A week has passed since the Pardes tiyyul (trip) and Shabbaton in Ein Gedi. The weather feels different (cooler, thank G-d!), and we are now all orienting ourselves towards Rosh HaShanah, which begins tomorrow night. But here I will share some pictures and a few reflections on our trip to Ein Gedi and Ein Bokek .

It was insanely hot last weekend — and down by Yam HaMelach (the Dead Sea — literally, the Salt Sea) it is always significantly hotter than up here in the Holy City. In case you thought all those references to “going up to Jerusalem” were only metaphorical, take a look at a topographical map – Jerusalem is on a series of high hills. https://mfa.gov.il/MFA/AboutIsrael/Maps/Maps/Topography.jpg Yam HaMelach, on the other hand, is the lowest place on earth. This is fact, not exaggeration; according to Wikipedia, “its surface and shores are 430.5 meters (1,412 ft) below sea level,^[4][6] Earth’s lowest elevation on land. It is 304 m (997 ft) deep, the deepest hypersaline lake in the world. With a salinity of 342 g/kg, or 34.2% (in 2011), it is one of the world’s saltiest bodies of water^[7] – 9.6 times as salty as the ocean – and has a density of 1.24 kg/liter, which makes swimming similar to floating.^[8][9] This salinity makes for a harsh environment in which plants and animals cannot flourish, hence its name.” (For the rest of the Wiki article, click here: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dead_Sea)

Our bus left Jerusalem at about nine in the morning. It’s been quite a number of years since I was on a bus trip with a group — all I could think of, actually, was when I was in my late teens and sang with the Blanche Moyse Chorale. I had a very pleasant seat mate, Joe, a young man originally from Lexington, Massachusetts who has been going to Yale and is considering studying for the rabbinate (not uncommon among Pardes students!). We had fun talking about the pleasures of New England.

We drove north from Pardes, past the Old City, and turned east to begin our descent through the West Bank. This area is Judea and Samaria to some, Palestine to others. On the map above you can see it’s shaded gray. We came down through a barren, stony, arid landscape, passing Jericho. I was reminded of the final lyrics to Yerushalim shel zahav, “Jerusalem of Gold”: Nashuv nered el yam hamelach b’derech Yericho! — “We will once again descend to the Salt Sea by the Jericho road.” (For the moving history of this song, read here: https://www.jerusalem-insiders-guide.com/jerusalem-of-gold.html) In class we had been discussing a gemara which suggests that when they blew the shofarot in Jerusalem, they were audible all the way if Jericho — which seems unlikely, but not entirely impossible, since one of my classmates found out that in Temple times they blew in a formation of up to 120 shofarot (ram or ibex horns) and chatzotzrot (silver trumpets). We learned also in a Bible class that Jericho is over three thousand years old, and was possibly a place where they dealt in spices and perfumes (It’s Yericho in Hebrew, which seems to maybe derive from reiach, meaning scent.) And yet, this is Jericho as in Joshua and “the walls came atumbling down”!

In the distance we could see the Dead Sea, sapphire blue between golden shores. The upper part of the Sea is in the West Bank, while the lower regions are in Israel proper. There is some tourism in the West Bank section of Yam HaMelach, although its modest. I spoke with a student who had swum at a beach there – -she said she and her friend had had the beach to themselves apart from a Bahai family. But of course, Americans are highly discouraged from going into the West Bank (except tucked up safely in a passing tour bus), so the most beautiful part of the eastern shore of the Sea is not much enjoyed except by Israelis and Palestinians.

We passed Ein Gedi (the spring of the baby goat), and continued down the road to Ein Bokek (spring of [meaning uncertain]). Here, we walked and clambered up the stream bed to the pools made by the Spring.

The water somehow seeps underground from way further north in the country. The heat and humidity were extremely oppressive (about 104 degrees F), but it was somewhat cooler in the shade of the tamarisk bushes growing by the stream. When we reached the pools and the waterfall, many of my classmates jumped right in! I wasn’t dressed for that, but did sit with my legs up to the knees in the water, which was warm, but cooler than the surrounding air.

After our walk up to the pools, we returned to the bus and drove the short distance to the beach in front of the row of huge hotels that characterize this peculiar desert outpost. The sand is hard and crunchy with salt — and definitely trucked in from somewhere. I saw none of the black mud that we’ve all seen in pictures — I believe one only finds this now in the northern section of the Dead Sea.

