Hello!

Finally the rain has remembered that somewhere at the end of the world is a little desert filled land that has waited for rain for a long time! Together with the rain, have come grey clouds, wailing winds and the unpreventable chill. It is true that the setting is not perfect but on the other hand, especially now, in wintertime, when all we want to do is curl up under a duvet and read a good book with hot chocolate, this is the time to improve our Hebrew.

How? It is very simple. You want to read a book in bed? Excellent! There are many great books in Hebrew! My tip is to buy the same book in Hebrew and also in your mother tongue, this way if you don't understand exactly what is happening in the plot- you can always fill in the gaps or use the English book as a backup. This makes studying very easy and the book is not as threatening as it looked before.

Do you have questions? Want recommendations of books to read? Write to us on facebook and we will get back to you soon!

Good luck and I wish a rainy and healthy winter to all!

Osnat 

Rain, rain (don’t ) go away, come again another day.

This week here in Israel we have quite appropriately have had our fair share of rain. With constant warnings going out about the state of the Kinneret (our largest lake) and our lack of water; any rain is good news.

At the end of our festive period we had the festival of Shmini Atzeret when we recited tefilat ha geshem, תפילת הגשם , the prayer for rain. Interestingly we don’t begin to include the prayer for rain in our daily prayers until two weeks after the festive period to allow the pilgrims who travelled by foot to the temple, to return home dry (outside of Israel there is a longer waiting period to allow for the longer travel times). This year the rains began to fall just three hours after the prayer for rain was instituted into the daily prayer!

The word גשם  is composed of the shoresh (root) ג-ש-מ which also creates the words גשמי meaning materialistic and  הגשמה meaning  fulfilment. Rain allows for physical, materialistic growth and without rain it is clear that life would cease to continue. הגשמה  is used in Hebrew to denote the fulfilment of a grand idea. It is only with rain that the fulfilment of G-d’s life cycle can continue and that our comfortable lifestyle can be sustained. At this time we remember countries less developed than ours, less able to deal with drought and additionally less blessed with rain.

Osnat