This past week marked our one month anniversary since getting to the program. I celebrated a beautiful Sukkot on campus spent by lots of well deserved sleep and rest. Since my last blog post we also celebrated Yom Kippur in Jerusalem. It was a very meaningful and somewhat hard experience due to the 25 hour fast. Also since my last blog post I have adjusted a lot more to the whole Israeli culture and feel a lot more comfortable in the environment and in stores.

One of the biggest parts of the adjustment has been the change to the school schedule. It’s not a difference such as having classes for longer its the difference of my super interesting Israel Studies class. We have the class every Sunday through Thursdays for almost three hours. We are taught by a super passionate and energetic Scotland man named Aubrey.

During the class we have gone in depth about everything in Jewish history. So far in the month we just finished the BCE area. For example, the structure of the class is to go through a certain point in that time period usually at a certain place and then in the next couple days we go to the place we are learning about and go much more in depth. For example, we learned about King Shaul and about the prophet Shmuel who appointed him. The day after learning about that we went to the place where King Shaul killed himself of his own sword.

I go to a Jewish school and have been since kindergarten. That means that I have been learning the Jewish history for a very long time. What I appreciate the most about the trips is that even though I’ve learned a little bit about the places this experience helps me learn them so much more in depth and understand all the geography during the times of the events.

It’s a really cool experience to be able to go on a trip every week to learn about our religions history. It’s also not just for classes we go on trips. We go on trips during Holidays and this past Simchat Torah we went to a Yemenite synagogue and we danced our hearts out with the Torah and it was probably one of my favorite parts of this trip! I’m really excited to see what’s in the future for our trips.