So I am officially a college senior, though it sounds strange to focus on a solely academic transformation when it seems as though so many other processes have taken place since arriving in South Africa, for now it is something in which I take great pride. This past week was consumed by studying and test-taking, which in the end was not as trying as I would have expected. Though the South African educational system has proved itself to be of high quality to me it seems that what is expected of you in return as a student is rather simple. Two out of my three tests were regurgitations of paper that I have already written, which made studying rather unnecessary. But in the end I do think that this system allowed me to cement all of the ideas that have been festering in my head and now if you ever want to know about Black Consciousness, Robben Island, export oriented industrialization, the economic evolution of Mauritius or the historical development of Eastern Bantu speaking societies in sub-Saharan Africa throughout the Iron Age, I am definitely your gal. Ultimately, I am extremely satisfied with my academic experience here; the subjects that I learned collectively painted a very multi-dimensional image of South Africa and some of its neighbors that truly allowed me to begin to develop an understanding of my surroundings in a way that unfourtanately far exceeds my awareness of the country and society that I actually live in. But maybe now I will have the motivation to begin to build that up as well.
So now that one very significant aspect of my time in South Africa, I am left with eight days of my semester abroad to start the process of placing this whole experience within a greater context. I find it fitting that Shavuot happens to be a large chunk of that time period because reception of the Torah also seems to be quite a significant culmination that has forced us to consider our spiritual positioning over the past 49 days (and perhaps a much longer period as well) as an entire people and as individuals as well. At a shir last week, I learned that though Rosh Hashannah and Yom Kippur are the days that determine our welfare for the coming year and thus require us to cleanse ourselves and request forgiveness for our sins, the annual fate that is solidified during these days is one of a primarily physical nature. Our subsistence and survival is determined in this time period, but our spiritual destiny is actually one that is decided on the annual occurance of the reacceptance of the Torah, Shavuot. Even more significant, we are personally in charge of our own fate, we make the individual choice to experience a year of spiritual fortune or emptiness. Taking on the commandments of the Torah is quite a hefty task and one that we need to commit ourselves to newly every year, for we cannot get caught up in the routine of banality that strips this decision, this relationship of its significance. Shavuot is not just a memory, but a chag that heavily impacts our decisions and our alignments.
While this, along with many of the topics I have discussed in the past, is perhaps a little exaggerated and dramatized, I think that this way of thinking perhaps adds an interesting new dimension to a holiday that we often associate with yummy cheesecake. Instead of it being a day that only commemorates the event that transformed the people of Israel into a nation, religion, civilization all simultaneously, it provides us with a unique opportunity to be active participants in that process. Understanding the importance of the Torah which I would expand to an entire system of ethics and morality, in whichever way you choose to interpret it, is something that strongly influences who we are as Jews and as human beings and because of this it seems quite beneficial to partake in such a defining, intense act. This is why the period of the omer exists, so that we can prepare ourselves for this undertaking and so that we can make an informed decision regarding our own status for the coming year.
I think that now is a symbolic omer for me personally, a time to really start to think about how much I have learned and how I can bring all of this back with me into the life that has been put on pause in a sense for the past five months. While I suppose I have been doing this throughout my Cape Town adventure I think that I have been constantly obtaining very separate experiences and mental mementos and in order to truly contextualize and translate these into my normal life, I think that I need to step back and look at the broader picture to truly understand who I am now in relationship to who I was five months ago. I know this sounds quite cheesy and dramatic, but hey I have since accepted that perhaps I am these things, and I should stop apologizing for it (unless you think I shouldn't stop that since it gets to be a bit much....just kidding). But I think that each experience is one that deserves this period of consideration, of pulling out the positives and the negatives and finding them the necessary place in the whole of one's identity, one's history, so that it is possible to understand and decide what we have the potential to accomplish in the future as a result of what we have already experienced. I think that this process is quite synonymous with what is asked of us in realtionship to our Jewish and spiritual identities on Shavuot.
I think at this point, I am at a loss for how I could possibly begin to sum up this experience. So much has happened, so much has been consumed, so much has been purged and I think that I will bestow this gift of a short blog post upon you in preparation for a more extensive and thorough update of my status as a result of this experience that will have to be written in the near future.
South African Ulpan:
narchie - umbrella term for the family of miniature orange-type fruits such as tangerinea and clementines.
Cheers!
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