So after Rosh Hashanna I've been really busy with all sorts of things. First of all I went to visit Samaritans. The same ones mentioned in the bible ("good Samaritans"), these people are very interesting. They claim to be descendants of Israelites who never left the land of Israel. They believe in the same Jewish Torah, but not the rest of the Tanakh, the Jewish bible. Their customs are similar to ours seeing as we lived next to each other for some time and we have the same holy book. For example they don't eat milk and meat because it says so in the Torah, but they have adopted our rules for that certain law. They won't eat chicken and milk or eat milk until six hours after eating meat; two laws derived from the Torah that only make sense after a considerable amount of extrapolating the original law. So they have many of the same customs and holidays as us but they are very different. Firstly they are not Jews and have no desire to be Jews. Secondly their Torah and prayer books are all in ancient Hebrew. The Hebrew letters that are used today are different from ancient Hebrew; the words are transliterated and not translated. Also they believe that instead of Jerusalem, the holy site is Mount Gerizim. They go up there three times a year. The most interesting time is when they go up for Passover. All of the Samaritans go up this mountain and ritually sacrifice lambs as dictated in the Torah; a sacrifice that we stopped doing because the Temple was destroyed. I'm going to try and get over there for Passover this year. I'm including a picture of their Torah in this post.


After the Samaritans I went to a small town that was one of the first settlements in Israel by immigrating Jews. We went to a museum and a winery in the town and it was interesting. I'm including pictures of the winery because it looked a lot like a level in a James Bond video game. We also had a wine tasting, but I didn't like the wine very much. Afterwards we went to Tiberius and had dinner in the city and slept in a youth hostel on a mountain over looking the city. I tried this chocolate that was chocolate with little pieces of Pop Rocks in it. It was really cool. The day was nice and it was cool to see the country. The next day we went to a graveyard and learned about the second wave of Jewish immigrants into Israel. These people by and large were a group of Jews who were sick of living in Europe where pogroms and the blood libel accounted for hundreds of Jews being murdered. They came to Israel to flush out swamp lands and battle malaria infested mosquitoes so that Israel could become a Jewish state. They started farming settlements that would become the boarders of modern day Israel. To protect themselves from thieves they made a group of armed horsemen that would eventually turn into the Haganah and then the IDF. So clearly these Jews paved the way for Israel in ways they never thought possible. They also began the Kibbutz movement. After we learned about these pioneers we had a talk with a modern day Kibbutznik whose Kibbutz is in the middle of a city rather than a farm. These people focus on things that modern day Israel needs with the same socialist slant that the original Kibbutzniks had in their farming communities. They do social action projects about social problems that face Israel like racism, sexism, homophobia etc. He was very interesting in his grassroots look at socialism and changing Israel for the better.

Last night I did Kaparot. This is an old Jewish ritual that many of my readers will think is pretty awful. You pay money for a chicken and, while holding it, say a prayer over it and then raise the chicken over your head and say another prayer. The prayers say that we have sinned and that we deserve to die, but instead God should accept the chicken as a substitution for our death. Then the chickens are killed right there and unfeathered and given to poor families to eat before the fast (it's a mitzvah to eat chicken for that meal). The place that we did it stunk and there were so many dead chickens it was gross. The meaning behind the tradition is to give to charity in a way that is relevant to Yom Kippur and atonement. It was really cool and I'll put up pictures of it on the blog.

Since then I have just been taking my classes and enjoying Israel. I hope everything is well on the other side of the Atlantic and that Syria chills out.
Kevin