A Day to Give Thanks

“I am thankful for the miracle that turned dinosaurs into dinner,” said one of the people in attendance at last Thursday’s thanksgiving dinner.  By candle light sat a family of some twenty-odd young adults, North Americans, South Americans, Israelis and Europeans.  This group of students had gathered together in the house of a kind hearted friend, and far from home I found a true representation of thanksgiving.

The word “Thanksgiving” means (unsurprisingly) to give thanks, generally to a higher power.  While some people give thanks daily with either grace, or birkat, nearly any family can tell you what thanksgiving is.  It may be an American holiday, but it is also an international sentiment.  What people are thankful for, however, can vary considerably.  Many times I’ve sat to a thanksgiving feast and enjoyed delicious food, greedily stuffing myself like a fowl.  Last year I know I was grateful for having a few friends at my apartment to celebrate, especially as I felt a growing detachment with State College.  This year’s celebration put a markedly new twist on the holiday.

We were not sitting by candle light because we had lost power.  We were not sitting by candlelight because we were performing any sort of Séance.  We were sitting by candle light because the host’s family has a tradition.  After the meal, everyone gathers with an unlit candle.  The first person lights his and speaks for a moment about what he is thankful for.  After, he lights his neighbors candle with his own and the light is passed from one to the next, each given a moment to tell what they are thankful for.

I thought of all the great things I have been given in the last year, so many times I received exactly what I needed at just the right time.  A call from a friend just to say hello, or a letter in the mail.  “What I am thankful for,” I said when I held a bright candle in my hand, “are the two most important things in life.  My friends and family.”  I have received so much support in my adventures, in my everyday life and I have been gifted with unanticipated generosity of both old friends and new.  I just wanted to mention that and thank you all for how much you mean to me.

Now please allow me to back track and gloat for a moment what a resourceful handful of young adults were able to create.  The atmosphere was warm and a blur of a number of languages.  At the end of a school week, it was a wonderful reprieve.  There were two large and juicy turkeys, sweet potatoes and mashed potatoes, corn on the cob, stuffing and gravy.  In addition, just imagine homemade apple and pumpkin pies.  There was more than enough food for all.

Not only did I spend a wonderful time with these great people, but I managed to spend a little of thanksgiving with my family back home as well.  I’m sure everyone has done it, on thanksgiving or some other holiday.  I was supposed to call earlier, but I had not imagined the thanksgiving feast here would run to midnight.  I reached my family after they had sat to eat, and enjoyed telling all of them about the evening, school and my future plans (most of which are currently uncertain).

When I am more confident in where things are heading I’ll be sure to commit them with electronic ink, but for now suffice to say that I have a couple exciting things I’m looking forward to. We shall see which hatch from their eggs, which to survive infancy and which fly war and wide.

A Week without Adventure

There is a cliché, "time flies when you're having fun."  While it may be true, it is more specified than required.  Time flies.  Period.  I remember at my last job, after I was hired, and before I knew it, I had been working there a year.  I could attribute the passage of time to any number of things, but that would just be for the benefit of categorization, and no real other benefit.  The time slipped past and there was just so much I tried to catch.

I didn't accomplish everything I wanted; in fact I think I have a decent laundry to-do list after the masters degree.  But thankfully, regardless of the situation, I have always found myself supported by the most wonderful family and friends.  Perhaps I have not always realized that, but looking back it's pretty clear.  Above all else, the people in our lives are the most important part of it.  That said, I reflect, almost daily, on how very difficult it is to keep in familiar touch a world away.  This blog was established in part to address that problem; however, going to school is not nearly as interesting as going on trips throughout the country and learning their history.

Despite how quite I might be, and the lack of breaking news, consider this my firm proclamation: I am here and I am quite alive.  I am also quite a bit cold.  Would you have imagined I'd say that?  I don't remember it getting this cold this early last time I was here.  It's also been raining quite a bit, but I urge all of you to keep sending your wishes and rain this way!  Getting out of the rain last Friday, I had dinner with a few friends and it was absolutely delicious.  It is wonderful to sit and eat with friends after a long, cold, hard week.  It lights a warmth in the heart that goes beyond food or a warm house.  It is, simply put, a rekindling of spirit, a invigorating engagement after a week of near seclusion, surrounded by texts dry enough to spontaneously ignite.  Of course, despite how much we may grip about our studies and papers, they invariably manage to make their way into the table conversation. 

