Israeli Culture: Jekyll and Hyde? ...and other random musings from this week

So I know--I've fallen behind, and I've got a whole lot of updating to do about Yom Kippur and my trip to Egypt over Succot break. But in the meantime, here are some reflections from this week...

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This afternoon, a woman cut me in line to use the ATM. Being the friendly, non-confrontational person that I am, and not confident enough in my Hebrew skills to complain, I let her get away with it. And immediately, I was angry at myself for being such a wet-behind-the-ears American pushover. No Israeli would ever have let her get away with that--by all standards, I should have yelled at her, made a big scene, or otherwise given her a hard time.

Take the grocery store, for example. It's impossible to go through the checkout line without somebody yelling at somebody (and I mean yelling): the whole line shouting at the person who cuts in front, the cashier yelling at the woman who takes a full cart through the "10-items-or-less" line, a woman screaming at a cashier in Hebrew that's too fast for me to understand. Or, my favorite story--the time I tried to check out at Rami Levi with the one item I needed, and the cashier angrily accused me: "You just came here to pee, didn't you! Right? You're not a customer! You think you can just come here and pee, is that it? Well, this isn't a public bathroom. Who do you think you are? Get out of here!" and she stormed off, leaving me standing there bewildered with my container of cottage cheese.

The bank's the same way--there's always a customer shouting at a teller, a teller shouting at a customer, or both. No such thing as "the customer is always right" in this country. The bus, too--you've got to be assertive if you want to get on. No waiting for the people getting off to get off first; the moment the doors open, people shove their way onto the bus, even when it means pushing past little old ladies.

On the other hand, despite the frequent instances of stereotypical Israeli rudeness, I am often surprised by Israelis' generousity and open-heartedness to total strangers. The strangers in the supermarket doing their pre-Shabbos shopping on Friday morning who invite you over for Shabbos dinner. Or my bank teller, who wants to make sure I'm adjusting well and settling in and that I have an apartment and that I'm making friends. When I'm carrying bags (or my first day in Jerusalem, when I had two giant suitcases), people are always offering to help. Or the best: a few days before Sukkot, a friend and I see a woman carrying a bunch of chairs and offer to help. "Oh no, no, " she says, "I'm just bringing them to set up in my sukkah, I don't need any help. Actually, you know how you can help? Come sit in my sukkah with me on the holiday!" Only in Israel. :)

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So, it might have snowed in Ithaca and Boston, but this past weekend here it suddenly became summer again. Absurdly hot, like in the 90s, out of nowhere. It messes with my internal calendar--I keep forgetting it's almost the end of October.

Apparently this heat is called Khamsin, from the Arabic for five (like חמש, khamesh in Hebrew), because the hot wind comes from the desert and lasts five days. Sure enough, it got hot on Friday, and lasted until Tuesday; Wednesday got suddenly cool again. Exactly 5 days. Weird.

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I started my ulpan (Hebrew class) this week. It's Mondays and Thursdays, from 5:30-8:30pm, and the first two classes went really well. It definitely feels like its exactly at my level, and I'm very relieved that we're systematically going over how to conjugate all the 7 verb groups in all 3 tenses, because that's review I really need.

The ulpan is downtown, which is great. It's nice to get away from Pardes for a bit, and what's really cool is that the students are from all over the world. Really all over the world. Finland, Italy, Brazil, the US, Israeli Arabs, the Czech Republic, Canada, etc... It means that everyone has a different accent, and that the common language between all of us is Hebrew (though most people also know some English).

And, the 12-hour days are not nearly as draining as I expected, which is definitely a good thing.

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*note/possible correction: According to Wickepedia, Khamsin is from the Arabic for 50, not 5, and describes a 50-day-long hot wind that comes from the desert around April. So, I dunno.

