Bomb Scares, Sheep, Concerts and More

Hey everyone,

Since I haven't had the time to blog within the last week, I am here presenting yet another essay for you to read. Once again, I'll tell you that reading it will be interesting for you, but as it is long, I totally understand if you don't want to read the whole thing. I promise, I won't take it personally. I'll start off from where I left off.

Last Thursday when I woke up from my afternoon nap, I found out that a bomb scare had occured on base. The bomb squad had come after seeing a suspicious bag and done a thorough investigation. No one was allowed in or out of the building--because a bag of school books had been left around and was deemed suspicious. Security here is very tight, and Israelis view events like these as a joke. It was interesting to hear about it though, though a bit alarming to realize that something like that could happen right in our courtyard.

Last weekend was a closed weekend, meaning all of Nativ was on base for the entirety of Shabbat. I didn't realize just how incredible the weekend was going to be. On Friday morning, we went to a place called Neot Kedumim, which is a Biblical Land Reserve in Modiin (between Jerusalem and Tel Aviv). While we all expected to be going to a place to take a hike or something of that nature, we were in no way prepared for the activities that the morning would contain. We had some bonding time for the Kibbutz groups doing some activities that ancient people did.

We herded sheep and learned how to grab life by the horns.

We learned how to hunt like true hunters.

We made fresh pita over a fire (I only have pictures of the fire making crew unfortunately)

And we had a jolly old time with it all.

When we got back to base Friday afternoon, it was almost time for the beginning of Shabbat (as it begins at roughy 4:30 in the afternoon). We had Kabbalat Shabbat services with all of Nativ, and I must say that even with all of the years of Camp Ramah, Jewish School, Synagogue Involvement, BBYO, and other Jewish groups, I have experienced few services as moving and exciting as this one. There were over 100 people in a room together singing beautiful Shabbat melodies and welcoming in the Shabbat day. It was truly awe inspiring.

Shabbat was a very low key day. We had some seminars on the ideology of the Conservative movement and on the Torah portion of the week (for those of you who haven't read Vayera, it's a really epic (yet sort of gross) portion), then we did Havdallah and the beautiful Shabbat was over. I spent the majority of my day napping and spending time just talking with people. It was nice to have a low key day in the schedule.

On Sunday, legitimately nothing exciting happened until the end of the day. I was sitting in my room talking to my roommates when we hear someone outside yelling "bomb scare!" Naturally, we ran outside to the balcony to see what was going on. We got to the balcony and saw that the busy intersection that usually has the sounds of honking and cars running more loudly than any non-New-Yorker can imagine was silent. Police cars were blocking traffic, and sure enough, outside of the great synagogue (where I went for Kol Nidre) the bomb squad was doing some work. We heard three mini explosions of the detonator robot as it blew up the suspicious bag (we still don't know what was in it) and that was it. The most interesting part of this scare was that as soon as the police cars left, the cars started honking again, the noise continued, and life went on as though nothing had ever happened. A few friends and I went to check out the scene after the scare was over, and sure enough, everything was cleared out within the 5 minutes it took us to get down there. It was so bizarre.

Monday had a very cool treat for us, because MASA put on a concert for participants in their programs with Idan Raichel, a very well known Israeli artist. Right after school, we took the bus to a convention center, and after listening to a bunch of boring speakers talk about the importance of Israel (preaching to the choir), Idan came on and wowed the crowd. It was really fun to be at a concert, but also, since people were there from so many different programs, I got to see a lot of friends who are in Israel on other programs which was really nice. I haven't uploaded my pictures from the concert yet. Sorry.

Tuesday was an average school day, but Tuesday night was the Kibbutz group lip sync competition. Each room of the kibbutz group (4 girls rooms and 7 boys rooms) had to create a lip sync that represented their room. Rooms went all out with costumes, roses, food, and epic mashups. My room did a mashup of a few Avenue Q songs and had a jolly old time with it. The night as a whole was absolutely hysterical, as nothing is as entertaining as watching boys dancing to boy bands and 30 people doing cheesy choreography. After the contest, one of the staff members and I had a guitar jam session for a good hour or two. He played me some Israeli music and I showed him some of my stuff. It was really interesting to see the way that English language is used in Hebrew music, as all of the songs which he had printed out chords to used English chord names.