Speaking of food, and being grateful, Thanksgiving is just around the corner.  I can only assume my friends and family in the United States have already had your fill of Jingle Bells and other assorted Christmas carols.  I wonder if it's as ridiculous elsewhere in the world?  I remember last year in SC, Turkey Day went pretty well.  I made the same mistake I did as an undergrad and underestimated the time needed to thaw the turkey, and a twenty-two pound turkey does take a while to thaw.  I think there were at least seven or eight people over at my apartment, and we had a fantastic time.  This year I will not be cooking the turkey; however, I will be attending a thanksgiving dinner, and there is a strong possibility of pumpkin pie.  So come next week, you can be sure there will be a little on our Israeli Thanksgiving dinner.

I just want to leave you, as I normally try, with a thought.  I find that it is easy in any given day to get swept up in the river of events.  It's like trying to ford a river, and regardless of how shallow it appears, you'll always lose something, just don't lose yourself.  Instead of creating a massive list of things to do, pick one thing, right now, and make sure it's done by the time you go to bed.  The saying is attributed to Mark Twain, "Do something every day that you don't want to do; this is the golden rule for acquiring the habit of doing your duty without pain."

Consistency: A Promise

I sat down last night, intent on writing a short update.  I wanted to tell you all that I would do my utmost to be more consistent, to set Sunday or Monday as 'update day,' on which you could expect a weekly report.  Perhaps it would not be as thought provoking as some of the more major issues, but you wouldn't have to guess and come back a dozen times only to find nothing new has been written.

Quite a bit has happened in the recent past, specifically things far outside my control, that I still haven't quite found the words to describe.  Yet, I feel like nothing of any real significance has occurred here.  I am a student.  Studies are currently my life, and as one may expect, the classes range from exceptional to average.  What will follow may be a bit dry, but I was asked by a few of your about my classes, so I hope to include at least a basic gist here of what I am up to.  Among my courses, there is a considerable amount of overlap.  The topics of my courses, their 'tagline titles' if you will, are international armed conflict and international law, conflict resolution, decision making, strategic aspects of International relations, deterrence, research methodology, Hebrew and two courses in Arabic (literary and Jerusalem dialect).  I am also in a few workshops which meet less frequently, but are designed to be more hands on and teach you techniques through experience rather than lectures and tests.  The only workshop I have attended so far is a media workshop that works on public speaking.  It is quite a lot of fun.

I have a hard time imagining it's much different elsewhere.  Despite the fact that Israel is half desert, and you may expect it to be hot all year, it is actually getting chilly.  So to my friends still at school in the states, living off campus with roommates, if you are wondering what I'm doing, it's probably something akin to what you are doing.  The main difference is when I bike to school in the morning, I must pass at least a hundred signs, very few of which I can read.  But as far as the classes are concerned, I miss the ability to actually make a schedule, as opposed to taking only the required courses (many of which are only offered once a year).  I'm trying to check out the extracurricular activities I can get myself involved in.  I am also currently working on arranging to go to a dojo to keep training in Shotokan karate.  My roommates have yet to catch me practicing kata in the living room either early in the morning or late at night, but it's bound to happen.  I do hope that I can manage to make it to a dojo around my classes.  I understand that the course is somewhat designed with people who work in mind, but personally, I'd rather start class in the morning, and have the afternoons instead of going till nine most nights.  And with that I will leave you all till next week.

Time: A relection, catching up, and looking ahead

Time is a very precious commodity.  I recall numerous times at Penn State postulating of the effects control of water and resources had on inter-personal relations.  I could bore you all to tears with my previous and current areas of study.  I’m actually rather fascinated by a lot of what I am reading about now.  But I also am realizing, with a twitch that I would use a cliché, how much constraints emphasize the truly valuable things.  So yes, you always want the one you can’t have, you never know what you have until it’s gone, ect.

For anyone who has complained of going to school, to having lots of homework or no time, I recently found out how very lucky I was, and many of my friends, to have gone to school in the United States.  Children here in Israel are in class six days a week.  They do, however, get out early on Friday to be home in time for Shabbat, I believe I was told around 1300 and 1400.  Perhaps it is just some unfortunate schools, I am not sure.  Regardless, aren't you a little happier now that American schools are only open five days a week? 

