Oops! I Forgot about Tuesday!

Such is life-- you procrastinate writing a blog entry for a little bit, and then later realize that you completely forget to write it!

Here's what we did on Tuesday

We started off with a Jewish History course in the classroom of the Moadon. The teacher, Dina Pina, covered her basic rules and expectations, and then asked everyone about their family history and origins. The diversity of histories in the room was quite interesting: everything from first generation American Jews to American Jews from the early 1610's! We then covered a little piece from pirkei avot (a Jewish text, the title translates to The Teachings of our Fathers) in chevruta style.

Note: Chevruta style is when two people try to go through and figure out\ argue about the meaing of the text. It is preferally done in the text's original language since a lot of possible meanings are lost in translation, as all translations require interpretations and therfore have bias.

As we were studying the English translation, I decided to put my many years of Jew-School education to work and actually translate the Hebrew for myself. I had a lot more fun doing it that way, and I feel as if I learned more and was able to interpret it more by using the original Hebrew.

After that, we went to our next class, Cultural Judaism, in the other bomb-shelter across from the Army base that's here on Kibbutz Netiv HaLamed Hey. It was quite amusing that the only people who were on time (actually, early) were three of us from Camp Tavor (myself, Etta, and K'Tanaw). Everyone else came a little late, but it was O.K. since they had brought food! The instructor was fairly peeved that we were late and that we brought food (he didn't allow eating in his class). Most of the class was discussion about how Habonim Dror approaches Judaism. Meh.... not my favorite.

Afterwards, we had Lunch, and then our entire Kvutza got a very nice text message: Our next class, Israeli Society, was canceled due to a slight technical difficulty: The teacher was nowhere to be found. Needless to say, we were all quite happy to have a free-block. I used the time to sleep and do some more computer work... yay!

Alas, our free-block ended, and we were forced to resume studies with our Israeli History class. The class had promise, but the instructor tended to just talk at us about the different aaliyot (pilgramiges to Israel) instead of talk with us. Hopefuly the next classes will be more interesting.

The day ended up with dinner and more free time... not a bad day at all.

Note: The classes are likely nowhere near as bad as I make them out to be -- it's just that the bad is much easier to remember than the good! I really am enjoying myself here and learning quite a bit.