Wednesday, July 28, 2010

The School Part of Rabbinical School has Begun

So I have officially started rabbinical school! Ulpan (summer intensive hebrew class) began last week; so I'm about a week and a half in now. I'm originally got placed in bet (the 2nd level) but moved up to gimel (third level) because bet was wayyyy too easy. I've already had my first test (yesterday) and I think it went pretty well. I know I haven't written anything in a while, but I have been unbelievably busy! I will attempt a brief overview of the last week and a half.

Orientation week Shabbat (7/16/10):
Two Shabbats ago our class was altogether at HUC. We had Friday night services on campus followed by a great dinner outside in the academic building area (pictures of my beautiful campus can be seen on facebook). Somehow a song session broke out after the dinner, and even though I never went to Jewish summer camp, my experience on my NFTY trip (youth group Israel trip) and at Hillel definitely helped me to know the tunes and happily participate! Saturday morning I went to services at HUC again (it is basically "strongly recommended" that we go to all of the summer morning services if we are in town aka we have to). After services I went over to some friends' apartment and made what has become our traditional Shabbat morning brunch. I'm having it at my apartment this week! There is a really cool park/garden/view point behind my school, and we organized Havdalah there (the ceremony that marks the end of Shabbat). If you've ever heard a stereotype about reform rabbis playing guitars... it's kind of true. There were soooo many guitars in one place, but it worked out really nicely!

Ulpan Week 1:
Ulpan began two Sundays ago (July 18). I already mentioned that ulpan is hebrew but it is basically 4.5 hours a day of class that you can only speak hebrew in (sometimes english pops up if there is a word that has to be translated that we don't know). My teacher's name is Oznat, and I like her a lot. We have her Sun - Tues and then have a different teacher Sarah on Wednesday. Sarah is a lot less great, so I guess it's a good thing she's only once a week. On Sunday I also had my first cantillation class (ulpan and cantillation are the two summer classes and they last for 6 weeks). Cantillation is the class where we learn trope which is essentially what you need to chant from the Torah. They had two sessions of the class; the first being for people with little to no experience with trope/reading music and the second one was for people who did. I of course went to the first one. The teacher's name is Cantor Tamar Havilio and we came to find out that her name used to be Heather Phepher and she changed it to Tamar when she moved to Israel. The Havilio part came in when she married and old Sephardic family that has been in Israel for 900 years (she really loves telling us about this part, and we can't help but love making fun of it a little). Cantillation was slightly terrifying but I got through it.

That same day (I was gone from 8am - 10pm) I went on a great tour through the old city called "Walking the Psalms in Jerusalem" with Rabbi Wilfond (HUC staff member also known as "Gingy"), where we used the psalms as our guidebook through the ancient part of Jerusalem. It was amazing! I also have pictures from that on my facebook and am in the process of creating a youtube channel to put some videos up.

Sunset Monday - sunset Tuesday was the holiday of Tisha B'Av which commemorates the destruction of the First and Second Temples (among other tragic events in Jewish history). It is supposed to be the saddest day of the Jewish calendar. It was really cool to be in Jerusalem so close to where the events that the holiday is based on occurred (the kotel/western wall/wailing wall in the old city is the remnants of the platform on which the 2nd Temple used to sit). I still can't understand why we had school that day considering it is a major holiday where people traditionally fast. The main school offices were closed, and even our teacher said it sucked that we had to be there. I think she felt bad for us so she didn't give us any homework. Definitely a bright side to the "saddest" day of the year.

We have ulpan Sunday through Wednesday and then Thursdays we have various other activities. This past Thursday the interns organized a Yom Yerushalayim (Jerusalem Day) where we got to choose an activity in Jerusalem from a bunch of things that they had put together. I chose to go to the Tavor House and then the Museum on the Seam. The Tavor House is the Swedish Theological Institute, and my group (of 6 people) met with a guy named Neils who showed us around, told us about the history of the institute, and then facilitated a great interfaith discussion about Jerusalem and Israel. I really enjoyed talking to Neils, and plan on being in touch so that we can get together in the future and talk more.

