I’ve been wanting to post about this here for a while… might as well use the momentum.

I remember a Saturday afternoon in Jerusalem last year spent with my friend Paul (Yankele) from Yeshiva. We sat in the living room of some classmates and talked for hours. The subject of much of the conversation was how much we had come to like Shabbat.

Here’s the thing about Shabbat for a halachically observant Jew… it comes. And you have to let go of everything. You simply have to. It is required. You put down your phone, you put away your money, you put on nice clothes, light candles, walk to shul, and you can’t worry. Whatever you might be worried about, there’s nothing that you can do about it for the next 25 hours. All you can do for right now is look around you, breathe in and breathe out, praise God, eat, rest, laugh, hug, talk, study… Shabbat forces you to take a break. It gives you an excuse to be with people, to not stray too far. You have to be where you are. Shabbat forces you to appreciate the world as it is at this moment.

On Shabbat, we don’t change things. It is not our place. This is the day we let go and leave everything up to Not Us.

There are a lot of laws of Shabbat observance, mostly about what one is not allowed to do. There is a set of laws about what is called muktze, dealing with the category of things that one is not allowed to touch or handle on Shabbat. You are not supposed to handle anything on Shabbat that doesn’t have a legitimate Shabbat use. You are also not supposed to pick any plants, anything attached to the ground. You are not supposed to write. You are not supposed to engage in commerce or touch money, or even discuss commerce. Though there is some debate about this, most accept that you are not supposed to use electricity on Shabbat. You are not supposed to make fire or cook.

A lot of people have a problem with these laws. They see these laws, they see the whole thing, as unnecessarily restrictive, bothersome and annoying, and not conducive to what they regard as “rest,” which they equate with enjoyment. I didn’t get it either until about the middle of my first year in Yeshiva. I was walking to shul Friday evening. It was not yet Shabbat but I had davened Mincha already and lit my candles and consciously accepted shabbat early. I was walking down Derech Beit Lechem and all of Jerusalem smelled like honeysuckle. I love honeysuckle. I love the smell, and the flowers are beautiful, and they remind me of the happy parts of my childhood. As I passed a honeysuckle bush, I had an urge to pick one. But I couldn’t. Because it was Shabbat (for me) already and you don’t pick things on shabbat. And so I stepped back, and I looked. And it was so beautiful.

And suddenly everything was so beautiful. I stepped back and I saw a vision of the world on Shabbat… a world where you don’t touch the pictures. You don’t mess with it, you just live in it. That is what Shabbat is. It’s the day on which you just live, and you don’t touch the things that you don’t need to just live. Why touch them if they are just going to take you out of the space? Why carry your phone if it will just tempt you to try to control things? Why carry money if it will lead you to do business, or to even think about business, and worry about how much you can or cannot acquire? It is healthy, I would say even necessary, to have a day where you let go of the desire to control the world, to make marks and changes, to have an impact. Six days out of the week you have for that. One day, you can just let it go. One day you can reassess your place in the grand scheme and realize that the world won’t end if you don’t have your cellphone.

Shabbat is about acceptance. And that is rest in a very true sense.

I’ve heard it said before that Yom Kippur should be joyous.

Rosh Hashannah is Yom HaDin, the Day of Judgment, not Yom Kippur. The month of Tishrei which leads up to Rosh Hashannah we focus on Cheshbon Nefesh, an accounting of our souls, and we do teshuvah, repentance and atonement, between ourselves and our fellows, ourselves and God, and ourselves and… ourselves. The 10 days between Rosh Hashannah and Yom Kippur, the cheshbon nefesh gets kicked into high gear, because on Rosh Hashannah, it is said, it is written, and on Yom Kippur it is sealed who will merit what for the coming year. By the time we reach Yom Kippur, we have done all of the work. On Yom Kippur we fast, but not mournfully. We dress in white and we spend the whole day praying as though we had nothing better to do. On Yom Kippur we don’t bathe or eat or drink or take care of our personal needs. On the one hand, the command is to afflict our souls. We fast in contrition. On the other hand, on this day we stand before God like angels. And we know that we will be forgiven, because God has given us this day for repentance, for atonement, and for forgiveness. Year after year we stand before God and are forgiven, pardoned, and absolved.

As my teacher Shaiya is fond of saying, Ashkenazi Jews, that is, Jews from Eastern Europe, on Yom Kippur weep and wail and cry “We have sinned! We have sinned!” Sephardi Jews, descended from the Jews of medieval Spain, on Yom Kippur sing and dance because “Hey, isn’t this the same judge who let us off last year?”

The month of Tirshrei, Rosh Hashannah and Yom Kippur have never been easy for me. The past ten years have been especially difficult for me at this time of year. For personal reasons, the work of cheshbon nefesh and all the talk of forgiveness has weighed on me horribly, and I’ve never been able to feel good about Yom Kippur. Besides which, I’ve never been in a space on Yom Kippur where I felt I had a chevre, a group of like-minded individuals who take all of this as seriously as I do.

