Back in the land

Well, I'm back in the Holy Land, and thank God, things actually seem to be working out now. I'm sorry I haven't posted since before my flight, but had I posted earlier, you would have been subjected to an intensely morose post. Instead, I'm posting now, in a decidedly better mood than I've been in in the last few days.

As you know, I've been searching for a Halacha lemaaseh Chabura. Most yeshivas have three full length sedarim where you just sit and learn Gemara all day. this is good, obviously, but it does lack a certain goal orientation. You can sit and learn all day, and even be growing in all the ways you should be, and yet you'll feel like you're not really accomplishing anything. That was my problem; I was learning, and learning quite well, but it just didn't feel right, to me. And I'd get horribly down, especially during the winter months.

A halach lemaaseh chabura is where you learn not just the Gemara, but you follow the steps that lead to actual practical application. Aside from seeing the entire process unfold, you actually gain something practical.

In any event, I was having trouble finding a chabura ( which means group, by the way) for several reasons. First of all, most of these chaburas consist exclusively of married guys, and therefore they learn topics which are deemed inappropriate for unmarried guys. Second, a lot of the other available options for myself turned out not to be options for other reasons, be it schedule wise, or the people there, etc.

The one place in the Holy Land that seemed to be a possibilty almost didn't work out, because I couldn't get a hold of the guy in charge. Until today. What happened was that I'd been trying to reach him throughout the summer, and I couldn't ever seem to catch him. My attempts after returning to the Land didn't bear any fruit, either. Up until yesterday, I was basically floating around in the afternoon, trying to learn, and having a real hard time because i feared that this plan wouldn't work, and I'd have to go back to the states for the winter, and go to a yeshiva there that had a chabura of the type I'm looking for.

I was so down, you have no idea.

Anyway, I decided this morning that if the guy in charge was gonna be so elusive phone wise, I'd go see him in person. Which I did, this afternoon. I got on a bus and traveled twenty minutes out of Jerusalem and found him. He said that had I shown up or spoken to him a day earlier, he'd have turned me down, because he had an equal amount of guys, and they were all matched up together. But one of his guys had to leave for some reason, and now he had an opening. Talk about karma! I tried it out today, and I think it just might work. I'm going back tomorrow, and if I feel it's going good, I'll keep going.

Anyway, that's all that's happening now......

Originally posted Thursday, 31 August 2006