Supermarket Sweep into 5774

After just three days of classes, we were all wiped out, excited for a day off to get ready for a Rosh Hashana-Shabbat double header. From Wednesday night until Saturday night, we’d be celebrating like it’s 5774 because, in fact, that is the numeric year in the Jewish calendar. Over that time, I’d go to synagogue a thousand times, and eat a hundred meals.

Though I slept until 11, I felt a sense of urgency to get to the grocery store. All stores would be closed from Tuesday afternoon until Sunday, which seemed to give the citizenry a sense of total apocalyptic panic. Candace, Molly and I took the market by storm, stocking up on necessities like challah, cookies, and hummus. I also bought some tomatoes and borekas, my personal key foods. About two hours later, I had seen three people I knew and waited on line for 90 minutes before we walked home with 10 bags overflowing.

Holidays equal food, in Judaism. So, I felt compelled to spend my afternoon cooking up a storm yielding a huge platter of couscous, hummus with sautéed mushrooms and onions, and a lifetime supply of those mediocre frozen borekas. Though the dishes were less than sophisticated, the house smelled festive.

To start the new year on God’s good list, I went to the neighborhood minyan, a service with a mechitza divider, easy-to-follow tunes and mostly anglos singing in cute headscarves, kids playing in the courtyard and a stellar cantor. There, I sat with some other Pardesniks, students at my school, who would be hosting me for dinner. We walked back to their apartment, in a highrise complex on the edge of our neighborhood, with a great view down the hill toward the city center. Naomi and Carolyn made us a feast featuring roasted vegetable bruschetta, turkey-sweet potato pie with butter beans, and a peach-mango cobbler.  The passion-fruit punch with gummy worms really pushed me over the edge of fullness and delight. Our crew included a former Ramah Nyack counselor, a New Jersey future PwC consultant, a Booz Allen Hamilton 4^th year from Ukraine on a sabbatical, a water scientist making a possible career switch, a youth director from the Pittsburgh Jewish Federation, and a British chick who has a total affinity for all things America, and an excellent sense of real humor.

Home at 1 a.m., I was intrigued by what the next four full days of celebration would bring, expecting the generally never-ending food comas, exhaustion and mumbly words of prayer.