Teaching is an Endurance Sport

My first act of winter break was to hop a bus to my physiotherapist. I packed up my piles of grading and the little envelope of merry Christmas letters that students had written, and half an hour later was telling a disapproving yet oddly friendly (for an Israeli medical professional) physiotherapist exactly how, in June, I had hurt my ankle in a half-marathon and been in pain ever since.

The woman quizzed me gently, gave me some exercises to do and advice on how to manage the pain, and then took me by the shoulders and looked me deep in the eyes.

“We need to make sure we’re on the same page. You’re not running the Tel Aviv marathon in February, right?”

Tel Aviv Teacher Life:
Grading at the beach

She reminded me of my mother. I grinned. “No, ma’am. I just want to run again. However long it takes.”

I called my mom on the way to the bus stop, ready to share my glee that I’ll be able to run again.

“Okay, great. But, listen, you won’t do the exercises too much? Not more than she told you to do them? Don’t overdo it.”

I get it. I tend to overdo things. It’s part of the danger of teaching. If one line of feedback helps, then a page ought to be even more useful. If one student needs an ear for their emotional outpourings, ten more probably do, as well. If I can make a lesson plan better through an hour of work, twenty hours will give my classes an ironclad brilliance.

But, as my physiotherapist explained, the rest in between the exercise is as important as the exercise itself. The muscles need time to strengthen. The philosophies need time to coalesce. The swelling needs time to go down. The planning needs time to catch up to itself.

In the two days before break, I had no clue how near I was to straining a ligament. I was giddy with organizing an exuberant Christmas talent show, deftly preparing my first-years for midterms, composedly torturing my second-years in practice essays. I assigned Extended Essay supervisors for the entire junior class and tracked down those who hadn’t submitted proposals for private chats about their unformed research goals. I listened to one of my Palestinian students talk about her identity crisis for an hour (it had been at least two weeks since I’d last touched base with her) and failed to make time for the student whose cousin was stabbed and in a coma. I wrote three college recommendations, didn’t snap at five kids at whom I wanted to snap (please don’t talk to the other ten), taught my first painfully inconclusive TOK class in three months, failed to navigate school bureaucracy to get a student the materials she needed for her extended essay experiment, and had a backlog of four classes’ worth of essays to grade.

Just so you know: I fall somewhere on the lazy side of teaching. I have colleagues and friends whose lists extend far beyond mine. There are those who are still responding to their student emails (at this point in break, I have only responded to the desperate emotional pleas, and the really funny ones, like my student who wants to solve world hunger, below). I don’t know how they do it.

Cheeky, eh? 

 

So now it is break. It is time for rejuvenation. I have graded half of my classes’ work. I have read books that I am not teaching. I have fallen in love with Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie’s Americanah, with Safran Foer's Extremely Loud and Incredibly Close, and the poet Warsan Shire. I have stared at the ocean, sometimes alone and sometimes not, for hours each day. I have seen Star Wars (it’s good!), Pride and Prejudice (the play in English—it was not true to the book), and יחסים מסוקנים at HaBimah (it was incredible). I have started to process the moments when my Palestinian students put me on edge with their claims and anger, the moments when rightwing Israelis shock me with their claims and their anger, and the space I live in between them. 

I have helped people in simple, concrete ways, ways that are untroubled by a politics of hierarchy. I have used both of my arms as railings so that a man who fell off his bike might shakingly climb back up them to a standing position. I have cleaned my Bubbie’s kitchen and carried a baby carriage up some steps. I haven’t had to think about the words that I use or search for meaning in tragedy. I have thanked G-d for the chance to help people without also having the chance to hurt them.

And for the first time in five months, I am running. As soon as I broke into a stride, I knew my mother and physiotherapist were right. The euphoria flooding me hit me hard. I don’t know what addiction is like, but I imagine it’s something of the chemical joy I feel at making my own speed, at feeling my legs eat up the ground and my muscles carry me over distance. After several kilometers, my ankle twinged and I remembered that I was supposed to walk a minute, run a minute. Regretfully, I slowed. But only so that I can run again, and farther, next time.

Someone Might Think I'm Jewish.