Wednesday was a great day as I had my two favorite classes with a two hour nap in between, but when I came back to base, sure enough, there was yet another bomb scare. I was on the phone when the scare happened, and when I told him that I'd call him back after finding out what was going on, he was legitimately shocked that Israeli society treated bomb scares so nonchalantly. I won't say that I'll ever be completely immune to them, but after having 3 in a week, I will say that bomb scares are neither scary nor exciting anymore. At least for now.

Today after school, A few friends and I stopped by at the end of the Jerusalem Race for the Cure. Because of school, we couldn't actually walk in it, but we did get to see the festivities at the end. We all got water bottles and we heard a few speakers talk about the importance of the Susan G Komen foundation and breast cancer awareness. It was really cool to see the huge amounts of people supporting the cause. The most exciting part, though, was the fact that the race ended in this park somewhere near the old city that we had never been to before, and we were able to use landmarks to find our way home in the quickest way possible.

Now It's the weekend, and I'm not sure if I'm going to wind up in Tel Aviv for Yitzchak Rabin's 15 year Memorial Ceremony or not, but I'm sure that I'll keep you posted on whatever I do.

Until than, thanks for reading and have a great weekend!
Becca

Weddings and Herzlya and Classes, OH MY!

Hey everybody,

It has been a crazy week, so it's been really tough to find the time to post. Because of that unfortunate fact, this post is going to be really long. Sorry.

I'm going to begin from last Thursday night, when I had the experience of being a fly on the wall during one of the most interesting spectacles of my life: an religious Israeli wedding.


I wish that I could tell you who was getting married. If I understood it correctly, the wedding invitation came from the fact that Art (the guy I went with) and his wife Carol have been helping to support Ethiopian girls go to college, and the most recent girl whom they supported was getting married, so they were invited. Carol was still in the states, so I was Art's plus one. He had never met the bride, and neither of us knew anyone else there; so to say the least, we looked pretty lost.

When Art picked me up (in my borrowed-modern-orthodox-elbow-and-knee-covering outfit (of course)), we drove over to a Kibbutz near Beit Shemesh (between Jerusalem and Tel Aviv) where the wedding was taking place.

There were many interesting parts of this wedding, but I'll just note a few things that I found particularly fascinating.

1) The bride was Ethiopian and I believe secular while the groom came from a very religious background. I assume this because many Ethiopian girls who were at the wedding were wearing less than modest clothing while the majority of non-Ethiopian men who were there were wearing tzitzit and had epic pais. if your not Jewish, I'm sorry. You're just going to have to be confused for a bit.
2) Before the ceremony began, there was a little ceremony called Kabalat Panim which happens at all Dati (religious) weddings. The bride and the groom each have a separate reception. The men went inside where the dinner was going to take place and the women were outside. The bride's reception consisted of women sitting on the couch next to the bride and giving her words of wisdom while other women sang and danced around her. It looked very sweet, but I can honestly not begin to portray to you just how out of place I felt.

I didn't go inside (obviously), but I observed that the grooms reception consisted of drunken dancing (yes, BEFORE the ceremony) followed by ma'riv (evening prayer). The two receptions went on for about 30-45 minutes, and ended when the men burst from the buildings singing and dancing with the groom outside. He walked into the bride's reception and put her veil over her face (I forget the name of the ritual, but it's symbolic of the story of Jacob being tricked into marrying Leah when he wanted to marry Rachel back in the Bible. He then left the circle, and his friends and family danced all the way up to the Chupah (wedding canopy) with him. While there were chairs nicely set up for people to sit in to watch the ceremony, the men found it more fitting to surround the chuppah as though the wedding was a concert.

Next, the bride was led up the chuppah by (I assuume) her mother and grand mother. The flock of women (and even men) surrounded her throughout the whole process. It was quite a site to see.

I'm not going to outline the entire wedding ritual, but if you've never been to a religious Jewish wedding before, I urge you to Wikipedia it or something so you can understand what happens as the rituals are pretty cool. There were a few things that happened during this ceremony that I feel like I should point out though.

