). Susan, Yig'al, and I walked to Susan's friend/lab partner's house, a very enjoyable 30-40 minute walk, for Shabbat lunch. The walk was really one of the best parts. It's amazing for me to come to Jerusalem, because I hear so much English spoken on the street. In Ramla, I hear very little other than Hebrew and Russian, with only the occasional sprinkling of Amharic and Arabic, and in Jerusalem, the streets are full of anglophones, and even a few francophones. Anyway, there were about eight frum girls at this apartment, with Yig'al and I as the only men there (neither of us being available, although for entirely different reasons). The food was great, but there was a lot of girl talk going on, and, apparently, none of them knew that Fili and Kili die after the Battle of the Five Armies at the end of The Hobbit. Afterwards, Yig'al pretty much admitted that he might have imploded if I hadn't been there. Tamar (Susan's friend) and the girl closest to the three of us were both friendly, but I think that a few of the other ones ground on his nerves. I felt a little bit uncomfortable, too, to be honest. The three of us returned to Susan's neighborhood, and although it was my first instinct to walk to a synagogue, none of them seemed to be open (I think that I was too late, and that it was too close to shkiah). So I said Minchah and Arvit at Susan's house, in between which I read a little bit about the extermination of malaria in Palestine (fact: Allenby's troops decisively defeated the Ottomans while the British troops were in the incubation period of malaria; had the offensive been delayed for two weeks, enough might have been dead to have swayed the odds sufficiently in the favor of the Ottomans, and changed the course of history). As soon as Shabbat was over, I jogged over to the Crown Plaza Hotel, where Rav Ami told me that he was staying with Taglit. I managed to find him, although we both needed to sit through around an hour of Taglit's scheduled speaker (who went way over his time limit, anyway) about the history of Zionism. Afterwards, Rav Ami and I had what is probably the most important conversation about my future that I've had since I graduated college. I really don't know where I'm going to end up in life, and I have several options on the table. I will let you all know what my eventual decision is, but I really don't even know in what country I'll be living one year from now. Also, very intriguingly, Rav Ami gave me the same advice concerning certain sensitive issues that my three new housemates gave me. (Also, I just learned that Hannah was staying in the Crown Plaza Hotel at the same time that I was meeting Rav Ami, and that she even saw the back of my newly-shaved head, but assumed that the person whom she saw couldn't be me.) Rav Ami also gave me a very warm hat, which I am going to hold onto. I eventually needed to leave, after sharing my thoughts, and getting advice, in order to avoid missing the meetup at the pizza parlor on Emek Refa'im. I made it there at around 9:30, and saw Jonathan, Rachel, Josefin, Eli, Hillel, and Moshe! I'm used to seeing Eli and Josefin, and I know that I'll see Rachel again soon, but I really wasn't certain when the next time I would see Jonathan, Hillel, or Moshe would be. I explained to all of them that Susan and Rav Ami wanted to come, but couldn't. Several of them wanted to see Rav Ami (and other people on Taglit), so several of us packed onto bus 21 to Ben-Yehuda street, which I don't think that I've ever visited before. On the way, Eli engaged a pre-frosh in the correct way to pronounce the letter ח in Biblical Hebrew. Apparently, some scholars believe that, like ש, it was once a letter with a single morphology but two separate, non-interchangeable sounds. Eli, as usual, actually made a very good argument, knew his sources, his evidence for and against; one interesting fact that I did not previously know is that ח is transliterated two different ways in the Septuagint, the earliest translation of the Hebrew Bible. Anyway, it turns out that there are tons of Cornell people whom I know in Jerusalem for Taglit. I had seen Rebecca Etessami from behind, and I think carried her several meters backwards when I hugged back, as I did several minutes later to Rebecca Stambler. I got to tell her how proud I am of her :). Aaron Match was also there, and Hillel and Moshe pretty much carried away Adam Sleeper when they found him. Jordana was there, too, for some reason (I never really got to interact with her; she was busy with other things). And, most surprising of all, I found Raymond Habbaz! Finding him was really the grand prize of the evening, even though I knew that he was in Jerusalem, thanks to seeing Ezra Sultan the day before! So many Jewish people! At the end of the night, it was past midnight, and Eli and I bid everyone else goodnight before staggering back to Susan's apartment to spend the night. Eli told me the story of the 20th-century secularization of the Iraqi Jewry on the way. We also discussed how strange to both of us the apparent discomfort of sharing beds with other men is to straight American men of our generation. We crawled into bed, and I fell asleep almost immediately.
