Aliyah

I think the weirdest part about Israel, and the thing that sets it apart from other study abroad locations, is the big emphasis on aliyah. Most people who speak fluent English in Israel, which is the vast majority of the people we meet on campus-sponsored outing or events, made aliyah at some point in their lives. Even in the Forum, amidst a very, very Hebrew-heavy "Welcome back to campus sign up for our bank/buy our books/come to our events!!!"--I turned to the older lady next to me to ask what the word for popcorn was in Hebrew (one of the stands is for the cinemateque, and they've been giving out free popcorn for the past two weeks) on Thursday, and she's American! She's from DC and her husband is from Boston. Maybe it's just because I'm in Jerusalem--I've been told that if I wanted real Israeli culture, I should have gone to Haifa--but there are a lot of olim here.

It's not just bumping into them, though, either! From my first weeks here I met people who had either just made aliyah or were about to, and the reaction they got from the other people around us--usually olim themselves--was one big "MAZEL TOV!" Last Monday I "attended" (read: went for an hour and then left due to a headache) an Idan Raichel concert sponsored by MASA, one of the organizations I'm getting money from for study abroad, and in the speeches before some Important Man told us all how he hoped we'd go back to our homes, be advocates for Israel, and then came back in a few years as olim. So then, the whole point of the MASA grant is to make Jewish kids want to move to Israel?

I have to wonder, at this point, how many native Israelis I'd meet and really speak to if I weren't interning at the Jerusalem Open House. I have yet to go to any events outside of the English Speaking Group, but once a week I'm there with Dalit and Or and Yotem, and whoever else happens to be there that day. Since my fellow intern and I have meetings with Dalit at 11:00 and I don't have class until 16:30, I can hang out there for a few hours after the meeting, soak in the atmosphere. If I wasn't there, would I really see anything but olim?

Theater and niggunim

After two and a half months in Israel, I have finally discovered Merkaz Hamagshimim. I've been on their mailing list for a while, but I never managed to get downtown for anything. I guess I'm making up for lost time now, since I'm in the middle of a "three events in a week and a half" spree.

My first trip to the Merkaz was last Thursday for Spontaneous Combustion, a 48-hour theater project for which Lynley was a writer/last-minute actress. I have to say, the plays were a mixed bag. Some were funny, some were a bit pathetic, but that's what you get when people have 48 hours to write and rehearse an 8-minute scene. There were a couple that were really impressive, though. There was one called "Grow Up," written and performed by Daphna Tadmor and Dayna Moses, which was done in monologues, each actress telling multiple girls' stories of childhood. Then there was one written by Anna Gerrard and performed by Micky adiv and Margalit Rosenschein, "Drink to Me," in which a woman meets with the girl she thinks her husband has been cheating with, only to find out that she was his very neglected daughter and she murdered her husband for nothing. Both of those were very well-done, and I can't believe they were produced in 48 hours! Lynley's scene was one of the humorous ones--an actress auditioning to be a teletubby. Okay, so it was very funny; I'm laughing just thinking about it.

I went back to the Merkaz last night for Erev Niggunim, a night of prayer-song-tunes co-sponsored by the Reconstructionist Rabbinical College. I almost didn't attend because of laundry issues, but I'm really glad I did. The niggunim that were taught were really beautiful, and the first few reminded me a lot of Nehirim's alternative prayer services. A couple of the niggunim were actually nigguns that we've done at Nehirim, which made me really nostalgic. It was really nice. I didn't learn any of the niggunim well enough to be able to repeat them by myself, but I could definitely join in if I heard them again. Also, I really hope the niggun Alanna Sklover wrote spreads; it was beautiful and very much deserves to be spread.

To conclude my spree, I'll be back at the Merkaz on Monday for The Children of Qassam Avenue, a play written and performed by high school students in Sderot. I really don't know much about what's going on there, so I really look forward to hearing their stories. I learned at AHA that plays of this sort can be very powerful, and I can't imagine this one being anything but.

Correction: I did not return to the Merkaz for The Children of Qassam, since the show ended up being by invitation only.