1) Whenever the rabbi stopped talking for whatever reason, the men flocking the Chuppah picked some wedding song and started singing loudly.
2) The only people who had a good view of the wedding were the camera men. They were standing directly in front of the ceremony so that no one could see it.
3) The Ketubah (wedding contract) was not signed by both the bride and the groom, but rather only by the groom. When the Rabbi gave the bride the Ketubah, he told her to give it to her mother for the night and to then put it in her home and never lose it. Though in modern Judaism the Ketubah is less legally relevant, I found it interesting that they still emphasized it as being an important way for women to have rights within the marriage.
4) Every single person who was called up to read one of the seven wedding blessings at the end of the wedding was a member of the grooms family who was a Rabbi.
5) When the groom broke the glass thus solidifying the marriage, instead of allowing the new couple to walk into their reception, the grooms friends attacked them and started dancing with them UNDER THE CHUPPAH. In true Israeli fashion, these men had no patience.

At that point, it was about 10 at night and Art had a lot of driving to do that night, we decided to leave instead of staying for the drunken bacchanal with a bunch of people we didn't know. As we left the wedding, a Charadi man who had been at the wedding asked us if we were going back to Jerusalem and asked us for a ride, so we took him with us. As we were sort of confused as to how to go (even though we had directions), we took his advice as to how to get back to my home. Sure enough, he took us back to his ultra orthodox neighborhood and sent us back to where I live on the most busy road ever. To say the least, we got screwed over. And even though a Charadi man took advantage of us since we were merely lost Americans, we still had a very enjoyable and interesting night.

The next morning, I woke up and went to the bus station to go to Herzlya to visit my friend Mika who is studying at IDC, the college in Herzlya. Herzlya is a suburb right outside of Tel Aviv, and it is beautiful. It is not touristy the way that most every other place that I've been to thus far has been, but rather is filled with genuine Israeli stores and people.

We spent Friday afternoon hanging out and getting back in touch as I hadn't seen her in nearly two hours and had Shabbat dinner with her roommate and a bunch of her roommates friends. Her roommate was from South America, but since she had Israeli parents, she is fluently tri-langual. Her friends were from all over the world, and the Shabbat table was surrounded by Israelis, Brits, Argentinians and more. Also, all of them were in their mid 20's. When I told them I was 18, they were shocked, and one of them told me that she assumed I was 22. WIN! We spent the rest of the weekend Shabbat sleeping, talking, watching TV, walking around Herzlya and hanging out. It was very restful, and it was quite nice to be away from the Nativ bubble for a while and to instead be around a group of older people. I definetly think I saw a preview of what my life could look like in 5 years. To say the least, I'm terrified.

The next exciting thing that happened was Monday night, when the Nativ women's football team had is first game. Many of us had class that ended at 6 and we were supposed to meet as a group at 6:15 for the game that started at 7. I should mention that it takes 45 minutes to get from school back to base. The large group of us literally sprinted from our Holocaust class to the bus, from the buses to our rooms, and then the group of us ran about a mile and a half to the field. Huffing and puffing, though, we made it (pretty much) on time. We were very proud...but the game hadn't happened yet.

To call the game football isn't really fair, since it is 5 on 5 and no contact, but it was fun all the same. We have about 20 girls on our team, and about 25 people came to cheer us on, so we were one big loud annoying group, but we had fun. And we SLAUGHTERED the other team. They had been playing for 3 years and we had been practicing for a week. It was quite funny.

Tuesday was pretty low key, but at the Nativ night time activity, we talked about the Yizchak Rabin assassination as it happened 15 years prior to the day. We watched a video about him and talked a bit about the lessons that Israel has learned from that event, and it was interesting to talk about such a pivotal moment in Israeli history from the place where it happened instead of  from the states. After the Rabin talk, the Executive VP of the United Synagogues spoke to us about some of the problems facing the conservative movement in preparation for our conservative movement boot-camp this weekend and then fielded our questions. I asked him a question that I thought was pretty basic, and something pretty incredible happened: HE OFFERED ME A JOB!

It was half a joke and half not, but he handed me his card in the middle of the talk and told me to contact him when I got out of college. To say the least, it was funny to watch the reaction of the college graduate staff as they asked him why they didn't offer to hire them. The honest best part of the talk, though, occurred when the door of the theater we were sitting in swung open and an ultra orthodox Charedi man appeared at teh door. It was very funny.