I awoke the next morning at around 5:25, Susan awaking me in order to prepare to leave with Yig'al. I grabbed my belongings (for the second time, leaving my Hebrew vocabulary-list at a friend's house in Israel), left Eli asleep in bed. Yig'al and I walked maybe 10-15 minutes to his parked car. We had a very easy, quick drive to Ramla. It turns out that we both like the same kind of Israeli music, including Hadag Nachash! I was very thankful to both Yig'al and to Susan for being such good hosts. I arrived at the door of my apartment at around 6:45 am, did my morning routine, and nearly passed out the moment my tefillin were off. I crawled into bed (as I am about to do right now), woke up again at around 12:15 pm, where I met Becky, who had just returned from her run. She told me the good news that both she and Veta are going to be staying in Ramla. This made me very, very happy! I ran, and, in the evening, my ITF group met with Anna Zinger, the director of ITF across Israel (remember that that's over 160 participants -- that's a big deal). During the meeting, I quite honestly expressed my feelings of the lack of apparent impact upon the English education in Rambam, where I work. I stressed that these observations did not apply to TZ, who does observe progress among her pupils, and are furthermore by no means the fault of my students. To be honest, I attribute the lack of progress to my own inexperience in teaching. Anna Zinger told me not to worry, because I was in the weakest school in the district, which is one of the weakest schools in the country, and that I should not base my judgment of my impact purely upon the continuing lag in test scores among my students. I also hasten to add that most of my peers seem to be making progress with their students, while I am still teaching my eighth graders how to read three- and four- letter words. We also discussed our lack of satisfaction with many aspects of our training. A sentiment that I felt, which I heard reflected in others' statements as well, was that most of the pedagogical training we are getting from Talpiot is irrelevant and unhelpful, and that the resources used to force us to spend the entire day listening to classes that are unhelpful to our specific classroom situations would be better spent increasing our Hebrew ability (and therefore our ability to communicate with our weaker pupils whom, for me anyway, make up virtually the entirety of the students who study under me) in our one-month preparation period. On the other hand, I was surprised to hear that others do not enjoy the tours and enrichments as much as I do. I really do learn something new at every single one, and, even if they were to be made optional (as several people suggested), I would nevertheless choose to attend all of them, because I find traveling around and learning about Israel to be so interesting and educational for me. As I mentioned to TZ today, sometimes others' knowledge about things about which I am ignorant make me feel like, as Winnie the Pooh put it, "a bear of little brain." Oh, well. At least, after the meeting, I was happy to spend the evening with my still-roommates, and even to Skype with my Mother (and show her my roommates). We agreed that all of them are agreeable people. And Alex and I are watching Pan's Labyrinth tomorrow night, which should be fun.
Today, one of my students posted in WhatsApp how incredibly bored he was learning with me. He even recorded a four-second sound clip of me in order to emphasize the point (I didn't even see his smartphone out). I really don't think that my lack of teaching skill is just my own imagination; I legitimately think that I have an enormous amount to learn about working with children, and with teaching in general, and that, moreover, my continued difficulties with Hebrew only exacerbate my shortcomings. I've spent the past several years of my life experiencing how difficult it is to learn; now it's my turn to experience how much harder it is to teach.
~JD
Natalie & Perrin -- Merry and Pippin (that was easy)
Becky -- Legolas (again, that was easy)
Harry -- Gimli (stoicism and interest in exploring)
TZ -- Samwise (loyalty and dedication, at least from my point of view)
One of the Alexes -- Frodo (just because)
Hannah -- Strider (kind of a stretch, maybe, but, hey, I don't need to explain these rationally)
Devin -- Gandalf (maybe? Kind of? In the sense of being older and wiser?)
Noah -- Boromir (um, for better or for worse)
That leaves Veta and me... Maybe we can add Carmel as Treebeard? And Ben Feldman as Tom Bombadil, in his role as a detached observer? C.J. is kind of like Bilbo, in that he's already had an adventure much like this one, and Eli is maybe just a little bit like one of the unnamed wizards, in that he's important, but people don't really ever see him. How would people feel about comparing Noa to Galadriel? And Sarumon would be -- but I digress.
