I have lived in Jerusalem for a week. That’s all—lived. Not studied in a prestigious program or researched in a preeminent library or dug at a landmark excavation. Today I did go to visit the school where I will be volunteering and conducting the observations and analyses that pertain to my sabbatical’s study question regarding teacher education in varied learning communities around the globe, but aside from that I have just lived.

Living in Jerusalem for me right now means:

•riding the bus downtown for a reason I can’t explain and running into Ariela, the gardener from camp this summer and one of my self-appointed assistants in the Jewish Education department, who is now studying in Bat Ayin

•being invited to Shabbat dinner by Rahel because “we are all under the jet lag and need your energy to come be with us and help bring in Shabbat!”

•going to the shopping center across the street with Tal and buying glittery nail polish to have Spa Night on the couch

•riding on the back of Eyal’s motorcycle (don’t worry, Grandma) to get late-night ice cream even though it’s 50 degrees out

•having the professional opportunity to attend a Hebrew class for Arabic-speaking Palestinian women

•and, receiving this email from Aaron just when I was suffering most from the sin of comparison about the fact that my colleague, housemate, and friend Debby is a fellow in the single most heavily-funded program the Jewish Agency of Israel supports and one of the two most prestigious learning opportunities in the entire country while at the same time I am “just” living in Jerusalem:

And don’t feel the need to knock yourself for
wandering and not having the biggest fancy
scholarship. This comment doesn’t have anything
to do with the fact that I’m currently piecing
together a very last minute and slapdash application
for an enormous National Science Foundation grant
while a labmate of mine is putting finishing touches
on a very cool, very relevant, very put together
project for another very prestegious grant from
the EPA. A Rebbe whose name I’ve forgotton talked
about a little apple seed that’s waiting in the
ground. It keeps asking “am I a tree yet?” and every
morning the answer is no. So the earth has to help the
seed. It has to give the seed strength to wait and it
has to remind the little seed that it isn’t just a
little seed: it’s ten thousand apples. So both of us
together is twenty thousand, and that’s a whole
lotta of pies.