Next there were two peer-led skill sessions. The first one I went to was a speech-giving class by the same guy whose doing the debate project I mentioned yesterday. It was a lot of fun and really funny because a lot of his points were ones I'd thought about before but in a different way, and he had hilarious names for several speech habits and hand gestures people do. I learned a lot, too, surprisingly. I'm psyched to bring these tips back to my role as a sales trainer.
The second session was about using found text in writing and story telling. We had to search our e-mail for certain words and then tell the story of what we found. It was really fun to hear everyone's story. One in particular was from this girl from Russia. The word we had to search for was the name of our hometown (my story was about how almost all of the e-mails were about overdue books I had at the library...), and she told the story of this e-mail. Basically, when she was little in this small town in Russia, she had to have her adenoid's removed. They had no anesthetic, so they had to tie her to her father to keep her still while they did this. The e-mail was from her father, and said "Don't worry..." and had a link to that doctor's obituary, and "He can't hurt you anymore."
Wow! There was no following that up.
Over lunch I talk with another writer and a girl who works in digital publicity for a talent agency. We had a really interesting conversation about literary denouement and also about author publicity. I really enjoyed it.
After lunch there was a panel of various experts talking about current issues in Israel: 1) Women of the wall, and generally the way Orthodoxy controls the law despite being a minority. 2) Are Israelis capable of criticizing the diaspora the way the diaspora criticizes Israel? and 3) Tikkun Olam ("Repair the world"/basically Jewish community service and Jews as agents of change.
It was a fascinating panel. Everyone had interesting things to say. One of my favorite things was that Micah Goodman was speaking. He is the director of Ein Prat, the leadership academy I'll be at later this trip. And I really loved a lot of what he had to say, so I'm looking forward to that.
The panel ended with a little speech by one of the panelists that began so encouragingly, and ended... well, it was something like this...
"The point of Judaism is not for the white view and the black view to discuss until they can find the common grey. The point is to fight it out! To disagree! There's only one Torah but so many interpretations. Black and white simultaneously exist. Orthodox and Reform and Progressive and Feminists and Traditionalists and Zionists and Anti-Zionists simultaneously exist. And no one group can tell the other they're not Jews. That can't be taken away. That's the amazing thing about matrilineal descent."
This was me listening to this:
Yes yes yes!
And then...
Sigh.
So then I was feeling a little overwhelmed, and the thing about these conferences is that they're very intense and wonderful but things are mostly on a surface level. There's no way to really discuss emotional things except in an odd way. On that note I'm really looking forward to Ein Prat where we will study together every day for 4 weeks! It will be nice to have that depth.
So I decided to go sit by myself outside for a little while. I was feeling a little discouraged. Everybody knows this identity question is THE sticking point for me (and the things that go with it, like marriage and other rights in Israel) but I don't feel like going over it here. So I went outside, and I was kind of bummed, and I saw this garden:
And then I noticed these hoses...
And I looked and I saw they were dripping...
It's kind of hard to see here, but the hoses are dripping. And first I thought the hoses were all leaking. But then I realized they were dripping, and not leaking. And it's intentional. And it's drip irrigation, which is an Israeli invention, you know. And something I've read a lot about for a long time and never seen. It's kind of hard to put into words now, but I found this really encouraging. I think sometimes I just need to remember these little awesome things around me even when certain parts of the Israeli reality are very disheartening.
So in we went and we had another round of discussions. This time I sat in on a couple of topics... 1) Gender issues in Argentina, in which I actually just ended up talking to this female Rabbi about her work and her experiences and Leah in the Torah. I loved it! 2) Should we specialize or should we study broadly? I which I ranted a bit about my experience as a comparativist. 3) Best places to travel 4) How do we maintain a Jewish society when we don't really know who qualifies as a Jew? Which was interesting.
Sorry I'm getting really tired so the details are failing me a bit but i want to get through the day! I'm sure I'll remember stuff and add it in the future.
At dinner I met another guy from Boston, and it turns out we both brought Red Sox paraphernalia as our special object to swap. He's also in sales, sort of, well, fundraising, and we talked a lot about that and that was fun.
And then we spiked the lemonade...
And I got into a REALLY cool conversation with this girl who works as an American Sign Language interpreter. I was FASCINATED! I learned so many things. Here are just a few:
1) There are "classes" within deaf society defined by one's deaf heritage. The highest class is if you're genetically born deaf and your parents were deaf as well. The less deafness in society, the lower your deaf class. Whoa.
2) Lots of deaf people consider it a form of genocide to give infants cochlear implants. They feel deafness is a culture and it IS a language minority, and unilaterally decided a child born deaf should not be a part of that culture is cultural murder. Whoa.
3) I guess I knew this, but I never really thought about it... written text is a second language to deaf people. It doesn't match their language in any way, really. I always thought if i were deaf I would read all of the time... but it's really not so easy for most deaf people. For this reason there are very few deaf writers or playwrights.
I learned other stuff too.
Then I went back to my room and talked to my roomate for hours about Israeli society, marriage, gender norms, child rearing, the humanities, war, house keeping, haha... it was great.
Now i'm crashing. So tired.
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