I'm almost finished with Havel Havelim, bli eyin haraa. G-d willing tomorrow, and then back to normal. Hah! Normal? I still have to make up a test, check tests, make up a project rubric, cook in advance, clean. Pesach is coming and I'm not ready to begin to be ready! Oh, yes, I'm going to NY for a couple of days, yes a couple of days, and it takes a long time to get there from Israel.
We were away for Shabbat, the YU Alumni Shabbaton, I think it was called. Honestly, everything was fine, until the last big "speech" at the Seudat Shlishit, that's the third Shabbat meal, as the sun goes down. It's not like we actually saw the sun in the hotel, but...
There were hundreds of people; we took over the largest ballroom for meals, and it was full. One of the people at our table came to Israel on the same boat we did, but she was a little girl, and we were already married. Another table, which had old friends was the "happy table." There were Smiles, Freilich and Sasson!
We were all impressed by the new YU President, Richard Joel, who's an amazingly talented and dynamic guy. But as I said, there was an awful speech by some yored (an Israeli who leaves Israel to live in another country) rabbi, who seems very popular with the bigshots in YU, Yeshiva University.
This yored said that in the states, there isn't the phenomena of kids from religious families leaving Orthodoxy, so it's better to raise kids in the supportive communities of America. This is total hogwash, and it's obvious that he has his emotional problems trying to justify his yerida, descent from the Holy Land to the states. Everyone who understood his Hebrew was angry.
Considering that YU has been working so hard to make us all one international community of alumni, it was surprising. A few days after Purim, they took off their masks to say:
"Aliyah just isn't it."
YU President Joel tried to put a good spin on it, but as one of my friends said:
"Four hundred people couldn't all have misunderstood, exactly the same way."
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