Yesterday there was a red suitcase without any apparent owner on my bus. A passenger asked whose it was. Nobody claimed it. Slowly, people began to freak out. A scared Russian woman requested a translation from me: “it’s a bomb scare, they’re frightened of the suitcase. It’s not yours, is it?” It wasn’t. There was a range of reactions. The teenagers in front of us were especially hysterical and began the general exodus off the bus at the first stop we reached, while the guy in front of them was totally calm and didn’t even take off his heavy-duty headphones as everyone shouted, “who owns the red suitcase?”

Setting Map of The Awakening

It was his, of course.

The driver got kind of mad, but everyone calmed him down, and the girl who’d first asked whose suitcase it was sat down and began flirting with the owner. I felt slightly sheepish, but also glad I’d kept my cool and hadn’t gotten off the bus. There was a strong sense of camaraderie throughout, as though, if we were all going to die in a few seconds, we wanted to do it cheerfully and together. And if we weren’t, well, we had a good story. After two months of attacks, the Israeli attitude towards violent death by terrorism has evolved into a team-building activity.

Someone asked my Palestinian student, “are you going to the climate march in Kikar Rabin Friday?” and he responded, “Hell no! I’m not going into Tel Aviv. Someone might think I’m Jewish and stab me.” A little introspection on who “someone” is might be interesting for him. That's also probably the best evidence against Israel being an apartheid state I’ve ever heard; we’re integrated enough that even the people determined to kill us can’t tell us apart. Don't let that fool you, though-- there's a great distance between not being an apartheid state and true equality.

Character Map

The Palestinian students in my classes are making close friends with the Israelis, who grok them better than anybody except students from other Muslim countries. Many are also truly struggling with their identities as Palestinian in an Israeli school. It would help if we had more Palestinian staff—two Arab teachers are not enough for our school’s mission. The administration has assured me that they’re working on getting more. I think it’s urgent. At times, I’m very conflicted about my own identity plopping up silently in my head while working through ideas with my students; they need more teachers who share their accents and discomfort with Israeli soldiers and naming of Yom HaAtzmaut as the “Naqba.” I can make a safe space for that in class, but I’m silently uncomfortable in the midst of my matter-of-fact mannerisms. And I can’t imagine how the all-Israeli teachers who spout political diatribes in the staffroom are dealing.

We had the oddest moment in a staff meeting, when one teacher wanted to space midterm exams out to make them easier for students. It gave me a moment’s mindboggling insight into an Israeli education system that, while being just as test-based as the American, doesn’t actually regulate those tests with any kind of intensity. Whereas in the States I always felt like education was some kind of holy crusade, here classes are a distraction from the important business of kvetching about students. Teachers wander into class with as much preparation as a TFA cadet—that is to say, a lot of contradictory nonsense that they espouse very firmly, and that confuses the students to maximum effect. Say what you like about teacher education programs, my traditional Masters was the most useful teaching instruction I had (besides, of course, trial-and-error learning on my poor students). But the Israeli system doesn’t seem to begin to approach the things we take for granted in the States: student-centered instruction, and investigative learning, and diverse methods of instruction, all appear brand new to them.

Thematic and plot maps

I recently created a new way to teach my students how to support their ideas with evidence. I put two theses that I want them to consider on the board (for example, “The Awakening is a modernist text,” and “The Awakening is a naturalist text,” or “birds are a symbol of femininity in the text” and “cigars are a symbol of masculinity in the text”). They don’t have to be opposed, just related. The kids work like mad for ten minutes, finding support for each statement in the book, and at the end, two names pop up beneath each thesis—they’re going to have to convince the class of theirs in two minutes or less. They take it very seriously. They don’t clap at the end of a speech; they pound the table like they’re at some hoity-toity board meeting. Their intensity in learning is incredible.

Today, they practiced for their oral exams. Their eager explications filled the room as they gestured and graded each other in partners. As they left the room, I pulled an incredibly cheesy teacher move, and stood at the door, high-fiving every kid as they exited. Well, some I clapped on the shoulder, and one I elbow-bumped (Hassan is always original). Every so often, something reminds me that I’m one of the adults that stand between them and the abyss of despairing teenagehood, whether they are tossed by low body-image or depression or a national identity crisis or genuine grief, and I want to wrap them up with an affirming love that will power them through. That part of teaching, at least, is the same wherever one goes.

