!שלמ

Shalom! I am now fluent in Hebrew transliterations. We had our Hebrew midterm this week, and a lot of us practiced for it by writing notes to each other in Hebrew characters (but still English words). It's so much fun! The title of this post is in block Hebrew, but there's also a script Hebrew alphabet that looks just like a great secret code.

This past week I got to go see the City of David Archaeological Park, which was amazing! It is an excavation for the Jerusalem of David's time (which also made up most of Jerusalem during Christ's time). I saw the place that they think was King David's palace, which means Isaiah would have been there, and we also walked through Hezekiah's tunnel under the city, which still has water running through it. It was so fun! Then we went to the pool of Siloam, which is where Christ healed the blind man. It was really an amazing site, because we were able to sit right there on the steps of the pool (even though it's dry now, of course).

On Wednesday, we went to Yad Vashem, the Holocaust Museum in Jerusalem. It was similar to the Washington D.C. museum, except with even more specific focus on the Jews. Our teacher told us that every time an important dignitary comes to visit Israel, the very first thing they do is tour Yad Vashem (and then they're taken to plant a tree on Mt. Herzl). I just thought it was interesting that Israel places themselves within the context of the Holocaust to introduce themselves to visitors. 

I was so shocked when we got home afterward, though, and found out there had been a shooting in the Washington D.C. museum the same day! A neo-Nazi somehow got in, and one of the security guards there was actually killed. That was significant, though--a reminder that the problems we had seen in Yad Vashem are still extremely current.

Thursday night, we had a Passover Seder here at the center! This is a picture of me, two of my roommates Hannah and Bethany, and our Judaism teacher, Ophir Yarden. He is an Orthodox Jew, and he conducted the seder for us (some of it sung in Hebrew). We also got to go to his synagogue Friday night for their Shabbat prayer. The whole thing was sung in Hebrew, and I thought some of the songs were really lovely. They seemed to be kind of improvising their harmonies, but I don't know for sure.

Aside from all that, we are getting ready here at the center for a talent show this Wednesday! I'm going to play piano (Kabalevsky again :-)), but I'm also on the talent show committee, and we're doing "So Long, Farewell," from The Sound of Music for the last act. We're doing all the choreography straight from the movie, and I'm going to be Louisa, and I'm really excited! This should be a good talent show, because we're doing it in our auditorium/chapel, so we said all of the acts have to be fairly serious. (We'll do another less formal talent show later in the semester.)