Bye for Now

After an incredible year in Jerusalem, we had a very busy, productive, and meaningful summer. We both had the opportunity to work at Congregation Agudas Achim in Alexandria, Virginia -- Geoff worked with the rabbi, and I worked with the cantor. We were also fortunate to spend time with Geoff's family in the DC area and with my family on a trip to Missouri in July. We are now settled in our new apartment in New York, awaiting the start of classes (tomorrow!) and enjoying the altogether different experience of NYC from the 11th story!

This will be our last blog post for the foreseeable future. Thanks for reading over the past year!

Bye for now,
Katy and Geoffrey

Saying goodbye to friends and family:

Shabbat and Yom Yerushalayim

We had a very nice final Shabbat in Jerusalem. We spent Friday night in the Old City with family, spent Saturday morning with our friends at Kehilat Kedem, and spent Saturday afternoon wandering around the western part of Jerusalem, near the Knesset. We trekked out in that direction to attend the 2nd birthday party of one of our teacher's daughters, which was held at the Jerusalem Bird Observatory; while we were in the area, we also got to spend some time wandering through the rose garden by the Knesset building, with its 400 species of roses and a large "garden of the nations" - gardens donated by representatives of countries from all over the world, displaying their nations' flora.

After Shabbat, Israel began its celebration of Yom Yerushalayim, the day commemorating the liberation of the Old City of Jerusalem in 1967. I spent the evening studying, but was treated to a nice fireworks display visible through our apartment window; Katy went to Yakar, one of the congregations in our neighborhood, for a rather cramped but otherwise festive singing of Hallel (the psalms of praise). This morning, I went with my Hebrew class to the Bible Lands Museum (for a Hebrew-language tour of the collections); Katy had a more Jerusalem-focused day, spending much of it with a friend on the Mount of Olives, which offers a terrific view of the Old City:





In the afternoon, we met up downtown, and passed by a huge Yom Yerushalayim parade:

Some of the things we'll miss about Israel

There are many things that we will miss about Jerusalem. We will miss the rhythm of life in Jerusalem; we will miss the intricate connection between the Jewish calendar and the agricultural cycle in Israel. We will miss being surrounded by our own ancient history. We will miss the passion that Israelis express, both for important things and everyday things. We will miss having a second bathroom, a beautiful porch overlooking the Knesset, the various unique features of Israeli apartments, the presence of cats (instead of the rats of NYC), and Gabe, our gecko. We will miss the fresh and delicious fruits and vegetables, the sunlight and the cheap flowers that they sell on the corner on Friday. And, we will of course miss our family and friends who are here and whom we hope to visit again soon.

The City of David

I went to the City of David with my friends Mark and Jen. The site features an intricate underground water system which was difficult to understand without the tour, but the views were interesting.

Here is one of the Arab village just on the other side of the ancient City of David. It made for quite a contrast with familiar West Jerusalem.

(You too should visit Jerusalem!)

We’ve had the pleasure of seeing lots of friends from elsewhere in the world who have come to visit Jerusalem over the past month – our friend Aviva came to participate in the Hazon Bike Ride, our friend Sara came to do research on genetic diseases, and our friends Ariel and Melissa came to visit family and friends.

Here are some pictures from an evening with Ariel and Melissa and our friends Mollie and Aaron:

Thinking about the Conservative Movement

I’ve been having a lot of conversations this year about possible directions for the Conservative movement in America; I suppose that being in Israel has provided some helpful distance, and has also provided a good chance to hear other perspectives (by comparing notes with my fellow students at Schechter coming from their respective programs in Los Angeles, Buenos Aires, and Israel). I’ve also been inspired by the work of the Shefa Network, a new network of “Conservative Jewish Activists,” which has provided an online forum for thinking about dreams and concrete visions for the movement.

Acknowledging that this is probably only of interest to a limited number of the people reading this blog, I'll do my best to keep this brief, but will go ahead and share a few of my thoughts about good things for the Conservative movement to do. Here are some preliminary suggestions regarding areas to focus on:

1. Getting over our fears of talking seriously about halakhah (Jewish law): being willing to teach about the ways in which Jewish practice is designed to influence the smallest details of daily life, rather than focusing on the practices that are easy and palatable to our congregants.

2. Being willing to distinguish between minhag and halakhah, between traditional customs and binding obligations. As I’ve learned from my teacher Moshe Benovitz this year, we should be focusing our attention on the things that we describe as divine commandents, and only worry about the additional customs when they seem to be of value. When extra-legal customs lead us in directions that bring about unnecessary and painful restrictions (for instance, in dealing with homosexuality or some of the issues connected with intermarriage), we ought to give them less weight and focus instead on the halakhic bottom line.

3. Making connections between halakhah and aggadah, between our binding obligations and the theological and ethical values of our tradition. We are pretty good at doing this, and have produced some good literature on how various aspects of ritual and prayer ought to be impacting our behavior, character, and worldview, but this is something we should really be making into one of the hallmarks of the Conservative movement. Part of the trick is defining what our “aggadic” values are; my teacher Rabbi Ira Stone has been doing some important work in that arena, and we should be paying attention.

4. Keep expanding serious adult education opportunities. I continue to think that the Conservative Yeshiva, where I studied three years ago and where Katy has been studying this year, is probably the most important institution that the Conservative movement has. We should be expanding its reach and also setting up other similar serious learning institutions (kollels) wherever we have large numbers of Conservative Jews.

5. Finding new ways to support Conservative Jewish Day Schools. Serious Jewish day-school education is undoubtedly the best way to strengthen the movement, but we don’t have the financial resources to make it possible to provide such an education to more than a small number of students. Most parents can’t afford private school tuition; even if they can, they’ve already paid their taxes, and would generally prefer to send their children to a decent public school at no extra cost rather than paying for a Jewish day school. I think that the best public policy solution for this problem is some sort of school voucher program, which the Conservative movement publicly opposes.

6. Refocusing the way we think about Bar and Bat Mitzvah training. Since parents are interested in having their children undergo some sort of training, we should take advantage of the time we have with our students to focus on things that will be more lasting than teaching them to read Torah or Haftarah. There are lots of other “mitzvahs” (commandments) that are likely to be more meaningful to students, and we should find ways to focus on whatever will create a lasting connection, even if that means ignoring Torah-reading-skills altogether. I’d like to imagine that the educational environment leading up to Bar and Bat Mitzvahs is a Beit Midrash (study hall) model, with lots of opportunity for individualized learning, rather than a classroom.

7. Reforming our approach to training cantors. This is Katy’s big issue, and one she started thinking about when she was looking at various cantorial programs. The curriculum for the training of Conservative movement cantors is a bit too focused on artistic performance, and not sufficiently focused on training cantors to be leaders who can teach and inspire humble prayer and devotion.

8. Restructuring the relationship between Conservative movement institutions. At present, the movement is filled with organizational chaos, which particularly presents problems in the realm of fundraising. We need some good consultants to help re-engineer the movement's structure so that we can more easily meet our goals.

UPDATE: An expanded version of these thoughts can be found here.

Studying

Katy finished her final paper (and has now become a confirmed expert on the Kedushah [“sanctification”] prayer in its many varieties) and, although she’s still doing Hebrew classes in the morning, she’s had lots of time to be spend time with friends all around the city. I haven’t been able to join her for quite as many nights on the town, since I’m mostly spending these final days in Jerusalem studying for exams and writing papers. Fortunately, traditional Jewish studying tends to be a fairly social activity, and my study partners and I have found lots of nice places to read the Talmud and the Shulchan Aruch.

With my chevrutas (study partners) Meir and Risa at Cafe Atara, a cafe noted for its delicious chai tea (illustrated here)


In the Beit Midrash (Study Hall) of the Conservative Yeshiva


In the Beit Midrash of the Schechter Institute

Explorations in Communal Prayer

Nearly every Shabbat morning that we’ve been in Jerusalem, we’ve spent our morning with a terrific community, Kehilat Kedem. Kedem is the only fully egalitarian minyan (prayer group) in the section of Jerusalem in which we live; it was founded four years ago, when I first arrived in Jerusalem, to fill that need. Fully-egalitarian prayer is not exactly all the rage in Jerusalem (as opposed to semi-egalitarian prayer, which is the rage, since it’s very much on the cutting edge of Orthodoxy) and so the minyan remains small, but it has certainly attracted a solid core of Israelis in addition to a large number of students like us who are here for one or two years and are studying at Schechter, the Conservative Yeshiva, the Pardes Institute, or the Reconstructionist Rabbinical College. It’s been a wonderful home for us this year.

On Friday nights, we often don’t make it to shul (synagogue), although this semester we’ve been regulars at the Idan Ha-Zahav nursing home, where we go and do some singing for/with the residents there. Katy went a number of times last semester, and this semester we made this our fixed volunteer project – bringing in Shabbat with songs and visiting with the nursing home residents.

When we do make it to shul, we’ve made some effort to experience some of the diversity of synagogues here. Some of these have been less successful.

1) We went to Jerusalem’s Great Synagogue one Friday night, to get a taste of what a giant synagogue with a full choir and a world-famous cantor would be like. We were not so impressed with the prayer experience; it felt a little more like a barbershop-quartet concert (although it was more of a septet, I believe).

2) In Tsefat, we went to the Ashkenazi Ari synagogue – a synagogue founded on the hillside spot where Isaac Luria (the Ari) and his disciples allegedly began the custom of welcoming in Shabbat with the series of psalms that Jewish communities all over the world use today. Our experience there was also not particularly impressive; it even featured a full-blown argument about who should lead the service. (Our Saturday morning experience, at the Conservative synagogue in Tsefat, was a much more satisfying experience, even though they didn’t get the quorum of people required for public prayer).

3) At a Reform synagogue not far from our house, we were treated to a recorder concert as part of the evening – like the Great Synagogue experience, it was aesthetically nice, I suppose, but not exactly our favorite mode of prayer.

We’ve also balanced these out, though, with a number of more positive Friday night experiences:

1) As we wrote about earlier in the year, the Italian Synagogue is an incredibly interesting place with really spirited and powerful prayer.

2) We’ve been to Shira Hadasha, a liberal Orthodox minyan right next door to Kedem, on a few occasions. It’s one of the few Orthodox congregations in the world that has taken a number of steps to allow women a high level of ritual leadership. Being there gives me a lot of hope for the rise of feminism in the Orthodox world. It’s also a place that does a particular good job of using song as a means of devotion rather than simply for the sake of aesthetics. And it's very crowded. As I mentioned above, places that are on the cutting-edge of Orthodoxy tend to generate a lot of excitement in the wider community, and attract a fair number of people who ideologically fit in well in the Conservative movement and whom I would love to see at a place like Kedem.

3) This past Friday night, we went to one of the Sephardic synagogues in Jerusalem’s Old City, the Yochanan Ben Zakkai synagogue, which was built by Jews exiled from Spain in 1492. It was a prayer experience with a lot of spirit, beautiful Sephardic melodies, and a really nice interplay between the prayer leader and congregation. The Song of Songs was chanted outloud in call-and-response format to a really nice melody, giving an extremely beautiful form to one of the most important texts for welcoming in Shabbat.

Teaching Tunes

Last night we had a night of singing at our apartment with the Yeshiva community. Some of the teachers came and taught some of the songs and melodies that we'd been wanting to learn all year.

Lag B'Omer

Since the second day of Passover we have been counting the days until the next holiday, Shavuot. I don't mean that we are "counting down" the days in the sense that I counted down the days until the end of the school year last year: we actually, literally, count each day for 49 days. After the exodus from Egypt, the Israelites traveled for 7 weeks until they received the Torah at Mt. Sinai (marked by the holiday of Shavuot). In the times of the Temple, there was a special sacrifice offered on each of the days of the counting of the Omer (omer literally means barley). Unfortunately the period of the Omer has known plagues and destruction for Jews over the centuries. It has therefore become associated with mourning and as such, many Jews refrain from certain things during this period such as hair cuts, listening to music and weddings.

But the tradition tells that on the 33rd day of the Omer, the deathly plagues lifted. It has thus become a day of celebration amidst a period of mourning. People cut their hair, go to concerts and have weddings. The 33rd day of the Omer is also associated with the anniversary of the death of Rabbi Shimon Bar Yochai the rabbi attributed with writing the Zohar, the main text of the Kabbalists. Because of his associations with light, it has become the tradition to build huge bonfires everywhere.

Last night we got to celebrate the engagement (with a "Tena'im" ceremony) of two of our friends here. We sang and danced with them, and on our walk home we saw the many bonfires that people were enjoying.

As we walked by one parking lot, we saw maybe 20 bonfires with people circled around them. The scene was exactly how I imagine Jerusalem must have looked during the three pilgrimage festivals when everyone came to the Temple with their sacrifices. The group in the parking lot was quite diverse, the bonfire tradition has been taken up by both religious and secular Israelis. Unlike what would happen in the United States, all the stores were closed: joining in the fun of these bonfires is more important to most store owners than the business opportunity.

Our apartment also has a huge parking lot outside, so we got to see the festivities right outside of our window (which we had firmly closed to cut down on the smoke!)

Here are some pictures showing both the pre- and during- festivities outside of our window:





Here are some pictures taken with friends on the walk home from the engagment party:

Talmudic Botany

The centerpiece of what I'm doing this year continues to be reading Talmud, the giant collection of ideas and instructions about how to live one's life more specifically described here as being a collection of discussions about

agriculture, astrology, biology, business, carpentry, chemistry, child-raising, cooking, cosmology, economics, engineering, finance, genetics, geology, happiness, history, kabbalah, law, linguistics, literature, marriage, mathematics, medicine, military science, music, philosophy, physics, planetology, psychology, social science, synergetics, theology, transportation and zoology.

My learning for the past month or so has been particularly focused on biology and agriculture. Most recently, we've been dealing with the question of what defines a tree, a question of some consequence in Judaism because we have a somewhat unique relationship with trees (and especially fruit-bearing trees) -- we give them special protections (both in wartime and in general), say special blessings of thanksgiving before eating their fruit and upon seeing them bloom, have a whole holiday dedicated to them, and see them as symbolic of a range of concerns. A tree is generally defined in Jewish tradition as a plant which lasts from year to year, but there are some plants whose status as a tree is slightly ambiguous; the one plant of uncertain status that my Talmud class has been particularly focused on is the caper-bush. One of the features of being in Israel today and studying texts about caper-bushes written in the land of Israel in the third century C.E. is that Israel is as full of caper-bushes today as it was then. In order to learn more about them, all my Talmud class had to do was to step outside the front doors of the Schechter building. I've enjoyed following the development of one of the caper-bushes right outside of Schechter: last week, as you can see in the first picture below, the caper buds that are a bit further developed beyond the way that we're accustomed to seeing them in jars in the supermarket; today, as shown in the second picture, the buds are opening up into flowers.