Yam HaMelach is shrinking rapidly, largely because of the industrial uses of the water by both Israel and Jordan, as well as the diversion of the Jordan River water further up stream. The shores of the Dead Sea in Ein Gedi have collapsed, causing the old road to be closed off for a distance. For both the purposes of tourism and of industry, barriers have been built and water diverted to preserve in some form the second, lower section of the Sea. The Western shore of this section in entirely in Israel proper. The towering Ein Bokek hotels, mall, etc., have been been built to support the tourists, both Israeli and from elsewhere, who still love to flock to the Dead Sea. Bathing in the Dead Sea is considered both healthy and fun. Many of my friends did go in, but I declined to have the experience. Although it may be exciting to float in water of such high salinity, and although the minerals in the water may indeed have some health benefits, I was put off both by the strong stench of sulfur and the descriptions from those who had been in the water before. I was advised that it feels like “swimming in a pool of warm butter”, and that if you have an open cut, or even have shaved within the past few days, you are going to experience severe smarting. Not for me!

After an hour an the beach we drove back to Ein Gedi. When I was there last November I stayed at the hotel, which is in the midst of an extraordinary botanical garden created by the Ein Gedi kibutz. We, however, stayed at the Field Station, an agricultural training center, training place for tour guides, and hostel. I shared a room with three young women, with whom I had been put because we share a certain iconoclasm. (One roommate — she of the ‘warm butter’ analogy — said “If calling my mother on Shabbat makes me an iconoclast, then so be it!”)

I’ll share more about the actual Shabbaton experience in another post…

When I first arrived here, I was diligent about posting to my blog every day. Then my life filled up, more and more things started happening, and I found myself needing my evenings to do homework, catch up on email, and tuck myself into bed early.

A lot has happened since I last posted, and I’ve had a lot of thoughts, as well. But once again, I find that it’s bedtime, I need to get up early in the morning to go to class, and so really I cannot take time to write a proper post this evening.

I do hope to catch up on my posting over the coming holidays. In the meantime, let me just say that life has been intense. Today, though, I feel as if I’ve turned a corner to some extent. I feel ready to meet the high holy days (starting Sunday night). Thanks to all of you who read this to know what I am up to and to share in my Israeli experience. I wish you all a sweet and fulfilling new year!

Tuesday was election day in Israel — the second time in six months, since the election in the spring resulted in a failure to build a coalition. Essentially there are two things making the biggest difficulty in putting together a government: people’s growing distaste for the corrupt grand-stander Bibi Netanyahu, and Avigdor Lieberman’s decision that even though he is far right, he wants no part of the religious right with whom he would have get in bed to form a coalition. As of this moment it looks as though the right/center group calling itself Kakhol/lavan (blue/white) has slightly outperformed Bibi’s Likud party. The more liberal parties have a smaller share of votes, as do the religious parties, and Avigdor Lieberman’s far right secular Yisrael Beiteinu (Israel our home) is in a position to help or hinder the forming of a coalition with either Kakhol/lavan or Likud. (But he doesn’t want to associate with Likud, he says….)To better understand the Israeli election, you can read this article from the Forward: https://forward.com/news/israel/431427/what-you-need-to-know-about-tuesdays-israeli-elections

To see how its all unfolding, you could read here: https://www.bbc.com/news/world-middle-east-49753221

For a sense of how many people feel about Bibi, you can see the photo at the top…

Election Day is a holiday in Israel. I guess this is theoretically true in the US — I know schools are closed, and many government offices — but I think most people go to work, and it feels like a pretty normal day. Not here. Even though everyone has the feeling that the election might just be another frustrating round of what happened in the spring, the mood yesterday was festive. I was hard put to think of a place to go that wouldn’t be mobbed. The Gan HaBotani (Botanic Garden) where I’ve been wanting to go, had a one day Playmobile interactive installation for kids, so that was out. Some museums were closed, and others only open partial hours. I decided to take the bus into the downtown area. Lord, it was wall-to-wall people! I managed to buy a new spatula, and to find the English language bookstore (I was looking for Alan Lew’s wonderful book for the High Holy Days, This is Real and You are completely Unprepared, for a book group I’m in, but they didn’t have it). Then I made the mistake of venturing into the shuk (market — the Mahaneh Yehudah, Jerusalem’s amazing covered marketplace. You couldn’t move for all the people. I had been hoping to buy some spices, but the idea of breasting the tide of bodies and trying to communicate over all the din in my pathetic Hebrew was simply too daunting. After that, the thought of seeing the little Dr. Ticho Museum I had intended to go to was driven form my head, so I came home. Never mind — I’ll go back to the hsul and the museum at a less busy day and time!

