Back in Haifa

I write, or don't, in a few different ways. The first is the most dramatic, I think; I sit down to record a small observation, and that little tidbit blossoms into a gigantic life metaphor, and I post or save my writings with a sensation that I've achieved something. Other times, I'll write and write, reread what I've written (rarely a good sign, for me, since if I'm rereading, it means I've already lost faith in whatever I thought I was expressing), and end up ditching the whole thing for lack of substance. Occasionally, I'll feel the motivation to write, but no subject matter in my mind, so I'll ignore the feeling altogether.

Today is one of those occasions, except I'm not ignoring it. So, I guarantee no great feat of literary greatness, just some thoughts that may or may not come together, in the end.

You've been warned.

Being in Jerusalem, it was easy to forget what's so nice about being in Haifa. I had spent so little time here actually taking in the breathtaking views, amazing weather, and fresh, clean air, that I failed to see the upside to our return. Being back here, though, only makes me lament our having to leave in the first place; spending time here is such a joy, letting hours fall off the clock in sun-drenched conversation, having old friends not spread out across an open campus, but new friends waiting in the expected places. The campus here is isolated and small, it's true, and perhaps one could end up with a severe sense of cabin fever (akin to what we felt during the war).

With the city open, bustling, and just a bus ride away, though, we feel not locked in to a hilltop prison, but rather selectively spending time in a mountain getaway. On one hand, it helps me identify with the closed-community mentality of the ultra-orthodox in Mea Shear'im or the neighborhoods in Brooklyn; to have an isolated community amidst the choice of an outside world, it creates a context to that community, opens up the avenue of choice, and allows for the community to become a vivid thing of beauty. Visitors here, though, become not a nuisance, but an addition; accent pieces to a single-minded whole. By the time we left Jerusalem, the act of learning had become an emotional burden; I tired of going to class, and every minute began dragging on, endlessly. Here, I feel a renewed sense of purpose; I'm speaking more Hebrew than ever outside of class, and I feel that I can actually start to express thoughts with a sense of clarity, albeit sparsely.

So, in a sense, we've come full circle. But what about Shabbat?

Our first Shabbat here was a thrown-together mess; Josh and I hurried to get food on an unset table, serving people who frankly had no interest in a Shabbat experience or participation in the meal. All fine, if that's their choice, but certainly not the kind of table I like to dine at. This weekend, the wonderful Adina and I teamed up for Shabbat, and like the first Shabbat here, it was once again a thrown-together affair. That said, it opened up into a thing of beauty, a table appearing from nothing, dining outside in the cooler evening breeze, pulling chairs from random apartments and food from random refrigerators, and creating a Shabbat table that drew people from different backgrounds and countries. It was a Shabbat table that didn't fall apart before it even got started; in a sense, it started from nothing, and ended up becoming a wee-hours affair. It was an impromptu Shabbat experience that could easily fall apart, but after so much moving, removing, seperation, and anxiety, I think it provided a much-needed calm for everyone at the table.

For the first time in a month and a half, I think, everyone felt settled, normal. There was a sense that we had returned home. This campus was ours, this community, however makeshift, was our own. To be a guest can be a wonderful experience, but sometimes, we unwittingly overstay our welcome; it's only when we leave, when we return to the familiar, that we rediscover what we never knew we lost.

So, yes, despite all my bitching and moaning, I'm really glad to be back here. I feel a sense of calm that I've missed for a long time, and my only regret now is only being back here for such a short time. I'm gearing up for Pardes, though, and an amazing year back in Jerusalem. It will be a good one.

A cheer-me-up look at how much I love to take close-up portraits

So, I'm at the cafe at the gym at school, and I finally have a decent upload stream, so I uploaded some pictures from the first session of ulpan. Hooray, to only be a month behind!

Anyway, here's a selection of my love for taking portraits.

(All are clickable for bigger)



Ben, 17, from Washington. Loves MMA fighting. Great kid.



Steve, recently engaged (Mazel tov!) and all-around one of the greatest guys I've ever met.



Geoff, a paramedic who's making aliyah and spent 3 years in the Caymans.



Elissa, who'll be spending a year in Haifa.