From the Tavor House our group walked to the Museum on the Seam which is a socio-political contemporary art museum. They are actually the ones that came up with the "coexist" bumper stickers with the different symbols in place of the letters that can be seen all over America. We had a little bit of an adventure when walking from the Tavor House to the museum. Jerusalem has a VERY religious neighborhood called Meah Shearim which is basically home to only ultra ultra ultra orthodox people. Some of these people are the fanatics that often set dumpsters on fire in protest of things like building parking lots that will be open on Shabbat. Unless you are completely covered up... you do not want to walk through this area. If anyone saw the movie Bruno, this is the neighborhood where he gets chased by religious people for basically wearing underwear. When we were walking to the museum, I saw that we were going in the direction of this neighborhood, and made sure we did not go in. We basically ended up walking in a street that borders the neighborhood so we walked a little faster than normal, kept our heads down, and avoided getting too close to any balconies (Meah Shearim is know for pouring dirty water on people that they don't think are dressed appropriately). We finally got to the end of the street which was a little bit of a dead end so had to jump over a short wall to get to the main street. It was a small step up to get onto the wall, but then a pretty legitimate jump down. When we had to meet back up with all of the other groups at school at the end of the day and talk about our experiences this was definitely one of our highlights.

Shabbat/Tel Aviv:
This past week's Shabbat was great! There is a weekly progressive Shabbat service on Friday evenings at the Tel Aviv port, and we picked this past week as the time that everyone from school could be there together. I got to sleep in Friday morning which was AMAZING after getting up early every day. There are very few days that we get to sleep in because the week is Sunday-Thursday and we have to be at morning services on Saturdays at 9:30. Friday is really the only day to sleep late. I got up, got brunch at a great cafe right near my house where I had shakshuka for the first time. It's basically an egg dish with tomatoes and other stuff thrown in. Wikipedia defines it as "a Middle Eastern dish consisting of poached or fried eggs cooked in a sauce of tomatoes, peppers, onions, and spices (often including cumin, turmeric, and chillies), and usually served with white bread."

After brunch we caught a sherut (inexpensive van taxi) to Tel Aviv which is less than an hour away. It is extremely amazing but also weird how easy it is to get to Tel Aviv especially because of how very different it is from Jerusalem. It really is like going to an opposite world. Where Jerusalem is very religious, Tel Aviv is all about the fun and party. I traveled with my friends Liz and Yael, and we went straight to the beach where we met up with some other classmates. Getting to relax at the beach after my first week of ulpan was so amazing and necessary. When the day started turning into evening, we went to the port where the service was. This service is known to attract a crowd at least ten times bigger than any single progressive service in Israel. There were a bunch of instruments and singers leading the services as the sun was setting. While it may not have been the most prayer oriented service I've been to, it was absolutely beautiful to be able to watch the sun go down over the water. Another highlight of this trip was that after services, I went out to dinner where I proceeded to eat three different types of shellfish (this would never happen in Jerusalem). I absolutely love Jerusalem but there was something about being in Tel Aviv on Shabbat where I was listening to live music and eating non-kosher food that just felt so amazing and freeing after only being in Jerusalem for so many weeks. (It's ok that I'm saying this because I was having dinner with a current 5th year student, other classmates, and another rabbi who were all enjoying it just as much!)

Shabbat morning I went to HUC services and then went back to Liz, Nina, and Yael's apartment to make brunch. In Jewish tradition Shabbat is a day of rest where if you follow Jewish law more traditionally, you don't do any work or use electricity or fire of any kind. This really doesn't leave a whole lot to do, so a lovely tradition known as the Shabbat nap developed. While I don't keep Shabbat in the traditional sense, this past week I decided to fully embrace the tradition of the Shabbat nap, and I think this will become a regular thing. To lay it out... my basic Saturday schedule now looks like this: services, shabbat lunch, nap, wake up and do something outside, go to havdalah, and then various evening activities.

This past week I also discovered an amazing restaurant right across the street from my neighborhood called Restobar that is open on Shabbat which equals non kosher meaning that I got a salad with grilled chicken AND cheese (kosher food doesn't allow you to mix milk and meat). Everyone I was with basically decided that this was our new favorite place. After dinner there was havdalah in the same location it was last week, and then some people came over to my place to watch a movie (the movie of choice was Hair which should be shocking if you know me well).

Ulpan Week 2:
This past week was pretty quiet considering we are really getting into the swing of things with school. As I already mentioned I had my first test yesterday. It was on a lot of grammatical concepts that were review but the fun part was the 75 word vocab sheet that the teacher gave us to know for the test (of which i probably knew 5-10 of the words beforehand). I also had my second cantillation class this week. Surprisingly I am nowhere near the worst person in the class and actually hit all of the notes I was supposed to.

I realize that my attempt at being brief didn't go so well, but I will really try to stay more on top of posting so that I don't have to put so much in one post. If you are regularly reading this, follow me or feel free to leave comments.

L'hitraot (goodbye for now)

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