Melton Seminar in Israel: What I Did On My Winter Vacation

by MARK WEBER

Congregants Sue Cohn, Marie Taubman and Debbie and I traveled to Israel to participate in the 11-day Florence Melton Adult Mini-School seminar that began on December 25. From Sydney, Melbourne, and across the U. S., 18 individuals descended into the land of milk and honey with one goal—to find out why the Israelis never heard of skim milk and aspartame. Seriously, we were there to better understand and tie together the Melton Mini-School two-year course of classroom lectures and discussions about our history, our practices, our ethics, and purposes of living Jewishly.

Marie, Debbie and I arrived in Jerusalem three days early, the Friday before the Monday the seminar was to begin. That Saturday, after attending morning services at the Shira Hadasha synagogue, we enjoyed an immense Israeli Shabbat lunch at Marie’s cousin’s home in the Jewish Quarter of the Old City. Corned beef, kishka, salads, gefilte fish, cholent, kugels, the meal went on and on. Are you listening Leona? On Sunday, we shopped Ben Yehuda Street, and while lunching at Luigi restaurant on Yoel Salomon Street, we spotted Joe Lieberman across the way, waiting outside a Dead Sea spa products store while his wife Hadassah was inside shopping. We all rushed out and had our picture taken with him.

The next day Sue joined us, and the seminar began. On the bus at 8:00am; off the bus at 10:00pm. It was like boot camp. However, we learned like we never learned before. Not only from the teacher, but from each other’s experiences, as well as from locals, who told us their stories. In our class was a woman who was taken in by a Catholic family at the age of 14 months for two years during the war to protect her from the Holocaust. At Yad Vashem, we found the tree dedicated to her foster parents. On Erev Shabbat morning, we paired off: our assignment was to go to neighborhoods throughout Jerusalem to interview people preparing for Shabbat in their homes. We all had positive experiences—embraced by strangers, finding out why they live in Israel, what they considered the highlights and low points in Israel’s history and what problems they felt Israel had in the present. Some of us were even invited to Shabbat dinner at these strangers’ homes, though we were not allowed to accept. In this environment, we all became like family—the students, the instructors, the Israelis we met, the country. It was like we were home.

(Reprinted from the February 2007 Contemporary.)