in anticipation of the torah portion to be read in a few short weeks, here are 2 noah's ark related stories that have happened to me in the last week.
1- a flood. last friday, emily came to haifa to visit. when we woke up saturday morning, she said "am, i think your bathroom is flooding" 1/2 asleep, i told her to put on some flip flops and get over it. she then persisted that this might be worth waking up for... when i got up, i heard the rushing of water and saw that not just my bathroom, but the entire common area and several of the rooms were slowly getting covered with a creeping layer of water...a giant centimeter-deep puddle was lurking its way onto every inch of floorspace it could... it was not my bathroom that was creating problems, it was one of my flatmates'... apparently a pipe had burst, causing galllllllons of water to geyser (yes, i jsut made geyser into a verb) out of her bathroom and flood the entire apartment. my other flatmate called the emergency number (i love living with israelis who always know what to do) and within a few minutes an uninspiring looking security guard showed up, turned a few knobs, and the problem was solved. apparently a lot of pipes had been bursting, and ours was relatively mild, as opposed to the apartment below whose eruption caused the entire place to be drowing in 3-4 centimeters of water and lose electricity! anyway, lots of roommates' wet belongings and a realllly intense session of squeegy-ing out several hydrants worth of water, and my apartment was relatively dry, though in disarray. basically the moral of the story was that we had our own little flood last week, though it only lasted like 40 minutes instead of 40 days and nights. plus, i got to use a squeegy.
2- it is amazing how quickly the names for barnyard animals in other languages just come right back to you when you come face to face with them...in a cab...on your way back to campus... last night there was a giant cow that literally came right up to the cab... i do not live on a farm. i do not live in the prairie. i dont really live anywhere wild cows should be... i live in a city. but the university is on the top of the mountainy part of haifa, right next to carmel national park, which i guess has a wildlife reserve or something, because there are often random animals on the grassy patch right by the bus station... emily and i saw a cow and a fox last week, but this cow last night came RIGHT up to the cab...like i had to roll up my window... and if that wasnt enough, once we ensured not to hit it, we saw 2 wild pigs. the cabbie then lectured me on how dangerous it was to have wild pigs roaming around...as if i had put them there for my own amusement. noah, please take your pigs back, they are a threat to univeristy students, according to raneel, my cab driver.
beyond close encounters with wildlife and mild flooding, things have been pretty unrelated to noah's ark. as i had said, study tour finished about 2 weeks ago, and since then i've been bumming around israel, doing holiday stuff, etc. for rosh hashana, i was outside of tel aviv with my friend noa and her tiny yemenite family for an awkwardly secular take on the holiday. im really feeling the secular-religious divide here. ill get to that another time. anyway, dinner the first night was great and involved a passover seder-type series of blessings before the meal... like "eat this date so you should have a sweet year" and something with beans and pomegranates and i forget what else...the highlight of this part was when we were to eat a chunk of onion so that we shoudl remember to be wary of our enemies and that we should be stronger and overcome them...at which point several crazy mizrahi/moroccan/turkish/argentinian/yemenite aunts all started loudly cursing nasrallah, hamas, hezbollah, sadaam, etc... definitely the first time my rosh hashana dinner has ever involved cursing ahmenijad...usually if we yell anything it's more like "pass the potato keegel"
yom kippur (and entirely too many subsequent days) was spent at my friend tamar's gorgeous apartment in jerusalem with drew, emily, and austen- my friend from study tour. austen and i have been hanging out a lot and while initial emails indicated that the people on my program sucked, this is not entirely the case. he is great and we have a lot of fun and the guy he is dating, tomer, is also wonderful and takes us on all kinds of adventures. and always has cookies at his house. mmmm. anyway, being in israel for high holidays is often a little anticlimactic, im finding... there is a lot of pressure that they should be