The Bank Saga

Financial situations are tricky when you go abroad. Student visas don't allow for employment, so work-study is out. If your student loan is through a school with semesters and your study abroad program wants you to pay everything up front, the money available to you will be extremely lopsided. And then there are the banks and the credit cards, which charge you extra to withdraw money from ATMs (for banks) or use your card in a currency other than dollars. Capital One gets around the fees when you're looking to use a credit card, but unless you're lucky enough to have a bank without an external ATM charge (or you think to change banks to one before you go abroad!) you're sort of stuck when it comes to banks.

I was not one of the smart ones. I did not change banks before I left for Israel, and my bank is one of the worst for charges--$5 for every non-Bank of America ATM withdrawal plus a percentage of the withdrawal for being in a foreign currency. When you're living on $500 a month, that actually means something.

I thought I'd found a solution. I thought I could just open an Israeli bank account, withdraw a ton of money at once from Bank of America, and put it in the Israeli account before I became a pickpocket's jackpot. It should work, right? This is what I thought on my second day in Israel, when I was still jetlaged and clearly not thinking.

Opening a bank account in a foreign country means trusting the bank completely. You sign a bunch of forms without being able to read them and hope that your friendly neighborhood banker is telling you everything you need to know. Something seems weird? Oh, that must just be how it works in this country.

So I opened an account with Discount Bank on the second day of orientation and was told to come back in a week to get my ATM card. I come back and it's not there yet--come back in a few more days, they say. So I come back, get the (activated) card, and am told to come back tomorrow to get my "secret code," as they say here (which, btw, you don't get to change). This is weird, but okay. So I come back, get my PIN and try the card. It doesn't work. The bank worker doesn't understand what I mean, but she does manage to help me fill out the paper deposit envelope so I can put my first ever 200NIS into my brand-new bank account.

I leave and walk back to the Student Village. My phone rings; I'd dropped my wallet at the bank and I had to go pick it up. When I got there, I discovered Warning Sign #1 (which I promptly ignored and chalked up to "this is how it is in Israel"): they had given me one person's ATM card and another person's PIN. So she helped me change that deposit envelope to my account number and told me, "Come back in a week and we'll have your card." One week later, I'm told that I'll get the card in the mail.

At this point I had a whole host of other problems--including an inability to find the mailboxes and the discovery that I was given the wrong mailbox key (thus confirming my theory of "this is how it is in Israel")--which delayed this whole process. At some point, I received an ATM card in the mail. During the first week of break--now the week before Yom Kippur--I went down to the branch in Ramot Eshkol to get my card activated. Once again I tried to use the card and it wouldn't work. The bank worker wouldn't believe me and made me show her, and the ATM ate my card (because apparently that's what the machines do here if you type in the wrong PIN more than three times in a row). Turns out that while this was my card and was my PIN, it was my original card and PIN, the ones that had been cancelled when I had received that other person's card and PIN. "You'll get your new card in the mail shortly," she said. ''And I ordered you a new PIN before we figured this out, so you'll get two PINs. Just try them both and one will be right."

Okay, now this is ridiculous. It's been two months and I still can't get my money from an ATM--which is important because, as I discovered these past couple weeks, while there are many branches of the bank, not so many of them actually contain tellers. (This is doubly important during Sukkot, when the banks are only open for half a day.) The few times I could actually get someone to talk to me, they told me that they couldn't help me; I had to go back to the branch that issued the card. Well, which one? The one on campus where I opened the account, or the one in Ramat Eshkol with actual tellers?

Now classes have started, which means I'm back on campus and that original branch on campus is once again accessible. "Are you sure it's not in your mailbox?" the woman kept asking me when I told her it's been two and a half months already and I have no card. "Are you sure." YES. "Okay, I've ordered you a new card. I'll call you at the end of the week."

Is it just me, or have we come full-circle here? Honestly, I'm about ready to strangle someone. At this point all my money is in that account, and I can't get to it. I'm ready to just close the account and forget about it, but then what would I do with all that money? I'm not ready to be a walking jackpot, and there have been break-ins at the dorms so I can't even hide it somewhere in my room.

Lesson learned: if you don't know the language or the culture, don't open a bank account. Period. It's not worth the risk.

There will be another post about classes once I've had more than two of them.

The art of toveling

Today I discovered the art of toveling. Or rather, my roommate needed to tovel her utensils, so I figured I might as well do mine too. Why not? I'm in religious housing, after all. Besides, I never managed to ask whether it was a problem with the sponges if I didn't.

