Here’s your security photo for today – a little blurry-artsy because I took it through a window at Cafe Hillel on Emek Rafaim late Saturday night. Most of the men who do restaurant and store security prefer not to be photographed so I’ve been shooting through windows while at a table inside. A friend who reads this blog has, a couple of times, emailed me to remember that the guards are here to keep us safe. I think she believes I’m complaining by posting these daily photographs. On the contrary – I just want to show you what it is like to be an Israeli in 2007. This is the least of it but it’s so universal and so visible that it seems a good example. So.
Now on to today.
This is Orly Ganor, the founder of Ulpan-Or, the extraordinary school where we’re learning Hebrew. A charismatic visionary, she’s created a very exciting way to learn the language (that includes audio – and a very positive attitude) and we’re really benefiting from it. We’ve worked with her and several other young women who are stunning as people and teachers.
Today Shira Carmel, who will be the Ani deFranco of Israel very soon, taught both Rick and me. She demonstrated that in the right hands, even the alphabet can be fun. It’s difficult to learn a new alphabet at my age, but she showed me something quite valuable about learning to read and although it’s been partially debunked, most of it emerges from "urban legend" to probably true. If you read a paragraph where only the first and last words are accurately spelled you still make sense of it intuitively because you know the words. When you learn a new alphabet you can’t skim along like that or you make mistakes (which was what I was doing, big time) because you can’t trust any of your assumptions of what the next word, or even letter, will be. She convinced me to really sound out each one. I discovered that after several tragic failures at trying to learn to read this ancient language I MAY actually do it! I’m irrationally excited about it.
ONE MORE THING – Because – as usual on this trip – I’m really really (really) tired! I’ve written quite a bit here about Mea Shearim and forgot to post this picture of a sign in the window of a tiny story there. So here it is. More tomorrow.