Har Herzl

Last week Katy and I went with the students from Schechter to Har Herzl (Mount Herzl). This is where Theodore Herzl was buried after the establishment of the State of Israel, and it’s a location that was chosen deliberately – rather than seeking to inter Herzl’s body in any of the locations of Jerusalem associated with religion, tradition, or Messianism, Herzl was buried on a bare hill in Western Jerusalem chosen because there was, apparently, nothing else there. The idea was to proclaim that Herzl’s vision of the founding of the state of Israel was not a continuation of Jewish history but a revolt against Jewish history – a break with everything that the past 2000 years of history had stood for. It’s a problematic idea, but one which is very important to understand in order to understand Israel’s founding vision.

Har Herzl is also where many leaders of the State have been buried: prime ministers, presidents, and speakers of the Knesset (the latter chosen not because they’re so important, but to “represent the people,” so to speak) are eligible to be buried there. One of the most widely visisted graves is, of course, that of Yitchak Rabin, a grave that is unlike all the others surrounding it. Rabin’s has no peaceful shrubs surrounding it and instead reflects the starkness of his death.

We also spent some time in the military cemetery on Har Herzl, a place where one becomes acutely aware of the huge toll that war has taken on the State of Israel; such a high percentage of Israel’s young and promising leaders have been buried there that one can only imagine how different this country could be if the price of its defense were not so high.

Beit She'an

Two weeks ago we went to Beit She'an with the Yeshiva to see its ancient ruins and spend Shabbat at the youth hostel there. It was originally a Caananite city that King David later captured. It then was taken over by Alexander the Great, and of course, the Romans. Here are a few pictures taken at the ruins.




This is us walking down the original main street of Beit She'an. Like the Cardo here in Jerusalem, it was once filled with store fronts.



Here we are trying to get out of the sun for a minute. According to the Talmud, Beit She'an was one of the few places that the rabbis permitted swimming on Shabbat - as a necessity, because of the heat. Yes, it was quite hot, even in early May! These are two of my cantorial classmates, Elana and Ayelet along with Ayelet's daughter Anatalya.

Celebrating Katy's Birthday

We spent our evening at the Ticho House in downtown Jerusalem, one of the first houses in Jerusalem to be built outside of the city walls. It was the home, painting studio, and eye clinic of the painter Anna Ticho and her ophthalmologist husband, Avraham Ticho; today it’s a restaurant and museum. We enjoyed the beautiful gardens on the property there, delicious food (and birthday cake!) and live jazz. We also spent some time at the museum looking at Anna Ticho’s watercolor landscapes of Jerusalem and elsewhere in the land of Israel (“I didn’t choose the landscape – the landscape chose me,” she said) and Avraham Ticho’s Hanukkah lamp collection (a particular passion of a doctor devoted to bringing light into people’s lives, the museum curators noted).

Katy reports that she has had a great birthday, even if she had to spend an hour of it taking her final exam for her Biblical Grammar course.

Happy Birthday!

Celebrating Yom Ha-atzma'ut

We were in downtown Jerusalem last night to celebrate Yom Ha-Atzma'ut along with what seemed like a very high percentage of Jerusalem's residents. A very large portion of the city center was closed to auto traffic, and all the streets were quite packed with people late into the night; even small children and parents pushing baby carriages seemed to be roaming about past midnight. Lots of people were wearing Israeli flags in some way or another - generally, either as skirts or as capes. I was surprised to see even some number of seemingly Haredi ("ultra-orthodox") Jews there, which was surprising given the general Haredi disapproval of Yom Ha-Atzma'ut (and the general Haredi ambivalence about the State of Israel). Overall, it was nice to see a good cross-section of Israeli Jews coming together to celebrate, and I love being reminded of how incredibly diverse Israelis are.

Our evening featured attending David Broza concert in Zion Square (at the center of the downtown area), running into lots of familiar faces, and trying to avoid the small children wielding inflatable plastic baseball bats and hammers decorated with Israeli flags and the spray foam which, for some unfathomable reason, seem to have become popular tools for merrymaking on Yom Ha-Atzma'ut. We also enjoyed folk-dancing, juggling, and fireworks. Here are some pictures from the evening:


















Today, we joined the cantorial school class for a barbecue (the most standard feature of Yom Ha-Atzma'ut here).



This evening, we joined a massive public sing-a-long ("shirah b'tzibur" - singing classic Israeli songs, mostly 1950's folk songs which we didn't really know the words to; the fact that they projected the words onto the side of a building wasn't so helpful, since the projector was not so powerful and the building not so easy to project onto). And we enjoyed some good Israeli food (falafel and pita and houmous and other salads) as well.



(Regarding "good Israeli food": yesterday's Ha'aretz featured a very interesting full-length article on the role of pita and houmous as an Israeli national symbol. Among the relevant statistics: at this very moment there is a container of houmous in more than 95 percent of the homes in Israel.)

Yom Ha-Zikaron/Yom Ha-Atzma’ut

This past day has been Yom Ha-Zikaron, Israel's Memorial Day. Like on Yom Ha-Shoah, a memorial siren brought the country to a standstill last night and again this morning. Here's a picture from Ha'aretz of traffic at 11 AM in downtown Jerusalem:


Now we’re moving into Yom Ha-Atzma’ut, Independence Day, which immediately follows Yom Ha-Zikaron. The juxtaposition of the two days drives home the message that Israel’s independence has depended on the soldiers who died defending it. We're also engaging in what Rabbi Yitz Greenberg describes as “the classic dialectical move of Jewish tradition from sadness to celebration, from mourning to joy, from death to life, in the wink of an eye.” We tend to fast or mourn shortly before days of great celebration (e.g. before Purim, Pesach, Sukkot, Shavuot, Tu B'av); so too Yom Ha’Atzmaut is preceded by a week filled with sadness – Yom Ha-Shoah and then Yom Ha-Zikaron.

Since today's an ideal time to reflect on the State of Israel, I’ll share thoughts from a few interesting speakers whom I’ve heard at Schechter over the last few weeks:

1) Rabbi Yossi Turner shared his thoughts on the contemporary significance of Yom Ha-Atzma’ut. He argued that the Israeli public has tended to see the meaning of the state of Israel along the lines suggested by Theodore Herzl and David Ben Gurion: that the political establishment of the state itself is the ultimate goal of Zionism, protecting Jews from anti-Semitism and “normalizing” our existence as a people. Is this enough of a reason to inspire Israelis to celebrate Yom Ha-Atzma’ut? Turner argued that, in our era, we should be re-focusing our attention on other visions for the State of Israel that present the state as providing not just a political safe-haven but also providing for the “cultural and spiritual rejuvenation of the people” – the sorts of visions associated with Ahad Ha’am, Martin Buber, and Mordecai Kaplan as opposed to Herzl and Ben Gurion.

2) Dr. Arik Carmon of the Israel Democracy Institute spoke with us about, among other topics, the instability of democracy in the State of Israel, something caused by a variety of factors: the fact that this is such a new state (of an old nation); the presence of a large Arab minority within the country that views their state as at war with their nation; the presence of so many questions about the identity of the state (hence the questions above; Israelis ask questions all the time like 'Israel is an answer to what question?'-- not the sort of question that most nation-states regularly ask themselves); the fact that Israel is the only democracy in the world without borders (because of a lack of agreement about how to define the state's identity); the fact that the Israeli public agenda is constantly overloaded, so that policymakers are constantly focused on the here and now ("in the evening, morning news is history") rather than on cultivating a long-term vision (let alone, say, a constitution for the state).

3) Rabbi Ron Kronish and Issa Jaber of the Interreligious Coordinating Council in Israel (ICCI) spoke with us about the process of creating dialogue and relationships between Arab Muslim, Arab Christian, and Jewish citizens of Israel. The question of the identity of Arab citizens of Israel - "Palestinian Arabs of Israeli Citizenship" is increasingly the popular term - is one of the questions that especially surfaces at this time of the year, since the Arab portion of the population here is not terribly enthusiastic about celebrating Yom Ha-Atzma'ut, singing "Hatikvah," and parading with the Israeli flag. Creating relationships between Arab Muslim citizens and Jews has been a particular challenge. It seems like the ICCI has had some clear successes in that area, and the fact that Israeli Arab Muslims are far, far more moderate then their brethren in the Palestinian territories (or their fellow-believers in much of the Muslim world) should be a sign for some hope. On the other hand, very few Muslim leaders in the state have declared any interest in engaging in this sort of meaningful dialogue with Jews, even if (as Issa Jaber claimed) there is a silent majority that supports such dialogue.

Yom Ha-Shoah

Yom Ha-Shoah, the day of rememberance for the Holocaust (in Hebrew, the "Shoah” [destruction], a more sensible term than the word “Holocaust” [sacrifice]), began last night.

At night, we went to Moreshet Avraham, one of Jerusalem’s Masorti (Conservative) synagogues, for their reading of “The Shoah Scroll” (Megillat Ha-Shoah), a text written by Avigdor Shinan that attempts to portray some of the horror of the Shoah in a form that can be read by communities on an annual basis. It’s a fairly chilling and effective text, a portion of which incorporates the cantillation used to read the Book of Lamentations. It seems to me to be one of the most effective efforts to compose such a text, though I think that there are others that are also quite effective, and I have no doubt that the Jewish people will continue the process of creating other texts that might be equally good at preserving the memory of the Shoah.

After the reading of Megillat Ha-Shoah, we watched an incredibly powerful documentary that left both of us with tears streaming down our cheeks: “Tak for Alt: Survival of a Human Spirit,” the story of a Holocaust survivor named Judy Meisel. Even though we’ve heard these sorts of stories many times before, we were still shocked by the un-human cruelty that characterized so many Nazi soldiers. What could possibly motivate soldiers to have such glee as they made people dig their own graves, as they killed everyone too weak to keep up with forced marches, as they dashed out the brains of babies on the ground in front of their parents?

This morning, at ten o’clock, the entire country came to a standstill as it does every year on this day. An air raid siren goes off, and everyone stops moving and becomes instantly silent. Katy stood with her ulpan class on King George Street, one of the major streets in Jerusalem, and saw the cars stopping in the middle of the street, the pedestrians stopping in the middle of crosswalks, conversations abruptly coming to an end. The ritual acknowledges that, on many levels, a moment of silence – pierced by the shofar-like cry of a siren - is the only appropriate response we can have.

At noon, we spent an hour at the Conservative Yeshiva with Rabbi Pesach Schindler, a Holocaust survivor and a dear teacher of both Katy and I, contemplating the place of self-examination by the Jewish people after the Shoah.

I’ve spent the day fasting, following a practice advocated by one of my teachers, Rabbi David Golinkin. I decided to do so despite three reservations about the practice:

1) the traditional view of fasting as a practice to raise consciousness of our sins and to stimulate our repentance. Fasting on Yom Ha-Shoah could seem to suggest the false theological conviction that tragedies like the Shoah came about because of our sins, something that no one should be thinking.

2) the widely-held sense that the response to the Holocaust should be a response that affirms life, not a practice of denial like fasting

3) if indeed some sort of abstinence is an appropriate practice for the day, I agree with my teacher Rabbi Ira Stone that a ta’anit dibur (abstinence from words) is preferable to a ta’anit ochel (abstinence from food). Jewish tradition teaches that initiating speech is unacceptable in the presence of a mourner because our speech often serves to trivialize tragic events. It is important to respond to tragedy with words as well, but it is important to make space for silence. Silence on Yom Ha-Shoah might also be an appropriate way to experience God’s absence – the blotting out of God’s presence and God’s image by the perpetrators of evil. On the other hand, fasts of speech are not easy for people to carry out in the course of their daily activities.

Despite these thoughts, though, refraining from food since last night seems to have been an effective practice for me for three reasons:

1) The repentance and self-examination associated with fasting are not totally out of place in response to the Shoah. Reflecting on one’s transgressions should not be linked with an admission of guilt for being a victim; but, rather, we should emerge from experiences of tragedy by reflecting on how we can be more effective at fighting evil in the world. As Golinkin argues, “we need to repent for our criminal apathy and silence which allowed the Nazis to progress towards the Final Solution unhindered and ignored.”

2) To quote Golinkin: “It is impossible for us, who did not experience the Holocaust, to imagine what it was like. But a common motif in almost every diary and memoir about the Shoah is that of hunger. Many suffered from acute malnutrition; all experienced hunger. One of the ways in which we can attempt to identify and empathize with the victims of the Shoah is to fast. By fasting we will remind ourselves in a tangible way of the hunger and suffering of the Six Million.”

3) In Jewish tradition, fasting goes hand in hand with giving of oneself to help others. Among other things that we’re doing is giving money saved by fasting to causes working to eliminate suffering in the world, in accordance with Rabbi Yitz Greenberg’s assessment that

Giving tzedakah is central to this day. Giving reasserts the value of human life. Taking responsibility for others repudiates the indifference of the bystanders which made the Holocaust possible. Thus authentic Jewish memory leads to acts of loving kindness rather than to hatred or revenge.

We’ve also spent some portion of the day thinking in practical terms about what can be done to prevent widespread denial of the Holocaust (especially a problem in this part of the world), steadily-increasing anti-Semitic violence, and preventing genocide from taking place in our own day. The Jewish community around the world is, not surprisingly, especially focused on the events in the Sudan today and taking action accordingly.

Our Pesach Travels

We spent the Seder and the first day of Pesach in Jerusalem. We were joined by three friends who are living in Cairo and made their own "exodus" from Egypt to Israel for the holiday - our friend Lindsay, and her friends Liz and Derek. The five of us spent the following week travelling throughout the north of Israel. Here are some pictures from our journey:


Derek and I engaging in a bit of interfaith Torah study on the second night of Pesach, before we started travelling


Katy, Liz, and Lindsay at Megiddo ("Armageddon"), our first stop as we drove north from Jerusalem towards Haifa.

In Haifa we were graciously hosted for the evening by our friend Yehuda and his family. They provided us with a great tour of the city, fantastic food, and lots of interesting conversation about the relationship between education and democracy and the role of spirituality and a vision of the good life in schools (the topics that Yehuda's father, a philosopher of education, gets to think about professionally).