amazing and a holier experience because youre in israel, but thts just not the case. it's hard. makes me miss my family and friends and the people, places, (and mostly foods) i usually associate with the holidays. that being said, it was pretty damn cool to be able to walk to the kotel (the western wall) at night after kol nidre (the services on the evening before yom kippur). after emily, drew and tamar all went to sleep (at like 8:30pm...come on guys) austen and i walked the 40 minutes to the kotel, just because. on our walk there and back we noticed a kind of pilgrimage of teenagers and young adults all doign the same thing. it was a really cool vibe, i cant really explain it any other way, but im really glad we went. we went back again the next night with drew for ne'ilah (the closing service of yom kippur) where there were probably around 1,000 people all gathered for different groups of prayer service to finish off any last atoning and wait for the sound of the shofar to signify its time to EAT. this was the first time i really saw why its called the "wailing wall" because man, the hundreds of people on the men's side were WAILING. pretty cool. it was remarkable to see that many different kinds of jewish people all gathered together (specifically the ADORABLE little ethiopian kids...combingin my adoration for little black children with my love for hebrew-speakers...). it was also remarkable that for all those thousand-ish people, there was only one 8-foot ish quarantined off area with costco sized flats of orange juice for when the fast was over... needless to say we brought our own snacks for when the shofar sounded. which happened like 29 different times, because, as i said, there were like a thousand people there, and thus a lot of different services going on...and that many "different kinds of jew" meant a lot of different guys with shofars, each one OFFICIALLY declaring the end of the fast. the walk home, that each of the other times took 40 minutes, took about 23... no food for 25 hrs can shave 17 minutes off of any walk (sorry if i recylced that joke al). we broke fast in style... and once emily, drew and tamar each returned to their respective campuses, austen and i went out on the town... and for the record, i'm going to recommend against drinking heavily after a fast day. let's just say we did some extra repenting. blame the time change (daylight savings time starts a month earlier here, so right now im only 6 hrs ahead of eastern time instead of 7)
i ended up getting sucked into the cushy life in tamar's apartment (constant internet, tv, great views, very posh) and was there for way too long doing a lot of nothing. and finally got back to haifa last night, which is when i saw the cow/wild pigs. today involved a lot of taking care of stuff...austen and i are planning our trip for next week, which at this point im really excited to report, looks like it will be to CAIRO!!!! while i was excitd about the prospects of turkey, greece, cyprus, etc... the last-minute trips to those places are always available, and i can visit on a long weekend. this is the only time i will have a significant chunk to be anywhere, and getting there is going to take forever anyway (we are being ghetto and taking a bus that is somewhere between 9 and 14 hrs through the desert.... im excited!!) so the plan is egypt, and im really excited. im lucky enough to have a bunch of friends who studied abroad there last semester, so i have some great tips, the most important of which came from my friend shaheen, "General rule: wherever theres a mummy, or a mummy tomb, there are Egyptians waiting to rip you off." got it. ill beware. we're hoping to go to cairo for a few days and then maybe to alexandria, dahab, and perhaps climb mt. sinai. if we do so, ill be sure to say hi to moses and pals.
so the plan is to leave for tel aviv tomorrow night, to stay over and take care of visas/embassy like things on sunday (slash go to the beach and find MEXICAN FOOD) and head out to the land of pyramids, the slavery of my ancestors, and a film industry that made me miserable for an entire semester. woo!!
the unfortunate thing is that it is sukkot (one of the three major holidays in judaism, the others being passover and shavuot. this one is a harvest festival and the one where your jewish neighbors may have built a weird hut in their backyard...that's called a sukkah...its to symbolize the portable homes the israelites lived in while wandering through the desert...so i guess its only appropriate that if im not going to celebrate sukkot traditionally, that i be on a bus wandering through the desert...en route back to the land in which they were enslaved?? somethign like that). as i said, holidays in israel have been kind of anticlimactic, but sukkot was always one of my favorite holidays as a kid an di havent really properly celebrated in years. moreover, apparenlty sukkot means week of ridiculous festivals in random cities in israel, the one im saddest to be missing out on is the haifa pirate festival (im not kidding), which i only know about because of the giant ads on the back of some #24 busses that have a kid in an eyepatch. im so glad i learned the word for pirate in my ulpan class, otherwise i woudl have thought it was a festival of kids with degenerative eye disease.
