To my great joy, three of my English-speaking friends in Jerusalem have decided to take advantage of my decision not to speak English (except for professional purposes) as long as I'm in Israel and started to speak Hebrew with me though their Hebrew still has room for further improvement.
Two of them told me that it's a shame not to (be able to) speak Hebrew while living in Israel, which means continuing living in an English-speaking ghetto. The other of the three even flattered me by saying that my speaking Hebrew raises the spiritual vibe of the synagogue where both of us daven regularly.
I had a heated argument with one polyglot whose native language isn't English. She claimed that this decision of mine also means my refusal to help English speakers. I counter-argued that she and people like her prevent them from improving their proficiency in spoken Hebrew by immediately switching to English upon detecting lack of their fluency in Hebrew. This is like constantly helping small children who want to learn to walk by themselves. This otherwise bona fide help only hapmers their independence.
I must be one of the few people with whom these three friends of mine have a chance to try to speak Hebrew on a regular basis as many people don't allow them to continue or even start speaking Hebrew in Israel. This mentality of so many speakers of Hebrew is for me the mentality of the colonized.
While listening to these three people with a lot of patience and care, I'm reminded of the neuroplasticity of speaking a (new) language. Starting to speak a new language is to take out yourself from your mental comfort zone and treading a new neural path. There is no other way but to keep treading the same path repeatedly in order to become fluent in this new language.
What I did every time I learned a new language almost every year in my twenties rather instinctively was to pronounce new words, phrases and sentences in a new language again and again. I realize now that this way I must have rewritten my brain by exposing myself to the sounds of this new language. I also realize that this was an ideal way for me as my modality of learning a language is listening rather than reading.
Recently I've started reappplying this newly realized method of neuroplasticity in my yet another attempt to improve my spoken Russian, which has defied this and other methods I've devised in learning new languages quickly.
Russian is one of the language I studied very systematically. And my former teacher of Russian at the Hebrew University of Jerusalem in 1989-1990 is the best language teacher I've ever had in my entire life and her textbook of Russian is the best textbook of any language I've used so far.
A few years after I started to learn Russian, I fell in love with it, but this love for the language didn't help me very much in improving my proficiency. A few years ago - about three decades after this first love for Russian - I fell in love with it again. I feel that the application of neuroplasticity, which is conscious this time, to my renewed intensive study of Russian is working much better.
The main reason for my decision to stop speaking English in Israel is that I can't stand hearing myself speaking English, which reminds me too much of something I really abhor. But when I hear myself speaking Russian, I even feel enchanted by my own sounds of what I consider the most beautiful language on this planet.