One month into my semester in Israel, I can’t help but think about how grateful I am for the people I’ve met here so far. In particular, I am astonished by the generosity of local families and organizations that are here to ensure we have the best time possible.

About a week into our time here, my roommates brought me to meet a man named Jeff Seidel, whom most of them had heard of before coming to Israel. Jeff Seidel moved to Israel in 1981 from Chicago and has developed an impressive career in outreach programs in Israel. He runs the Jeff Seidel Jewish Student Centers, which provide opportunities and experiences for English-speaking college students who have come to Israel. The group of us went to an opening event at the Jeff Seidel Center near our campus, and I left absolutely mind-blown.

The Jeff Seidel Center (JSC) hosts a series of events for students all semester, some at the JSC and others across Israel. Each Tuesday night, we head to the JSC for a speaker and dinner. On Monday, they brought us to Jerusalem to drive all-terrain vehicles in the Jerusalem hills, right along the border of the West Bank (a zone of serious Arab-Israeli tension here in Israel). In March, we will be going to the south of Israel for a “Shabbaton” that includes rappelling in a crater and visiting a winery. After the first meeting, I was ready to call my parents and ask for some money because the opportunities were too good to pass up — until I found out it was all free. The JSC is funded by philanthropists that support students who come to Israel and hope to enrich our experience as much as possible. I was so shocked that something so incredible could exist for free.

Seidel himself has met celebrities such as the Rolling Stones, Jay Leno, Amare Stoudemire, Ivanka Trump and more. He is essentially a legend. Here in Tel Aviv, he works with another man, Rabbi Dov Lipman, whom we have also become quite close with. Last weekend, Dov and his wife, Dena, invited some of us from the JSC to their home for Shabbat. This was my first time truly celebrating Shabbat, and doing so at Rabbi’s house was a very unique experience.

Shabbat, as I mentioned in a previous article, is the Jewish Sabbath and takes place every Friday at sundown until Saturday at sundown. It’s supposed to be a day of rest, which is why much of Israel kind of shuts down during this time. Within the home, there are other specific rules, depending on the degree to which you follow Shabbat. Rabbi Dov and his family are Orthodox Jews, so their Shabbats are about as legitimate as you can get. For example, some of the rules include no writing, erasing, using the phone, driving, riding in cars, shopping, and turning on or off anything that uses electricity. When we arrived for Shabbat on Friday evening, the lights were on, and they remained on until Shabbat was over on Saturday, because you can have lights on as long as the flip isn’t switched during the actual period of Shabbat.

It was an immersive cultural experience, and an interesting one for me as Shabbat is part of my religion, but never something my family or I have paid much attention to as reform Jews. On Saturday, we had a large Shabbat lunch with the Rabbi and his family, and then went for a long walk outside. The area we were in, located just outside Jerusalem, follows the laws of Shabbat pretty seriously. We walked in the middle of the road as we strolled through the town, because there were almost no cars out driving; families were outside, kids were playing, and nearly everybody we passed said “Shabbat Shalom!” — the typical Shabbat greeting. It was incredibly peaceful, and though at first glance the long list of Shabbat restrictions seems overwhelming, I can now see how and why people follow these rules once a week, every week. It felt like a cleanse.

Between Rabbi Dov, his family and the Jeff Seidel Center, I have found myself surrounded by a group of incredibly supportive and generous people. At that first meeting at the Jeff Seidel Center, I never would have guessed that I soon would have a new family in this home away from home.

In the week and a half of my Hebrew class, known as Ulpan, I’ve learned nearly as much about my teachers as I have about the language itself. In Ulpan, each class has two different instructors that switch off so that each group of students is exposed to more than one teaching style. Both of my teachers are phenomenal, with incredibly impressive resumes and teaching histories. One of my two teachers, a woman named Ruti, likes to tell the class stories about her life and about Israel — while also incorporating plenty of new Hebrew words into them.

Ruti’s past is particularly impressive to me. Nearly every day she teaches our class, she comes with stories that prove her life has been anything but boring. Though Ruti was born and raised in Israel, she has spent a lot of time in the U.S. for various reasons. She studied both at Boston University and Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT) and lived in the MIT dorms for five years with her husband as they studied there together. She has taught at Columbia University, New York University, Boston University and Harvard University, and years ago, the Israeli Minister of Education sent her back to the United States to oversee the teaching of Hebrew throughout the entire country for a few years. Her background in linguistics is so comprehensive that she traveled around the country to instruct Hebrew teachers on how to teach Hebrew.

