Perhaps I've tried to rationalize my new sleep addiction, but my point (reads "unsolicited advice to all overseas travelers") is that melatonin actually seems like a mild but effective strategy for overcoming sleep issues. Having arrived Sunday night for Monday morning class (in which you know I was attentive), I was pretty well on Israel time by about Wednesday and could begin devoting my time to...adjusting to a lot of other things.
When you enter a new phase and pace of life, for certain things to need acclimation comes as no surprise. Hearing and reading a world in Hebrew and Arabic took adjustment--they are still tiring and will be until I can think in those languages--but of course it was no surprise to find them everywhere. Eating falafels and shawarmas for lunch took days of adjustment for my stomach, but this food too was no surprise. (Other than that the fast food cannot be unhealthy here, "for it is naught but [vegetables]," as the Bard almost said.) Seeing armed soldiers everywhere, especially in commute to or from duty--to my meta-surprise--neither surprised me nor took getting used to.
Getting an American laptop connected to a foreign wall socket and encrypted network was an acclimation of sorts, analogous to possessing pieces from three different puzzles and being expected to turn them into a single picture. And if one puzzle is on the wrong Hertz setting, it buzzes and eventually blows a fuse--an unfortunate shortcoming of French jigsaws from the 1980s. (To give a sense of some of the decisions you may need to make when setting up a computer in a foreign country--as well as anticipate the inevitable "Mr. Fleissner, when will I ever need to use EM physics and cryptography?"--I'll post my multiple-choice electronics quiz designed to prepare people for such an occasion.)
On the other hand, some aspects of Jerusalem came as a surprise but took absolutely no getting used to. Oh my goodness, the climate: it has not rained once, frequent breezes carry cool rather than humid or sandy air, and only a few hours in the afternoon can be characterized as being unpleasantly hot--together culminating in my postponement of trying to get a bicycle, for it is actually pleasant to walk the fifty minutes from school to בית הכרם (Beit HaKerem, literally "House of the Vineyard"). (The Jerusalem-area weather site ירושמיים, on which it is possible to witness the early fall's constancy, is an untranslatable play on the city's name ירושלם and the word for "heavens, sky" שמים.)
Then there are those aspects of life that come as a surprise and require acclimation. If I had to sum it up in a single sentence, every culture living here seems to thrive on contradiction, know that this is the case, and enjoy it. My top five:
5. It is easy, routine, and sometimes necessary to cross the tram tracks. Out of sight of any crosswalk. Having come from New Jersey after the summer when a man fell asleep and then onto the tracks (zeugma!), I was slow to warm up to this habit. That said, everyone else seems content to use the tracks as a bike lane, so it's hard to tell what counts as dangerous here.
4. Christians take Sunday off, Jews take Saturday (and apparently all of Friday) off, but Muslims do not have a weekly day of rest. What was confusing at first is that, unlike everyone else, Muslim shopkeepers still keep shop even when they are closed, as they are five times a day for prayer. If you try to buy something in this time, they say they'll sell it to you in fifteen minutes.
3. People's names mean weird stuff, and everyone
seems to know it. Out of respect for anonymity, names like Myrtle and Sine (of the previous post) have been changed, but the friend Sine really does have a name as strange as the English "sine." And everyone
is cool with that. In one of Sine's many visits, she told of a woman בד "Bad"--apparently nonsensical in Hebrew (where it is a kind of
fabric) and certainly anti-sensical in English--who actually encountered difficulty on an English practicum because she hadn't been anticipating the question "'Bad' is an unusual name; how did you get it?"
2. Although it isn't surprising to have unspoken physical boundaries (e.g., a men's section and a women's section at the West Wall), I am surprised to find them unmarked (in any language). Most strikingly, one avenue in the Old City's Muslim quarter can be entered by non-Muslims, so long as they do so from the other end. No sign, no guard, and in fact no overt indication that this was the case made me wonder how this was even enforced...and where I had already misstepped.