The shuk is always a very beautiful sight, even when crammed with people. There piles of scarlet dragon fruits, pomegranates, fresh figs, and big lumpy orange mangoes. There were displays of spice mixtures and dried fruits. There were whole fish, not long out of the Mediterranean or the Kineret (Sea of Galilee –actually a big lake), displayed elegantly on ice. There were arrangements of Middle Eastern sweets — baklava, maimuna, etc — and of Eastern European baked goods — rugelach, burekas, and so on. Here, fresh juices of all sorts pressed on the spot. There, a long line to get a pita with falafel and all the fixings. Also, kitchenwares, household staples, clothing, and so much more.

Since I didn’t take any pics , I’ll share a few from a previous trip! The shuk looks empty in these — picture every one of these shots crammed shoulder to shoulder with people. Also, it was March — the fruit at this time of year is much more abundant and amazing. I’ll take some more photos next time go! As for the election – -stay tuned, it will be awhile before we know if a government really forms and what it will look like.

Today (not as promised) instead of sharing the pictures of my tiyyul to the southern excavations, let me share with you the words of one of my Talmud teachers, Leah. We had just completed a very difficult sugiyah, and as I mentioned yesterday, had gone around Robin Hood’s barn and returned to where we started from (or whatever the equivalent circumnavigation is in Hebrew — the translation by computer is l’histoveyv ba’asam shel Robin Hud, but I suspect this is literal rather than idiomatic).

“We’ve just climbed a big mountain, and come back down again to the very same place we began,” she said. “And you might ask: Why? What’s your answer?” I said (being a little flip, and thinking of Sir Edmund Hillary), “Because it’s there.” Turns out that was the right answer — that is one of the four reasons she sees. She made a list for us. It’s a very rabbinic practice to give a list like this. In the Talmud, and in the baraitot (the many additional rabbinic sources that are not compiled in the Talmud, yet are often referred to there), and in the contemporary collection Pirkei Avot (Verses of the fathers), lists are common. The characteristics of one who is wise are: a, b, c, and d; what did R. Gehgesunt say about teaching: 1,2,3,4, and 5.

Here’s Leah’s list:

1. Because it’s there. These are opinions and discussions of the rabbis, here they are, we should study them. The mountain is in front of us, we climb it.
2. Because of everything I learn on the trip. I see so much, the view is very interesting, I’m learning things beyond the topic of the sugiya.
3. Because the exercise is good for me. Simply studying talmudic arguments is a healthy practice in and of itself — as climbing the mountain is good for my mental health and my cardiovascular system.
4. Because after I have climbed up and down again, the base of the mountain looks different to me. Even though I seem to be in the same place, my perspective has been changed by taking the journey.

And speaking of the view — I have put at the top and bottom pictures of the view out the third floor windows of Pardes. To get to see this view (not a very lovely one, although it’s pretty at night and at sunset), you must either climb six flights of stairs, or go up in a slightly untrustworthy elevator. And then at the end of the day, you come down again. If you go up the stairs, there are posters all the way up for events that Pardes has offered, and talking points about why Pardes is a great place to study. But in the end, it’s what I learn and experience at the top that makes the world look different when I come down at the end of my day.

It had to happen eventually. I’ve been here a little more than two weeks, managing everything more or less, walking to school even with a cold, improvising and bumbling along, feeling like an idiot, often being treated like an idiot (on the street and sometimes in class), socializing with lots of new people and sometimes feeling I was putting my foot in my mouth, and fulfilling my role as the baalat habayit (or if you prefer the Yiddish, balabuste) of my apartment by cleaning and shopping and preparing for Shabbat, not to mention the endless walking here and there (I haven’t been on a bus yet!)…Yesterday, I gave up. I took a real Shabbat — a Rest — by staying home.I attended a lovely Shabbat dinner Friday night, but on Saturday I did not even unlock my apartment door. I napped. I read a book in English. Eventually I studied a little Hebrew — just a little. I had long conversations via Skype with a friend and a relative. And today…today I woke up refreshed and ready to begin the whole process again.