This Friday, I got up after Alex, Becky, and Veta had all gone to work, completed my morning routine, and took the 9:45 train from Ramla station, bound for Jerusalem. Jerusalem is quickly becoming my most-frequent out-of-town weekend destination, but every time I've visited in the past, I've taken the bus. So, this time, I decided to try the train instead. A modestly-dressed Israeli grandmother asked me on the train if I wasn't cold, after I peeled off my sweatshirt. I told her that I wasn't, and she muttered something about my being young, before asking me about what I was up to in Israel. Like many others, she thought that I might be an oleh chadash, and I explained to her that I was just a volunteer, here for one year. She was very sympathetic. For the rest of the very scenic ride, I read the copy of the Concise History of the Catholic Church that Eli lent to me (I reached the chapter about St. Jerome, who produced the Vulgate translation of the Bible). The train was good for an adventure for me, but it dropped me off at entirely the wrong side of Jerusalem. The train station is located next to Teddy Stadium, while the Central Bus Station is not far from the Machanei Yehudah shuk, Davidka Square, Ben Yehudah Street, etc., and not even terribly far from the Old City or from Har Hatzofim (Mt. Scopus), where Hebrew University is located. That is the region of town which I know relatively well. I'm used to walking along the light rail tracks to my desired destination (that's how I found the bookstore that sold me my Hebrew grammar book). So, I decided to take a bus to the city center. An oleh gave me the right directions, and, despite my continued attempts, I never managed to actually pay the bus driver my fare, because he kept on shooing me off, until it was time for me to get off. I walked the rest of the way to Machanei Yehudah, where I was planning to meet both Rav Ami and Susan, the first around noon, and the latter, at around 2:15 pm. I bought some persimmons and dates to munch on while I waited, and kept on reading, and studying my vocabulary list. I always keep a vocabulary list with me (called an "אוֹצַר מִלִּים" in Hebrew, translating to something along the lines of "treasury of words") in order to learn new words in my spare time. While strolling around the shuk, whom should I meet but Ezra Sultan, one among many of the very smart people whom I met at Drisha Institute this June! He told me that Raymond (another Drisha friend) Anyway, Susan sent me a text instructing me to meet her at an organic bakery across the street from Machanei Yehudah, which I did, and, about 12 seconds before catching sight of Susan, I saw Rav Ami! I was so excited to see him, hugged him, and then spotted Susan and her boyfriend, יגאל (Yig'al). Rav Ami had to leave almost immediately, but we promised to see each other again (while I was introducing myself to Yig'al, Rav Ami was telling Susan how to send me to the synagogue that he was likely to attend for Kabbalat Shabbat). I walked a short way with Susan and Yig'al to Susan's apartment. I was very happy to see Susan. Over the next few days, we reminisced a fair amount of time over our not-too-far-gone college days. I think that Yig'al must have gotten the impression that Victor is the most unfortunate of all people, given the number of pranks that Susan and others pulled on him during our last year, without either Victor or I ever catching on to who was perpetrating them. To those of you who weren't living in the CJL, there were a series of pranks, most of them set in the men's bathroom, including the rubber monster under the toilet seat, the inflatable clown on the toilet seat, and the audio recorder disguised as a toilet paper roll, but not the annoyotron planted behind the filing cabinet that prevented Victor from sleeping for five nights. Yeah, I think Elliot got surprised by one of these, but poor Victor was the main target. Oh, well. I was also introduced to Susan's pet cat Newman. Newman is a kitten whom Susan literally saved from the jaws of a dog a few weeks ago, and has since been the worst-behaved pet Susan has ever needed to deal with, which is quite impressed, because this girl takes in all kinds of animals (I think that she would have gotten on very well with Rose, if the two had ever met). Anyway, Shabbat fell very early, so after showering, etc., Yig'al and I headed off to the small synagogue located a few blocks away, where Rav Ami had told us he would be visiting friends. The synagogue was locked, and while Yig'al and I waited outside for someone with the key to arrive, we met a very unusual ultra-orthodox Teimani man outside. He seemed slightly confused: he refused to shake Yig'al's hand, didn't have a job or anywhere to stay that night, and wandered off, saying that "everything always worked out." He was also smoking after candle-lighting time, which was unusual, and articulating his ayins very gutturally; there are people in Jerusalem like this man, that is all that I can say. Anyway, although we barely had a minyan for minchah in the tiny synagogue, before long it filled up. It was a very Rav Ami kind of atmosphere; I could tell almost immediately that this is the kind of place where he would fit in. People took their time to pray and to sing and to dance, there was a mix of Israelis and Americans (and French men), a mixture of Ashkenazim and Sepharadim (I think), and although there was a vaguely-Chasidic euphoria about everything, you couldn't really point to anyone and call him a Chasid. There was, however, no Shir Hashirim (I still thought of מַה יָּפִית וּמַה נָּעַמְתְּ אַהֲבָה בַּתַּעֲנוּגִים זֹאת קוֹמָתֵךְ דָּמְתָה לְתָמָר, though). Rav Ami was there, along with some Cornellians, including one whom I remember meeting, quite positively, at a pre-frosh Shabbaton for the CJL. Yig'al and I walked back to Susan's house. We all ate together. I felt a little bit bad, because my combined kashrut preferences and vegetarianism meant that I wasn't really sharing the same meal with the others. The chickpeas in my stew were kind of underdone; I really need to work on boiling my dishes more fully. Oh, well. Much more important than the food was the time that the three of us spent with each other; Yig'al has been all over the world, and has had some incredibly interesting experiences in his lifetime. He's slightly older than I am (a little bit younger than my older brother Andrew), but has also done a lot with the time that he's had in this world. I really hope that, looking back in a few years, I'll be able to say the same thing about myself. We were all exhausted, and went to bed early. I had completely misused the timer with which Susan had provided me, and it shone on the night through. I didn't care; I was exhausted, and slept, regardless.