I was, when I first knew I was going to pursue my MA, expecting the easy life.  Not so many courses, class two or three days a week.  A piece of cake!  A bunch of my friends have been cautioning me otherwise.  And I really should have listened.  They told me that being a graduate student is more than a full time job.  It is like being a student on top of a full time job.  Luckily, I choose to live in the same city as my school partly for that reason.  It really does make life simple, when I am in class five days a week; but, on the downside, it kind of means my whole life is centered in one town.  In that regard, it is kind of like at State, no real reason to ever leave the area and explore.

Speaking of Shabbat and school, I can now say I have finished my first week, almost through with the second.  In some respects it feels just like the bachelors degree.  Some teachers are quite hilarious, others blatantly brilliant and of course the odd one that you really don't know where the class is going (and it turns out that all the notes you took for the class were meaningless).  There is, however, something I discovered that is quite a bit disappointing.  Whereas when I was an undergrad and had four years to complete my degree, I had plenty of time and opportunities to mix and match courses, take many electives that were either for a challenge or pure fun.  There were always opportunities to learn more.  In this masters program, there is no time.  Whether it is due to the one year constraint of the program or perhaps it's the specialized nature of a master’s degree, but I find myself unable to fulfill any interest beyond the curriculum.

I did not want to start with negativity, but I did want to follow up on what I had written previously.  In my previous entry I had said that though people were hopeful, and peace seemed like it may finally be closer, I was skeptical.  One of the reasons why, after such a landmark deal, peace may actually still be far away is that the issue at hand had nothing to do with peace between the two people.  I am happy Gilad Shalit was returned alive, but his situation is not directly connected to the end result of the conflict.  It could actually be argued that neither side wants actual cohesive peace.  This exchange could play out to support such a hypothesis.  By successfully bringing Gilad home, the Israeli government has eased the population's pressure on the government for progress, and the same can be said in Gaza.

On the day I started writing this entry, two weeks ago, at least six rockets were fired from Gaza indiscriminately into Israel.  On the one hand, the rockets that they are using are primitive, unlike the missiles the United States deploys which can hit the bedroom window of a target, and have no significant guidance system.  In this regard they are more akin to the German V1 and V2 rockets which were used by Germany in the Second World War, shot across the channel in the general direction of population centers.   This is an act of unbridled malice with the sole intent of causing terror.  The Saturday before last was a particularly intense day of both rocket fire and mortar shells into southern Israel.  From Saturday into Sunday, at least 32 rockets and mortars were shot into Israel, with at least two persons injured and a third person killed.  This comes after a lull in attacks surrounding the exchange.  One the thing I do not comprehend is if Islamic Jihad and the other terrorist groups can rightly expect Israel to release more convicted terrorists when after the first group has been released, they return to violence?

With the continuing violence, I do not want any of you to worry.  I am in a relatively safe location.  I am about 12 kilometers from the border of the West Bank or 73 kilometers from the Gaza Strip.  For my American friends and family that is approximately 7.46 and 45.36 miles respectively.  In addition to that, there are many bomb-shelter rooms around the campus.  On the first day it's a little intense to see the massive metal doors and the sliding metal window covers, but already they have become a bit standard.

Of course there is more to life than school!  I just have to boast that while the North East United States is being hit with snow and the like, I spent the Shabbat before last at the beach with a good friend I had not seen in quite some time.  In addition to a relaxing day on the warm sand, for brunch we ate at Abu Hassans.  I know not everyone will know what that even means, but let’s put it this way.  It’s a hummus restaurant, one of the best known, and pretty much all they serve is different types of hummus.  They make one batch in the morning and when it’s gone, it’s gone.  And it is delicious, yes Dave.  I know you want hummus.  I thought I might write about this specifically for you.   We even had left overs which we took with pita to the beach.

There was of course a week of orientation preceding the.  For someone who already had two classes and had been living in Israel at the time for over a month, I have to say that it wasn’t the most beneficial.There was a fun trip to the southern desert called the Negev.  Now the rockets from Gaza are landing in the Negev, however, that region is rather large.  It is at least half the land mass of Israel.  It was a pretty standard trip.  Team building activities, seeing the massive crater unique to the region (called a maktesh), going to the Dead Sea and a small hike.

Now the morning hike was really not much of a hike. It was at most 20 minutes, and perhaps less challenging than walking from my apartment to campus. Our aim was to make it to this water hole near the big Makhtesh in the Negev.  We were told that you could jump off the sides of the cliffs into the water.  My mind flashed to those tropical paradise scenes with a waterfall, great big trees and exotic birds passing overhead.  I should have been more realistic.  How can a water hole survive in the middle of a desert?  Our collective hope of jumping into a large body of water was dashed, as we certainly would have been if we had jumped, when we saw a tiny, green, smelly body of water.  At most it was waist deep and not really many people wanted to go in. I had been excited but I wasn't going to swim in it.

