I am
really
going with the flow.
My feet have been leading me, always two skips and a jump ahead of my head. And I’ve just been following. Because somehow, up to this point, things have been working out in unbelievable ways. I’ve somehow landed myself in Israel, and as I stepped off the plane in the airport after over 15 hours of travel, I thought to myself quite honestly: “what on earth am I doing here? How did I manage to get here, for one thing, and now that I’m here what on earth am I supposed to do?”
Dazed and a little confused, I’ve been following myself around – from Ra’anana to Tsipori and onto Tsfat. From home to home, friend to new and beautiful friend, from synagogue to synagogue, and from one welcoming Shabbat table to the next. I received an invitation to spend this past Shabbat and Purim with a friend from McGill who is currently living in Tsfat. And so I got on a bus and went up to meet her, and the weekend was unbelievable and surreal in the most unbelievable of ways. Purim in Tsfat… it deserves more explanation than I can possibly give here. Needless to say, it made an impact. Today, on Shushan Purim, I made my way down to Yerushalayim. And here I am. Tomorrow morning I’ll start taking some classes at Yeshivat Simchat Shlomo in Jerusalem, and see where things go.
To give you all an idea of where my head is at right now (which, given my state of mind seems like the only rational and appropriate thing to write on my blog for the time being), I’ll say this… in the past week the following things have come to pass:
I flew to Israel. I realized hours before departing India that my cousin, who I rarely get to see, would be landing in Israel a day after me to start her exchange program here. I connected with her, and got an invitation to go and visit her and her host family. I found myself in the most beautiful home and garden that I could imagine, in the company of the most beautiful family, and i had the opportunity to pick fresh lemons from the tree and collect freshs eggs from the chickens in the yard. I connected with a friend in Tsfat who determined my plans for Shabbat and Purim (both of which I was worried about coordinating), and in addition recommended an awesome place to learn for a little while I’m in Israel – something non-committal, spirited and open-minded. I emailed this Yeshiva and received an email two hours later welcoming me and inviting me to take a look at their schedule. They looked forward to receiving me, they said. I travelled to Tsfat and found myself in the company of strangers who I felt like I had known for years, and coincidentally connected with a family that friends had been telling me to meet for ages. I met a girl who has connections to midwives in Israel, and she was coincidentally going to be at the same Purim party in Jerusalem that we were planning on heading to after Tsfat. I got on a bus to Jerusalem, and found myself at a Purim seudah at the home of the only female in the orthodox world ever to have been given halachic authority to teach Kabbalah, and I learned that she teaches classes twice a week… and I found myself being invited to come. And when I stopped off at another purim party I ran right into my cousin Nedarah who I not only was hoping to see in Israel, but who I phoned up earlier that day to get in touch with. And there she was, at the party… and she was introducing me to the Rabbi and Rebetzin of the Yeshiva I was about to start at, beacuse of course she’s good friends with them both. And now I sit on the floor in the dorm room of a friend at the Hebrew University trying to comprehend it all.
You can imagine… it’s a bit of a trip that I’m on. And I’m so, so loving it!
Funnily enough, despite the fact that there are far too many words needed to describe my present reality than will fit on this page, I do happen to have pictures. And I’ll post them tomorrow 
Maybe it will give you a taste.
So I am here, and here I am. We’ll see what tomorrow brings. And I will try and write more, once I’ve had a little time to process.
We should all be blessed with those things that we need most at the moment, and we should be blessed with the ability to recognize them, in all their incredible and insane beauty, as they come our way.
So much love,
Hava