Only in Israel

• The freebee magnet you get from the dentist tells you what time to light Shabbat candles and what the Torah portion is every week.
• You need your passport number (in lieu of an Israeli ID number) in order to mail a package at the post office.
• Traffic lights turn yellow, before they turn green, so that drivers can be ready to step on the gas the second the light changes.
• You pay your bills at the post office.
• Once, on a bus, passengers in the back started yelling “Fire! Smoke!” The bus driver stopped and got off, telling us to stay on the bus. Several of us got off anyway. Only in Israel would the bus driver yell at you for getting off a potentially on-fire bus, and make you get back on, just cause he said so. (Don’t worry, he drove 30 feet to the next stop, and we all got on the next bus. Never found out what happened to the first one. Sorry for scaring you, Ima.)
• In Nachlaot (a neighborhood in Jerusalem), the benches have funny, pipe-like dividers down the middle—so that Orthodox couples on a date can sit on them and be sure not to touch.
• The buses say “Gmar Chatima Tovah”—“May you be signed (in the Book of Life) for good” during the 10 days between Rosh HaShanah and Yom Kippur.
• Daylight savings time starts early, the night before Yom Kippur, so that our fast can start and end one hour earlier. (The West Bank and I think also maybe other Muslim countries did this too—they changed their clocks a month ago, before Ramadan, for the same reason.)
• The whole city congregates in the streets on Yom Kippur night after Kol Nidre—there’s not a single car on the road.
• Even restaurants have built sukkahs on the sidewalk.

Kaparot--Sept 29

Last Thursday, I did Kaparot (literally, atonement). For those of you who don’t know, this is one of the stranger and more disturbing rituals in Judaism, practiced mostly only by very Orthodox Jews. It involves swinging a live chicken over your head, while symbolically transferring the sins you’ve committed over the past year to that chicken. The chicken is then slaughtered and given to a needy family to eat. Some people use a bag of money instead (much nicer, in my opinion), and donate the money to charity.

So how did a lifelong vegetarian end up swinging a chicken over her head and handing it over to a shochet (ritual slaughterer) to be killed? Let me explain. I did not intend to do Kaparot. I went with a group of Pardes students, fully intending to just watch. My logic was as follows: It’s awfully inhumane. If I really thought it was going to atone for my sins, that’d be one thing. But—God hasn’t minded all the other years of my life that I didn’t do Kaparot, and really, if God decides not to forgive me this Yom Kippur, it’s not going to come down to whether or not I swung a chicken over my head. If I did it, it would be purely to have the experience. It would be touristy, voyeuristic , and that’s just not fair to a chicken. Also, I’d heard that in places like Mea Shearim, there’s no refrigeration, and the chickens lie out in the sun for hours, so that they’re not fit for anyone’s consumption. Which, to me, is morally disgusting. (Though that could be just a rumor; I haven’t verified it.) So I figured—I’ll go, and watch, and if it’s really awful maybe I’ll even join the animal rights protesters down the street.


We went to “Shuk Kaparot”, in the Machaneh Yehuda Shuk (market). I think I’d over-prepared myself for how bad it was going to be. I had imagined people swinging chickens by the feet, fast. Instead, the chickens were held behind the wings, and passed slowly over the person’s head three times. Not all that much different from the handling/treatment chickens would get on a farm, actually. The chickens were each in their own crate, not 6 chickens crammed into a tiny cage with beaks and toes cut off, like often happens to chickens destined for dinner in the US. And kosher slaughter, as far as methods of slaughtering animals go, is pretty humane. I asked one of the men working there who eats the chickens. “Poor families,” he told me. “When?” “In the next day or two.” And as far as I could tell, it was true—the chickens were already being plucked and taken away.


What were the reasons not to? I was going to be responsible for the death of a chicken, and for subjecting it to unnecessarily uncomfortable and scary (but not painful or horrible) treatment beforehand. I watched several chickens be slaughtered, to make sure I was fully conscious of and could handle what I was about to do. What were the reasons to? I wasn’t totally sure that this was going to atone for my sins, but at the very least I’d be giving dinner to a family that couldn’t afford it. And so…I decided to do it.