This year, a lot happened in Elul. I had a lot thrown at me, I’d been hurt emotionally, and as a result a lot of stuff got hashed out and thrashed out and worked out. And on Yom Kippur I davenned at The Leader Minyan. I’d never been before, but my good friend David was going there, and Shaiya was as well, and I felt the need to try something new.

I walked over with my new friend Josh, who lives up the street from me. I met him at his apartment at 7:15, we waited for a couple of other people, picked some people up along the way, and found our way to the Zionist Youth Farm where they were holding services. At some point I asked Josh what time they start. He laughed and said “about an hour and a half ago.” We got there in time for Borchu, around 7:50.

The first time the congregation broke into singing and dancing, I was conflicted. I had spoken to David the night before about toying with the idea of having a joyful Yom Kippur this year. Elul had been so hard. David suggested that I had to. I had to have a joyful Yom Kippur. I told him I wasn’t sure if I could. And when I saw the women begin to dance, I hesitated. I wanted so badly to join them, but something held me back.

The day continued. The singing became more spirited and more intense. As we started to feel the fast, little containers of eucalyptus oil and powder were passed around for smelling. At some point a piyyut, a liturgical poem, was sung that people started clapping to. It got me clapping. Clapping and swaying. I looked up and saw dancing again. I saw that David was dancing over on the men’s side. A circle formed on the women’s side. And I remembered something that David had said to me the night before as we were finishing up dinner alone at his place before we headed out to Kol Nidrei. He said “Gella, you will be inscribed for a good year. There is no way that you could not be. If you’re not inscribed for a good year, then I don’t want any part of this.”

For the first time in my life, I stood before The Lord on Yom Kippur, and was not alone.

I tied my tallit around my neck so that it wouldn’t fall from my shoulders. I climbed over chairs. I grabbed the hands of two women, and I danced. I closed my eyes and I danced and I sang.

Someone had my back. Someone argued for me. I had support. I had solidarity. I had someone standing behind me saying “if she goes, I go.”

And I knew, then I knew, I was being forgiven. Released. How can you not dance?

There was no break between mussaf and mincha. I’d been nervous about that, but now I was glad of it. I didn’t want to stop praying. Even at the end, when we’d davenned neila, the last service of the day, the locking of the gates of heaven, and we’d already gone a half hour over the end of the fast, I still didn’t want it to end. In that last amidah I’s held my hands out to God in thanks and praise and love and marveled that every year, every year, we get to stand before our God and every year God forgives us our iniquities and gives us the chance to do better next time. God was suddenly a father. A good and loving father who cares and cradles and looks upon us with kindness. I, in turn, loved everyone and everything. After ma’ariv we broke the fast with water juice and cake. I just had a little water, and immediately went to find my friends and hug them, because that is what nourishes me.

This past Tuesday morning at Moreshet Yisrael Nancy gave a dvar torah about v’ahavta, the first paragraph of the shema, and about loving God. I was suddenly reminded of the last time I had heard Parshat V’etchanan in which v’ahavta appears. On Shabbat Nachamu last year I took weekend trip to Tzfat with some friends from the Yeshiva. We ate, slept and davened at Ascent, a Chabad hostel. After I outed myself to one of the staff as a Conservative Yeshiva student and hopeful future rabbinical student, he asked if I would give a d’var torah during lunch. I’d not given a d’var torah since my bat mitzvah. I didn’t have any of my books or the internet, I didn’t even have a chumash with me. I was scared – no, I was terrified. But I saw that I was being challenged as a Conservative Jew by a Chabad rabbi, and I couldn’t back down from that.

Lying in bed that night at 2 am, I tried to think… parsha parsha parsha… what can I say about the parsha? Shabbat Nachamu, ok… 10 commandments, always nice… Shema… Ah! Yes, I thought! Shema! I know the Shema! Well, yes, I mean one should hope, right? I mean I say it at least twice a day. Last summer we studied Shema pretty closely in a few of our classes. I remembered feeling troubled in Rabbi Goldfarb’s tefillah class, when I was studying in chevruta, about the talk of love in the shema. Take the Shema completely out of context. Forget the brachot before and after, forget everything else you know about Judaism. The love described in v’ahavtah, the first paragraph of the Shema, seems very one-sided. You are to love the Lord your God with all your heart, with all your soul and with all your might. Why? Because the second paragraph says that if you don’t… you get “schmeised,” as Reb Mordechai likes to say. Love God, obey the commandments, otherwise, no rain, grain wine or oil, and you disappear. The brachot before and after talk extensively about God’s love for us, but if anything it seemed to me at the time that this was an attempt to compensate for the lack of reciprocal love in the Shema proper, our paradigmatic statement of faith. How can we love God if we can’t see God’s love for us? How can you even conceive of calling such a thing love?