Wednesday and Thursday were both very low key. I wish that I had something really interesting to talk about, but this post is quite long, and nothing that interesting happened during the days. I will say this though: I'm loving my classes, I'm enjoying being at school, high school was way more difficult, and I'm loving life in Israel.

Until next time, thanks for reading!
Becca

I Survived My First Week of College!

Hey Everybody,

Last time I checked in, I made the lovely mistake of forgetting the most epic part of my post (the rain during services on Saturday) the first time I posted, so if you happened to read the post and rain rings no bell, please go to the actual blog (beccarosenthal.blogspot.com for those of you getting email updates) and read it. It'll blow your mind. This week, however, was all about college. Hopefully I won't forget anything.

After posting on Sunday, I headed off to the bus stop to take a bus to Hebrew U. I had only one class on Sunday, and it was pretty uneventful. The interesting parts of the day at Hebrew U really had nothing to do with class. As soon as I stepped off the bus and through the security gate, I was handed a flower and a piece of paper with a nice note to the students of Hebrew U welcoming me to a new school year. It was in Hebrew. Needless to say, I had no idea what it was talking about. It was a nice gesture though. As my friends and I headed out of the main bus building, we walked along the same paths leading up to the International School that we had been walking for the entire previous month, but it was by no means the same place. It was filled with students walking, talking, hanging out, listening to the live broadcast of the Hebrew U radio show, playing music. It looked like a day at a normal college. Until I heard a familiar chorus of a song: "Find me somebody to love, find me somebody to love, find me somebody to love..." over and over again. I looked in front of me, and I see a massive crowd of students standing in front of a building holding balloons and I <3 HU signs singing that part of the song "Somebody to Love" by Queen. I then looked at the door of the building and saw a guy with a camera. I was so confused until I saw this video.
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=IPo-6kxgiDk&feature=player_embedded
I was there when they filmed it. Welcome to college. 

My class on the Modern Middle East was very interesting in terms of subject material, but the lecturer was really bad. I ultimately decided that I was going to stick it out anyways.

On Monday, I fought my way into a class called "A Post Modern Reading of Modern Jewish Texts" which has the most incredible professor I've ever had the honor of learning from. He is the kind of guy who teaches you something that causes you to make all of these seemingly logical and brilliant connections and then explains to you why those conclusions are actually the most problematic thoughts in the world. I love it! After that, I had a holocaust class from another completely brilliant lecturer. He understands that we've all studied the holocaust before, so he doesn't spend time on things that we all have known forever. Instead, he looks at the war through all of these different lenses. It's been 2 days and I'm already obsessed. My only other class is Hebrew, and that seems to be the right level for me this time (thank god).

On Monday night, the Nativ Girls football team had its first practice. It was awesome to see about 20 girls from my program show up to play football on Monday and Thursday nights in a league in Jerusalem. After winning one of two quarterback spots, I headed back home knowing that it was going to be a really fun season.

The last few days have been very uneventful, as they have been filled with classes and homework for the most part, but I can say a few things about it in reflection.

1) Head Royce, thank you. I am VERY prepared for college. Special shout out to Paul Scott who spent about 6 months focusing on Epistemology and Epistemological shifts, and all 3 of my history classes have now spent time trying to explain this concept.
2) Being a Nativer is sort of aweful at Hebrew U. There are 166 kids in the International School, and 66 of us are on Nativ. The majority of the other kids are Junior year abroad students. This means that roughly one in three kids in the Rothberg School are on Nativ, and most classes have at least 5 Nativ kids in it. We have targets over our heads, and everyone can tell that we're Nativ. Having said that, at least there is strength in numbers.
3) I love being in a campus with a lot of outdoor natural areas. There is a very nice botanical gardens and lots of nice grassy patches in which one can sit and work or just hang out with friends. Hebrew U is a beautiful campus (I urge you to watch the video I linked above since it shows you a lot of the Campus).

Tonight, I'm going to a wedding with Art Gould, and then I'm going to stay with a friend in Herzlya for the weekend. I'm sure I'll have a lot to report when I get back. Until then, Have a great weekend!

Becca

Let The Rain Fall Down...In Jerusalem

Hey All,

These past few days have been fairly uneventful, but there are still some fun things to report, so I figured that I'd report them.

