So Right

This past week we had the first two days of classes. Wednesday was our Israel seminar day. Every week we are going to look into a different aspect of Israeli culture and Israeli history. From what it sounds like, we are not going to be examining Israel in only historic perspective, but also sociological and economic perspectives. It really is going to be like a crash course in Israeli Social Studies.

I really like the class grouping I'm in. It's going to be an interesting year.

Thursday morning, we started with student led morning services. This was the first one that two of our classmates lead and chanted from Torah. It was really cool to hear some of my peers and was a reminder of exactly why I'm here. Then there were the classes.

First was Hebrew which was a shorter version of what we were doing all summer. But now we're in a classroom! Before we had a classroom adjacent to the Library, but now we have a room up by all of the other classes. Yea!

My second class of the day was Bible. We learned about the class and how it will for for a little bit of the class. Then we started to get into it. We were instructed to look into at Genesis 1:1 - 2:4a; the days of creation. Although a little more guidance would have been helpful, it was so much fun just diving into the text. My Chevruta Partner (this refers to a style of learning Torah that is two people looking and discussing the text together) had actually written his BA Thesis on a few of the verses from this section. It was really cool talking with him about it.

The class opened into a discussion that we talked about what we found interesting, difficult or anything else. Some of my thoughts were echoed by other students and it was really fun talking about this text for the hour. This seems so basic, but this is really why I'm here. Learning these things are a lot of fun. After two days, I know this is the right place.