Carl (with future roommate Josh, in the background), sporting the chops we all miss.

Twice-roommate Andrew, who's made the trek to and from and back to Haifa with me.

And perhaps the greatest picture ever taken of me (with a blurry Josh hanging around):

Stress relief, August 22

As I'm writing this, Iran is roughly two minutes away from delivering their response to the United Nations. I'm sitting in the computer lab on Hebrew U's main campus. I've felt glued to the computer for the last twenty-two minutes, refusing to go get the food I probably need to eat, reloading news sources for any hint of an accord. I've realized, in the past couple days, thanks to reflective words by both my dad and journalist Gabe Ross, that I have little to worry about.

One minute, by the computer clock.

I've felt a heaviness for the last three days, a weight on my shoulders, my heart, my body, carrying over into everything I've done, every conversation I've shared.

3:30. I'd have worn the rubber off, if "refresh" were a real button.

3:31. 3:31. 3:31.

Josh, my future roommate, is sitting next to me, trying to put together words regarding his position on Iran and the nuclear situation as a whole. I can see him checking the time on his cell phone out of the corner of my eye. We're pretending not to notice.

3:33. 3:34 now. Still nothing on the news wire.

We're moving back to Haifa on Thursday evening. I'm hopefully going to have the keys to my apartment by tomorrow, so tomorrow night Josh and I can work on moving most of our stuff into the apartment, only taking a temporary, week-long supply to Haifa. Before our meeting this morning with the head of the program, I knew that we would be going back - why else hold a meeting with the head of the program? I feel better about the situation, since I've already let my thoughts be known via e-mail communication, and I'm going to let it drop off my shoulders until the program is over. Despite the lengths the program went to in order to provide for us during wartime, I cannot say that I see the logic in this decision. Alas, it is what it is, and another week in Haifa I'll have.

3:38. Nothing. Nothing here, nothing on the news channels. Nothing.

I'm in a nervous calm. My fingers are tingling. This is weird.

3:40.

3:41.

3:43.

Now I'm just waiting. Waiting for any word. I've been a personal bomb shelter for three days in a way the shelter in Haifa never felt. I've been dreading a looming nothing, a fantastical threat created by hype and speculation. The deadline for the delivery of the "multidimensional" response has come and gone, but I still sit in wait, with no word yet. I still wait.

3:46.

This is getting ridiculous. At this point, I'm just working myself up for the sake of working myself up, like going to see a horror movie even though you know it will ruin your sleep for the night. I'm waiting and waiting, just for word. It's silly, but come on... "Iran delivers response." "Package received by UN." Anything.

3:52.

The computer lab is closing in 8 minutes. I'm giving up.

I'm sure my world is fine. I'm sure things will be ok for awhile. For today.

So I'm good. I'm good. And the lab is closing. I'll wrap things up later.

Yeesh, Israel.

Mystery Edit...

4:12

I snuck down to another lab, to find this:

Reuters: Iran has handed its reply to a six-nation nuclear package to foreign envoys in Tehran, Iranian TV reports.

I'm going for a bite to eat. I'll find out what the report included later, but for now, I'm out.

I promise, my next post will (hopefully) have nothing to do with war.

The stresses of August 20, 2006

It all started last night.

I had a great Shabbat. It's warm as hell in Israel, and yes, I think I was sweating for the entirety of Shabbat, but I went into town, davened Friday night at Shira Hadasha, and spent Shabbat with Josh, an amazing guy who'll be studying at Pardes with me. Then I got home, back to Har Hatzofim, and talked to my roommate, Andrew.

"Did you hear about August 22?"

"No, why? What's August 22?"

"Oh, just that Iran might nuke Jerusalem. On Tuesday."

I laughed it off as absurd, for a moment, then, in my typical obsessive manner, started googling like crazy. "August+22+Iran." "Nuclear+Iran+August." "Muhammed+Old+City." "Ahmadinejad."

So what did I find?