I found it interesting that I, a life-long vegetarian, was actually much less disturbed than many of my meat-eating friends. I’m not sure if it’s because, as a vegetarian, I’m very aware of horrible treatment of animals that occurs all the time in slaughterhouses and farms where meat is raised, so I wasn’t so disturbed when I saw chickens being slaughtered in a not-so-terrible manner. Or if it’s because I grew up in a rural area and am used to farm-animals. Or if it’s because I saw much worse treatment of chickens when I was in Tanzania. Who knows. I’m still surprised at myself for doing it. In retrospect, I definitely like Tashlich (which involves symbolically “casting away” your sins by throwing bread into water) better—it gives you as much time as you want to reflect, which is certainly difficult to do while holding a chicken.

My Rosh HaShanah--Sept 20

My Rosh HaShanah was really nice! Friday night, Natalie, Carra, and I went to Yedidya, a modern orthodox shul very close to us, and then to some Pardes friends’ for dinner--lots of yummy food and singing. Saturday morning Natalie and I went to Kedem, which is an egal minyan mostly run by Pardes and Conservative Yeshiva students--almost completely made up of American students in Jerusalem. It was nice and full of ruach (spirit/energy). Ran into one of my former campers who's on Nativ, and a young woman who'd been at the Conservative Yesahiva with me 5 summers ago who just made Aliyah.

We had a whole bunch of people over for Saturday lunch. We’d started by inviting around 8 or so people to a semi-potluck (we’d cook main courses, they’d bring side dishes). Somehow, somebody’s roommate wanted to come, and someone else’s friend from out of town, and a couple people who had nowhere else to go…and suddenly we were looking at a possible 18 people, including the 3 of us, instead of 11. We set up three tables end to end in the living room, and had to borrow a few chairs from one of the neighbors, and it ended up being great. Only 14 people in the end, not 18. Everything went well—except for the moment where we discovered that we had no bottle opener to open the nice bottle of wine one of our guests had brought, and had to make Kiddush on sherry we happened to have in the fridge instead! Lots of fun; people ended up singing and hanging out until after 5pm.

Last night we went to another friend's apt, which was also very nice and very yummy. Today I went to David Breakstone’s (an old friend of my dad’s) synagogue in Talpiot Mizrach, and had lunch with his family. It was nice--though the acoustics in shul weren't great and I was sitting where it was much easier to hear the kids running around in the lobby than the Shaliach Tzibur. Oh well. Lunch was nice, though everything was in Hebrew, so I couldn't always follow the conversations. David showed the two little kids (his son-in-law's niece and nephew) his shofar, thinking that they wouldn't be able to blow it and that would be the end of that. But they could blow it--so they ran around all afternoon blowing the shofar constantly... SO much yummy food, I'm still stuffed at 8:30pm (don't think I'll want dinner tonight!)

Oh, and it RAINED—apparently its very unusual for it to rain so early in the fall. Nobody could believe it. A little bit of rain during the afternoon of the first day, during lunch, and then more rain in the morning and the afternoon of the second day. Everyone is saying that it’s a good omen for this new year.

(R"H preparations, and all set up!)

Pardes

A quick summary of what happened between the last entry and the start of Pardes classes: My second roommate Natalie arrived, and Tobie left, so the apartment finally felt like ours. I opened a bank account, and we signed out lease and paid the first three months of rent. Probably none of this is terribly exciting to read about in a blog, but they all felt like significant steps towards really truly living here.

Now, on to Pardes: on the first day, we had an “opening circle” in which we all introduced ourselves and said “something about ourself that’s not on our resume”. It took over 2 hours, because there were so many of us—but I enjoyed it. While I didn’t really remember anyone’s name or what they said, it gave a really good sense of the makeup of the student body, and who exactly I’ll be studying with for the next year. There’s some pretty awesome and unique people here—it was a little intimidating actually; it reminded me a little of the talent show during freshman orientation at Wes, when I realized how incredibly talented my classmates are.

Definitely the best part of Pardes is the people, both the students and the teachers. The students are very inclusive and friendly, and come from a wide range of Jewish backgrounds-- it’s a great environment to learn in. The inclusive, open atmosphere actually reminds me a lot of Wesleyan, except with a greater diversity of opinions (a.k.a. not everyone's liberal, which is refreshing). We had a shabbaton/retreat the second weekend after classes started, which was really incredible. Lots of spontaneous singing and dancing (:-P :-P), long conversations, an early-morning hike, kavanah-filled davenning, and of course, learning. The teachers are so, so enthusiastic about what they do, and they’re great. A few of them even stayed up super late at the shabbaton having conversations with students, and then still got up at 5am to go on the sunrise hike. Most (it not all) of the teachers are Orthodox and many are relatively right politically, but they have also all committed to teaching the diverse student body that is Pardes--and therefore to teaching students who often hold radically different opinions from their own--without proselytizing to us.

