New Turn for Jew-is-Beautiful

In about four days (after Simchat Torah), I'm leaving on a jet plane (Jet Blue) to Israel. The purpose? I'm going to study in a yeshiva (religious school) in Jerusalem, about one hour south walk from the Kotel (Western Wall). This is a new turn in my life, and it seems that many of the new major turns in my life have always taken place in Israel, including the one that made me decide to become observant, so it's no wonder that I am reaching my next step in Judaism in where else but Eretz Ha-Kodesh (the Holy Land).

Now I know that I write many serious things on this blog, but to my readers (assuming that I have them), I will begin to sporadically journal about some of my adventures in the Land of the Jewish People, in the manner of a true blog (which I just learned stands for 'web log'). Therefore, you can tap into these experiences via my blog, it can be your intermediary, just don't turn this into avoda zara please. I eventually hope to get a video camera and to actually tape myself reading my blogs, but will only reserve that for my essays.

I will start with this random set of information, which was actually an e-mail that I sent to a friend who spoke to me about Ethiopian Jews. All of the subsequent content is true and entirely factual.

Ahhh, my first love in Israel, or maybe my second or third or eighth, was an Ethiopian girl named "Adis," named after the capital of Ethiopia, Adis Ababa. She was adorable, let me just say that, and she might have liked me too but I was a stupid 16 year old, then a stupid 17, 18, and 19 year old, and I think eventually I'll grow out of that. It was 1996 and just the beginning of the introduction of Ethiopian Yids into the mainstream culture in Israel and my cousins and their friends thought I was out of my mind for liking this girl, but I knew better than that, she was kosher shoko cham (hot chocolate milk). I know, I know, so gashmi, (physical) but I'm not like that anymore. She was traditional, and now that I'm observant maybe I have a chance with her. Her parents always liked me. It helped with her family of eight or nine siblings that I was mad into reggae, which the Ethiopian Jews liked, and that I could tell them what Bob Marley was talking about. I might have been the first white Jew they met to be into reggae, but gradually that caught on like wildfire in Israel.