 |
| Eilat, November 2014 |
It was an enormous decision back in
2012 to sell most of my earthly belongings to strangers on Craigslist, rent out
my beautiful house where I had planted a huge garden of kale and other super
foods, quit my 2 jobs one of which was offering me a raise in the year to come,
and enter a Masters degree program in Teaching English to Speakers of Other
Languages [TESOL] at Tel Aviv University in Israel. My daughter also uprooted
herself, quit an excellent job she had worked for several years at the local
community college, and journeyed with me to study physics in the Hebrew
language [instead of her mother tongue English]. Both of us had no idea if we
would last here more than a year. We came on student visas and had no way of knowing
what the future held. Of course we hoped for the best, but trying to maintain a
realistic outlook we were always expecting the worst, primarily because many of
our friends didn't think we'd make it more than a year.
I decided since I was here in
Israel, I would make the most of every opportunity. Since I didn't know if or
when I was going to have to return, I made sure that I took in as many
experiences as possible, traveled to as many different locations around Israel
as was feasibly achievable without owning a vehicle, and met as many different
people as I could. The most time I had
ever spent in a foreign country previously was a month in the UK, and even
though it had been an opportunity to take in a new land and culture, England
wasn't SPECIAL to me like Israel. England played the role of the setting of many
books and historical events but was not a place that resonated in my heart and
soul. Israel, however, is the seat of my spiritual life and center of my
understanding of the universe. There was no way I was going to let this time
spent in Israel go to waste.
When I arrived here in Israel, I
was immediately busy with my Masters studies, attending classes on language research
plus a required Hebrew ulpan class,
and adjusting to living in a dormitory with women from all over the world. I
came in the month of July so the heat of the summer was quite overwhelming. Having
lived in a cloudy, moderate climate most of my life I was used to summers being
spiked with plenty of rain, clouds, and only occasional heat in the 80's or
90's F for short periods of time. But Israel in the summer is a ruthless heat
that does not yield for months with absolutely no rain. Combined with the
humidity of the Mediterranean coast, one can sit outside at midnight in a tank
top and be dripping relentless sweat.
Those first few weeks in Israel
were all about dealing with the choking heat, strange smells, cockroaches on
the streets and ants in the kitchen, new procedures for doing simple things
like mailing a letter or buying food, and the constant attempts of Hebrew and
Arabic speakers trying to practice their English with me. It felt like everything
I set out to do had to be relearned. The money is shekels rather than dollars
so you have to learn what the coins and bills are worth and what things
normally cost. Most bus drivers don't know English so you better know the name
of your destination in Hebrew if you are going somewhere you have never been
before. When I went to open a bank account at Leumi Bank it took two whole hours
and I felt as though the people who worked at the bank had never opened a new
account for anyone before. It mystified me how complicated they made it seem. I
was beginning to realize that this culture seems to make everything more
complicated than necessary, but I will save that rant for another time. While
all of the things listed above might sound negative, the entire time I was
adjusting I was so enchanted by the fact that I was in Israel that nothing
really bothered me that much. Knowing I was in Israel was the most thrilling
feeling I had ever experienced.
One thing I started doing early on
was go to rikudei am sessions. These
are traditional Israeli dance sessions in which the dances are mostly done in
circles and sometimes in lines to both old and contemporary Israeli music. The
dance and music styles vary widely from slow to jazzy to rap and rock
everything in between, including the occasional use of songs from other
countries. The sessions last for hours, starting with simple dances and warming
up to more complicated ones as the night progresses, usually from 8:00 PM until
1:00 in the morning. People gather for these dance sessions in gymnasiums all
over Israel every night of the week. I started attending because my daughter
loves to dance and I saw this as an opportunity for us to get to know this
aspect of Israeli culture. When my daughter ended up moving to a different city
after a few months, I continued attending and made many new Israeli friends
from those dance circles. I truly wonder what it would have been like if I had
not attended rikudei am when I first
came to Israel. It gave me such an interesting and authentic window into the
culture here.
