Hey Everyone,
It has been a crazy few days in the beautiful Land of Israel, so I'm just going to jump right into it.
Wednesday night marked the beginning of Rosh Hashannah, the Jewish new year. We did services as a group in the Nativ building. Our director of the program gave a drash in which he talked about reflecting on the past year through the lens of where each of us was exactly a year ago, and it was a very trippy experience. It's nice to know that in the last year I've grown a lot, much (I'd like to believe) for the better.
The next morning, we got up very early (by 18 year old standards) to go to two different conservative shuls for Rosh Hashannah services. I went to a Synagogue called Moreshet Avraham in Talpiyot. It was about a 45 minute walk from beit Nativ. Services were very interesting because they were in every way different from the service at TBA. While it was conducted entirely in Hebrew, every single person at the shul spoke english and about 90% spoke Hebrew with American accents. I felt very much like a tourist, which is an unfortunate trend that Nativ has made me realize.
An alumna of Nativ made it her mission for every Nativer to have a home cooked meal for the holidays, so I (along with three other people) were welcomed into a home for lunch. The meal was very dissappointing (as I missed the epic potluck at the Odenheimer's house), but it was an interesting experience to see the way people live in a more suburban area of Jerusalem. After the group did Mincha, we walked to a park to do Tashlich. However, since there is no access to water in Jerusalem (or at least that we could have walked to), we didn't get to do real Tashlich. It was quite a disappointment. That night was very low key as we knew that we would have to wake up again the next morning to go to services somewhere else.
My second day was nothing special as I slept for the majority of the day.
Friday night began shabbat, so the Holidays continued. For dinner, I went with one of my Israeli staff members to her friend's house. There were 3 sisters and their husbands with two friends, me, and about 6 adorable little kids. It was really fun to be dropped into a scenario so foreign yet familiar to me. They were not good English speakers at all, so I either sat their silently (shocking, I know) or spoke in my broken hebrew. The two standout experiences of the night occurred when 1) I found a children's book that my class read in 4th grade (Mitz Petel) and understood the entire thing, and 2) when the parents were all playing the game rush hour (the cars with the traffic jam that you have to slide the cars around to move a car through the gate). It reminded me just how much of American culture has infiltrated the rest of the world.
Moving on to Saturday. I slept in until lunch (which was a very wise choice as I was so tired), and in the afternoon, I played soccer and Frisbee with a bunch of friends before we davened again. Before dinner, a large group of us played bananagrams (like speed Scrabble) and I had some fun using my Scrabble dictionary knowledge for good (thanks Mr. O). After Shabbat ended, a bunch of friends and I went to a Jazz bar and listened to some good live music. Then we turned back the clocks (Israelis do day light savings early so Yom Kippur is an hour shorter) and went to sleep.
Today, I had class all day, which was brutally difficult. After 4 hours of intense Hebrew class, In my Jerusalem class, we went to the archeological site at the Western and Southern walls of the 2nd Temple. It was very repetitive to stuff I had done in the past, but it was awe inspiring to see buildings that were built thousands of years ago that are far more beautiful than buildings built today with modern day machinery.
That's all for now, but I'll check in soon.
Becca
No comments:
Post a Comment