Rak b'yisrael (only in Israel)

Sorry for my delay in posting now that I'm ba'aretz (in the land - aka Israel) - this is really the first afternoon of free time that I've had since arriving! I won't try to detail the whole last week, but basically I've been getting used to my classes, setting up my apartment, and adjusting to the 7 hour time change! Here's what I'll be taking for the semester:

Talmud - Masechet (volume/tractate) Rosh Hashanah until "achrei hachagim" (after the holidays) and Masechet Ketubot for the rest of the semester which is about marriage (ketubot are Jewish marriage contracts)

Chumash (Torah) - The book of Shemot (Exodus)

Biblical Hebrew Grammar

Parshat HaShavua - the weekly Torah portion

Halakha - Jewish law and practice

The Social Justice track - looking at Jewish texts about tikkun olam - the concept of repairing the world - and reflecting on the reality of our lives and how we can work to improve the world. This isn't just a class - we'll go on field trips, listen to guest speakers who work w/ social justice organizations in Israel, and head up Tuesday afternoon volunteering projects.

Hasidut - the "spiritual" side of Judaism, for lack of a better term - taking a multidisciplinary approach to learning about this sect of Judaism through story, song, and spiritual debriefing with a chevruta (study partner)

Women and Halakha - I'm taking this class at the Conservative Yeshiva both b/c I'm really interested in the material and b/c I wanted to have a connection over there, something a bit different from Pardes. This'll be continuing for the whole year, and we'll cover all of the different topics concerning women and Judaism - modesty, prayer, sexuality - the whole gamut. I'll probably be debriefing about that course on here a lot.

I've also been waking up at 5:30 every morning to go run, which has been tough b/c it's hard to get to bed early at night, but hopefully if I can keep this up I'll really start my day off right.

Finally (for now) - I'm living w/ two other Pardes girls, Shira and Joanne, who are really great, and we've been working on collecting furniture and dishes and things for our rather unfurnished apartment. Today I made an announcement at Pardes that my roommates and I were looking for a refrigerator, and a friend gave me the name and number of a guy who does a lot of used furniture dealing. We took a cab over to his place tonight, around 7pm, and we arrived on this dark, narrow street where we couldn't even find the number of the place that he told us. We were expecting a storefront, but the street was totally residential. I called Shai, the dealer, and asked him where to go, and he said, "Oh, I'm not home, but just go up the stairs in front of you and go down the hall - I left the door open so you could look at the stuff." Sure enough, we pushed his door open and found an apartment with tons of stuff packed in, and he said over the phone, "Everything's for sale - just tell me what you're interested in!" We picked out the fridge (which was pretty messy but he promised he'd clean it out before delivering it), a coffee table, a washing machine, and a mirror, all for pretty cheap. But only in Israel do independent appliance dealers sell stuff out of their homes without even being there to make the sale. Wild.