Wednesday was Erev Sukkot here in Israel. I got up early, and left first for the mikveh on Rechov Vilna, where I immersed my new vessels, and then for the post office, where I bought a sheet of stamps. I felt like a big spender as I walked on to the shuk, thinking about how I was going to find sufficient postcards to send to everyone back home. For those of you who are wondering as to why you haven't received anything in the mail from me, it's because there are, to my knowledge, no postcards sold in Ramla. It just isn't desirable enough as a tourist destination to generate sufficient demand to justify the expenditures, I bet. Still, I'm betting that a smart entrepreneur could take a few distinctive photographs of the city hall, the tower of the white mosque, the library, the shuk, etc, print them up as postcards, and sell them in the shuk, ten postcards for twelve shekels.
I had my biggest shopping trip yet, not stinting on fresh fruit, and even picking up some hummus and zchug. I also found the telephone store on Rechov Herzl, learned that I could get an extension for the SIM card in my Israeli cell phone. I walked back to my apartment to drop off my groceries, and, by this point in mid-afternoon, ran back to Rechov Herzl, bought the extension, and found myself with a functioning telephone. Unfortunately, it was, at this point, entirely in Hebrew (the keyboard, by contrast, has no Hebrew, only Arabic, and the manual is exclusively in Arabic). As I had promised, I made my first telephone call to Eli. He didn't pick up, perhaps because I had his number wrong. Regardless, next I called my Sukkot host family, and told Ronit, the contact (and mother) that one of the three Oranim participants assigned to her house was not feeling well, and that there would only be two of us, one of them a vegetarian gluten-intolerant female (TZ), and the other a vegetarian male (me). Luckily, in the host family, one daughter is vegetarian, and another is gluten-free, so our dietary restrictions didn't seem so outlandish. I spent the remaining time writing my previous blog post about my trip to the Galil, showered, dressed, and, at around 5:30 pm, left for... 23 Yoseftal! For those of you who remember that my current address in Ramla is 24 Yoseftal, you will realize that my host family lives literally right across the street from my apartment.
When I arrived, I met Ronit, whose English is a little bit better than my Hebrew. She told me that TZ still hadn't arrived. It was slightly concerned, because it was just passed 5:45 pm. Thinking that TZ might have had difficulty finding the house (it's located a slight distance away from the street), I sat on a bench outside until around 6:00 pm, when I returned inside, telling Ronit that I was going to walk to TZ's house on Havaradim, to see if I could find her, and that I would likely stop in a synagogue on the way back, if I didn't find her (if I did manage to find her, I was planning to escort her all the way to Ronit's door, so that she wouldn't be lost). Even though I had told myself that I didn't want to return to Havaradim (I had been spending the day doing everything except attending Perrin's all-day party), I nevertheless made the walk. When I arrived, I rather curtly asked where TZ was, and was told that she was sick and asleep. I stopped by the Beit El synagogue, where I had attended my first Kabbalat Shabbat in Ramla a few weeks before, and arrived just in time to finish minchah. Arvit followed, and then I scurried back to my host family's house on Yoseftal.
When I arrived, I explained the current situation vis-a-vis TZ, then proceeded to help prepare the dinner table located in the sukkah. My Sukkot host family was even larger than my Rosh Hashannah host family; I think that there were around fifteen of us crowded into the sukkah. The grandparents are Tunisian (and, hence, the rest of the family), and spoke to each other in Arabic at least once. Saba is apparently from a family that has produced many chazanim (cantors) and Torah chanters, and he was very proud of his adult son Asaph, who was scheduled to read Torah in synagogue the next day, on Sukkot. I received an unexpectedly large number of political questions throughout the meal: my opinions of Barack Obama, the Syria situation, Binyamin Netanyahu, the poverty in the United States, charitable institutions in the United States, the Conservative and Reform movements in America etc. In many cases, I chose to make what the French call réponses
de Normand, which are equivocal replies that are deliberately vague, offered in order to avoid offense or dishonesty. The family was very conservative, and thought that President Obama had entirely bungled his response to the chemical attack in Syria; they said that if Israelis choose to talk, then they talk, and if they want to shoot, then they shoot, but that the United States had revealed its own weakness in its apparent indecision as to whether to talk or to shoot. The dinner table was completely loaded with food; I've rarely seen so many dishes crammed together. This is a very Israeli way of serving a meal, and I've seen it among Jews in the U.S. too; small bowls filled with various simple cold dishes collectively referred to as "salads," usually including foods such as hummus, roasted eggplant, eggplant dip, egg salad, mixed vegetables, Israeli salad, marinated peppers, etc. Most of them are best eaten with bread. Ronit wanted to deliver some food to TZ, so, despite my disinclination at this point to return to Havaradim, my sense of responsibility was stronger, and, along with two of Ronit's daughters and one of her sons, made the trip southwards to Havaradim. On our way, we met a group of the kids' friends, who were surprised that I could speak any Hebrew at all, and even more surprised that I was actually Jewish (for some reason, many of the Israelis have seemed surprised TZ was sleeping (it was well past eleven), but I presented my new Israeli friends, who presented the cool people still awake with the food from their mother. We walked back to Yoseftal together, speaking in a mixture of Hebrew and English. They're a really great group of kids, and I only wish that I knew more about basketball, for the benefit of the son. Maybe I can somehow bring Eli along with me next time, who's a grade-A Knicks fan.
