This week consisted of two big highlights, and a lot of normalness. For the firs time, I felt almost like a real college student. Almost :)
The first highlight was on Sunday, October 25th. MASA, the program that brings American teens to Israel, such as me, sponsered a free concert for all teens spending a year in Israel. This concert started out as something small, some speakers, some little performances, etc. Nothing too exciting. A few weeks ago, they decided to turn it from a little concert into a huge concert by booking one of the most famous Israeli bands: Idan Raichel! Idan Raichel is awesome, their music is great and above all, all American Jews know and love their music. Therefore, all Americans in Israel suddenly wanted to go to this concert. This includes Nativ, Yearcourse, Kivonim, Yeshiva programs, etc. There were over 1000 people there. I'll post some pictures and videos below for you guys to see! It was an amazing concert, their music is so unique, and I found myself understand much more Hebrew than I expected. That was cool. A really fun night, got to see my yearcourse friends again after spending the weekend with them just the day before and see the Kivonim friends that will shortly be leaving Israel to travel.
The second highlight was last night, Oct 28, I went to the Jerusalem Poal's basketball game against some random European time in the Euro Basketball league. We didn't know who they were playing, we couldn't figure it out. They wore blue uniforms, if you know, tell me? That would be great thanks. I got back from school at 6:30 on Wednesday, so the Nativ group had already left. So Jesse, Jonny, Max and I had to make it there on our own. No big deal, except it took a very very veryyyy long time. We ended up getting to the game in the middle of the 3rd quarter. I didn't really care, it was still an unbelievable experience. It was really similar to being at a college basketball game, everyone was wearing red, the color of Poal, cheering, yelling, people brought drums to bang on, and the level of basketball was about that of a mediocre D1 school, so it worked out really well. I'll get some pics and vids of that too.
Classes this week were ok, Ulpan is getting hard but I'm learning a lot which is strange that it is working out that way. I just need to cement the new verb forms, new vocab, etc. It's getting technically more difficult, but I'm understand more and more.
Talmud is great, learning a lot and a great environment to spend time in. My cheveruta is Rachel, which means partner in Hebrew, and we do all of the Talmud homework together because you are not supposed to study the Talmud alone. Rab Pesach is our teacher, and he is a really good and passionate teacher.
Silicon Wadi is going well, finally dropped into a groove which consists of reviewing the homework for the first 2 hours and then learning new information for the second two hours.
Israel society and politics is a good class, but it is sooo much history on the society of Israel so far. I think that eventually it will be a good class, but at the moment it doesn't seem worth it to stay at school an extra hour and a half and get back at 6:45 as opposed to 4:45. That's kind of annoying, but it also has my Tuesday's and Thursday's almost completely free. That's really nice when that happens because I am very productive on those days, and I tend to do homework better at school than at home. Having class so late gives me a 4 hour break on Monday and a 2 hour break on Wednesday.
Freshman Writing is going to be terrible. It's so much work, and so far it doesn't seem to be helping me with my writing, which is it's overall goal. That's kind of annoying, but its ok. Hopefully they will teach me to improve my writing level. My topic is Conservative Judaism, and I believe I will be writing about the trends of Conservative Judaism over the last couple decades or so. I'm sure I'll be addressing the idea of Conservative Judaism increasingly becoming more and more secular, but I'm not sure I will take a stance for it or against it. I'll have to decide by next Thursday so I'll keep you updated on that.
Erev Nativ (Tuesday nights on Nativ, all Nativers must attend and its usually geared towards learning) was good this week. If you remember, a few weeks ago we were lectures by one of the most prominent Rabbi's in the Conservative Movement, Rabbi Roth. This week, we had Rabbi Artson. He lectured us on the topic of God. Rabbi Artson's main points were these: God is not all knowing because he can't know the future; God is not all powerful because if he had all the power, then he would have none of the power; God is not all good because if he is all good then he cannot improve; and prayer is not magic. As you can see, it was a very intense and intellectually challenging conversation. It was a very interesting discussion, and it has spurred a ton of conversations between Nativers over the last few days. Yesterday, Jesse, Joey, and I had a conversation for about an hour and a half over what the Rabbi talked about. I don't particularly want to post my own ideals in the blog, so if your interested in hearing, I would love to tell you just not here. send me an email. In my opinion, Rabbi Artons's views directly conflicted Rabbi Roth's and that was helping for me to have a balance of what to believe.
OK well on that note, nothing else really exciting happened this weekend, so I'll get some pics up and say goodbye! This weekend I will most likely be on base; I was going to go visit my friend Roee and Mor outside of Tel-Aviv, but that kind of fell through at the last second. Then I was going to go back to Bat Yam, but I just kind of want to stay on base and have Shabbat in Jerusalem. We'll see.
Have a good and restful Shabbat.
-Josh
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