Skip to main content

Elul Blues

 After the shofar class, we headed out to join a zoom call with the Dean and some other faculty members for another session of orientation. We heard about what it meant to be in Israel and experience a totally different culture. The Dean brought the example of clouds and sunshine. In European countries sunshine was something positive and clouds something negative, whereas here in the Mediterranean area, clouds were something positive and sunshine was something negative. 

At some point later that day, when I was running errands in the city this thought crossed by mind and made me a little sad: Was looking at all of the chaos and energy witch which people were going around by and I thought "Will I ever be as Israeli as all those people?"

The Dean also mentioned that in the beginning things are going to be hard, the same way as babies get their baby teeth when they are small, and it hurts, but they (read "you") forget about this pain and remember only the good things. The same, he said, is going to happen with our experience at Pardes, and I think he is absolutely right! He called this phase the Elul Blues.

Funnily right when classes were over today and we all went outside, there were clouds at the sky!






Comments

Popular posts from this blog

Parashat Devarim 5784

In unserer Parascha, Parashat Devarim, beginnt Moses mit seiner letzten Ansprache an das Volk Israel. Das Volk hat zu dem Zeitpunkt ganze 40 Jahre in der Wüste verbracht. Währenddessen ist die Generation des Exodus aus Ägypten gestorben und eine neue Generation ist in der Wüste als freie Menschen aufgewachsen. Gleich in unserer Parascha erklärt Moses der neuen Generation auch, warum das Volk 40 Jahre in der Wüste verbringen musste: Kurz vor der Ankunft im Land Israel entsandte Moses 12 Kundschafter in das Land, um von der Beschaffenheit und den Bewohnern des Landes zu berichten. 10 der Kundschafter kehrten mit sehr schlechten Nachrichten über das Land zurück. Das Volk glaubte diesen Kundschaftern und beklagte sein Leid, so ein schreckliches Land als Erbe zu bekommen. Daraufhin bestrafte Gott das Volk mit 40 Jahren Wanderung in der Wüste und dem Ableben der Generation der Ungläubigen, die dem Versprechen Gottes nicht glauben wollten, dass das Land ein gutes Land ist, wo Milch und Honig ...

Zot Chanukka

Welcome back to my blog! I haven’t been writing here for a long time, but now this Chanukka I was inspired to write! Last week I stumbled upon a very sweet piece of Torah when searching for Chanukka on thepeoplestalmud and scrolling through the results (note: thepeoplestalmud is a directory and collection of Talmudic passages sorted by different categories and topics written in simple and entertaining language.).  One of the results was this section in the Tractate Eruvin, which surprisingly talked about Chanukka, specifically about the Machloket (disagreement) between the School of Beit Hillel and the School of Bet Shammai about how to light the Chanukka candles. Bet Shammai held that one starts with 8 candles on the first night and decreases the number of candles with the consecutive nights. The reasoning draws on Chanukka’s origins in the Sukkot holiday when the number of bulls sacrificed each day decreased from 13 to 7 (8 days). Beit Hillel on the other hand held that on the ...