First Week and Teveriah

Wednesday night was my friend Ilana's birthday so we went out to Caffit (a restaurant on Emek Refaim) to celebrate with a birthday dinner. That was lots of fun (as any meal with gnocci is), and it was a great group of us at the restaurant. The first week came to a close on Thursday (as they do in Israel), and that night we watched the movie United 93 as a commemoration. It was a very sad movie, but also a very interesting examination of the events of the day. I recommend it, but caution that it has some sickening moments.

Thursday night in Israel is usually the night to go out on the town, since there arent any classes on friday but this thursday was different in that a) many of us were to have a class friday morning, and b) we'd just watched United 93. We still hung out and had some fun.

Friday morning I had my first Mendelsson class - he is very interesting, but I could teach his course (that's not my hubris peeking through, he just has to teach to a fairly low common denominator), so I find it hard to focus, but I think it will be ok - I get to impress a college professor with my knowledge, which is always fun. Immediately after that fourteen of my friends and I set out on our first adventure of the year - shabbat in Tiberias. When we got there, we checked into our hotel, went shopping for food, and then relaxed for a few hours.

As we got close to shabbat, I grabbed my siddur (which I thought to throw in my suitcase for the weekend) and we headed down to the Kinneret. Since I was the only one with a siddur, I became the de facto leader, but my friend Shira joined me. Because some of the group peeled off, we only had 9 people and so we couldn't do maariv - even so, kabbalat shabbat was beautiful.

After that we spent time at the beach, and then headed back to our hotel to hang out more. We slept late on shabbat and then lazed around all day until it was time to head home. Back in Jlem, we had slichot services. We had an option in theory, but since we got back late we were told to go to Shorashim, which is a congregation that meets on Shammai in Jlem about ten minutes from Beit Nativ. Their services were proceeded with a guided meditation (a dimyon medurach in hebrew - I found that phrase really interesting), which was relaxing. Then we had the service, which was very long, but with beautiful tunes - not many of us made it all the way through but it was good. I explained to my staff that the reason most people gave up halfway through was because slichot in america means coming together at the shul to watch the movie Ushpizin, and then racing through a 15 minute service. They liked that description.

Today it was back to the real world. I had all three of my classes in one day for the first time, which was long but not unfun. I have a pretty bad cold though which is why I'm going to sleep very soon. Tonight, after dinner, a bunch of us headed down to the Kotel to watch an induction of soldiers, which was very cool.

I'm fading fast, and I want to get this up for this evening in America so I'm wrapping up now.

Talk to you soon,
Seffi