Someone to Run With

I read THE BEST book last week! It was absolutely beautiful in every way (well... except physical condition). It was called Someone to Run With, by an Israeli author named David Grossman. It was originally in Hebrew, but the translation was fabulous. I really hope the writing is as good in Hebrew. I know that other people liked it too, because it's been made into a film (which I really want to see).

Okay, time for a short summary with no spoilers, and then I'll get back to extolling its virtues. The book takes place in Jerusalem, and it was about a boy (named Assaf), a girl (named Tamar), and a dog (named Dinka). I know, sounds pretty ordinary and cliché, but I swear it isn't. They're both on very specific missions, that turn out to be (in some cases) more dangerous than you would expect. Actually, Tamar's mission was exactly as dangerous as you would expect, but Assaf's wasn't. Tamar's mission, which was self imposed, is to extract someone from a dangerous environment (read: criminal underground), and then once she got him out she had to get him off of his heroin addiction, all on her own. Assaf's mission, which is on the surface much simpler, was to return a lost dog, Dinka, to her owner. Dinka, however, turns out to be Tamar's, and since Tamar was busy going under cover into a dangerous criminal underground, he couldn't exactly find her. The book basically follows Assaf as he follows clues, meets people involved in Tamar's life, and gets closer to finding her, and Tamar as she undertakes her mission. Sorry, that wasn't the shortest summary ever, but the book is really complicated.

The style of writing was absolutely unique. Actually, that's probably why I loved it so much. It switched perspectives a lot, so it was really easy to see what was going on, and understand how different scenes and characters related to each other. It was also slightly random, and totally unpredictable, from little things like sometimes using quotation marks around full sentences and sometimes not, to how long a point of view would last, and similarly how much time was between each scene. It was amazing. I think that the writing style really helped me to engage in the story.

The characters were so well crafted, it was incredible. I could tell just from reading how much extra thought was put into each and every one of them. Even the minor characters that only appeared once or twice had intricate and very telling personalities. I would bet anything that there were thousands of interactions written out that didn't make it into the book, if only to help establish the characters. They had a sort of depth that is hard to get unless you work really hard for it. Another thing that I liked about the characters was how I don't think there was a single one that was not immensely complicated, and had many sides to them. None of them were all good, or all bad. Everyone was ambiguous, even the ultimate villain, just like in real life.

Okay, I think I'm done extolling the book's virtues now. Moving on, it's time to talk about the connection to Jewish culture and Israel. Well, aside from the obvious bit that it took place in Jerusalem, it gives a great perspective on the uniqueness and complexity of Israeli culture, specifically on the streets. For Tamar's mission, she had to spend a while pretending to be homeless. Since she's a singer (I don't know if I mentioned that before), she spent her time performing in the streets of Jerusalem. She encountered all sorts of people, and the descriptions of the encounters were such that the reader would get an intimate view of the kinds of people who live here. The narration allowed the reader to see Jerusalem through the eyes of someone who lived their entire lives there, and I found it fascinating. This book was a great peek into the culture of Israel, and I loved every page of it.

First Poland Blog

Sorry it's a little (try two weeks) late, but here's my first blog from the week after Poland!

Last week, we went to Poland. As I'm sure you can imagine, it was horrifying and intensely emotional. We started off with a tour of Warsaw, beginning in their Jewish cemetery. It was a surprisingly uplifting experience, seeing two centuries of our ancestors laid out proudly with Jewish language (mostly Yiddish, although some was definitely Hebrew seeing as I understood it) displayed for all to see. After the cemetery, we took a tour of Warsaw which included the pieces of Warsaw that are relevant to the Holocaust, basically the ghetto and the .

The next day we went to Tykocin, which was very emotional for me. At first I wasn't sure why, but then I realised that it was because Tykocin was a shtetl very much like the fictional town of Anatevka (from Fiddler on the Roof), which was one of the first plays in which I found a real family in the cast. So going to trace the footsteps of a tragic community like that one made me think of them, and how I would feel if it were them in the shoes of the Tykocin Jews. During the Holocaust on the day of their death, they were all rounded up and made to either crowd into a truck or run behind said truck all the way to a nearby forest, where every single one of them was shot immediately, and nearly every single one died. We walked through that very woods, and I noticed that the upper halves of the trees were all slightly tinted red. It was definitely disturbing, and slightly freaky. We went up to the mass graves, and our madrichim did a ceremony in front of the main one with all the memorials. In the end, I lit a candle for them, and then walked out of that forest with my dignity intact, in a way that none of them were able to.

This week was a week of accomplishing feats like that. We also went to two concentration/death camps, and walked out of each of them with our heads held high.