It's actually a beautiful ritual. The point of kashrut is that eating is an act of worship, one of many that we compare to worship in the Temple. Thus, we treat dishware the way we would have treated articles of sacrafice preparation in the Temple times: we dunk them in the mikveh to make them holy. It's not something that I would particularly care about normally--I don't pay attention to the kashrut of dishware, period, nor do I really concentrate on the meaning of what I eat--but that doesn't mean it isn't a beautiful analogy.

Estie and I took the trip to the mikveh this afternoon. It was a nice walk, since it's actually not overly hot in Jerusalem for once. And there are so many mikvehs here! The shul we went to--right down the street from Kfar HaStudentim--had three of them: one for men, one for women, and one for dishes. (Estie said that at her shul in America they only have one that's used for all three purposes.) The one for dishes is a little structure in the middle of a courtyard, with two steps leading up to it and a metal lid. It wasn't very deep, but sitting on the side and looking into it reminded me of our foremothers drawing water from their wells. In a way, we were drawing water from this mikveh, as holy water dripped off our utensils and pots when we brought them out of the mikveh.

The process is simple. Open the lid, say the blessing, submerse the spoon/fork/pot/whatever into the water, let go for a second, take it out. Repeat until everything is done. Then you close the lid, gather your dishes, and leave. That's it. And yet, walking away in the sun with a plastic bag full of toveled items felt really, really nice--even if I know that the feeling will completely the first time I go to make pasta and burn myself on that newly holy pot. Oh well.

Gateways

Sukkot in Israel is not just a festival of sitting in booths outside but an all-out break. Banks are only open half the day, schools (and JOH) are closed, and there are festivals all over the place. One particular festival that caught my eye was the Gateways Festival, a series of shiurim held over the course of two days. I ended up attending only four sessions during my time there, partly because of my all-nighter at Ahuva's, but they were generally good.

The first session I attended on Wednesday, "Mystery of Mikveh" led by Rabbi Miriam C. Berkowitz, was a bit of a let-down. It was just a powerpoint overview of the concept--what it is, who uses it, etc. I knew this stuff already. I mean, I've been to a mikveh before. I've read a little bit about it for class. Been there, done that.

My next session--Rabbi James-Jacobson Maisels's "The Meaning of Forgiveness"--was much better. I went to it thinking it was about seeking forgiveness, but it was really about giving it. I took a lot away from it, the biggest being that if you remain angry at a person, the pain they caused you once just keeps repeating itself over and over and over until you let go of that anger. It sounds pretty simple, but it's a really big realization for someone who's stuck in the cycle. New year's resolution, perhaps?

The sessions I went to on Thursday were more fun and less serious. The first session was "Creative Connections to Sukkot and Self" run by Yael Unterman and Ilene Prusher. Basically, creative writing in which we pretended to be a sukkah--such as this one, where I write as the sukkah outside Village Green:

There are so many different people in me. In and out, in and out, all kinds of people. Haredi men, with their long beards and dark suits. Young men and women, tourists, with their tank tops and shorts and cameras. All come bearing trays of food. Pizza. Quiche. Chocolate cake. All kinds of food for all kinds of people. Some sit down quickly, eat, leave. Maybe they bentch. Others stay, talk, dwell in me. Maybe they come in a group, maybe they come alone. Some meet old acquaintances. I recognize you, they say. Were you at Mati’s sukkah two years ago? Yes, I was! I can’t believe you remember me.

Three girls sit at the next table. Who are they? They’re not daitim. They’re not tourists. There’s no Hebrew in their conversation. Americans. “This is the first time I’ve eaten in a sukkah this year,” one of them says. I’m her first. I’m many people’s first, over the course of these seven days.

The girls leave, and their trays remain on the table. What are they? Just one of many. In and out, in and out, leaving no trace but an empty tray. Then even those disappear, and new people arrive.

It was really fun. Yael teaches a creative writing on the parsha class at Pardes on Sundays, but I can't go to it because I don't really have 800 NIS to spare. It's sad, but I gave her my email address so she can tell me when she does random workshops like the one at Gateways. Sigh. I forgot how good writing feels, and how I can't do it without prompting but once I'm given something to go on... it goes.

