Tangerine Moon and a Stained Glass Service

I reached 2500 views last week, which is pretty crazy. That's like 25 people looking at this blog every day I travel. Which, is weird, because I can't even name more than 10 people who I think would be that interested. There's also the statistic that tells me three people in Bulgaria have clicked here, and I really can't explain that either.

GoogleMaps does not explain inclines in walking directions, so never trust the app, I've learned the hard way. Last night, I got locked out of my apartment and ended up in a friend's home, with a British doctor making me tea and sambucas. No complaints there - best lockout ever. However, the time crunch put pressure on me to speed up and get ready for my one chance to actually go out on the town. Because I spend all my time doing crazy religious stuff, it was nice to stop by a birthday party and take an hour break from all the Judaism, theoretically. Everyone there was American and Jewish, most people recognizable from the New York or USY scenes of days passed. I'm looking forward to moving to Chicago where hopefully I'll play a little less Jewish geography. After about an hour, our Pardes school crew of six decided to take a hike - literally. We planned to walk across to Nachlaot for a Persian midnight Selichot service. This would mean I'd walked in Arnona, Talpiot, Emek Refaim, Katamon, Rechavia and now, Nachlaot in one night. And, each area required ascending and descending all kinds of inclines, some better suited for hiking boots and a staff. I was in my trademark beaten rubber flip flops. My feet and ankles were destroyed from the tomato picking of the afternoon. Somehow, I stayed a happy camper the entire time. We saw the Knesset parliament glowing up on a hilltop, and the brightest orange half-moon that looked like a tangerine slice dangling in the sky.

When we finally made it to Nachlaot, we were relieved to reach Ohev Zion Synagogue. We met up with a bunch of other Pardesniks around midnight and got a brief history of the synagogue from the wife of the founder's great-grandson. Last year, the community had withered, old and quiet. In 365 days, her husband and his brother had created Carlebach-style ritual experiences for a vibrant community of liberally-orthodox 20somethings. The place was a total mobscene. I ended up sitting behind the synagogue, in a courtyard looking through the stained glass at the shadows of men inside. People sang in an excited yet mournful way, pleading with God, celebrating the community, hoping for a better year - if I had gotten a seat on an wooden cushioned bench, I probably would've more comfortably enjoyed the service. There were droves of women huddling around the windows outside even, peering in, reading prayers off their cellphones and occasionally, texting or snapping pictures.
By 12:45, I was really too tired to be standing up and listening anymore, but the service had an intrinsically fascinating quality - these brothers have created something that really pulls people in.

I taxied home, sleepily, clutching the rider with me as our driver raced an invisible competitor through the bus lanes to get us home. I fell asleep quickly, knowing that I'd be facing my day of atonement the following afternoon. Yom Kippur had arrived, stealing from me a shabbat in Israel, replacing it with a fast day of repentance. We're hosting a huge BreakFast in our apartment, so my one day off from school will be busy with shopping and cleaning and prep. I can already taste my everything bagel with lox, tomato, onion and vegetable cream cheese. Can you?

Tomatoes and Resentment

As usual, I found my morning Hebrew class to be immensely frustrating, annoyed by my own inability to translate everything. Maybe I should've studied for my quiz, and then I would be able to conjugate more than half the verbs... anyway, I was too busy exploring the Old City. I went into study buddy hour to look at Chapter 4 of the Book of Jonah (the story where he gets swallowed by a whale), but my buddy quickly got caught up on other things, aka Israeli-Palestinian conflict policy. Some of the teachers live over 'the green line,' in the West Bank, in settlements protected and provided for by Israel. It bothers me that these settlers don't pay taxes to the Palestinian Authority, since they live in the territory, but the rules around here tend to get a little funky. Not that I think the PA uses tax dollars responsibly - wow, this area gets so taboo so fast. We finished our study and determined that God is very compassionate and forgiving, and we should be toward one another as well. We also talked about God's relationship to non-Jewish peoples, which is incredibly important to recognize and understand in a world where I am often asked why the Jews think they're 'the chosen people' (read: prague, day one, walking tour guide). Bottom line: He's everywhere, and He cares about everyone.
Loaded stuff.