The first camp we went to was Majdanek. It was horrible. Everything was left almost entirely intact. When we walked through the bath house/gas chamber in the front, I found myself stuck behind a line of people in this small dark room that was incredibly terrifying. I felt this rush of fear, as though I had to get out of there immediately. I knew at that moment that I was standing in a place where someone had died or was about to die, and it was horrifying. We walked through at least one example of every type of building in the camp, including the main gas chambers and crematorium. It was also awful. The worst part though, was at the end. We went up to this huge monument, and our teacher wouldn't tell us what we would see when we walked up the steps. Well, being the trusting fool that I am, I went up the steps.. Only to find myself face to face with a mound of human ashes the size of a small house. HUMAN ASHES. And those were only the ones that they didn’t have room to bury. After we had all recovered from that, we held another ceremony at the base of the monument. I participated in that one, along with around ten other students. Everyone read a poem, diary entry, or other writing from a survivor, except a few of my friends and me. We sang a song called Arim Roshi. It was impossibly emotional, and I don't think any of us made it through without crying.

In between Majdanek and the next camp, Auschwitz I and Auschwitz-Birkenau, we visited Krakow. It was amazing. It was so beautiful. We visited this gigantic castle, which looked like a thing out of a fairy tale. (Unfortunately, I think I sprained my ankle on the way down. At any rate, I twisted it, and it's still very painful a week later. I still had fun roaming the city for two hours though. I just did it slowly.) After we had that free time, we toured the ancient synagogues in the area (and had an interesting debate about the use of the word "temple" in description of a Jewish place of worship), and then visited the Jewish Community Centre of Krakow. It was comforting to see such a familiar organisation in such a wildly different place. Our last stop of the day was a visit to the "umschlagplatz" of the Krakow Ghetto. An umschlagplatz is the place where they gathered and waited for the trains, which in their case took nearly all of them to their deaths at camps.

Rather fittingly, we started the next day with a visit to Auschwitz-Birkenau, the Auschwitz camp dedicated solely to killing people. It was terrible, although for some reason I was much less affected there. I have no clue why, because that's where all the Jews died, but I just didn't feel anything there. Maybe my emotions were all worn out, but even though my brain was comprehending all the horrors that occurred around me, my heart just wasn’t breaking the way it shattered at Majdanek. There was one thing that still affected me though. The story that we followed through the camp was the one of the Hungarian Jews, from whom I am descended. If my ancestors hadn’t made the decision to move to the US fifty (ish?) years before, I would not be alive today. My grandparents, who were just three at the time that the Hungarian Jews were brought to Auschwitz, would have died there. Even knowing this though, I still couldn’t bring myself to feel any strong emotions after we had been walking around for about fifteen minutes.

Please don’t judge me for any of this. Everyone reacts in different ways, and I can’t help how I did.

PSA

Hi all! I'm really very sorry I haven't posted in a very long time. I have several blogs written, but the connection was bad, so I wasn't able to post them. I'll be uploading them ASAP.
Also, it's come to my attention that my blog is hard to read, visually. I'm not quite sure how the setup works, but I'm trying to fix it. Please comment on how it looks now!
Finally, and on the same note, I'm going to take some time as soon as I find some to go through and respond to every comment. I think I've finally figured out how to do that. Sorry for the delay!
Thanks!
Signing off,
Ilana

Women of the Wall

(PSA: I apologise for not posting for so long. I've been having computer issues. I'm leaving for two weeks for a little trip with the group, but when I get back I will upload all the blogs that I have missed.)

This past Rosh Chodesh, my group went to the Kotel to pray with Women of the Wall. It was an extraordinary, and at least for me, incredibly fulfilling, experience. For those of you who don’t know, Women of the Wall is a women’s (although there are men who believe in the cause too) activist group that fights for the religious rights of women, especially surrounding the Kotel. Every month, they go to the Kotel and hold Rosh Chodesh services on the women’s side. They wear tallitot and tefillin, chant from the Torah, and pray out loud with kavana. All those things were, until recently, not allowed at the Kotel… for women. Men are always allowed to dress and do whatever they want there, as long as it’s within the bounds of halakha and respect.

May of last year was the first time that they were legally allowed to go about their business. Before that, members were regularly arrested and assaulted, and the law wasn’t on their side. In fact, last time I was in Israel, I wasn’t allowed to go pray with them because the danger was too great. I had spent most of that year studying them, and I was really disappointed. I think, if I had known how different things are now, I would be both disappointed (that I missed it), and happy for them. After all, this was a big step.

My time with them this past week was brief, because of some traffic issues, but everything I had ever dreamed of. We stood together and prayed loudly and with kavana. It was amazing. I’ve been dreaming of having an experience like this since I first discovered them. I didn’t know all of the tunes, but the ones that I did know, I sang along to with all my heart. There were men who were standing up on the platform behind the railing separating the women’s section who were participating as spiritedly as we were, and that warmed my heart.

