Week One

I never thought I'd be the type of person who writes a blog and I certainly never thought that I'd move to Belgium.  I guess I'm 0 for 2 on predicting what I'm going to do next.

Week one here has definitely been an interesting experience, one quite different then I imagined. So far it's been pretty much the same every day - getting up, going to work, some sort of evening activity, then back to the apartment to sleep.

I just spent my first Shabbat in Brussels. Shabbat here ended this week at 11:11 PM.  It typically doesn't start to get dark till around 10:30 here.  I imagine there are a lot of confused kids in the summer time wondering why they are going to sleep when it is still light outside.

Friday night, the local students and young professionals get together for Kabbalat Shabbat and Maariv at one of the Jewish Center buildings. It is mostly people that are unaffiliated, so there is a lot of page number calling and explanation of what we are doing.  Following dinner, the group goes to the home of the head of the organization that I'm working for (also the people that I'm staying by while looking for an apartment). This week there were about 30 people eating dinner together.

Shabbat day all of the religious Chabad families go to shul together and have a kiddush lunch following davening.  This week one of the congregants was the guest speaker.  She spoke about an editorial that she published through the BBC about the pogrom that occurred 70 years ago in Baghdad, killing 150 Jews living there on June 1, 1941.  They call it the Iraqi Kristallnacht.  There was one story she told us about a survivor she interviewed who was 11 at the time. It seems that his whole family was killed during this massacre.  This boy vowed after that to kill any muslim that came in his way. A few years later when the boy was 15, he heard someone drowning in a river screaming for help.  The boy helped this man live.  He was distraught for breaking his vow and went to the town Rabbi who told him that you can't make a vow to kill, you can only make a vow to save.  This little boys whole attitude changed and he grew up to become a doctor, living in Manhattan.  He now treats Iraqi patients who were wounded by explosions for free and was returned to Iraq at the behest of the Iraqi government to be an advisor.   If you want to read the article here is a link: http://www.newenglishreview.org/blog_display.cfm/blog_id/35611

In general, I'm not sure what to write here or what you guys want to read, so all suggestions are welcome.

Gut Vach and Have a Great Week.