Here are my classes themselves, for those of you who are interested in such things: from 8:30 until 11:45 I either have Chumash (Bible) or Mishna, depending on the day. Then there’s a short, one-hour class before lunch; I’m taking a class on siddur (the prayerbook) and one on personalizing prayer. In the afternoon, I have either Rambam (Maimonides) or Social Justice. In every class, we break up into Hevruta, or learning pairs. The idea is to work through a text with your Hevruta partner, and to challenge each other, so that by coming up with counterarguments to each others’ opinions you both come to a deeper understanding of the text. Then the class comes together to discuss the text. It’s definitely a different experience for me to be discussing Torah in a classroom setting—though I guess that’s something my friends who went to Jewish day-school are very familiar with!

My only complaint is that I'm so busy with my classes that I don't have a ton of time to experience the rest of Jerusalem--I feel like I'm spending all day in a building with Americans (and a few Brits and Australians) speaking English all day, because I am!

Tiyul 1--August 18

So--my 2-week, one-on-one ulpan comes with two tiyuls (trips), one each week, which I knew. What I didn't know is that they're also one-on-one, so it’s essentially a personalized tour! My first one was this morning. We went to Rehov haNevi'im (Prophets’ street) and the surrounding neighborhood. Saw the house of Dr. Helena Cagan, the first female doctor in Palestine, and the next-door house where the famous poet Rakhel lived at the end of her life. (Her kibbutz kicked her out because she had cholera, so she moved next door to Dr. Cagan, who treated her). My guide, Moti, was excited that I knew some of her poems (shout-out to Dalit and Hebrew classes at Wesleyan). We also saw the Ethiopian church, which was really cool, the house of Eliezar Ben Yehuda (he led the rebirth of modern Hebrew as a spoken language) and Rav Kook's house (he tried to promote dialogue between the secular and orthodox). Last, we went to the Ticho house--Dr. Ticho was a famous ophthalmologist in the first half of the 20th century. He treated everyone, Arab and Jewish alike--one of my new heroes, I think! :-P His wife was an artist, and I also enjoyed seeing her sketches and paintings.

Of course, all of this was in Hebrew. I had been given a little booklet with the stories of all the places, that I had read last night for homework. So, at each place, I had to tell as much as I could, and then Moti filled in the rest. We also talked about all sorts of other things, also in Hebrew. It's kind of a huge ego boost, though--you think you know so much Hebrew because the whole tiyul is almost entirely in Hebrew, but then you realize that these ulpan teachers are really good at speaking in simple Hebrew that's exactly at your level, and not minding when you butcher your grammar. In real life, as soon as my waiter starts explaining the difference between two types of whole wheat bread, I'm completely lost... :-P

First day in Jerusalem--August 17

I arrived in Jerusalem on yesterday morning, after taking the bus from Ra’anana with a bunch of Israeli soldiers (they go home for Shabbat, and then all head back their posts on Sunday morning). I had been planning to take a taxi to my apartment, but was told that the taxi drivers sometimes drive in circles to rack up the charges on the meter if it’s clear you don’t know where you’re going. So, with the help of a friendly teenage boy, I somehow managed to shlep my two suitcases onto the local bus to get from the central bus station to Talpiot, the neighborhood where my apartment is. It was crazy; the most crowded bus I have ever seen—there was barely enough room for everyone, and me with my two giant suitcases blocking the aisle. Needless to say, people were pretty annoyed with me (and I learned the Hebrew word for “suitcase” as a result).

