Anyway, classes are going great. We've received the results of our first Hebrew test this week. I did quite well I knew I was prepared, but certain sections made me a bit nervous. Of course, I will be pushing myself to do even better since I don't want my teacher, Osnat, to think it was a mistake. Tonight is a vocabulary flashcard night!
Let me introduce a few important people:
Jay O'Brien, me, Emma Goldin, Laura Breznick, Lauren Levy, and Vladimir Lapin.
This is the Cantorial Class of 5776! I'm pretty much in love with my class already.
We performed as a class for the first time for T'filah on Sunday Morning, singing the Maseng "Elohai N'tzor." While the final product was wonderful, it was the rehearsal that really made me proud of our class. We all got a sense of each other's energies, voices, and talents. While we had to formally talk out specific musical ideas, others naturally occurred. The response from our classmates was overwhelmingly positive--much more than a "oh you guys sang great" but "This really helped to make my morning prayer experience fuller." I can't wait to reflect on this again when we have learned more about Hazzanut and learned each other much better! Massive thank you to Summer Intern Leslie Niren for getting the ball running on all of this. It was truly a blessing to find a group with whom I could make music--I haven't had that since Deep Treble in college. Oh, and by the way...rudeeptreble.com (Inside joke. The website is under renovations).Arts and Crafts Time!
I am a crafty person. I blame my two years working at Michaels for that. My primary skills include knitting, assembling books out of leftover stuff, and coloring. Naturally, when a few classmates decided to attend a session about making tallit, I jumped at the opportunity. We didn't weave the fabric or do fancy fabric work, but we made the fringes, tzitzit, and learned about the history of tallit. As of this writing, mine is currently unfinished. I haven't done that much sewing in my crafting career, outside of basic embroidery required for my various knitting projects. The original fabric is perhaps a bit over the top, but I think it is beautiful. It will certainly mean much more to me when it is finished than just one that I bought on Ben Yehuda or something.
This workshop was only a few days after a tefillin workshop. Tefillin is a box that contains a number of scriptures. In Deuteronomy 6, we are commanded to keep the "Sh'ma" as frontlets for our eyes and to bind them to our arm. Up to this point, I have laid tefillin three times: the first at a dear friend of the family's Bar Mitzvah, the second before I left for Israel, and the third at the Shuk. Each time I felt like it was a costume. I could never quite understand what I was doing or why I was doing it. Thanks to a wonderful session led by Student Intern Daniel Bar Nahum featuring Professor David Levine, I felt something in the power of placing it on my right arm and just above my hairline. I am not quite ready to make the jump to make it a regular part of my religious practice as I think I need to experiment with it a few more times. That, and they are quite expensive.
Well, now that I've sufficiently procrastinated working on those flashcards, I believe it is time to sign off. I apologize for not posting in a while. I am in the process of adding some pictures to my older posts, so feel free to peruse some of them. I am also thinking about having a weekly feature section about a different part of Jerusalem I am exploring or am learning about.
"I Gotta Feeling" is a great pop song by The Black Eyed Peas, and probably one of the best pop songs of the 2000s. Best set of lyrics: Fill up my cup. (Drink!) Mazel tov (L'chayim!)
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