Halfway through, some older ladies walked by and told us that our mothers and grandmothers would be ashamed and theirs were rolling in their graves. One of the Jewish History teachers, Ariella, who I happened to be standing near, responded by saying that her grandmother would be proud of her. I know that my grandmothers and mother are proud of me. At the end, I (and a few others) got to talk to Anat Hoffman! She was very nice. While we were chatting, there was a group of Orthodox girls nearby, staring at us and giggling, or sometimes glaring. Anat explained to us that they were curious about us, and how we could do things that the rabbi told them were forbidden. I think they were a little jealous, because they seemed to be curious about what it would be like to do what we were doing. Anat said they were probably confused about why we could, but they couldn’t. She said that this is why the rabbis are so opposed to Women of the Wall; they don’t want their  own women to even think about straying from tradition. It makes sense, I suppose, although one of the biggest points of Judaism (from what I understand) is the importance of curiosity and asking questions. By that logic, the rabbis should be happy that the girls are exploring things like that, but this wouldn’t be the only area in which religion and religious leaders have been corrupted from the original values of the religion.

Religion and corruption are a topic for another day, though. I promise I'll write a blog all about my views on it all at some point, but now I have to go to bed. Lila tov all!

Hijab Wearing Teens Have Restored My Faith In Humanity

This week I got special permission to write about an article that isn't about Judaism, because I found one specific one (still about a religion, just not ours) that truly restored at least a small portion of my faith in humanity. It was about the issue of whether Muslim girls should be allowed to wear a hijab while playing sports. What I read astounded me. First off, it was only this year that FIFA lifted its ban on headscarves. It took until March of 2014 for them to stop discriminating against an entire religion's worth of soccer players. Second, even after this decision was handed down, a school team still refused to allow one of their girls to play with a headscarf. Now, I might understand them not following the big league's rules if it wasn't for religious purposes, but for some Muslim girls, telling them that they may not play with a hijab is as good as telling them that they may not play at all. This girl, Samah Aidah, is one of those girls, apparently. Her teammates, instead of standing by and having someone fill in for her like you would expect, decided to do their part in coming to defence of their wronged teammate.

Yes, ladies and gentlemen. The entire team wore headscarves for their next game. Amazing, isn't it?
I absolutely love how these girls, who are mine and my friends' age, managed to not only let go of any and all prejudice and form their own adult opinions, but also work together and actively support their friend. Not many people would willingly don an article of clothing that is such a classifier, in this climate. And the very fact that they felt bothered enough by the injustice to stand up for their friend's right to religious freedom shows a special kind of integrity not often found in American teenagers. On the flip side, I think it's just sad that these girls had to resort to this. Why were they put in this situation? Because their coach couldn't let go of that same prejudice and be a decent human being. So over all, huge win for the girls, but major disappointment in the Responsible Adult department.

The article that I read can be found here.

Poland

Before you read this entry, I must give you fair warning that its contents could very well be seen as controversial, and perhaps insulting to some. In no way do I mean for it to be, and I am only speaking my mind.
Last week began our preparation for the Poland trip, with a very moving and informative display put together for us by the madrichim. But it was only today, as we were given our roommates and told to start preparing, that it really sunk in for me that next week we will be going to Poland, a veritable showcase of our worst memories. It was there that so many of our brothers and sisters died, and many more suffered unimaginable torture. Yet it is also a place, a country, just like any other. Yes, we have many bad memories there. But it is also the home to many people. As terrified as we all are to travel there, we must remember that it isn't all death, gloom, and concentration camps. It's also schools, houses, libraries, politics, and so much more. So even as I steel myself in preparation to send my emotions through the wormhole at warp 10, I remind myself and others that the side of Poland that we are about to see, that of darkness, is only one side, and we mustn't forget that there are many other parts to this country, as with any other. Yes, it holds a dark past for the Jewish people, there is no denying it. But it also holds a bright future for the human race.

Hillel

NOTE: I just discovered that my posts for this week were sitting in my drafts folder, and that they didn't actually get published. I apologise for the wait, and here they are now.
The other day on Facebook, I saw a link my dad posted about Hillel. The movement, not the person. It was by a rabbi who used to be heavily involved in Hillel. Now though, he said through this article that he can no longer support them. After reading the article, I have to say neither can I. Apparently, they have the nasty habit of suppressing anyone who doesn't agree with their extremely pro-Israel beliefs. If you are even involved in anything that is in any way associated with Palestine, Arabs, Islam, or anything even remotely anti-Israel (or has the potential to be), or you disagree with some of the current Israeli policies (and act on your belief), then you are not welcome. As the rabbi put it (because I couldn't put it any better), they have "essentially banned all liberal Jews who love Israel but disagree with the current Netanyahu government from Hillel involvement."
This infuriates me. I've never been involved in Hillel, but it doesn't matter. They are Americans, and they are suppressing people's right to an opinion. They are going against the very essence of our country, the very reason we exist. The right to be your own person. I almost can't conceive how an institution in the United States could be so blind and one sided. Perhaps I'm madder than is rational, but it really bothers me.
They insult respectable people who have their own sophisticated opinions, and in doing so they are proving themselves to be rather low on maturity.
If you have a different opinion, or know another side of this issue, please let me know because I feel woefully under-informed.
Here's a link to the article: http://touch.sun-sentinel.com/#section/-1/article/p2p-79515797/