Catching up!

Despite indications to the contrary, I survived the war. (Whew!)

The real reason for my bloggy silence is that I have had nothing sufficiently important to procrastinate about. Semester-א ended on February 6th, and Semester-ב only starts tomorrow. I've been on vacation!

Now, just to be clear: there are no real breaks between semesters in Israel. Instead of having reading week, finals week, and then vacation, the exams are spread across a whole month, right up until the day before classes resume. In fact, it's even worse than that. All of this is just "Mo'ed Alef" (the first round of exams). If you want to improve your score, you're guaranteed an opportunity to retake the exams: "Mo'ed Bet". And if you're not sure you're ready for the exam when the exam date arrives, you can take it on the retake date, and you're guaranteed another retake date even later on. That's right, "Mo'ed Gimel." I think there's even a "Mo'ed Daled," for students who get called away to reserves service during the earlier rounds of exams.

Consequently, pathological procrastinators wind up smearing one semester's exam period into the following semester. The guy I dated over the summer couldn't go home for Rosh Hashana because he was still studying for last year's semester-ב exams.

So during the break all the Serious Hebrew U Students were busy with a never-ending stream of exams. Meanwhile, I took the opportunity to travel and have adventures around Israel! The Center for the Study of Rationality took all of us on a retreat to the Galillee and the Golan Heights, where we investigated rationality, hiked, and thorougly celebrated Tu B'Shvat with wild hotel-room parties. Just after I got back, I took off again and drove half the length of the country on an off-roading jeep trip with my uncle. I crashed with Jessa and her cousin Suzie for a few days at the University of Haifa, hung out in Tel Aviv and Rehovot with Garth, had a cookout with Katey & Dan on the roof of a dorm at Weitzman and spent a few days chilling with Rotem's family in Nes Tziona.

After that, I was supposed to go on a ʇɥbıɹq1nɟ-sponsored trip to the north of Israel, but my body decided it was time to catch a respiratory virus and a digestive bug, and have a total blue-screen system meltdown. I took my packed bags — actually, Rotem took them for me — and crash-landed at my grandmother's house, that well-known middle-east TLC hotspot. A week and a half and a million cups of tea later, I'm coughing but otherwise fully recovered. בשעה טובה!

take every word you have given me back to the dictionaries

If you had contemplated the victim’s face
And thought it through, you would have remembered your mother in the
Gas chamber, you would have been freed from the reason for the rifle
And you would have changed your mind: this is not the way
to find one’s identity again.

(From Under Siege, by Mahmoud Darwish, translated by Marjolijn De Jager)

Last night, I said goodbye to my high school friends Tim and Loranne over Taybehs at Uganda. Tim has been studying Hebrew at Beit Ha'am this summer (back again after studying Arabic at Birzeit last summer); Loranne arrived just this week to visit her uncle in Beit Hanina and to hang out with Tim here in Jerusalem. Tomorrow morning they'll both be heading back to the US. (إن شاء الله / בעזרת השם — Loranne has a foreign passport and a Palestinian last name, which puts her squarely in a new-ish category of suspicious travellers, by Israel's lights. Things would be worse for her if she were a British-passport-holder travelling alone, but we should still cross our fingers for her after the trouble she had getting in.)

Last week, Tim and Loranne and I rented a car and hopped down to the Dead Sea together. Then, over the weekend, I visited [Fellow-Fellowshipper] Cheryl in Tel Aviv, [college friend] Shadi in Haifa and [cousin] Arik back in TA. (I'm all over the place! When do I find time to do Ulpan homework? —— If you answered "on the commute to Ulpan," you are correct!)

Political Adventuring

photo from Activestills

A couple of days ago, I tagged along to a rally-against-racism with my dad's leftist younger brother. The two of us joined up with a group of Jews and Palestinians gathered outside of one of the Hebrew University dorms in Kiryat Yovel, where an Arab HUJI student had been beaten up by some racist Jewish teenagers on July 16th. There was a little bit of speech-making and a little bit of shouting slogans in Hebrew and Arabic, some of which even rhymed. (Israelis are all about the rhyming slogans.) Incredibly, a couple of people showed up to oppose the rally, yelling about how Jerusalem belongs only to the Jews, and so on. And the cops were there, taking pictures of everyone who came. But as protests go, it was a very safe one — well within the green line and addressing what should have been a completely uncontroversial issue. (As opposed to the evacuation of the settlements, which... well, that should also be completely uncontroversial. But racist violence against students is really in a league of its own.)


Today, my uncle took me to visit Beit Said, the house in Jerusalem that was once owned by Edward Said's aunt, in which the famous postcolonial theorist spent a few of his early years, and which the Saids also rented out to Martin Buber! Beit Said is just an apartment today (10 Brenner Street), whose current tenants have purportedly heard of Said but don't really know anything about him. There's no plaque or anything. Anyway, Brenner street is just a short walk from my uncle's house, which is right around the corner from my grandmother's. We brought my baby cousin, who devoted some thought to the role of orientalism in the Israeli public consciousness before toddling around the playground across the street.

Who's lived here? Martin BUber, remember?
Oooo-da!

Today, we climbed Masada went down to the Dead Sea by way of Jericho. (Pictures soon, really!)

We only heard about today's terrorist attack when we got back. More talk of punishing the family on the news.

I have to run, but there's much more to tell. I'll update as soon as I can....

ARRIVED SAFELY!

Here I am! (can you see the jetlag in my eyes?)

The flight was sleepless, but my neighbor was a nice Israeli man who said that my Hebrew is fantastic (but that I should say anatzel et hahisdamnut — "take advantage of this opportunity" — instead of ecach et hahisdamnut — "take this opportunity," as in English.)

Anyway — we just had dinner at my grandmother's house, with almost everyone. Kisses, rejoicing, hora NTBG-im,* hora jetlagim, etc.

(lyrics, translated)

*see WWZ's explanation & commentary on "NTBG" as an abbreviation for Ben Gurion Airport, here.

Tomorrow:
The Israel Museum
The Kotel
The Old City
Mt. Scopus
Talpiot
Armon haNatziv in Ramat Rachel
Jerusalem downtown
for dinner, Steikiat Chatzot (Midnight Steakhouse?) for me'orav (cat meat??)

MUCH MORE SOON!