Catching Up and Looking Back I:
Overview of the First Two Weeks In Israel,

Summer 2011

Rabbi Michael Feshbach

Temple Shalom

Chevy Chase, MD

Delays and Departures

Despite getting to Dulles Airport in plenty of time, going through security and boarding, a storm blew through, closed the airport… and we sat on the airplane, for an extra two hours before take off.  I had a good book, but was worried about connections in London.  Well, I ran at Heathrow, and, out of breath, I made the plane, one of my bags made the plane… and one of the bags stayed in London.  Julie had advised me to pack medicine and toiletries in the carry on; guess I’ll listen better next time!  (The bag was delivered from London all the way to where we were studying 36-hours late, so as travel stories goes this is a relatively happy ending).

Renting a car at the airport was a new experience… as was driving on Israel’s roads.  The good news is that I was somehow awake enough to drive despite (characteristically) barely sleeping on either flight.  The other pieces of good news is that my Israeli cell phone rang, with a message, practically as soon as I turned it on (although it took me days to figure out how to set the message and get some other guy’s name off the machine, as well as reach someone who spoke English slowly rather than Hebrew at 100 miles an hour to explain how to get voice mail messages).  I am the proud owner of a permanent Israeli cell phone number!

The other thing that worked, to my very pleasant surprise…was the GPS we bought last summer.  Talia had called the thing “Miss Directions,” and I think it was one of the most fitting names I had ever heard.  But, lo and behold, once I had a stern talking to the thing, and threatened it with being tossed out the window, suddenly, she started to behave!!  She is finding addresses she would not find last year, I am figuring out what she means in terms of the timing of her turns, and her British accent was always kind of appealing.  We seem to have made peace.

The bad news was the traffic; totally stuck for over an hour with a bad accident on the way to Jerusalem.   Multi-car collision, as was apparent when I eventually passed it.  They say that, without any doubts, driving is the most dangerous part of living in Israel.  Felt that way, right off the bat.

Easing In

I am renting an apartment this year in the neighborhood of Rechavia (very close to where I lived during the second semester of my Junior Year at Hebrew University), sharing it with my colleague and fellow-student at Hartman Rabbi Jonathan Hecht and his wife Gladys Rosenblum.  Gladys was very nicely waiting for me when I got in, and introduced me to the two-bedroom apartment.  I was too late for the evening program at Hartman that night, so, essentially, I had missed the opening day.

But showing up on the second day was like coming home and being greeting as a long-lost friend.  It was a great feeling to come “back.”

And there are hundreds of rabbis around during the first two weeks.  Our program is largely rolled into the larger one, which any rabbi can attend, during this time period.  Sometimes it feels as if everyone  you know is saying hello, all at once.

Peoplehood

The “theme” for the first two weeks of our studies this year was “Peoplehood,” which, personally, I think is the single most challenging concept on the North American Jewish agenda.  Do we still feel a sense of connection with a large whole, with a collective, when our ethnic Judaism fades into history, when we are now (often for good, by the way) a mixture of so many new people, and as an unrestrained individualism takes ever firmer control of the conceptual universe of American Jews?

I will cover some of the approaches to the topic as I review individual day in my next post.  But the program was well run this summer, with high-level presentations and important conversations, of which, more below.

Chevruta Study (Paired Learning): A Typical Day At the Machon

Last week I was able to take out to dinner one of my former Bar Mitzvah and Confirmation students, a young man I am very fond of who is about to enter his senior year of college and with whom I have had ongoing and fairly deep conversations about Jewish life.  To my great delight I discovered that he was in Israel for two months, working at an agency called the Association for Civil Rights in Israel… and that he had an apartment about a block and a half from mine.

When we went out to dinner last Thursday night (including Gladys), he was gracious and as interested in what I was doing as I was in his work; very poised, he asked me what a typical day was like for me.

The Hartman “method” is powerful (borrowed in part from the Yeshiva world) and worth explaining in more detail.

In the morning, we arrive early (usually at 8:30am), in the large Beit Midrash (study hall), with small tables and only some seats facing the speaker.  The scholar or presenter for the morning comes in, lays out the texts that we should be studying, outlines general issues and asks us a number of leading questions… and then sends us off on our own, for an hour and half to two ours.  Some people have the same study partners each time, others, you should pardon the  expression, “study around.”  Some remain in the Beit Midrash, others find places throughout the rest of the campus.  We study the texts we have been given, often in Hebrew or Aramaic but also, often, referring to the English translations.  Then, what typically happens, is that we come back at 11 AM and the scholar blows us away by taking us in totally unexpected directions and laying out perspectives we had not come up with despite the leading questions.  It is mostly an awe-inspiring experience, tinged with an occasional twinge of wondering why we couldn’t get it… or an even more triumphant feeling if, every once in a while, we actually did anticipate where someone was going.  (Those who have been here for many years or know the individual scholars’ writings well seem to be able to do that more frequently).  We have breakout groups after the presentation to de-brief, then lunch at the Machon, then afternoon electives (more on those later).  Then the two week students got a longer break, but my program often continued an hour later with “roundtables” in which each of us needs to make presentations to our group.  During the first two weeks this was followed by dinner at the Machon, and then the evening program.

So, for those first to weeks, the time was tight, and the days were long.  Those who did have families here barely saw them, but we were busy for almost 14-hours straight.

It continues to be, however, the highest quality study experience of my career, and I will go into more detail on the content of what we have covered in the next post.