First Day

Is this post left or right justified?  Why am I asking this question?  Because when I opened up the blogger I found that the instructions are all in Hebrew. I hope you're reading this in English.   My writing is moving from right to left rather than from left to right. The punctuation marks appear on my screen to be in the wrong places.  I've got to figure out how to get Blogspot to give me directions in English!!  I hope you have luck reading this post.

 I'm here in Israel, in a lovely apartment across the street from the beautiful San Simon park.  First thing - put some food in the refrigerator and in the cupboards! It's been a long 36 hours. 

.I’ve been officially brought to my knees!

Yesterday, with great confidence, I walked across the park and went into the grocery store.  Where were the carts? Outside!  But they were locked up and, like in the airport, you have to put in a coin.  10 shekelim, which is returned when you return the cart. I didn’t have a 10 shekel coin.

 I don't think I recognized the names of any of the foods except lechem and dag. (milk and fish) and those were pretty obvious. But there were things on the shelves and even in the produce section I didn't recognize. I couldn't tell the butter from the cream cheese, what flavor the yogurt was, and I never did figure out what was in the freezer that looked like frozen olives (maybe it was frozen olives!)  It was at that point that I started thinking that I should have continued the Hebrew lessons, or at least listened more to the tapes.  My next purchase will be a Hebrew-English dictionary.

My friend Lynn forwarded me an email from Shlomo Katz (as in niggun fame) that she had received saying he was doing a special class on Shavuot at his home.  Through a coincidental connection I was able to get a ride to this class.  At the time Shlomo and his family lived in one of the settlements (or communities as they prefer to refer to them) called Neve Daniel, which is in the Gush region near Efrat and Beit Shemesh.  It turned out that the person who gave me a ride had made aliyah 2 years ago from New Jersey, where he was the executive director of the little synagogue where I had Rosh Hashonah two years ago with Andrea – Manhattan Jewish Experience (MJE) on 86^th Street.  And now he’s the development staff for Stand With Us in Jerusalem, an organization we are all familiar with and support in Seattle.

The class was amazing.  There were several niggunim before the learning, two that I knew from Lynn. A group of 40 people of all ages sat together quietly listening to Shlomo’s Shavuot message – to ask Hashem to reveal to you who you are and what life is all about in the deepest way.

Isn’t that why I’m here in Israel?