Blogs from Israel, Middle East - page 192

So many things are happening for the first time, so why not write a blog? In 9 days from today I will go to the airport with a big backpack, board the flight to Hong Kong, and start my big backpacking experience! I’ve been playing with the idea ever since I got single again, but it scared me quite a lot to travel for a long time, on my own. After all, I am not the average backpacker age, I didn’t sleep in hostels since I was 18 (unless we consider the officers course in the army, where we were 14 girls in a room. But that was also many years ago :-), and what about wearing the same 2-3 pants and shirts for 6 months??? Is that ME? But the world kept calling me. And ... read more

Today was a big day. Our first stop was Masada. They packed us into a gondola to take us to the top. As we walked around this ancient base, Joe told us all about it's significance. He told us of the Zealots who, after the second temple was destroyed, took their families and made their last stand there. less than 1000 men, women, and children stayed there for 3 years, as over 17000 roman legionaires laid seige to the mountain. After 3 years, with the romans finally closing in and preparing to come up, they made the decision to kill their families and themselves, leaving only one man to commit the sin of suicide, rather than allowing the romans to rape their women and selling their children into slavery. Joe took us to one part, adjacent ... read more

After a 10 hour flight, we finally arrived at Ben-Gurion International at sometime between 8 and 9 am. I didn't get any sleep on the flight, so it promised to be a looooong day. Our first stop was the ancient city of Yafo, or Jaffa. This ancient seaport has been in use since the time of greek myth and legend. It is here that Perseus slew the Kraken, as legend tells. One of the first things I noticed were the cats. There are cats everywhere. The reasoning behind this goes that when Israel first became a nation, nearly 60 years ago, there was a major rat problem. To deal with this, cats were released into the environment. Well, the cats proloferated at a prodigious rate, and I haven't seen a single rat to speak of. Maybe ... read more

We were free for Shavuot, so we each went our own way. I went to the tikkun leil Shavuot at HUC with Lisa Rothstein, one of the students from the communal service program at Baltimore Hebrew University who just arrived here. The first couple of programs were not so interesting (an interpretive dance performance and a lecture in Hebrew), but the other talks were interesting. One was by Rabbi Carol Glass on spiritually preparing to receive the Torah, and the other was by Rabbi Michael Marmur (the dean of the college) making the case that Moses was a thief who actually stole the Torah at Mt. Sinai. After Rabbi Marmur's session, we walked down through the Old City to the kotel. It was very strange walking through the shuk in the Christian Quarter (a place I ... read more

After dinner Friday evening, Lisa and I hung out and played Scrabble and cards. In the morning, I went to a shul in Baka called Yedidya. Although it is an Orthodox shul, it is quite liberal (the mechitza is nearly transparent, the Torah is processed through both the men's and women's sides, etc.) Most of the congregation is American or British olim. The davenning was energetic and I enjoyed it a lot. After services, I got an invitation to have lunch with a family from the congregation. It was an interesting mix of people. Ed is a Conservative rabbi who now works in the Education Department of the Jewish Agency. His wife Minda and two of their children were there, as well as the daughter of a family friend who is in college with the sister ... read more