November Update

Hello again, everyone!  I hope you're all doing well!  I'm doing very well, keeping extremely busy, and learning a lot!  

High Holy Day services were interesting.  They were different from the services at home because here, they read no English in the prayerbook.  Cantor Shleifer did just about all of each service except for the sermons and the parts that the cantorial students sang.  He is an amazing cantor!  When he wasn't singing with the piano, to get his pitch, he used a tuning fork, which he kept in his front shirt pocket underneath his white robe.  He also wrote many many pieces that we cantorial students sang.  I sang his B'Rosh HaShanah.  He's proving himself to be quite the cantorial genius!  I use cantorial and not musical, not that he isn't a musical genius either, but because he is able to so easily fuse the Judaism and music together in his services, his compositions, and in his classes.  Unfortunately, as I may have already told you, he is retiring this year.  His retirement ceremony, at which the cantorial students will be singing, is November 11th.  It is sad, but I am so happy that I am able to study under him this year.  

Classes are moving right along!  Yesterday morning, I had a test on singing the nusach (traditional way of chanting) for the beginning of a weekday morning service.  We had to chant it, not from our books with the musical notations, but out of an orthodox prayerbook, called "Rinat Yisrael."  We chanted everything the Cantor is supposed to chant before the Bar'chu, which is apparently a lot!  I'm glad they're having us learn the traditional chanting of the service.  We're also studying trope (Torah, Haftarah, etc.), and currently we're working on the portion where the Ten Commandments are read.  I think we'll probably move on to Haftarah trope next week.  

Our class just took a trip to Masada earlier this week.  It's too bad I forgot my camera!  This trip was for my Second Temple History class.  It's great to see places like Masada with real historians/archaeologists as your guides!  I'm also learning a lot about current Israeli culture and its recent history in our Israel Seminar class, which is a full day class on Wednesdays.  We've talked about things like the 6-Day War, the different waves of immigration, the establishment of a state, and many other things.  We've also watched movies and traveled around Israel.  In a couple of weeks, we'll go to Haifa and Tz'fat for the day.  

And... there's always Hebrew class!  I have 1 class each week dedicated to Biblical Hebrew and 5 classes each week dedicated to modern, conversational Hebrew.  It's a lot, but well worth it!  I can actually speak a little bit of it!  My teacher is great!  She's an Israeli woman who seems to wear the exact same dress every day, but she's very good at what she does!

Also, I have a great vocal coach!  Her name is Judy Axelrod.  I feel I'm learning a lot from her, and will have a much greater handle on good vocal technique by the end of this school year.  

The weather has finally started to change here and it's getting a little cooler, right around 70 degrees during the day, and in the 50's at night.

My friends here are wonderful!  It's really a neat thing to have close friends who are peers that share so many of the same interests as I do.  As much as I miss you all and as much as I miss being home, it is truly a blessing to be here!

Amanda