Thursday morning, I took my hebrew exam, and I legitimately thought it was a joke. They gave us about 4 hours to do 6 pages of grammar work and write 8 sentences. Welcome to college? I hope not. I got back home and within a few minutes received a text from the director of our program telling us to meet in the auditorium in a few hours for an emergency meeting. Why?

Nativ 30 got bedbugs.

When I walked into our main courtyard, I instantly noticed something different--instead of seeing lovely Jerusalem stone and smelling a nice fresh breeze, I saw about 100 mattresses which smelled like gasoline standing vertically against the walls. It was among the funniest things I've ever seen.

When we went to the meeting with the director, he told us that since so many rooms (including my own) had reported bed bugs, they decided to err on the safe side and clean every single mattress from every single room. He also announced that Nativ would be paying for a round of laundry (YES!) because bugs tend to nest in clothing. I now have clean sheets and towels.

After the meeting, he sent us out to the courtyard (which smelled significantly better) to choose mattresses and then bring them up to our rooms. Imagine 100 teenagers trying to select mattresses, fighting over the best ones, taking pictures, jumping on them, jousting with them, then facing the reality that they had to carry the mattresses up 6 flights of stairs. That was my Thursday afternoon. Here are a few pictures.

I did join these boys to jump on these mattresses. But then the guy in charge of the hostile told us we had to stop. Having said that, it was SO fun!

Then I went to play a game of basketball. It was much more safe.

Friday afternoon, I went to what I thought was going to be an environmental festival, but my friends and I went to the wrong place, so we wound up at a trades fair. I saw a hippie trying to convince me that he made good sourdough bread, and I laughed at him for a good hour. I miss Bay Area bread. I then bought good granola and the best dates I've ever eaten.

Shabbat here was pretty low key, but there were some really cool highlights that I totally forgot to mention. In the morning, I went to shul at a place called Yemin Moshe (right outside the walls of the old city). As we were doing the silent Amidah speaking the lines about bringing rain, we looked outside the window and saw rain start POURING down from the sky. I don't mean pouring, I mean DUMPING. It was as though someone decided to take a bunch of buckets and dump them down on Jerusalem. It had apparently rained a bit the day prior, but I was napping when it happened, so this was my first rain of the season. When the leader did the repetition of the Amidah, the line about rain made the whole congregation start cheering (sort of). It was really cool, since as soon as the rain stopped (about 5 minutes later), the smell of rain wafted in through the windows and I got this really epic flash back to the Oakland hills. The best part, however, was that by the time the service ended about 20 minutes later, the sky was blue and the rain was nothing more than a memory. It was cool. I'm sorry for sending out a second post, but this is worth it.

For the rest of the day, I hung out with friends, played board games, slept, slept some more, slept a little bit more, then went out at night to enjoy a nice night with my British friends.

This morning, I slept in, and as soon as I'm done with this post, I'm going to hop in the shower and then head off to Hebrew U for my first day of real "college" class.

Wish me luck!
Becca

Nothing Interesting To Report

Hey All,

I feel bad, because this post is legitimately going to be the most boring one to date. I posted last Saturday, explaining how I had just been to a lovely Shabbat dinner and was spending the next day studying for a final. To be honest, nothing has happened since then.

I took the final on Sunday, and was pleased that it was by far the easiest test I've ever taken in my life (welcome to college?). I went out with a bunch of friends that night, and it was weird to be going to sleep at 3 in the morning on a school night being perfectly aware that I wouldn't be too tired to learn anything important since I wasn't being taught anything important (or at least new). From Monday through today (Wednesday), I've been spending my days going to Ulpan in the morning, attempting to not die of total boredom (easier said than done) during class, and then going home to spend time hanging out with friends doing uneventful things. Tomorrow (Thursday morning), I have a final exam for Hebrew, and I need a 65% to pass. To say the least, I'm not too worried.

I'm sorry that this post was so dull and that I have nothing really exciting to report, but I wanted to make sure to post something to inform people that I'm still alive and having a good time. The real semester starts on Sunday, and my classes should be INCREDIBLE. I'm taking Hebrew, "From Jewish Jesus to Christianity," "The Emergence of the Modern Middle East," and "Issues in the Study of the Holocaust: Perspectives on Perpetrators, Victims, and Bystanders."