What else happens in the Shema, I asked myself. Mention of Yitziyat Mitzraim, and Tzitzits. There are many different ways to tie tzitzits, but the way my father’s family does it, the way I learned at Camp Ramah, is to tie them in 4 segments with 7 loops in the first segment, 8 in the second, 11 in the third and 13 in the fourth. I started thinking about numbers, playing a gematrya game in my mind. What is God? Well, God is One. The Shema tells us this. But God is also 26, 10 for yod, 5 for hey, 6 for vav and 5 for hey, adds up to 26. So do 7, 8, and 11, the numbers of the loops in the first three segments of the tzitzits. Love, Ahava, it just so happens is 13. 1 for aleph, 5 for hey, 2 for bet and 5 for hey add up to 13, the number of loops on the last segment of the tzitzit. Why do we wear Tzitzits? The shema says to look upon them and to be reminded of all of the commandments. So if God, 26, plus love, 13, makes up the tzitzits, which we can understand to be a representation of the commandments, since we look at them to be reminded of the mitzvot, what can I take from this? God, plus love, equals Commandments. The mitzvot are the expression of God’s love for us.

Ok, a numbers game. That’s very nice and very cute. But does it mean anything to say that God shows God’s love for us by giving us commandments? This summer when I went back home to New York for a couple of weeks, I was bombarded with questions from my friends and family and shul community about what I’ve learned during my year in Israel and how my observance and my outlook on Judaism have changed. I found that these conversations tended to break down when they came to the concept of commandedness, specifically the idea of Jews being bound, obligated, by the commandments. “Ah, see, there’s the problem,” one friend told me as she tried to wrap her head around my newfound religious fanaticism. “I hear obligation and I immediately think ‘that’s a bad thing!’” Another friend agreed, insisting that obligation by definition carries negative connotations. According to these views, the notion that God shows love for us by giving us commandments seems, if not preposterous, at least childish. When we think of commandment, of laws, many of us think of restriction, of narrowing. Many modern enlightened adults view this kind of restriction as infantalizing… as a vision of a sort of cosmic mommy and daddy who restrict our behavior because they know better than we do. Do we really need this? After all, we thank God every day for granting us intelligence, for making us free… how then can we see being bound to a restrictive prescriptive system by which to live, even to think, as a good thing, as a manifestation of God’s love? Aren’t we supposed to be able to think for ourselves?

Ok, so we’ve covered tzitzits. Yitziyat Mitzrayim is the other main element of the Shema. God gave us commandments, the Torah, after taking us out of Egypt. When we think of commandment as restriction, narrowness, are we to learn from this that God brought us out of the narrowness of bondage in Mitzrayim, to bring us into another narrowness called mitzvot? Psalm 118 says that Min Hametzar Karati Ya, from my troubles, literally from the narrowness, I called to God, Anani Vamerchav Ya, God answered me by setting me free, literally by widening the way. Perhaps God does not take us from narrows to narrows but rather from narrows to widening. It is true that living a halachically bound life is, on the surface of it, restrictive. There is no way of getting around that. But perhaps what we can learn from the psalm is that there is a way to look deeper at the commandments. I tend to believe that each mitzvah, if you look at it closely enough, points to something else, some principle, something for us to be aware of. There is a lot of marking, distinguishing, sanctifying, categorizing in Jewish practice. If we can accept as a basic premise that God’s commandments, our law, is meant to teach us how to live with maximum awareness, to maximize our potential as human beings, then each mitzvah has the potential to widen our perspective and broaden our understanding of the world in which we live. The world may be a very narrow bridge, but God gives us a derech, a path, a way to live which can expand our consciousness if we let it. This is how I can believe that God loves us by commanding us. Viewed in this way, the mitzvot are a gift, an addition to the gift of our lives to allow us to get the best that we can out of that life, if we are open to receiving it.

If God loves us by giving us mitzvot, then the shema is not devoid of God’s love, it is filled with it. And it seems to me that the best way of loving God back is to use this gift of God’s love to its fullest, to use each mitzvah to its full potential. To do the mitzvot is only the first step. To really fulfill the Mitzvah to love your God is to do more than that. It is said that the Torah has 70 faces, that everything is in it. To take each mitzvah and to turn it over and over and to learn all you can from it is, in my opinion, the way the way to love God back.

A couple of years ago I made a decision to work on watching my tongue. I decided to take on lashon hara as my project for the year and I became very aware of what I said and I also became very aware of what others said and what conversations I did and did not participate in. Over the course of that year or so I felt like I did a pretty darn good job. Not good enough, because of course it is never “good enough” (which doesn’t have to be a bad thing) but I felt like I made a lot of personal progress.

This year I feel that I have not done so well.

