Tomatoes and Resentment

As usual, I found my morning Hebrew class to be immensely frustrating, annoyed by my own inability to translate everything. Maybe I should've studied for my quiz, and then I would be able to conjugate more than half the verbs... anyway, I was too busy exploring the Old City. I went into study buddy hour to look at Chapter 4 of the Book of Jonah (the story where he gets swallowed by a whale), but my buddy quickly got caught up on other things, aka Israeli-Palestinian conflict policy. Some of the teachers live over 'the green line,' in the West Bank, in settlements protected and provided for by Israel. It bothers me that these settlers don't pay taxes to the Palestinian Authority, since they live in the territory, but the rules around here tend to get a little funky. Not that I think the PA uses tax dollars responsibly - wow, this area gets so taboo so fast. We finished our study and determined that God is very compassionate and forgiving, and we should be toward one another as well. We also talked about God's relationship to non-Jewish peoples, which is incredibly important to recognize and understand in a world where I am often asked why the Jews think they're 'the chosen people' (read: prague, day one, walking tour guide). Bottom line: He's everywhere, and He cares about everyone.
Loaded stuff.

On that very religious note, we went to do something more hands-on and less text-based for the afternoon. Judaism in action in the form of picking tomatoes for poor people through Lekhet, Israel's national foodbank. The last time I was in Israel, we also picked tomatoes, but for an organization with comfortable t-shirts called Table-to-Table. On the way there, we had a contest to guess what we would be picking, and I guessed tomatoes because that's the only thing I knew for sure grew in Israel. I won the contest, and with that, a free Pardes t-shirt! Now I can prove to people I went to school here! After two hours in the most brutal sun, being attacked by thorns and feeling tomato juice squish in my socks (yum.), we retired to the water coolers and headed back to the bus. I have to say, had I not worked in a dining hall for 1000 people this summer, picking and lifting dozens of pounds of sunburnt tomatoes would probably have seemed gross, but it was pretty routine stuff. I got some great shots of me wearing a hat, so now my mom can't tell me I should've worn a hat because I have proof!

We stopped on the way home at a gas station where ice cream seemed to be a most necessary decision. After, we paused by a small man-made pond to do tashlich, a service that is done between Rosh Hashana and Yom Kippur. I remember going to the brook behind Scarsdale Train Station and casting bread crumbs into the water, thinking that it was a symbolic casting away of sins. For lying, a breadcrumb, for being mean to my siblings a breadcrumb, for being selfish, a breadcrumb - and so on. This time, we had no breadcrumb and instead a few mumbly paragraphs of chanted Hebrew I didn't know. I prefer the personal bread toss. It's fun to feed the ducks too. But this 'pond' had no ducks, nor fish, and I had no bread. Oh well. We had some time to reflect on repentance and forgiveness and I thought how nice it would be to not feel resentment toward anyone ever - we did a breathing meditative exercise that was hopefully a first step toward releasing resentment from our minds. Sometimes you'd think I was at hippy camp, not torah school...