Hopefully those classes will be a bit more challenging than the ones I've been in thus far, and I can't wait to relay some of the most interesting information to you.

Talk to you all later!
Becca

The End of the Holiday Season

Hey All,

In my last post, I mentioned that I would talk about life in Jerusalem after desert survival, so here goes.

When we got back from the desert, our program director mentioned to us that the final day of Sukkot (which was Tuesday) is a very fun day in Jerusalem as their are parades, art shows, festivals, free live music, and much more. He wasn't wrong. I just went to a lot of the wrong places and therefor only got to see a small amount of the festivities.

My friend and I walked to a park called Gan Sacher where the international parade was beginning and a fun festival was taking place. We saw delegations from all over the world wearing some really wacky costumes, throwing us flags, singing cheesy Israeli songs and speaking in more languages than I could count. I took a lot of pictures, but my camera is currently getting repaired so I can't upload them. I'm sorry. I'll describe some of the best outfits though. There was a group of about 30 people wearing outfits appropriate for high priests in the 2nd Temple Period. They were wearing long robes with fake breastplates on them and pope-like hats. Another group of Christians were walking around holding signs with verses from prophets which confirmed the holiness and importance of Jerusalem. Many of my friends were in other places and were able to watch the actual parade, but I couldn't.

Because my friend and I missed the parade, we walked back taking a leisurely route stopping at pretty much every jewelry show we could find. There were TONS of tables selling some beautiful work, but I didn't have enough money on me to buy any of them. Some day I'll go back...

Sukkot ended, but as has been the case with every other Holiday during the High Holiday season, it was only time to prepare for yet another Holiday: Wednesday Night was Erev Simchat Torah. Again non Jews, I'm sorry for confusing you. To give the best explanation I can though, I'll just say that Simchat Torah is the celebration of finishing reading the whole Torah, celebrating it's existence, and then rolling it all the way back to the beginning to read it over again.

Wednesday night, a large group of us went to a shul called Shirah Chadasha to celebrate the Holiday. It is a Modern Orthodox shul that I really enjoyed. The men and women are divided in prayer (as they are in all orthodox shuls) but they sit side by side with a divider in the middle (like Beth Jacob in the Bay Area), AND women are allowed to lead certain parts of the services and read torah. The Chazzan stand is split down teh middle of the shul with part of it on either side of the Mechitza. When the Hakafot were going on (rounds of dancing with the torah), the men and the women each received 3 Torahs. While I prefer to pray in an Egalitarian Setting, I enjoyed feeling as though I was at least wanted in an Orthodox Shul.

The Hakafot were insane. Women were going NUTS jumping around, clutching on to the Torah as though no one could ever take it from them, and everyone was grinning from ear to ear for the entirety of the hour and a half long song and dance session. It was so much fun to dance along with total strangers in such a joyous manner.

For the non Jews, I'm realizing that you're just going to want to stop reading all together here since none of what I have left to say will mean anything to you (I'm really sorry, but I miss you all and hope to speak with you soon).

The next morning, I went to Simchat Torah services at a small Egalitarian Minyan made up of mostly American rabbinical students in Israel for a short period of time called Kedem. I hadn't even known that Simchat Torah morning had services, so it was quite an experience. There were a few things that set this service apart. I'll just list a few of them.

1) It is the longest service of the year. LONGER than Yom Kippur
2) Though It's not a specific commandment to get drunk, people have no problem dishing out alcohol to celebrate the joy of the Torah (and Dad you'll be proud of me, but I enjoyed the whiskey that I was handed).
3) There is a kiddush break in the middle of the service BECAUSE it is so long.
4) When they read the end of the Torah, anyone who wants an Aliyah gets one, therefor, congregations split up into as many rooms as they have Torahs so that they can move faster. Also during this portion, they reread the same 4 portions of the end of Deuteronomy over and over and over and over and over again. Cohens and Levis are VERY important here and tend to have to do many more aliyot in order for the readings to be halachically legal.


I got to services at about 8:30. Hallel lasted until roughly 9, Hakafot (dancing) lasted until roughly 11, Kiddush took another half hour and reading the end of the Torah took another hour, so I decided to leave the service at that point. I talked to a few of my friends who stayed, and they explained that I missed the rolling back of the Torahs and the reading of Breishit (which I was prepared to miss).