On that very religious note, we went to do something more hands-on and less text-based for the afternoon. Judaism in action in the form of picking tomatoes for poor people through Lekhet, Israel's national foodbank. The last time I was in Israel, we also picked tomatoes, but for an organization with comfortable t-shirts called Table-to-Table. On the way there, we had a contest to guess what we would be picking, and I guessed tomatoes because that's the only thing I knew for sure grew in Israel. I won the contest, and with that, a free Pardes t-shirt! Now I can prove to people I went to school here! After two hours in the most brutal sun, being attacked by thorns and feeling tomato juice squish in my socks (yum.), we retired to the water coolers and headed back to the bus. I have to say, had I not worked in a dining hall for 1000 people this summer, picking and lifting dozens of pounds of sunburnt tomatoes would probably have seemed gross, but it was pretty routine stuff. I got some great shots of me wearing a hat, so now my mom can't tell me I should've worn a hat because I have proof!

We stopped on the way home at a gas station where ice cream seemed to be a most necessary decision. After, we paused by a small man-made pond to do tashlich, a service that is done between Rosh Hashana and Yom Kippur. I remember going to the brook behind Scarsdale Train Station and casting bread crumbs into the water, thinking that it was a symbolic casting away of sins. For lying, a breadcrumb, for being mean to my siblings a breadcrumb, for being selfish, a breadcrumb - and so on. This time, we had no breadcrumb and instead a few mumbly paragraphs of chanted Hebrew I didn't know. I prefer the personal bread toss. It's fun to feed the ducks too. But this 'pond' had no ducks, nor fish, and I had no bread. Oh well. We had some time to reflect on repentance and forgiveness and I thought how nice it would be to not feel resentment toward anyone ever - we did a breathing meditative exercise that was hopefully a first step toward releasing resentment from our minds. Sometimes you'd think I was at hippy camp, not torah school...

Wanderers Wandering by the Western Wall

Sometimes, you can't sit in the classroom anymore. It's like the scene in the movie where your pencil is tapping and the clock is ticking and finally, ah, the metaphorical bell rings. I had wrestled through six mishnayot (teachings) of Pirkei Avot, which was funny, since one of our vocab words was 'to become dusty/to wrestle with' - yes, in this ancient language, it's common to have one word meaning a few separate, somewhat-related things.

After a short lunch break, in which I acquired and consumed four different flavors of boreka from the local boreka bakery, I was back to studying Pirkei Avot. The dean of our school came and worked through a similar six mishnayot, but this time with the group of six students in my one-month program. I brought cookies, and we all shared some feedback on our experience. We love Pardes, we love the learning, we wish we had more time, etc.

I was really ready to scoot outta there as soon as our session ended at 2:25, so I made the adult decision that skipping afternoon class would immensely benefit me. It did.

I hopped a bus (after the one I waited for never came, typical, GoogleMaps) and ended up having to walk another 25 minutes up and down the hills of Jerusalem, through the Yemin Moshe flower gardens and the artists colony. When I reached the bottom of a massive hill, I realized I'd have to climb eight flights of stairs to get up to meet Haley, a friend from NU who is studying abroad at Hebrew University. As I paused to breathe, a car pulled up and out hopped Yoni, a boy who works at camp with me. This random run-in thing keeps happening. It happened the day before with an Israeli in a coffee shop, who once staffed a summer week camp with me. It happens in the shuk, by the Kotel, on the bus - it's a little overwhelming how tiny this country actually is. Anyway, I was so glad to see Yoni because the up-and-down walk alone had been a little creepy since it was so empty and only strange men were out, despite the fact it was 3:30 pm on a Thursday in the middle of town. We trotted up all the flights together, breathlessly catching up on the last few weeks before reaching the Yafo Gate to the Old City and parting ways.

Haley found me hiding in the shade of the looming gate, and we began to venture through the Arab shuk, ending near the Church of the Holy Sepulchre and Church of the Redeemer. We listened to the late afternoon call to prayer before feeling we were in too deep, and there was nothing to buy anyway. We u-turned toward the Cardo, the ancient Roman-era marketplace now housing fancy tourist art. We found mosaics and columns and kids scootering around them. What a playground. Our next stop was Jeff Seidel's office, a keiruv center that provides young travelers with Shabbat plans and cultural tours and parties and classes and more. I was in pursuit of a prayerbook to rent for Yom Kippur, and ended up with a glass of sweet red wine and a halfhour talk about Chabad at Northwestern. Jeff is an interesting man to say the least, and good at what he does. He was able to arrange dinner plans and offer me a cab fare if I were to go to a Rivky's house to learn about fasting on Yom Kippur - if keiruv is aggressive, it's also generous. (I didn't go because my phone died and a bad rugelach made me sick).