Myself, Yehuda, Lindsay, Derek and Liz in Haifa, high up on Mount Carmel looking down on the port below

Katy, Lindsay, Liz, Yehuda, and Derek in Haifa with the Bahai Gardens ascending up Mount Carmel in the background

Katy, Lindsay, and Derek at the Bahai Gardens the following morning

Katy and I near the site on believed by Catholics to be the site of Elijah's Cave

We hiked down Mount Carmel to the site accepted by Jewish and Muslim tradition to be Elijah's Cave, and, after a lunch by the shore, took these cable cars back up to our rental car.

We travelled north from Haifa to the city of Akko. The picture here is by the city's crusader-era walls.

Katy and Lindsay in the underground crusader city at Akko

We also stopped by Peki'in, a Druze village and the alleged site of the cave in which Rabbi Shimon Bar Yochai (2nd century C.E.) and his son lived for a period of thirteen years in an attempt to escape from the world, an experience from which they eventually learned the profound lesson that a Jew is obligated to bring holiness into the material world rather than retreat from it.

We spent the next few nights in Tsefat, and used it as a base for exploring the Galilee and Golan Heights regions. In this picture we're enjoying breakfast at Cafe Baghdad in Tsefat, where we enjoyed multiple good kosher-for-Passover meals.

Our five-person travelling group at our hotel in Tsefat

Overlooking the Jordan River, at Gadot, an area best known for being the area that was constantly shelled by Syrian forces before Israel's capture of the Golan Heights in 1967

We briefly stopped by the "Mei Eden" (Waters of Eden) spring-water-production plant in Katzrin

We spent much longer at the Golan Winery in Katzrin ("the city of water and wine"), which was possibly the educational highlight of our trip. We learned a tremendous amount about the process of harvesting grapes and producing wines of all sorts. The Golan area is well-suited for wine production because of its high altitude, volcanic soil, and the range of climates within a small region that allow for the production of a wide variety of wines. In addition to learning about the modern facilities for wine production, we spent some time focusing on the history of wine production in Israel, the art of treading grapes in pre-modern wine production (done barefoot, so as not to crush the seeds and impart a bitter taste to the wine), and the seasonal cycle of wine production in the land of Israel (with the grape harvest traditionally beginning in the late summer on Tu B'Av and ending around the time of Rosh Hashanah and Yom Kippur).

Also at Katzrin, we visited the reconstructed site of a Jewish village from Mishnaic times. Here Katy and I are doing our best to look like Jews from the third century C.E.

Katy inside one of the reconstructed houses at Katzrin. Being at this site was also a highly educational experience, as we were able to get some insights into the realia of the texts that we're reading all the time. We also had the pleasure of seeing a short play and a fascinating movie there about the relationship between Rabbi Meir, one of the principal transmitters of Jewish oral tradition, and his excommunicated teacher Elisha Ben Abuya; the film highlighted the fact that Meir continued to learn from his teacher even after Elisha had rejected Jewish observance altogether, and held up this example as a source of hope that Haredi ("ultra-Orthodox) Jews could begin to respect and learn from the secular majority of the State of Israel.

The ruins of the ancient synagogue at Chorazin, built of black basalt like the rest of the structures in the town. This was one of the many ancient synagogues that we visited on our trip.

By the Sea of Galilee (on the road to Tiberias)

In Tiberias, looking down towards the tomb of Rabbi Hiyya and his sons. Beyond that is the city center and the Sea of Galilee.
The two of by the waterfall at Banyas, in the northern Golan The spring at Banyas

At the Temple of Pan at Banyas (also called "Pan-yas," originally named after Pan). This site was originally dedicated to Pan by the Greeks who came to the land of Israel in the third century B.C.E. Evidence of sacrifices to Zeus, Asclepius, Athena, Hera, Aphrodite, Artemis, Dionysus, and other gods were also found here. It eventually became part of a larger Roman sanctuary that continued to exist into the Byzantine era.

Nearby Kiryat Shemoneh; the snow-capped Mount Hermon, on Israel's northern border, is in the background

Katy at Tzippori, one of the centers of Jewish life throughout the early centuries of the common era. We spent our time there exploring the archaeological site, which includes a large number of well-preserved mosaics such as a villa floor focusing on the cult of Dionysus and a very interesting synagogue floor featuring Biblical scenes and a zodiac. In the background of the picture above you can see the areas to the northwest of Tzippori including Resh Lakish Forest on the left (presumably where the rabbi Resh Lakish spent his time as a bandit before repenting and becoming one of the most important rabbis of the 3rd century C.E.), and, in the distance, Mount Carmel and Haifa.

At the Mount of the Beatitudes ("Har Ha-Osher" in Hebrew). In this picture you can see two of Israel's seven species -- date palms and olive trees -- growing on the mountain.

Pesach Cleaning

We've spent the last few days before Pesach (Passover) in fairly typical fashion, scrubbing away at pots and pans and floors and shelves and tables and pretty much anything else that we can get our hands on. We've left the house for occasional expeditions such as going to a matzah factory in Mea Shearim, where we purchased a stack of round hand-made "shmurah" (i.e., with grain carefully guarded from coming into contact with water from the time of harvesting) matzahs.



Another Pesach-preparation expedition was to go down the street to kasher some of our pots and pans by dunking them in a giant pot of boiling water.


Otherwise, our recent existence has mostly been about battling it out with the forces of dirt and grime. Katy is, not surprisingly, much more dedicated to this battle than I am. I tend to accept that spring cleaning is a good idea, but midway through the process of cleaning tend to cry out that we can cut a few corners with the cleaning as long as we fulfill our obligation to get rid of leavening (hametz).

Katy, of course, is right. As Moshe Benovitz, one of my teachers at Schechter this year, argues, part of the original idea of Pesach was that it was the holiday of "total and merciless" cleaning -- not just getting rid of waste, but going so far as to get rid of one's sourdough (starter), which most people in the ancient world would keep alive for years and years. In the course of the development of Jewish law, the focus shifted away from house-cleaning and towards focusing on matzah, such that

according to the letter of the law, the house need not even be cleaned thoroughly for Passover. It is enough to eliminate leavened foodstuffs from the house (or put them away, annul them, and sell them to a non-Jew); the house need not be cleaned of other organic or inorganic dirt. Some people chant the mantra "dirt is not hametz" during their Pesah cleaning, in order to excuse a less than thorough job.

But most Jews who clean for Passover don't take advantage of such halakhic loopholes. They intuitively understand the true reason for the prohibition against hametz, and take advantage of the elimination of hametz as an opportunity to clean the house thoroughly in every respect. We are asked to renew ourselves entirely each spring: to cleanse our houses of the past. Leaven is just a particularly stubborn form of dirt chaining us to the past, dirt that can only be cleansed by means of a seven-day matzah diet.

Happy Pesach, and happy spring cleaning!

Music with Monks (and rabbis)

Since February, I've been attending ulpan (intensive Hebrew class) at the Milah Institute here in Jerusalem. It's definitely been good for my Hebrew, and it's also been a good chance to meet a diverse spectrum of the city's residents. Most people in the class are here to do some religious learning; the majority of them are Christian, though my class also has a number of Muslim and Jewish representatives. It makes class discussions very interesting.

Tonight, Geoff and I went to a "sing-along for peace" sponsored by the Milah Institute. It took place at a small and beautiful chapel adjoining the Italian Synagogue. The song-leaders were a rabbi with a guitar and a monk on guitar and violin (not at the same time), and the students gathered there had a great time singing along in Hebrew. One of the more inspiring pieces was led by the monk, who set the Hebrew words of Psalm 117 to a melody which I recognized from the Taizé services I used to attend at Carleton. I was also impressed with a Hebrew translation that we sang of "Blowin' in the Wind." There were a few English-language songs thrown in for fun (or, possibly, for the benefit of the beginning Hebrew students), and also a few impromptu performances by audience members - one woman sang a 13th-century Christian poem in Latin, and our dear friend Jen rocked the house with a fantastic rendition of a Bill Withers song.

Prophetic Vistas, Blue Fringes, Dates and Ancient Desert Outposts

We had another Schechter trip this past week designed to help us use the land of Israel itself as a commentary on our texts -- a healthy alternative to elucidating texts by using other texts, as is our norm.

Our first stop was Kefar Adumim, from which we gazed out into the Judean hills beyond (the first picture below), and at the wadi known as "Perat" cutting through the valley below us (the second picture). The wadi in question is the one to which the prophet Jeremiah is reported to have gone to in Jeremiah 13:1-7; it's situated right below his hometown of Anatot, which today is a Jewish settlement, the small cluster of buildings visible in the picture in the distant hills.





In Kefar Adumim, we paid a visit to the "Tekhelet Factory," where tzitzit (fringes for the corners of garments) are dyed with a shade of blue known as "Tekhelet." Tekhelet was one of the colors of royalty and priesthood in the ancient world; the Biblical demand for all Jews to don this color is understood by many scholars as part of a democratization process by which the whole people may be seen as a nation of priests. The color is also identified in Jewish literature with sapphire blue, which ancient midrash describes as being the prism through which God sees Israel's suffering as slaves in Egypt; when we look at the tekhelet fringes on our garments, we are reminded to see the world as God sees the world -- to see the world in such a way that we are attuned to suffering wherever it exists, striving to rid the world of its pain.

The production of this richly-symbolic color came under Roman imperial control in the early centuries of the common era; eventually, it was decreed that only royalty could wear garments made with the dye, and many scholars think that the production of tekhelet ended altogether with the Arab Conquest of the Land of Israel. With the help of lots of scientific research, the technique for producing the dye has been rediscovered in the past twenty years - and though some disagree that it is truly tekhelet, I think the evidence is actually pretty solid.

The factory that we went to is the primary place for the production of tekhelet today. Here's a picture of the hand-cranked machine to spin wool:



Dying wool in process:



Driving on towards the Dead Sea, we stopped by the huge date palm plantation on its shore, a plantation owned by three neighboring kibbutzes. Dates have been one of the most important products of the land of Israel since Biblical times - when the land of Israel is described as the "land of milk and honey," the honey mentioned there refers to date honey rather than bee honey. In addition to producing dates, date palms are described in Jewish literature as the trees that "have no waste" because every part of the tree is useful in some way - for roofing, for rope, for weaving, for fuel, for building materials, for making baskets and mats and other utensils, and for the holiday of Sukkot. According to Josephus, many of the date palms of the land of Israel were destroyed during the first century of the common era; some were eventually re-planted, but the deforestation that took place under Ottoman rule did away with these. Over the past century, date palms have been reintroduced to the areas where they once grew, particularly the area near the Dead Sea, which turns out to be a great area for growing delicious dates.



We spent most of our afternoon at Qumran. We had visisted Qumran with Katy's parents in December, but didn't spend long there: we wandered around the archaeological site for a few minutes and we saw the movie shown at the site which was particularly interested in the question of whether John the Baptist ever spent time at Qumran (catering to the thousands of Christian tourists who come to the site seeking to discover the origins of Christianity in Judaism). On this trip, we hiked up into the rocky hills beyond the archaeological site where one or two of the caves that held Dead Sea Scrolls were found. Here's a picture taken from the hills, looking down at the archaeological site that is, today, looking rather green (featuring a museum and large gift shop); cave number four, where pieces of 562 different documents were discovered, is visible on the side of the canyon below the site.



Our guide, Aryeh, urged us to imbibe the now-traditional story told about Qumran: that the archaeological remains there are the remains of the first monastery in the Western world, the community center of the sect of Jews known as the Essenes who lived in caves and huts surrounding these ruins and who hiked in every morning to immerse in the mikvah, to participate in public meals, to write scrolls, and to engage in some light industry. This was an all-male community that praised celibacy, that made poverty into a religious ideal, that considered itself the "sons of light" destined to defeat the sinful "sons of darkness" (everyone else in the world), and that planned to wait in the desert until Jerusalem would be re-purified (having been defiled by the Hasmoneans and then the Romans).

An Essene community with this worldview is described in the Dead Sea Scrolls. There is a question, though, as to whether the site called "Qumran" today was in fact a place that had any association with these Essenes. We spent some time considering the various possible theories. A number of scholars have proposed that there is no connection between the scrolls that were found in caves within a half-hour's walk of the site and the archaeological site itself. Some say Qumran was in fact a villa for a wealthy family; or that it was a Hasmonean and then Herodian fort; or that it was a manufacturing or commerical center; or that it was an Essene site, but that the Essenes who lived there were not impoverished monks but were prosperous Jews who lived a fairly comfortable life on the shore of the Dead Sea.

The debate over the identity of the site at Qumran turns out to be the most fierce debate in Israel archaeology today. It was interesting to get a taste of the various possibilities, and to see the ways in which the early archaeologists at the site may have created a myth based on certain expectations and religious ideals -- the excavators of Qumran were doubtlessly influenced by their expectation to see the site looking like a sort of medieval Christian monastery, and also by their desire to forge a link between the Dead Sea Scrolls and the ruins. On the other hand, the evidence to support the traditional theory regarding the site isn't bad, which is good news for the people who charge the admissions fees, run the gift shop, and play the film about John the Baptist and friends to thousands of visitors every year.

More family news

We're thrilled to introduce the newest addition to our family here in Israel: Hillary's new dog, Butcher, who showed up looking rather lost and confused in her bosses' yard last week, and whose former owner has not been found. We spent this past Friday frolicking with him in our apartment and at our local park.

(Interrupting our regularly scheduled programming with a brief polemic)

I haven’t been particularly engaged this year with the more distasteful wings of Israeli Orthodoxy, but do occasionally get a bit worked up about them when their spokespeople say abhorrent things that, as far as I’m concerned, bring shame upon the entire Jewish people. The latest example of such behavior came yesterday, following the Supreme Court’s decision to give increased recognition to non-Orthodox conversions, a decision that I was thrilled to hear about on the radio as we took a cab home from babysitting a friend’s daughter last night. Much of official Orthodoxy, not surprisingly, objects to anything that gives any legitimacy to the Conservative or Reform movements, even in cases when the Orthodox position has no particular basis in Jewish legal tradition. Despite the popular Orthodox polemic that liberal Judaism seeks to “change Jewish law” whereas Orthodoxy is opposed to change, I’m increasingly aware of the degree to which contemporary Orthodoxy has changed Jewish law by limiting its pluralism, often for the most crass political reasons.

