UGGGHHH MIDTERMSSS

Hey everyone,

This week is the perfect storm of papers: Israeli Society and Politics due Wednesday (10 pages) and Freshman Writing (also 10 pages) due Thursday. SOOOOO on Thursday after I turn in my paper there will be THE BIGGEST UPDATE EVER!! Get excited.

My ISP essay is on Operation Cast Lead and the Goldstone Report. So far, the first 7 pages are pretty good (I hope...) and with all the research I obtained while reading online during Talmud last period, I should have enough information to get to the 10 page mark. OK my teacher is here for ISP, as usual 7 minutes late. woot woot

-Josh

Hi!

Hey everyone,

I apologize for not writing in the past week. This week is midterm week, so I've been really busy studying/writing papers/etc. for them. My apologies.

Also this week, my parents are in town. So a lot of free time has gone to being with them.

I'll give a massive update on Sunday probably. Until then, have a great thanksgiving, watch a lot of football, eat a lot of food, whatever. If your back in the north shore from college and planning to go to the Turkey Dance, have fun! Sorry I won't be there. :(

ALSO: I recommend going to Haaretz.com because they have sooo many updates about Gilad Shalit, the captured IDF Soldier. It looks like he may be coming back home soon! (possibly by Friday!) Best thanksgiving ever?? If that happens, probably.

All for now

-Josh

Pictures from Ain Aqev!

Here's some pictures from the weekend in Ain Aqev!

-Josh

Me and Aaron hiking

Aaron and I drinking the water in the FREEZING cold spring

Max and I hiked a mountain

Aaron and I hiking up the final mountain...

Max, Aaron, Asaf and I at the bus stop going home

Aaron and I went in the freezing cold water

Jumping in... it may or may not have been against the rules

Max, Aaron and I hiking

Everyone at the spring!

IMPACT! Ceremony/NBA/Hiking in Ain Aqev

Hey everyone,

I would like to apologize for now writing last Thursday. Hebrew U decided to give us an extra ulpan class at 4:30 Thursday afternoon, so I didn't get my Thursday to blog because I was at school doing freshman stupid writing, watching South Park with Seffi, etc.

Wednesday night, November 11th, my friend Tyler and I went to Tel-Aviv for the IMPACT! ceremony. IMPACT is an organization where donors can help sponsor Israeli soldiers fresh out of the army that need financial help with their university studies. My family is apart of the IMPACT organization and so is one of my former camp counselors from camp Interlaken, Roee, so we went together. This was a really cool ceremony. There were excellent musicians, great speakers (including Ehud Barak, former Defense minister) and touching videos of current IMPACT students. It was a excellent ceremony.

After the ceremony, Roee took Tyler and I around downtown TA, a place where I've wanted to go since I've been in Israel but never got the chance. Roee realized that he didn't remember where he parked his car, which was slightly a problem but was more funny than it was a problem (he ended up finding it don't worry). We went to a reallllyyyyy good ice cream store, way better than Jerusalem's finest-Aldo's. After about an hour and a half of catching up with Roee, we loaded the car and back to Jerusalem. Going back to Jerusalem is still one of the best feelings in the world.

Thursday night: NBA make-up because of the closed Shabbat the prior weekend. We had a session with Jules which inhibited our ability to have the NBA, so we made it up on Thursday. The white team played two games, against the blue team and the yellow team.

Game one: blue team. The game started out pretty even, with us basically trading baskets back and forth. I had a couple steals in the first half with helped us keep up with the blue team. Nadav, the big guy on the blue team, just was too big for Gabe, the big guy on our team, and the blue team had no trouble exploiting it. With 10 seconds left in the first half, with us down 6-10, David drove right, got stuck, and kicked it out to me with 2 seconds left. I put up a 3, and I finally made my first 3-pointer of the season as time ran out! I guess all the practice I've been doing at the "Yud Mem Kof Aleph" (YMCA) has been paying off. After hitting that shot, I ended up scoring 15 points and grabbing 14 rebounds, my second best game of the season (after the first game where I had 18 and 18, points and rebounds). We won by about 8 points. Everyone was going really good, and we just played much better basketball than they did.