So what have I been up to since I last wrote? Trying to understand the convoluted and compact text of the first sugiya (section) of the seventh perek (chapter) of Yoma — the book of Mishna and Gemara that deals with Yom HaKippurim, or Yom Kippur. According to the Society for the Interpretation of Talmud, “The sugya is the basic unit of organization in Talmudic literature, more so than the ‘page’ (Hebrew daf), which is merely an external trapping. Someone studying Talmud should be directed to understanding the material at the level of the sugya, with careful attention paid to its internal structure, its major sections, and the nature of its component parts, with the words of the earliest generations of sages(Tanna’im) considered in their own right, the words and reported actions of the later sages (Amora’im) too considered in their own right, and finally the words of the anonymous editorial voice of the Talmud considered as such.” Thus, I and my classmates in Leah’s class have been excavating this sugiya, a process which took us down several rabbit holes and around Robin Hood’s barn, after which we arrived right back where we started from (not in Philadelphia…)

In Rahel’s class we’ve also been digging into Mishna — the foundational texts collected and edited by R. Yehuda haNasi, upon which all of the rest of Talmud bases itself (at least in part). And in Nechama’s class we’ve been sifting through some of what Rabbanit Nechama refers to as the “Top Twenty Greatest Hits of the Talmud”, starting at the very beginning of everything with the famous section on “When do we say the nighttime Shema?”, through which we learned a lot about life after the destruction of the Temple, and a very startling section of Berakhot , 17 b, 19b-20a, in which the question of how to be compassionate to mourners leads oddly into a thicket of bad behavior by some rabbis who surely(according to the laws of Judaism) ought to have known better.

I take two Bible classes as well. In one we’ve been shoveling our way through the Book of Joshua — with most of the shoveling being done by the teacher in lecture form, even though he admitted to me that he personally hates sitting through lecture classes. (Me too!!) In the other, our archeological explorations of text have been conducted in Hebrew, as we have heard about and also discussed the Torah portion of the week in the very tongue it’s written in (more or less). Oh, and there’s an evening class called “Unpacking the Sages” – I cannot even tell you what we may uncover there, as the first class was spent on the teacher explaining to us, with good deal of obscure terminology and reference to many academic theories, why he does not believe in obscure terminology or academic theories…

Why am I using an archeological motif? Two reasons: one, I took a tiyyul with a guide and few classmates to the Southern Excavations — the area South of the Temple Mount (Har HaBayit, the Mountain of the House). I have loads of pics — that will be another posting I think. Two, I’ve been musing not only on the textual digging we’ve been doing at school ,but also the mind-body-soul digging that I seems to be inevitably engaging in during this whole strange process. Before I left Vermont, I had spent a good deal of my summer reflecting on and revisiting my past — not just my life with my husband, but also my life before I knew him, when I was growing up in Marlboro, attending Marlboro College, and just generally maturing as a human being. When I arrived here I set all that aside for a time; I was overwhelmed by the stimuli of my new life. Some time last week I found my past catching up with me again. Now, my task seems to be to reclaim myself — my past, my experiences, my existing body of knowledge — and integrate it into the life I am living now.

My day of rest was a key to this process. To simply be, to go on strike in a sense, to forget my struggles with Hebrew, my struggles with Mishna and Gemara, my struggles with daily existence in a foreign land — this allowed me to remember that I am not an idiot, I am not generally tactless, I am on the whole a reasonably intelligent and sensitive human being. My life now is not only what I see on the surface — it rests on the layers of my past, and the past of people before me, my family, my teachers, my friends. As much as the Talmud is about generations of Tannaim and Amoraim, so too is any life — mine, for instance — about the generations that came before me, and about my own previous life experiences.

Tomorrow, I’ll tell you a little about the real excavations — at the Southern Wall.

I’ve written a lot about what it’s like to be here in Jerusalem, but relatively little about what its like to be studying at Pardes. I’m afraid there won’t be any pictures with this post — sorry! I wish I could show you the wonderful faces of my fellow students, but it’s a bit soon our relationship for me to be asking them for photos (I think — they are mostly children of social media, and might feel differently). As far as our classrooms, they couldn’t be more stripped down and boring — there’s nothing to see. There is a bit of a view from the third floor rooms (there are also some rooms on the first floor, which have no view at all because the windows are covered). The breeze blows through those upper rooms, and in the evening the sky turns pink behind the buildings on the surrounding hills of Jerusalem. But we are l peering at our texts, or watching the teacher frantically scribbling in Hebrew and English on the white board — or looking into the faces of our peers as they share in the process of struggle and discovery.

