A Labyrinth

I moved into Ulpan two and a half weeks ago. I have had a week and a half of instruction. At first it was very hard to concentrate. I have not been in a classroom in a year and I have not learned Hebrew in a classroom in 5 years. Despite my ability to communicate and understand on the street my written Hebrew skills and my grammar are pretty bad. So I am in level 5 of 7 levels at the Ulpan. It is a hard class but I think I am in the correct level.

The social atmosphere at the Ulpan is really nice. People are fun and friendly. I have already made some musical friends who want to put together a set list to perform on Ben Yehuda street in downtown Jerusalem. I am very excited to take back that part of myself. I really need to relearn how to sing. I used to have a much wider range.

I am starting to get stressed about money and I want to get a job. I have been too generous with myself and others.

I went on a bad date where my date asked me what my budget was before we went out to dinner. That is correct friends, after spending lots of money on clothing and makeup to look beautiful to get a date in the first place I had to pay my for my own dinner. (His eating habits were nothing to brag about either.) Needless to say, there was no second date.

**Note to the males in the crowd: It is okay to go Dutch, but not on a first date. A first date is when you have to impress a girl. Asking her what her budget is will automatically get you booted off the list.**

The Ulpan likes to encourage participants to offer classes in what they are good at, so today I gave a shiur on the Parsha. It went very well, I had 11 people join in on it and everyone seemed to really enjoy the talk. One of the girls who came wants to have a chavruta with me and another asked to join so I may have a little chaburah. (Any suggestions on what we should learn?)

This week’s Parsha is crazy dense. Redemption of firstborn, teffilin, tell your children about leaving egypt, parting of the sea, Az Yashir, bitter water, ma’ana, no water and striking the rock and Amalek. I decided to go at it from a psychological perspective. It can be very easy to look at the Jewish people and see all their faults and complaints and wonder how this could be the holy people. One of the most beautiful things about the Jewish holy text is that all the characters have faults, sometimes they make really big mistakes, but they are still holy. It is encouraging to know that you do not have to be perfect in order to be a holy person. The Jewish people at this point in the Torah had been slaves all their lives and they did not know how to serve anyone but a slave master. They were not their own people, they were used to being told what to do and they had no free will. So when things went wrong they turned to Moshe and Moshe tried to teach them that God would be the one saving them. God gave them experiences to teach them that he is the one in control. Each experience they had they needed in order to become a strong minded people who had the psychological capability to serve God.

And that is how I try to view my own life. Every experience I have is given to me because I need it. It is up to me to be conscious and learn from those experiences but hopefully I will be able to understand the lessons God is teaching me and better myself.

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To say I had an interesting weekend would be a gross understatement.

On Friday morning I got ready for my day and packed for Shabbat. I decided that although I had already prayed that morning in my room, I needed to get out of the house and spend time at the Kotel to ask Hashem for some guidance. I got off the number eight bus by the Inbal hotel and walked to the Jaffa gate. There are two ways to get to the Kotel from the Jaffa gate. The Armenian quarter which leads to the Jewish quarter and the Arab shuk which leads directly to the wall. For many reasons I chose the Arab shuk which I have only gone through four times in my life. I got a little lost but shopkeepers trying to sell me their wears steered me back on track. The guard at the wall asked me if I had eaten that morning. I said yes and he said it didn’t look like I had (can they tell I don’t eat when I am stressed? I mean I am far from the only skinny girl in Jerusalem). That’s Israel for you. When I got to the the wall for some reason I did not want to get close. I sat as far as I could, at the bottom of the stairs.

After twenty minutes of taking in the morning, a man who looked to be in his late thirties, wearing a long black coat and carrying a cane came over and sat next to me. He said his name was Ami-Or (my nation is light/light of my nation). As a woman I am extremely cautious of male strangers (experience has taught me I must be). As a friendly, open person I am very curious to hear all people’s stories (experience has taught me I will understand the world and God better this way). Since it was about eleven in the morning in a public place I let him talk to me. For me, he was a mixture of a prophet and an incredibly creepy person.

