It's me again

Hi! I'm back. I haven't written in a while, because things (I mean real life) seem to always get in the way. Besides, I always write better late at night, and I've been falling into bed pretty tired. It seems that the Diet RC I drank with dinner and with ice cream after maariv did the trick.
Today we bought a car. Or, at least, we paid a down payment for a car. We can't buy the car until R gets an Israeli driver's license, and he can't do that until he takes a lesson and a driving test, and he can't schedule that until he gets the letter he is waiting for from the Michigan Secretary of State with the issue date of his US driver's license on it, since it's not on the Michigan license. So, we just paid the down payment. The car we bought/we're buying is called a Mazda 5 (click on that for the cool Hebrew website, or click on this for the boring US website.) The good thing about buying a car in Israel is that there is no haggling over the price. The bad thing about buying a car in Israel is that there is no haggling over the price - with our new immigrant discount, we are paying almost double what the car would sell for in the US of A. I'm sure R will blog about the experience some time.
I really wanted to share with you my experiences at the Shabbat afternoon women's parshah class I attend. It is given in Hebrew by a lovely young olah (immigrant) named Adina Ellis, who does a very nice job of intellectual analysis of the weekly portion and personal relevance. Many members of the class are from the community of Ganei Tal, the "community within a community" in Yad Binyamin who migrated here after they were kicked out of Gush Katif. Well, in this last week's parshah, Va'etchanan, Moshe describes the land that the Jews are entering as a land with natural resources that will need to be worked to produce good things. The women of Ganei Tal naturally connected that with their own experiences of growing beautiful tomatos and flowers and other stuff in the desert land of the Gaza Coast. However, this past Shabbat was also called Shabbat Nachamu (the Sabbath of Consolation and Comfort), since it always occurs right after Tisha B'Av. One of the Ganei Tal women in the class decided to make a statement that she had previously only shared privately with a friend: "It is a good thing we got kicked out of Gush Katif - now we know for sure that God is King. Otherwise, we would have just gone about our daily lives, without consciously acknowleging that God is the King." By way of explanation, there is a bumper-sticker/ad campaign here with the phrase "Hashem Hu Hamelech", with translates into "God is the King". Another evacuee protested the statement of something good resulting from the disengagement. The first woman responded: "This week is called Shabbat Nachamu - we're supposed to get comfort from the fact that God destroyed the houses of tzadikkim (righteous people - the Talmud says that we should gain comfort from the fact that God destroyed the houses of the righteous, but not the righteous themselves.) You're a tzadikkah (righteous woman)!"
Wow. Pretty strong people, huh? I'm really glad we moved to Yad Binyamin.
Shabbat Shalom.