Game Two: White Vs. Yellow. The Yellow team consists of Adam, Seth, Moskowitz and Noah. We were winning after the first half, but in the last three minutes, Moskowiz just started to drain 3's and they took a quick 8 point lead. Gabe fell apart at this point; stopped trying and stopped guarding Moskowitz which just ended up in him scoring more. This just got me angry and I think I pulled down 6 boards in the last 2 minutes of the game. My shots weren't falling but when I missed I made sure that I got my own rebound and put it back in. I ended up with around 12 points and 12 rebs. Not bad, but we still lost by around 6. By no means did we deserve to win, but I think we still could have.

FREE WEEKEND:

So for the first time since desert survival, I finally went camping for real. Asaf, Aaron, Max and I went to Ain Aqev, into the middle of the desert, with nothing but food, a tent, water and some camping spirit. I brought around 7 liters of water, which was way too much for 2 days i found out. As a group, we brought 20 pitas, Hummus, peanut butter, 20 chewy bars and 11 hot dogs. plenty of food for 24 hours of hiking.

After about a 2 hour hike into the desert, we found the camping grounds. Aaron and I set up the tent while Max and Asaf went to find firewood. Those two ended up tearing down a tree, a legit tree, which we used in turn to fuel our fire and cook hot dogs that night. Around 5, we did Kab Shab and Maariv, accompanied by some random guy who was camping about 30 yards away from us. Then, we had dinner and turned in around 8. Before we went to sleep, that random guy told us to watch out for foxes which tended to wander in the middle of the night. We thanked him and went to sleep. I slept pretty well considering it was FREEEZZZINGGG outside, my pillow was my towel and the tent was kind of small. All throughout the night, I heard the foxes barking in the distance. Not loud enough to wake me up, but if you were awake definitely something you could hear.

The next morning, at 5:45, the random guy came up to our tent and said, "ehhh... you want to Le'hit'pallel" (translation: ehhh... you want to pray?") after waking up Aaron, Max and I, Aaron reponded nicely with "no we're sleeping." The guy then asked if we wanted to at 7 and Aaron said no again. I ended up waking up boiling hot at 8 AM, saw max wasn't in the tent and went outside. I was immediately gripped by the cold air, but the warm sun made it a little better. I saw Max sitting on the sand hill, so I went over and said hello. He had put part of a branch into the sand and was putting rocks onto the leaves. He said, "it's art. How many trees do you know grow rocks?" Max and I then proceeded to go up the big mountain next to the camp ground. It took about 10 minutes to go up it, and it was soooooooooooo beautiful. We could see for miles and miles around us, all the other mountains and and sand around us. I wish I was a good writer because then maybe I could describe to you how beautiful it was. Once Asaf posts the pictures I'll put them here so you can just see them.

Around 8:45, Aaron and Asaf woke up and told us it was about time to go to the spring. We got down the mountain and loaded up out packs. Asaf said, "where's the pita?" Aaron said, "it's probably in my pack, and if not its one one of ours cause its not around the campsite." We loaded up and got hiking. after about an hour, we made it to the spring. We got there around 10 and decided it was time for breakfast. Max got out the peanut butter and hummus, and Aaron went to get the pita and bread from his bag. We then heard, "guys, where is the pita?" uh oh. I think you can see where this is going. We all scrambled to look through our bags to find the pita but to no avail. We decided that it was probably taken by some animal, or by the random guy because the night before he kept trying to mooch food off of us. I personally think it was animals but it didn't matter because somehow we lost 15 pieces of pita. After about 45 minutes of freaking out, realizing that for the rest of the day all we have is 4 slices of bread, hummus, peanut butter and 9 chewy bars, we realized it was time to start rationing our food. Rationing our food. Geez. Luckily I thought ahead and brought an extra 2 apples and 2 nature valley bars for myself, but overall it still was clearly not enough food for all of us. After about an hour there, a ton of other people showed up and it got really crowded really fast. Even though the water was freezing cold, Aaron and I decided we need to go swimming anyway so we did. It was sooo worth it.

We then hiked back to where we started, giving ourselves 5 hours for a 3 hour hike due to the lack of food. Right after we passed the campsite, not seeing the pita but definitely checking, we got to a big rock that was shaded by a big hill. We had "lunch" there around 2. Lunch consisted of one slice of bread with so much melted and gross hummus that you couldn't even see the bread anymore. Yum. After our piece of bread we shared the rest of the jar of peanut butter from 2 spoons. Double yum. Then we finished a bottle of Prigot Mango drink. Triple yum. That was it. Yay. Then we ate 2 cookies and cream chewy bars each. Great lunch right?

