Since last post I have been a little busy. My mom and dad were in Israel so I saw them a fair amount. I met some scientist friends of my dad's and it was very nice to see my folks. My group went to the Mevo Modi'in Moshav. It practises what is known as Carlebach Davening. A moshav is a type of settlement. It can be similar to a Kibbutz, but I think there are plenty of moshavim that are quite different. I didn't fully grasp the philosophy of the moshav, but I did find out that there is plenty of artists and I didn't see any farmland, so I'm under the impression that it doesn't emphasize community living and labor, as is found in the Kibbutz movement. Shlomo Carlebach was a musician and Rabbi. His followers use his music in their prayer services and the end result is very very beautiful. The moshav's population follows this format of davening so the services are filled with song and it's great. The whole Carlebach movement is inside Orthodox Judaism. The people on the Moshav were basically hippies. Before Shabbat our host played us some songs on this small, strange guitar looking thing. I really enjoyed the trip and hope to spend another Shabbat on the moshav.


I found out my placement for the next three months and I will be doing Marva, the army program. I'll spend the first two or three weeks doing army community service. Then two weeks vacation followed by two months of living on an army base doing army training stuff. Towards the end of those two months I will leave two days earlier than everyone else to go to Poland for an extra trip, but I'll speak of that closer to the date. While in the army I'll do some basic training, some in-field training, a lot of learning, and more. Supposedly the first two weeks are terrible because you're not used to waking up that early and the program is really slow because it's all classes, but then after that it gets awesome. I'm excited.

I'm in the middle of exams and I'll be done tomorrow afternoon. For my King David class I had to pick a chapter that we didn't study in class and examine it closely. Afterwards my teacher came up to me and told me that I found things in the chapter that she had never thought about and that she was very impressed. Shwing! I have a week vacation next week so I'll be staying in the hostel for it, but going on day trips in and around Jerusalem. It should be awesome!