The B'hai Temple

Today we went to visit the B’hai Gardens – the most famous site in Haifa. It is considered the second-most holy site for the B’nai faith, because its founder is buried here.

The gardens, as you can see, are spectacular. It’s as perfectly manicured and arranged as a Japanese garden. Our guide said that their gardeners literally walk around with measuring tapes and trim the plants and bushes to centimeter-specific guidelines. The architect was a famous guy who also built a prominent temple in India, although, sorry Aaron, I can’t remember which one. I’m sure it is google-able.

Laura, my roommate from Holland, was also on the tour. She and I agreed that the whole place is pretty amazing, but we both had mixed feelings about the amount of money and labor it takes to maintain such a place – and then keeping it basically barricaded away, so it can’t really be enjoyed.

Japanese gardens are places for quiet strolls and silent reflection. At the B’hai Gardens, you can’t go in without a reservation, made several days in advance; then, when you arrive, two tour guides shuttle you through briskly, forbid photographs in all but designated places, and tell you to hurry up and “stay with the group” if you linger too long on a landing. All the grassy areas are roped off, of course, and the few benches dispersed around the gardens are inaccessible. Even drinking the water we were carrying was forbidden, and it was 110 degrees outside.

Eze basa I learned to say today. What a pity.

Laura had a neat idea. Wouldn’t it be cool, she said, if you could enter the gardens and linger as long as you like, and placed discretely on little plagues with inspirational sayings or quotations from the B’hai faith, which one could sit and contemplate.

Yeah, that would have been cool!

Shabbat at the University of Haifa

On the upside, I've learned how to say the sentence "I threw up last night" really well in Hebrew!

Oye. It appears the antibiotics I finally got for ear infections (probably caused by the diving) aren't sitting too well in the ol' stomache.

It's Shabbat here in Haifa, and I'm spending my last weekend in Israel on campus. It tends to be pretty quiet here in general (as most students live off campus), but it is particularly quiet over the weekends. The minimarket shuts down, the computer labs are closed -- even the library shuts its doors, which took me quite by surprise the first time I realized that!

I've been getting some extra Hebrew help from a generous man named Elan, a Hebrew and Arabic professor who is here on campus chaperoning his 10 undergrad students from Baard College in NY. He tells me that the campus life I've seen in Haifa this summer is pretty typical for Israel.

"Israeli students don't start undergrad until they are 20 or 21, after military service, and then once they do, they usually have to work. They don't have the time or luxury to sit around and only study all day, party at night, for four or five years, like happens in the U.S. They have to actually earn money. The fact they are starting college relatively late, they feel very motivated to get through it, get jobs and have families."

A native Israeli, Elan taught Arabic at Tel Aviv University for 20 years before coming to the U.S. 10 years ago. He said working at a U.S. campus was a huge shock to him when he first got there, because of how starkly different the culture was. He was shocked by how much alcohol and drug abuse there was; and by how many kids endlessly party and never really work very hard.

At first, he said, he couldn't believe that any of these kids actually grew up to have real careers and families -- but he's been teaching long enough to know that the majority of them do. "It's a phase, it's a cultural phenomenon that goes on, and fortunately, most of them seem to grow out of it -- but it still sometimes shocks me to see it," he said.

These are all generalizations, of course, but generally speaking, I can really see what he's talking about. Given that he teaches at a university where the annual tuition is $50,000 (as opposed to, say, a state university), I imagine the phenomenon is all the more true there. Then again there is the infamy of CU-Boulder ...

Hiking in the Galilee

Imagine the following:

You sign up for a weekend hiking trip in the northern Galilee with 40 other ulpan students, the majority of whom are somewhat vacuous undergrad students. The beginning of the first day, your throat is scratchy and you have a low-grade headache because of a headcold. Never-the-less, you finish the three-hour hike without too much trouble and make it to the campsite.

Then the waiting begins. For the food to be prepared. For camp to be setup. For the 39 college students to get their act together, which is a little bit like trying to herd cats.

By the time dinner actually starts, your head hurts so bad you can hardly eat. You nibble a bit, then retire early to your sleeping bag, which is basically on a patch of rocks surrounding by a barbed-wire fence -- the Israeli definition of a 'campground'.

Then you writhe around in pain for 45 minutes because of the headache, which is now a full-fledge migraine, before jumping out of your sleeping bag and throwing up all over a bush five times. Nice.

You have a fitful sleep until daybreak, at which time you wake up -- still congested with a sore throat and a headache -- to discover that your Teva walking shoes were apparently close to the pile of vomit, which apparently attracted some little critter who managed to completely gnaw off one of the straps. The strap that actually affixes the shoe to your foot.