I have noticed this year an unwillingness on my part to say anything about L”H when I hear it, or even to refuse to take part. This is a big problem. It is a problem for me personally and it is a problem in the Jewish world. This is not one of those areas in which one can say “oh that’s just not so-an-so’s strong point.” Shmirat HaLashon is essential in Jewish life and especially essential for our professional body. I’m sincerely disturbed by the lack of care i have observed given to this area.

So I’m laying out a proposal. I am making a deal with myself. I want to be a rabbi. Not so that I can have the job-title “Rabbi” but because I want to achieve a certain level of mastery in Jewish learning so that I may contribute to the Jewish world and the Jewish people by helping others to live fulfilling Jewish lives, have their lives enriched by Jewish learning, and so that I may live properly as a Jew myself. Becoming a rabbi entails more than just learning though. You can get a master’s or a doctorate just learning. Being a rabbi is being a master in our tradition which is not just a learning tradition but a legal and ethical tradition as well. Study is in our tradition is optimistically considered more highly than performing mitzvot for the simple reason that study leads to mitzvot. If you study with no intention of putting into practice what you learn, then you have merited something certainly… and you might gain a title out of it… but how can it be anything but empty until you implement it in your own life?

I’m making Shmirat HaLashon my project again. And not just for a year, but for good. I was reading lessons from the Chafetz Chaim that year, and I think I might do so again… but what I might want to do, rather than reading summaries written up in English flooding my inbox, I might make it a project to read the original. Maybe set a weekly goal. I will make it my business to watch what I listen to, what conversations I participate in, and to try to steer conversations away from lashon hara when I see it rearing its ugly head. I have already incorporated a reminder into my daily tefillah. Now I am making it public.

We’ll see how this goes. Wish me strength and success.

So, raise your pinky if you know what hagbah is.

For the rest of you:

Hagbah is when, after reading the Torah, the open scroll is lifted and turned so that the congregation can see the writing in the scroll.

This is hagbah.

When I was a kid, my dad would comment on the hagbah. He would say what the magbiah did right or wrong, what a good hagbah is supposed to look like, how many columns of text it is proper to show, etc. My father put into my mind that there was such a thing as a good hagbah, a well-done hagbah. He taught me to appreciate a good hagbah.

There’s a fellow here this year, a wonderful person named Alex who has become a very good friend of mine… he does a positively beautiful hagbah. He has impeccable form, graceful, unwavering, the words that come to mind when I see Alex do hagbah are “good lines!” Everyone sees it, even people who don’t know so much about what is a really well and properly done hagbah can appreciate that Alex’s hagbah is just beautiful.

Hagbah is traditionally a male honor. Well, traditionally all Torah-related honors are male honors. Hagbah remains overwhelmingly in the male sphere even in egalitarian communities.

Why? Because a Torah scroll is heavy.

On Rosh Hashannah of this year, I did hagbah for the first time.

It was something I’d long wanted to do but had no confidence that I could. I mean, I don’t think I’d ever seen a woman do it, generally I’d only seen strong men doing it, and heard many untried men express apprehension at the prospect of lifting that heavy book from far below its center of gravity, spread out with the threat of a 40-day fast hanging over the heads of the congregation should he falter.

Oh yeah… if you drop a Torah, everyone who witnesses the drop has to fast for 40 days. There are ways to be lenient about it, but it’s still a damn scary thought for the one doing the lifting.

But anyway, at the service that a group of us from the Yeshiva were leading at a chiloni (secular) Brazilian kibbutz, Reb Hillel beckoned that I should come forward for hagbah. Startled, I hesitated. He reassured me that I could do it, and briefly instructed me in the proper technique. I grasped the handles. I took a deep breath, bent my knees, and stood up.

Since then I do hagbah not infrequently at the Yeshiva. I am the only woman who does so. Alex does it more often than anyone. In egalitarian circles generally by default hagbah goes to a man and galilah (the rolling, tying and dressing of the scroll after hagbah) goes to a woman. I am one of the gabbaim at the Yeshiva, so I would like to be able to reverse that model when I can but it isn’t easy. I managed to convince one of the cantorial students (a class of 6 women this year) that she could do it, and I gave galilah to Alex. I like to give galilah to Alex when someone uncertain or doing it for the first time has hagbah, so that he’s on-hand for support in various ways. It felt so good to see Annelise lift that Torah.

It took some doing to convince them (and it is difficult to do so gracefully since honors like aliyot, hagbah and galilah are not something you ask for but which are given by the gabbai or rabbi [when the rabbi is also the gabbai]) but I recently became a regular magbihah at the synagogue next door where I daven when Yeshiva is not in session. The first time I did hagbah there was the first time many of those folks had ever seen a woman do the lift. Yesterday, we read from two scrolls. I had the first hagbah and Alex had the second. After services Alex and I hugged (as we always do when parting company) and one of the congregants asked, laughing, if there was a post-hagbah hug tradition.

