Limmud Day 5-Tuesday

After my standard breakfast of fried tomatoes and hash browns I had a tough decision to make, no session stood out. On the Sunday, I lunched with one Francis Treuherz, wearing a brown farmers hat, a purple waist coat and a multi-coloured shirt. With no lecture to go to, I went to go see Treuherz, this time without the hat, but with a sleep silver Apple laptop, a kippah and an organon homeopathic tie. Never did I think that I would attend a session on homeopathy. I did not sign up afterwards.

I went to another of Mikhael’s intensive sessions. This time he used videos looking the Hawara checkpoint in the West Bank and a documentdary video on soldiers frokm the 1st Intifada then and now. He showed a video which was supposed to be used as a Hasbara movie by the Israeli Defence Force (IDF) but was cancelled because it showed the army in a bad light, it was eventually leaked. It shows soldiers mistreating Palestinians at this checkpoint.

It was another great session; I hope that does not come across as biased.

My volunteer duties finished early, so I decided to catch a session near by, I walked into a lecture by Richard Freund, a world famous archaeologist and highly popular presenter, so I went to go see an interview with Chaim Ulliel, lead singer of Israeli band Sfatayim.

Ulliel lives in Sderot and is at the forefront of reviving Moroccan Jewish music and Morrocan Jewish culture in Israel today. However, there was this woman sitting behind me who had the audacity to ask 14 questions during the talk, it became excruciatingly painful and unbearable. I had to breathe in and out to prevent me from vicious outbursts. The audacity and the nerve of the person to hijack the talk-this was probably my worst experience at Limmud.

I then had a 20 minute descent to the Cavendish buildings to hear the editor of Ha’aretz David Landau. Speaking at an event entitled “ Israel’s Annus Horribilis “. Like his newspaper, Landau was brilliant. A religious, observant Orthodox Jew, Landau painted a very gloomy picture of Israel, from the untimely departure of Sharon from the political scene, to the election of Olmert, to the failure of the Lebanon war, the grey clouds could not match the gloom of his presentation, pacing up and down, not making much eye contact with his audience, at times very verbose, Landau’s address was one of the best I went to at Limmud.

Mikhael, Roi and I did not know what next to choose, I let Mikhael decide and we went to a talk on Revisionist Zionism and the right wing in Israel. Given, by noted academic and author Colin Schindler, from the first minute I raised my brows at Mikhael and let him know that he had made a crucial error. Monotonous and dull, Schindler gave an historical account of Ze’ev Jabotinsky and Menachem Begin, this lecture was so boring that it flatlined until some thoughtful new insight at the end.

Tuesday was not living up to Sunday and Monday’s standards.

To make matters worse, people were swapped on my dinner roster and I had to work with this loud, bumbling fool on my team, thinking she was in control and holding that Motorola walkie-talkie as if she was running a Fortune 500 company, I dodged her like the plague and ran the operation with one of my colleagues without her knowing what was going on.

Later that night, I went to a talk on racism and violence in Israeli football. Alan Bolchover, Chief Executive of the New Israel Fund in the UK until last Friday, gave a humorous yet telling account of this vice in Israeli sports and what his organization and the Israeli and English FA’s have been doing to combat this scourge.

After a few drinks, I went to go watch Sfatayim in concert. The turnout was poor, not because the music was poor, but because they were practically a full house the night before. It was another late night, and although parts of the day were crap it was still a great day…until I realised I had smashed my cell phone screen which meant that I could not do anything except see the time or take calls, I asked a good gentleman to wake me up the next day. I was looking forward to four hours of solid sleep.

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1) Francis Teurheuz on Homeopathy
2) David Landau
3 Sfatayim in Concert