Anyhow, the latest occurrence of obnoxious Orthodox rhetoric has come over the past 24 hours in response to the Supreme Court ruling. Among the choice comments that immediately showed up in the media:

This represents "a hostile takeover of the nation by means of an extremist, marginal worldview."

“Their ruling says there will be no more Jewish people and it is thus our obligation to sit with the great Torah sages and see how we will be able to act to defend the Jewish people."

“This is disaster, ruination for the Jewish people."

The ruling is an "explosives belt that has formed a terror attack against Jewish identity.” (!)

"This is the most difficult day in the history of Israel …” (!!)

Most of these comments are coming from the various Orthodox political parties in Israel or coming from the Chief Rabbinate, the embarrassing government religious establishment here in the land of Israel which is in need of dismantling at some point very soon. (The Chief Rabbinate is the institution that has also been in the press lately for joining forces with Christian and Muslim clerics in opposing the plans for the WorldPride festival in Jerusalem this coming August. For the first time in a long time, leaders of the three faiths are joining together in harmony –- for what? For the sake of promoting bigotry and hatred.)

There have been countless examples in recent months of other repugnant statements made by the religious establishment here – click here for some more examples. I find it all pretty depressing. And so even on a day when I’d like to celebrate a wise decision of the Supreme Court, I’m sufficiently disgusted by the response of the opposition that I have little desire left to celebrate.

UPDATE: Rabbi Reuven Hammer does a good job of "exposing Orthodox conversion myths" here.

Tel Aviv/Yafo

As part of our continuing efforts to see other areas of Israel, we went to the Tel Aviv area on Sunday with our friends Mark and Nelly. We had the day off from school because it was day #3 of the three-day Purim celebration that happens whenever Purim falls on Shabbat: some obligations, like giving to the poor and reading the Megillah (Book of Esther) are moved to the day before Shabbat, and some obligations, like eating a festive meal and giving gifts to friends and neighbors, are moved to the day after Shabbat.

We spent the morning in Yafo (Jaffa), the ancient city from which the modern city of Tel Aviv sprouted. Yafo claims to be the oldest port in the world, and has lots of interesting myth surrounding it – being built by Noah’s son Yafet (Japhet), being the source of the cedar trees and much of the treasure used to build the First Temple in Jerusalem, being the city from which Jonah set sail, and, according to Greek legend, being the site where Perseus saved Andromeda from being devoured by a sea monster. Having passed through much subsequent history, the Old City has been recently renovated, and its old stones are mixed with colorfully painted wood. We wandered around the Old City and then had our Purim meal at a Libyan restaurant where we enjoyed couscous, shakshuka, a vast assortment of salads, and freshly-baked bread.

We spent our afternoon in Tel Aviv at the Diaspora Museum – we thought it was an appropriate place to spend the conclusion of Purim, the holiday of the Diaspora.

Here are some pictures from our morning in Yafo:

More About Purim

One of the important things that I learned about Purim this year is that one of the four big mitzvot (commandments) of Purim is to give money (tzedakah) to people who would not otherwise be able to share in the joy of the day. In fact, the tradition tells us that, on Purim, one should give away more money to others than one would spend making his/her own special holiday meal. And Purim, in some ways a slightly disturbing holiday. has taken on much more meaning for me this year because of this focus on tzedakah.

I am on the Tzedakah Committee at the Yeshiva where I study, and we plan events to help raise money to give to different charitable organizations. I suggested that we have an auction, and of course I then got put in charge of planning it! We scheduled it to coincide with Purim, and the holiday spirit got people caught up in giving. The majority of the items auctioned off were food items, but we also had some more eclectic items such as an hour of pre-Shabbat cleaning, an hour of chauffeuring to wherever you need to go, and a ping-pong competition with the head Rabbi of the Yeshiva. (We purchased a box of Thin Mints - a rarity here in Israel!-and an hour of Kabbalah study with one of our beloved teachers.) I am proud to say that the Yeshiva raised 2,535 Shekels (close to $600) on Friday!


Here is a few pictures from the Purim party that we went to on Thursday night. Purim is a holiday where nothing is as it seems and, in that spirit, people wear costumes. Geoff and I, now a dual-clergy family, have maxed out on the dork-factor. We dressed up as the concepts of "Mutar" (permitted things to do according to Jewish Law) and "Asur" (forbidden things to do). Geoff wore a green shirt as mutar and I wore red for asur, and we pasted pictures on our shirts from a children's book about Permitted/Forbidden actions on Shabbat.

Baby Kate

We received the wonderful news yesterday that my niece, Kathryn Dmitrievna Joukovski, was born. My sister, Laura, and her husband, Dmitri, are doing well and are very happy to welcome a daughter into their family. She is beautiful!

Purim and the Consciousness of Exile

We’re approaching the holiday of Purim, and I’ve been thinking recently about Israeli and Diaspora perceptions of the holiday. I gave a d’var torah (in Hebrew) on the topic at Schechter earlier this week, and want to share some of my thoughts on the matter here (in English!) as well.

The holiday of Purim, in many ways, teaches about the hazards of living outside the land of Israel. Yes, Purim teaches us, there are miracles in exile, and peace and prosperity for Jews can come about there thanks to self-assertion and divine grace. But the story of the Book of Esther is in many ways a story about the vulnerability of Jews living outside of Israel. The survival of the Jewish people in Persia is a miracle, as the Talmud tells us, and yet Purim is not considered an appropriate time for the joyous recititation of Hallel (the psalms of praise) on Purim because we remained in exile after the miracle: so long as the people of Israel are without political sovereignty, another genocide led by a different Haman can easily arise. In the diaspora, the holiday of Purim seems to say, we can be protected only by wearing masks - or by drinking ourselves into a false sense of confidence that can allow us to sleep serenely for one night.

This negative portrait of the diaspora could easily lead those living in the land of Israel to feel a real sense of smugness, viewing life in exile from the land as a perversion of true Judaism. One former chief rabbi of Israel, for instance, argues that Purim illustrates the “complete and utter negation of the exile …. The events of Purim teach us that the presence of the nation of Israel in exile is not only a national and spiritual danger for Israel, but also a genuine physical and spiritual threat to each and every individual Jew.” In this view, the modern Israeli experience of Purim emphasizes the alienation of the weak Diaspora Jew.

I would argue, however, that exile is not a geographic state; it is a metaphysical state of being in an unredeemed world, alienated from the word of God. The hazards of life in Shushan symbolize not just the hazards of life in the diaspora but the hazards of life in an imperfect world, even in the land of Israel. Even in Israel, when we read the Megillah, we should imagine ourselves as residents as Shushan, who may say “in my serenity: I would never be moved,” but “when you concealed your presence, I was terrified” (Psalms 30:7-8). As Rabbi Joseph Soloveitchik argues, everyone who reads the Megillah is not only giving thanks for a miracle, but is calling out to God in crisis and despair: “My God, my God, why have you abandoned me… My God, I cry by day—You answer not” (Psalms 22:2-3; Megillah 4a). We can learn from the Megillah that the essence of exile is not simply being outside of the land of Israel; rather, the essence of exile is the existential reality of distance from God.

But despite this sense of alienation, Purim is traditionally thought of us as the time when “they accepted and upheld” (Esther 9:27) - that is to say, when the Jewish people truly accepted the Torah for the first time and entered into a new, mature phase of covenantal relationship with God. How were the Jewish people able to re-affirm our covenant amidst exile? Why is Shushan the place of mature relationship? I would suggest that one of the blessings of exile is the openness to receiving Torah. Having a consciousness of exile means being without pretensions, knowing that the world is not yet redeemed, and therefore feeling a sense of responsibility. To accept Torah is to acknowledge that the world can always be better, that there is always much more to be done, that one’s current state is always a state of alienation. This is why, even when we are in Israel, we are obligated to put ourselves into the mental state of the Jews of Shushan: so that we can feel the insecurity and responsibility of exile, and to realize that we today in Jerusalem are just as much in exile as the Jews of Shushan were 2500 years ago. Purim should remind us of our unredeemed state: its parody and satire serves to remind us how far we are from our ideals. But acknowledgement of distance and exile can be a blessing, because it arouses our desire to search out the word of God and to accept it with hearts full of longing for redemption.

The Scribal Arts, the Architecture of Justice, and Yad Vashem

In addition to spending most of our time inside the beit midrash (study hall) and the classroom, here are a few places that we've recently visited:

1. I went with my Schechter classmates this past Sunday afternoon to Oter Yisrael, one of the factories in Jerusalem which produce the Jewish ritual items requiring carefully-written Biblical texts on scrolls of parchment (Torah scrolls, tefillin, and mezuzot). The facilities that we visited included a department where scribes write out the text of the scrolls, a process which demands an incredible amount of spiritual focus; a proofreading office, where the work of the scribes is reviewed; and a factory where tefillin are produced, tefillin being the boxes containing Biblical verses which folks like Katy and I (not to mention, of course, folks rather unlike Katy and I) don during prayer every weekday morning. We spent much of the afternoon examining the process by which tefillin boxes are crafted.







2. Today, the Schechter students had a trip to the Israeli Supreme Court. I had taken a trip there three years ago while I was in Israel, but had clearly forgotten quite a bit of what I had learned, both about the Israeli legal system and about the architecture of the court building, so the return trip was worth it. The symbolism expressed by the architecture of the building is actually quite interesting: for instance, the understated entrance to the building, designed so that entering does not overpower you but instead affirms your human dignity; the attempt to make much of the inside of the building seem like an accessible outdoor space (see the picture below), underscoring the approachability of the justice system and the always-open-to-the-public nature of the building itself; the centrality of the library (see the slightly-disorienting picture below) within the building, a library containing a wealth of legal literature from around the world because Israeli justices do have some flexibility in using precedent from other countries and bringing it into the corpus of Israeli law; the mix of "old" and "new" architectural forms, as walls made of old Jerusalem stone are juxtaposed with more modern-looking facades; the use of lines and circles in the architecture, lines representing law ("You are righteous ... and Your laws are straight," says Psalm 119:137) and the circles representing justice ("He leads me in circles of justice," says Psalm 23:3).





3. Katy and I went to Yad Vashem, Israel's Holocaust memorial site, about 10 days ago on one of the last days before the the closing of the old museum there. Last week, a major new museum opened amidst much ceremony and a vast legion of foreign dignitaries visiting Jerusalem.

The old museum may have lacked the multimedia, the powerful achitecture, and the personal approach of the new museum, but it was definitely worthwhile to spend some time there. Long blocks of texts and black-and-white pictures of horrific cruelty and mass murder taking place might not always be the best educational tools, but are certainly quite effective at producing tears and serious thought. The museum also did a fairly effective job of reminding us of the miracle of the creation State of Israel in the aftermath of the Holocaust, something that is too easily forgotten by those of us who are young enough to take Israel's existence for granted.

On that note, I've been reading Danny Gordis's book Home to Stay over the past week, a book rich in feelings of thanksgiving for the State of Israel, full of good reminders to those of us who are here today. Like this:

"... Nazi Germany seems eerily recent. And daily life in Israel just reinforces that sense for me. There are too many elderly people walking arond here with numbers tattooed on their forearms to ignore what this country was created of.

"In the 1940's, the world basically conspired to let the Jews become extinct. Germany and the Axis powers murdered them. The U.S. and Canada (with a long list of associates) closed their borders so that the Jews had nowhere to go. The British closed the shores of Palestine .... A third of the Jewish people was exterminated, and it came close to being much, much worse.

"I think of that, and how recent it was, every time something happens here that other people would think was terribly annoying. Long lines at the checkout stand in the grocery store? I can live with it. "Too many Jews in Jerusalem" still seems pretty amazing to me, given the fact that just over fifty years ago, the British kept them all out and sent refugees back to Europe, only to have the boats filled with survivors of the Nazis sink and many of the dispossessed people drown on the way.

"Long lines of cars during rush hour trying to get up the hill and through the entrance to the city? It's fine with me. After all, all along the roads are the (now carefully preserved) burnt-out trucks that were used to convoy food and water to the Jews of Jerusalem, surrounded and besieged by the Jordanians, in 1948 .... When I think of all that, I can deal with the traffic. It seems like a problem we're lucky to have."

(Home to Stay, p. 50-51)

Adventures with Chickpeas

Among our recent activities: eating "authentic" Israeli houmous, the word that is often popularly spelled humus, hummus, chumus, choumous, houmus, etc., though best pronounced with a guttural "ch" so as to not offend Hebrew or Arabic speakers. (A quick Google search will reveal that popular American pronunciations of the word cause great anxiety in the Middle East.) Houmous has been a definite staple of my diet since coming to Israel - we continually come home from the grocery store with rather large containers of it which I tend to consume in a rather short period of time. Katy, for what it's worth, has yet to understand this particular passion of mine.

For the uninitiated: Middle Eastern houmous is a very different animal from the varieties typically available in American supermarkets, which has a totally different texture and a variety of flavors that is unheard of in this part of the world (see here for more discussion on the matter); and rather than being used as a dip or spread, it tends to be "wiped" from a plate or carton with the help of pita bread. Containers of humous take up an astonishingly wide swath of space in the refrigerated aisles at most grocery stores here.

Hillary informed us, however, that if we thought we were getting a real Israeli experience by enjoying pre-packaged houmous, we were really missing out. So, this past Friday, she and Yehi took us out for a "real" houmous experience. We went to one of the restaurants where you more or less walk in and have large plates of freshly-made houmous and tall stacks of fluffy pita doled out to you (along with other optional sides, like pickles and falafel balls). It was exceptionally fresh and delicious -- even Katy, not always the biggest fan of houmous, enjoyed it tremendously. And we were thrilled to have a slightly more "insider" Israeli experience.

"Houmous Talpiot," i.e. where we dined on houmous in the neighborhood of Talpiot

Pictures from Beit Shemesh

We spent this past Shabbat in Beit Shemesh with my cousins and their children and had a great time. Here are a few pictures that we took before Shabbat:

Reading Torah

This past weekend I had the opportunity to publicly read from the Torah scroll. This is an event that often marks the beginning of a Jewish adult life – becoming a Bar/Bat Mitzvah and accepting the responsibilities of an adult Jew. While I accepted these obligations and responsibilities upon conversion to Judaism, the experience of reading Torah for a congregation was nonetheless an important landmark in my life and I wanted to make it as special and meaningful as possible. I read aloud 9 verses from the book of Exodus (Chapter 35, verses 21-29) that describe how the men and women brought free-will offerings of gold, silver, linen and more in order to build the Tabernacle (the portable temple of the Israelites in the wilderness). When I first came upon this section, it reminded me of a story that I heard as a child growing up in the R.L.D.S. church, presumably based on these verses in Exodus, of the construction of a temple in Kirtland, Ohio. As the story goes, the early church members did not have fancy materials, so the women brought their fine china to grind up in the stucco so that the Temple would shine in the sun.