1. Kosher rules get their own section--not because Kosher itself is over-the-top, but because of the frequency with which people appear to be trying to circumvent the rules and amplify their purview at once. Sine comes over a lot--living in a Russian Jewish neighborhood, I cannot tell if everyone's frequent visits are a Russian thing, a Jewish thing, a Russian Jewish thing, or an everywhere-but-America thing--and she has explained to me what appear to be some of her favorites:
- The prohibition on boiling an animal in its mother's milk has famously been generalized to one against mixing beef and dairy. The expected circumvention of mixing
species--beef with goat cheese, for instance--is also, I think
reasonably, prohibited because the appearance of eating
beef with dairy would look like a sin to others and thereby set an
erroneous standard that this is okay. Also logically, because a fish
does not produce milk, there is no harm in combining fish with any meat
or dairy. The weird part is birds: even though non-mammalian chickens do
not produce milk, their meat cannot be mixed with milk. Even more
strangely, chicken meat can be mixed with (chicken) eggs, even though the spirit of mixing parent and child is clearly violated here.
- Work is not permitted on the Sabbath, of course; for less obvious reasons, tearing paper along perforated lines--including toilet paper is also forbidden. (I mistakenly thought that tearing paper must be considered some sort of work, but an Orthodox classmate has since corrected me.) Expected workarounds like tearing toilet paper somewhere other than along the line, or purchasing pre-ripped toilet paper, are apparently common. But so is redefining "tearing" as "holding in your hands, moving your left hand to the left, and moving your right hand to the right" (apparently, for I can think of no other way to justify what comes next). Crossing your arms while holding toilet paper allows you to move your left hand right and your right hand left, and miraculously the paper is torn. (Note that, of course, you did not tear the toilet paper according to this method.)
- Because any lifting is considered work, the commonest exception to "no work on Shabbat" is that you may
lift objects within your house (because you frequently must). Now,
since families frequently congregate at each other's houses on this day,
how can you take food or infants across town? The solution in many large Jewish communities is to surround the city with a giant wall, so that the city as a whole
may count as a residence. Well, a wall is pretty expensive, so how about a
single fishing line? That's right, Jerusalem has an עירוב eruv
that serves the purpose of a wall (despite not being made out of wall
material--but more on what counts as "wall" below), so that the whole
city may count as a single domicile. Accept at least this much, for it's the
normal part. Reasonably, as I think, everyone in the city
must agree to the presence of the eruv. (In Jerusalem, because the large number of
non-Jews would probably never give consent to living "under the same
roof," the government has of course never asked permission lest someone exercise veto power.) Suppose
that a single man in the city objects to the eruv; if he dies, then is
the eruv a wall, or must you ask his son? (Bonus: In this scenario, are you allowed
on Shabbat to lift the corpse of the man who alone objected to the
eruv?)
- In an ironic tale (which sounds, from its telling, like it evolved from a children's etiology), wolves are a threat to deer because of the deer:
since deer frequently look around when they eat, they appear as predators and scare the wolves. Out of fear, a wolf therefore attacks a
deer's heart (לב lev), killing the deer. People who do not want
to be attacked by wolves (because people look like deer...?) therefore wear a strap of leather over their
heart, called a לבוב levuv. Now, suppose you are a deer-keeper, and you also
have your deer wear לבובים levuvim over their hearts to protect them from the
wolves. Because wearing clothing (for animals) obviously counts as
lifting objects, and therefore as doing work, what should you do on Shabbat?
Do you sin by keeping the levuvim on the deer, or do you risk their
lives by following God's law? (As Sine confirmed in this very real conversation, there
never arise the obviating counterarguments that (1) levuvim do not
actually protect anyone from wolves and (2) people do not actually keep
deer.)
- The holiday סוכות Sukkot is famous for the construction of סוכות sukkot, which effectively means "temporaries" in the sense of those ad hoc buildings on cinderblocks that ironically never get taken down. Although the respective materials for the walls and roof of a סוכה sukkah are typically loose wood and leaves, in order for the building to be transient ("you are supposed to be able to see the stars through the roof"), anything that preserves its transience (yes that makes sense) is apparently acceptable. As you might expect, this could reasonably yield all manner of Ship-of-Theseus-esque issues, since the structure is built to be ephemeral and unstable but is supposed to last seven days. Here's the question, though, which beat my expectations: If one of your walls is a (live) camel, and this wall wanders off, do you still have a sukkah? (When the question was posed to me and the short-lived purpose of the building was explained, I suggested that one might as well make the whole house out of birds or winds; Sine said that I would have been considered very wise in the schools of these teachings.)
