Chofesh Part 1

For the first week of my chofesh, vacation, I went to Tel Aviv, Akko, and Haifa. I was only in Tel Aviv briefly. With my friend Asher, who I did all my traveling with, I went to Nachalat Benyamin, which is an artists' market in Tel Aviv. The market is filled with very beautiful things, many of which are made by the same people who are selling them. We walked through the market for several hours before heading off to Haifa with the key to our friend's apartment.

After spending the night in the apartment we took off for Akko, or Acre. Old Akko is a walled in city on the Western coast of Israel north of Tel Aviv. Like the Old City in Jerusalem, it features ancient buildings, roads, and architecture. Akko is also famous for a prison escape by a radical Zionist organization called the Irgun, the same outbreak that Leon Uris wrote of in Exodus. In Akko, we toured the city, visited some art museums, and saw what was to be seen. The city is mostly Arab and we walked through the Arab shuk. I bought a flannel shirt and we saw this shark: It was a very cool trip.

We then bused back to Haifa to sleep and eat there. The next morning we woke up and went to catch the first of our two tours of the famous Baha'i gardens. The Baha'i are a 100-some year old religion that is supposedly the most dispersed religion in the world. I don't know much about their practices, but they believe in a universal oneness, respecting of all religions, universal education, equality of the sexes, and much more. They have these gardens in Haifa, which is the center of their religion, that include 18 well-groomed terraces and a huge Shrine in the middle. Located on top of a hill, the gardens overlook the city of Haifa and into the Mediterranean Sea. Here's a picture: The gardens are beautiful and peaceful and if anyone is in Haifa I would highly suggest seeing them.

Sar El

So I spent these past three weeks on an army base called Amiad in the north next to Lake Kinneret and Tiberius. My time there was spent doing the work of an army jobnik, which are people whose work in the army is non combative. They work on bases so that if a war breaks out then they are ready and equipped for it. After the Lebanon the government really saw how ill-prepared they were in the event of war so now they are spending more time on base upkeep i case of the outbreak of war. So as a temporary jobnik I would work to organize a warehouse full of solder's bags or cleaning guns. Other kids helped clean tanks. The work was typically trivial, but it was cool to be doing something that so directly benefited the army. I also was able to meet many interesting solders. My group went on some trips; one to a hike next to the Kinneret and one to an ancient city towards the coast. In Sar El we had to wear army uniforms all the time. Here's a picture of me in mine inside the room that I lived in for the three weeks.

Ch-ch-ch-ch-ch-changes

So I'm now anticipating a change in location and activity. I'll be leaving Jerusalem on Sunday and going to an army base to begin three weeks of Tsar-el. It is a community service program for the army that is fairly popular. The only clothes of mine that I'll be wearing will be undershirts, socks, and underwear. I won't be bringing any t-shirts or anything that I usually wear. It'll be the first time that I'm away from all my possessions that I've grown so attached to after wearing them and seeing them everyday for years. I'm excited for this distance even though it'll likely be very novel.

After the Tsar-el I'll have a week or two of vacation followed by two months of Marva starting on January 6th. Marva is army program that I've been talking about for months. I don't know much about it so I won't post about it right now.

I've had a break here since last Wednesday. I spent Shabbas with the rest of my program because it was a closed Shabbas. We had to go to programming and everything was planned and it was very BBYO-esque. On Sunday, after waking up late and taking it easy, some friends and I went down to Tel Aviv beacuse there were bomb threats in Jerusalem and we weren't allowed to be on the streets there, but Tel Aviv was safer. So we went to Tel Aviv and walked around the city for a bit jut to check it out and then had dinner. After dinner I left my friends to meet up with a new pair of friends and we went to one of their counsin's house for the night in Ramat Gan. The cousins were very nice and they give us beds and a couple of meals.

After sleeping for a while I got up to go back to Tel Aviv to watch Across the Universe, a musical movie that features on songs from the Beatles' repertoire I really liked it and afterwards we took a bus back to Jerusalem and just hung out for the rest of the night. By now it's getting pretty cold in Jerusalem so at night you have to wear shoes and a sweatshirt, or a jumper as the Brits like to call it. I've been going to more bars than I did in the beginning of my time here.

It'll be hard for me to update this blog when I'm doing my two military-related programs because I won't have my computer with me for those times and the time off is Shabbat so I can't use my computer anyway, but I'll somehow find time for updates; don't worry fans.

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!

Sigd and Tottenham and Phylacteries

So now that I'm very accustomed to living in Jerusalem and I know my way around I find myself very very busy. I go to all different types of events and have little time to publish them in an internet blog. Nevertheless, I feel I have a commitment to the fans of this blog to update as regularly as I can afford to.
I went to a city called Rosh Ayin with my History of Zionism class. Rosh Ayin is a primarily Yemenite city that absorbed tens of thousands of Yemenites during their mass immigration to Israel. Called Operation Magic Carpet, Israel removed the entire Jewish population in Yemen in the 1950's and brought them here using airplanes. It was a humongous immigration that was hard to accommodate when they first arrived. Also the Yeminites are neither Sephardic nor Ashkenazi and they didn't really fit into Israeli culture. So at Rosh Ayin are all these Yeminites and we met a few and talked to some about their migration. After we went to a dance studio and learned some Yemenite dancing.

