Ulpan Fun

An ulpan is an intensive modern Hebrew course that usually meets a few days a week, and the most intensive courses last a few hours per class. My course, which I began last night, is not of this super intensive variety; my class is more like Ulpan Lite, meaning that my it meets twice a week for about three hours per class, and there's even a 25 minutes break during which complimentary Turkish coffee available. (Turkish coffee isn't as bad as I used to think.)

The course is run through Hebrew Union College, and since I'm affiliated with the college, I got a 25% discount on the tuition. Those of you who know how cheap I am will not be surprised to learn that this discount was a decisive factor in choosing the Hebrew Union ulpan.

I liked my teacher Leila right away. She began the class by going around the room, and each student had to say in Hebrew his name and where he's from. When I mentioned that I live in Baltimore, she said she had lived in Pikesville for a few years and had taught modern Hebrew at Johns Hopkins. It turns out she taught in my department, and we knew some professors in common.

There were about twenty students in the class, and on one side I sat next to a woman from New York named Judy, whose partner is a rabbi on sabbatical in Jerusalem. She wore several Lance Armstrong knock-off bracelets, and her backpack featured at least twenty buttons, one of which read: "If you're against gay marriage, don't marry one." I couldn't read the other ones, but I took this one as representative of the corpus. When someone commented on how many buttons she had, Judy said: "I'm a trouble maker." For some reason this struck me as funny, as if two dozen buttons were an edgy and provocative new way to express political ideas. Here in Israel folks grapple with the two-state solution, corrupt politics on both sides, constant security anxiety -- and now political buttons! Oh, the troubles!

Judy and I spoke for a bit (without any troublemaking, thank goodness). She was very nice, and I was glad she would be my conversation partner whenever we're told to "turn to your neighbor and discuss...." Then this Australian kid sat between us, which may have been a blessing in disguise because later in class, when we were talking about why we all like Jerusalem, Judy said in English: "The rocks, the stones are like gold. They speak to me." When you make no sense in Hebrew, it's all right because it's a foreign language and maybe you can't find the right words, but this was in English, and I'm pretty sure no one knew what she was talking about.

The other highlight of the evening occurred just after class had started. Leila had just asked us a question in Hebrew ("Are there any museums in Jerusalem?"), when the door opened and a 30-ish man spoke in Hebrew to her, then closed the door. Leila had just repeated the question when the door flew open, and a woman stormed in. But before she actually entered the room, she roared down the hall: "I told you I don't want to be here!" I thought: this should be interesting. Our new student plopped down at a desk, and Leila looked right at her and said: "Shalom. Do you know a museum in Jerusalem?" Under the circumstances I thought it was the best thing she could have said.

So between Judy's mystical non sequiturs and the late-comer's not-so-passive aggression, this should be an interesting course! The Hebrew should be fun, too.