The story in Exodus beautifully shows the virtue of contributing with one’s heart to build things that one believes are good and holy. As I embark on a new career pathway, I hope to keep in mind the idea that I should put all of myself into the work that I do as a cantor and leader in the Jewish community.

The Western Wall Tunnels

We joined my Schechter classmates this morning for a tour of the Western Wall tunnels - i.e. walking along the part of the western retaining wall of the Jerusalem Temple complex which has been obscured from view for many centuries by the arches and buildings built above it. The Temple Mount complex was built by Herod in the 1st Century B.C.E., and the main street and marketplace of Jerusalem ran along its western wall. Long after the destruction of the Temple, Mamluk builders (after Saladin's conquest in 1187) sought to raise up the level of the city to the level of the Temple Mount plaza, and filled the area below with arches in order to support the new city above. Thanks to the Israeli excavations of the past thirty-five years, it is now possible to walk below those arches along what was once a wide, main street open to the sky at the foot of the Western Wall, and to see the original stones put in place by Herod's builders. Some of the stones, for what it's worth, are amazingly large, like this one pictured below, which may well be on of the largest building stones of antiquity - it measures 13.6 meters long, 3.3 meters high, and 4.6 meters thick, and may weigh as much as 570 tons. The plaster coating and holes that you can see were added by later Byzantine Christian builders as part of a project to build a cistern adjacent to the wall.


A portion of the Western Wall is, famously, above ground (and, in fact, visible 24 hours a day by internet!). But it was striking to us to realize how much of the original 485-meter long wall is now beneath the ground. It's in quite good condition, thanks to being underground and not being smoothed by countless hands the way that the stones of the exposed wall have been.

We also got a careful look at the way the wall was built, so that each stone is set slightly further back from the one below it. This means that when you stand at the base of the wall and look up, you don't feel like you're about to be crushed by the wall that towers forward over you; rather, the wall looks perfectly straight.

At some places along the course of the wall, we were able to get a fairly good glimpses of it:


We travelled on through the tunnel along the course of the wall:


We spent some time at one of the Western Wall gates - Warren's Gate - which, according to some accounts, may have been the gate standing opposite to the Holy of Holies, the place of spiritual centering in Jewish tradition. Though Judaism has always preferred focusing on sanctifying time rather than sanctifying space, space is indeed made holy over time, and no space in Jewish tradition has been imbued with more holiness than the Holy of Holies, the earthly focal point of Jewish prayer for millenia. Warren's Gate is also a space that itself carries a powerful aura: for much of the time after the destruction of the Temple that Jews were permitted to live in Jerusalem, this space was used as a synagogue marking the most accessible point close to the Holy of Holies. It was in use until it was blocked up by the Crusaders of the late 11th century, who allegedly closed off the space by trapping as many Jews as they could inside and burying them alive. When the tunnel excavation began and this space was discovered, many argued that it should be restored as a synagogue, but the Chief Rabbi of Israel at the time ruled against it, apparently motivated to some degree by a fear of violent Muslim passions being inflamed by the presence of a synagogue under the Temple Mount complex; and so the space was newly sealed up:

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In addition to dealing with ancient and underground things today, we also had the pleasure of continuing to enjoy the present-day spring in Jerusalem. The almond blossoms here are still beautiful, and many other flowers seem to be springing up all over. We had a wonderful afternoon of buying groceries at Jerusalem's outdoor market and enjoying the weather.

Italian Melodies and Spring Weather

Katy’s been continuing along with her ethnomusicology class for cantorial students, the one that brought us to the Syrian synagogue at three in the morning one Shabbat. Last night, we joined the class at Jerusalem’s Italian Synagogue, which offered a spirited prayer experience - every word of the service sung aloud, a healthy contrast to standard Askenazic mumbling - as well as fascinating liturgical variations unique to the Italian Jewish community. The synagogue is also architecturally interesting: after the Holocaust, its whole intricately-carved wood interior was taken from a synagogue built in 1719 in Conegliano, Italy (about 60 miles from Venice) and was brought to Jerusalem. The synagogue has a very informative website if you’d like to see pictures, take a “virtual tour,” or read about its traditions or history from before or after the Holocaust.

After a chilly night last night - we were shivering a little on our walk back home from the Old City, where we had dinner at my aunt and uncle's house - we enjoyed a spectacularly beautiful spring day today. We spent a good portion of the afternoon in the park around the corner from our apartment, reading and talking in the sun. The park lies next to the San Simon Monastery, which was built here in the 1880's by the Greek Orthodox Patriarchate. The monastery has had an interesting history, including being the site of extremely fierce fighting during the 1948 War of Independence. Today, the park surrounding the monastery was simply idyllic, filled with people eating Shabbat lunch, lying in the sun, reading, and playing with their kids.

As you all know, things have been remarkably quiet for some time now in this corner of the Middle East. As Danny Gordis recently wrote, it's been "so quiet, in fact, that people are getting nervous." Israelis are either afraid that the peace won't last, or that they're being fooled by the "moderation" of the new Palestinian government, or that Israel might miss an opportunity to do what it should be doing -- whatever that is, exactly. Gordis writes:

No matter what happens, something is going to change (with some degree of permanence, one suspects) around here. Which is probably why people are unanimous in their nervousness. Because the stakes are very high. Because all of us -- no matter which way this plays out -- are going to have to soon rethink the whole world we live in. But most of the (rational) people who are nervous also understand that there are also risks in not risking. Not risking means that nothing will change, and that, too, is unthinkable.

UPDATE: Breaking the relative calm of the past three months, four Israelis were killed in a suicide bombing in Tel Aviv last night.

Happy Birthday, Geoffrey!

For Geoffrey's birthday, I took him to a delicious Indian restaurant. Geoffrey, who has not moved past his college habits of staying up all night writing papers, was totally exhausted, and I was still jet-lagged, but we had a wonderful evening anyway.

Some Pictures from our trip to America

Around the dinner table in Virginia with my mom and grandmother:

Celebrating my birthday in Saint Louis (with candles in my pizza):

Katy and her friend Alexis:

Our niece Caelen and our "nephew" Herschel:

News

We just returned from a delightful visit with our families. We spent a week in Virginia with Geoff’s family and then a week in St. Louis with mine.

During the course of our time in the States, I made a little side trip up to NY to decide my future. I have decided to go to Cantorial School and I will be starting a program at the Jewish Theological Seminary (where Geoff is a Rabbinical student) in the Fall. In the meantime, I am already taking some classes since the first-year students from JTS are also spending a year at the Conservative Yeshiva where I have been studying. As a result, I will be able to take classes this Spring and then enter as a second-year student at JTS when we’re back in NYC next year. I am looking forward to this new adventure!

How we've been spending our last two weeks

Mostly, we've been very busy. I've been taking exams and so have been spending most of my free time studying things like the prohibited labors of Shabbat, the origin, meaning, and practice of the daily recitation of the Shema, the significance of the character of Caleb in the history of the redaction of the Bible, and various and sundry other topics. My semester break is now beginning, and we're heading back to the States for two weeks.

Katy has also been exceptionally busy, especially in developing her plans for next year - more updates are forthcoming on that front.

We have managed to get out a little bit, though. This is a good thing, because it's been exceptionally beautiful here, with temperatures in the sixties. It's still raining, but the rains are feeling more like spring rains than cold winter rains, and almond trees and a variety of wildflowers are coming into bloom all around Jerusalem. The period of blossoming here began right on schedule with the holiday of Tu B'shevat, the holiday which celebrates, among other things, the new year of the trees, the time when trees begin to re-awaken. Katy and I always loved celebrating Tu B'shevat in Minnesota, because it gave us hope that somewhere, somehow, underneath all the snow, tree roots were slowly thawing. Here in Israel, though, the holiday really corresponds to the seasonal renewal taking place before our eyes, which is very inspiring.

Katy went with the other folks at the Yeshiva for another trip down to Ne'ot Kedumim, the Biblical landscape reserve, in honor of Tu B'shevat, and we both joined the Yeshiva community for a Tu B'shevat seder.

(Yeshiva students and faculty experiencing Tu B'shevat from the trees' perspective)

We also got to enjoy the nice weather by spending some time on the Hebrew University campus. Admittedly, the occasion for our trip there was to use their library, but it was delightful to take some time to enjoy the weather and the trees.

A week and a half ago, our friend Cynthia from New York was in Jerusalem for a conference, and we had a wonderful time seeing her.

Our most unusual trip in the last two weeks was taken at three in the morning on the Shabbat before last. We've been trying to commit ourselves to take advantage of seeing some of the diverse Jewish communities and practices that you can find in Jerusalem, and we finally succeeding in doing so by attending a four-hour "bakashot" service at the old Syrian synagogue in Nachlaot. Nachlaot is the neighborhood in which I lived three years ago (for the first half of that year). It was one of the first neighborhoods to be built outside the Old City walls - much of the neighborhood was built in the 1870s and 1880s - and today it's a unique, ethnically diverse, and architecturally interesting area. The synagogue that we went to there - the Adass synagogue - is a synagogue built in 1901 by the community from Aleppo (in Syria). Every Shabbat, many of the members of the community -- especially the men -- gather at three in the morning for reciting medieval hymns set to captivating Arabic and Turkish melodies. I thought the music was teriffic, although the men's section of the synagogue was overly crowded and that didn't make for the most positive environment. Katy had a seat, got to enjoy the tea that was being served, and was generally a little better off than I was.

Sorry - no pictures from that experience, since it was Shabbat.

One last trip of note that I've taken recently was to an elementary school in the neighborhood of Gilo, one of the schools in the TALI ("enriched Jewish studies") school system. The TALI system is more or less run by the Masorti (Conservative) movement here, although it's officially unassociated with the movement in an effort to make it more attractive to the Israeli population at large which tends to start running and kicking and screaming in panic when confronted with the reality of non-Orthodox Judaism. Instead of trying to appeal to the small Israeli minority that would be interested in serious non-Orthodox Judaism, TALI's leaders feel that they can have a greater impact on Israeli society by providing a good pluralistic Jewish education to as many children as possible who come from more-or-less "secular" homes, and who would otherwise get the chance to do very little serious study of Judaism in secular public schools.

In learning about the TALI system, I've been occasionally frustrated by the limitations of the system. I wish that it could be a little more ideological flavored, particularly with regard to teaching about issues like gender egalitarianism. I also wish that the system was more focused on secondary education -- although it's important to get a good elementary foundation in Judaism, I feel like even secular kids here get a good foundation simply by being in a country where Hebrew is spoken and where some basic biblical literacy is taught even in secular schools. I worry about significant Jewish education ending at age 13 for the kids in a system like this, which means that all they've learned is a childish version of Judaism that is, I think, easy to walk away from. Much of the attraction of Judaism, I like to think, emerges from the complexities that you can only succesfully teach after a certain age.

Despite all my angst about this sort of issue, though, seeing one of these schools was actually a very inspiring experience, and did make me feel like the TALI system has the potential to make a serious difference in creating a more Jewishly literate society here. At the very least, I was impressed to see fourth graders spouting off information about Maimonides and the Golden Mean and engaging in sophisticated conversation about the proper approach to property based on this rabbinic teaching; to hear second-graders learning about Tu B'shevat and making connections between the morning blessings of the liturgy and moral values; to watch other students analyzing the language of the weekly Torah portion with great skill; and so on. I'm skeptical about whether the system can really challenge the divisions in Israeli society that identify Jews as either " secular" or "religious" with no middle ground. But it can do a lot to increase Jewish literacy, and to advance pluralistic and democratic values in Israel.

That's enough from me for the time being, since I should be trying to get a few hours of sleep before our sherut (shared taxi) comes at 3:45 in the morning to whisk us off to the airport. We'll be in Virginia for the coming week, and then Saint Louis for the week after that, before returning to Israel on February 17.

Notes on the Political Situation

My "Israel Seminar" class at Schechter has been dedicated, for much of the past month and a half, to talking through some of the issues surrounding the Israeli-Arab conflict. Schechter brought in a few guest speakers to help represent some of the various points of view. We spent one afternoon with Shaul Goldstein, the mayor of the Regional Council of the settlement bloc of Gush Etzion, and heard a defense of the location of Israel's settlements on strategic defense grounds. We attempted, the following week, to hear from a Palestinian guest named Salaam, whom Arik Ascherman, the head of Rabbis for Human Rights had invited to speak with us, but Salaam was detained by the police (-- seemingly because his temper got out of hand in a shouting match, although undoubtedly it was more complicated than that) and was unable to join us. So we spent that afternoon with Ascherman, who showed up to tell us that he was unable to get a speaker, and also took some time to speak to us about the issue he's currently focused on -- the injustices of house demolitions performed by Israel in the Palestinian territories. At our following seminar session, Ascherman returned with a Palestinian speaker in tow named Mohi, the one Palestinian on the Rabbis for Human Rights staff - someone much easier, logistically, to bring in to speak to us. He answered questions for some time about Palestinian society, and about his personal story and his decision to work for an Israeli human rights organization (which, while focused on protecting Palestinian rights, is a clearly Jewish pro-Israel Zionist organization, such that working for it doesn't seem to win him a lot of friends on the Palestinian side of the barrier).

The speakers were a non-ideologial bunch, and of course everyone was certainly interested in speaking to their audience and not engaging in rhetoric about the God-given right to any various piece of land. We heard lots of anecdotal evidence, which of course is very important but also tends to distract from the process of developing rational political viewpoints. In addition to that, Shaul Goldstein is a media-savvy character who had plenty of coherent arguments to throw out, whereas Mohi, our Palestinian speaker, was not interested in trying to particularly make an argument. So in that sense, things were a little imbalanced, but, on the other hand, we also spent an afternoon with Arik Ascherman, so we got to hear plenty of articulate arguments from a someone highly sympathetic to the Palestinian cause.

