Long and overdue entry

I'm hanging my head in shame right now. I haven't written about my life in Jerusalem in such a long time that I don't even know where to begin at this point! I'll give a summary I guess of some highlights and then hopefully continue to post regularly for the rest of the year.

- Shabbat
This past Friday night was my final "official" service to lead of the year (I led 3 that I'm being reviewed for). I actually found this service to be a bit more difficult in forming than the services that I have planned for Monday mornings. I think this is partly because there is so much more energy on a Friday night than on a Monday morning. In fact, there shouldn't be the same energy level as a Friday compared to a Monday! How else will you separate Shabbat from the rest of the week? I worked with rabbinical student Meredith Kahan on this service. We both decided right off the bat that music was incredibly important to us. However, we couldn't really decide on any one genre of Jewish music, so we used that to our advantage and honored different traditions in our service. Highlights for me were l'cha dodi and ahavat olam. The l'cha dodi we used was from three different Jewish musical traditions: Ashkenazi, Bratslav, and modern (Rotenberg). The three different tunes flowed into one another beautifully and created such a cool high point in the Kabbalat Shabbat service. We decided to use Debbie Friedman's melody for Ahavat Olam. What made it special was an added flute part that I composed over the course of the week. It ended up being such a simple, beautiful line that it really added something special to the prayer. I was very proud of it.

- Army Base visit
This past Wednesday in my Israel seminar class, we traveled to the Dead Sea area to visit an army base. The landscape is beautiful in the area. The mountains role so beautifully. It's almost like someone laid skin on these vast areas of land. Unfortunately most of the day was just hanging out. We got to hear about how the unit ran though (well, mostly. There was a good amount of information that they weren't allowed to tell us for security reasons). This particular day, they were doing a run of taking over an area. Apparently this is a pretty standard exercise that is done in the army, and although we watched an elite unit, they still needed to review the basics. So at the very end of the day we got to watch them do a "wet" run of this exercise-- wet meaning with real bullets! It was an incredibly intense experience. I feel like I understand that much more about what training is like in the army now though. Definitely an experience that will stay with me when I leave Israel this year.

- New classes
I only have 2 new classes this semester: bible and Israeli Art Music. My Tanach class is wonderful! In the class we each take a verse to read in Hebrew and then are asked to translate the Biblical Hebrew into Modern Hebrew...read that again. Modern Hebrew! Not Engligh! It's incredibly difficult, but soooo wonderful. It forces you to pay attention to the grammar of the sentence so much more than if it was just translated to English (I'm learning that grammar is very important!). We also talk about different concepts in the Tanach as well, but it's always surrounding the translations. My other class is Israeli Art music which is essentially studying classical music of Israel. The content is interesting, but not my favorite class by far.

I know that in the next few days I'll think of more to tell you, but that's it for now! I'm off to class!
Love,
Sarah