I am about to close my third month here on Year Course, and leave Beit Riklis in Jerusalem for an apartment in Bat Yam. I have three more school days, one more Zionism siyur, three finals, two papers to write, one song in Hebrew to translate, and one JVibe article to write until the weekend rolls around, when I'll be packing up my room for Sunday's big move in day. The transition should be an interesting one. Coming from Beit Riklis, our Year Course has been characterized by classes, dorm life, our proximity to Aroma coffeehouse and Hebrew U, living with our madrichim, being on 'lockdown' in the building where we live, eat, and learn when the security level dips down, living in a sizable American, British, and Canadian bubble, being settled in a room with two other roommates and a bathroom down the hall, and basically spending the greater part of our 24 hour day with the other 100 people here.

In Bat Yam, Year Course will magically take a new form. My group, Paz, will join with Shachar, who has spent the last three months on "Israel Experience" where they have either completed Marva (an army program), a Navy boarding school, MADA, or worked at a youth aliyah village. We will live four to eight of us in an apartment, go to volunteer placements during the day, ulpan twice a week, and be left with the chance to not only live on our own, but to live on our own in Israel. Finally I can start doing something that helps out our country! While my Israeli counterparts are starting out their army service and American ones begin work on their bachelor degrees, you can find me in Bat Yam, tutoring in English and working at a community center.

But if I forget thee, O Jerusalem... A few times these past few months, I've walked out to the balcony of the Hecht Synagogue at Hebrew U in the late afternoon, to watch the sun set over Jerusalem. It is an image I will always see in my mind when I think of this city. Jerusalem is the center of the world! The entire city and the entire world itself seems to branch out from the gold Dome of the Rock and the Old City walls. If I look to the west, past the crowded downtown streets and the big hotels, past the horizon and the ocean farther and farther is the United States and my friends in universities and family in New Orleans. If I look behind me, past the university's buildings to the north, past the houses on French Hill, and the Judean Hills stretching as far as I can see there is Lebanon and the cities of Europe and Russia. Looking out to the east, past the Arab towns and mosques is the vast desert-like lands of the West Bank, the Jordan River, Iraq and Afghanistan, India, China, and Japan. To the south, I can see Israeli communities, one next to the other, one after another, circling the hills; their orange streetlights and white car lights turning on one by one. Past them is the Negev Desert and Eilat, the mountains of the Sinai and of Africa. The entire world stems from our city, and it's never been clearer to me that this is the holiest place in the world. Sitting there, I feel so ridiculously alive. I can feel the fact that I have life and am living, and I am so lucky and happy to be alive right here, right now, in Israel.

It is with this feeling that I will leave Jerusalem Sunday morning. As the stone sign on the side of the highway leading out of the city imparts, I will "go in peace", and look forward to seeing the sign on the other side of that same road, welcoming me back.