Mostly, I found information related to two sources; first, an article written by Princeton professor emeritus Bernard Lewis for the Wall Street Journal, and second, statements by leader of the Syrian Reform Party, Farid Ghadry. To sum up the following articles:

http://www.opinionjournal.com/extra/?id=110008768
http://www.frontpagemag.com/Articles/ReadArticle.asp?ID=23533

It is entirely possible that Ahmadinejad's crazed, Jihadist mentality, his fear of militaristic retribution, and his forthright opinion that creating a global end-game scenario could very well lead to his doing something terrible in two days. In Jerusalem. Does Iran have nuclear capability already? What does a "multifaceted response" to the nuclear proposal mean? What is Ahmadinejad's "surprise"?

Yeah, so, I was up until 3 am googling like crazy. Sure, I kept rereading the same two sources, quoted numerous times by numerous bloggers and web journalists, but knowing that this speculation was based on limited sources did nothing to ease my mind. My roommate and I spent an hour discussing how a nuclear attack would affect the city, how great Iranian capability probably is, how widespread destruction would be, and what kind of longer lasting effects would come with such an attack. How good is their military? How accurate is their missile capability?

THIS WILL DRIVE YOU TOTALLY CRAZY.

So, finally, I got to sleep. For a moment, when I awoke, I sensed calm; then, my senses came to me, and the calm was erased. What was this dread that was sitting on my heart?

You'd think this was enough. I walked to class, sweating at 10 am, already driving myself crazy. I couldn't eat breakfast... I just wasn't hungry. When I get to class, though, rumor mills started. Not about Tuesday. Not about Iran. No, about us moving back to Haifa, on Thursday.

FOR ONE WEEK OF CLASS.

This is ludicrous. The rough plan, as long as it's approved, is to once again uproot the program, force students to once again repack all their belongings, trudge through a three or four-hour ordeal up to Haifa, arrange for all new rooms, and unpack, just to repack and move again one week later. Now, were I on vacation, hoping to really 'see and experience' Israel as my primary goal, maybe I'd prefer to spend a week in Haifa. As it is, I want to learn as much Hebrew as possible, in an enviroment and a program with the same goal in mind. I can't even begin to comprehend how so totally disrupting this program, with 5 school days left (including the final exam), will do anything but upset the learning process. Certainly, no final decision yet, but I've only been able to get the information I've gotten from endless e-mail requests of the faculty and staff. I'll be even more insulted if this decision is made unilaterally, especially after numerous July/August students, who have more than proved their dedication to the program, go unheard.

I'm livid.

On top of all this, I had a presentation today, that I was totally unprepared for. Nothing like giving an unmemorized presentation in an 86-degree classroom while you're running on 4 hours of sleep, no food, and the stress of nuclear attack. Somehow, talking about my experiences travelling in the UK lost their meaning. I trudged through it.

So, here I sit, with a stomach half-full of dried fruits and nuts, holding back fifteen-hour old tears and a weight in my stomach so heavy I can barely pick myself up. I'm having the worst day I've had in Israel, and probably the worst day I've had in the months before that. I never really had a terrible day in the Haifa process... in fact, I felt totally, emotionally removed from the situation. This immenent nothingness, this plague of unknowing... this is the worst. The worst.

Just so you know, there is a good chance that Andrew and I might make for Tel Aviv, or elsewhere, for Tuesday. Part of me would rather skip a day of class than, you know, face this whatever. I still haven't decided what I'm doing.

So, hopefully, G-d willing, it's nothing. Hopefully, this "multifaceted decision" that took two months to put together, an announcement that comes on the same day as Muhammed's ascent from the Temple Mount, will just be an announcement regarding Iran's nuclear future, and nothing more. G-d willing.

As always, as much love as I can give, I'm giving.

snippets.

• I restarted class today. I got put into Kitah (class) Bet (2nd level), but at the end of last month, hadn't even made it through the first half of our Kitah Aleph book. It was a challenging day. I may move down a level (into Aleph Plus) and do additional work on the side.
• I checked out a 2BR apartment today with Chaim (potential roommate) in the Talpiot/Arnona neighborhood. We both loved it. Unforunately, there are a couple other people checking the place out, and it sounds like the owner is leaning towards giving the lease to a married couple. Hoping for the best, though.
• On the way back to campus, on the 4-Aleph bus, I saw a duffel bag that didn't belong to anyone. I thought that a Haredi family might have left it behind (as they were sitting there previous), but regardless of who, I told the bus driver, and he stopped and cleared the bus. My dad asked if there was anything in it. I told him that I didn't stay to find out.