My friend Nadav, an older (older = early 50s) Sabra (Sabra = native Israeli) who was so very pleased the first time he saw me do hagbah, pulled me aside and told me that I’d made him very happy. Why? Because I did the lift so gracefully, with no shaking or shuddering or wavering or dramatics, so smoothly and gracefully… and that I’d done it with the second heaviest Torah scroll in the shul… and with most of the wight on the left side, no less!

The heaviest was the one that Alex lifted.

It’s hard to describe what its like to do hagbah as a woman, or to see a woman doing hagbah. The word that comes immediately to mind is “empowering” but I tend to dislike those sorts of cliche feminist words. Cliches in general are bad. Feminism is good, but it’s important to keep perspective here. I’m not sure that Jewish practice should be used as a tool for empowerment in that way, especially personal empowerment. It’s not supposed to be about you but about the community. I guess that is really the point… getting up there and hearing murmurs of astonishment that *gasp* a woman is lifting the Torah(!) is not about people being impressed with me. If it were then I would have no interest in getting Annelise or any other woman to take hagbah… rather it is about broadening the community’s perspective, challenging assumptions which, in the egalitarian model anyway, need to be challenged. For those of us who feel themselves obligated in time-bound mitzvot and participate fully in public Jewish life, no area of that system of practice should be assumed by default to be out of bounds. Women can be physically strong too. And hagbah really has more to do with physics than with strength. Women can be rabbis, sure. That one seems so obvious to so many people. Women can and (in some circumstances, some women) should put on tefillin. That one seems so much less obvious to folks. That women can/should do hagbah… well, that’s just right out for so many people, when there is no reason that it should be.

This is the thing about feminism in Judaism altogether, really. I’ve heard far too many people shy away from or react negatively to being called feminists, especially in connection with Judaism, because their perception of feminism is of overlying “female empowerment” on our tradition… images of angry women putting on tefillin in front of old men and saying “whatcha gonna do about it?” come to mind. To my mind that’s not Judaism done right, and furthermore that’s not feminism done right. The kavanah (intention) cannot be about my empowerment. If empowerment comes about from the experience then bully for me, but once it becomes about me rather than being about the the connection of the kahal (congregation) to the Torah, then egalitarianism and feminism lose their meaning and their relevance.

My friend Jessica suggested a nice little drash on “v’zot haTorah” when a woman is doing hagbah… she remarked on the gendered form “zot,” meaning “this” in the feminine. I was confused. Zot is referring to the Torah which is feminine, I told her. No, no, I understand that, she said, but so is the woman doing hagbah. She is also zot. The whole scenario is zot. Zot haTorah. This too is Torah. For the egalitarian community, it is the very fact that this *is* something that we do and that we believe is permissible, women participating… it is Torah. Just like the rest of it. Pshita. Simple. And yet… so significant. The most powerful feminist statement to me is being able to not think twice about these things.

So yes. I am a woman. I hagbah. And you* can too.

*assuming a Jewish audience for this particular statement

Whoo… first week of classes over. Dear Lord I’m surprised I even remember my name after this week!

The day before yesterday was, as most of you probably are aware, the 4th of July, A.K.A. U.S. Independence Day. Being in Israel I wasn’t quite sure what to expect. Well, it turned out to be quite an interesting and eventful day.

First point of interest… I got a package! And not at the apartment where I’m staying, oh no… I got a package at The Yeshiva! After tefillah I was hunting for coffee for the old beit midrash and Rabbi Lebeau intercepted me. “Oh, did you get your package?” he asked.

“Package? I got a package?”

“Yes, you got a package! Hang on…”

He disappeared briefly into a room and emerged with… that’s right… a package. And it was from none other than Ms. Jen Taylor Friedman, A.K.A. Hatam Soferet. The package was an “Instant Yeshiva Bochur Kit.”

Yes, that is a miniature Vilna Shas. You might even think it was made for a… a…

Oh come on, you know the answer.

Anyway, THANKS SO MUCH JEN! You made my day, like, for realz.

In ulpan, our instructor told us about a CD shop on Rechov Shammai off Ben Yehuda. Rebecca (one of my classmates) and I decided to go find it.

And find it we did. On the way back, two interesting things happened. One, we ran into Cantor Simon. This was the third time I had run into him on the street since he gave a presentation at the Fuchsberg Center on the great chazzanim on the golden age. I decided that this time I had to take a picture.

The next interesting this was that we came across a group of folks sitting on the midrachov playing Apples to Apples. Just sitting there. In the middle of the road.

We followed the sign’s instructions.

This guy knows two of my friends. I’m telling you, Jewish geography is scary.

The guy with the parasol, Dovid, told us that there was going to be a barbecue in Independence Park across from the consulate and that we should come. So after we took our leave of the A – A group we got some food (cause we were hungry and couldn’t either of us wait for 8 o’ clock barbecuage) and headed over at a leisurely pace to supersol to pick up a 6 of Heineken. By the time we got to the park Dovid was already there with a couple of other folks from the A – A group and some others setting up disposable grills.