Not long after I started attending
these dance sessions known as harkadot,
one of the dance leaders, Gadi Bitton, hosted his annual Camp Bitnua in Eilat
which consists of several days of nonstop Israeli dancing catering to every
skill level and age group along with unending entertainment such as concerts,
comedy, and contests, while attendees are accommodated in luxurious hotels serving
incredibly delicious food. My daughter and I attended Camp Bitnua in the fall
of 2012 and that ended up being the first of about ten Israeli dance trips for
me. Quite a few of the harkadot
leaders host annual weekend trips to popular places around Israel such as
Eilat, Masada, or locations up north, and when this happens hundreds of attendees
basically enjoy nonstop dancing and schmoozing for the entire weekend. Hired
buses would pick us up in major cities usually on a Thursday morning and bring
us back after the end of Shabbat. The bus would stop at designated locations
along the way so we could take in some beauty and dance, and then we would arrive
at our hotel in the afternoon and dance and be entertained for the duration of
the weekend.
In addition to attending harkadot about 2-3 times per week mainly
in Tel Aviv, I attended weekend dance trips every couple of months throughout
Israel. In 2013 I even attended a week-long summer course designed for dance
instructors who conduct harkadot in other
countries. No one seemed to mind the fact that I myself am NOT a dance
instructor in the least. About 25 dance leaders flew in from all over the world
and we learned new dances every day from a wide variety of Israeli dance
instructors around the country. At the end of the course we attended the
Karmiel Dance Festival for an additional three days of nonstop dancing and
observing others dance. The Karmiel Dance Festival hosts dancers from all over
the world who perform in several locations throughout the festival, along with
hosting harkadot and other styles of
dance sessions. At any given time during
the festival there might be 4 different performances going on, 2 harkadot, and a concert for young
people. It is impossible to see it all,
but what I did get to experience was amazing. I posted a video on YouTube of
that summer course and festival.
Towards the beginning of my first
year in Israel I was invited to a Shabbat dinner at a Chabad rabbi's house who hosts
Shabbat dinners every other week for students at the university. My daughter
and I started attending Rav Shay's dinners and going to his shul on Shabbat and
soon found ourselves within a group of friends who also did likewise. I had my friends from the university that I
studied with, my friends from the harkadot
that I danced with, and my friends from the Beit Knesset and Rav Shay's house
that I did Shabbat with.
When we first arrived in Israel we
had thought that my daughter would have to do a year of Hebrew language
preparation before she could begin her studies on her Bachelor of Science in
physics. Israel has what are called mechina
programs that instruct new immigrants in the Hebrew language for a year so that
they are able to begin their degree programs in Hebrew for real the next year. But
after studying in the mechina for
only two months, my daughter was able to skip the rest of the preparatory
studies and begin attending Technion University in the fall of 2012. While she
was still in the mechina, we were
about a 10 minute walk from each other in Tel Aviv. But when she moved to Haifa
she was a total of 1.5 hours of travel time away. It was a big adjustment for
me to no longer live near my daughter as well as a huge adjustment for her to
be taking a full load of physics classes in the Hebrew language. What an
adventure we were both having!
The adventure never stopped. I
learned to manage the Tel Aviv bus system but I finally acquired a bicycle
because bus schedules are too constricting for me. I found it a delight to explore Tel Aviv on my
bicycle, always encountering new places, animals, beaches, shops, restaurants,
etc. Everywhere I go I love meeting people and learning something totally new
that had never entered my mind before. A great pleasure that I discovered is
the Yarkon Park in Tel Aviv. The giant park sits astride the Yarkon River and
has bicycle and walking paths on either side of it for kilometers and
kilometers until the river reaches the sea. There are also tennis and
basketball courts, climbing walls, baseball fields, toning centers, and other
recreational facilities throughout the park, but the part I love the most is
the bicycle paths that run along either side of the river and adjoin with the
promenade that goes from the northernmost beach in Tel Aviv just south of Herzliya
to its southernmost beach just north of Bat Yam. One could literally spend a
day riding a bike along the Yarkon River and the Tel Aviv promenade, watching
birds and lizards and people, eating ice cream and drinking freshly squeezed orange
juice and photographing the sunset. The breeze from the sea blowing through my
sweaty hair ~~ the sun's gleam reflecting off the sea and blinding me ~~ my
bike wheels whirring across the pavement while I try to dodge people who insist
upon strolling in the bicycle path rather than the walking path ~~ Groups of
parakeets hold heated debates while flying in arcs over my head ~~ Writing
about this makes me dizzy with desire to go do it right now.
