Purim and reflection

For my Jewish Thought and Culture class, we are assigned (almost) every week to read the portion of the torah that most of rabbinic judaism is reading that week, along with the commentary on the passage in the Jerusalem Post (by a Rabbi Shlomo Riskin) and one of 4 different other commentaries. This week's passage was Tzav, Leviticus 6:8-all of Chapter 8. It's all about the different sacrifices that the children of Israel were to make, and the procedures for them to follow. After we do the reading we have to do a 300 word write-up, containing our thoughts on what we read. Mine today ended up being kind of a summary of some things I've been thinking about lately, and i thought I'd share it with all you lovely people out there in la-la land who have nothing better to do than listen to the ramblings of a young college student off in Israel.

The Torah portion this week was all about the sacrifices that God commands from His people. As I pondered the reasons why I should be made to read this passage that holds little interest for me--frankly the whole thing about the fat on the long lobe of the liver somewhat disgusts me--I read the commentary on the Midrash, and in the third section that I read, the commentator was referring to the verse in psalms that talks about the sacrifices God wants being “a broken and contrite heart.” And I thought about this in relation to some things that I’ve been going through this week, and God, even as I write it, is showing me how He wants me to sacrifice for Him. God wants me, and all His children to fully surrender control of our lives to Him. Of course He is sovereign and in full control anyway, but I fight so often for supremacy of my heart with my selfishness and self love. God desires me to live in love for others through the commands that He has given me, and I must start this path to love by getting on my knees and showing my love for Him by allowing him to break down all my hardness of heart and sinful selfishness, and fill the space they occupy with pure love. A broken spirit and a contrite heart are the sacrifice He wants, and practically, I must obtain them by dying to self every day, and learning how to love in being patient, kind, not jealous, not boastful, not arrogant, not acting unbecomingly, loving truth, bearing all, hoping and enduring. God’s way is the best way, and we are called to follow by sacrificing—offering to Him—our lives and attitudes, every day that He gives us breath.

Last Friday, if you didn't know, was Purim (the feast celebrating God's salvation of His people as recounted in the book of Esther) and we had a party and, as is traditional in Israel now, we all came up with Purim costumes. :) it was great fun to figure out a costume with extremely limited time and resources. But we all pulled something together with the help of the "Canada," which is the place here on the Moshav where people bring rejected clothing and the rest of us are free to take as we will. We picked pieces that looked helpful, and then proceeded to rip them to shreds as needed. Great fun. I was a newsie with a black eye and abrasion above my eyebrow, all thanks for my friend Ashley's wonderful makeup abilities. She pretty much put my costume together too. :)

Prayer and update

Dear Friends,
Here I am again, to talk to you. :D All the way from Israel. These last few days have been exciting, as this week some things got switched around in the class schedule. On Tuesdays I normally have 4 hours of my Jewish Thought and Culture Class and then 2 hours of my Hebrew class, and on Thursdays I generally make a practice of only having Life of Christ in the morning for 2 hours and Hebrew in the afternoon for 2 hours or so. This week, I ended up having Jewish Thought and culture on Thursday as WELL as on Tuesday, because of a conflict in the Teacher's schedule. He comes in from Jerusalem once a week and only teaches this class. So my Thursday was quite full this week. :) I was pretty worried about it going in, but it ended up being a lot better than I had expected.
I'm a bit worried about my Hebrew class, because I've not been doing very well, it's hard for me, learning a language so quickly and in spurts. So, if you would, pray about that!
I'm on the worship team here, and I absolutely love it! We're doing a long set tonight, and I'm excited about the way it sounds. I love the team too, we work together pretty well. As I'm a singer this time around, please pray that God would sustain my voice tonight, because since it's spring, the hills and everything are in bloom, and my allergies are affecting me rather negatively right now. :D I guess that's what you get for sitting on the hill in the sun and flowers for an hour. :D
Okay, Lotsa love!
Savannah

Negev, Tel-Aviv, and Latrun! :)

Well, thanks for all the feedback on my new layout! :D I love it a lot and am thankful that everyone else does too. :D