THIS CONCLUDES MY DISCUSSION OF SIMCHAT TORAH, SO EVERYONE CAN RESUME THE READING HERE.

High Holiday season is officially over. As much as I don't want to be saying this, I will say that I've been holiday-ed out, and I am more than OK with the fact that I will not be celebrating any big Holidays (obviously Shabbat will still happen) until Hanukkah in December. Having said that, the High Holidays in Israel were truly magical, and I hope that people who have been reading my blog consider the prospect of spending them in Israel at some point.

On Friday, I had a very low key morning, but for Shabbat dinner i had a real treat when I went to Rachel Heinstein's house for Shabbat dinner. Rachel is a former Hebrew/Judaic Studies teacher of mine from Middle School. She lives in Talpiyot, which is a neighborhood of Jerusalem about 35 minutes walking from where I live. I took a bus to her apartment and enjoyed a very nice home cooked meal (with amazing Morrocan food) and the most incredible Challah I had ever eaten (it was cooked with Zatar (a classic Middle Eastern spice) in the dough).

It was very nice to catch up with a person whom I hadn't seen in over 4 years, but more importantly, it was refreshing to see the incredible hospitality of Israelis. She mentioned as I left that I was welcome any time, and furthermore, if I wanted to bring a friend, I should feel more than free to do so.

I am not spending my Shabbat studying for my first "college" final which I have tomorrow in my Jerusalem class. This post is so long since I've been procrastinating doing that, so I'm going to get back to studying now.

Until next time, have a great Shabbat,
Becca

Desert "Survival" and Hol Hamoed

Hey Everyone,

Last time I posted, I talked about backpacking, and I stated how excited I was to go camping in the beautiful Negev Desert in Israel for 3 days. I'll let you know how it all went.

Before I start, I just want to say that I'm not going to be posting pictures onto this blog, but I'll give you the link to the Facebook album that I posted. Here's the link for those of you who don't want to read this. http://www.facebook.com/album.php?aid=296011&id=705901132&l=5d50a14e3e
 
On Sunday morning, we woke up at the crack of dawn, packed everything up, got on the busses and headed to Ein Gedi to pray and eat breakfast before the hike. After breakfast, the director of the program gathered us all together and explained some hysterical news.

But first, some background: We had left so early in the morning to begin a program called Desert Survival. The idea was that we would hike from about 10-5 in the desert through the heat of the day and try to "survive" the heat. We didn't survive.

Our director gathered us together in order to tell us that it was too hot to hike--and the Israeli Government (or some subsidiary of the government that I don't know the name of) has implemented a Hike Freeze for all hikes in the desert. Therefor, instead of hiking for 7 hours that day, our director had to scramble to find us something else to do--so he did.

We went on a light stroll (we're talking 25 minute walk) in the desert at the one location where we were allowed to hike and then took a jeep ride to a natural spring where we got the chance to go swimming. Not a single one of us had a bathing suit or an extra pair of shorts to change into, but it didn't matter as we all had a total blast swimming, and the lack of drying caused all of the girls to look as though we were lactating once we got dressed.

That night, we took a nighttime walk by the light of the full moon. It was really exciting to take a walk in the middle of the desert in the middle of the night with no flashlights and be able to see everything. It reminded us how people have been able to live in the desert for thousands of years.

Because of the hike freeze, we woke up at 4 the next morning so we could take a hike before the freeze began at 9 AM. We prayed (really long service because of the sukkot stuff), ate and left to take the hike. There were a few big highlights.

1) As we were hiking, I saw the same spray painted trail markers as we saw when hiking up in the north of Israel, meaning that I was on the same trail in teh south as I was in the north. That realization was really fun.

2) We went to one place that was a fossil bed for amonite in the middle of the desert. Our guide pointed out that millions and millions of years ago, the site of Israel was underwater. That area was most likely a shore.

3) From the top, we could see this incredible view of the desolate nothingness that is the desert, and it was BEAUTIFUL. I urge you to check out the pictures. The link is at the top of this post.

From there, we went back to Jerusalem.

Now I'm here. There was a parade and a lot of epic events going on in Jerusalem yesterday, and I'll write about in my next post when I talk about Simchat Torah (which begins tonight).

So until then, have a great Simchat Torah!
Becca