The next day, I was up at 7:20 am, and arrived at the Zer'a Ya'akov ("Offspring of Jacob") synagogue on Bar-Ilan street before the congregation had even reached baruch she'amar. It felt good to be relatively on-time. In case you haven't realized, I really love these early start-times in Israel, and love being finished with Mussaf on Shabbat and holidays well before noon. Asaph gave one of the best Torah-readings I've heard in a while, pronouncing every single guttural ayin, enunciating marvelously, and chanting every cantillation mark with precision. I'm getting used to praying with the Sepharadi nusach, although I still sometimes stumble over the sections that differ from the Ashkenazi nusach. I had brought my own arbat minim, and shook them during Hallel, just as I do back home in the United States. Americans typically hold their lulavim in wicker sconces made from palm leaves, but I didn't receive one when I purchased my lulav this year, nor did I see any of the other men with one. Many of them had, however, decorated their arbat minim with what looked like colored streamers, and bound them together with rubber bands. I found this rather surprising, that any additional entity would be added to the arbat minim. I lost a lot of willow leaves.
We finished at around 11:00 am, and as we exited the synagogue together, I told the men in the family that I was going to walk to TZ's house to see if she was healthy yet. The door to the house on Havaradim was locked when I arrived there at 11:30, and nobody answered my knock. I walked back to Yoseftal, and helped my host family set the table. I was very thirsty by the time we finally had our 1:00 pm kiddush (according to halachah, one is not permitted to not eat or drink anything before making kiddush). The meal was even better than it had been before. Yehudit had made a wonderful Tunisian dish just for the vegetarians at the table, called shakshouka (شكشوكة), which I had never tried before. The best way I can describe the dish is as an omelet in which the vegetables have taken over, and entirely overhwelmed the eggs. I believe that the dish is entirely kosher for Passover, and I think, Mom, that you might want to consider trying this at least once. I would eat it, anyway! I think I ate more at that meal in one sitting than I have at any other meal since arriving in Israel, my host family pushing ever more dishes on me, insisting that I have at least something of everything, and, when a dish was running low, that I be privileged with the last bite.
After lunch, it was time for "גלידה בסוכה" ("ice cream in the sukkah"). Again, I was obliged to eat a large amount, as well as to have several roasted marshmallows, while I sat and studied the first chapter of mishnaic tractate Sukkah with the other men. My Hebrew really is improving, I guess, because I could understand several of the mishnayot, including the first one, without any assistance or translation. After this, I walked back to my own apartment, where I studied Torah a little bit with my housemate Noah, after which I returned to the synagogue at 6:20 for holiday minchah and arvit. I listened to holiday Havdallah in the synagogue's sukkah; the holiday was over. During arvit, I had realized how absolutely stupid and needlessly stubborn and prideful I had been with my friends, and walked the long walk back to Havaradim to apologize for having been so rude to them since the trip to the Galil. They were very friendly about everything, but I still felt guilty. I also stopped in to see TZ, who had been asleep for nearly twenty-four hours. I walked back to my own apartment. I was hungry, so walked back to the synagogue with some bread and fruit, and had a meal, while a group of women cleaned the synagogue, and spoke to each other entirely in undecipherable (to me, anyway) Russian. Afterwards, I walked back to my apartment, and finished and published the last blog post before going to bed. The one-day festivals inside the land of Israel is surprising to actually perform (in the entire rest of the world, the first day of the three festivals is repeated for a second day, so I would have had three back-to-back days in which I could perform no work, out of contact with the rest of the world), even though I've known about this practice for my entire life.
I was up late on Friday morning, not getting out of bed until nearly 9:00 am. I left for the house on Havaradim after I had finished with my morning routine, and found Noah, to whom I also apologized (he wasn't around when I had visited the night before, and I had probably been ruder to him than I had to anyone else). I walked on to Herzl and from thence to Jabotinsky, making a very large pre-Sukkot shopping trip. In addition to going to the telephone store to finally have my telephone language switched to English, I purchased new sunglasses, figs, pita, hummus and zchug, and some slightly overripe dates. Unfortunately, there was a bit of a misunderstanding about the dates, resulting in an Arabic man yelling at me, and me being too ashamed to try to explain to him in Hebrew that I had walked away with twice as many dates as I had paid for. To make up for this, I visited a kuppat tzedakah, and deposited what I hadn't paid, plush a couple extra shekels, even though I had already donated that day, in preparation for Shabbat. I returned to Havaradim in the early afternoon, bringing a bag of mixed fruit to TZ (for the sake of ביקור חולים), and hanging out with the others, ending up watching a movie that I had never seen before with Emma Watson. It was called The Bling Ring, and, as one of my friends aptly commented, was a story about the dumbest teenagers in America stealing from the dumbest celebrities in America; it wasn't such a good film, but I was happy to be hanging out with my friends again. They told me that there would be a Shabbat dinner later that night, at 7:00 pm. I knew that I wouldn't be finished with Erev Shabbat arvit until after 7:30 pm. I wrote part of this post before I left for synagogue Zer'a Ya'akov, which I think I am going to make my default synagogue from now on. After minchah, I kept up with the reading of Shir Hashirim, savoring hearing, as always, my favorite line, מַה יָּפִית וּמַה נָּעַמְתְּ אַהֲבָה בַּתַּעֲנוּגִים זֹאת קוֹמָתֵךְ דָּמְתָה לְתָמָר (if you know why I love this line so much, you know what it reminds me of, which I haven't forgotten). After arvit, I walked to my host family's sukkah (they were out-of-town for the weekend), where I had left a bag of food and my siddur, and recited kiddush, followed by a very, very brief Shabbat dinner. From there, I walked to the house on Gil'ad, and came in singing Shalom Aleichem (it's a song about angels visiting one's home on Shabbat evening, although I'm not certain that the others got my joke), and most of the others joined in. Everyone was friendly, and acted happy to see me. I was so happy to be with my friends again, and had a very good night.
Shavua Tov v'Chag Sameach, lekulam!
~JD
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