Recently in class, she went off on a tangent that had our entire class captivated and close to tears by the end. She told us the story of when she was studying at MIT and living in the dorms with her husband and their good Israeli friend, Bibi. Her husband and Bibi had served together in the Israeli Defense Forces (IDF) prior to coming to the U.S. to study (as did Ruti, as all Israelis serve their time, but some longer than others). Her husband and Bibi had been in a top-secret special forces unit called Sayeret Matkal. Sayeret Matkal had a handful of crucial roles, but the story she told us was about a hostage rescue beyond Israel’s borders. It is difficult to do a story like this justice, but here is my attempt.

On July 4, 1976, while Ruti, her husband, and Bibi were all at MIT watching the fireworks out of their dorm window, they received word of a rescue mission that Sayeret Matkal had embarked on across the world. A week before the 4th of July, a group of Palestinians and Germans had hijacked an Air France flight and were holding over 100 Israeli hostages from the flight at a terminal in Uganda. They did this in an attempt to free 40 Palestinians that were in prison in Israel. Sayeret Matkal, which consisted of many of Ruti’s close friends, was tasked with retrieving the hostages. The rescue mission took a week to plan, and during that week the group had gathered information that on the 4th of July the president of Uganda would be traveling in a black Mercedes to the terminal where the hostages were being held. In an attempt to fool the air surveillance and guards, the unit built a replica of the Mercedes and traveled to the terminal in Uganda. They successfully freed 102 of the 106 hostages. In the process, only one Israeli commando from Sayeret Matkal was killed: the commander, Lt. Col. Yonatan Netanyahu — who was one of Ruti’s closest friends. They called him Yoni.

Ruti and her husband got the call with the news in the middle of the night. Yoni’s parents were living in Ithaca, New York at the time, teaching at Cornell. Ruti, her husband, and Bibi got in the car in the middle of the night and drove all the way to Ithaca to tell Yoni’s parents the news before they heard it elsewhere.

The story is much more complicated than that, and a quick google search of “Operation Thunderbird” will give more of the intricate details about the rescue mission, but Ruti told us all of this at the beginning of class this week in an incredibly casual manner as we all sat there absolutely captivated.

One of the most interesting things about Israel is that so many people have some sort of story like this to tell stories that involve extreme danger, risk and loss that most of us in the U.S. can’t even begin to imagine. Because the IDF is mandatory for Israelis, these experiences seem to be expected to a certain extent. While the Operation Thunderbird story is an extreme case, nearly everybody who’s been in the IDF has likely seen or experienced something that would make my jaw drop, but for them it’s just a way of life.

It certainly puts a lot into perspective.

Sitting down to write this, I’ve just realized that I moved into my apartment in Tel Aviv almost a week ago. In those seven days, my expectations have been exceeded, and each day I learn more and more about the fascinating culture and country of Israel.

On Tuesday, Jan. 14, I moved into the Midtown Tower in Central Tel Aviv and found that I’d been placed in an apartment on the 46th floor. The city is full of skyscrapers and some of the most modern architecture I’ve ever seen, and my apartment’s balcony gives a breathtaking view of it all. Being from the woods of Maine, it’s a stark contrast to what I’m used to.

I’m getting accustomed to walking everywhere. The market and the beach are less than two miles from my apartment, and to say the weather is beautiful is an understatement. My heart goes out to all those at University of Maine right now battling the cold.

Studying abroad in Israel is quite different than in many other countries. For starters, everybody who moves to Israel, whether it be to make Aliyah and join the Israeli Defense Forces, to work, or just to study abroad for a semester, takes a mandatory intensive Hebrew language class called an Ulpan. The classes last either a month, as mine does, or six weeks if they take place in the summer; they consist of fast-paced instruction in Hebrew of four and a half hours a day. Though it may sound a little exhaustive, the teachers are all incredibly passionate and caring and have impressive backgrounds in the study of linguistics. Teaching Ulpan seems to be a sort of honor, a duty to the country, to spread the language and keep it alive.

I should also clarify that making “Aliyah,” which I just mentioned, is a common thing to hear in Israel. It refers to the immigration of Jewish people from around the world to Israel and is a staple of Zionism, the movement to develop and protect the Jewish state of Israel. So coming to Israel for any extended period requires some learning of the language, to continue to develop the country. Thus, we have Ulpan – which is pronounced “ool-pahn.”

