A long day - A good day

Today I spent 15 hours at Pardes (from 7 AM to 10 PM). I plan to continue this ritual every Monday.
On "regular days" classes run from 8:30 to 5, but I try to come to shacharit which starts between 7 and 7:30 (so far, I have a perfect attendance record!*) .
So normally, I'm there for around 10 hours - which is already plenty long.

Today was the first day of "night seder", which is when you can choose to stay late and learn a topic of your choice with your chevruta (study partner).

Night seder runs from 7:30 to 9:45ish, so most people who are going to come take a break between 5:00 and 7:30.

Being the eager learner that I am (at least for now), I decided to fill that "free" time slot with an optional class on Jewish ethics that Pardes offers from 5:45 to 7:30...

Needless to say, it was a very intense day.
Amazingly, however, I left Pardes at night with much more energy than when I had entered the building 15 hours earlier.

In fact, I was somewhat sad to leave the beit midrash.

I was very excited by what I learned today.

Although I can't promise that I'll keep up this pace, I'm really looking forward to spending the next 9 months studying at Pardes.
I think that I made a good choice to come to Israel for a year instead of starting work right away at my accounting firm.


On a lighter note, I made a bit of an ass of myself today in one of my classes.

The class was full, so I ended up sitting in the back corner.
At one point, my mind began to wander and I started doodling in my notebook.
That is the setting for the following story:

We were learning about Rosh Hashana, and the teacher wanted to point out that it can be understood as not just a holiday for the Jewish people, but rather one for all the nations of the world.
To back up this theory, she tried to explain that we celebrate it on the day that the world was created and not on the first day of "Jewish peoplehood".

At the moment where I made an ass of myself, the above point had become clear to everyone although it had not yet been spelled out explicitly.

So, just to firm things up, the teacher said "On Rosh Hashana, we celebrate the birthday of the world, and not the birthday of..."
Instead of piping in "the Jewish people", or "Judaism" (or even not saying anything at all), somehow the word "Jesus" slipped out of my mouth - and it came out much louder than I had intended (I said it as a joke, but it was intended for my neighbour and not the whole class -and especially not the teacher).
It was pretty embarrassed, but at least it got a laugh (partially laughing with me and partially laughing at me).

(I have no idea if this story makes sense in writing, and even if it does, you probably don't think its funny. I'll pre-empt your criticism and say "I guess you had to be there").



*This is less impressive than it sounds, because school has only been running for a week