The Jewish Guilt Trip

Surely it’s happened to you before. You visit a city in a country where a million plus of your nation were murdered in genocide within the past century, and you find yourself quickly, unhappily, liking it. I’m in Warsaw at an IB workshop this weekend, and, well… it would be silly to compare Warsaw to Tel Aviv or Jerusalem. It’s a hundred times more beautiful, cleaner, more intelligently designed… if only, in the words of an Israeli woman I met here, it wasn’t a giant graveyard for our people.

One in five people who board the bus here trip as they do so because they have a book held in front of their faces. I want to press their hands in comradeship, to memorize the way their knuckles grasp the dust jackets. After three months of Israelis and their smartphones, it feeds something hungry inside of me. In fact, I scan the streets to realize that there’s a conspicuous lack of smartphones out. In both countries the youth rise for elders on the bus, though.

The sky is a marbled, pastel wonder—I appreciate it all the more after the flat dangerous white light of the Israeli sun. I consciously crunch leaves beneath my feet, aware that the sensation is one I must treasure against the gritty sand of Tel Aviv streets. In Łazienki Park, I want to mimic the dogs and roll in the fabulous fall foliage. I’m equipped to: for the first time in two months I’m wearing proper clothing, boots and jeans and hooded jacket and scarf, instead of the sweaty loose outfits which barely hide the fact that I’d rather go naked through Israeli heat. And this is no Gan Sacher or Gan HaYarkon; here I could find myself a private space and roll to my heart’s delight, and there would be nobody to see. I don’t need to stake out a few cubic feet of my own. I have an entire forest clearing to myself. I compromise by lying on my back to watch the sky through the branches and occasionally taste the raindrops on my face. The ducks watch me for awhile, then go about their business.

The city is a wonder of wide boulevards. It mixes periods well. I tramp upon cobblestones past skyscrapers, and bemusedly enjoy the monstrous Communist architecture rearing up near the Old Town’s quaint painted castles. At no point do I need to weave through the drippings of air conditioners, nor avert my gaze from Bauhaus architecture. Fluffy red squirrels scamper happily beside me along the paths planted with trees. There are no rodent-like cats.

The people are interestingly ugly. None of the silky bronzed unapproachable beauty of Tel Avivis. Only the sexy mystery of plain faces, made alluring by their expressions and simple similarity to my own. And by the way they wear their winter gear; toggled wool coats, well-wrapped scarves, and heeled boots are so much more attractive than clinging minis and undershirts. Their language beckons. I could learn Polish. I already joyously recognize many words: billet, and kontor, and skrive. They are just like in Norwegian.

Warsaw smells incredible. It is washed clean by regular wind and rain. On Nowy Swiat, the scents of bakeries and chocolateries and Italian pizzerias drift into the street, and sometimes the illicit smell of sausage tickles my nose. The rest of the city smells of autumn leaves, and by the Vistula, of the river. I am amazed at how clean the streets are, and remind myself that just because people live somewhere, does not mean they must contaminate it with their trash like Israelis do.

In the Old Town, a group of Israeli men surprise me. I hear them debating about where the ghetto wall was, and draw near. As they bicker about it, one of them glances at me.

 

 .תשאל אותה. בטח שהיא יודעת ושומעת עלינו

Caught. I grin and look at the map.

אני לא בטוחה, אבל נראה לי שזה בכיוון הזה... 

We were off. They insisted I join them on their tour, and told me all sorts of lies: they’re looking for jobs here, they’re a soccer team here for a game… turns out they all grew up together and came to Warsaw on holiday. We had a boisterous time through the Old Town. Finally I insisted that I had to leave. I had a pilgrimage to make. They couldn’t believe I was going, and wouldn’t let me go without shaking each of their hands: shalom, Nissim, shalom, Avi, shalom, Itzik v’Gadi, shalom, all the rest of you quintessentially Israeli guys.

 "!שבת שלום, ובהצלחה, מותק" rang in my ears as I caught my bus.

The Zydowski Cemetery is an eerie place. It's one of the largest Jewish cemeteries in Europe. I’ve been there once before, with a trip from my midrasha while on gap year in Israel. Then I was mostly irked at being surrounded by sem girls and the “isha tznuah” descriptions on so many of the women’s tombstones. Now, I pushed open the gate hesitantly, and emerged into a world in which pre-war Judaism merged with memorials for the many killed in the shoah. It was so easy to forget cheerful, bustling, beautiful Warsaw, and sink into the twisted shadows of the trees. Tombstones tumbled across tombstones in a nightmare of mossy, mulchy death. I stopped to consult a map of the enormous cemetery.