Pardes tries to structure its classes to reflect a traditional yehiva, but with a bit more breathing room. Morning davenning (prayer) starts at 7:10, or 7:25 if there is no Torah reading. (I have yet to make it to morning davenning!) Morning classes start at 8:30 and go to 11:30. We spend part of that time in the classroom and part in the Beit Midrash, the study hall or “house of discussion”. Yes, it’s a three hour class. Then we go to our next class, which lasts from 11:45-1. In this season of Elul we return to the Beit Midrash to hear the shofar blown and to recite Psalm 27, and then we go to our respective minyanim for Mincha (afternoon) davenning, which lasts about 20-30 minutes. Then we get an hour or so for lunch. I only take an afternoon class Mondays and Wednesdays — on those days, I go back into class from 2:30 to 5. Again, we always spend part of that time in the Beit Midrash, discussing text with our chevruta (learning partner). Generally I come home after this, but on Tuesday I have a class from 5:15-7:15. One could (and many students do) spend the whole five days engaged in study from morning to night — and beyond if you stay for “night seder” which is an open study session in the Beit Midrash on Monday nights.

All this studying is very intense, and not the best thing for what Frederick Alexander called “The psychophysical being”. We sit a lot. Fortunately, we have to get up and move to go to the Beit Midrash, which sometimes means going upstairs or grabbing a cup of tea. And I also walk to and from school every day –sometimes twice. But I want to tell you about my studies. I worry that you will not understand. What am I studying? And why bother?

I spend -T-Th mornings discussing Mishna and Gemara, and M-W only Mishna. The teacher talks to us about some of the background, and then we go to the Beit Midrash in pairs and wrestle with the text. In the more beginning class it’s a short piece of text — a mishna — and then our teacher, Rahel, gives us some supporting texts to consider — verses from the Hebrew Bible, things Rashi or other commentators have said. We have to try to understand what the text is saying, and also why, and where it came from and where it is going. She typically gives it to us only in Hebrew/Aramaic. In the more advanced class, we study the mishna and the gemara that comes after it, also untranslated and without nekudot (“vowels”). We have Rashi’s commentary, but it is in what is called “Rashi script”, a special Hebrew font that doesn’t look like normal Hebrew at all for some of the letters — so, hard to read for some of us! The latter part of both classes is spent with the teacher unpacking the text for us, and helping us to understanding that is going on.

My later morning classes are both Bible classes. One is looking at the early books of the Prophets — the ones that aren’t really by prophets at all, but are history: Joshua, Samuel, Judges, and Kings. We are reading the text in Hebrew or English according to our skills — so far, I’ve found I can understand the Hebrew almost entirely without reference to a dictionary. In the other, we read the weekly portion in Hebrew — or some bit of it — and discuss it in Hebrew. Today the teacher brought a number of texts — from Rambam (Maimonades), Ramban (Nashmanides), and others — to unpack the meaning of one line of Torah. The line was the one about how you should shoo a mother bird off the nest before taking her eggs to eat, and not kill her and take the eggs. You wouldn’t believe what could be derived from that one line…

My one afternoon class is also about Mishna and Gemara — we’re looking at a selection of great sugiyot, or chapters. In this class, thank G-d, we are given the translation as well. And what is the purpose of all this, you might ask? Why sit in a room for hours, studying these ancient texts that are discussing minutiae of practice? Why do we care what Rabbi Yochanan ben Zakkai said about whether you can blow the shofar on Rosh HaShanah if it’s Shabbat? What’s it to us if the rabbis declared that it was okay to eat food less than the size of a large date with its pit still in, when you are fasting on Yom Kippur? And how did we fall down this rabbit hole where we were talking about preserving human dignity and suddenly we’re reading stories about dirty old rabbis who hung around the mikveh ogling the naked women and claiming “Oh, it’s ok, they’re just so many white geese to me.”!?

It happens that the woman who teaches my afternoon Talmud class, Nechama, is the one I find the most helpful. (BTW, all my Talmud teacher are women, and how cool is that?!) She really brings it all alive, and help you to see how these long ago discussions of seemingly small things can lead to real shifts in Jewish thought and practice which are still unfolding today. She also is of the firm belief that Orthodox Judaism has lost track of its right to innovate. The rabbis of the Talmud innovated like crazy. Today, for instance (before we fell down that rabbit hole into #MeToo with the rabbis), we were talking about how the Talmudic rabbis made a decision to totally change the laws, and did it pre-emptively with a bit of extremely fancy footwork based on one verse taken out of context from Torah. Or consider R. Yochanan, who decided that the first year after the Temple had fallen that they would blow the shofar in Yavneh (the town where the remaining learned Jews had holed up) on Shabbat Rosh HaShanah. When his rabbinic colleagues protested, “Wait, we should discuss this,” he said, “We’ll discuss it later,” and after they had blown the shofar he said, “Well, that was such a success, there’s nothing to discuss!”