If all this were to happen, you actually not feel to bad about bailing on the next day's hike, which turned out to be 12 km over 8 hours in 112 degree heat. That's right, 112 degrees. Two people in my group apparently got sunstroke and barely made it down.

That's what I am told anyway. I spent those eight hours stretched out on the long seat in the back of an air conditioned bus, alternately reading an Isabel Allende book, napping, and getting great Hebrew practice listening to the driver talk about Israeli politics.

All in all, a pretty good day.

Beit Shearim: The Jewish necropolis

Well ... we had our midterm today. And it was brutal. The grammar wasn't hard, but for the text we had to study, I sometimes wondered what language I was even reading. Yeah, it was that bad. I probably have 10 pages of new vocabulary words from my readings in the past two weeks, and all I can say is, if there is anyone out there with a brain that can learn that many vocubulary words at one time -- it isn't me!

Where is Lt. Commander Data when you need him?

Meanwhile, we've had some neat hiking exercisions, and in particular a fantastic trip to Beit Shearim -- burial grounds of many prominent Jews in the centuries after the 2nd Temple fell, most famously Rabbi Yehuda HaNasi, the signator of the Mishna. If you don't know what the Mishna is, put on your SAT hat and think of it like this: New Testament:Christians ... Mishna:Jews

Okay, that's probably an overstatement. But it is the foundational text upon with Talmud and the entire rabbinic tradition of Jewish law (halacha) was built.

But back to the cemetery. It contains thousands of sarcophagi and burial chambers made in carved out limestone caves, surrounded by rolling green hills and trees. It's beautiful. And we were the only group of people there. Most fascinating, the engravings are in a half-dozen languages, in particular Greek, reflecting the many places the interred came from. Apparently, owing to the tradition that Jews buried in Israel will be resurrected first when the messiah comes, wealthy Jews from the diaspora paid to have their bodies shipped here during this period.

One of the burial places is reputed to be that of Yehuda HaNasi's but there is no inscription to prove it. So ... fanciful thinking more than anything.

In the third photo on this webpage, note the beautiful stone menorah carved on the wall in the background. For more neat pictures, visit www.biblewalks.com/Sites/BeitShearim.html

University of Haifa Ulpan

Today we finished our first week of the ulpan. It’s pretty amazing how fast it is going. They run a very organized program here, and unlike Ulpan Akiva in Netanya, they are much stricter about attendance and tardiness. It’s nice actually because in Netanya, there were way too many breaks, and having students trickle in late all the time tended to disrupt the class.

After classes one day, we took a trip to the nearby port city of Akko, famous for its Crusader/Byzantine/Roman architecture, which includes a lot of cool tunnels and underground arches open for exploration. The old city is largely Arab now, and very poor. The living conditions for the humans were pretty sparse, and as for the condition of the animals that were variously left out dying in the heat, and chained up in the steaming sun without any shade, etc. etc. – well, that is probably enough said.

Akko is probably the most famous for being the beginning and the end of the Silk Road to China. Being a port city, it was from here that the silk was transported across the Mediterranean into Europe. It’s also the place where Alexander the Great established a mint in 333 BCE. In 1799, it was still a very important port technically part of the Ottoman Empire but in truth being ruled by a corrupt Arab regime, operating as a fiefdom. Napoleon tried to conquer the city but was repelled by the Arab leader and his henchmen.

Yesterday, there was another optional trip after classes taking a hike in the Carmel Nature Park; an entrance to the park is right by the university. Our guide said it the largest nature reserve in Israel, and we heard some hyenas howling toward the end of our walk. The trail was pretty steep and rocky – Haifa being built on the side of a mountain and all – and it took over three hours to travel just a couple of miles.

About 250 students are participating in the July ulpan, about 90 percent of them are American. This is a very different makeup than Ulpan Avika, where over half of the students were new olim (immigrants), largely from France and Russia.

I have a private dorm room that shares a living space and tiny “kitchen” (if you can even call it that) with five other women. One is French, one is Dutch, two are American and one is a local Israeli student finishing up her undergrad year in psychology.

One of the Americans is also a rabbinical student, studying at Leo Beck, the rabbinical school in Britain. What we all have in common (except for the Israeli undergrad) is that we are all “older” than the majority of other students, who are largely undergrads. I will say one thing: After sitting around and listening to them make their endless stream of plans every day to go out to funky restaurants, salsa dancing venues, art-house theatres, Tori Amos concerts in Tel Aviv etc. etc., it’s really rather nice being an “old fogie”. I pretty much couldn’t care less about any of these things anymore, and am perfectly content to study quietly and go to bed early each night!