I'm doing a program called Shevet which is a part of Young Judaea Year Course that leaning towards being religious without being completely observant. Through Shevet I get to do a lot of amazing things that I wouldn't do otherwise. We tied our own tzitzit last week and were given the option of using tekhelet, a special blue die that comes from snails, that is supposed to be part of tzitzit. So as I'm writing this I'm wearing my new, freshly-tied tzitzit with a thread of tekhelet in them. My program had a workshop where we learned how to do it and were given the strings and everything.

We visited a yeshiva, basically Rabbi school, and were given a chance to study and speak with the yeshiva students. I learned with a guy who actually went to and worked at Camp Airy. It was a good experience to find out more what it's like to be part of a yeshiva.

My mother visited me and took me to Eilat, the southern-most city in Israel that is on top of the Red Sea. While there we toured the immediate area of the city and saw some of the southern parts of the Negev Desert, including the Timna Pass and the Red Canyon. I also scuba dived. One one of our days we left Eilat and went into Jordan and then to Petra. Petra is this 2,000 year old city that is famous for an ancient temple carved 10 meters into the face of a mountain. Here is a picture.

My mother bought me my first set of Tefilin, phylacteries.










Yesterday I went to Sigd, an Ethiopian celebration of their return to Jerusalem. They used to celebrate it in Ethiopia and it was a fast day for mourning their exile, but now they it is more of a festival. I saw this cool Ethiopian dance circle and this interesting fish rod-looking instrument. It was incredible to see the thousands of Ethiopians that showed up in this one park. Celebrating with them was also really cool. Picture.














Last night I went to a soccer game; Hapoel Tel Aviv vs. the Tottenham Hotspurs. Tottenham, for those who aren't into football, is an English soccer club whose fan base calls itself the Yid Army because it is primarily Jewish. My roommate is a crazy Tottenham fan, his bed sheets are Tottenham, so he bought a bunch of tickets and a bunch of us went to the game. Tottenham won 2-0 and I learned that Israeli soccer is not impressive. Tottenham played half-decently, but Hapoel Tel-Aviv was awful. I went to my first European football game in Israel. Here is a picture of that as well.

Ethiopian says what

Today we drove to a city north of Tel Aviv. We went to a community center in an Ethiopian neighborhood. There we listened to a lawyer give us the quick history of his people. He told us the story of his specific town's immigration from Ethiopia into Sudan and then to Israel. Civil war broke out in Ethiopia and many Jews decided to leave their homes for refuge in Sudan. Seeing as they were already fleeing they figured they might as well go all the way to Israel, the land of their forefathers. So this man's small community of about 300 up and left their homes with some Sudanese peoples who had made the same immigration. They were traveling on foot when suddenly Shabbat came and the Ethiopians told the Sudanese they could not travel for a day. The Sudanese could not understand and told them that if they stayed where they were they would die and they left them. The Ethiopians would not be moved and they stayed till the end of Shabbat. By 10 AM the next morning they had run out of water and the children began crying and the people were in serious trouble. So the men went out and looked for water even though there were no animals around, a clear sign that there was no water. At around noon a man decided to dig under a pile of rocks and water sprung out of the ground. They finished Shabbat and kept moving. The next day the Sudanese found them and, once they had heard about the water situation, told the Ethiopians that they had traveled the same route for years and had never known of a water supply. The Ethiopians had found an abundant water supply that had remained hidden from the frequenters of the land. Amazing, right? They continue their journey and finally make it close to the boarder of Sudan. On the boarder is a big city, though; a city that the Ethiopians could not afford to go through because of suspicion. So they circumvent the city and go towards the boarder. In the midst of this part of their journey they were severely low on water and a group of armed horsemen came riding up. They told the people that they knew they were Jews and that they were not getting into Sudan at gunpoint; the Ethiopians were devastated. The two parties started to talk and it turned out that one of the gunmen knew one of the families in the group and told his fellow gunmen that they would not harm these Jews in any way and that they'd help them get to Sudan. They show the Ethiopians where to find water and escorted them the rest of the way to the boarder: another miracle.
After listening to this story we were fed Ethiopian food and then made pottery with some woman.

Hike and a Speaker

Since Sukkot we've had a full 5-day schedule of classes. That means that I have classes till 4 and then I'm free for some of the rest of the days. So last week I took my free afternoon and traveled into Tel Aviv with some friends. We then went to see an Israeli ska band at some club. The opening act was the lamest thing I've ever seen on a stage; and I was in Wootton Theater. The lead singer was doing this really fake-looking hardcore personality and the rest of the band was equally lame. The drummer grabbed the mic for one song and sang this Spanish sounding song. The main band was this ska band that was really good and we had a lot of fun.
Last week we had midterms so I had two exams on the first day of exams and then none the second day. So I spent the day buying a tallis.
This past weekend I went on a big water hike in the north with some friends. I'm putting pictures up of that. The hike was absolutely beautiful and amazing. We trekked through waterfalls and streams.




















I also went to listen to a man talk about his service to the Jewish people in the late 1940's. He was in the Merchant Marines during WWII and then was asked to help with the illegal immigration of Jews into Palestine right after the war when Britain. He told us this amazing story of how he was just an ordinary American Jew who was asked to help the Jewish people by complete strangers. The whole operation was done very secretly. The ship this guy crewed brought 1,500 Jews into the Mediterranean, but the damn British boarded their ship and they got sent to Cyprus, like in Exodus. The man was a prisoner there, too. He was very inspirational and I thoroughly enjoyed him.