Many of my classmates are Orthodox — generally Modern Orthodox — although many others are Conservative, and a few are Reform. To an Orthodox or even Conservative Jew, these questions are still of great relevance today. There’s a young man on one of my classes whose family (or possibly their rabbi) misinterpreted halakhah and did not take him to get a broken arm fixed until after Shabbat (the law is quite clear that to save a life — which include the remote possibility that the arm gets infected or doesn’t set right ,etc etc.– you can always break Shabbat.) He had lasting nerve damage in that hand. Today my chevruta, a young woman who has grown up in a modern Orthodox family in South Africa, was wrestling with the shock of knowing that the rabbis — the Sages, the great ones — also were ordinary, fallible men who in some cases behaved reprehensibly toward women. At the other end of the spectrum, as a liberal Jew I find myself fascinated by how much some of these Talmudic stories can sound like today’s news. A year or two ago, for instance, there was a rabbi who was found to have been secretly video-taping women when they went into the mikveh for conversion. (To be clear, you are totally naked in the mikveh, or ritual bath.) Yesterday I was reading a New Yorker article an Alan Dershowitz and Jeffrey Epstein, and today I’m reading about a Talmudic rabbi who grabbed the clothes off a non-Jewish woman in the marketplace because, he claimed, he thought she was Jewish and she was wearing a prohibited mixture of linen and wool. (He was fined four year’s salary — quite a fair judgement, I thought.)

All this study brings me close to my fellow students in a way I never would be in “regular school.” I remember this from Hebrew College as well. When I had a chevruta, I learned to appreciate how smart and intersting in that classmate was, whom I might have previously even actively disliked. Here, I am getting to know people from other parts of the world, and sharing stories and background in a non-competitive atmosphere. (This is different from a traditional yeshiva!!) But more, I feel close to my Jewishness. I may be out of my depth sometimes, baffled, struggling, but I also feel the power of learning about the laws and traditions and stories on which my Judaism stands. And every day, every hour, I learn more — more Hebrew, more rabbinic terminology, more nuanced readings of Torah, more stories, more laws, more reasons, more exceptions to laws, more sources, more roots. It’s hard, this kind of study, and tiring, and yet deeply satisfying. I hope to keep sharing more, as I learn more.

By the way, I won’t give the whole lesson about that line about the bird and her next, but in later life the Rambam wrote that the lesson is that G-d was compassionate to animals, and Ramban said that the lesson is that every mitzvah is designed to teach us to be more compassionate, period. As we reflect on our mistakes during this season of Elul, I hope that we can be compassionate with ourselves and with each other.

I’ve been thinking of a lot of things about which I would like to write. As I walk to and from school (approximately 20-25 minutes each way, depending on how long I have to wait at the crosswalks), I often have lots of ideas. For instance, did you know that they ticket jaywalkers here? A friend of mine was ticketed 150. shekels (currently about 142. bucks) for crossing a street when there were no cars in sight. People from other big cities are driven crazy by this, but frankly, drivers here are fairly aggressive, and so I wait politely at the light as instructed.

Another day I will talk a bit more about how things that initially seem odd to a foreigner can often be parsed and made sense of if you only try. Since I am spending my days unpacking Talmud, this “And why is this?” kind of thinking is coming very naturally to me in all contexts now. Some time soon I’ll also share (for the benefit of those who have never considered Mishna and Gemara in any language) the kind of thing I am learning. You either love it — or you don’t!

This week I learned many new words (although not of all them will stick). Today I took a class on the weekly parsha — the Torah portion — in Hebrew! Boy was I proud of myself. Granted, Meir translates any word that people don’t know, and he speaks slowly and clearly. But still, I was pleasant surprised to see how much I understood, to learn many new words, and to learn something new about the portion.This past weekend I also taught myself how to describe my current condition: Ani hitkararti, ani hitztananti. Yesh li nazelet. I have caught a cold (two different ways of saying this). I have a runny nose. (Related: I wash my dishes with nozal l’nikui kelim, liquid for cleaning dishes). Every Hebrew word starts with a three or four letter root (four if it’s from some other language, like English or Aramaic.) It’s an incredibly logical language in many ways. If only the natives wouldn’t speak so fast — ;-)!