After a week of Ulpan, the first week I’ve ever spent really focusing on learning a language, I have realized the strain that this learning process puts on the brain. I came to Israel knowing the Hebrew alphabet, which, just to clarify, looks nothing like the English alphabet. I also knew a collection of vocabulary words, some verbs, and a thing or two about the grammar – but not much. I found out on the first day that very little English would be spoken during Ulpan, and the concentration it takes to follow along is astonishing.

In addition to learning Hebrew, I am also getting used to being in a country that is predominantly Jewish. Again, coming from a small town in Maine, I have always been a religious minority. In middle school, my sister and I came from one of two Jewish families. I grew up facing questions such as “do you celebrate Thanksgiving?” and eating Chinese food for Christmas. Here, nearly all the study abroad students are Jewish, as are the people in Tel Aviv and the rest of the country. Israel in general operates on Jewish laws, and I’ve never felt more at home.

For example, the workweek and school week here is Sunday through Thursday, because Shabbat, the Jewish Sabbath, begins Friday at sundown and ends Saturday at sundown. On Sunday morning we wake up and go to class as if it’s Monday, and we have every Friday off, an adjustment that took getting used to.

Unlike in America, the Sabbath is observed by most of the country; around 4 p.m. every single Friday, most grocery stores, restaurants, gyms, offices and public transportation close until about 6 p.m. on Saturday evening. My roommates and I were not prepared for this at all and as a result had very little for dinner on Friday night. Next week we’ll plan to go grocery shopping on Thursday.

Yet despite the minor inconvenience and our bad planning, being in a country where I’m part of the religious majority is an incredible experience. There’s something new and different about being in this country living with people who nearly all have at least this one core thing in common with each other.

This isn’t to say that everybody in Tel Aviv is Jewish – there are plenty of non-Jewish students in the program who came to Israel for various reasons. Many, including myself, are interested in the conflict in the Middle East, and being in a country that has war zones just a couple hours away certainly allows me to look at it all from a new perspective.

Just this past Sunday, Iran-linked forces in Syria fired rockets at Israel that were intercepted by the Iron Dome, Israel’s aerial defense system. The Iron Dome is a single machine that gauges the threat level of oncoming missiles (whether they’ll land in open space or in an inhibited area) and decides whether to shoot down the missiles from the sky. It does all this in the span of 1.5 seconds, and is moved around Israel to protect the entire country and make it difficult for enemies to plan attacks. In retaliation to the rockets, Israel fired back on Monday with a strike on the forces in Syria. And all this happened about two hours from the couch I’m sitting on right now.

In just a week, I have settled in, started to learn my way around and figure out a thing or two about living in Israel. We’ll see where I stand with my Hebrew by this time next week. L’hitraot! (Goodbye!)

Chelsea Cutler is a name you may have heard on campus by now, whether it be by hearing her music as it blasts from a car in the Belgrade parking lot, from a friend who checks up on Spotify’s “New Music Friday” playlist each week or from University of Maine fourth-year Alyson Matteau, who enthusiastically suggests we bring in Cutler as the Maine Day Concert artist.

Rewind to spring of 2017, Cutler was a college student with a four-year plan just like the rest of us.

Today, Cutler has dropped out of one of the most prestigious colleges in the country, leaving her education and her sports career behind. In their place is a recording contract, a nation-wide tour as an opening act, a sold-out headline tour, two projects released, another on the way and a debut album in the works.

Originally from Westport, Connecticut, Cutler attended the Pomfret School, a prep school in the northeast corner of Connecticut, before heading to Amherst College to play soccer in the fall of 2015. Throughout high school and her freshman year of college, Cutler wrote and recorded music purely as a hobby from her dorm room or music room at school. She would post both her original songs and covers (such as “Hit Me Baby One More Time” by Britney Spears) on her SoundCloud profile for friends to hear.

In the spring of 2015, during her last months of high school, it was Soundcloud that sparked the fire of her fame. Kian McHugh, owner of a music blog The Kollection, contacted her about her posts and offered to work with her to promote some of her songs and provide management.

“I didn’t think of it at all as a career,” Cutler said.

Even at this point, she was focused on entering college and preparing herself for NCAA soccer. But once at Amherst, she continued to make music for fun out of her dorm room.

Throughout her first year in 2015-16, her SoundCloud continued to gather followers and attention from other artists. During this time, she was in touch with artists Gnash, Kidswaste and Adventure Club, among others. Most importantly, labels began to reach out.