I awoke on Saturday morning at around 8:00 am to Yig'al gently shaking me, telling me that it was time to get up. I dressed quickly, hurried off to the synagogue without getting lost (incredibly), despite the winding streets. In fact, I'll tell let you in on a secret: in the two and a half years of this blog, this is one of my few travel posts involving me visit to a big city that does not involve me getting lost there. Well, then, I arrived at the synagogue when they were nearing the end of Pesukei Dezimra. It was, as I had expected from the night before, very energetic. One young American man (maybe 19 or 20, by my guess) had his first aliyah to the Torah, ever, and the congregation broke out into a wild dance. I left at around 10:50 am, and the other men were still in the midst of Musaf (remember that they did not even begin until 7:30 am). Susan, Yig'al, and I walked to Susan's friend/lab partner's house, a very enjoyable 30-40 minute walk, for Shabbat lunch. The walk was really one of the best parts. It's amazing for me to come to Jerusalem, because I hear so much English spoken on the street. In Ramla, I hear very little other than Hebrew and Russian, with only the occasional sprinkling of Amharic and Arabic, and in Jerusalem, the streets are full of anglophones, and even a few francophones. Anyway, there were about eight frum girls at this apartment, with Yig'al and I as the only men there (neither of us being available, although for entirely different reasons). The food was great, but there was a lot of girl talk going on, and, apparently, none of them knew that Fili and Kili die after the Battle of the Five Armies at the end of The Hobbit. Afterwards, Yig'al pretty much admitted that he might have imploded if I hadn't been there. Tamar (Susan's friend) and the girl closest to the three of us were both friendly, but I think that a few of the other ones ground on his nerves. I felt a little bit uncomfortable, too, to be honest. The three of us returned to Susan's neighborhood, and although it was my first instinct to walk to a synagogue, none of them seemed to be open (I think that I was too late, and that it was too close to shkiah). So I said Minchah and Arvit at Susan's house, in between which I read a little bit about the extermination of malaria in Palestine (fact: Allenby's troops decisively defeated the Ottomans while the British troops were in the incubation period of malaria; had the offensive been delayed for two weeks, enough might have been dead to have swayed the odds sufficiently in the favor of the Ottomans, and changed the course of history). As soon as Shabbat was over, I jogged over to the Crown Plaza Hotel, where Rav Ami told me that he was staying with Taglit. I managed to find him, although we both needed to sit through around an hour of Taglit's scheduled speaker (who went way over his time limit, anyway) about the history of Zionism. Afterwards, Rav Ami and I had what is probably the most important conversation about my future that I've had since I graduated college. I really don't know where I'm going to end up in life, and I have several options on the table. I will let you all know what my eventual decision is, but I really don't even know in what country I'll be living one year from now. Also, very intriguingly, Rav Ami gave me the same advice concerning certain sensitive issues that my three new housemates gave me. (Also, I just learned that Hannah was staying in the Crown Plaza Hotel at the same time that I was meeting Rav Ami, and that she even saw the back of my newly-shaved head, but assumed that the person whom she saw couldn't be me.) Rav Ami also gave me a very warm hat, which I am going to hold onto. I eventually needed to leave, after sharing my thoughts, and getting advice, in order to avoid missing the meetup at the pizza parlor on Emek Refa'im. I made it there at around 9:30, and saw Jonathan, Rachel, Josefin, Eli, Hillel, and Moshe! I'm used to seeing Eli and Josefin, and I know that I'll see Rachel again soon, but I really wasn't certain when the next time I would see Jonathan, Hillel, or Moshe would be. I explained to all of them that Susan and Rav Ami wanted to come, but couldn't. Several of them wanted to see Rav Ami (and other people on Taglit), so several of us packed onto bus 21 to Ben-Yehuda street, which I don't think that I've ever visited before. On the way, Eli engaged a pre-frosh in the correct way to pronounce the letter ח in Biblical Hebrew. Apparently, some scholars believe that, like ש, it was once a letter with a single morphology but two separate, non-interchangeable sounds. Eli, as usual, actually made a very good argument, knew his sources, his evidence for and against; one interesting fact that I did not previously know is that ח is transliterated two different ways in the Septuagint, the earliest translation of the Hebrew Bible. Anyway, it turns out that there are tons of Cornell people whom I know in Jerusalem for Taglit. I had seen Rebecca Etessami from behind, and I think carried her several meters backwards