We hiked the last hour back to the top of the mountain where the bus stop was. The food situation wasn't that big of a deal. I was fine the whole time with an excess of water, extra food from my apple and nature valley bar, and it also wasn't even that hot. It was in the 70's the whole time, which for the desert is awesome. We ended up getting a ride back to Jlem with Maayan, the woman who works at the front desk of Beit Nativ who was in Beer Sheva for the weekend. Sweet.

OK, that's all for now. Hope that wasn't too long. Back to Silicon Wadi. Learning how to build a business today. A little upset that I missed part of the lecture to write this but not really. I got all the notes.

NBA tonight. Pumped.

I'll get some pics asap.

Talk soon,

Josh

Monday blog post/Yitzchak Rabin Ceremony

Hi!
So I realized that every week may be a little boring, so let's do like Monday and Thursdays? On the days when we read Torah! (except Shab obvs)

This past weekend was a closed Shabbat. We had a special guest with us for the whole weekend, Jules Gutin! He is the international director of USY, and somehow actually knew my name when I talked to him this time. After 4 IC's, wheels and pilgrimage, he never actually knew my name. That's understandable considering there's thousands of USYers. But this time, he knew my first AND last name! It was very exciting. He gave us a speech which was built up to be another lecture like the two previous rabbi's, Roth and Artson. It wasn't at all. In fact, one could say that this lecture was.... boring? Oh well, he's not a rabbi.

I went to Kedem Saturday morning with Adina and Debbie (two of the girls I watch LOST with all the time). I thought was my favorite shul but ended up being just mediocre. I had only gone there on Rosh Hashana and Yom Kippur, and it was great then. It was not so great when not during the Chag Season. We had two more sessions, each with just the Kehilah group and not all of Nativ, and both also proved to be relatively pointless. Don't get me wrong, I definitely learned something from the weekend with Jules, but it didn't take 3 sessions and 6 total hours to learn it.

Sunday came my newfound favorite class, Silicon Wadi. This time, our teacher, Avner Halperin (we're not sure if we should call him Mr. Halperin or Avner) brought in his father to lecture to us about the US-Israel relationship. It was a great lecture. I took a lot of notes so if you want to see them, email me. We learned about the US-Israel relationship from '48 when Israel was established until today. I learned a lot. The one main point he continually reiterated was that although today is Israel's most important ally, the US hasn't always been. There have been many times where the US congress opposed Israel, but the President felt obligated to protect Israel and therefore supported Israel; overriding congress. It was very interesting.

Currently, I'm sitting in Talmud class. This is a good class because it's kind of a break from studying and working during my free time. We just found out about our Talmud Midterm today, exciting! A test on Talmud, never thought I'd see the day where I would be preparing for that.

Still have society and politics after this class, getting back to base around 6:45 (hopefully) and will try to go to the YMCA tonight to workout. That would be great.

Last night, my friend Tyler and I started to write our first song for the album we are going to create while on Nativ. It's a pretty simple song so far, but hopefully it will grow into something amazing. He plays piano decently, but more importantly than that is that he can sing really well. Together, I think we'll make something great. I'll keep you posted.

WAIT TIMEOUT! Friday night, the girls had a "sleepover party" which involved all the girls hanging out for about 3 hours before they went to sleep in their respective rooms. Not so much of a sleepover, but a good time to bond with all the guys since there were no girls around. A bunch of us were sitting in the computer room playing risk when we had this great idea: go to the girls sleepover party and take their food! Well, what a great idea this was. We waited about half an hour until after it started, then we ran downstairs. We ended up not getting any food, but we ended up just crashing their party for a little bit. It was a good start to Shabbat.

On Saturday night, 48 Nativers, including myself, boarded a bus and went to Tel-Aviv for the annual memorial ceremony for Yitzchak Rabin. This was a very interesting experience. I've learned about Rabin here at Hebrew U a little bit, back home at Hebrew school, etc. However, I wouldn't consider myself an expert on Rabin. I still wanted to go and see what it was all about. We arrived, and when we got there our Madrich (staff) Nadiv said, "After the ceremony is over, you have 20 minutes to get back to the bus, then we're leaving with or without you." He was being a little ridiculous considering it took 15 minutes just to walk to Rabin square because all the roads were closed off surrounding the square. We all made it back, don't worry. We get to the square, and I texted my yearcourse friend Arielle (the girl I visited twice that lives in Bat Yam) to see if she and the rest of the Bat Yam people were there. They were, so I decided to meet up with them after getting some Tel Aviv falafel. I wanted to compare it to Jerusalem falafel and see which was better. I gotta say, I really like Jerusalem falafel better. But that's an argument for another time :) Joey, Seffi and I aimlessly wandered around the huge area until we found some Nativ people. I then left them and went to meet up with Arielle and her friends including one of my good yearcourse friends, an Israeli Tzfoim Yoni. I spend the majority of the ceremony with them.