When I entered the MA TESOL degree
program at Tel Aviv University in the summer of 2012 I had expected that I
would be doing a 3-semester program ending in the summer of 2013. However, I
found out that if I elected to do the thesis track, I could stay registered as
a student for an additional year or two while writing my thesis. This was a
perfect plan for me since my daughter was in a degree program up north and was
going to remain a student for several years anyway. I needed a way to retain my
student status for several years, also, and so I elected to do the thesis
track. Most of the classes I took culminated in final papers that had to be
written by some future due date, usually a month or two in advance. Several of
the final papers needed to be seminar papers that exceed 20 pages in length with
some kind of research component involved. By the way, the program I was in was
completely taught in English. Though we were required to take one Hebrew ulpan class at Tel Aviv University
during the first semester of the program, the grade we got in that class did
not count on the degree and it was the only Hebrew class that we were required
to take. I took the beginner class referred to as Alef. It is equivalent to attending kindergarten and coming out two
months later able to read and write a few basic sentences in the present tense.
That first year of study was filled
with a heavy load of classes, reading academic articles about language
development, doing research, and writing long analytical papers. For a short
time I was also recruited to help Israeli students with their English writing
assignments in the university writing center.
Plus, an important part of my MA program included being assigned to a
school somewhere in Israel where I had to actually teach English classes. Most
people in the program chose elementary students to work with, but I asked for
college-aged students. They assigned me an internship at Ruppin Academic Center
near Netanya, and so I took the bus there once or twice a week and gave English
lessons to Ethiopian students. After my three
semesters of coursework in the MA program ended, when most people turned in
their final papers and flew home to wherever they had come from, I continued
working at Ruppin as an intern for an additional year and taught several more
classes.
During my second year working at
Ruppin, I was given the full responsibilities of an actual instructor employed
there even though in reality I was still an intern. I designed all of the
lessons and homework for two full classes of college students and I had my own
Moodle page where students could keep track of their grades and homework. My
boss decided to take advantage of my presence that year to have me rewrite
every single test, midterm, and final exam used in that particular English department.
Creating a test is a lengthy process of selecting and editing a text to make it
appropriate for the level of my students. At the beginning of the year the
texts would be approximately a page and half long, but after two semesters the
texts grew up to three pages long. I would design problems that tested my
students on specific concepts we had covered in the course along with
vocabulary and grammar questions. Each problem had to be worded carefully for
my English learners using a variety of formats such as true/false, multiple-choice,
fill in the blank, etc. Needless to say, I found it a challenge to work on my
thesis that year and still had some other final papers I hadn't finished.
Fortunately, I was able to get extensions on everything for an indefinite
amount of time into the future.
For the first 14 months of living
in Israel I lived in a 4-person dormitory apartment with women from all over
the world. My roommates were always changing, sometimes coming for only a month
or a semester, so in total I lived with quite a few different women over the
entire year. They were mainly from Europe and Asia, but one of them was a
muslim woman from Jordan who was also working on a masters degree. In my second
year in Israel I moved out of that dormitory and was able to get a brand new
studio apartment with a view of the sea. I was the first person to ever live in
that room and even got to take the plastic off of the brand-new mattress
myself. While it had been an adventure having roommates from all over the
world, I was ecstatic to have my own private apartment 7 floors up from the
street that gave me a panoramic view of northern Tel Aviv and the sunset every
night.