The pond was nestled at the end of a gorge of sorts, protected from the sun by high stone walls that at points bridged the gap.  But just beyond the pool, maybe a dozen meters away the narrow area opened into a large opening, surrounded on all sides by tall stone walls.  Now I didn't feel like wading through the water to explore, nor did I want to just sit in the shade for an hour.  So without thinking really, I spotted a small, narrow vertical passage (a chimney if I may), and being the sort I am, I started climbing. At the bottom of that path I hit a ledge where there was a very narrow tunnel formation that I crawled horizontally across in order to finally reach the canyon floor.  It was a terrific time, climbing, and crawling around on the rocks. It made me feel like a little kid again; so excited and happy for something so small and really insignificant.

Once on the floor, I walked around and poked my head in different caves and around the area.  There were a lot of birds and lizards all about, interesting caves and other rock formations.  Unfortunately, I left my camera with a friend because I didn't want to accidentally damage it.  When we had to leave I had been looking for a different route up, just for fun.  I had spotted one earlier, but when I began the ascent, one of our group leaders cautioned me against it.  So I kept looking, but there were not any other paths that I liked.  I went back to that menacing wall, the one I had been cautioned against, and had back at it.  Looking back, I suppose many things could have gone wrong; there could have been animals in the grips I was using, which could have bitten or stung me, but I made it to the top!  I was giddy like a kid and trembling a little at the end.  I had just climbed about two stories and I could feel the adrenaline pumping, racing though my body.  I was so electric I couldn’t sit still!  I wanted to tell everyone about it, but I realize no one really cared. 

So when everyone else really didn’t care and pretty much thought I was crazy, I kind of doubted myself.  Thinking what is wrong with me?  But after some thought (we had a long ride from there to the Dead Sea) that it really doesn’t matter what they think.  I hope we all are friends, and we all get great jobs and can help one another, but if they think poorly of something insignificant like that, than I really don’t need to concern myself.  Can’t please everyone right?

A bunch of people just thought I was crazy, and they couldn't imagine why i was excited.  I got that look that said, "Ok, and your point?"  At first I felt silly, and than I began to critic myself.  Why was I so happy?  I hadn't done anything really all that spectacular.  Why wasn't I more grown up and stern like these other folks?  It made me question myself. But I came to a conclusion. Why should I care what they think?

In this world, family and friends are important, but you are important too.  If you do not seek out for yourself happiness, if you do not pursue any of your own interests, but instead seek to appease every other person, no amount of love or assistance of family of friends can assist you.  Be happy, spread that happiness.   That should be the most important rule.

So I leave you for now, with this thought, and this ties into the news that I recently heard emanating from State College.  Happiness, much like misery, is contagious.  Embrace misery or anger, and you share it with those around you.  Instead, embrace happiness and joy, and those will flower and bloom in your wake.  The mind dislikes contradiction between thoughts and actions, but in such events as such occurs over time, the mind alters its thoughts more often to fit the action than the other way around.  So embrace the good essence, and show it through action.  And you will see a better world.  It starts at the individual level.  The riots occurring in State College are in direct contrast to the aims of that message.  I can understand the anger and pain; however, heed the words of Joe Paterno.  "[I] want to emphasize that everyone should remain calm and please respect the university, its property and all that we value."  The values of Penn State are not violent protests or flipping cars.  I urge, with my humble voice, to ask all students for a moment of contemplation.  Is this what Penn State Represents?  If you need any help answering that, simply read the last lines of the Alma Matter.

May no act of ours bring shame
To one heart that loves thy name,
May our lives but swell thy fame,
Dear old State, dear old State.

The senseless violence that has erupted, and perhaps by now been dispersed, is a slight to the dignity that is the institution.  Reel it in, and channel that outcry to positive constructivism.  Seek beneficiary means of dealing with the sorrow and torment of this tumultuous time.  I may not be there, experiencing these events with you, but my thoughts are with you all.  A cruel and foul act has tarnished a good name, but I ask, think and instead of adding fuel to this ghastly fire, act in such a way as to salvage and rebuild the name.  "For the glory."