Jet lagged but we have arrived!

Well you may have noticed my post from the plane was a bit hard to read, that was because the Blogger site was in Hebrew! After some quick translation by our trusty Rabbi we are back in English, better for you and me! When we arrived we were met by our IsraelExperts tour guide Yael and our guard Bachi (ba key) and then visited the Israel Museum. We were all exhausted after our 10 hour flight and the hour bus ride from Tel Aviv to Jerusalem but our guide is amazing and we have already learned so much. At the museum we were able to see an amazing model of Jerusalem during the Second Temple Period. I have some fabulous photos that I will annotate and upload a bit later in the week. Basically we were able to see what the with looked like with the full temple, enact Wailing (Western) Wall and the surrounding villages. Having this perspective going into the city tomorrow will be so helpful. We were also able to tour 3 different synagogues in the museum that had been reconstructed from places like Italy, India and the Carribean. And we were able to learn a bit about the life cycle of a Jew from birth and the Briss ceremony through death and preparation for burial. After about 3 hours in the museum we were all exhausted and able to check into our hotel, Park Hotel in Jerusalem. From there we slept for about 4 hours and just had dinner, an extremely yummy brisket, baby potatoes, rice and assorted salads. The food was amazing, and it makes me very excited to eat more whe I am actually hungry (we ate all day really). In a bit we get to meet with one of the NY Times best selling authors we will be reading later in the course, so that is very exciting, and then back to bed to be rested and ready for a full day tomorrow! So back to my angle, what has been changed as a result of today? I was confronted with a few personal thoughts today, many centering around cultural otherness and privilege. A few times I found myself looking for a more polite and customer service oriented perspective from cashiers or museum attendants. We were told that Israelis are a blunt people and I found myself judging that cultural bluntness in my head as rude or disrespectful. That is a very American perspective to take and one that I then found myself reflecting on as it would happen. I also thought a few times about the statistics or generalizations Yael, our guide, would make. I was crtically pondering in my head, how much of this is her individual interpretation as a secular Jew (as she disclosed) and an individual citizen of Israel versus the reality of all people. Yeal has been guiding tours for 15 years so I would imagine she is very knowledgeable though I do find myself using a critical lens to interpert the information she gives us. My Hebrew word of the day it, "Toda" which means thank you so "Toda for reading, more tomorrow!"