Once the ceremony got started, a bunch of important people spoke such as Talia Rabin and Tzpini Livni. AI obviously couldn't understand about 85% of what all the speakers were saying, so after a while I kind of tuned them out. Also, Hadag Nachash played. Funnily enough, Israelis don't really like Hadag Nachash, but that doesn't mean that I don't! They were awesome, playing "shirit hasticker" (the sticker song) which is probably their most famous song. All of the Americans loved it, can't say the same about the Israelis though. Then in the middle of the speeches, President Obama gave a video message to everyone. Go look it up. If you know my political tendencies you may be able to guess how I felt, but I'm committed to keeping this blog neutral. If you want my opinion, the email box is always open. I will just say that it was not too surprising of a message, I enjoyed listening to it, and the crowd definitely did to.

During the ceremony, I couldn't help but notice the signs that were extremely numerous and prevalent around me. For example, one of them said, "Bibi's government=no peace ever!" They were all mostly conveying this kind of message. After the ceremony, I found myself asked to be interviewed by the Daily Beast. They were asking me about what my views on Obama and Israel were. Again, neutral blog. We had a good talk, and eventually he asked me for my name/where I'm from/where I'm living in Jerusalem and why I'm living there. That lead me to believe that he was writing an article and was going to quote me, but to this day I couldn't find anything. He said his name was Uval Pearlman, or something like that. If you are a Daily Beast reader, let me know if you see my name! I've been checking but haven't been able to find anything.

Our staff member Nadiv felt the need to give his opinion to everyone on the bus after the ceremony. Considering most Nativers weren't able to understand the speeches like me, this was the majority of what they got out of the program: Nadiv said something along the lines of, "I've heard a lot about this ceremony, but I've never been there before. I heard that it has turned from a good memorial ceremony into a free rally for the left of Israel. Tonight, we heard many the speakers blaming the lack of peace between the Israelis and Palestinians on the religious right in Israel, and since I was wearing a Kippah people started giving me dirty looks. They turned Rabin from a prominent and important Israeli political leader into a martyr for the leftist propaganda." Whether that is true or not is not up to me, but just so you get an idea of what he believes happened. I personally think it was wrong of him to put his opinion onto us like that. And I plan on telling him it was out of line to do that as well.

I'll get some pictures from the ceremony.

OK thats all for now. Talk to you in a few days!

-Josh

Joey, Seffi (roommate), Me and Adina at the ceremony!

Week Update: Nov 1-5

What's going on America,

I've decided that if nothing extra exciting happens during the week and I don't have a good reason to blog, I'll just blog every Thursday to give a weekly update on what's happenin' here in the holy land. So look for the weekly update. Plus some pictures if I can get some. Pic's from the internet don't seem to work on blogger which is super lame because I don't have my camera with my at all time but other people do. So when I figure out how to use those pics I'll put them up. I think I just did, so well see.

ANYWAYYYYY let's start on sunday, and you know what that means! Silicon Wadi! It was much better this week than in past weeks. Our teacher, Avner Halperin, isn't a teacher. He is just a successful entrepreneur who just teaches the Silicon Wadi class once a week. That has its ups and downs. One of the plus's is that he really knows the material not because he studied it so much, but because he lived it. One of the downsides is that he isn't very good at teaching. It's a fair trade off.

Talmud was cancelled on Monday, which was awesome, but instead of having the usual 4 hour break, we instead had a 6 hour break. That was rough. I couldn't really focus in Talmud on Wednesday, but I really enjoyed the homework. It talked about the idea of living life to the fullest, aka fulfilling all the mitzvot possible, and the reason why you may not be getting rewarded for it. In other words, "why do bad things happen to good people?" According to Rabbi Abaye, if you act poorly in your life, you will be rewarded well in this life but suffer severe concequences in the afterlife. If you act in a righteous manner, you may not be rewarded in this life, but in the next. Very interesting stuff.