the lack of sukkot-ness plus the fact that this is being written on shabbat, which i usually dont do, is part of the current religious observance crisis ive succomed to being here... ironic, eh? i mentioned the religious-secular divide...israel doesnt have the same spread of sects like there is in the states...according to my observations, progressive/liberal judaism doesnt really exist here, nor does the conservative movement. theres a small presence of reform judaism in jerusalem (but im not so huge on reform judaism, though some of my issues with it in the states are that there is too much english and debbie friedman for my taste, neither of which are so pervasive here) but im not in jerusalem, nor am i a reform jew. beyond that, its either "religious" or "secular." secular isnt me. secular here means that you dont do anything at all, ever. it was basically unheard of that i was fasting on yom kippur and wanted to go to services ever because im not "religious" in the "long skirt" sense. its just hard to be inbetween here, epsecially when that is so welcomed and encouraged in the states. i kind of got spoiled last year on being able to go synagogue hopping every week, and REALLY spoiled that i had friends who were interested in doing so with me. thats the other thing, i havent really had a shabbaty experience in haifa yet, because there arent really people here yet who are interested in doing so, and its not so appealing to just show up at a random synagogue by yourself. that's actually the source of a lot of what im getting antsy with lately...there arent people here yet... there is austen (and thus, tomer), and there is emily/drew/their friends in jerusalem, and tamar in beer sheva, and my friend jake in tel aviv (when he answers his phone ;-)), but that is it... im realllly anxious for the 50 other people on my program to get here, and i reallly h ope they dont suck. though, if they do, austen and i have already agreed to spend even more time together because we will have a whole new pool of people to mock (as opposed to the same 5 who are here now). [perhaps statements like that last one are why i needed to atone on yom kippur... oops] anyway, thats the other weird thing...ive been out of the country for nearly 3 months, im almost 1/2 way done with my time abroad and i havent even started my real semester yet! ive had lots of wonderful adventures, earned 9 academic credits, been to 9 countries so far (egypt will be 10), bla bla bla, but i havent actually started my legitimate semester abroaod. thus, im super excited for my trip, and also excited (slash, ill be honest, nervous... these new people could suck/be irritating/my classes are all in hebrew and that is terrifying, espeically my arabic class) to get back and for the semester to actually START and to have some sort of sense of stability and legitimacy for said "study abroad"
im also excited to come back in january :o) i miss you guys. and i miss mexican food. and its sad that im missing things like delicious dinners at hirsh's house (the rabbi from the avi chai fellowship i did last year), and the cider mill/michigan in the fall, and barenaked ladies concerts and avocado eggrolls at the cheesecake factory and the brands of gum and deodorant that i like, and a diet that doesnt rest solely on chic pea consumption (ok, i have that at home too)... so im excited to come back to all of these things in a few months. but for now, im having a lot of fun here, speaking lots of hebrew, working up the courage to use my arabic (hello, egypt? this should be funny), and doing my best to take full advantage of this tremendous opportunity. wow that was cheesy. whatever. i miss mexican food. hopefully we find some in tel aviv tomorrow. mmmm.
thanks for reading, sorry for writing so much at once instead of in managable chunks... ill work on it.
shabbat shalom, chag sameach, and have a wonderful day :o)
miss you (and by you, i mean guacamole)
-am
if for no one else, this picture is specifically for scott hantler... it is of the sign for a pet grooming place, and if you can read hebrew, you will see that it is called "doggy style"
attention i ever actually paid to anything my professor said. it is a delightful slice of life, taken by austen. here you see everyone in their elements: our professor, mustache, backpack and all, lecturing about something...adina (the short-haired, scalp smelling girl) stroking her imaginary beard and likely saying "ahh" with each newly acquired piece of knowledge, the back of liz's head (ok, pretty unremarkable), and me...blatantly not paying attention...at all...to anything...ever. and yet i can still tell you that he was lecturing about paratroopers and chana senesh. i can even recite some of her poems and tell you that the word for paratroopers has the same root as the word for skydiving. and what.
