Greetings from the Holy Land!

So it would seem blogging is back. I mean, my sisters blogging again, I'm blogging again…who else do you need? Here I'd thought this was kind of a fad which got old around mid-2009, and yet every once and again I decide to post my deepest thoughts on the internet where just about anyone and everyone can read it. I usually don't do this anymore unless I'm really having a hard time making a decision, as I suppose you could tell by looking at some of my previous posts, half of which seem to be about laptops. 

How have things been going here the last three months? Well if you asked me that, I'd probably tell you something like "pretty good" since there's way too much information involved in the answer to that question to put into words. So it's a good thing you didn't ask me, or you'd have just been wasting your time. Luckily, I've asked the question for you, and so I've decided to answer it in the only way I can think of- by writing it all out. Of course, when I come back to Milwaukee and everyone in shul or wherever asks me how Israel was, I'll have to give them the short answer, which usually leaves people pretty unsatisfied and kind of confused. 

Anyway, it's November now and I've been on the three-seder schedule for about three months now. And I must say it has started to get to me. I learn close to nine hours a day, and the rest of the time there doesn't seem to be much else to do. Everyone else here seems pretty bored. It's a good thing nobody listened to the no-laptops rule, because that seems to be the only thing most people do around here. We've even set up our own computer to computer network and played games against each other.

Now I know what you're thinking right now- "You're in Israel! How could you be spending your free time playing computer games with your friends?" It's a fair question, but I hope I'll have answered it by the end of this post. Of course the odds of me finishing this post seem to be diminishing- I've been interrupted twice already and I have another half an hour. 

Here's the truth- I don't really know what else to do with myself. Sure, in the first few weeks we all went to town and checked out ben yehuda and the old city and the kotel and all that, and it was cool for awhile. But now what? I can't exactly go touring Israel between 11:00pm and 12:30. I still do go down to town quite frequently- usually for felafel, a food which I can only eat in Israel for reasons I have yet to discover. But besides for getting food (and the food is good- many of you know it is the center of my universe) I don't see much reason to spend the money on the bus to go downtown. Many people go every night, and that's because they came here to party. I did not, and I'm kind of surprised that people like that actually wind up here. 

They've been a major damper on the experience, these party-people. Around half my yeshiva of 30 kids was made up of party-people when I first got here. Some have left, but a nice chunk of it is still, well, white trash. I had expected maybe two or three people to be like this, but when it's closer to six or seven it kind of ruins things. The front of the yeshiva always smells like cigarette smoke (and so does my room occasionally), people steal things from the fridge, the kitchen has been broken into a couple times already, etc. I didn't fly thousands of miles away from home when I was perfectly comfortable in New York to spend a year with people like this. 

There are of course some really great guys here, and I don't mean to exclude them. There are some of my closest friends from high school, without whom I probably wouldn't be here to begin with, and there's a number of other guys I've met also (pretty much everyone who isn't british, actually)  who are just fantastic people, and I'm glad I've had the opportunity to meet them. Without these people, I'm sure I'd be utterly miserable here. I mean, I've never been a huge fan of learning gemara, as I'm sure many of you know. I'm not bad at it, and I've been told by many knowledgable people that I actually have a flair for it, but that doesn't mean I enjoy it. But that's part of why I'm here. I thought I'd get the chance to learn more of the "whys" of my religion, rather than the "whats" which I've focused on my whole life already.

I discovered last year that the "whats" don't hold up without the "whys", and I wish I'd discovered that sooner. I was left on my own last year, with zero supervision, and what I discovered was that I was left with zero motivation. My davening was a joke last year, as was my learning, and I'm not proud of that. I had hoped that coming here would give me a different perspective on things, and would give me the motivation I need to come to davening without a minyan point system, and be able to learn without getting a grade. 

For the most part, I seem to have been mistaken. 

There is one part of my day where, about once a week, I can ask one of my rabbeim some of the questions I have about, well yiddishkeit. And that's not nothing. I've learned a great deal from those sessions since August. But I get the feeling that I'm wasting 90% of my time here by just piling on more and more gemara. My rosh yeshiva is convinced that if I stay for an additional six months, I will continue to grow in my learning. That's fantastic, but I'm not really interested in it, and certainly not in these conditions. In fact those words kind of make me nauseous at this point. I don't need to be better at reading a gemara- I need to know why I'm reading it in the first place! I mean really, I've spent the last ten years learning HOW to read a gemara, but I can't keep myself dedicated to it if I don't understand the reason behind it. 

That's something I couldn't get at YU, so I thought I'd come here and hear their take on it. So far, I haven't heard anything new, and my belief is that that's not likely to change. I have learned about quite a few other things I wasn't sure about, and in that respect coming here was a great chizuk, But I really was much happier in the states, and I'd still like to get back there as soon as I can. 

I realize that sounds like a mistake to a lot of people. Lots of people view Israel in this bold, perfect light. Like it's heaven or something. "How could you want to leave Israel? Aren't you enjoying yourself? What do you have in America that can't wait another six months?"

That's not the question. The question is, what do I have here that I need to stay another six months?

The best argument I can think of is the fact that my friends are here, my brother is here, my relatives are here, and my father's friends are here (and they've all been really great!). This more than anything else is what make the decision to leave early tough. I'm all too happy to leave the english lads and their cigarettes, as well as the subpar living conditions (toilet paper!), but when I think about leaving these amazing people, some of whom I've known my whole life, I hesitate. I had no close friends at YU, and that is the one aspect of it I'm not looking forward to. But I didn't really try last year, did I? I had my own dorm room, I spent more time at my sisters apartment playing xbox than anything else- who's surprised? I feel if I make more of an effort when I come back in January, the social scene in New York will look much better for me. And I can't make the decision to stay just to be with these people. I can't be with them forever. 

As for the land itself, people told me before I came about the "connection" you get with Israel by going, and how it couldn't be described, you just had to go see for yourself. Well, it still can't be described in my mind, because I still have no idea what those people were talking about. You can say three months isn't enough time to let a bond like that grow, so I guess maybe I just don't have the patience for it. Or maybe I'll never get it. Regardless, it's not something that's keeping me here. I don't feel any kind of connection to this place- I'm far more connected to Milwaukee, the place where I actually grew up. I don't feel at home here. Maybe I haven't been to the right places, but I just feel like the Jews that live here are just a different kind of people. It's a world I can't really relate to, where in some places it's ordained by halacha that you throw stones at cars, or pour bleach on seminary girls. If anything, going to charaidi places like netanya and mean shearim have shaken my trust in Judaism. 

We go to tishes in Netanya, with thousands of chassidim sitting around a table watching their rebbe eat, and the whole time people ask me "isn't this amazing? aren't you inspired?" But it just makes me feel more distant to my religion. I don't believe the same thing these people do. They are their own breed of Judaism. They don't inspire me, and I don't connect with them at all. 

That's four interruptions. I seem to be annoying some people, so I guess I'll end this off here. I think I've covered everything, right? I've completely lost my train of thought anyways. Overall, of course I'm glad I came here, and I think I've grown a great deal from the experience in many ways, but I am really looking forward to coming back. And the rosh can call my father if he wants to (on sunday, look out) but I do kind of wish, at least for once, someone would respect my decision. It hasn't been an easy one to make, but I've made it already. Please stop trying to change my mind, because it might work.