G-D

I personally do believe in G-D. Whenever I pray I pray to G-D and I have personal conversations. A lot of people in the town I live in think that I’m crazy and some people have gone so far to try and explain to me why I shouldn’t believe that there is a G-D. I think the main reason why I believe in G-D is because I haven’t known anything else for the rest of my life. There is definitely a sense of comfort in praying to G-D and having someone to talk to in a sense. I’m not sure as of now what G-D’s role in our lives is. If G-D has a part in why bad things happen to good people or why there are Holocausts. It could be that there is a G-D out there listening, but G-D does not have the power to make miracles, or it could be that G-D is seeing how we deal with difficult situations. 

While studying the Tanakh in Jewish History, we learned that there were times were G-D was not always there for Am Yisrael and even tried to teach them a lesson at one point. There was a time in the Tanakh when we saw all of G-Ds great miracles and then the transition to G-D becoming a quiet presence. We see G-D going through different phases of power and its really important to question the role G-D plays in our lives in a personal matter. Especially during the Holocaust, it was hard for people to continue believing in G-D. Many Jews at the time were wondering how G-D could let such a terrible thing happen to the Jewish people, and thus stopped believing in one altogether. I think that our upcoming trip to Poland may have an interesting turn on my relationship with G-D. I think it is important to not stray from my beliefs too much because I will be so immersed in what I am learning, but it is also important to keep on questioning my beliefs. If I came back from Israel with the exact same beliefs that I came with, I do not think that it would be a successful trip. 

Talmud

What seemed like an ages ago, I took a class at my Religious School regarding the Talmud and how it can be applied both when it was written and today. Today in Jewish History, we learned about the Talmud. The Mishna is the written version of the Oral law that Yehuddah HaNasi wrote down in 200 CE, and the Gemara is the first set of commentary done on the Mishna. Together, the Mishna and the Gemara make the Talmud. As we said today, all of the different Rabbis who commented on the Mishna have different interpretations of the oral law. In my class at my synagogue, it was really hard to connect with the examples that were given to reflect an issue revenant at the time the Talmud was first written down. When the examples were things such as, what do you do if your neighbors sheep dies or is injured when you’re borrowing it, it’s hard for us to decide because we have not been placed in similar situations. However, we then applied that same situation in a more modern form. The most equivalent version of this in modern times is to consider what should be done if you borrow a friends phone, and you break it while using it or return it a worse condition than you received it. Questions similar to these are made for us to question, and most of our answers were based off of the morals that we were raised on. Very often, we found out that all of our morals seemed to be related to Judaism in some way, but we also thought that many of the Rabbis interpretation seemed crazy, even for an ancient civilization. The main point of the eight week class, was to see how we interpreted Jewish laws and how relevant they still are to our everyday lives. 

Why Obama is the only problem in the Obama-Netanyahu conflict.

The beginning of this article really pin pointed how much pressure is placed on politicians globally. During Obama's first speech to Cairo during his first year of his presidency, he  briefly touched on Israel. While doing this, he happened to make the mistake of saying that the reason for the Mass Aliyah was because of the Holocaust, not because of the historical connection to the land. I interpreted this as Obama trying to appeal to a different country, because at the time, compared to the other countries in the Middle East, Israel was doing fairly well. I also accredit this to Obama also being human. Although he has many people helping him write his speeches, he is still a human that makes mistakes and can accidentally offend groups of people just like everyone else. As an American reading this article, I felt slightly offended. While I do not agree with all of Obama's policies, this article is extremely one sided and felt uncomfortable that this article was specifically targeting Obama. 
To state that this article was an understanding of the deep seeded conflict that lies between Netanyahu and Obama is a misconception. This article barley touched on Netanyahu's flaws, particularly, the most recent controversy of Netanyahu's address to congress. In the article that I read earlier in the week interviewing Yair Lapid, he stated that while Netanyahu's speech was very good, the timing of it ruined the whole thing. Because the speech occurred two weeks before the Israeli elections, it seemed as if Netanyahu's intentions were mainly driven by political reasons. While the speech was extremely effective, the way he went about doing it was very wrong and took away from the speech itself. Had Netanyahu waited a few weeks after the elections and asked Obama instead of going behind his back, he would have probably earned a lot more respect and understanding of why this issue is so important not just on a political level but because it potentially threatens the lives of many people. In the coming week, we will see how effective Netanyahu's speech was as it could easily be reflected similarly in the polls. Netanyahu can either be seen as the hero rebel who went against the US president to speak about an issue extremely important to him, or the jerk who does whatever he wants. 

What Did Jesus Do?

A few weeks ago in Jewish history class, we were talking about interfaith marriages and how they play a role in our society. My mom is Christian and my dad is Jewish, so if we are going by technicalities, no orthodox person would consider me Jewish. To me, this is so frustrating. I don't think that just because my mom isn't Jewish, that it means that I am not. I was raised Jewish and I am extreermely active in the Jewish community.  While my mom never converted to Judaism, she attends services with us all the time and is very active in our Jewish lives. She knows all of the prayers in Hebrew and even made it a point to learn how to read Hebrew a few years ago. This is relevant to what we are doing now because we have just started our unit on Christianity and I realized that I really don't know anything about that religion that my mom was raised by. I think that this in a way is unfair of me, that I never really asked her that much or took the time to learn what moral values she was raised on. Instead, she adopted our culture. I really like that EIE is exposing us to the other religions as well and teaching us their involvement and attachment to Israel.

Massada

Michael Oren

I think that there is something about Michael Oren that I can connect with personally and on the level of the Jewish people as a whole. For starters, he grew up in West Orange, New Jersey, which is about thirty minutes from where I live, and I have been there quite a few times for soccer games.I think that the decision he made to make Alyiah was also a very difficult decision that in some ways can be connected to what we are doing. Oren decided that he no longer wanted to be a U.S. citizen and that he wanted to move to Israel without knowing anyone here. He left his whole life behind to come to a land of freedom from the bullying he faced in his youth. I think that this is really admirable and I know that after EIE there will be more than a few people that will seriously consider making Aliyah. It is very impressive that Oren is running to be a member of the Kinesset and if he makes it into a coalition which is a likely situation, he will be one of only a few other people to be an American-born member of the Kinesset.

Massada

Waking up at 4am to climb Masada was an amazing experience that I will treasure for the rest of my life. I have always been considered a very competitive person in various aspects of life. For me and my competitive nature, getting to the top of Masada before everyone else would have been something that I would have done a few months ago. Over the past month of being here, I have realized that making friendships is more important than being the first to get to the top. Instead of going as fast as I could, I waited and instead hiked a bit slower than I usually would to be with a friend. I know this might not sound like a huge change, but to me, I considered this a huge step.

 

Along with the personal significance that just the climbing of Masada meant to me, learning the history behind the mountain was very important to me as well.  I think that the choice that the Zealots made to kill themselves instead of have the Romans kill them or be enslaved by them shows an enormous amount of bravery. I know that I would never have the courage to be the one that had to kill everyone else. I think that by leaving their food behind to show to the Romans that they were able to sustain a life without them showed some of the Hutspa (guts and sass) that the Jewish people have. While what happened at Masada was up there with some of the most tragic events in Jewish History, the courage displayed by the Jewish people was in a twisted way, amicable.