I got to my apartment and met Tobie, the current tenant (she’ll be moving out soon, but she’s leaving her furnishings for us to use). The apartment is great—not at all the penniless post-college-student’s apartment—big and spacious, with lots of windows. Then I unpacked…and realized that I’d left my sleeping bag on the bus. I was pretty sure it was gone forever—in Israel, unattended bags are treated as potential explosives and are disposed of by the bomb squad. But, Tobie called the bus station, and it turns out they had my sleeping bag—I just had to go to the end of the line to pick it up.

Next, I headed to my first Ulpan class (Hebrew intensive language class). It went well—but there’s so much that I’ve forgotten! My teacher told me that all of the verbs are a balagan (mess) in my head, and we’re going to have to straighten them out. It’s true; they're all up there, but I can't remember what means what, and how to conjugate a whole bunch of them.

It turns out that my Ulpan is just down the street from the Conservative Yeshiva, where I studied for a summer 5 years ago. So, after class, I walked down to the Supersol, got a snack, and sat in Gan HaAtzmaut (the park across the street from the Conservative Yeshiva), just for nostalgia’s sake. It already feels good to be back in Jerusalem. Just being familiar with the city and the streets makes a huge difference—while it was so nice to stay with Julie in T”A, I already feel much more comfortable here.

After Ulpan, I met my roommate Carra—she’s a highschool friend of Mad Weiss and is really nice. My second roommate, Natalie, arrives in a couple weeks.

Tel Aviv

I arrived at Julie’s apartment in Tel Aviv around 2am on Monday night. Somehow I got an incredibly nice cab driver (a real rarity in this country) who let me use his cellphone to call when I arrived, because mine wasn’t working. Thanks to Julie for waking up to help schlep my suitcases up three flights of stairs, and hosting me for the rest of the week!

Tuesday we had a little mini-Wes reunion—Julie, D’or, Eyal, and I all met for dinner. We realized we’re all psych majors, and we even ate at a place called Japanika (like in Middletown), at that.

Wednesday I wandered around on my own a bit while Julie was at work. A little bit of culture shock, not quite, because I’m familiar with the culture; but I felt rather overwhelmed, somehow, to realize that this country and this culture and this language are about to be my environment for the next year…and I can still barely order off of a menu.

Thursday I did errands in south Tel Aviv with D’or. We went to an area where there are streets full of vendors all selling the same thing—a street full of spices, a street full of fish, a street full of light fixtures…you name it. And got barekas and fresh-squeezed juice for lunch. Mmm.

Friday headed to cousins’ David and Rivka in Raanana for Shabbat.

Brussels!

(palace)

My first stop on my way to Israel was an 11-hour layover in Brussels on Mon, Aug 10, where I discovered that I’ve completely forgotten French. Coincidentally, the young woman sitting next to me on the plane from NYC to Brussels was Israeli, and had the same layover in Brussels as I did. I convinced her to go exploring with me, and we took the train to the center of the city.

Places we visited: the Palace, H&M (apparently they don’t have it in Israel so Hadas wanted to do some shopping there while she still had the chance), the park near the Palace, the Cathedral (it had an art exhibit inside, too), and the Grand Place (central market square). We’d hoped to visit the famous statue of Le Mannequin Pis (a little boy peeing that they dress up in different outfits for special occasions), but we got distracted by Belgian waffles for lunch instead (yum), and then it was time to get back on the train to the airport.

Hadas and I even had seats next to each other for the flight to Tel Aviv, too!

(cathedral, central market square)

Finally, a blog!

Here it is, 2 months into my year in Israel, and I'm finally creating a blog. I'd written a few of posts earlier in the summer/fall, and just never got around to posting them...so I'll post them now, with the dates that I wrote them. I also wrote a few other posts, just to fill in the gaps.

My year is off to a great start--classes at Pardes are going well, and my apartment and roomates are great. It's been busy--classes for the month of Elul (the month preceding Rosh HaShanah and Yom Kippur) were all focused on preparing for the High Holidays and doing T'shuvah (repentance; literally, return), which was intense. Plus, a whole new environment, new people, new classes...

Right now it's Sukkot break, and I actually just got back from an amazing trip to Egypt--more on that in a few days when I get a chance. For now, let's start with those old posts...

Shanah Tovah--a Good (New) Year, and Chag Sameach--happy holiday to all!