I couldn't think of any other title for the post, OK? I think that it fits. The reason being is that several weekends ago (January 10th-11th), I met four Cool People from Ithaca in Ramat Gan!
Unfortunately, when I began this post more than a month ago, I was already severely backlogged. The situation is much worse now, in mid-February. I'm therefore going to quickly end the post, acknowledging that I forgot a lot of detail in the month that has passed, so I can hurry to work on a catch-up blog post for next time.
I had been looking forward to this meeting for a couple of months, ever since I learned that Rachel was planning a trip to Israel. I knew that I would want to see her, and that so would Eli and Josefin (the three of us are all her chevrutot, i.e. learning buddies), and expected to see them all. Eli suggested his maternal grandparents' apartment in Ramat Gan (right next to Tel Aviv) as a gathering place. The day before, Thursday I had left school early because I felt absolutely terrible. When I ended up sleeping for about 4-5 hours on our couch, I was so exhausted. Of the four of us in the apartment, Becky was the only one to go to Ulpan that afternoon -- the rest of us had varying combinations of exhaustion and illness. I guess that Coco was alone again for the whole period. That's been happening a lot, recently, it feels like (to me, anyway).
I struggled out of the bed the next day, feeling better, but still not exactly excellent. Eli's grandmother didn't want us using her dishes, so it was my job to bring a cooking pot; I grabbed it along with a bunch of sweet potatoes as I ran out the door, following my morning routine. On the way to the train station, I met not only Tomas, from the new group of 5-month Community Involvement volunteers, but also Becky and one of her friends, Dudi. As a result, I arrived at the train station literally as my train arrived, and the conductor yelled at me to get on, even though I didn't have a ticket (they opened a gate for me so that I wouldn't need to hop to turnstile). All of this I thoroughly did not deserve -- in honesty, the train should have continued without me, but, in Israel (unlike, say, in France), there is some amount of sympathy for travelers. Speaking of sympathy for travelers, when I arrived at the train station in Tel Aviv, I was able to get directions to Ramat Gan from a friendly soldier who was returning home (Tel Aviv, that is) for Shabbat. As an example of Israeli interactions, he was the first to address me, while we were walking over a bridge, as the only two pedestrians. I've actually given a fair amount of thought to just how interested he was in who I am. Some of my friends have complained that the Israelis whom they have encountered are unwilling to make the initial interaction with strangers, and that it is up to us, the Americans, to try to make friends. This way well be the case, all other things being equal. However, my own experience is that, among observant Jewish men, anyway, there is a sort of instant rapport. Men wearing kippot see other men who are wearing kippot, and feel an instant affinity towards them. This is not the first time that I have experienced this instant warmth of recognition; I tend to get it whenever I enter a synagogue, especially if the men around me realize that I'm struggling to speak in Hebrew, even though I'm not Israeli. It's not just men, either; Israeli women, religious or otherwise have a tendency to describe me (or even address me) as "חָמוּד," when they hear my accent. I had a conversation today (Shabbat, the 25th of January) about what Americans tend to interpret as Israeli rudeness, which I have really only experienced in the shuk and other commercial settings. Regardless, I followed the directions given to me by the soldier, which required a bit of backtracking, but, before long, arrived at Eli's apartment building. Based on the apartment number, which began with the digit "6," I assumed that I would only need to climb to the sixth floor. I was wrong; Eli's grandparents' apartment is on the top floor of the apartment. For some reason, you cannot ride the elevator upward from any floor other than the ground floor, so I ran up the remaining ten flights or so (not the first time I have done something like this, nor, as the rest of the weekend revealed, the last). I knocked on the door, and found Eli :). We were both happy to see each other, and, after Eli had fed me some breakfast, we decided on a plan of action. We thought of all of the ingredients that we would need for the food that we wanted to prepared, and of where it was best to buy them. We went to a few different stores, picking fruit, vegetables, challot, meat (for Eli, Eliana, and Josefin), wine, dates, and some very interesting Iraqi pastries known as Bhabha (very poor transliteration on my part of a hard-to-pronounce Arabic word). I started the pot of stew, throwing together the vegetables and other ingredients that we had. Fairly close to sunset, the three women -- Eliana, Rachel, and Josefin -- arrived. They had all been in Jerusalem the night before, and, because Rachel was traveling with her suitcase, needed to take a taxi from the central station at Arlozorov. Eliana (whom I don't know as well as the others) gave me the spices that Eli had requested, and I threw them into the pot. We spent a few moments preparing, showering, etc., recited Minchah (due to lack of time) and headed off for a Libyan synagogue around the corner. On the way down, we took the stairs We arrived too late for Shir Hashirim, but I enjoyed the experience (and I still thought about מַה יָּפִית וּמַה נָּעַמְתְּ אַהֲבָה בַּתַּעֲנוּגִים זֹאת קוֹמָתֵךְ דָּמְתָה לְתָמָר). I've begun to notice that Israeli synagogue decoration tends to include the motifs of the seven species and/or the twelve tribes (there are other motifs, too, such as the decalogue and the holiday cycle) Both of these form recognizable patterns, but I wonder why these two in particular? The twelve tribes is rather important, but the seven species is just based on a single verse in the Torah, but it makes me wonder why the seven species and not, say, the utensils of the Temple, the garments of the kohen gadol, the orders of the Mishnah, etc. I guess that I expected more variety and creativity, that is all. Perhaps the popularity of the twelve species is a reflection of religious Zionism? Could that be it? After Arvit, Eli and I rejoined the three women (who had been upstairs in the women's gallery), and walked back to the apartment. We just barely made the Shabbat elevator, which took us directly to the top floor of the apartment building, and had Shabbat dinner, complete with good food, conversation, and singing. Eli has an enormous range of Sepharadic songs at his disposal, and Eliana also knows a great deal of zemirot. We completely finished the stew that I had made (and it was a full pot), as well as the dates and the Bhabha. I was the main reason for the dates' disappearance, as might be expected. We fell asleep while talking to each other, Eliana on a bed and Josefin on a mattress in one room, and Rachel on a mattress and Eli and I on couches in another.
Saturday morning, we all got up at a fairly reasonable hour, and once again experienced the adventure of running down all of the stairs in the apartment building to reach the bottom floor. We developed a strategy in which the person in front (usually me) would fling open the door on each landing, in order to illumine the otherwise dark staircase, then run down the next two flights in order to reach the next doorway. This usually gave those following behind enough light to continue safely. Anyway,we made it down, made it to synagogue and back again, and, after climbing the stairs to Eli's grandparents' apartment, made some cold salads together for Shabbat lunch. Eli and I also ended a discussion of ours concerning MT Hilchot Shabbat 30:9. For the rest of the afternoon, we explored Ramat Gan, and spent time in a nearby park. We even found an enormous playground, complete with swings, zip-lines, jungle gyms, etc. We made it back to the Moroccan synagogue for a late Minchah, then had third meal in Eli's grandparents' apartment again. We said Arvit and made Havdallah, and then we all walked Josefin and Eliana to the train station (Rachel was spending the night). On the way back, I discussed some of my plans for next year, and tried to get some valuable feedback from my friends. For better or for worse, I really think that I need to decide between mutually-exclusive priorities, and that nobody but me can make that decision. I ate through a lot of the food in the refrigerator, hungry as I was, despite all of the eating that I had done over Shabbat. Then, the two walked me to the train station (again), and I caught a train back to Lod, and walked from there to Ramla.
That was it for that Shabbat. Since the last time I've blogged, I've also worked hard at school, taken on an additional pair of pupils at their home, experienced Rambam Day and Hebrew Language Day, visited the local Ethiopian Jewish cultural center on Tu B'Shevat (and planted a tree), visited Haifa, hosted Eli here in Ramla, struggled enormously with Hebrew, felt the squeeze of living on a tight budget, taken some heat for something I wrote in a past blog post, been frustrated by difficult days at school, dealt with the coming of the dreaded inspectors, listened to a lot of hateful and obnoxious words coming from the people around me, continued teaching my weekly adult class, had a couple of job interviews in one day, bid farewell to Becky (who ended up leaving after all, much to my disappointment, without my even having a chance to really say goodbye to her, because I had a job interview scheduled during the time of her goodbye party), dealt with sickness (both my own, and TZ's), and been so exhausted by the time Shabbat arrives at the end of each week that I spend most of the day sleeping, involuntarily (and sometimes doze off during Shir Hashirim).
~JD
