This Friday was Tu B'Shvat, the Jewish new year for trees. It is a festival of growth and nature and in more recent years- environmentalism. Last year, I celebrated by going to a Tu B'Shvat Seder- a meal of sorts with lots of symbolism- with a lot of hippies. It was a pretty cool experience in which I contemplated a lot of fruit and heard some pretty cool spiritual thoughts about winter (my favorite being that we all have to go through patches of cold and misery because it is during that time that we are preparing for the growth and warmth of spring. It is that time that not only makes us strong, but lets us truly appreciate the happy flowery turnaround.)
This year was a little different. I met up with a friend and we quite accidentally stumbled upon the Jerusalem Municipality celebration. They had my favorite pre-pubescent boys choir singing in little white tuxedos with red cummerbunds, and even better there was a fleet of oddly decorated men on stilts. They were wandering up and down Ben Yehuda street personifying various aspects of nature. There was a man covered in flowing white cloth and cherry blossoms, another who looked like he had been attacked by the fake flower section at Marshall's, and one who was dressed up as a tree with quite impressive foliage. A woman dressed as a giant strawberry was giving a speech from a balcony and showering her spectators with flowers, while the balcony next to her held some sort of wood nymph blowing bubbles. I was pet by a man in a flower pot, but unfortunately the picture was not taken on my camera, so I will have to show that to you at a later time.
The rest of the week was not quite so exciting. After a few days with the english teacher in my office it became quite clear that I am not in fact capable of teaching technical english in hebrew to people who do not speak a word of english (which really makes me doubt the advisability of letting them fix airplanes when they cant read the manuals, but that is another issue). So after a few meetings with my commander, I am slowly trying to get through the bureaucratic process of switching jobs. As I am slowly but surely learning how things work in the army, I also have been calling everyone I know in the army (and everyone they know in the army) and trying to get someone important enough interested in me enough to pull me into their job. I have been talking to a lot of people in the IDF spokespersons unit as well as in the Foreign Relations unit. It is very unclear who might be able to actually help me and how long it might take, and well, pretty much all the details are unclear. But as I spent the week vacuuming bird poop off of chairs, I am getting kind of desperate.
That being said, it was not a bad week, and while my job or lack thereof is still frustrating, I am not letting it get me down and I am trying to enjoy the time I am spending where I am. It is charming company when they arent stripping, and I actually think they are going to miss me. Boris practically threw a hissy fit when I told him.
It is hard for me to feel that I am wasting my time when there are many more productive things I can think of doing, but as I learned last year from some smelly hippies in Nachlaot, sometimes we have to work our way through the hard cold patches to get to the good stuff. I have faith that there is a reason I am where I am right now, but also understand that it is up to me to make something out of what and where Hashem puts me. If I want my situation in the army to change, it is up to me and me alone to make sure that it does. So I am going to keep pushing, keep calling, keep bugging, and keep trucking on. I feel very much like the little engine that could or Dory from Finding Nemo.
I think I can and Ill just keep swimming and I wish you all a wonderful week!
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