Oh, Jerusalem life.

This is dedicated to keeping my mother sane

Yes, yes, I know it's been too long since I posted to this blog, and I'm doing so now. Frankly, the network I'm on at school makes it near impossible to access the blogger site (long story), but I seem to have a clear channel now, so I'll take advantage of it.

So, I'm in between sessions of the Haifa ulpan (now located at Hebrew U), and I took my final (piece of cake) last Wednesday. I'm still a little frustrated with the pace of the class, so I asked my teacher to see if there is an accelerated class I could place into. I want to at least finish Kita Aleph (a full "year" of university ulpan) by the time I wrap up the summer, so I can get rolling into Pardes and the evening ulpan I'll be taking there.

Now, on to some more cerebral matters, of which I was thinking about last night.

A few weeks ago, on the weekend of the big rocket insanity in Haifa, we had a very peaceful Shabbat on Mt. Carmel. Before Shabbat came in, though, Steve, a brilliant and loving rabbinical student from Denver (who just got engaged, Mazel Tov!) asked me to prepare a D'var Torah (literally, words of Torah). Steve, myself, and his fiancee Rachel had been studying the Sh'ma (the blessing said twice a day), so I shaped some of what we studied into some D'varim.

So, roughly, in the first full paragraph of the sh'ma, one is told to love G-d "B'kol L'vavecha" (with all your heart), "U'v'chol Nafshecha" (and with all your soul), and "U'v'chol M'odecha" (and with all your... very very). M'odecha comes from the root "M'od," meaning "very" or "extremely," as in, "Tov M'od." Now, how do you love G-d with your "very very" or your "extremely"? I don't even know how to find my soul, frankly, but to willfully start loving with this unidentifiable "very very" is pretty hard. So, briefly, we found parallels to a Freudian way of thinking. The levavecha, the heart, referenced an ego sense; we act and love G-d with our heart, meaning our body, our mind, our day-to-day actions. How do we do this? By performing mitzvot, but willfully expressing our love for the divine through our keeping of the mitzvot. The nafshecha (soul) refers to a Freudian id level of being; not only does the id drive our subconscience, but through our ego actions, we can also shape our base, soul-level being into a loving structure as well. But our very very? Our extremelyness? Here we have the super-ego... the level of consciousness we can't really ever attain, a level of being somewhere between us and the divine.

So, how do we love with our M'odecha? This love becomes of a mutual love; it's not a willful infatuation, as when we love something unrequitedly, but it is where our love with the divine becomes a meeting place, a wedding, a funeral, a kiss, a lingering hug, or a gaze. We love not with a knowing, but with an unknowing; we tap into a sense of pure loving goodness (pardon my hippie terminology). But how do we tap into this? By performing mitzvot, by "doing Jewish." It's funny, and I think most Jews can identify, but doing Jewish things, with Jewish people, gives me a feeling different than doing anything else. Sharing a Shabbat table, seeing tired faces at Shacrit services on Shabbat morning, sharing Kiddush - these are experiences where I feel a sense I can't identify, a lingering something that I just want to tap into more and more often. Frankly, I think this is why I love doing more "Jewish stuff;" I love reconnecting with that sense of being, of identity, of love, of M'odecha.

Anyhow, all that said, last night I was smoking nargilla (hookah) with my roommate Andrew, and I overheard his conversation with his Hillel president back home, as they made plans for the upcoming school year. I was so excited, by proximity, to hear them talk so excitedly about energizing the Jewish community at Dartmouth, about getting Jews active and showing them how great being in community really is. Then I thought back to about a year ago, when I was last in Israel. I had met up with Callie, an awesome girl from my first Livnot trip, and we met up with about ten folks studying at HUC, Hebrew Union College. For whatever reason, I was subtly judgemental; these folks weren't spiritual enough, or didn't keep halacha enough, or whatever. I created a "better than thou" mentality. This might have been shaped by many things, including my struggle with my Reform upbringing and the Reform belief structure, but for whatever reason, I found myself annoyed with these ten students, living in Israel, studying "Jewish stuff."