He was not an Anglo but I don’t think he was born Israeli either. He had a long dark beard and light eyes. He told me that the beads he was wearing absorb people’s bad energy and then he washes it off. The western cynic in me asked him if he thought that maybe this was too close to Avodah Zarah (idol worship). He explained that he believes that this is just a way for him to access the energy of God. He asked me how I can be friends with people who are not Jewish. I told him about KT and how she taught me better midot (values) and how to be a better person and that Hashem decided that there should be gentiles in the world for a reason. He asked me if she would ever want to convert. I said no, that she was only curious and trying to be close to me and understand me. My religion is so inextricably intertwined with who I am that she could not be close to me without understanding my Judaism. Ami-Or started to look at my hands, he said he saw Magen Davids in the lines of my skin. I told him everyone has lines and you can see what you want to see but he would not listen to my reason. He asked me what I came to pray for. I wouldn’t explain my situation but he asked for my full name, and prayed that I would find a beautiful husband. He said that I would marry Peretz, that I was destined to be with someone who was a descendant of King David. He told me the man would have blond hair and blue eyes. I liked the first part. As a little girl I believed I was destined to be a Queen (ok, I still do) and as a Jewish girl I knew the only way I would ever be a queen would be to marry the Mashiach. Every boy I ever liked had at least one characteristic of David; curly hair, poetry, a Yisroel (not from the priesthood, because David was from the tribe of Judah) and music. Not such a fan of the blond hair and blue eyes, but that is less important. I explained that I have a bad habit of falling for men that are not available to me, and he tried to comfort me. At this point he was getting very close to me and I do not touch any men, let alone strangers, so I tried to get back to reading Perkei Avot (where better to seek guidance?). Ami-Or continued to sit with me. So I shared with him my favorite passage. The Third chapter, ninth passage says “Rabbi Yaakov said: He who is walking in a field and studies and breaks off his study and exclaims: ‘How beautiful is this tree!’ ‘How fine is this field!’ is regarded as if he has sinned against his soul.” This passage does not mean you should ignore the world for Torah. Quite the opposite. It means that if noticing a tree or field is a break from your learning and not a continuation of it, then you have sinned against yourself. Seeing God in the world should be fluid and if you do not feel this way you are not a whole person. As I became absorbed in the Chapters of my Fathers, Ami-Or blessed me and left.

About half an hour later a young man on his phone ran beside me and yelled frantically in Hebrew into the phone. I got nervous that something terrible was about to happen until I saw a huge sign with pink and white balloons attached. I got up with my camera just in time to document my witness of an engagement. I would never have gotten to see the beautiful moment if I had not gone through the Arab shuk and sat far away from the wall. For that moment my heart was lifted.

Sitting next to me were two tourists speaking to each other in English. It was obvious to me that English was not the first language of either of them but their only shared one. They tried to take a picture of themselves and I offered to take it for them. We got to talking about the engagement that just happened. It turned out the the young man was Korean and the young woman was Dutch. Niether of them are Jewish and both were working on a kibbutz in the north. The man was happy to be returning to Korea after his five month stay but the woman who was not leaving yet, said that after her extensive travels the only place she would live other than Amsterdam was Israel. It made me warm to hear someone who was not Jewish could feel the spirituality and beauty of this land. She will be a great ambassador for Israel. We talked for fifteen minutes and then it was time for me to leave. I walked back through the Arab shuk. I was swept in a tide of Muslim men returning from prayer. They seemed to be all levels of religious and despite our differences and the hatred that seems to never be far from our skin I was proud of my cousins for praying to God.

I spent Shabbat on Moshav Mevoh Modaim with two good friends. This Moshav is known as the Carlebach Moshav. It was the place of the Rav Shlomo Carlebach who is famous for his open mindedness, kindness and music. On my way to my hosts I passed the shul on the Moshav which is painted beautifully and I now have a huge desire to paint a shul. I slept at the Sanz family. The Sanz family have a tradition to go around the table at Friday night dinner and say one thing that they are thankful for this week and give a Bracha to the table. I received Bracha’s of peace, of God, of forgiveness and more. I said I was thankful for my friends and blessed the table to have great friends and to able to recognize their friends as teachers and learn from them. Of course, KT came up again. You are never far from my heart or my lips, Kathryn Marie.

The rest of Shabbat was full of organic food, Torah, singing, story telling and prayer. It was my best Shabbat so far in Israel but hopefully that is only because I am continually going up in holiness. I met many interesting people and was invited back for Pesach and a wedding. I hope to make it to both.

On the way home, my friend Sammy was joking around about being perfect and I said I would not want to be completely perfect. He said “you don’t think you’re perfect already?” I said “I think I am just a little short of perfect and I always want to be, so I have something to strive for, so I can push myself to be better.”

I know that God does not give you challenges that you cannot face. My issues remain unresolved and patience is not my strong suit. I will continue to pray and to seek guidance in the trees, in fields, in people, in my friends, in books and Torah, in every manifestation of God. What else is there to do?

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