Mid-May Musings

Mid-May Musings
It’s early Friday afternoon. My apartment smells of lysol, bleach, and other assorted cleaning supplies. The washing machine is humming with tablecloths, towels, and assorted rags. I just finished a combo pre-Shabbat/post-party apartment cleaning.

Although my birthday isn’t for another two and a half weeks, I threw myself a pre-birthday party last night. I requested (okay, required) of all my guests to teach me something as a birthday present. [Isn’t that a great idea? Shoshanah thought of it first.] I learned an amazing assortment of facts and skills. I now know how to crochet, how to tie a one-handed double knot on shoelaces, and how to make a flexagram. I also know a brief history of the development of kippot, why people hiccup, and that Traverse City, Michigan is the cherry capital. Plus I now have a small vocabulary of words in Zulu, Yiddish, Wolof, Japanese, Russian, and Arabic. Aren’t birthday parties great?

Of course, many of my close friends I’ve made this year couldn’t make it. Starting last week and continuing for the next few weeks, most of the amazing people I’ve met and become close with the past year are leaving to return to their home countries. Sure, I have a few dozen friends who live here who aren’t planning on leaving any time soon, but that doesn’t change the reality that I may not see many of my friends for a very long time. (I refuse to believe that I’ll never see them again.) As everyone goes off to work, grad school, volunteering fellowships, and every other imaginable Future, I stay in my comfortable apartment in Jerusalem. I’ve been having nightmares about packing up all my stuff before I wake up to remember that I’m not going anywhere – at least not for a few years.

Okay, so that’s a bit of a lie. I just purchased plane tickets this week – I’ll be returning to America for a few weeks in June/July to visit some family and friends. When I return, I will enroll in Hebrew classes at the University of Haifa, in the north of Israel, for a month. But after that early summer traveling, I will be returning to my home here in Jerusalem to buckle down and learn some more. I’ll go back to my same school with many of the same teachers, but almost none of the same students. That’s the nature of Pardes – most people come to learn for a year and then move on with their lives. Their main goal, in fact, is to provide one year of intensive Judaic text learning before their students return to their ‘real lives’ in North America. For those of us in special programs that last longer than one year, this means that the majority of our classmates and friends pack up and leave in early June to scatter themselves across the globe and we’re left having to make new friends again. And again. Now don’t get me wrong – I love making new friends and I’m excited for how many different friends I’ll have at the end of three years here. But right now, in mid-May as everyone packs up and ships their books to various ports I’m left feeling a bit lonely.

I’m grateful for all the amazing experiences I’ve had and the relationships I’ve built over the past year. I look forward to the ones I can continue to nourish as well as the ones I have yet to begin. It’s a bitter-sweet season, mid-May. Beginnings and endings. Closing doors and opening windows. Birthday parties and goodbye parties. And sometimes, both rolled up in one.