Battle Royale

Not sure what a blog should be like because I have never read one but here goes--Having settled quite nicely into my dorm room and, for the first time, falling asleep when it was dark, I awoke at 3am to the sound of scratching.  At first, I thought it was a rat in the wall but then I remembered that all of the walls were concrete.  I had heard a similar but softer noise earlier in the night but thought nothing of it.  This time it was much louder .  Then I remembered I had a bag of pretzels in the room.  I flipped on the light and peered into the corner from which the noise was emanating.  I couldn't see anything at first so I moved in for a closer inspection but not before grabbing a shoe for protection.  There, on the floor, was a massive cockroach, (4 inches long) trying his hardest to break into my bag of pretzels and from the looks of it, having little luck.  I slammed the shoe down on the bag, destroying my snacks but the cockroach was already hiding behind my backpack under my bed before my arm had started its downward motion.  I lifted all of my other luggage onto the desk and bed, creating a clear floor for the makeshift arena floor.  It was me or the cockroach.  I snatched the backpack and flung it on the bed and for a couple of minutes, all hell was loosed upon the room, totally by me.  I was jumping around, yelping, and pounding my shoe on the floor.  The thought of it running up my leg was more than I could bear and so my offense was not very effective.  Finally I finished the job but not before I had awakened my roommates and probably half of the building.  Mordechai (the name of the cockroach which my friend decided upon, post-mortem) has found his temporary resting place in my garbage can.  I didn't sleep for the rest of the night. Lesson one: no food in the bedroom.

I have just finished my second day of Hebrew classes and I have the alphabet down.  All twenty two letters and their corresponding sounds.  A small victory, but an important one.  Now, it's just the small task of learning all of the words.  The interesting thing about Hebrew is that it is more than 3500 years old so it has gone through several phases which means that some sounds don't exist anymore but the letters remain.  Therefore, there are several letters which have the exact same sounds and so the only way to know which letter to use in each case is to memorize them.  There is some help in that some letters are reserved for biblical words, others for Rabbinic hebrew (mostly the language of the Talmud) and now there is modern Hebrew, which was reinvented when Jews began immigrating to what is today Israel.  Thus, words like television, pizza, telephone, university and many others sound virtually the same as they do in english.

Finally, Israel is, frankly, a quite amazing place.  Those of us from the United States consider our country to be a sort of melting pot of cultures.  Not as noticeable in Iowa but Postville, the Amanas and the influx of spanish speaking immigrants is a testament to this.  However, if America is a melting pot, then Israel is an industrial blender.  This seems like common sense considering Israel is a young country and the 'in-gathering of exiles' was and is a process of assimilating Jews from all over the world.  But there's just something about running into people whose personal history is tied to places like Muldova, Spain, America, Macedonia, Greece, Finland, Czech Republic, Turkey, Canada, Austria, Germany, England, South Africa, Ethiopia, Russia, Poland, and Sweden.   Yesterday, for example, I met a fruit vender who fluently spoke nine languages.  This is not uncommon.  From what I can tell, there is a different mentality here.  It stems both from a sense of their place in the world and their connection to it; an interconnectedness not with just other people through blood and religion but to other lands and histories.  This is also the cause of much division within this country.

Shalom