We have been in Tzfat now for a a little more than a month.
Our daily routines have changed. We don’t try to attend all the available classes and events any longer, but settled on a few that we found most important. Last week we also started a new class called Cafe B’Ivrit out of town, in Karmiel, which is 40 minutes bus ride from Tzfat. The bus goes on a twisty mountain road, with unimaginable views of the hills of Northern Gallilee, lake Kineret, fertile valleys, with many Jewish and Arab towns, built on the side of these steep hills so it makes you wonder how they keep standing. Every hill seems to have a town on it, and the bus stops in many of those towns. Some of them are arab-christian, some are aran-muslim, some are Druze, and some are Jewish. The jewish towns can be religious, non-religious, and the majority language spoken can be Hebrew, Russian, English, French, Ethiopian, or the mixture of all of them… Every town seems like a planet of its own. In Tzfat, in the area we live, everybody is religious, and either Hebrew or English speaking, but when we come to Karmiel, we seldom see another religious person, and languages spoken there are Hebrew, Russian and Arabic – no one speaks English… Our Hebrew class is in Nefesh-b’Nefesh office, located on a second floor of ultra-modern glass building, and people in our group are from several towns in the North of Israel. In the class we are are allowed to speak only Hebrew, and not allowed to be embarrassed. Typically for Israel, the class is very informal, and also typically, everybody immediately becomes friendly with each other, despite very different backgrounds: a black woman from California who converted; another person from Maine (of all places), a Jew from Czechoslovakia, who escaped after being imprisoned three years in Gulag for his Jewish Faith, a woman who escaped Hungary, one American woman who moved to Karmiel because she wanted to join one of the very few conservative congregations in Israel, located in Karmiel, and us. It turns out that the Czech and the Hungarian also live in Tzfat, and would not hear of us taking a bus back, so we get the ride back with our new friends Yochanan and Katy in their car. As much as we like to see other towns in Israel – every time we get back to Tzfat – we feel that there is no other place we would rather be!