 

“Excuse me, you know where is the monument of Janusz Korczak?” Two clearly Israeli women approached me.

 "לא, אבל אני גם רוצה למצוא המצבה שלו," I answered, and that was it. They adopted me. Together we ranged through the cemetery’s section by the gate, identifying the mass graves for the Warsaw Ghetto dead, and Korczak’s monument, while one told me their family’s history of escape from the Holocaust.

 "את יודעת איפה הבית כנסת בוורסה? את שומרת כשרות?" they wanted to know, and then apologized for not being themselves. Finally I shook them off, and headed deep, deep, deep into the cemetery on my own. Twenty minutes' tramp in, far beyond the area where most tourists visit, a white sign nailed to a tree told me to turn right into the depths of the forest. I stumbled along the overgrown path. As all sound grew muted around me, and the smell of wet earth overpowered me, I found the place I sought: the ohel of the Netziv and Rav Chaim Soloveitchik.

I wasn’t sure what I wanted to do there. Perhaps to atone for enjoying Warsaw so much. Perhaps to leave a pebble to mark their greatness, or to remind myself that an entire civilization had been wiped out here. I’m not the type to pray at a tzaddik’s kever, but I wanted to visit. Within seconds, the smell of wet decay, and the eerie green light of the forest, was too much for me. I retreated. Not until I was back in my hotel could I shake off the sense of malevolent magic, the knowledge that once there had been thousands of people here, a thriving civilization who may have enjoyed Warsaw as much as me, and they had mostly been murdered. I showered, set out the food I'd brought from Israel, and lit shabbat candles semi-defiantly. Something about davening kabbalat shabbat in Warsaw seemed a proper retort to the shoah.

At the first day of the IB conference, I explained to many different people, who understood to various degrees, that I couldn’t write today, or eat any of the food that was so nicely prepared, or carry the workbook back to the hotel. I heard two Americans speaking, and felt moved to approach them to talk, but didn't spend long with them. They weren't Israeli and family, just American and friendly. And unlike the woman from Skagerak, I couldn't practice my Norwegian on them, an opportunity which tremendously excited me.

It’s all right, I think, for me to enjoy some things about Warsaw. The cringing that I feel when I see tiny statues of Hassidic Jews grasping a coin in souvenir shops, and the sense of alienation that accompanies a stroll down the sentrum, past where the ghetto walls stood, punches me in the face enough to send me back to Israel. I was born in chutz la’aretz, and will always have an affinity for rainy afternoons, autumn foliage, and the crisp clean smell of approaching winter.

And yet, over the past weeks, I’ve found a beauty in Israel. It’s not in the countryside—that’s as scrubby as ever. But in the urban parks, where joggers thread between playing children, and in the wide boulevards lined with palm trees, and the chic coffee shops at every corner, and the numerous squares that dot Tel Aviv with cultural meaning… Tel Aviv is a beautiful city, which lights up at night and turns pastel over the sea at sunset. And whatever Warsaw may have that Tel Aviv lacks, Tel Aviv has the people… the keen people that so urgently claim me as their own. Perhaps, over time, its place will have the same hold on me that a cool, rainy fall day has now.

I Would Vote For You

I led a class on racial profiling (technically, it was on comparing different text types, but the content was racial profiling) with my first years this week. That topic becomes a lot more complicated when you add Mizrachi and Ashkenazi Israelis, an Ethiopian student, several Palestinians, a half-Black French-Canadian, and a South African who casually mentions that last week one of her parents was jailed for being white, into the mix. They brought angles to the mix that other students had never considered before, and since this is a topic where I mostly tend to ask questions and see where the class can arrive with guidance, I found it educational, too.

Yesterday morning, I sat outside on a picnic table, thinking. My laptop charger had just fried, courtesy of Israeli voltage, and there wasn’t much else for me to do during my planning. One of my favorite students, a kid I don’t teach but whom I mentor in my homeroom, approached me.

“Ms. W? Can I join you? Do you mind? Are you busy?” he asked.

“I’m pondering."

"Can I ponder with you?” He sat down beside me, laying his pile of books to the side. “What are you thinking about?”