So, lots to tell, last week, March 4'th, we packed up and took off for a visit to the Negev region of Israel. The Negev region is wilderness and desert with a few oases sprinkled here and there. It starts up near the dead sea, and goes down to Eilat on the red sea, and is pretty much the width of Israel.
Our trip was 4 days long, and we began the endeavor by going to Qumran. At Qumran we saw the caves where the Dead Sea scrolls were found in 1947, the story goes that a little Bedouin shepherd boy, named Mohammed, was trying to herd his sheep away from the cliffs by throwing rocks beyond them to scare the toward him (a method that is still in use) and the rock went into a cave and he heard the sound of some pottery breaking, and the shepherd boy discovered the Many scrolls that were the collection of a community of people that lived in Qumran. Probably the Essenes. So we saw the caves and then we hiked around and climbed to one small [barely there] cave. After that we drove down the shore of the dead sea, went to En Gedi again (if you remember, that's where my campout was), then we went to a place called Ahava (noun form of love in hebrew). Ahava is a factory where they make all sorts of cosmetics, ranging from lotion to shampoo, and all with minerals directly from the dead sea. After we walked through the factory, we got back on the bus and drove down to a private beach where we ate lunch (tuna pita sandwich) and then got in the water for a bit. When Randy whistled time to go, we all left and from there, we drove further south along the dead sea and then we went to Masada.
Masada is a mountain fortress near the dead sea. It was fortified bye Herod the great, who used it as a fortress, palace, and later as a place where he stashed his family during times of danger. Later on, in 73 AD there was a group of zealots led by Eliezar Ben Yair, who, with their families, lived up on Masada and would run raids down to pester the Romans. The romans got fed up with this after a bit, and laid seige to the fortress for 3 years, while the zealots lived up top. The Romans, led by Flavius Silva built a huge ramp of dirt up Masada from the west, and built a seige tower with a battering ram up at the top and wheeled this up the ramp to take out the walls. This was not entirely uneventful, but i'll spare you a few details. Anyway, they eventually broke down the wall and when they entered they found that the Zealots had all committed suicide, so the 3 year siege ended in 900 dead, not of the Roman's doing. Josephus documented this later, and according to my prof, Josephus probably got his information from a few women and children who did survive.
So much for Masada background. :D So the roman ramp is on the west side, but we approached from the east, from the dead sea. There is on this side a visitor's center, and we walked around in there and watched a bit of a film in there about the history of the excavations there, and then a few people took the cable car up, and the rest of us climbed this extremely windy path (known as the snake path) up the side of the mountain. It was really tough for me, but I quite enjoyed it and it felt like such a big achievement to reach the top! When we got on top and the whole group was reassembled, we walked around and looked at the ruins of the buildings up top, looked down into Herod's dining room, saw his bathhouse and other things. Then we climbed down the ramp on the other side and at the bottom we saw part of the seige machine that they built for the movie they made. And we have this tradition here at IBEX where Randy asks us what time it is and we all say "COOKIE TIME!" and out comes a box of cookies or snacks of some kind that Becky Bange (our nurse and librarian) made for us. At masada, we got a bag of Puppy Chow. :D (if you don't know what that is, it's chex cereal with peanut butter, chocolate, and powdered sugar. OH so good. :D)
At this point i was very very tired having been up until 3 in the morning the 2 nights before doing laundry and other such things, so, since we were done with our trips for the day and were just driving to the Arad Youth Hostel where we stayed that night, I took a bit of a nap. When we got to the Hostel, we went to our rooms and because of my nap i was so out of it that i put my stuff down, kicked off my shoes and Deborah let me sleep an hour before dinner. :D Then i went to dinner with Deborah, and i was at least as much out of it, as before. Naps make me very disoriented. :D So I was in an odd mood all of dinner, not a bad mood, but pretty goofy and relaxed to the point of being barely there. :D Then i went back to my room and the girls i was rooming with, Deborah, Ashley, and Tiffany all went to walk around Arad. I was too tired to go, so i did a little reading, took a shower, and then went to sleep. All together, counting my naps and the night of sleep. I got 11 hours of sleep. I was QUITE proud of myself.
So, the next morning i woke up and felt oh so good. :D Our first stop of the day was Tel Arad, which is near where we stayed. Actually, being as this is Israel and the ancient inhabitants of the land had a vendetta against poor students trying to memorize geography, there are three locations that go by Arad, all in one area. :D We stayed at Modern Arad, went to Tel Arad the next morning, and drove past biblical Arad. Haha So anyway, Tel Arad is a hill and on top of it is the earliest settlement they've found in Israel. It dates to 3000 BCE (before common era, in western terms BC) and there are houses, bathouse, and even a temple. We took pictures of me sacrificing Deborah on the altar there. :D David and I found some big huge lizards and tried to catch them, but they would have none of it. Oh well.
After Tel Arad, we drove through the Eastern Negev Basin, to Beersheba. There is a well there, and in the Bible Abraham makes a covenant here after digging a well. So this well is probably the one that Abraham made. Here we learned about a thing called a casemate wall. Beersheba is the first city to have an example of this. It's where they took an Israelit four room house, (three long rooms pointing the same way and one broad room across the back of the house) and turned the broad room into part of the wall, so that it was really two walls with room between them, where in times of siege those who lived there could put wood or something in between the walls to make them stronger. At Beersheba i also found the cutest little fuzzy caterpillar. He inched his way all over my hands and we had fun together. Then I went over to the well to look and accidentally killed him. :( Woops. Unless caterpillars can be wounded and survive...I don't know. I hope he was ok. :D
To continue, when we left Beersheba we stopped at MacDonalds and got icecreams. M&M McFlurries make me very happy. Especially when I've had 11 hours of sleep. And it was sunny and warm and breezy and nice. Close to perfect. :D
That afternoon we went to a kibbutz at Sde Boqer, where Ben Gurion retired to, and we saw his "hut" there. Then we went to a big canyon nearby that's part of the Nahal Zin. We did a fun hike in there.
That night we stayed in a hotel called Club Ramon on the edge of the biggest of the Makhteshim, geographical feature in the negev, it's like a big crater where the earth split apart and the stuff in the middle sunk. There are three, Q'tan, Gadol, and Ramon, smallest to largest. The edges actually match up apparently. They had some english tv channels so Ashley and I watched some crime drama shows. Pretty fun. :D