After I had completed the one Hebrew
ulpan class at Tel Aviv University that
I had been required to take my first summer here, I found a Hebrew school called
Gordon Ulpan in Tel Aviv where I completed two more additional levels, namely Alef + and Alef ++. Altogether,
in Alef + we learned past tense which
took four months, and in Alef ++ we
learned future tense which took another five months. I waited several months in
between taking each class while trying to learn as much as I could on my own,
and when I finally finished Alef ++ I
decided to study the Bet levels on my
own [at least for now].
The year 2014 was a blur of teaching
at Ruppin, taking ulpan classes,
going to harkadot, and photographing Israel
with friends while some final papers and a thesis still hung over my head. Somewhere
along the way I had discovered playing the djembe drum in drummer circles on
the beach in Tel Aviv, and so I also found myself doing that about once a week
or so. During the summer of 2014 there was a 50-day war between Israel and the
terrorist group Hamas who controls the Gaza Strip. Hamas fired hundreds of
rockets into Israel both before and during the war, so it was an exciting time
of running into bomb shelters and trying to keep up with all the latest war news.
The Israeli government did only the minimum strikes necessary to temporarily thwart
Hamas' attacks, the result of which is insufficient and pitifully begging for
many more wars in the future. At that time I began to realize that the Israeli
government does not make decisions based upon what is best for the Jewish
people in this country but rather what makes the government look more
acceptable in the eyes of the world. In spite of my disappointment with the
passive and apathetic government I should mention that not once have I ever
regretted coming to Israel even during that war. My life has so much more
meaning here that I cannot imagine going back to the safe and boring bubble of
living in the US. That fall I started taking classes to learn more about
Judaism and my daughter and I started attending a new Beit Knesset in
Haifa. We immediately became friends
with a family there with whom we started eating Shabbat dinners nearly every
week.
Then in 2015, in the midst of
learning Judaism, Hebrew, and writing final papers, I moved to Haifa to live
with my daughter. I needed to finish a paper about street art in Tel Aviv in
which I included a lot of photographs that I had taken of the street art in the
Florentin neighborhood. Taking the pictures had been very fun, but writing that
paper was torture for me because I am in no way an art critic, let alone a
street art critic, and my professor wanted an even deeper analysis of what the
street art meant on some nebulous subconscious level that seemed far beyond
description in human terms. I did finally finish that paper after much inner
agony due to lack of knowing what to say.
Immediately following that paper I
wrote a long paper on the language policy of Ethiopia. The history of Ethiopia
is fascinating, including the fact that the Islamic invasion around 700 AD was
what halted the economic growth of most African nations. Before the advent of
Islam, Ethiopia was a prosperous sophisticated society that traded with nations
all over the world including China, India and Europe. But the Islamic invasion
not only thwarted trade between neighboring countries but Muslim invaders took
control of the seas and all the trade routes. Though Ethiopia resisted having a
Muslim government, most nations succumbed almost immediately and all of their
previous economic and cultural progress was suppressed and reversed. In fact,
it can be argued that Islam is responsible for why Africa has taken so long to scientifically
and economically develop over the past 1,400 years and why Europe was so slow
in scientific progress during the Middle Ages. Writing that paper on Ethiopia
was both enjoyable and arduous. I found it difficult to limit its length and
decide when to end it.
The last paper I needed to finish
was my thesis in which I argued against Chomsky's theories of the origins of
human language. I exposed the unscientific and unprovable nature of his theory
in which he posits that humanity's ability to speak language is due to a
genetically transmitted body of grammar knowledge referred to as universal grammar. I refuted his theory by demonstrating that
language learning is the result of a variety of cognitive processes functioning
simultaneously within a finely-tuned input/output system located in multiple
centers of the brain. My supervisor at
the university gave me absolutely no guidelines on how to write a thesis so I
had no idea what was required, how long it should be, what I should include or
not include, or basically anything that was expected of me. I found guidelines
online from other universities and simply used my best judgment on what I
believed would best reflect my work. I finally finished writing my thesis while
a friend from the states was visiting us. Lots of friends from the states
stayed with us in 2015 at different times, which also provided a lot of travel
opportunities and a lot of distraction from writing. By the time I finished my
thesis I was so exhausted from writing that I could hardly proofread it. To be
honest I still haven't finished proofreading it. But as it turned out, my
supervisor was pleased with it and gave me an extremely adulatory review. It
was all worth it in the end, but boy did I become burned out from writing!
