Home / Student blog / Page 4
Wednesday, May 28, 2014
Today we climbed Masada, Herod’s ancient fortress. I already had a personal connection to Masada, since I had climbed the mountain once before with my socialist Zionist youth movement, Hashomer Hatzair, where we were initiated into staff and, by extension, leaders of the movement. However, visiting Masada as a student of religion was quite... More
Saturday, May 24, 2014
Today, we went to visit Yad Vashem, Israel’s national Holocaust museum. It was not an easy day for any of us, but as a Jew I was especially struck by the horrors displayed within the museum. I had not been sure how I would react, seeing as I had already done a similar tour... More
Wednesday, May 21, 2014
... More
Tuesday, May 20, 2014
Today, we went to the ultra-orthodox area of Jerusalem, Mea Shearim, and we explored both the marketplace as well as the streets themselves. By ultra-orthodox, I mean to say haredi, which is defined by Raysh Weiss on My Jewish Learning as a catch-all term to describe highly religious Jews, who typically dress in black... More
“Lo toda” is the Hebrew phrase meaning “no thank you” and I have used it the most since arriving here. It is an infinitely useful phrase when brushing off vendors in a market with an air of friendly Canadian politeness. My favourite phrase since my arrival, however, must be “slikha” meaning “sorry”, a word... More
Thursday, May 15, 2014
Tuesday, May 13, 2014
On Thursday, we visited the Israel Museum, where we saw the Dead Sea Scrolls, the Model of the Second Temple, and a variety of other fascinating artifacts within the museum itself. We also went to the Knesset, and had a guest lecture on religion and public life in Israel. The readings were focused, then,... More
Saturday, May 10, 2014
Aside from Jerusalem, Tel Lachish was the second most important city in Israel until it's final destruction in 586 BCE. There at over 25 references to the ancient city both in the Bible as well as other ancient sources. One such source comes from the reliefs at the palace of Sennacherib, the Neo-Assyrian king... More
Friday, May 9, 2014
The Dead Sea Scrolls have been mentioned to me various times in the religion courses that I have taken – so many times in fact that I naturally felt that the readings for the day were not even strictly necessary. How shocked I was to read the first assigned article by Hannah Wortzman and... More
The article by Talal Asad looks at changing conceptions of religion and its relation to politics. Asad’s article essentially functions as a critical review of relevant literature, tracing (somewhat) chronologically how different scholars have conceptualised and sought to define religion and faith over time. Although he ends the article with... More
Thursday, May 8, 2014
“It is, moreover, the self-evident right of the Jewish people to be a nation, as all other nations, in its own sovereign state.” Does that phrasing sound familiar? It should. The assertion of the existence of self-evident truths in the Israeli Declaration of Independence echoes the American Declaration of Independence and its premise that... More
Search