In the morning we drove down into the Makhtesh (remember, it was the biggest one), and we were learning about the Nabateans, who were a nomadic group of traders. We stopped at a spring where the Nabateans had a caravanserai, a place where they could hole up and water their camels. There was hardly any water there, but Randy said that at night many animals come down there for water. We went to the remains of a building there and Randy burned some Frankincense there for us, because that's that the Nabateans traded in, mostly. (It grows on trees in south Yemen. :D)
After that we drove down through the wilderness of Paran which is where the Israelites wandered a lot. Randy put on Michael Card's cd In The Beginning as we drove and asked that we all sit quietly and contemplate and listen to the words. This cd brought back a lot of good memories for me of when I was younger because we had the tape of this and Michael Card was one of the only things I listened to when I was a kid. :D The words were rich with meaning and the music was enjoyable. :) When we got to a certain spot we stopped the bus and we all took our bibles and a paper and walked out and read Deuteronomy chapter 8 and wrote down our reflections. It was really neat, and fun to talk about it later because a lot of people ended up thinking about the same things. God's sufficiency and our helplessness.
We left there and went to a big Caravanserai on the edge of the Makhtesh. This one is where they ended up settling down a lot and growing grapes. We walked all around it and looked at the architecture and some different buildings. And in the visitor's center we saw some examples of the spices they traded in. There were also many Metal sculptures around that people njoyed climbing on. :D
After that it was nearing lunch time, but before lunch we went to a desert nature preserve and saw all the animals in the small zoo there. My favorite was the Fat Sand Rat, and that's not just what I'm calling it, that's actually it's name. It's species name has the word obese in it. :D Then i saw lots of foxes and wolves and some mice that i'm pretty sure were zombies. They were exhibiting behavior very similar to the zombie things in I Am Legend. :D
We left there and backtracked a bit to Yotvata, which is a kibbutz with a dairy. Most of the dairy products in Israel are produced here. We ate lunch there and tried some of the famous chocolate and mocha milk. :) It was pretty good. :)
We left there and continued to drive down the Negev through the Valley known as the Aravah. We went to a place called the Valley of Timna. This valley has a lot of copper ore in it, and many people throughout history have mined copper here. The Egyptians and the Midianites were the main ones who mined here, and there's a possibility that King Solomon mined somewhere in the area, although no evidence has been found for him having mined there. We saw a cool multimedia production at the guest center, we sat in a bleachers type seating in a round room and around the walls was some sort of screen and the bleachers would turn as the story was played out by projector on the walls. (Haha, mom, "You call this a Multi media event?? It's a sheet and a slide projecter. Uh...oh look! it's the bull's cousin. He's a Cebu." :D)
After the video we went to the tabernacle model that is set up down in the desert there, it was neat to see everything and how it might have been. Then we drove to the formation known as Solomon's pillars (Nothing to do with Solomon, it's a volcanic rock formation), and we hiked up and saw an Egyptian etching in the rock, and below us there was a small temple that was first Egyptian and later midianite.
We left this spot, got back on the bus and drove to another area of the valley and hiked up to a lovely natural arch in the rock. We spent a bit of time there taking pictures, and then we all hopped back on the bus and we drove down to our final destination, Eilat.
Eilat is interesting, as Abner pointed out to me today, it was known as the place where Solomon would import all the things he needed for his false gods. When i was studying for the quiz, Peter informed me that Solomon also imported monkeys, and i think that's really funny. We couldn't figure out why he'd import monkeys, but apparently he did, so that how i remember it. :D
In Eilat we went to the Eilat stone factory, it's jewelry store. In Eilat they have a kind of stone that is not found elsewhere. It's a blue and green stone swirled together.
It looks something like that. :D
So we saw where they produce jewelry like that. And that was interesting.
Then we went to our hotel which was pretty nice, and it was about a block away from the beach, so most of us that night right before and after dinner walked along the boardwalk and the beach. It was lovely, sitting on the beach hearing the music from the restaurants and chatting with my friends.
The next morning most of the group, who are in a class called Regional Explorations in Israel and Jordan, packed up to leave straight for jordan after our morning's activity. I'm not in that class, so I just prepared for our next activity. Which was going to the beach, where we went snorkeling!! I'd never been snorkeling before, and frankly, sharks are one of my greatest fears, but I'm made myself do it, knowing I'd love it and really wanting to do it, although I'll admit that i did it with caution. :D I saw a lot of very cool fish and small non-poisonous jellyfish, and so much coral, and at the bottom i saw a big eel of some kind. It was so much fun. :)
Then the Jordan group left straightaway. We were at the junction of 4 countries. Israel, Egypt, Jordan, and Saudi Arabia. It was cool to look out and be able to see all of those. Those of us not in the jordan class laid on the beach for a while longer and just hung out, then we went back to the hotel and packed, then went and got Pizza Man! Let me tell you, Feta Cheese pizza and Green Olive pizza are pretty great, even if they are kosher. :D
So we came back and did homework and stuff and on Shabbat (saturday) we went to the moshav assembly in the morning and then into Jerusalem where we "did some homework" at the Christ Church cafe. Sunday and monday we just chilled here at the Moshav until our friends returned on Monday night. Tuesday I had class all day after Bible study. Then on Wednesday the class Modern State of Israel had a field trip to Tel-Aviv and Latrun, the tank museum. That was a fun field trip. :D
Thursday i had Life of Christ and i really love that class. :) and then Thursday night we had our study session in the Miklat for the test this morning (Friday). So this morning I went and took the test, and felt like I did really well, we came back to class like an hour after we finished, and I got my test back and found out that i had gotten 100%!! :D So that was very exciting, and then this afternoon, i went with Abner, Joe and Lacey to the airport in Tel Aviv to meet the friends and family group! My good friend Jane came with her parents and I'm so happy to see her again! Two guys from my church, Dave and Jason are here too, and i was really glad to see them. :)
Alright I know this was long, but here's your reward. :D Lots and lots of pictures. :D

