Or should I say, “Vive La Jerusalem!”? As it turns out, although I am studying tons of Hebrew, the survival language I am being forced to use is French. It seems that in someone’s infinite wisdom, I have been placed in a dorm of 100% native French speakers, (er, um, with an average age of 19—use your imagination regarding chaos levels) and when I say that my spoken French is better than their spoken English, that is not actually saying anything good about my French. Let’s just say that if I was an RA responsible for this floor, I would have probably already quit. But enough of that—who really needs to study or sleep? Lots of Miscellaneous Thoughts . . . So we have a fragile cease fire, and for this I and many others are saying “Baruch HaShem.” The general feeling here seems to be one of collective “we’ll see,” and the Israeli saying of “Better a critical editorial than a praiseworthy obituary” contains much truth and perspective. How does anyone weigh defense...
In the course of my rabbinical studies I have already been gifted with amazing opportunities and experiences. This summer as I study in Jerusalem at the Steinsaltz Yeshiva , however, one of the most intense of these experiences has arisen -- I was invited to sing with the choir at the Great Synagogue of Jerusalem for Selichot and the High Holy Days. Well, streaming vids are worth several terabytes worth of words, so I am posting a link to a video here -- sorry, I cannot imbed it and the site is all Hebrew -- that might help shed a little light on the nature of the experience. Several groups filmed Selichot this year at the Great Synagogue -- the sound is not great but certainly gives a little idea as to the nature of the music. For those of you that are not Jewish, and maybe even for some that are, this might be a bit of an alien experience. This video is 25 edited minutes from a 3 hour service that lasted until 1 in the morning (and unfortunately does not contain the early part...
Some people call them happy accidents. I like to say that the dice are rolling. Let me first say that I am in RA purgatory. For my international readers, in college I was employed in the dormitories as a “Resident Assistant,” which at my University meant that my cohorts and I were expected to be Counselor, Police Officer, Father Confessor, Parent, Court Jester, and Ah—yes—babysitter. So I must have been a rotten RA, or at least built some really nasty Karma, as the dorm experience here has gone from bad to intolerable, and I apparently don’t have a whole lot of choices in the matter. Well, last night I had my “encounter” with the, uh, gentlemen and their lady friends from my dorm: the first at midnight when a group of them decided to bring a hookah out into the common area and fill my room up with clouds of reek, the second at 4:14 am when they returned from wherever to continue the fun, including opening up all their doors and blasting their music at 5 pm levels. ...
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