Ok, so I had a hot dog. I bit into it. And… it was… well… it was…

The hot dog was fluffy. I ate a fluffy hot dog. I tried to get a picture of it but I couldn’t get it to come out right in the dark. I mean, it was like a sponge.

It was tasty, don’t get me wrong. I think it was a chicken dog. But… dude… fluffy hot dog.

Dovid and I talked most of the night. Turns out we like a lot of the same music and we stood and recited the Penguin Sketch from Monty Python together. Someone else. I found someone else who recites the penguin sketch word for word. No one was listening or watching us, it was purely for our own amusement. After a bit we got into a friendly argument about whether or not it was problematic for women to wear tzitziot while niddah. He said it was problematic and I said that it wasn’t… and neither of us could back up our claims, so we just left it. (I have subsequently asked one of my ravs and am satisfied with his answer and with my ability to make the point better in the future.) At some point we could hear fireworks but we couldn’t see them. Someone broke into The Star Spangled Banner. When everyone finished with “And the home of the brave” I launched into the other two stanzas.

I got strange looks.

It was a lot of fun. I still smell like smoke.

And yes, I am proud to be an American. I will never apologize for that.

This past shabbat was filled with even more awesome than the last. First of all I had dinner at Lisa and Alans. The Magills and their magildren were there and I got to talk to Danny a bit about stuff which is always really nice. I was wearing my purple scarf on my head (cause I felt like not wearing a kippah) and Alan said to me “You know Gella… you’re looking very traditional. Very (small c) conservative. Except you’re wearing pants. It kind of throws the whole thing off.” There was a pause. I thought about this for a minute. Then I started giggling. “What? What’s funny”

I hesitated.

“You only think I look conservative because I have my tzitzits tucked in.”

Much laughter. More on this subject in the next post.

Dinner was lovely, and there was, of course, scotch to follow. Funnily enough, it was Danny’s scotch. See, Lisa and Alan’s friend Adam was there, and he had brought a flask of scotch. Danny’s response? “Oh, I have some nice scotch with me. Lets open that up.”

Danny Magill, ladies and gentlemen. It was an 18 year old Glenfiddich. Very nice.

In the morning I went to Kehillat Kedem, a progressive egalitarian minyan that also meets at a school, and consists largely of American students, many of whom were folks I’d met in the Beit Midrash. Some were from CY, some from Pardes. Again, everything was conducted in Hebrew. This time around I did bring my Sim Shalom and my tallit. Turns out they use Sim Shalom there. I went to Kedem because Hillel invited me for lunch and told me that it was where he was going, so I decided it was worth checking out. The first guy to daven was someone I’d seen in the beit midrash. He had an interesting style of davening/reading… he really pronounced his ע and every dagesh. It was almost like listening to Arabic. I was given the third aliyah. That’s a nice thing about being new somewhere… you always get an aliyah. After services Hillel introduced me to some people, and I actually introduced Hillel to someone… a young rabbi dude (JTS trained) whom I had met at tfillah and who (sidenote) actually took me for a little walk around the area past kikar tzarfat. I think his name is Adam Rosenthal.

Ok so here are some pictures from that walk… NOT to be confused with pictures taken on shabbat. I do not take pictures on shabbat.

This is a tomb from the time of the Hasmoneans. It’s just… there. In the middle of this residential neighborhood.

This is the ancient graffiti on the wall… they think it’s a boat.

This is a giraffe. It is in a playground. Apparently it is famous.

So back to shabbat…

After shul Hillel and I and his brother Gilan, his brother in law Ariel, and a girl named Aviva all headed over to Hillel’s place for lunch. Hillel’s roommate Ben joined us. Conversation was lively and we discussed Aviva’s job as a Tzahal prosecutor of terrorists, Ariel’s research project on Jewish right-wing nutters, Yiddish, genealogy, and various other things. After this we played Taboo, which I had never played and which was fantastically fun.

After a little bit of quasi-napping during which Ariel and I discussed the nature of Conservative institutions, two other folks showed up for Seudat Shlishit, Juan and Abby to whom Hillel had introduced me at shul. They are JTS student. They are geeks. They are awesome. And they could easily be my new best friends. We were regaled by Juan with stories of naked men doing strange things in and around mikvaot.

…

It wasn’t what it sounds like. But it was hilarious.

After Ma’ariv and Havdalah (we also had Mincha in there after lunch) Hillel set up his laptop and projector so we could watch a movie on his wall. We watched The Chosen, which I hadn’t seen in a very long time. We all had fun (mostly Hillel and Abby) pointing out mistakes in the film regarding Chassidic and Jewish practices, things that the characters were doing and saying that would never happen in real life (and also that didn’t happen like that in the book) etc.

Abby and Juan walked me home and we stood on the corner of HaPalmach and Kharlap talking about JTS. They said some very nice things to me which I will not soon forget. They have also informed me (not suggested, but *informed* me) that I will be at The Yeshiva for two years, not one. We shall see.