Love, Savannah

Valleys and Mountains and the sea

Well, we went on 2 great field trips, one for land and bible to the Shephelah, and one that was mandatory for the History of Ancient Israel class, but the rest of us went along too. The Shephelah one was a beautiful trip, down to see 5 valleys. The Aijalon, where the sun stood still when Joshua was there, we didn't actually go into, but we looked down it. The Sorek, which is where the story of Samson took place, to read more about the story of Samson check out my dad's new blog. :D
Then we went to the valley of Elah, where David fought Goliath. then to the Guvrin valley, where the Prophet Micah lived. Then we went down to the Lachish valley, where Sennacherib the Assyrian came up to lay seige to Jerusalem during the time of Hezekiah. He never got Jerusalem, but he took the city of Lachish, nota very important town, and then went home and had this big mural thing made up about his great victory at Lachish. :D

So here's the like to the photo album, just click the picture.






That was on Wednesday, and the next trip we took was on Friday. We all packed up and then got on the bus and headed out to the Dead Sea. We got there, and set up camp on the shore. Then we all changed into our swimsuits and went into the water. It was one of the strangest things I've ever experienced. I'm so used to swimming, but this is like nothing I've ever done. you get past about knee level, and you have trouble standing because your feet want to come up. So you let yourself into the water, watching out for the sharp crystals of salt that encrust all the rocks along the shore (I scraped my knee on one, and it got all puffy and red. Although not infected because of all the salt. :D) So you get in the water, and you literally CAN NOT sink. It's a pretty crazy feeling. We had to figure out the maneuvering. You had to float on your back and then pull your legs down, and then flip over and dog paddle to get anywhere. :D Then there are some banks that have this black mud, that people always put all over themselves. Because it's supposedly good for your skin. Then we all did that and then came back and washed it off. And i got salt water in my eyes, and it burned. Haha. :P Then we all got out, and went back to our campsite where we changed and ate dinner. Then we had a campfire and sang songs and had a devotional and a prayer time in small groups. Then we slept in our sleeping bags out under the stars. It was pretty great to look up and see the great bowl of the sky with the Big Dipper right above my head and Orion behind me. It was amazing. The next morning we woke up and had breakfast. Then we packed up everything and went to the bus. We had a cool crazy bus driver named Mickey. "Not Mickey Mouse." Then we drove up to this nature preserve area, and we hiked up "the cliffs of insanity" and saw some ROUS's (rock Hyraxes). And we hiked to the stream of en Gedi, where David wrote Psalm 63 when he was on the run from Saul. Then we hiked back into a canyon called the Dry Canyon, but it had too much water in it from last week's flash flood, so we couldn't go down there, so instead we turned around and went to some waterfalls. There we swam in the pools and it was great fun. Then we came down, ate lunch and came home. :) and that was my great adventure for the week.

Photo Albums from that below.




Love to All!
Savannah.