Now, in 2016 I am still studying
Hebrew on my own and trying to learn more Judaism and Jewish history. I seize
every opportunity to travel around Israel, taking thousands of pictures and
learning as much as I can about each place I visit. The more I travel the more
I learn about new places in Israel that I simply have to visit some day. I am excited
that friends from the states are coming to visit again in a few months and so I
will be doing even more traveling and maybe even some camping. I have gone to
Cyprus twice now, having seen and photographed many locations all over that
island. The adventures just never end. And in the midst of everything I have uploaded
many videos of Israel on my You Tube channel of different places I have visited
or small glimpses of my experiences.
There just isn't enough time to
write about all my little adventures that have taken place here in Israel, but
each one has taught me something new about Israel and about the world in which
we live. There was the time when I had a fever for about two weeks and was
sicker than I think I have ever been in my life. It was such a different kind
of sickness from anything I had ever experienced before. I couldn't eat more
than a cracker at a time and even just one cracker tasted very strange like it
was made from laboratory chemicals. It was interesting to observe the various
symptoms I had with that sickness. I became so weak that even I, one who always
avoids going to the doctor, agreed to see one. That was my first experience
with Israeli doctors, and let me tell you, they don't listen to you any better
than American doctors do. Or there was the time when I decided to refinance the
house I still own in the states by doing it all from the embassy in Tel Aviv.
It could take me pages to explain how complicated that was. Or the time when I
lost my wallet and had to replace everything that had been in it, including my
passport, credit cards, bank cards, student ID, etc. Ugh, that was such an
annoying adventure. But looking back now, I feel like I have learned so much
from having to have gone to the embassy for the refinance and replacing my
passport. I had never been to an embassy before I came to Israel. Being here in
Israel affords many new experiences that I am sure I would never have had in the
states.
I loved it when my grandma's
brother Great-Uncle Joe came to visit me here in Israel. Though he had been to
Israel before on a tour, this time he came just to see me. He wanted to go
somewhere he had never gone before, so we hopped a train to Ashkelon and
visited the ancient city that Samson had frequented in the Tanach. I also
showed him around the ancient city of Yafo where Jonah had caught the ship
while trying to run from HaShem. So far Uncle Joe is the only relative of ours
who has come to visit us since we moved to Israel.
I have met people here in Israel from
all over the world. I couldn't begin to list all the places they are from.
Jewish people regularly move here [make aliya]
from every corner of the world, while people from every ethnicity imaginable
come here to study or just to visit. Even though the United States, where I am
from, is such a big country, I have learned so much more about the world here
in this tiny country of Israel where practically every country and so many cultures
and ideas are represented.
Well, I took a long year and a half break from writing on this blog, mainly because I was so burned out from writing all my final papers and thesis. But now I don't feel nearly as much pressure and have gained the ability to write again. Hence this long story about my life here in Israel so far. If I could go back and do it all again, I wouldn't change a thing. Coming here has been the most exciting, enriching, educational decision I have ever made. In spite of the challenges, bugs, heat, etc., when I got here I immediately felt as though I had come home, and I still feel that way now. No matter how hard situations get, no matter what financial sacrifices need to be made, no matter what else I have to give up to be here, it has all been worth it and I am SO GLAD I live here! I hope I will be able to live here for many years to come.
Hinei Ma Tov, Camp Bitnua, Eilat: https://youtu.be/0nJM95GqeFc
Happy, Camp Bitnua, Eilat: https://youtu.be/Jo60A2fKlX4
C'est la vie and Riverdance, Camp Bitnua, Eilat: https://youtu.be/wUQrHmf0UgI
 |
| Eilat, November 2014 |
 |
| Eilat, November 2014 |
 |
| Eilat, November 2014 |
 |
| Eilat, November 2014 |
 |
| Eilat, November 2014 |
 |
| Eilat, November 2014 |