When we finally left Jeff's office, we were worried we'd miss our one afternoon itinerary item that actually had a timeframe: get into the Aish center before 5. We found our way through the skinny stairwells and winding walls of the city to the entrance of Aish's magnificent new structure (keiruv central, Jerusalem!). Shoulders covered, I successfully schmoozed our way to the observation deck, fare on the house.  We ascended further and further up until we reached the sky. I felt like I was touching the sun. Or the Dome of the Rock, at least. We were in the center of all of Jerusalem, right by the Temple Mount, where the two Holy Temples stood, and now the Western Wall, still a hub for a peoplehood for over 2000 years. What a powerful place - it's just magnetic and splendid, yet not so overhwelmingly big that it's inaccessible or beyond emotion. I'm not the type to break down and cry, but I felt breathless again - it could've also been all those stairs. Haley and I rejoiced in the amazingness of the views, and took an excessive amount of photos, debating if we should ever descend.

Eventually, we did, and we decided to wander around the more residential parts of the old city. Flower petals and iron gates mark the area, in a pandemonium of crooked Jerusalem stones and yeshiva boys' prayers. It's just a poetic place. When we exited the city through the same gate we entered, we weaved through an outdoor art expo of giant painted globes with social messages. Four Haredim were smoking on an overlook of the highway. I wanted to yell at them because I found their personal presentation, black and white and cigarettes, to be appallingly inconsistent.

Haley and I plopped down at an intersection back in the hubbub of the New City, and talked about all the excitement and overwhelmtion that comes with being here, and all of my past travels and her future ones.

What I wouldn't give to get to repeat these two incredible years of nomadic status again - not to do anything differently, just to taste and smell and touch and remember everything all over again.

Sensory Overload: A Prosey Piece

How beautiful are your gates, o Jerusalem. I smile to myself as I push the door out of class, still relishing in the day's studies, decoding mysteries of a story that's 5774 years old. And a young, fresh people with unfettered attitude and resilience, is still writing the next page right outside that same classroom door. 

Broken glass on the sidewalks, abandoned kittens jump gingerly over the shards sticking into my well-worn flip flops. The stubborn purrs remind me what the British left behind from the mandate era, but animal rights aren't the big regional issue, I hear.

I walk down the uneven streets of Baka, losing balance, losing focus, getting lost. Family names on door frames inviting me to linger, to ring the door bells or just sit on the skinny sidewalks, praying no taxi driver without a conscience gives me my daily heart attack while I stare off into the sky, dreaming.

And then, the smell of fresh borekas wakes me up from the pit of my rumbling stomach. I follow the steaming scent trail and point to a round doughy ball, and two shekels later, it's demolished within seconds.

I pause in a bean-shaped bench to recline, watching the scenes in seder position. There is no order. A boy, twirling tzitzit strands in one hand, cautiously flirting with a shy denim skirt on the walkway. Scooters whiz by, birds sing, babies cry, teenagers gossip - no war is being waged in this place of peace, of normalcy. Across the sea, you would think you could cut the tension with the kosher butcher's knife; but, no, you'll barely feel it at all in the warm dry air. 

But, I feel the sweat gather on my shaped brow, and imagine the girl across the walkway in the olive polyester uniform feels much damper as she walks home for a night off of base. The cars keep going, keep honking, maybe just to be heard, to be noticed for a moment, while the world, my time, flies by.

I key into my building, ready for a cold shower to ease my burning pinked skin, to rinse off the ceaseless, breathless exhaustion of the day's learning, wandering, loving this land.

Singsongy Services

On just under eight hours of sleep, I was somewhat alive, alert, awake, enthusiastic for meeting Alisa to go to Yakar in the morning. The mechitzah minyan was recommended to her by a friend was liberal, easy-to-follow, and singsongy. We got a little lost heading into Katamon, the area neighboring mine, and asked a few people for directions. I was able to understand enough Hebrew to identify the synagogue as the one with the big tree. A handful of words can really get you by, but I still sometimes respond to strangers’ kindness with an excited ‘gracias!’ Wrong country.