My last session was "Song and Soul" run by Dr. Elie Holzer. It was beautiful right from the beginning, which meant I had to capture it. (Thank goodness for my voice recorder!) I have two clips to share here which basically sum up the entire session. Blogspot won't let me upload mp3s, so they're in video form with random pictures. Just ignore Garfield there, okay?

First, the meditation:

This was only done once, but it was enough. I'm not a big fan of meditation (I left the forgiveness session before the meditation bit), but this was extremely calming. It was followed by a bit of text study out of Heschel's Man's Quest for G-d and then a bunch of prayer-songs such as this:

My voice recorder is not quite so wonderful at capturing music, which is sad. It was beautiful. It also made me wish I had gotten up for the 10:00 Musical Hallel session, but oh well. Nothing I could do about that.

I had intended to go to one more session--A Taste of Gan Eden--but a need for food and quiet down-time one out. Instead, I discovered tuna pizza (much better than it sounds) and returned to the festival in time for "Jammin in Da Sukkah," (acapella) which I found a bit too quiet for my taste. Again, oh well. I got to play with a kitty in the sukkah, and it delayed doing my laundry that much longer.

And... that was that! Really, there enough jammed into one wonderful week that I think one more even would have driven me overboard. Now for a nice, quiet week of emails and scholarship essays...

Simchat Torah

A few weeks ago, Woty invited me to an event on Facebook, “Simchat Torah in Netanya.” At the time, I thought it would be perfect. I’d get off the French Hill for the holiday (because I have a mostly unfounded dislike of spending Shabbat in the dorms) and I’d get to travel to a different place for the holiday. Do the non-tourist touristy thing, experience the holiday as it’s done in non-Jerusalem Israel. I’m still glad I came, but I have to say that I really wouldn’t have minded staying home. I did a little too much moving around this Sukkot.

The trip was open to “15 CYers and Shechterers and Kedemers and their friends,” but Abigail and I were the only people not from the Conservative Yeshiva, which was sort of weird. (On a side note: I spent Yom Kippur with a bunch of people from Pardes, Shabbat of Sukkot with a bunch of people from HUC, and now Simchat Torah with people from CY; how is this happening?) Congregation Bet Israel in Netanya, as we discovered, is sort of like the Florida of Israel—it’s right on the coast and mostly populated by older, grandparently-people. Abigail and I stayed with a woman named Ruth, and she was really nice. I wish we had gotten to talk to her more, but we spent most of our time either at synagogue or asleep.

Services themselves were… interesting. Long, The rabbi said multiple times that if anyone needed to put a Torah down, they should hand it to one of the “young people” because “that’s what they’re here for.” Which… is pretty true. Very few of the congregants could hold or dance with a Torah. I almost feel, though, that if the congregation only had one Torah instead of five, the Rabbi could have done it all by himself. He was so full of energy; the only rabbi I’ve ever seen with that much energy was (ex-)Rabbi Stein. I heard one congregant make a comment that “he’s not a rabbi, he’s a shaman! He’s just putting on a show,” which is actually a pretty accurate description (the show part, not the shaman part). On Friday night the dancing concluded with the rabbi and a little boy (one of, like, four kids there) on a table carried by a bunch of students. When he took the Torah out of the ark again to read it, he did the blessings while on a student’s shoulder, and I was sure that all three of them—the rabbi, the student, and the Torah—were all going to drop and we would have to fast. This morning it was the limbo and dress-up hats. It was a little bit too crazy for my tastes.

In a way, I wish that I had stayed in Jerusalem for Simchat Torah. There would have been a lot of people dancing with the Torahs, not just a few students—and as the hakafot went on, the number of students dancing really dwindled. Maybe I wouldn’t have gotten to hold a Torah, but maybe there would have been enough energy to keep me from being exhausted, and if there wasn’t I could collapse in my own bed. Okay, so maybe I lied up there. But hey, I went to Natanya. I met a few people, had some good conversation, and danced with a Torah. I’ll just have to come back and spend Simchat Torah in Jerusalem sometime. Maybe after I get done with all this school stuff I’ll come back to Israel and do research on the holidays in Israel.

A very queer Sukkot

My facebook status a while ago proclaimed that I was going to have a busy Sukkot, but I really had no idea just how busy it was going to be. I had no idea how queer it was going to be.