I didn't learn a tremendous amount of new information from the speakers, though I was reminded by Arik Ascherman that despite the impressive restraint and honor that Israel has shown in its war (see this piece from Yossi Klein Halevi and this piece from Daniel Gordis), there's always plenty more to criticize for anyone who wants to hold Israel to the highest moral standard. And I was reminded by Shaul Goldstein that there still is no really logical justification for much of Sharon's disengagement plan -- this might still mean that it's the best of a lot of bad options, as I think it is, but also means that it's important to realize that it's an incredibly dangerous and potentially unproductive gamble from the point of view of Israeli security. Still, none of our speakers said much that I hadn't heard before, and none gave good reasons to some of the more vexing problems of the conflict.

What I especially wanted to hear -- and didn't hear -- were ideas for how to solve the problem of trust. From the Israeli point of view, there is no reason to trust that the Palestinians have anything but deadly intentions; and from the Palestinian perspective, there is no reason to trust the Israelis. Gestures that one might think would build trust, like Sharon's disengagement plan, are viewed as nefarious conspiracies by the Palestinian side; and the alleged "moderate" nature of Mahmoud Abbas, the newly-elected Palestinian chairman, seems like a cover-up to Israelis once one starts reading his party platform or listening to his campaign rhetoric. The many conspiracy theories that turn out to be true don't help build trust either, like the stories in the Arab press which turn out to be complete fabrications -- for instance, the story about the shooting of a 12-year old boy that never happened. Nor can I imagine how Palestinian youth could ever trust Israel so long as school textbooks call for the destruction of Israel and as, even today, official Palestinian television calls for the "mandatory" murder of Jews; then again, daily experiences with Israeli soldiers at checkpoints don't really help build trust within Palestinian society either.

The week after hearing the last of our speakers, the North American students from Schechter (along with a number of spouses, Katy included) took a trip to see one of the key facts on the ground in the conflict -- the separation barrier, which is sometimes a separation "fence," sometimes a separation "wall," and which is euphemistically referred to as the "Jerusalem envelope" in this area so as not to give the impression that Jerusalem is divided by it. The trip was facilitated by an organization called "Ir Amim," a group dedicated to exposing the issues surrounding Israeli-Palestinian co-existence within Jerusalem by promoting public discussion about the possible futures of the city, as well as working for the equitable distribution of services to the populations within Jerusalem.

We started off our tour in the neighborhood of Gilo in the south of Jerusalem, looking out over Bethlehem and Beit Jala and the barrier in between -- at this point, it was a fence with electronic sensors and a soft dirt road on either side so that footprints would be left behind. Much of the separation fence is a fence rather than a wall, except when it is going through densely populated areas or in places where it is designed to prevent shooting attacks. As you can see in the picture below, we could see part of the walled section a bit further in the distance. (Gilo also does have a separate, smaller, artistically-decorated fence on the outskirts of the neighborhood which actually was designed to prevent shooting, since the area was under constant gunfire attack during 2000-2001, the last time I was in Israel.) Here's a picture looking out at the separation fence:

We spent our time in Gilo discussing possible goals for the fence. It was principally conceived as a security barrier with the goal of making it harder for terrorists to infiltrate Israeli territory, and has been largely successful at meeting this goal. Things get more complicated, though, once one acknowleges that the separation fence also may well become a de facto political boundary, and so other political factors enter the equation. We spent some time looking out in the direction of Rachel's Tomb, a spot slated to be included within the fence even though that requires re-directing the fence route to go quite a bit east, and which also means that 120 Palestinian families get walled into western Jerusalem even though they're not residents of Jerusalem or the State of Israel. The Israeli High Court case dealing with this issue has caused a long delay in the fence-building process, and this itself has created a huge security risk - allegedly, one suicide bomber sucessfully penetrated through the still unfenced area last year. For the time being, it seems that long-term political aspirations have trumped both security and humanitarian concerns.

We also contemplated the problem that, simply, there seems to be no good place to build a barrier through Jerusalem. The barrier is on one hand totally necessary, and has pretty clearly been a force in preventing terrorist attacks on Israel. On the other hand, it's hard to find a place for it that doesn't have adverse affects on the Palestinian population, and one way or the other the barrier ends up dividing families, taking property, or cutting off people from their places of work or from their schools. The Israeli high court has demanded "proportionality" between Israeli security interests and Palestinian humanitarian interests, but this is a hard goal to strike.

After spending some time in Gilo, we travelled to the other end of the Jerusalem municipal boundary, looking out over the Kalandia Checkpoint and Ramallah from the Atarot industrial area. We looked at the route of the barrier and the way in which many parts of it attempted to correspond to demographic realities, keeping as many Israelis on the Israel side of the line and keeping as many non-Israeli citizens as possible on the other side. Palestinians in the villages close to the barrier are split on the issue: while they want to eventually be a part of a Palestinian state, in the short term they want to be on the Israeli side of the fence for the sake of their economic livelihoods. The majority, by and large, wants to have it both ways: to be on the Israeli side of the barrier even though they have no interest in being a part of the State of Israel and are, in large part, openly supporting the destruction of the state.

Here are the views we had looking towards Ramallah and the Kalandia checkpoint:

The following week, our friend Danya and I facilitated a discussion on the issues surronding the separation barrier. Danya has a good summary of the experience here. I was very hung up on trying to get to the bottom of the question of where, in fact, the best place for a line separating the two peoples would be. If you were drawing the boundaries to separate the State of Israel and the Palestinian state, we asked, what criteria would you use to draw those boundaries? Once you draw that line, should there be a wall there, or elsewhere? We handed out a list of some different models for where to put a barrier. Possible criteria included demographics, concern for the safety of Israelis, concern for the economic livelihood of Palestinians, other political goals for either side, etc.

Many of these criteria end up being fairly important, I think -- hence, I favor a barrier that can effectively prevent terrorist infiltration into Israel and a boundary based on demography to whatever degree possible, given other political concerns about protecting access to holy sites, creating a contiguous Palestinian state, etc, etc. I feel strongly about creating a solid border, which means that I have limited sensitivity to the idea that people should have easy access to cross back and forth for economic reasons, knowing that the reason for Palestinian suffering is not just because they don't have easy access to Israel but also because of a corrupt leadership that wants to leave its citizens in refugee camps, that has historically siphoned off the majority of aid money for the benefit of leaders and bureaucrats (and, often enough, terrorists), and has done nothing to create a viable economy within the Palestinian territories. I think that Abbas is, at the very least, fairly serious about ending corruption in the PA. Hopefully an improved situation is on the eventual horizon. We'll see if he's equally serious about reigning in terrorists.

More Babies

Tonight we went to the brit milah (circumcision) of Geoffrey's newest second cousin cousin. His cousin Otny and Otny's wife, Sarah, had a beautiful baby boy, Oz Eliezer. It was a nice chance to see other family as well. Here are some pictures from the event:

Winter Break

I have just started up with classes this week after a few weeks of vacation. I must say it's good to be back. I feel renewed energy and urgency to learn now that half of the year is gone. I'm enjoying the studying so much that I even met with my chevruta (my learning partner) to study some Mishnah over the break. Other features of my break include a few sight-seeing adventures around Jerusalem and the flu. I went with some friends to Hadassah Hospital to see the stained glass windows that Marc Chagal painted depicting Jacob's blessings on his 12 sons. I took a few pictures, but you can view all of them on this website.

Speaking of Joseph, we also went to Hebrew University over the break to see a production of Joseph and the Amazing Technicolor Dreamcoat. It was very cute and got me thinking even more about the stories of Joseph that we are studying in my Chumash (Bible) class. In many senses, Joseph is not the only dreamer in the story. Jacob also sees Joseph in a dream-like way almost as if Joseph is some sort of extension of Jacob. If you want to hear more about my theory, you can email me.

Geoff and I also went to see the model of Jerusalem in the Second Temple Period (66 CE). I was quite impressed with the intricacy. It really looked real as if you were looking down on a city from the top of a mountain. And since it is outdoors, and had been a rainy week, the water had even collected in the right places. We were both particularly fascinated by the model of the Temple itself (see the last two pictures):

Friday Afternoon Thoughts

1) This Shabbat, our minyan is using this prayer composed by Rabbi Shai Held in the wake of the Asian Tsunami Disaster.

2) We've been mulling over the overhead costs for various disaster relief organizations.

3) Meanwhile, Israel has been doing its best to send medical teams to Sri Lanka, and has been trying to make use of some of its experience in dealing with trauma and disaster rescue operations. But it seems that various Sri Lankan authorities are trying to prevent them from coming, choosing politics above saving life -- see here and here.

4) We're all ready to bring in the new year on the Gregorian Calendar with the day also known to Catholics as "Saint Sylvester Day." It's also known by that name in Israel; although Israel as a country follows the Gregorian calendar, the real New Year here is Rosh Hashanah, and so New Year's Day tends to be labelled as "Sylvester" rather than as the real "New Year." For what it's worth, Sylvester was (allegedly) the Roman Pope who convinced Constantine to prohibit Jews from living in Jerusalem, and was responsible for considerable anti-Semitic legislation.

5) This semester the two of us have been volunteering with an English tutoring program at Congregation Kol HaNeshama called K.E.E.P. (The Kol Haneshama English Experience Program). We only have a few weeks left with the program before we move on to other volunteer programs (to be determined) for the second semester.

We've had a mixed review of the program, not fully satisfied that we're teaching the kids as much English as we could be given the time we've put into volunteering, and preferring one-on-one homework tutoring to the small-group game-playing that we've been doing with our kids. But we had a terrific time running the tutoring session last night. We planned a lesson related to movies - in preparation for next week, when the kids will be watching a movie with the tutors. We set up a number of stations - playing hangman with movie-related vocabulary, playing a game where the kids competed in teams to identify movies based on their descriptions, making posters for their favorite movies, and acting out scenes. It was all quite a lot of fun for the kids, and for us.

6) Today it's beautiful, sunny, and 66 degrees here in Jerusalem. We're baking cookies, studying on the porch, and enjoying the weather.

Family Fun and Photos

We've had a wonderful time with our families visiting us in Israel over the past two weeks.

When Katy's parents first arrived we picked them up from the airport and, after a brief stop at our apartment to drop off their bags, drove down to the Dead Sea. We stayed for two nights at Kibbutz Ein Gedi, a beautiful oasis in the middle of the desert, complete with a huge botanical garden, spa, and very good breakfasts. After a good night's rest (on quite comfortable beds, we thought, compared to our bed in Jerusalem!) we left early the next morning to hike up Masada by way of the "snake trail," and spent the morning exploring the site.

After a morning of hiking, we stopped by some of the other Dead Sea attractions, like the Dead Sea itself, and the Ahava factory.

Back at the kibbutz, we rested; we knitted; we lit Hanukkah candles and practiced our dreidel-spinning skills; and we spent a good hour doing Israeli folk-dancing.

On Friday morning, we came back to Jerusalem (with a stop at Qumran on the way), enjoyed a restful Shabbat, had a nice dinner after Shabbat with Hillary (my sister), Yehi (her boyfriend), and my cousin Tsidky.

On Sunday, we spent the morning at the shuk (note the picture of Katy's parents enjoying their Marzipan rugelach) and did some touring of the Old City.

Katy's parents got to join Katy at the Yeshiva for her afternoon Bible class. Here's Katy in front of her locker before class:

After class, we stuck around for the Yeshiva Hanukkah party, featuring a potato latke contest, for which Katy's father was one of the judges:

On Monday, we spent some more time exploring the Old City, and also got to stop by the Craft Fair where my aunt Sue was displaying, among others, the needlepoint that she had done in honor of our wedding. The needlepoint incorporates a verse from the Book of Psalms (119:173) that includes the Hebrew letters of our initials; Sue also worked our initials in English into the border.

A day after Katy's parents left, my mom arrived, and we spent a delightful week with her in Jerusalem. Here are a few pictures:

Among the highlights of my mom's visit was a family gathering at our apartment. My aunt and uncle and seven of my eight first cousins here were able to come spend some time with my mother and celebrate my uncle's birthday. Many of my cousins brought their children -- there were 12 in all, 10 of them under the age of 6 -- and we enjoyed a lovely evening.

Happy Hanukkah!

We've been enjoying the wonders of olive oil tonight - we used olive oil to light our Hanukkah lights, enjoyed delicious teriyaki tofu made with olive oil, and, to cap it off, we indulged in some Israeli-style Hanukkah doughnuts.

We wish you all a happy Hanukkah and hope that you are able to reflect on the possibility of finding light amidst darkness.

Hanukkah has space for a more private, concealed sense of the miraculous (the hidden bottle of oil) and simultaneously it aspires to bold, universal proportions. I recently read Emmanuel Levinas's essay "The Light and the Dark," which describes this duality. Here's a little taste of universalist language about Hanukkah: Levinas describes the miracle as

"the daily marvel of the spirit that precedes culture. It is a flame that burns with its own fervor: the genius that invents the previously unheard-of, even though everythinghas already been said; the love that is inflamed even though the loved one is not perfect; the will that undertakes to do something despite the paralysing obstacles in its way; the hope that lights up a life in the absence of reasons for hope; the patience that bears what can kill it. It concerns the infinite resources of the spirit that, as a creator, surpasses the prudence of techniques; without calculation, without past, it joyfully pours forth its feelings in space, freely and prodigiously entering into the cause of the Other."

Yoga and Other Matters

We're enjoying winter here. In recent days it's been very sunny, and the grass is starting to sprout up because of the rain from the previous weeks. It's actually much greener during the winter here in Israel than during the dry summer.

I started a yoga class last night. I'm hoping it will help with some of the aches and pains of sitting in the Yeshiva all day. It's also a good chance to work on my Hebrew, and it gives an opportunity to focus on the sun - the "sun salutation," "birkat shemesh" in Hebrew, is a major movement in many kinds of yoga.

Learning at the Yeshiva is great, as always. I'm continuing to learn a lot.

My parents, and then Geoff's mother, are coming to visit soon - we're very excited to see them.

More to follow on our adventures soon!

Speaking in Tongues

I spoke at Congregation Moreshet Yisrael last night - my first attempt at giving a d'var Torah (sermon) in Hebrew, which meant speaking somewhat less fluidly than I would like. I focused on the first words of this week's Torah portion, "Jacob settled" (Genesis 37:1), a pair of words which has been put under the microscope by Jewish commentators since the beginnings of commentary as we know it. The general trend has been to understand Jacob's "settling" as revealing his desire for peace and serenity after a lifetime of hardship. One traditional understanding of Jacob’s desire is to view it negatively, to condemn him for his attempt to find peace of mind in a world of constant suffering. For a righteous person whose job is to respond to the suffering around him, seeking inner tranquility and comfort is an inappropriate retreat from the difficulties and sorrows of human existence. Jacob’s error is to think that the messianic age is dawning, that fragmentation and exile are experiences of the past, and that the time has come to focus on finding inner contentment. In this interpretation, the lesson that Jacob must learn – one which he learns from the subsequent trials of his son, Joseph – is that he must face and respond to the pain of this world rather than retreating into his own inner life.