I debated telling him the truth, and in a rare move for an introvert who prizes the privacy of her thoughtspace, decided to. “The peace parade we had last night. It left me… dissatisfied.” We talked about our mutual feeling of missing the point in it. Then we talked about the coding club he wants to start, his grandmother’s farm up north, his dream of MIT, the fact that he should probably share more of his thoughts since he didn’t bother telling anyone as they were building the new sidewalk that rain would definitely pool in one area, and then it did and someone slipped, and that’s the sort of thing that happens a lot around him because he has so many thoughts to share but rarely gets them clear enough...

At one point he stopped and asked me, “What do you think of it, though? Really, I’m very curious to know what you think of the school. Is it fulfilling your expectations?”

I thought for a bit about how, as a teacher, it’s not my job to give students ammunition for complaint. But there was one thing that was really on my mind, and this is a very mature student, much more prone to coming up with solutions than complaints.

“Yes, it’s wonderful. But in some ways… look, it’s great that you are all together, Palestinians and Israeli-Arabs and Israeli Jews, and being kind to one another and sharing love for each other. Nothing could be more important right now. But at the same time, it’s not enough. In a few months, the Israelis are going to the army, where they’ll be put in impossible situations, and you and the other Israeli-Arabs and Palestinians will have to decide whether you’re going to stay in Israel or Palestine or leave the country, and whether to be politicians, lawyers, businesspeople, how to lead your people, whether you’re going to keep in touch with the Israelis and all of you are going to build peace together, or whether it will be just a nice interlude, a pleasant blip in your childhood.”

He agreed, vehemently. He mentioned MEET, the peace initiative he TA’s for, and its way of bringing participants to acknowledge their own and each others’ pain with such urgency that nothing can possibly be done except to meet together to end the violence. I want to know more about it, because I think it might provide a good model for our school, as we toddle towards creating rituals and institutions.

Today, the school was quiet—the second years are in the south for a trip. I enjoyed the peace and sat in the hallway with my laptop, working to the strains of Stravinsky. I took a headphone out at one point, and overheard my student from yesterday with one of the Jewish Israeli students. They must have been sitting on the couch around the corner. He was speaking insistently, but also with camaraderie; these two are close friends—they’re both incredibly goal-driven, serious but game for a laugh, and deeply intelligent.

“—because I don’t want you to forget where you came from. I don’t think you will, but it’s so easy, when you’re part of the system.”

The other boy answered, saying something I couldn’t hear. I lowered the volume on the “Firebird Suite.”

“I know. It’s more about thinking about it, preparing for it, because it’s easier to see something from the outside. I know you, and I can’t see you forgetting basic humanity. I mean, if you ran for prime minister, I would probably vote for you.”

The Jewish Israeli laughed. “Really? Because I think I will be center right.”

“I think you would be center left.”

The conversation switched to political parties and soon they were doing impressions of Donald Trump. At least, with everything going on in Israel-Palestine, we can still get a good laugh out of America.

As they left, they came back to their earlier discussion.

“Oh god, man, this world is so messed up,” said the polymath who will revolutionize whatever field he chooses.

“Yeah, but that’s exactly it, you find the people who work best in a messed-up world, and you stick with them,” said the future prime minister of Israel.

I hope they stick with each other.

Why Am I Wearing a Keffiyeh?

One of my Palestinian students walked into class a trifle late on Sunday. He was wearing a keffiyeh tied loosely around his neck, and as he entered, I felt a jolt of confusion. I’m not sure what a keffiyeh represents. I only knew that he was laying claim to an identity group, and that somehow, in that instinctive part of me that I’m not wholly conscious of, I had the primal response of recognizing someone from a different tribe as potentially opposed to my own. The jolt of discomfort that went through me was from a deeper place than simply recognizing otherness—this wasn’t just weird to me, it was in opposition to a group I belong to. I filed the emotion to consider it later.

As per class rules, he passed me a note a few second later that explained why he was late: “some kid from the kfar (village) tried to start up with me because I’m wearing a keffiyeh.” I thought a moment, and then scribbled a return note: “did you end amicably?”

Puzzled look up at me.

“Amicably means friendly,” I whispered, trying not to disturb my silently writing students.

“Oh. No. He wanted to fight me. But I walked away.”

“Way to be,” I answered.