I am happy. I am happy that I can make friends like that, and that people get excited to meet me. I’m happy that I’m here.

Last week, my first shabbat in Jerusalem, was lovely and fun. I had dinner here in the apartment with Jeff and some friends he had invited over who were all lovely people and fun to talk to.

Shabbat morning I went to Mayanot, a מסורטי (Masorti/Conservative) congregation that meets in the gym of a מסורטי high school. It was a nice place and seemed to be geared toward young families. Everyone spoke English but the announcements and דבר תורה (d’var Torah - teaching on the week’s reading) were in Hebrew… as was, of course, the service. I hadn’t brought my tallit with me because I just didn’t know if that was how they did מסורטי here or not. I also didn’t bring my סידר סים שלום (Siddur Sim Shalom, the Conservative Movement’s prayer book) and discovered that the סדורים (siddurim - prayerbooks) that were available were the all Hebrew סדור in the front, חומש (chumash - 5 books of Moses) in the back kind. Now, I’ve always known that I relied way too heavily on the English in the סדור (yes, most of my silent davening is in English. No, I’m not satisfied with this state of affairs. Yes, I am working to remedy it.) but I never realized just how lost I would be without the translation. I guess it was a bit of an eye-opener. Didn’t detract too much from my enjoyment of being part of the קהל (kahal - congregation). As a matter of fact, I got (what was to me) a very special honor… I was given the first עליה (Aliyah) to the תורה (Torah). This was special and interesting because traditionally the first עליה is reserved for a כוהן (kohein - descendant of the priestly family). Being a lowly ישראל (Yisrael - people who are not patrilineally descended from the priests or the לויים, the Levites) have never had the first עליה. Honestly, I wasn’t entirely sure it was proper for me to take it, given that my מנהג (minhag - custom) is to honor the כהנים (Kohanim) in this way… but I’ve been doing a lot of switching between following my family’s and my home congregation’s מנהג and doing like the proverbial Romans… and I was taught that it is generally improper to turn down an honor in shul.

Ok, a note about the Hebrew… I have set my language bar such that I may switch back and forth easily between typing in Hebrew and in English. I am trying to learn to type proficiently in Hebrew, and so I am practicing. Hopefully certain folks reading this will visually assimilate some of the Hebrew characters and words, and others… well, if I make spelling mistakes please let me know. My Hebrew sucks.

Anyway, after shul it was off to Lisa and Alan’s for lunch and… yeah, bridge. Alan and Natan kept encouraging me to play, but I still had no idea how the game worked! I mean, I understood about tricks from playing Spades and Hearts, but I was completely lost on the bidding. So I just watched and spent some time playing with the little kids. Later I went home with Natan and Gabe and they taught me שש-בש (sheshbesh - backgammon) and Cribbage, of all things. We did הבדלה (havdalah - the ritual ending the sabbath) and I walked back to the apartment.

All in all a successful first Shabbat, I thought.

ETA: Ok, it’s not really that long, but after inserting all of that Hebrew it feels long. So I’m leaving this to be continued.

I’m gonna throw out chronology for a moment to post this:

That is smoke. I noticed it walking home from an all-day babysitting gig yesterday and it occurred to me that it might be important, so I took a picture.

And indeed it was, as I suspected it might be, related to this:

Yes, this is the Jerusalem gay pride parade, which I only got a glimpse of from a distance. My friend Lisa and I took her daughter and Uri who I was watching and we walked up Emek Refaim which was closed to traffic. There were soldiers and police everywhere. Seeing as how I was pushing a stroller I decided not to take pictures, but boy… there is something about seeing all those soldiers on the street.

Anyway, the smoke was, I suspect, the result of this:

While Jerusalem police prepared to protect the pride parade in the center of town Thursday afternoon, anti-parade protestors seeming decided to relocate their demonstrations. Less than an hour before the parade began, a number of protestors are suspected of having set fire to various spots in forests around the city.

So apparently the protest was more extensive than what Lisa and I experienced from our edge of the security which included chants of “Boosha! Boosha!” (Shame, shame) and “Yerushalayim Ir HaKodesh!” (Jerusalem is the Holy City) and a couple of signs (I only got a partial pic of one, front and back

Apparently there was also this:

Israeli police have arrested an ultra-Orthodox Jewish man who they say was planning to bomb a gay pride march in Jerusalem overnight.

An Israeli police spokesman said police found an explosive device in the man’s bag.

A man from the Conservative shul told me this morning that one of the news channels is completely ignoring it. *sigh*

Ending on a happier note, Lisa’s son Caleb aced his Karate test.

Ok, so now let’s see how much I can remember of Thursday…

Thursday morning I woke up early (not difficult since I crashed hard and early Wednesday night… slept until around 3:30 Thursday morning) and went to morning minyan at the synagogue in the Fuchsberg center. The walk is a nice one, not too far at all. The thing about walking here is that the sidewalks tend to be… erm… occupied.

