Shabbat, Old Skool-styles

This weekend I spent Shabbat in the Jewish Quarter of the Old City of Jerusalem. It was quite an experience, staying with two friends (one of whom is Orthodox) at a religious women's hostel in the heart of the Jewish Quarter.

Although I don't normally keep shabbat (ok, I don't ever keep shabbat), I really enjoyed the Old-Skool Shabbat experience. The Jewish Quarter is full of Yeshivot (schools for study of Torah) and many many Jewish outreach programmes and experiences. We took advantage of one of these - Shabbat Hospitality. What happens is on Friday nights, after Shabbat comes in, you can go and meet a very comedic guy called Jeff Seidel who will send you to the home of a Jewish family for Shabbat dinner. You can do the same on Saturday for lunch. We went to two different homes and had two exceptional meals with our generous hosts. The people were so welcoming and I really appreciated the opportunity to glimpse inside Jewish Orthodox life. Although Orthodox Judaism is not for me, I am endlessly fascinated by people who seek to live every aspect of their lives in keeping with the codes of conduct and teachings of the Torah. As always, I heard and saw things I could relate to, and things that I couldn't relate to at all. At times I felt connected to K'lal Yisrael and at other times, felt like a separate species of Jew from my hosts. But this is Israel, and the longer I am here and the more I read and learn, the more complex this place becomes for me.

This past week I have also become more conscious of the "bubble" that we could potentially be encased in at WUJS, in our quiet little desert town. Just outside our carefully and richly designed programme lies a country that is rent by religious, cultural, social, and political tensions. Some of these tensions are beginning to become the centrepieces of our seminars and fieldtrips. Tomorrow, for example, we are going to visit some Bedouin sites to find out more about the issues and challenges for this group of people. Next week we will focus on "Jerusalem's seam line" - the East-West divide that sits at the heart of so many of Israel's deepest problems. We look at these issues in our seminars too. There is a lot to think about.....

Very busy!

I feel like I haven't been blogging as often as I really need to, to keep y'alls up-to-date. The problem is that there is SO much to blog about (what we're learning, what's going on at WUJS, our tiyulim, etc) but so little time to blog! Many days we have nary a moment to spare, in between classes and homework and group activities. So, my apologies blogfans...I will try to write something interesting soon :)

The WUJS routine

I have now been here at WUJS Arad a little over a week, and I'm just beginning to get clear on our general weekly "routine". Up till now it's been a little confusing because we had an "orientation" week, and then we began this week with Yom HaZikaron (memorial day) and Yom Ha'atzmaut (Israel Independence Day), so things have been a little frenetic. Today we spent most of the day at a Yom Ha'atzmaut BBQ in a local Arad park, chilling, eating, reading, and playing (or in my case learning to play) shesh besh.

But anyway here's a precis of a normal week: We have Hebrew Ulpan (Hebrew language classes) for 3 hours a day on Sunday, Monday, Wednesday and Thursday. On Tuesdays, we do a"study tour" - basically a field trip to learn about some topic by going to see it. Mondays, Wednesdays and Thursdays we also have seminars in three different streams: Judaism stuff on Mondays with Artie Fischer, Israeli society and culture stuff on Wednesdays with Steve Israel, and Middle East Politics stuff on Thursday with Neil Lazarus. On Sundays we also have special stuff according to which WUJS track we are on - e.g. Arts (AP), Land Language and Society (LLS), or Peace and Social Justice (PSJ) - I am PSJ. So there is also a whole series of trips and seminars related to that. Sundays and Mondays we have some sort of evening activity. Classes end 5.30pm on Thursday, and we have Friday and Saturday off as our weekend.

Busy Busy!!

It's great though, I am loving being a student again. Next week we also get to meet our "adopted families" - these are local families from Arad who we can go and visit, practice our Hebrew with, etc. I am not sure how much Hebrew I can learn in the 2.5 months I'm in Arad, but I really want to because I hate not being able to talk to Israelis in their own language!

As for other "routine" aspects of life, I haven't joined a gym yet but I think I probably will. The two gyms here are tiny, one is very expensive but has a pool, and the other is cheaper. I am missing Les Mills a lot, but in the meantime we have been doing a lot of walking, a bit of hiking. A couple of times I even got out of bed in the morning and went for a run. I kind of need to, as we seem to spend a lot of time eating here!

Lying in the middle of a crater

I have just returned from a 2-day tiyul (trip/hike) in the Negev desert. As our "opening tiyul" for WUJS, we went to the large and small Makhtesh (crater - but a very specific kind of crater formed by geomorphological processes, not from a volcano or a meteor or comet impact). The first day we hiked down into, and across, the small makhtesh and camped in tents on the outer rim. Today we walked through a beautiful winding canyon to the Arava valley. I was a very happy camper (though it seems not all the WUJys are cut out for camping!).

The Negev is so beautiful, and our guide - another Rachel - had a gift for eloquently weaving together stories about the natural and cultural history of our surroundings and helping us to appreciate where we were at each moment.

At one point, after lunch, she had us lie down in the middle of the makhtesh just to listen to the sounds and the silence of the desert. Once everyone stopped shuffling their feet and zipping their bags, the silence was blissful. A few weeks ago in Welly, I think it would have been pretty hard for me to imagine myself lying in the middle of a crater in the Negev....