An alternative reading of this verse – which I learned from my teacher Ira Stone - sees Jacob’s “settling” not as a search for inner tranquility but as a real attempt to bring peace to the world around him. Jacob’s attempt at “settling” (yishuv) may well be an attempt at “settling the mind” (yishuv ha-daat), bringing the total awareness and clarity of thought that allows the righteous person to repair the brokenness of the world. Such repair is very much a part of Jacob's mission - traditionally, his job is seen as finding a peaceful balance between the limitless love of his grandfather, Abraham, and the strict justice of his father, Isaac. In one reading of a classic midrash on this subject, Satan, the inclination towards evil, tries to convince Jacob that he should accept the sufferings of this world; in return, he will get to enjoy peace and tranquility in the world to come. Jacob refuses to accept. He refuses to submit to a loss of consciousness in this world in exchange for the desirable treasures that are promised to him in another world. Instead, he follows the model of seeking the potential peace of the world to come and bringing it into the present tense, into the world in which he lives. This is an impossible battle for Jacob – how can anyone maintain hope for peace in the world when one’s beloved son seems torn apart by wild beasts? But when classic Jewish thought imagines Jacob as a “righteous person,” I imagine it reflecting on the insistence within him for “settling the mind,” for repairing the brokenness of the present tense even amidst incredible pain and suffering.

I’m attracted to both of these readings, since I imagine both the desire for retreat from the world and the desire for repair to be pieces of Jacob’s tormented consciousness. At any rate, this was the basic dialectic that I worked with last night, though in a somewhat less familiar language.

Thanksgiving

We hosted a delightful Thanksgiving meal tonight - a potluck where we dined on baked tofu, lasagne, mashed potatoes, cornbread, spiced hot chocolate and delicious pumpkin pie (Katy's two particularly mouth-watering contributions), a chocolate mousse birthday cake in honor of one of our friends, and, of course, hummus (without which any Israeli Thanksgiving would be incomplete). We managed to fit nearly 30 people into our apartment, including Americans, Canadians, Peruvians, Brazilians, and Israelis, and we sang a nice mix of classic American songs (i.e. "American Pie" and Simon and Garfunkel's "America) and classic Jewish songs of thankfulness. Here are some pictures from dinner:

Earlier in the day we were at our volunteer project, where Katy and I have been tutoring 5th and 6th graders in English. Today we taught them a set of key English words: "pumpkin," "pilgrim," "turkey," "corn," "feast," "pie," and "sweet potato." Be assured that we've been busy spreading the atmosphere (and vocabulary) of Thanksgiving all day today in Jerusalem.

Nadav Shalom

We recently had a new addition to our family here - my cousins Tsury and Maya had a baby boy named Nadav Shalom. The whole clan gathered together for his Brit Milah (circumcision) yesterday morning. Here are the mother, father, and (inside the stroller) new son:

Here are some other pictures of the family:

World Wide Walk

Last Friday, we participated in the "world wide walk" to benefit the Pediatric Wing of the new Center for Emergency Medicine at the Hadassah Medical Organization in Jerusalem. Here are a couple of pictures taken at the start of the walk:

Downpours and Daytrips

After months of bright, sunny days here in Israel, the weather here is finally getting a little cloudier and rainier - we're entering the rainy season, for real. Typically the rainy season begins around the holiday of Sukkot, but this year has been quite dry; although we felt a few drops shortly after Sukkot, we still hadn't had a good rain until the past two days. But thanks to some good downpours on Wednesday and Thursday, we finally got to make use of our black raincoats that we bought from L.L. Bean shortly before coming to Israel. We think that they make us look sort of scary when we're standing together in the rain, shrouded in black from head to toe; we'll post a picture one of these days and you can judge for yourself. (For what it's worth, this morning was beautiful and sunny again, which was good because we spent the morning doing quite a bit of walking to benefit the emergency pediatrics department at Hadassah Hospital-more on that later).

Rain, as any reader of the Bible knows, is a big deal in Israel, and therefore plays a major role in Jewish religious consciousness. The rabbis teach that "the day of rain is like the day the world was created," a source of total renewal. (Why total renewal? Because rain sustains the entire world. Midrash Shocher Tov teachers that "the day of rain is greater than the day on which the Torah was given. For the giving of the Torah brought joy to the Jewish people, whereas a day of rain brings joy to all nations and to the entire world, including the animals and beasts." On the other hand, classic rabbis who were less-rain dependent because they didn't live in the land of Israel are more willing to admit that the rain isn't always so fun; the Babylonian Talmud [Baba Metzia 85a] teaches that "the day of rain is as hard to bear as the day of judgment" because of the discomfort it can bring, especially in the days before nice L.L. Bean raincoats and buildings that stay fairly dry.)

The start of the rainy season in Israel is also the start of the olive-harvesting season. As in the Biblical era, when Israel had three major crops, the season for the grain harvest is in the spring, the season for the wine pressing is in the summer, and the season for olive pressing is in the fall. While wine presses in Israel can be built outside since it never rains in the summer here, olive presses have always been built inside. Katy and I got to see a few of these indoor olive presses (both ancient and modern) this past Tuesday, when we took the day to join a trip with all of my classmates to some of the areas southwest of Jerusalem. Our first stop was at a modern olive press, a small press at a highway junction used by local residents. The olive season was clearly in full swing, and we bought some oil for ourselves:

Another feature of this particular daytrip was getting to learn more about some of the trees native to the land of Israel, and linking the trees before our eyes with various Biblical verses showing how these trees have played into the Jewish consciousness. We paid particular attention to oak trees, pistachio trees, almond trees, olive trees, and carob trees. One of the striking things was noting how no trees are particularly tall in the land of Israel, because the land is totally dry for at least half the year (during the summer dry season) -- so when I say "oak tree" you should actually imagine a medium-sized bush. On the other hand, the land of Israel has historically been pretty well covered with these unimposing trees of various sorts. Many of its trees were cut down during 400 years of Ottoman rule, but there has been considerable reforestation over the past century.

In addition to looking up trees in our Bibles, we also spent some time mapping out the story of David and Goliath on the ground. We spent about an hour at Tel Azeka, the site described in the Bible as the place of encounter between the two. It's a site that stands between the coast and the "sh'felah," the lowlands between the coast and the hill country of Israel. Looking to the west from Tel Azekah, we could see the mound where the coastal Philistine town of Gat--Goliath's birthplace-- once stood, and looking to the east we could see the lowlands and could faintly see the Judean mountains in the distance (though we would have seen much more if this hadn't been the day before the rains began - it was a very overcast day, as perhaps you can see from our pictures). The hill country, where David is from, would probably be a five hour walk away from Tel Azeka; Goliath probably only would have had a two hour walk from his hometown.

Anyhow, we got to look at the valleys and hills around which the Israelite-Philistine fighting played out. We also got to take a look at the sort of sling that would have been used by David - not a "sling-shot," but the sort of woven sling that was clearly a major war weapon in the past and also a useful tool for shepherds guarding their flocks (until this very day). It was clearly a useful tool for David because of its size: he was able to taunt Goliath by pretending to carry nothing but sticks, and then to pull out his sling at the moment that Goliath lowered his shield.

Here's a picture of the two of us at Tel Azeka. The picture is looking towards the east, overlooking the valley of Elah and the town of Socoh in the lowlands beyond (see I Samuel 17:2). The Judean hills start to emerge far off in the background.

We spent the much of the rest of the day exploring the caves of Bet Guvrin-Maresha National Park. There are lots of caves in the general region because it's an area rich in limestone, which is very easy to dig out. The bedrock is soft limestone, and above that is a cap of harder limestone (5-10 feet thick) which had to be removed in order to get to the soft limestone below. If you're quarrying, therefore, you'll make a hole in the ground with a small diameter until you get to the soft limestone, at which point you can start working further and further out to the sides: the result was the formation of these huge underground caves in the shape of bells--"bell caves." Seeing bell caves was our chief activity when we explored the town of Bet Guvrin, which was the major city in the region during the Late Roman, Byzantine, and Early Muslim periods. Here's a picture of Katy in the bell caves there:

We went from Bet Guvrin to Maresha, the nearby city which predates Bet Guvrin - it is mentioned in the Bible, and was well populated throughout the Hellenistic period until it was destroyed by the Parthians in 40 B.C.E. Among the things that we saw there were a water cistern - the place for storing the water from the winter rains, which hopefully can last you for the entire dry season; a massive cave network which included an ancient olive press (partially reconstructed, but nonetheless in quite good shape for being 2000 years old); a cave with a columbarium, a massive pigeon coop, where pigeons were raised primarily for their droppings, which was used for fertilizer; and a Sidonian burial cave dating back to the 3rd-2nd centuries B.C.E.

Here are pictures of the olive press in the cave:

Here is a picture of the columbarium:

And here is a picture from the burial cave:

Goats, continued

Just on the off chance that you wanted to see yet another image of my attempts at goat herding, I'm posting an additional photo which I just received and which I think is particularly striking, if I may say so myself. (Thanks to Danya for the picture!)

Herding Goats

This past Wednesday, I went back to Neot Kedumim with the other North American students from Schechter. The highlight of our trip, this time around, was trying our hand at goat-herding, a good trial for any aspiring clergy person: it's quite humbling to find out just how difficult it can be to be a "leader of the flock," although enticing the flock with fig leaves certainly helped. Here are some pictures of my efforts:

Sweet Honey, Scattered Ruins, and Scenic Beaches

Here are some pictures from the trip we took last weekend to Netanya with our friends Rebecca and Meir. On Friday morning, we drove to a farming community, Mishmeret, which is famous for its honey factory. It was interesting to see the honey-making process, and Katy even gave a presentation on it in her Hebrew class back in Jerusalem.

Also, as part of our trip, we drove out to the ruins of Caesarea. On one hand it was very beautiful and tranquil - a nice place to have lunch on the Mediterranean coast. On the other hand, its one of these places which has known tremendous amounts of violence - lots of massacres and lots of destruction followed by rebuilding in every period of history. Here are some pictures that we took:

In addition to visiting Mishmeret and Caesarea, we spent most of our weekend in Netanya. We had a great time there, enjoying a very peaceful Shabbat and spending a fair amount of time at the beach.

Post-Election Musings

I cast my absentee ballot vote (in New York) for John Kerry two weeks ago, and am not feeling terribly happy after Bush’s victory. I’ve been tremendously disappointed by the Bush administration in lots of ways – because of its faith in a big, powerful, and intrusive federal government, because of its strong social conservatism, because of its promotion of indefinite detentions and its disregard for civil liberties, because of its failure to come up with realistic environmental policies or energy policies, because of its general recklessness, incompetence and lack of integrity (most notably, in its handling of the Iraq war), because of its failures to respond to criticism, concede mistakes, or hold anyone in its ranks responsible for failure, because of its culture of secrecy and slanting the truth, and because of its inability to communicate effectively with the vast majority of the world’s population (with the exception of Israelis). I admit that I hadn’t gotten so enthusiastic about the Kerry campaign, but I came to like the idea of supporting a candidate whose administration promised competence, and I was also very excited about the prospect of divided government in Washington – clearly the best way to keep the federal government limited, checked, and accountable.

On the other hand, unlike a vast majority of my fellow classmates in Israel this year, I don’t think that Bush is an idiot or a tyrant. I may feel pretty lousy about him, but I do have some optimism regarding some of his domestic agenda, since I think that he may push in the right direction on important issues like tort reform, Social Security reform, and simplifying the tax code. While I find myself very disturbed by some of the election results from around the country – like the decision by 11 states to ban gay marriage (and, in most cases, civil unions) – I don’t feel a sense of total despair in regards to the presidential election results. I do hope that I'm justified in feeling that, and that the next four years turn out better than the last four.

Tension in the Air

I know that there’s a strong and tense feeling of political division in the States at this moment of time, but the feeling of division in America really seems quite moderate in comparison to the polarization in Israel. There seems to be a regular stream of newspaper headlines here that warn of impending “civil war” stemming from Prime Minister Ariel Sharon’s plan to withdraw from the Gaza Strip. For anyone who hasn’t been following the news from Israel in recent weeks, the disengagement plan is supported by most Israelis and was approved yesterday by the Israeli parliament, but Israel’s coalition government is falling apart, rabbis are urging soldiers to disobey orders to dismantle Jewish settlements, Sharon is regularly branded as a “Nazi collaborator” for demanding the expulsion of Jews from Gaza, and talk about the imminent assassination of Sharon is not uncommon. The focus on incitement and death threats seems especially acute today, the ninth anniversary of the assassination of Yitzchak Rabin, a day with memorial services and discussions taking place all around the country (including at Katy’s and my respective schools). My Hebrew teacher suggested today that the climate in Israel feels very similar to the climate before Rabin’s murder, but that the atmosphere feels much more intense – in part because we now know that assassinations are a real possibility here. This morning, graffiti appeared around Jerusalem with messages such as: “We got Rabin and we’ll get Sharon” and “Hearty wishes to the next assassin.”

We’ve been discussing many of these issues in my Hebrew Language class – one of my favorite classes – over the last two weeks. In commemoration of Rabin’s murder, we most recently read Naomi Shemer’s translation/adaption of Walt Whitman’s poem “O Captain, My Captain,” which she translated for the first anniversary of Rabin’s death. The most striking difference between Whitman and Shemer’s poems is that Whitman is able to write about a situation after Lincoln’s assassination in which “the ship is anchor’d safe and sound, its voyage closed and done; from fearful trip the victor ship comes in with object won.” In the Israeli parallel, the ship is still anchored at the harbor before the voyage; when Rabin was assassinated, Yossi Sarid pointed out in today’s newspaper, “not only was the man assassinated, the course he had charted was entirely disrupted as well.” Hopefully, “blind and murderous nationalist zealotry” (Sarid’s phrase) will not strike again anytime soon, and hopefully the plans for withdrawl from Gaza will continue apace.

Classes, Cousins and Construction

We have had a busy week of classes (Geoffrey finally started his as well) and we also have been fairly social -- I got to meet four more of Geoffrey's cousins this week. They were all very nice and I look forward to spending more time with them.

