Our first class was taught by Rabbi Marcus, who actually spent an hour talking about the Hebrew letter Hay. And the amazing thing is, it was not even a little bit boring. Each letter in the Hebrew language has so much meaning behind it that our hour class was actually just an "introduction." Because we are sort of sitting in on the Mechina program, the students had already been through the first few letters of the alphabet. A few quick and interesting things I can report about the letter Hay is that it is actually made up of a Dalet and a Yud. The Dalet stands for the physicality of the world, and the Yud stands for the spirituality of the world. The letter Hay represents that every physical thing has an internal spirituality. Our teacher also related this to masculinity and femininity. The hebrew word for male and female have the same root, but the word for female has the letter Hay on the end. This shows how women are able to take something physical and bring it to a higher spiritual level. For example, a male might see everything as being outside of himself, and it is a women's job to take things from the outside world and find meaning in it, something women do naturally.
Our second class was from Rebbetzin Heller, who talked about marriage and the relationship between a man and woman. This specific class was on how children are raised by two parents coming from very different backgrounds. The parents need to keep the values they want to teach their children always present, while the consistency with what children do in the home is important, but not quite as important as the values they should be taught. She also talked about how a marriage is about helping your spouse and children grow. Basically, it is a very important to help others grow and experience growth in yourself when you are in a loving and committed relationship.
Our third class was from Rabbi Kass, who talked a little bit about democracy and Torah nation. I’m not so good with government and politics, but the other students had visited the Knesset the day before and were interested in the topic. Rabbi Kass was saying that he believes a democracy is the “least bad” way to run a country, however it has it’s drawbacks, as does any other form of government. According to the Torah, the Torah nation (when the Messiah comes) will actually be a monarchy with a supreme court, made up of Torah scholars. So the “King” will be somewhat limited in decisions based on the most scholarly people in the nation. I had never talked about anything like this before, so it was interesting to me, although a bit hard to understand.
Lastly, we had Rabbi Leff, who is actually the head of the Mechina program at Neve. His class was on how every action in the world has good or bad potential. Actions are unbiased, but it is the associations with these actions that are considered good or bad. It was interesting to me because I remember Bayla telling me a few times before the concept of how everything that has great potential for good also has great potential for evil. Some of his examples included killing someone else. According to the torah, it is okay to kill someone in self-defense. If someone is going to kill you, you should instead kill them. In addition, if a fetus is putting a mother in danger, the fetus should be aborted instead of the mother being harmed. This led to a very interesting conversation that I will not go into right now! Another example was giving charity, usually perceived as a good thing to do. However, the act of giving charity can be associated with bad things, like giving charity to a know terrorist organization, obviously not so good.
After Neve classes, we hurried off the Ceasaria, which was about an hour away. We went to the ruins that are amazingly preserved there from the early Roman era. We watched a video about the land and how it changed over the years, and then we went and saw the ruins. It was amazing how even the intricate tiling in the ancient bathhouse was still there from thousands of years ago. Walking around the ruins was an amazing experience, especially because it was all on the water, so the view was beautiful. It was a bit rainy but that did not stop us! We of course did some shopping in the area. There was a really cool jewelry shop and also a driedel store in the area that were fun to look in. We eventually left and headed back to Jerusalem for dinner, where we got soup and salad. Perfect for the cold day. Then some of us got coffee from Aroma (where they also give you a little chocolate with your coffee, what could be better?).
The last activity was an amazing class given by Gerald Schroeder, who is an incredibly brilliant scientist and physicist (he got his BS, MS, and PHD from MIT). Anyone that knows me for about five minutes knows that I’m not the biggest fan of math or physics, but this subject, while esoteric, was incredibly interesting (if you could follow along!). He tried to explain to us how science actually works along side the genesis of life according to the torah. I can’t go into too much detail on account of I actually could not understand much of what he was saying. But It related to the fact that it is scientifically known that the world is billions of years old, however the Jewish year is only 5771 (which started at Adam and Eve). The only thing that came before Adam and Eve were the six days of creation, meaning the world should really only be 5771 years old plus six days. So Mr. Schroeder attempted to explain to us how time and space are related in a way that scientifically explains how each of those six days was actually billions of years. The greatest torah scholars have concluded that those six days of creation were actually 24 hours each, just like out workdays. However, it is scientifically known that space is related to time, therefore the hours become longer the faster something is moving. In addition, when the big bang occurred, something was created from nothing. Time and space have actually been physically expanding since the big bang occurred. The first 24 hours of the world really felt like 24 hours, but they were actually billions of years long according to our concept of 24 hours. He ended with saying that everyone knows that energy is neither created or destroyed (so take away the fact that something had to create the big bang in the first place) and focus on the fact that all the energy released from the big bang (literally just light) actually became living breathing, feeling, emotional human beings. Amazing right? Now, if you did not understand a single thing in this last paragraph, don’t worry. You can check out one of Mr. Schroeder’s four published books, Genesis and the Big Bang, The Science of God: The Convergence of Scientific and Biblical Wisdom, The Hidden Face of God: Science Reveals the Ultimate Truth, God According to God: A Physicist Proves We've Been Wrong About God All Along.
So here we are at the end of a long day. Chocolate, popcorn, my amazing girls, and some good music are the perfect things for blog writing. Hope you all enjoyed reading and look forward to another post tomorrow!
Lots of love,
Ashley
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