Looking back, I realize this is exactly the kind of thinking I hate - exclusionist, isolationist closed-mindedness. Here I was, most likely far less educated than most of the people at the table, probably less spiritual, and certainly doing less "Jewish" at the time, yet I chose to see their choices as "bad" and "wrong," making myself "good" and "right." Looking back, I'm ashamed; to so judge these people who, knowing or unknowing, are in search of the same M'odecha as I am, the same connection and unidentifiable love with the divine, in whatever form that takes, is really the biggest mistake I could make. Instead, I should treasure those students, that group, these Jews, trying to "do Jewish," not because we have to, but because our heart, soul, and m'odecha constantly tell us how good a thing it is.

On a whole other topic, I got quoted in an AP article that went out on the wire but didn't get picked up, but the author sent me a copy anyway, so if you'd like to read it, here ya go:

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JERUSALEM (AP) _ Alexandra Kenig's summer began with high hopes of learning Hebrew by the beach in northern Israel. It ended with a hail of rockets, hours spent in a bomb shelter and an early trip home to Texas.

Kenig was one of thousands of American students who came to Israel this summer to study, tour the country or connect with their religious heritage and found their plans scuttled by fighting between Israel and Hezbollah guerrillas in Lebanon.

Some went home. Those who stayed found their programs hurriedly changed to keep them out of the northern communities that were bombarded by thousands of Hezbollah rockets.

Kenig, 23, a recent college graduate, had heard positive things about the University of Haifa and decided to take courses in the seaside city over the summer. But after Hezbollah rockets forced her into a bomb shelter, she decided to head south with her Israeli roommate.

But that did not mollify her frightened parents back home in Austin, Texas. "I tell them on the phone I'm fine, but then they turn on CNN and it's not fine," she said.

Kenig gave in, packed her bags and went home along with some 50 other people on her program.

The program itself had to act quickly after the University of Haifa was forced to close its campus under the rocket barrage. The 150 students who decided to remain found themselves relocated to Hebrew University in Jerusalem.

Groups that organized tours of the country were also forced to rearrange their itineraries, canceling visits to the north, said Neil Weidberg, director of Israel programs for the Young Judaea youth movement, which organizes summer tours for Jewish teenagers. Of 450 teens on the program, only 10 went home, a figure consistent with similar programs, he said.

"We feel like we're in a very safe atmosphere, it's not constantly on our minds," said Jessica Levis, 17, of Miami, who was participating in a color war on a beach south of Tel Aviv that had been moved from its original site by the Sea of Galilee in the north.

Some of the Jewish students said being in Israel in a time of crisis had helped them identify with the country.

"In a kind of sick way it is a privilege to experience this type of phenomenon," said David Riemenschneider, 27, of Atlanta, who relocated to Jerusalem along with the University of Haifa overseas program. He said he had begun to refer to Israeli actions as "our decision rather than their decision."

Two American immigrants to Israel were killed this week. David M. Lelchook, 52, was killed by a rocket Wednesday as he fled on his bicycle toward shelter. Lelchook was originally from the Boston area and had lived in Israel for 20 years.

Michael Levin, 22, was among three Israeli soldiers killed in fighting in Lebanon on Tuesday. He emigrated to Israel about four years ago from his home in the Philadelphia suburb of Holland. Levin had cut short a visit to his family in order to return to his unit.

Riemenschneider said that though he did not personally feel unsafe, he has taken steps to reassure concerned family and friends at home, including setting up a blog.

Program organizers were also taking extra steps to calm worried parents.

Weidberg said his staff was sending parents daily e-mail updates.

Tamar Vital, the administrative director of Haifa University's overseas program, said there was only so much reassuring to be done.

"I spoke during the last two weeks with more parents than I have ever spoken to before," she said.

"If a mother tells me that she's terrified and she can't sleep at night ... (I tell her) you are a mother and you have to make your decision and we'll understand it. Israel will still be here next year."