My classes at the Yeshiva are going well. My favorite classes are Liturgy, in which we explore the words, structure and history of the different Jewish prayer services, and Chumash (Bible) in which we are reading the stories of Joseph and the classic commentary of Rashi. Despite the difficulties of getting in the door to the Yeshiva due to the double construction zone there (the construction of the larger complex of which the Yeshiva is a part, and also the construction on the privately-owned apartment which is in the same building as the Yeshiva itself), and despite the sitting-too-much syndrome, I am enjoying the learning very much.

In the meantime I am slowly working on my Hebrew. It is not coming along as quickly as I had hoped, but I finally have come to terms with the fact that learning Hebrew is really a secondary goal for this year. I am focusing on doing Jewish learning at the Yeshiva, and while Hebrew will help me in that and in getting around Jerusalem, it is not my primary goal. I am, however, trying out different methods for learning the language. Tonight I watched a soap opera in Hebrew. I didn't really understand a lot of the dialogue, but I could follow the plot without too much difficulty and picked up some words and phrases of the Hebrew.

Geoffrey has started his classes and, unfortunately, his homework. Hopefully, though, we will soon find a good balance between school and relaxing.

Zichron Ya'akov

As part of my orientation, we spent the day on Tuesday in Zichron Ya'akov, a coastal village on the southern slopes of Mount Carmel. The town was one of the first to be founded by the 19th century settlers who came from Eastern Europe as part of the First Aliyah. The story of these immigrants is a story of incredible struggle and the hope followed by disillusionment that is a major part of the story of Israel. We spent much of our day contemplating the various ways to teach about the story of immigration to Israel and contemplating the complexities of Israeli identity.

We weren't so good at picture-taking on the trip, but here's one picture that Katy took of a few of us JTS students outside the Ohel Yaakov synagogue, built in 1886 by Baron Edmond de Rothschild, the major patron of the town:

Malls, Monkeys, and Mishnah

I've been on vacation from school for the past week (and Geoff has continued to be on his extended vacation - his orientation is, finally, tomorrow) and we've been having a good time.

Among the highlights have been seeing Harry Potter and the Prisoner of Azkaban, dubbed in Hebrew, at the Jerusalem Mall. We're in a bit of withdrawl from Harry Potter after finishing listening to the fifth book on CD, and so it was good to get our Harry Potter fix from the movie, even if it was a little hard to understand the Hebrew. Being at the mall was like being in a mall in America, except that they had lots of children's art activities in the middle of the mall, and there was a children's music concert going on (featuring "Old McDonald" in Hebrew), and many of the kiosks were selling Judaica items like yarmulkes, candlesticks, Kiddush cups, stuffed Torahs for children, etc. It was very kid-friendly and fun.

On another day, we were ran into some friends as we were walking home who were on their way to the Monkey Park. We decided that spending a day with monkeys would be fun and went with them. It was neat to see monkeys up close: at one point, as I walked under a tree, I heard noises from up above, and had to duck as a monkey came swinging through the branches.

For another adventure, we went with a group to Ne'ot Kedumim, the Biblical Landscape Reserve in Israel, a nature reserve full of the plants and landscapes of the Bible. A prime feature of Ne'ot Kedumim during the holiday of Sukkot is their display of life-size models of more than 20 different varieties of Sukkot (booths) discussed by the rabbis in the Mishnah (a traditional Jewish text) - exceptionally tall sukkot, exceptionally small sukkot, sukkot built on top of boats, wagons, etc. You can see examples here. Seeing them was especially exciting for me, since I studied the texts giving all these possibilities at the yeshiva before the holiday. Here are some pictures that we took at Ne'ot Kedumim:

Sukkat Ha-Or

Tonight, after Shabbat, we went out walking and came upon the "Sukkah of Light," the largest (480 sq. meters) and most brightly illuminated (144,000 mini light bulbs, 4 kilometers of electric wiring) sukkah in the world. It's a little grander than our sukkah, but ours does feel a little more "authentic," as many of our guests have described it.

And on to the next holiday...

"You shall dwell in Sukkot ('booths') seven days" (Leviticus 23:42). Geoff and I fell in love with the holiday of Sukkot amidst the rolling hills and farmland of Minnesota and I think it is without a doubt my favorite Jewish holiday. After two mildly disappointing years of not being able to build a sukkah in the middle of Manhattan, we were really looking forward to building one here in Israel. We were disappointed to find that our porch had a permanent covering on it; since a sukkah must not have any barriers between the roof and the sky, we gave up on the idea of building one. But as I studied each day in my Talmud class about how to build a kosher sukkah, and as I watched people cleaning their porches and removing their awnings to make sukkot, we gave it one more chance. As we were poking around in the garden trying to decide if we should ask permission of the woman in charge of the apartment committee, she stuck her head out the window and said "Lama lo?!" - "Why not?!" So we collected various things off the street to make into walls and bought some large palm branches off the street to use as the roof and we built a very small, but homey sukkah. Here are the pictures we took throughout the process:

And, finally, here's a picture of us shopping for our lulavs and etrogs-- the palm branches, citrons, myrtles, and willows that we shake during the days of Sukkot:

We also would like to share this cute illustration of Sukkot, sent to us by one of Geoff's cousins.

Eating well and with good company...

A picture from dinner with Hillary and Yehi last night at Angelo, a delicious Italian Restaurant in Jerusalem:

Yom Kippur

Yesterday was Yom Kippur, and we spent pretty much all of it in prayer at The Leader Minyan, a community somewhat famous for its long services and high-energy singing. We were there on Friday from 5:30 pm until 10:00 pm, and then on Saturday from 6:30 am to 6:30 pm, engaging in more joyous prayer, song, and dance than you might expect on a day when you're fasting and encountering your own mortality. But, then again, the Talmud ranks Yom Kippur as one of the two most joyful days for the people of Israel - a day where accepting your mortality leads not only to desperate confession and tears but also to forgiveness, love, and the experience of receiving Torah (specifically, “oral Torah,” the evolving teaching that can never be written down).

Here's a picture of Katy taken right before candle-lighting on Friday afternoon:

Just to let you know...

An 18-year old Palestinian woman blew herself up in an an area on the northern outskirts of Jeruslem today, killing the two policemen who were trying to stop her and seriously wounding a large number of other civilians. We heard the news while we were studying at the yeshiva today, and just wanted to let you know that we're okay.

Our New Pal

As some of you might know, we had some unwelcome little guests in our apartment in New York last year. So, when I saw something scurry across the bathroom floor one night, I was not too pleased. I was even less pleased when I couldn't tell if the small reptile hiding in the corner under the trash can was a small lizard or a small snake. We stared at it for awhile as it shyly cowered in the corner, and then I went to google "reptiles in Israel" while Geoff kept watch. Without a magnifying glass, we could barely see this almost-transparent tiny creature, so we took its picture with our zoom lens. Our critter exactly matched the picture of the Mediterranean Gecko ("shmamit batim" in Hebrew, the "house gecko"). You can read more about them here.

Since they eat other bugs, we decided to let him be. Meet Gabe the Gecko (many times magnified in this picture), the newest member of our household:



Apparently, Gabe's ancestors played a prominent role in Biblical times as well. Note the passage in the Book of Proverbs (30:28): "You can hold a gecko in your hands, but it dwells in the palaces of kings."

Wake-Up Calls

We had a good two days of Rosh Hashanah, full of lots of prayer and food, the former done mostly with the Kedem community here in Jerusalem, and the latter done at the apartments of various friends (old and new) in the area. Among other things, over the two days we got to hear a total of 200 blasts of the shofar, the ram’s horn blown on Rosh Hashanah which is incredibly rich in symbolism (see here and here). Generally, the sound of the shofar functions as a wake-up call – in the words of Maimonides, it is like a voice crying out: “Those who are sleeping, wake up from your sleep! Those who are slumbering, arise from your slumber!” The shofar blasts remind us to look within ourselves and to create ourselves anew, something particularly appropriate to the day that celebrates the creation of the world and the creation of the human being; we seek to wake up to our responsibilities, to the cries of others and our obligations to them. The sound of the shofar should also be viewed as a voice coming from deep within us, articulating our basic, wordless prayers: both the staccato, broken notes acknowledging the brokenness of our world and also the sounds of wholeness and strength signifying our hopes for a world redeemed and transformed.

We’re currently in the period between Rosh Hashanah and Yom Kippur, the period between the day of being judged and the day of being forgiven. During this time, in order to get to that place of forgiveness, we do the work of ”teshuvah,”-- recreating ourselves, reorienting ourselves in the world, and asking to be forgiven. Among the intermediate days, today is a day with a more specific focus, a minor fast day known as The Fast of Gedaliah, commemorating the murder of a Jewish official by his fellow Jews who were angered by his realism and willingness to compromise with the occupying authority (Babylonia) in the land of Israel. It’s a day to meditate on the dangers of political extremism and violence, particularly as they occur within the Jewish community.

Defeating political extremism is, of course, an ongoing process in the land of Israel in this day and age. The country is slowly moving towards figuring out what the most reasonable sorts of compromises are, and I’m fairly confident that things are moving in the right direction. If you’re interested in good reading about the path towards normalcy and security here in Israel, see this article from The New Republic, recommended to me by my mother.

Rosh Hashanah starts tonight

Best wishes to everyone for a good and sweet new year. Rosh Hashanah, the first day of the new year on the Jewish calendar, marks the anniversary of the creation of the world. Happy birthday to the world and "shanah tovah" to everyone -- may the coming year be full of goodness, health, and happiness for you all.

Apartment Pictures

We're posting some pictures of our apartment. With all of these pictures, you can click on the small images below in order to see a larger image. Enjoy!

Here's our living room:



Here's our dining area (looking a little barren-- you can imagine delicious food on the table and delightful guests sitting around it):



Here's our porch (our "mirpeset"), which makes us very happy. The picture is taken from our living room. You can see some of the view beyond, looking off to the west in the direction of the Knesset (the Israeli parliament building), the Israel Museum, the Supreme Court, and my school, Machon Schechter:





Here's our kitchen. We're very exicted to have an eat-in kitchen (which is not a feature of most New York apartments!):





Here's our study (pardon the funny angles of the pictures):





And here's our bedroom. Note that all the sheets and blankets that came with the apartment were either bright pink or bright purple:



Thankfully, Hillary (my sister) was able to provide us with some tamer sheets, although we've grown rather attached to the bright pink blanket. Last night was a little bit chilly, and Katy also pulled out a bright purple blanket. We're living in style here in Jerusalem!

Hebrew, Kabbalah, and Rugelach

We're nearing the end of our first full week here in Jerusalem. Katy has now been to all of her classes at the Yeshiva, and I've been busily studying Hebrew. I went to one ulpan (intensive Hebrew) class, and thought about doing the full 5-hour-a-day program for the month, but decided instead to work with a private tutor for a few hours a week and do lots of homework. So I'm spending the mornings slowly working my way through newspaper articles in Hebrew and doing exercises and writing essays and so on; then a few evenings a week I get an hour or so of one-on-one speaking and listening time. I'm not entirely convinced yet, but I think this is a better arrangement, since I get much more time to actually speak with a teacher and since I seem to be sufficiently self-motivated to practice by myself. And I like getting to choose subjects and reading materials on my own. I spent today reading an article in Ha'aretz (one of the daily papers here, and also probably the one with the most difficult Hebrew, for better or for worse) about the ongoing struggle of the Conservative and Reform movements for recognition in Israel.

I've also joined Katy for a few classes at the Conservative Yeshiva, one on Kabbalah, the Jewish esoteric tradition, and one on the texts of the early Hasidic masters (18th century) who are particularly adept at taking Kabbalah and making it a bit less esoteric. Both classes were ones that I didn't get to take when I was studying at the Conservative Yeshiva three years, and I'm excited that I get to sit in on them for a few weeks. Although on occasion I find Kabbalah (and some of its Hasidic interpretations) deeply problematic, I think that Kabbalah offers an incredibly rich symbolic language and many promising tools for the project of "building a contemporary spiritual vocabulary."

In addition to things like Hebrew and Kabbalah, I also get to engage in slightly more domestic tasks like cooking and laundry, since I'm spending much of my day at home. I've been trying to listen to the news in Hebrew on the radio while putting the laundry up to dry on our laundry line, although I find that hanging up the laundry here actually requires considerable concentration, since our laundry line is out the window and right below it is a very large and very prickly-looking cactus plant. A dropped piece of laundry might be impossible to retrieve ever again.

Today we spent the afternoon doing errands - buying the essential items in life, like food and books. We got to stop by the Marzipan bakery in Jerusalem's Mahane Yehuda market and sample their rugelach, their delicious, ambrosial chocolate pastries which are certified as the best rugelach on earth and have, as they say in Hebrew, "taam gan eden," "the taste of the Garden of Eden." I made an attempt to capture Katy's first Marzipan rugelach on film:

Hiking and Resting

On Friday, we traveled with the Yeshiva students and teachers and their families up to the Carmel Mountains, where we hiked for part of the day. We spent some time sitting and singing inside the cave that you can see pictured below with Katy in front of it.

We then traveled a bit further east towards the Galilee and spent Shabbat in an area called Alon Tavor, right below Mount Tabor (Tavor in Hebrew). We engaged in lots of studying, eating, praying, and sleeping and had a nice time meeting people.

Getting Over Jet Lag

We arrived in Israel on Tuesday morning bright and early and were met by Geoffrey’s sister Hillary and his uncle Joel. We spent most of the day going to the grocery store and taking care of other logistics with Hillary’s help. We’re now starting to feel a bit more settled. The city is beautiful. Although I had seen pictures, it looked different from what I expected. One of the things that I find most striking about the city is the Jerusalem stone that is used in almost every building. It has taken a few days to get used to it, but I now find it to be beautiful.

Our apartment is very nice. It is quite spacious and it has a lot of natural sunlight! It is on a quiet street, although we did have a neighbor play music until 3:00 a.m. on our first night here. It didn’t matter much though, because we were awake and very jet-lagged. :)

I have had two days of orientation at the Conservative Yeshiva and I think it will be very good. The teachers are very nice and personable and the other students are friendly. I will have a packed schedule but I am excited about it.

Geoffrey is going to be doing some ulpan (intensive Hebrew language study) this month until his classes begin at Machon Schechter. He will be doing various other learning as well.

We will be spending Shabbat up north in the Galilee region with the Conservative Yeshiva folk. It should be very nice. We’ll let you know how it goes and post pictures soon -- both pictures of our apartment in Jerusalem and also pictures from our trip!