Food Fight

Food in the yeshiva isn't bad: three meals a day. The trouble is, you get exactly half an hour to eat, and there's a limited amount. So, if you get there 5 minutes after they open, you can probably select from some scraps of peppers or maybe a bowl of kasha. Everything else goes instantly; it's like a piranha pool. Yesterday for supper all I got was two baked potatoes and some canned tuna.

One of the students told me that conservative and reform jews are different from "Torah Jews". They're still Jews, but they're different. The teachers are old enough and mature enough to have gotten past this attitude, but most of the student body is made up of baal teshuva, and newly observants, like converts, in every religion tend to be very zealous. Add that to a 22 year old mentality, and it can make for some hard-core mentality. They're all very kind, and very pious, but it'll be a few years, I think, before they're comfortable enough in their own skin to begin to accept the world around them.