The End and The Beginning

I’m sorry that this last update is looooong overdue, but the last couple weeks have been crazy. So, with that being said, I’ll try to catch you all up on my life. On May 24th, I cashed in my Hanukkah present and took my friend Zehra on a tour of the tunnels of the Kotel. I hadn’t been on the tunnel tours since I was around 10 years old with my family, so it was still new enough to be interesting for me too. Many people don’t know the visible part of the Kotel (the Western Wall) is really only a very small part of the walls of the ancient Second Temple. You can take a tour walking along the rest of the wall that runs beneath the Muslim quarter of the current Old City. Also, this tunnel tour gives you the chance to marvel at one of the ancient mysteries from the Jewish world: a single stone block that weighs over 500 tons was placed down there, but no one knows how! Little did I know that I would be going on this same tour a few weeks later on June 11 with Ramah Seminar because we had to learn to give the tour so that when we take our kids (yes that means I’m going a third time this year) during Seminar, we can give them the tour. The first week of June was absolute craziness. Not only did I have 4 finals, a 12 page paper, and a 15 page paper to do, but I had to say goodbye to all of my closest friends from the semester as they flew back to the United States. After the tearful goodbye to my friends, I had to move out of my apartment in the Kfar and into another apartment. Thanks to my friend Abby and even more thanks to her grandmother, I have a great place to stay for the 3 weeks until Seminar starts. Also, during these crazy first two weeks of June, I started my staff training for Seminar. Long days of them telling us obvious things like don’t exit the bus in the middle of the street. I’ve met my little staff of 4 (3 others and me) and I really like them and I think this will be a fun yet exhausting summer. After the boring parts of training like sitting in a classroom while they talk and talk, we were taken out on a hike to simulate a day in the life. We hiked in an ancient agricultural site right next to Jerusalem called Sataf, located on the terraced slopes of Mt. Eitan, where you can see the remains of a pre-1948 Arab Village. Here in Ein Sataf, we entered a cave where a spring flows and brings pure cold water out from the rocks. Inside the cave, completely pitch black, the whole staff sang a song called Ohzee (a Jewish song/prayer). It was really emotionally moving to hear all of our voices singing this beautifully haunting melody in a cave thousands of years old. And actually, even more moving for me, I did this same thing 5 years ago, in this exact cave, on my high school in Israel program. One last thing I wanted to tell you about: my Shabbat experience at a synagogue called Shira Hadasha. Shira Hadasha (New Song for those non-Hebrew speakers) is an orthodox synagogue but with a very feminist feeling. By that I mean they have a mechitza (curtain separating women and men) but women were leading parts of the service, reading Torah, and doing many other egalitarian things. They even opened up the mechitza in the middle so that women could read from the Torah. This was the most confusing Shabbat for me. I really liked it at the beginning because you could get that bond with women only, but not feel like you’re being completely excluded from the men. However, by the end, the more I thought about it the more I didn’t like it. I felt like if you were going to be Orthodox, be completely Orthodox, and if you were going to be egalitarian and let women be involved, don’t separate us and let us do some things but not all things. As I said before, it was a very confusing Shabbat experience for me. It made do a lot of thinking and re-evaluating of my current observance level to figure out what I liked. Anyways, now I have 2 weeks to hang out in Israel until Seminar starts. I hope to spend some time with some of my new Israeli friends and see those friends who are still here. I’ll try to update you again before Seminar starts, but be aware that once Seminar starts on June 28th, my internet access will be zero to nil.