Anyway, since I am still getting over my cold, and I had a really long day at school (a good one!), I’m not going to write a lot more, but since some have asked for photos, I’ll share a few of plants I see on my walk to school.

A visitor to Israel from another country is likely to be astounded at the number of cats he or she will encounter in the course of a day, or even an hour. A recent sub-headline in Arutz Sheva reads “With city’s stray cat population hitting 240,000, Jerusalem officials mull solutions to burgeoning problem.” The article continues, “With nearly 2,000 cats per square kilometer (mile), [the Holy City] has a total of some 240,000, in a city of more than 900,000 residents, the Israeli official in charge of its veterinarian services, Asaf Bril, said.” Vets are currently managing to spay or neuter 15 cats per day here in Jerusalem. However, “Only a large-scale, rapid program to sterilize some 80 percent of the cats within a six-month period would be capable of bringing the population under control,” according to Bril. ” To achieve that result, 25 clinics like mine would be needed to sterilize 500 cats per day,” he said.

I have long been aware of Israel’s cat problem. As most of you know, I like cats. Indeed, I have some lovely photos of cat encounters from my last trip here, in November 2018.

Some cats one encounters are quite friendly. It can difficult to distinguish between what we Americans would call “pets” and “strays” or “feral cats”. This is because, as the article notes (and as my landlady recently bemoaned to me ), on every street there are always some people who put out food for the cats. Also, Israelis do have pet cats sometimes — although another source notes that only ten percent of Israeli’s actually keep cats as pets. Israel has a total population of 8.5 million people — and an estimated 2 million cats. Clearly, most of the cats running around — like the one currently meowing outside my window — are not pets in the formal sense.

The Israeli sensibility on their cat-astrophe is extremely startling to a foreigner. (I guess, to be fair, they have a lot of other things to worry about! When you don’t know if your country will survive, if peace in your own land seems eternally elusive, if you are wondering how to feed and house and employ the continuous stream of Jewish folks coming to your shores, if you are concerned that the country is the size of New Jersey with a population of 8.5 million — so nu, what’s a few cats?)

In the US, at least where I live, the understanding nowadays is that cats should be kept indoors. This both for their own protection (so that they don’t catch diseases, and are not eaten by fishers or owls), and also to protect the wildlife. I once read in an Audubon Society magazine that the average cat kills 50 birds a year. Here, when one brings up the cat issue, the response is usually some form of a verbal shrug. It may be shrug of “Who cares?” or it may be shrug of “What can one do?”, but either way, there is little sense of urgency about reducing the cat population. It is little wonder that I see few birds here except for the feral parakeets — who are large and aggressive enough to fend off a cat, I imagine. I fear for the lives of the pair of Syrian Woodpeckers who frequent the nearby telephone pole.

And if one is not met with a shrug, then it is with something worse. I read, “In 2015, Agriculture Minister Uri Ariel refused to use $4.5 million (four million euros) in government funding made available for the sterilization of stray cats… As an Orthodox Jew, the minister had said that castrating cats was contrary to Jewish religious law and had proposed sending stray cats and dogs to other countries instead.” Yup, this was serious, and it’s still mooted in some quarters. Let’s see, we’ll catch every cat, identify its gender, and ship the females to one country and the males to another….Anybody want a million cats?

Not too surprisingly, the notion of shipping the cats off to some other land was not met with enthusiasm by the larger Israeli population. Perhaps they feel some identification with the cats — after all, it isn’t so long ago that someone had a plan to ship all the Jews off to anywhere that would have them… My impression, on the whole, is that Israelis view the cats with affection, tolerance, and sometimes pity. They don’t seem to see what seems so obvious to me as an American, that letting masses of feral cats roam free is not a kindness to the cats or the environment. (Actually, any idea of “environment” is a recent comer to Israeli discussions. But look, there are plenty of places in the States where it’s not a topic of discussion either…)

Here in my apartment, the cat problem is very plain to experience. When I close up my windows to go out for the day (since it is on the ground floor, it is not advisable to leave them open, even with the bars), I come back to a stench of tom cat urine throughout the rooms. The earth along the side of the building, which was recently dug up to put in some new pipes, also makes a lovely litter box. At night, what is known, for obvious reasons, as caterwauling, frequently keeps me awake. Some nights little faces appear outside the french doors. My landlady advises that the previous tenant fed the cats. She suggests throwing water on them. I haven’t been able to bring myself to do this, but I am not feeding them. It doesn’t matter, though, because someone down the street certainly is….

