My D'var

Hey World,

So the moment you've all been waiting for...maybe.

Yeah so here is the link to the video for my d'var Torah: http://sharing.theflip.com/session/da351510cb5bc5643d1a0619969d1e1a/video/42014841

After watching it myself (which was quite painful, it's weird to see yourself on video), I think it was decent. I could nit pick, but I won't do that here. But yeah the message is something that is really important to me. It is summed up by the line in my d'var "Reform Judaism gives us a choice but it shouldn't make the choice for us" (or something like that). I think that as Reform Jews (sorry if this is not something that concerns you) we have these choices and the opportunity to make really meaningful choices, and instead we just do what is common reform practice, whatever that means. We need to challenge ourselves and I think we will gain so much from doing so.

Ok the end of that...let me know what you think!?

So yeah today was our last day of classes for this semester. It's pretty crazy. It didn't really hit me that we were in the last week of classes until like yesterday. I do feel accomplished to some degree that I made it through the semester (not counting finals of course). I've been thinking about the semester and reflected. What a ride, I was all over the place. oy. I feel pretty good about it overall. I still have some frustrations with my classes, but I do think I did the most I could in my power to give myself the opportunities academically that I wanted.

I stayed up late last night to finish a bible paper so I'm pretty tired. It was an interesting subject but we had to write it in Hebrew. The actual writing part wasn't a huge pain, but TYPING in Hebrew was super annoying. I need some mavis beacon teaches typing Hebrew style haha.

Yesterday during Israel seminar we went to the Ades synagogue in Jerusalem, a syrian synagogue (Aleppo). Attached to this synagogue there is a piyut school, which helps train people to sing in this certain style. I am explaining this horribly...So piyyutim are these religious (Jewish) songs and there are lots of complicated melodies and scales that are associated with them that this synagogue uses and helps train people. The guy who was telling us about it says that each shabbat has a different scale associated with it (there are over 100), and it takes years to learn. He also sang to us examples of different scales and different piyyutim. It was soo beautiful. This tradition comes from Syria, so it was something I had not been exposed to before as I usually pray in (and am exposed to) ashkenazi style synagogues.

Ok I need to stop procrastinating. work time

Becca

ps thanks Jay for being my editor kinda