Jenin

My friend went to the store today and asked where the vegetables were grown. Don't worry the shop-keeper told her. They're from Jenin. Great. That's just what she wanted to hear. She's planning on living off of canned vegetables for the year. Not a bad idea...

Forgiveness...

Yom Kippor has just ended... A time when Jews traditionally ask each other for forgiveness for things that have done, might've done, or even wished they had done... One of the major downsides of asking for forgiveness is actually calling someone who you might've insulted or hurt or bothered. But maybe you didn't. Like sometimes you can say something that someone else will take personally...and sometimes you can say the same thing to the same person and it doesn't bother them at all.. I think instead of the person asking for forgiveness trying to figure out who they might've insulted in the past year... the insulted parties should be responsible for declaring they took something personally, and informing the other parties they need to be forgiven.

Feeling the Ignorance....

The kitniyot issue in this country was weird to get used to. In the States the norm is not to eat kitniyot on Pesach - in Israel there are many more people who do eat it, and you find yourself surrounded by products in kosher for pesach stores that you can not eat. But you generally accept the customs of your family and community and watch as others eat corn chips knowing that their doing nothing wrong - but you can't have any.

The kitniyot issue in no way prepared me for the Shmita issues though. Shmita has started. I'm not sure why I feel caught off guard... I've known that it was starting for quite some time.... I know I was planning on attending some classes on the laws of Shmita.. but I never got around to finding out about them... and I definitely did not get around to actually going to them. Suddenly I am realizing how ignorant of the laws I really am. Why didn't we spend any time studying this in school? Shmita was sorta glossed over... after the basic "every 7 years, we don't work the land in Israel" we never really went into details of... so then what do we really do. Sure we discussed the nissim that could happen if we worked the land for 6 years and not 7... but the practical what to do during that 7th year was never discussed. Now, I know what you're thinking... I went to school in the States.. where this is not an issue... My schooling did includ memorizing the steps of bringing karbanot, all the materials and measurements of the mishkan, and how to write progams in BASIC... none of which I'm ever going to really have to deal with... so why not the laws of shmita? And now i'm faced with all these ideas of laws I've never heard of before, and everyone has a different story about what they do.

Some of the laws are intertwined with ones personal political tendencies, and some to are attached to various loopholes.

Tangling laws with politics.... i'll save that for another post :) Right now i'm just trying not to feel overwhelmed by all the new laws I find myself treading through to stay afloat...