Thursday 21 October 2010

End of Klita

I knew I shouldn’t have left it till Wednesday to write about as far back as Monday, the days here are so long and full its impossible to remember as far back as this morning. Having started Monday morning with what I remember was quite a heated debate on the Ideology of Netzer and who should be allowed to become a sniff, I can't now remember most of the specific details. I do however remember a particularly heated discussion which involved one of our educators (the same one I mentioned before) claiming that our ideology is what we do whilst I disputed that it was what we thought and believed in. One of the boys came out with the Latin root of the word..again which I can't now remember..thereby proving my original point. An argument I also had with this educator was the issue I had with his machon-bashing. As an ex-shnattie and one from Etgar he was consistently making (joking) comments about machon-niks betraying their movement and how much better Etgar was. After several days of this I decided to inform him that I thought it was contributing to creating an already inevitable divide and separating the group.






We then split into our groups for Karmiel, Shvil and Kibbutz to discuss how the time after Kibbutz would work. Due to my ultimate laziness (and of course many other reasons) I had already selected Karmiel as my option before I came. Two Madrichim, Galit and Miria, came to talk to us a little bit about UJIA in Karmiel and what we would be doing there. For those of you who don't know Karmiel is a small city located in the Beit HaKerem Valley which divides upper and lower Galilee. UJIA supports the entire communities in the Galliel, not just Jews. We were told that the 15 of us would be living together in (hopefully) a relatively big house with a garden. There are 13 girls and 2 boys. When we began to discuss what we would actually be doing whilst there, I totally threw out the idea of MDA because I started to get very overexcited. Our week would involve cooking for each other, practical Hebrew lessons (such as in the actual supermarket), volunteering, lectures,seminars, dinner with our host families and a Netzer evening each week. Our host families would be the families of the local kids we would be doing hikes and activities with-in Israel they call them CITs (Counsellors in Training). Each week we would each go to our individual host families for one night and spend the evening socialising and eating with them. The bit that I started to really look forward to was the volunteering options. They are divided into morning and afternoon choices and you can pretty much do as much or as little as you chose. For the morning (which is until two) you can chose to work in an Elementary school, a high school, or the Muslim school on the opposite side of the road. There is also the opportunity to work in the Soup Kitchen or with disabled people both in homes and in a supportive work environment. For the afternoons if you chose to you can do one-on-one Tutoring (maths for me) twice a week. A couple of times a month we will also help at the packing place where they pack a basket of Groceries for 4000 families every month. Working in the schools involves actually building and planning the lessons together with the teacher and having a lot of input into the work. After deciding I wanted to work in one of the school during the day (either of the high schools probably) and that I wanted to do maths tutoring in the evenings and maybe occasionally a couple of soup kitchen shifts, I then found out that one of the Madricha's husband is just starting a brand new ceramics and sculpture programme which they need help for-at this point I was literally buzzing!






We later had a peula on 'Shnat and the Big questions'. We basically had to brainstorm questions such as 'what kind of a leader am I?', 'what place does Israel have in my life?', 'who are my role models?', 'Where is god in my life?', 'What is Zionism to me?' etc and then had to pick a particular one to discuss further. I chose 'What place does Israel have in my life'. A discussion that developed into questioning the diaspora's voice in Israeli politics and the concept of being Zionist without making Aliyah.






Our closing tekkes was at the Ha'as Tayelet overlooking a beautifully lit up Jerusalem followed by a lovely Italian meal as a group for two peoples birthdays and our last night in Jerusalem. That evening I saw both Sophia, who is currently studying at Seminary inside the old city, and Steph who's on BA year course. My chat with Sophs was rather short as they are only allowed out the old city on a Monday night and not on Ben Yehuda street and they have a curfew!






Much later that evening, about 1 o'clock, the group decided to go to the kottel. Myself and two others went slightly later than the rest and got there to discover them fuming. Apparently they could not understand why, when approaching the wall drunk and dressed in short skirts and tank tops, a women got angry at them for being dressed immodestly and asked them to cover up or leave. They decided it was a massive scandal that “at the place they are supposed to feel most comfortable and holy they were made to feel uncomfortable”. Personally I believe that all religious aspects aside it is a simple question of respect to other people. If you wouldn’t go to a reform synagogue dressed like that, or even to a friends house for dinner, why would you go to somewhere that you claim is sacred. Even if you do feel like you should be comfortable in a such a place, it is a blatant disrespect of those around you. Modesty may be something that Orthodox Jews are obsessive about and known for but that doesn’t take away from the fact that it is a stand-alone concept itself. It is the same as being disrespectful in any holy or important place and it was quite clear that this dispute was a direct result of RSY's “we can question anything” approach because we are reform and was quite simply teenagers trying to feel like they were making a point just for the sake of it.






I was going to write about Tuesday and Wednesday as well now but we have to be up at 7 in the morning to work with the dates-fun times- so simply I’m going to apologise for the rushed incorrect and probably incoherent nature of this post and go to bed.






Night All






S x

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