when I hugged back, as I did several minutes later to Rebecca Stambler. I got to tell her how proud I am of her :). Aaron Match was also there, and Hillel and Moshe pretty much carried away Adam Sleeper when they found him. Jordana was there, too, for some reason (I never really got to interact with her; she was busy with other things). And, most surprising of all, I found Raymond Habbaz! Finding him was really the grand prize of the evening, even though I knew that he was in Jerusalem, thanks to seeing Ezra Sultan the day before! So many Jewish people! At the end of the night, it was past midnight, and Eli and I bid everyone else goodnight before staggering back to Susan's apartment to spend the night. Eli told me the story of the 20th-century secularization of the Iraqi Jewry on the way. We also discussed how strange to both of us the apparent discomfort of sharing beds with other men is to straight American men of our generation. We crawled into bed, and I fell asleep almost immediately.
I awoke the next morning at around 5:25, Susan awaking me in order to prepare to leave with Yig'al. I grabbed my belongings (for the second time, leaving my Hebrew vocabulary-list at a friend's house in Israel), left Eli asleep in bed. Yig'al and I walked maybe 10-15 minutes to his parked car. We had a very easy, quick drive to Ramla. It turns out that we both like the same kind of Israeli music, including Hadag Nachash! I was very thankful to both Yig'al and to Susan for being such good hosts. I arrived at the door of my apartment at around 6:45 am, did my morning routine, and nearly passed out the moment my tefillin were off. I crawled into bed (as I am about to do right now), woke up again at around 12:15 pm, where I met Becky, who had just returned from her run. She told me the good news that both she and Veta are going to be staying in Ramla. This made me very, very happy! I ran, and, in the evening, my ITF group met with Anna Zinger, the director of ITF across Israel (remember that that's over 160 participants -- that's a big deal). During the meeting, I quite honestly expressed my feelings of the lack of apparent impact upon the English education in Rambam, where I work. I stressed that these observations did not apply to TZ, who does observe progress among her pupils, and are furthermore by no means the fault of my students. To be honest, I attribute the lack of progress to my own inexperience in teaching. Anna Zinger told me not to worry, because I was in the weakest school in the district, which is one of the weakest schools in the country, and that I should not base my judgment of my impact purely upon the continuing lag in test scores among my students. I also hasten to add that most of my peers seem to be making progress with their students, while I am still teaching my eighth graders how to read three- and four- letter words. We also discussed our lack of satisfaction with many aspects of our training. A sentiment that I felt, which I heard reflected in others' statements as well, was that most of the pedagogical training we are getting from Talpiot is irrelevant and unhelpful, and that the resources used to force us to spend the entire day listening to classes that are unhelpful to our specific classroom situations would be better spent increasing our Hebrew ability (and therefore our ability to communicate with our weaker pupils whom, for me anyway, make up virtually the entirety of the students who study under me) in our one-month preparation period. On the other hand, I was surprised to hear that others do not enjoy the tours and enrichments as much as I do. I really do learn something new at every single one, and, even if they were to be made optional (as several people suggested), I would nevertheless choose to attend all of them, because I find traveling around and learning about Israel to be so interesting and educational for me. As I mentioned to TZ today, sometimes others' knowledge about things about which I am ignorant make me feel like, as Winnie the Pooh put it, "a bear of little brain." Oh, well. At least, after the meeting, I was happy to spend the evening with my still-roommates, and even to Skype with my Mother (and show her my roommates). We agreed that all of them are agreeable people. And Alex and I are watching Pan's Labyrinth tomorrow night, which should be fun.
Today, one of my students posted in WhatsApp how incredibly bored he was learning with me. He even recorded a four-second sound clip of me in order to emphasize the point (I didn't even see his smartphone out). I really don't think that my lack of teaching skill is just my own imagination; I legitimately think that I have an enormous amount to learn about working with children, and with teaching in general, and that, moreover, my continued difficulties with Hebrew only exacerbate my shortcomings. I've spent the past several years of my life experiencing how difficult it is to learn; now it's my turn to experience how much harder it is to teach.
~JD
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