I'm feeling a bit better about being here now that I actually got to focus on learning. I'm still homesick, but a little less so. I guess I just need to be occupied. Shabbat was alright. I spent meals with a couple of families, but it was still tough to be away. I ended up sleeping for most of the day, and I bonded a bit more with my roommates.
I spoke to the administrators about possibly switching apartments to be with girls who are a bit more at my level in terms of religiosity and outlook on being here. In the end, I decided to stay where I am for a few reasons. First, I really like my roommate Esther, and while she comes from a frum background, she's very down to earth and fun to talk to. Plus, we learned together in class today, and she's a great study partner (although I am actually at a higher text level, which can be challenging sometimes). I also think it will be good for me to learn to be around people who are different from me. Why come here if not to try and push my comfort zone a bit further? It's a bit intimidating to wake up to 5 girls praying in the livingroom, especially when I'm still struggling with things like that and wondering if I will be, or will ever want to be, the type who can wake up in the morning and pray, but that's alright, I know I can go at my own pace and just do what feels right for me. For now, at least. If it gets too difficult, I may switch apartments.
On the physics thing again -- now that I wrote that out, and read over my brother's and my Dad's responses, I can't really get it out of my head. Every time I sit down at a table, I look at it and wonder if it's really there. Then I wonder if I'm here. Then I get a headache, and wonder if that's there. Fun! I read another cool idea in that same book. When does water become wet? As in: if you have one molecule of H2O, is that wet? No, not yet, because wetness is a description of the distinct level of viscosity water has in its liquid form, and in order to even form a liquid in the first place, there need to be more than one molecule. Fine, so how about 2 or 3? At that point, it is still completely invisible to the human eye, much less the human fingertip. So, is it still called "wet?" Or does it only become wet at the point when it is perceptible? Does a tree falling in a forest make a sound? Well, no, not really. It makes waves in the air, which travel through space, but those only really become "sound" when they reach an ear that can pick up the wave and perceive it as such. So, by that logic, water does not become wet until we perceive it. So then what about everything else in the world? Do things only exist when we perceive them? But we can barely perceive anything at all, it seems. We certainly can't perceive most of the micro-levels of physicality, nor can we perceive all the energy around us (which, as we've established previously, all physicality is made up of in the first place). So maybe none of that exists, either? Well, what if an animal perceives it? Who says the world has to revolve around us human beings? (Well, Judaism says that, but that's a whole other discussion. Or is it?) So maybe all that really exists are things like the hardness of this table I'm sitting at. Maybe even though it is in theory (in actuality, but in terms of my perception, in theory) composed of energy and space, but in reality, in my reality, its hardness does exist. So it could be like my Dad said -- we have to live with what we perceive. We have to go based on that. And even more so -- maybe it only exists if we perceive it. Because we perceive it. Hmmm.
Anyway aside from all that craziness I'm reading about on the side, I've learned some really interesting things here at Shearim already, and I wanted to share some of it with everyone. There's a lot, and I already talked too much about physics so I won't go into everything, I'll just bring in one idea from class for now. So weve been learning a lot about Tshuvah, or repentance (actually the word literally means "to return," which is different from the Christian concept of repenting. Believe it or not, there is supposed to be no such thing as guilt in Judaism -- regret, yes. But not guilt. Guilt holds you back, keeps you down, regret pushes you forward to do the right thing next time. So Tshuvah is supposed to mean a return to goodness, or to G-d, rather than just sitting there feeling bad about something.) So we've been learning about that process, because we are now in the month of Elul, which is the month leading up to Rosh Hashana and Yom Kippur. So we asked the question today: what's worse? transgressing a negative mitzvah, or not doing a positive one? In non-Jewishy terms: what's worse? doing a bad thing, or not doing a good thing?
So at first glance, it seems obvious that it's worse to do a bad thing. It's worse to steal than to not visit a sick person. It's worse to disrespect your parents than to not give charity. And in a sense, that's correct. After all, when you do a bad thing, you are hurting others, and probably yourself as well, while if you don't do a good thing, things just stay at the status quo. So by utilitarian terms, you are at negative in the first situation, and at 0 in the second, which is higher than negative. Sounds good.
But on another level, it gets a bit more complicated. When you do something wrong, you can at least afterwards try to make up for it. You can apologize, you can work hard to be a better person than you were, you can repay people, you can think back on it and improve. OK, so sometimes damage can't be undone. But in the end, you can learn from things always, and in most situations, you can fix and improve things. But when you don't do anything good, then that means that you missed out on opportunities that you will never, ever, ever have again. If my friend was sick, and I didn't visit her, I will never have that same opportunity again, in that same way, in that same time. Maybe another time I can, but that time, I can't go back to. By the end of your life, when you are about to pass away, you can think about all the things you've done wrong, and you can apologize to whoever you can, even to G-d if you're into that. But you can never go back and do the things you never did, because they never existed in the first place, an the time has already passed. On Yom Kippur, we spend most of the day doing tshuva for things we did wrong. But there is also a place for thinking of all the missed opportunities, as well. Time moves on, and we never get it back. The New Year is a marking of time's passing, of moments that are leaving us that we'll never get back. That's definitely also something to think about.
K, I've typed a lot. Thank you to all those who are commenting, I really enjoy reading them, especially when little debates over physics and politics pop up. Also thanks for all the encouragement on homesickness. Hopefully things will continue to get better. I'm nervous for the holidays...we'll see how that goes.
Till next time....which will be soon....
Shira
PS pictures below, in order: the view out my window, me and my roommate Esther (all dressed up for shabbat, elbows covered as can be, (eep)) and the view from school
