Shabbott!

June 22

Wow. What. A. Day. I would love to go to bed but I know if I don’t write this down now, I will never get the chance, and I will kick myself. SO. First, all the girls woke up bright and early to be ready to leave by quarter til 8 so that we could help clean an apartment. We’re all ready and we go downstairs to wait for the guys to come up and we wait… and we wait… and we wait… it’s 8:15 and we’re like uhhh… where are they? We then grow to realize, that they have left. Without us. Then we find out it was a mistake. They didn’t need us to go today. Only three girls! Ahh! So, most of us went back to bed (including me) and woke up about 2 hours later to go to softball! The two hours actually made a huge difference and I felt much more rested.

Softball went much better than I anticipated! I mean, we’re not going to talk about outfield. I did absolutely terrible out there. BUT batting, I hit every single ball!!! And I even made it to home half the time!! I was so proud of myself! Of course, I  can’t give all the credit to myself. I knew that the men who played were competitive, and I didn’t want to ruin it for them by not being at least somewhat of a challenge, so right before I would go I would just shoot up a prayer, “God, please please please just let me HIT the ball. I don’t want to ruin the game for them!” And guess what. I hit the ball EVERY time. It was a miracle!! Of course, it didn’t help my speed at all. It was hilarious because I was on base and the guy behind me ended up hitting a homerun and while I was running as fast as I could, he ended up catching up to me and slowly jogging behind me while I was running my heart out. It was hilarious. He came up to me and he’s like, “Wow… you’re fast…” All I could do was laugh. It was so much fun!

So after sweating off 20 pounds, we went back and prepared to gain all the weight back and got ready for our Shabbott dinners. Small groups of us were assigned to different host families for dinner. Shabbott is a time for all of Israel (it’s not just a religious thing, it’s a cultural thing) to get together with their family and friends and just spend time together! It’s really a wonderful tradition. Anyway, I ate SO much food. There was about 14 salads that were just appetizers! And bread of course. And then there were pierogies and chicken and burgers and hot dogs (kosher) and pasta salad, and potatoes and all kinds of food. Then we had ice cream for desert which was DELICIOUS of course. And chocolates. I am so full  beyond belief right now.

Before Shabbott we had devotions, continuing on in the book of Philippians. We talked about versus 9-10. It says, “And this is my prayer: that your love may abound more and more in knowledge and depth of insight, so that you may be able to discern what is best and may be pure and blameless for the day of Christ.” It was really interesting because we talked about what he meant when he says your “love”. Chris explained to us that love IS the fruits of the spirit. Love consists of joy, peace, forbearance, kindness, goodness, faithfulness, gentleness and self control. Against such things there is no law. If every single person showed love in these ways, we wouldn’t need any laws! This is what true love consists of. True love also consists of real knowledge. He explained that in a relationship, when you get married, even though you already knew your spouse, you’re still getting to know him or her every single day. And the more you know him, the more you love him. That’s the same way with God. You can’t base your relationship with God on emotions without any foundation, the same way you can’t in a marriage. Your relationship has to have a foundation of the knowledge of who God is. Emotions will cause a roller coaster, but a true constant foundation is the knowledge of God and His consistency and love and power and mercy. The list goes on and on. The more you get to know about God, the more you will love Him. It’s an endless love because every day there is something new to learn.

Anyway, at Shabbott, I met a guy named Taylor who is from Texas. He is studying Hebrew at the University here. When everyone got back he offered to take us a walk around town. We went to the Orthodox part of town (after looking totally awkward by circling around three times before finding a parking space… and then trying not to look awkward by getting out one van at a time but then just making it look awkward anyway because the other people just sat in the van awkwardly and waited for us to walk away but then met with up with us anyway when they got out of the van and then we awkwardly stopped talking every time someone passed us and we were standing in an awkward circle and everything about that was awkward…) but it was really fun! After Taylor talked to us a bit about being in Israel and the town and how Israelis will walk around really late at night and it doesn’t matter! They don’t care about privacy as long as you’re not bothering them so we could walk literally anywhere we wanted. (Except maybe inside a house!) So, Brett, Gabby, Hannah, Tyler, Chris and I walked around and we ended up running into some guys who asked us where we were from and he told us about how he used to live in Brooklyn and he was just a cool guy! He invited us over his house and told us all about how a rabbi convinced him to become religious and we got to know a lot about him in just 10 minutes! We ended our conversation with him and then walked around a bit more until we all met up again. Gabby and I laughed all the way home. Just too many inside jokes tonight!

But yes. It was such a fun day and I could go on and on but seeing as it is almost 1:30am and I don’t want to fall asleep in Kehila tomorrow (the congregation meets on Saturday mornings) I bid you farewell.

Remember I have all my pictures on facebook so sorry about the boring blog with no pictures! I almost have one full album and it's only been a week!