Yesterday I woke up and there was a little snow on the ground. I was not expecting that when I signed up to come to Jerusalem. During our morning class is really started snowing. Probably close to an inch accumulated over a couple of hours. In our class break we all went out and played in the snow. I got a couple of cool pictures of a snowy Jerusalem. The children of the professors even went out and built a snow man.
As is already obvious I have not been keeping up with doing at least weekly posts as I had planned. We'll see I do better. I think in this post I will just highlight some of the things that I've done.
Neot Kedumim was a field trip that I wasn't expecting much of so I was pleasantly surprised at how cool it was. They told us that Neot Kedumim was a "Biblical Garden" so I was thinking that it was going to be a botanical garden of sorts. I was wrong. Neot Kedumim is more of a nature reserve. What they have done there is grow all of the plants there that are mentioned in the Bible. I think that there are over 600 plant species referenced in the Bible, and they have almost every one of them planted there. In addition to the plants they also have sheep and goats. One of the first things we did there was attempt to herd the sheep and the goats. It wasn't too difficult because we were a large group of students, but the animals were stubborn at times. The goats were a little more rebellious than the sheep. They would just stop to eat some grass and refuse to move for a bit while we were trying to get them to the designated area. I understand a little better now how we as 'sheep' can just stop to do our own thing which results in us not doing what the 'shepherd' has in mind. At the end they had us separate the sheep from the goats which wasn't too difficult.
So far this semester we have done a couple of things outside of our class to learn more about Jewish religion and culture. With a group of students I went to an Orthodox Synagogue on a Friday night to welcome in the Sabbath. It was hard to follow along because everything was in Hebrew. It was similar to my experience at the Western Wall in that it was very interesting to see how others worship. There was a sermon but most of the service was spent singing prayers. We also had a Passover Seder meal which is the meal that Jews have at Passover to remember the Exodus. A good comparison is that the Passover Seder is like Thanksgiving Dinner but with more religious significance and you have to read the story of the Exodus before eating. A week ago we had an Israeli Folk Dancing night at the center. Someone came in and taught us a bunch of different dances. The closest comparison I can think of is line dancing. It was way fun. In Jerusalem there is a Holocaust Memorial called Yad Vashem. It was a good experience to have. My favorite parts of the museum were the tributes to "the Righteous among the Nations" (non-Jews who without compensation saved Jews from the Holocaust). One thing that disappointed me about the museum was that they hardly mentioned the other 6 million non Jewish people that died.
I'm sure a bunch of you have heard about the 1967 Six Day War. In that war the Israelis gained a lot of territory and part of that war was fought here when Israel took all of Jerusalem. Ammunition Hill is where part of that fighting happened and they know have a museum there. It was cool to go there because they had a model of the city of Jerusalem that they projected the troop movements on as we watched a movie about the war. Out in the park they still have the trenches where the fighting took place. A semi-related site that we visited was the Separation Wall. The Separation Wall was built after the second intifada (when all of the suicide bombs were occurring about a decade ago). This wall was built in between the Israelis and Palestinians to deter the violence. The wall is 25ft tall and made of solid concrete.
This last free day was one of the most relaxing. We went to Ein Kerem which is the place where John the Baptist was born. There is a church to commemorate his birth. There is another church to commemorate the meeting of Elizabeth and Mary. The town is right out side of Jerusalem. The best part of the town was how quite it was. Jerusalem is so loud and busy.
This last week we finished a lot of our classes. We had finals for Israel, Palestine, and Hebrew. I'm glad that is over.
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