Sukkot started off with Shabbat at Ahuva's, which was pleasant but fairly unremarkable. Sunday was also fairly unremarkable; I started my internship at JOH, but all I did was meet with my boss, Dalit, and do some brainstorming. The excitement really started on Monday, and it really hasn't stopped since.

I've been told that there's very little gay stuff in Jerusalem. There's Jerusalem Open House, of course, and a few gay-friendly cafes, but there's pretty much no nightlife--with one exception. On Mondays, Hakatze has a gay night complete with drag queens. Since we are both on Sukkot break right now, Ahuva and I decided to check it out. I forgot to ask the people at JOH what time things start there, so we went by the website: the show starts at 22:30. Yeah, right. Well, we got there at 10:30, or rather a bit before because Ahuva wanted to make sure we got good seats. The place was empty. We waited a while, and the place was still empty. We knew we were in the right place--our entrance receipts said Hatatze--but there was just no one there. Finally I went up to ask the bartender what was going on. Yes, it was drag night. No, she doesn't know what time the show is gonna start. "It's drag queens," she said. "You never know with drag queens." Apparently, all the Israelis knew this already. They started trickling in around 11:15; the show didn't actually start until 12:30.

It was worth the wait, especially since this is the first time I've seen drag outside of Pride events. I took some videos of the performance, but they're currently not working. It's very sad, especially because I can't really describe it in words. It was mostly in Hebrew, but a lot of the songs were in English and the drag queen MC would periodically joke with the audience in English. There was also a drag king there, but I wasn't so impressed with him. Overall, though, it was good. They took a big break in the middle, during which Ahuva and I attempted to swing dance to music that very obviously not created for that purpose. We are also both very out of practice, so it was more funny than anything else. And a nice change from standing on a chair for forty-five minutes, of course.

We left at 2:30 and went back to Ahuva's apartment, where I promptly collapsed. (I'd expected this and arranged to stay with her overnight--the buses don't run that late.) I was up again around 7:00 because of the sun and noise from the construction, read a bit, and then fell back asleep. Next thing I knew it was 14:52 and I'd missed a call from Jessica about our JOH event.

That night was our second JOH event, a showing of The Bubble. We (Ahuva, Alexis, and I) arrived at JOH at 19:30, at which point I spent an hour trying to locate various pieces of technology and convince the movie to play. It mostly failed since Yotem told me to play the movie from my computer, which Dell apparently didn't fix. We finally got it going with a JOH DVD player--which we really should have tried in the first place.

That is one powerful movie. I mean, I knew it was. We watched it at Brandeis, but I still wasn't prepared for the ending. I don't think anyone was. We had some pretty intense discussion afterwards about it, which was nice. Then, as I was cleaning up (around 22:30), Ahuva asked those people who remained to relocate to her apartment and eat birthday cake--because she'd been eating cake nonstop since Friday and still hadn't finished it. So we (Ahuva, Alexis, Devorah, Lynley, and I) bought a carton of ice cream and went back to Ahuva's. And... never left. We were just talking, telling funny stories, and it was fun. We completely lost track of time. Alexis left around 4, but by that point Lynley, Devorah and I figured that we might as well wait another two hours and take the bus back to campus. So... we did. Just stayed there talking from 23:00 to 6:00. And then it was all over. I went back to campus, went to bed, and got right back up again for the Gateways festival.

(To be continued)

Village Green

Yesterday I discovered a really cool restaurant: Village Green. Really, this place is cool because it reminds me a bit of the US. While I can easily find falafel and pizza and pasta places in Jerusalem, I've been mourning the lack of pie and muffins in my life. They just don't seem to exist in most places (other than a 32NIS piece of pie at a couple places - way too expensive!), and it's sad. I love pie, and I mill my normal Brandeis breakfast of yogurt and a carrot or corn muffin. I walked into Village Green yesterday to give them a flyer for our next JOH event and there they were, among other things, right near the register: carrot muffins and apple pie. Pie! Muffins! And cheesecake (which is a pie), and a bunch of other kinds of muffins. Heaven. Pie and muffin heaven.

I will gladly pay 18NIS for a piece of cheesecake. I miss it that much.