The service wasn’t overcrowded, but full, so we had to move chairs four times because we hadn’t purchased tickets, as is customary for high holiday services. I also didn’t have a prayerbook with English, which really helps me keep engaged with the Hebrew words of the prayers. I missed America and Beth El and Northwestern and all things more familiarly Jewish.  Throughout the service, people seemed to burst into lai-lai-lais and bum-bada-bums arbitrarily but they all knew when it would happen, so it definitely was random. I had to stifle laughter in my total confusion. I got into praying for a good chunk of the musaf midday service, able to follow the shofar blowings based on what I learned in school this week, so that made me feel more into it. I really couldn’t see the service leader or totally hear what he was saying, half because he was mumbling and half because there was a curtain in my way. While I have a new appreciation for the Jewish prayer and study separation of genders, I can’t ever imagine myself truly enjoying a service where I can’t see the service leader. I’m a visual person. I need to feel connected to the voice I’m following, and it’s a lot easier when you can see the lips moving and the pages turning and the shofar being blown. The curtain gave me a good excuse to close my tired eyes and ignore the sort of randomness of what was happening around me. I would consider coming back, oddly, maybe.

I had to head back to my house quickly because my roommates and I extended an open invitation to our entire school group (about 70 people) to come and spend the afternoon reading and studying and conversing anything at all. We had a cozy turnout that allowed small conversations or bigger group discussions to flourish. I chose to ignore an argument about the binding of Isaac and instead read the most amazingly clarity-inducing essay by Former Chief Lord Rabbi Jonathan Sacks (best titular name ever) about Rosh Hashana’s themes, purpose and current relevance. (Best of all, you can read it for free here, on the Amazon preview of the Koren Machzor!) I felt incredibly enlightened and totally overjoyed! Wahoo! This holiday DOES have relevance and purpose. I understood the holiday, God, the Jewish people’s history, and myself more because of a ten-page essay by a British guy. I’d say the afternoon was a huge win! I want everything I read to be this valuable. FCLR Sacks might be my new hero.

Late in the afternoon, I wandered to Shira Chadasha, a service with a curtain divider, but where women can lead certain parts of services and serve as visionaries with their male counterparts to design a meaningful prayerspace for both genders. I must have felt so at home that someone asked me to help her with the pages. I sang those prayers like the happiest Jew around.

The adventures continued at a faculty member’s condo for dinner, which included THREE kinds of meat. Everything was kind of my favorite, but if I had to pick one dish, it would be the meatballs. Hayim and Leah were such a relatable young couple who could ambiturn between pop culture references and Jewish life topics fluidly, with a sense of humor and love that makes you want to linger in their home or model yours after it. I left once again totally stuffed, walking through the warm night toward my apartment, thinking about how I had started the holiday from a place of complication and frustration and turned things around to read the best essay and join my favorite service so far in Israel. I went to bed, loving Jerusalem, feeling at home with the place and myself. 

Leopard Prints and Socks and Clogs and Chags

Based on the week’s teachings, I was not feeling super-duper-excited to celebrate Rosh Hashana. Sure, the idea of apples and honey and matzah ball soup is always thrilling, but there’s a lot more philosophy to grapple with that comes with that. I was struggling with having the attention to prayer and the point of the holiday. Over the few days of classes, I had more enjoyed the intellectual aspect of the learning, even distracted during the meditation and spirituality lessons because I was too focused on the literary and philosophical analysis of the texts. I went to Pardes’ learners’ service for the first day, looking for a change of pace and hoping to derive more meaning from the day even if I wouldn’t be in a traditional 300-page liturgical service. While I did not find the meaning I was seeking, I found some really good babka, and a girl named Livia gave me a nice hug, and described how she was at a troubling, lost time in her life, so I felt really grateful and peaceful. I leafed through some more pages of a book about Jewish Law’s applications but the author failed to include a foreword about why following Jewish Law is compelling to so many people, so I was bored by the book quickly, not seeing a point to so much specification and discussion. I returned home with a book on the rationale and applications of the Jewish Renewal movement, thinking this highly spiritual movement would be a refreshing change. 

I invited Alisa over for lunch, and made up a mini-shmorgasbord of turkey sandwiches on challah rolls, couscous and borekas, in an effort to incorporate as many carbohydrate forms to one meal as possible. Alisa, a former financial analyst a year ahead of me, is in the month-long study program with me before she goes to a social entrepreneurial fellowship for six months in the north of Israel. I remember we talked about finding meaningful work and transportation mishaps and wigs, and we had a grand old time.