By the way, the story — apocryphal or not — is that the cats were brought in back in the 1930’s by the Brits to keep the rat problem under control. So you can blame it on the British, like so many things in this mixed up world!

It’s really nice to be living in Jewish time. Today there was no school at Pardes, as everyone is getting ready for Shabbat. Like all my neighbors I went to the market (as you see, I bought a lot of fruit!).

The streets were full of people like me toting grocery baskets on wheels, women with double strollers (a common sight here) in which groceries can be tucked around the children, Phillipino aides holding grocery bags on one arm and the arm of an elder on the other. The folks seeking handouts were gathered around the grocery store entrance and all along the street, raising money for starving children or new schools. People were buying chocolates, pastries, flowers, wine. I bought some chocolate halvah, and some pastries to take to the mid-day meal at my granddaughter’s tomorrow, and some after-dinner wine to take to the tisch after Shabbat dinner at Pardes tonight. (A tisch — Yiddish for table — involves stories, mini-sermons, songs, drinking, and snacks. I expect to get home late tonight!)

Then I came home and did my first cleaning. I know my neighbors were cleaning too, because just like last week, water came raining down onto my patio furniture from the mirpeset (balcony) above me. I investigated the cleaning products and tools I have at my disposal. No mop — but a long handled squeegee that is clearly intended to be used on the tile floors. Lots of spray bottles with labels in Hebrew (and sometimes a little English) to be deciphered. (Thank G-d for labels with pictures!) A broom, and a Spanish vacuum cleaner which more or less does the job. I did my best, including washing my own patio to get rid of the dirty water from above! When you wash the floors and squeegee them down, then mop up the last of the water with a rag, they dry with amazing rapidity.

Soon I will put on my Shabbat clothes and walk to the Nava Tehila Kabbalat Shabbat services. What a treat — I can go to a different shul every Friday night, and if I get up in time, every Saturday morning as well! Nava Tehila only meets once a month for Kab. Shab., and it’s tonight, so I am lucky! It’s just around the corner from Pardes, where Shabbat dinner will begin right after services, at 8:15 pm. There will be a lot of singing at both events. I started the day feeling a bit sluggish and out of sorts, but now, even though I am quite short of sleep, I am so happy.

Shabbat Shalom from Jerusalem, everyone!

I had promised that I would tell you the story of my neighborhood, Katamon (officially called Gonen –but no one uses that name). However, as I read over the Wikipedia entry, I decided I would let you refer to that yourselves, if you are so inclined. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/

Suffice it say that like much of this beautiful, contested country, my neighborhood has had a complex and sometimes violent history. As I sit here on my patio watching the half moon set and the night time clouds gather overhead, it’s hard to imagine that this peaceful place was so recently the site of conflict. It’s a very gentrified neighborhood now, full of French and Americans (I can hear both languages, as well as Hebrew, drifting down from the upstairs balconies of this six or seven floor apartment building.) New apartment blocks are going up everywhere. There are plenty of little shops, offices of doctors and acupuncturists and yoga practitioners and lawyers, batei kafe (cafes), a hospital, small supermarkets, and more, within easy walking distance.

It’s also a religious neighborhood — Modern Orthodox and also Haredi (“Ultra-Orthodox”). Up the hill a little is an area known as “the minyan factory”, where at any time of the day you can easily find ten guys if you need to say kaddish. There are several nearby synagogues, including the large new Sephardi synagogue next door. Early in the morning I hear the sound of men’s voices raised in slichot (penitential pre-Rosh HaShanah song), followed by the merry sound of children’s voices. (Mostly merry – -there is one child who clearly is not adapting to his new school!) When I leave for school at eight in the morning, I meet parents in cars, on bikes, on foot, on scooters, bringing their small children to the gan (kindergarten).

But I see plenty of secular folk as well. Almost exclusively white. No Ethiopian Jews to speak of, and no Arabs except working construction or in the shops. Middle class looking people, walking dogs, wheeling children in strollers, hurrying off to classes or to work, sitting in the cafe run by Chabad (the Orthodox Jewish outreach group known for its “mitzvah mobiles”).

Every place has history, of course. When I am at home in Brattleboro, I don’t think much about how I am living in a place where my ancestors displaced the Abenaki Indians (I am being a bit euphemistic with the word “displaced”). And here, it is difficult to say to whom any area or piece of land belongs. It’s possible to say, “The Jew were here first” — possible, and not wrong. And yet, if the Abenakis were to suddenly multiply and reclaim Brattleboro, imagine the violence and the anguish…