Society and Politics has just gotten boring. Our teacher is ALWAYSSSS late, and while normally I wouldn't complain, he then keeps us that much later. Since it's my last class, his tardiness at the beggining directly effects how quickly I get back to base on Mondays and Wednesdays. I thought this would be more like a poli sci class, and so did Reina the Nativ Advisor, but she was wrong. So far, we have mostly just learned about the history of Israeli society; ie immigration from 1870 til today. I'm pretty sure the topic of my paper will be on Operation Cast Lead, the IDF's operation last winter. That should be a good paper.

Speaking of writing papers, unlike the previous class, Freshman Writing still is terrible. Today, she talked to us for literally 30 minutes on what a credible source is. According to our teacher, the New York Times, the Jerusalem Post, or any newspaper is not credible source to get information. Neither is any internet source unless it specifically comes from Hebrew University. Neither are magazines, or personal interviews. So then I asked if Rabbi's are a credible source, considering my topic is Conservative Judaism, and she responded "well, sometimes." Right.

This week, I got to work out twice at the YMCA. It was great. I also got over being sick, I think, and that's good too. The Nativ Fantasy basketball league is going ok. I'm currently in second to last place, but I have faith that will change very soon. Jake Brown helped me with the draft, so how could my team be bad?

I wrote my first album review!!!!!! This is a huge deal for me, so if you have some time, check it out. My good friend Tyler Silver, aka T. Silvs has a website, Thagoodlifereviews.com. It's a Hip-Hop blog, but I wrote about the funk group Soulive and their new album Live in San Francisco. Let me know what you think of it! Here's the link:

http://www.thagoodlifereviews.com/2009/11/02/soulive-live-in-san-francisco-review/

This weekend is a closed Shabbat. We have programming all day Saturday, probably Friday night as well. But Saturday night, aka "Motzei Shabbat" as it's called here, is the memorial service for Itzak Rabin. I'll definitely get pictures from that.

OK, I'll post some pic's and say bye for now.

Talk soon! And feel free to email me if you have questions, comments, whatever. Love to hear from you.

Josh

Me and my Roomatey Seffi!

Me, Joey and Nadav walking around last Thursday night at Adina's birthday party!

The Nativ Basketball Association (NBA)

Greetings,

This update won't be complete without some pictures, so hopefully I'll get some up soon. I didn't take any, but it would for sure improve the blogging experience if there are pics. Thursday after I blogged we had another week of the NBA (Nativ Basketball Association) and right as the first game started, a game I was playing in, it started TO RAIN!!!! Now, some of you might be saying "Oh man, how can you play basketball in the rain? That's soooo lame that it started to rain!" Well, as we've been told by our staff members, rain in Israel is ALWAYS good, and never ever ever bad. So by canceling basketball due to rain would be just plain wrong. So what did we do? We had the best week of the NBA yet. Besides the fact that my team, the white team, had its first victory ever against the blue team, playing in the rain was not only extremely dangerous but a ton of fun. Every couple of minutes, someone would slip and fall on the court because it was coming down HARDDDD. I only fell once, but the king of slipping and falling went to your truely, CHUSY regional President Seth Lerman. At one point, he was so wet he actually just laid down and make rain angels on the court. It was raining so hard that while everyone on the court still took the games really seriously, everyone watching just stopped and after anything good happened, we all just went crazyyyy. Like obnoxiously crazy. Like Tyler would hit a 3, and we would be yelling and screaming for like a minute straight. It was just out of control how crazy everyone was. Hopefully there will be some pics of the day, and I can show you guys how it was.

Last night, Sunday, was another week of the NBA and I finally got outsted as the rebounding leader. At 5'10 you think I wouldn't be the rebounding leader considering there are a good amount of players over 6'0 tall, some being 6'2 and much heavier than me. for the four weeks I was leading the league in average rebs per game with 10.7. This past week I was a little sick, so I only grabbed 8, which brought me down to 3rd place. Lame. I'll reclaim the title next week.

OK I should go back to working on freshman writing stupid homework. only two and a half more hours until class starts!

-Josh

Me driving on Brian Cook, or as he is more commonly called, Cookie.

Me guarding Aaron Leven. We have a little rivalry going between us. I think I won this one.