In the fall of her second year, Cutler signed a year-long contract with Ultra Records, the label that has managed artists such as Calvin Harris, Lil John and Kygo, immediately using the money to buy herself a Jeep Wrangler.

That spring she released her debut single “Your Shirt,” which sent her into the spotlight and has now accumulated over 50 million streams on Spotify alone. Months later, she released her first EP titled “Snow in October” with Ultra Records.

From there, her career took off. Now recording independently under the management of Visionary Music Group (who also manage Logic and Jon Bellion, among others), Cutler signed on as the opening act to indie artist and mentor Quinn XCII’s nationwide tour in the spring of 2018. With more record labels now knocking at her door and a six-week tour coming up, after her first semester of her third year at Amherst, she left school to pursue music full-time.

Despite the increasingly likely promise of success in the industry, the decision to leave school was not an easy one.

“I just get so sentimental about change. And transition,” Cutler said.

And this fall, once the Quinn XCII tour wound down, she felt this change a little more than usual.

“Right now it’s like, I just left New York City (her home for the summer) and all my friends are there, and all my Amherst friends are back at school, and my team is back, and meanwhile I’m leaving to go on tour,” Cutler said. “It’s just a lot at once.”

Her parents, too, are dealing with the transition.

“My dad is so unfazed but my mom is freaked out,” Cutler explains. “[My mom] talks to me about it way too much, like ‘my clients kids love your music,’ it’s so weird!’ and I’m like ‘it’s weird for me too! Please don’t talk about it!’”

Since leaving school, she released her first mixtape titled “Sleeping With Roses,” sold out her debut headline tour this fall, and has another mixtape on the way. Currently unsigned, she is working with her lawyers and management team to select the record label that will best serve her goals as a musician.

Cutler’s following has grown rapidly in the past year, which her numbers on social media reflect. Since releasing “Snow in October,” her Instagram follower count increased from approximately 13,000 to 118,000, and she currently gains approximately 1,000 followers every 48 hours.

At UMaine, her fan base is enthusiastic and loyal. Third-year Taylor Williams, who attended one of Cutler’s concerts this spring, has no shortage of praise for Cutler.

“My favorite song is ‘Water on the Bridge.’ I love her with my whole heart,” Williams said. “Someone asked me the other day, ‘if you could only listen to one artist for the rest of your life who would you choose?’ and I said Chelsea Cutler.”

In comparison to that of her friends, Cutler’s daily life looks very different. This past summer, she moved to New York City to be closer to the studio and more readily available for meetings. She met with Spotify, various record labels and was featured on Instagram TV after visiting their office and performing for them and a handful of fans.

“Sometimes I work from home and write and record, sometimes I go to NYC to cut vocals or write with people, sometimes I have meetings or events, sometimes I’m flying to shows, sometimes I’m on tour,” Cutler said. “And sometimes I don’t feel like working so I don’t!”

An average week might include set rehearsal for shows, hours or an entire day completely blocked off for writing music, a video shoot, a flight to a show and a handful of sessions both writing and recording with different artists and producers.

Some of her shows last summer, while on break from tour, included opening for Halsey’s New Jersey concert in July, performing their co-written song “Flair Guns” for Quinn XCII’s set at Lollapalooza, and performing at both the RBC Bluesfest in Ottawa, Ontario, and the Common Ground Music Festival in Lansing, Michigan.

And although she left her soccer team behind, she has a new team behind her.

“I have a lot of managers. My normal managers, then my tour managers, then my business managers. And then I have booking agents and my lawyer,” Cutler said.

When asked about her tour manager (who last managed Bebe Rhexa’s tour), Cutler says “she rocks. She takes care of me [on tour]. We eat food, and talk, and then go to bed.”

Her “normal managers” are part of Visionary Music Group, doing everything “on the creative side,” such as approving her new songs and helping her shape her image and sound. In the studio, she worked over the summer with Robopop, who produced hits like Maroon 5’s “Payphone,” and is currently working with Andy Seltzer, whom she describes as her “right-hand man.”

“We’re like creatively the same person. It’s insane,” Cutler said.

A year ago, Cutler was a college student. Even now, she’s not so different. Slightly freaked out by her own rise to fame, as anyone might be, she says an aspect that not everybody considers is that she can’t use Tinder. Imagine seeing your favorite artist on a casual dating app?

Instead, find Cutler on Spotify, Apple Music, or anywhere else you choose to
stream, and be on the lookout for new releases coming soon.