I had lounged about for a significant amount of time and then realized I had to hurry and get ready for my dinner – an hour walk away. This walk, up trendy Derech Beit Lechem through Baka, across the quiet Rakevet park, toward the Paamon gardens. As I was walking up Keren HaYesod, I decided to take a tiny extra hike through the gardens, enchanted by cactuses bigger than me and shiny sculptures, with fountain plazas where children played and parents prayed. I remembered leading services with someone who had never led before, back in 2008 on my Pilgrimage trip, my first Shabbat in Jerusalem. I had forgotten where the spot was, or that the service had happened but places come flocking back to memory quickly. I saw the golden glow of the Old City walls reflecting the afternoon sun, the same as it had 5 years and a few weeks earlier.

I continued up (you’re ALWAYS walking up when you’re in Jerusalem. Even when you’re going downhill, it’s only to go back up.) and pit-stopped in the Fuchsberg Center for Conservative Judaism, looking for a little more familiarity and comfort (and a bathroom). I ended up finding that in the arms of Maya Dolgin, who was there with her brother and these two other guys. I knew three out of the four, and it was really nice to see some familiar faces after half of my long, hot walk. I met the last of the four, a guy from Chicago, so I felt like I kind of knew him already. I continued my walk in the best spirits I’d been in all day, excited to find my friend Mitzi at our 7 p.m. meeting point.

Mitzi had invited me to one of her Rabbi’s houses, a mentor of hers who runs the Nishmat seminary’s year-long post-high school program. I know a handful of girls who have studied there and they are all kind, smart, well-rounded, open-minded people – Nishmat must be an amazing place. The rabbi lives in Nachlaot, Jerusalem’s most quintessentially Jerusalem neighborhood: windy paths, nameless streets, hanging gardens and so many pregnant religious women with beautiful scarves. Mitzi and I went to evening services at Kol Rina, a Carlebach-singing style service in a bomb shelter. Three Israeli women wearing a combination of leopard print and plastic platform stripper heels made me appreciate the diversity of Jewish people in Israel and the holiday that could bring such shoes into a synagogue. Still, I disagree with their fashion choices but I can focus on giving them an A for bringing out what they considered to be their best styles. 

Dinner was held in a square room with a basic vaulted gothic ceiling. This architecture had the effect that on one side of the room, you could perfectly hear the conversation at the other end of our 27-person table. Acoustics can be crazy. While not freaked out by hearing each far-away word about making aliyah from a girl from Oregon wearing clogs with socks, I enjoyed all twenty different symbolic foods, each blessed with a special play on words wishing us an enemy-free year of health and success. I was overwhelmed by the seven children singing songs, particularly the young boy next to me who kept wishing me a fruitful life of many children. This blessing comes with a tradition of eating a fish head, which he delighted greatly in. By the soup course, the boy was conked out on the couch. I was slurping up matzah balls and listening to a young yeshivish couple who had met at the table a few years earlier when independently exploring religion ask a hippy-dippy also observant older couple why they were choosing to home-school their son. It takes all kinds to make the world go round. By the main course, I was already stuffed from the abundance of new fruits, symbolic vegetables, huge matzah balls and sizeable chunks of the two enormous 2-kilo challahs smothered in honey.

We all went around introducing ourselves and saying our favorite thing about the Holidays in Jerusalem. I explained that I had come to Israel, with just excitement thinking I would find clear validation for every part of my identity and chosen path. Two weeks in, I have experienced more mental duress and emotional confusion than I have felt in the last eight months of nomadship. This place and it’s people force you into a constant state of questioning, but from that comes the potential for a remarkable path of self-discovery, evolution and betterment. And for that, I am extremely grateful. It’s better to grow and change than simply validate what you already think you know. Next thing I knew, I was explaining to a girl on the couch why I wasn’t planning to become more religiously observant or stay in Israel to study (I have three specific reasons, feel free to ask). Then, I talked with an Asian woman about her forearm tattoo of a Scottish mythical creature. The night ended with some good gooey chocolate cookies and the rabbi’s wife sending me and Mitzi off with water bottles for our long walks home. It was again, close to one a.m.

On my walk home, I was lonely, so I befriended some seminary girls, a flock of them from Passaic, New Jersey, who were a little confused by what and who I was. I’m sometimes confused about it too, but I’m not sure they’d really met any practicing Jews who hadn’t been to day school growing up.

Most of my walk was silent, dark and alone – but not as lonely. I think the break from chatting and noise and people and food was much needed. I ran into my friend Sara from Pardes right outside my apartment, and I couldn’t wait to divulge all of the crazy characters who had punctuated my evening.

And it hit me that the holiday weekend was only halfway through.

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.