At the end of class, while some students lingered to chat with me, he offered to clamber up on a table and turn the projector off. As he did so, he grabbed the end of the keffiyeh, and muttered to himself, “this is so hot. It’s choking me. Why am I wearing a keffiyeh? Well, I know why I’m wearing it.” I wish he’d answered himself out loud with a reason. I want to know, although I also kind of know. Perhaps it could clarify my own reaction.

I riffed a lesson off of a former high school English teacher of mine, and taught my students the rules to definite and indefinite articles (“listen up, German speakers!”), then handed them a bunch of sticky notes and set them loose on the school.

“Everything should have the correct article,” I told them. “The one and only principal, an arm, a hot mess in the coffee corner… but nobody can see you label it. If they do, you have to take it back. You need to sneak attack the school with correct grammar.” As I picked up my bag to follow the students out, I noticed it had a sticky note: “A bag.” Aces. I headed into the main building, following the trail of sticky notes pasted along the way.

The school had a “Peace Parade” yesterday evening. One of the Albanian students organized it in response to current events. Our students went through the village with drums and candles, and as they went, they called to the village students whom they drummed out of dorms: “Peace parade! Come and join!” The ranks swelled, and Israeli children of all ages came out with their friends and held the proffered candles. I eavesdropped on their conversations as they went along, wondering what my students would think if they could understand:

“Peace? I’m a fan.”

“What the hell do these kids from outside the land know about peace? Or war?”

“Trade you my candle.”

“The nation of Israel lives!” (This in song). “We’re still alive, still alive, still alive.”

“She’s so cute. Do you think she’ll laugh at me if I speak English to her?”

“Peace? Yeah, right. Hey, Yossi, come watch the foreigners do a parade!”

The march ended at the village outdoor auditorium. Students from our school performed “Amazing Grace,” read a poem in Spanish, in Hebrew, and in Arabic, thoroughly befuddling the Israeli students who had no idea what this had to do with peace. I happened to be around for the selection of the Arabic poem—my Yemeni student asked for my help in translating it. He and a Palestinian student chose a poem by a famous Yemeni writer in which the current war in Yemen is bemoaned, asking how nonsense has become common sense, the regular norm of our daily lives. It then goes on to cry for return to Sanaa, the capital city of Yemen.

“But we’re going to replace ‘Sanaa’ with ‘home’, and make it applicable to everyone,” they said.

“Hmm,” I thought out loud. “It really reminds me of classic Jewish prayers to return to the land of Israel after the Roman exile. Are you sure it fits the purpose of this parade?” They didn’t want to change it. As we headed out on the march, I noticed one of the Palestinian students had the Palestinian flag stuffed in her pocket. She didn’t take it out though, as far as I noticed.

The parade was a lot like the UN trying to come in and impose peace. It was very nice to see Albanian and Argentinian students in flowing white dresses and pressed slacks perform, but both the Israeli and Arab selections were more to the point: one was about this being the land of our forefathers, the other about return to a homeland. It strikes me that this is the same point that most of the world misses: two nations are vying here, but outsiders who have their own country can’t quite get the struggle. Many dismiss the vital need for nationhood of one or another of the groups. And, while Israelis recognize, ironically enough, the desperate need for a Palestinian state, Palestinians don’t seem to have the same approach to an Israeli state. Well. The kids got to play with candles and perform, so they were happy. Probably much like the UN.

Right now I’m writing in Kikar HaBima, before the iconic Habimah theater, watching toddlers play in the sand and run between the cactuses in the sunk garden in the middle and tell their parents with a high degree of seriousness, “Ima, I can’t come right now exactly, I am playing in the sand.” I’ve just come from my second run-in with Israeli healthcare, and it’s left me no less bemused than the first. After visiting a family doctor and orthopedist, I’m now armed with two prescriptions: one for an ankle brace, and the other for an ultrasound (my ankle better give birth to a diagnosis soon. It’s been five months). It feels like I’m on some kind of weird scavenger hunt through the Israeli medical system, at the end of which they will declare me a true Israeli.

Slowly, savoringly, I am learning Tel Aviv. It’s no longer odd to me that young children and toddlers play in the city’s squares deep into the hours of the night. Their calls echo against the white walls of HaBimah, and trail off in the green shadows of palm trees and cypress. Both of those trees show to best advantage at night, lit up against the white backdrop of Israeli architecture. As flute music floats from the direction of the theater, a few raindrops land on my face. I have never before felt this relaxed on a school night.