A Blast and BreakFast

A few random facts: 1. I have started watching Orange is the New Black and it's so good. It's like Gossip Girl and The Wire and Shawshank Redemption and Shopaholic. 2. I have more mosquito bites than ever in my life, and I feel like I am constantly being bitten. 3. I am reading a book called "Integral Halacha" which a friend lent me, which explains liberal modern relevance of Jewish law. 4. I invited thirty people over for dinner tonight. 5. I am leaving Israel in 7 days.

I'll spare you the agonizingly bland details of my Yom Kippur day and skip to when things get exciting again. Around 5:30 p.m., my roommate Molly and I finished up the prepping for our BreakFast meal. The day before Yom Kippur, I made the mistake of sleeping till noon, and then going in to a full-fledged panic attack when the grocery store was locked before my eyes at 12:45. I had no food for the day, and no bagels for tomorrow. I went to some eating therapy at the boreka bakery down the block, grabbing a sampler of two mushroom and two potato borekas, and then ran over to the bagel shop. I procured a dozen bagels and felt proud, so I rewarded myself with a jug of Israel's finest chocolate milk, shoko from Yotvata dairy farm. Healthiest eater around? It's clearly me. So I spent the afternoon eating borekas and drinking shoko from the bottle, and having a steady stream of school friends drop off food for the BreakFast. As a good Jewish mom in training, I spent the hours before the fast ended worrying about not having enough food, when it was definitely not a realistic concern. A visiting friend of Molly's pointed out, astutely, that worrying about it was duly unproductive because every single store in Israel was closed, so I couldn't really do anything about the food situation. So, I went to synagogue to pray that the food would be enough.

At Mizmor L'David, the prayer was a fervent as it could be. Everyone seemed to cry out the dramatic Neilah service - so many proclamations of hope and declarations of faith in unison can't not inspire a sense of community, belonging, and the power of collective bargaining. Knowing people are saying the same words, shouting the same wishes together on every block of the city, in every town of the country, and all around the world - that has a bigness to it. And at the very end of the service, the shofar is blown one final time, and I felt that beyond-words feeling my teachers had been describing. The hollow wailing noise produced by a ram's horn has come to represent the overwhelming processing and feelings and traditions I've acquired from a lineage that's thousands of years old, and belongs to everyone I'm surrounded by here, too. It's cool. I'm into it.

And then, it hit me. After the shofar is blown, everyone declares, 'Next year, in Jerusalem!' which is a totally true and fair statement for them to make. (I think it's more prophetic/messianic than about reality, but whatever.) For me, however, I start a 12-month contract in Chicago in a few weeks, which means 'next year in Jerusalem' is highly unlikely for me. A tear came to my eye. Not more than one, but I definitely welled up. Leaving is always hard. Saying goodbye is tough. This was the beginning of a week of goodbyes.

So, I ate a granola bar and went home to play hostess and distract myself. And boy, did we host. We had expected guests and unexpected guests, two platters of lox, a lot of quartered bagels, an oatmeal kugel, sweet potatoes, Israeli salad, real orange juice, baked apples, couscous, cream cheese, and a thing of herring: a feast for the ages! Two Northwestern friends came from the other side of the city and while I do love my Pardes friends, it was so wonderful to have some Purple Pride in the room, too.

The remains of an epically devoured BreakFast: Party Like It's 5774

In between serving food and smushing on the couch between friends and trying to cool off our overcrowded living room, I was just so happy and grateful and in my element in every which way. Now, I'm thinking back to the Thanksgiving I hosted in Sevilla in my front yard, another good time in a good home with good people. Jerusalem will now always have that mark of home to me, too.