Like for example by cars. Or garbage or recycling bins. Or by electrical towers with big signs on them that say “DANGER OF DEATH!!!” But anyway, once you get the hang of the way Israelis drive it is not so difficult to work in and out of the street traffic and make your way. In NY you get to be an empowered pedestrian. Here, not so much.

Anyway, I went to shul and met Rena there. Rena is one of my surrogate moms. She was our neighbor when I was a kid and is a member of our synagogue community and the mother of two boys who are my sister’s and my age respectively. She was in Israel for a couple of weeks visiting her mom. So I got there, greeted Rena, and pulled out my tefillin.

Now class, does everyone know what tefillin are?

This is a photo I just took of the instruction sheet here in the Beit Midrash. I have my tefillin in my bag but I didn’t want to pull them out and unwrap them to take a picture right now sitting here in the Beit Midrash. Too much work. Anyway, tefillin are those things that are translated as phylacteries… big help, right? Basicall they are little leather boxes tied to the head and arm with leather straps. The boxes contain bits of parchment inscribed with words from the Torah. You put them on when you pray in the morning on days that are not Shabbat or Yom Tov (a no-work holiday). Traditionally a Jewish male begins putting on tefillin every morning when he comes to the age of bar mitzvah, that is, the age at which one becomes, theoretically, mature enough to be obligated in all applicable mitzvot (commandments/points of Jewish law). In practice, it is generally difficult to find non-Orthodox people who actually put on tefillin every day, and even among those who consider themselves Orthodox, not everyone actually does put on tefillin and pray every day. In my family, none of us three kids were given tefillin or taught how to put them on, perhaps because the only time we were expected to be in shul or to pray at all was shabbat and yom tovim.

Recently I decided that it was time that I acquire a set of tefillin, and so I did. The day before I flew out I had my friend Rabbi Josh Gutoff teach me how to use them. The thing is, the part of putting on tefillin where you wrap the strap around your hand is really kind of complicated, and it is difficult to totally have the hang of it from doing it only one time.

So I got to the hand bit and I got a bit lost. I noticed that there was a youngish and friendly looking guy talking to someone next to me, so I tapped him on the shoulder.

“This is only my second time leying tefillin, and I’m a little lost. Could you help me?”

He was happy to. In fact, he was the rabbi.

The “helpless with tefillin schtick,” as Josh calls it, is a good way to meet people.

After services, Rena took me to breakfast on King George Street.

Our waitress indulged our mixture of Hebrew and English and helped us with words that we didn’t know. The fact that nearly everyone here speaks English is both a blessing and a curse. It means that you can get most things done with little difficulty, but it also makes it that much easier to not learn Hebrew, if you are an Anglo.

On King George street I saw this and was amused.

Later that day I was invited to come over to the Skop-Steinberg residence to see the family.

The Skop-Steinbergs are good friends from Brooklyn who made Aliyah almost a year ago. Their youngest son is Akiva who is 9 and with whom I have a special bond that none of us really fully understands I don’t think… I love him as though he were… not exactly my own kid… not exactly my brother… maybe something in between.

I said hi to most of the crew and then spent a lot of time sitting on the sofa (I say couch, but to Akiva, “sofa” is an important concept, and their couch is “sofa”) singing songs to him.

Here’s the thing… there is another family at Kane street, our Brooklyn shul, with whom I am close. They moved to France for a little while. Their youngest son was… well, he was quite young when they left, but he was old enough to say to me “I promise I won’t forget you!” And when they returned a year later, he had forgotten me. Given Akiva’s special needs, I was a little worried that he wouldn’t remember me, especially considering the fact that I had heard reports that he had asked for other members of our synagogue community but hadn’t heard of him asking for me. Was I not a grand concept in his world the way Rose or Penny or Ralph were?

I walk into their house and Natan, the eldest, is there. “Akiva,” he says, “look… it’s Gella!”

Akiva doesn’t move.

“Akiva, come say hi to Gella!”

Nothing.

“Akiva! Who is it? It’s…”

At this I came to him and put an arm around him. He slowly looked up, his eyes focusing on my face, and a big smile spread across his. “It’s… It’s… It’s Gella!”

At this he took me by the hand and led me to the sofa where he demanded by name (or really by code word) every single song that we used to sing together in Brooklyn… and in the correct order!

Talking to Ira about this later, his response was “Gella, there are a lot of things that Akiva can’t do. Remembering is not one of them!”‘

Not long after, Alan (another Kane Streeter who made Aliyah with his family in the past couple of years) called saying that the Skop-berg clan should deal the cards for a game of bridge.

Apparently I am expected to learn bridge. Quickly.

Well, that’s most of Thursday. I should do something useful with my time now. I spent all morning studying Taanit… maybe I should go back to it.

More to come.