Yom Kippur

Yom Kippur in Israel is nothing like Yom Kippur in New York. In the States, a Jewish holiday feels like a Jewish holiday within your home, or within your synagogue, or with your Jewish friends. You make the holiday a holiday--by lighting the candles, having a festive meal, praying. In Israel, the holidays are holidays everywhere. The festiveness, the chag-ness, seems like its in every particle of the world. I breathe the chag in and out, I am inside of it when I walk the streets.

All public transportation stops every shabbat and every chag here in Israel, but Yom Kippur is something special. There are no cars on any of the roads at all. It's silent. The children take advantage of this by taking their bikes and tricycles out in the middle of the streets. There are blocks filled with children playing in the otherwise-empty roads. Everybody is dressed in white--flowy white pants, white shirt, white skirt, white head scarf.

My cousin Sarah made us a meal around 4PM before the fast started. I think she might be the best cook in the entire country. At around 6, my cousin Yossi and I walked to a beit kinesset (synagogoue) a few blocks from the house. The closer we got to the beit kinesset, the more crowded the streets became. There are at least three or four synagogues within close walking distance to my cousins' house, and the one we went to was small, old, Orthodox. It was overflowing when we got there, and by the time we walked back home, it was more than overflowing. Men pray downstairs, and women pray in the upstairs balcony. Many people brought their own books, because there were far from enough for everybody. Children rode small bikes in the courtyard, played in the streets outside the synoguge, ran from Ima (Mom) upstairs to Abba (Dad) praying downstairs with the men in their tallitim. There were were the Dati'im, religious people, who usually attended the beit kinesset, and there were probably hundreds of chilonim, secular people, who don't attend on a regular basis, but made the walk over for Yom Kippur.

When Yossi and I left, the streets were packed for blocks. Night had fully descended on Even Yehuda, and people looked like bright white ghosts in their white clothes, shining against the darkness.

The next evening, after having fasted for a little more than 25 hours, we broke the fast on Sarah and Moti's deck, a cool wind rustling the cherry-colored tablecloth on which we sipped hot tea and devoured those first pieces of honey cake. As we ate, we heard the cry of the shofar from one of the synogogues nearby, signaling the end of the chag.

Pho-toes

the port in Akko


Akko


my cousin Noam


a tiny stray kitten that was following us around and that I fell in love with


me and Anita on our way to the pool


I went to the Kineret with my Kibbutz family and 400 other people from Yagur! My tattoo


Kineret...haircut...apple...


Cachal, my 11-year-old kibbutz sister


Gali, my four-year-old kibbutz sister



a group of us went to Akko one Shabbat; this is a nargilah (hookah) bar in Akko

Halvayah.

When you're in a foreign country, learning the language, words come up in every day life. It's really different from sitting in a high school classroom with posters of different countries on the wall and a pull-down map. There are words that come up that are fun to learn, like melafafone, which is a cool word, plus it means cucumber, so it's delicious, too. And then there are words that might be useful, but you might still wish you'd never been in the situation where you had to learn them--tipul shoresh (root canal), for example. Or halvayah--funeral.

Rosh Hashannah this year was strange and sad. I traveled to my cousins' house in Even Yehuda on Wednesday afternoon. In Israel, trains and buses don't run on Shabbat or on chagim (holidays), so I had to get in early before the chag started Wednesday evening. We had a delicious, if subdued, Rosh Hashannah dinner (my cousin Sarah might just be the best cook I know). On Thursday morning, we all--me, my cousin Noam who is my age and was visiting from the States, his dad Yossi, and Sarah and Moti all went to the hospital to visit my Uncle Chaim.

Uncle Chaim was 90 and adorable. When my mother was my age, she also traveled to Israel, and Uncle Chaim was her Israeli father. They had a really special connection, which they kept up through all the years. Each time our family was in Israel we visited with Uncle Chaim, and he visited us several times in the States, too. This past year he's been sick and in and out of the hospital, which was difficult for everybody, especially for his daughter Sarah and his son Yossi.

I had visited him in the hospital a few months ago right after my birthright trip. It was strange to see him in a hospital bed, but he was conscious and alert, speaking, and happy to be leaving the hospital that week--which he did. Before my sister left Israel to go home, we visited our cousins, and Uncle Chaim was able to join us for dinner. This was about a month ago.

But Thursday was awful. Every breath was labored and difficult. He wasn't speaking. Noam and I spent the entire day there.

On Friday morning, Yossi and Noam went to the hospital to visit Chaim. He must have passed away a short time before they walked into his room, because they were the ones to find him. My cousins said that soon after, they heard a shofar being blown in the hospital and felt like Chaim's soul was ascending to heaven along with the shriek of the shofar. Because it was still a chag, and Saturday was Shabbat, we had to wait until Sunday for the halvayah--funeral.

It was my first Israeli funeral. The cemetary was very crowded, since it had been a 3-day chag and lots of people had passed away, and needed to be buried on Sunday. Usually, you don't wait in Israel--as soon as the person passes away, you bury him. When it was finally our turn for the rabbi, we all piled into this room that was empty except for the body in the front and a few benches lined across in the middle. The body was wrapped in a white cloth, because you don't bury people in caskets in Israel. It was weird because I could see all the contours of Chaim's body: his limbs, the rise of his nose, dips and bumps. The rabbi told the men to stand in front of the benches and the women to stand behind them. I thought this was strange, because everybody at the funeral was extremely secular, especially my cousins, and so was Uncle Chaim in his life. Usually it's only in Orthodox Judaism that men and women are separated, but I guess this cemetary was for everybody. Also, sometimes in Israel, people are either completely secular about things, or rather religious. There's much less of an in-between than there is in America.

The rabbi said a few words, and then a friend of Sarah's read something that Sarah had written. The whole thing was in Hebrew and a little difficult for me to understand, but it was very poignant and sad all the same. Sarah and Yossi, Chaim's children, and their children, Chaim's grandchildren, all stood in the front with their arms around each other's shoulders. Then they wheeled the body, still in the cloth, to his plot, and we all followed. They placed the body in the hole, and then anybody who wanted to was invited to help fill in the whole with dirt. It was so strange and sad and a little horrible, to stand there and watch piles of dirt dumped onto his body. I cried.

And then we placed stones on the grave as a mark of respect, and drove back to my cousins' house where they are now sitting shiva (the 7-day period of mourning). I'm back on the kibbutz until the end of the week, when I'll travel to my family again for Yom Kippur.

Ulpan Yagur-Revised

Things are a little different here now:

1. Lazar and I are "yedidim," friends. This is very nice, because he is a really a wonderful person, and I hated the awkwardness of living two doors down from him and not speaking to him. When I came back from Jerusalem on Sunday, the day after my birthday he threw me a little surprise party in my room. It wasn't too much of a surprise, because Spencer texted me twice and called me once asking me where I was, and then Lillian called on Ori's phone asking where I was, and then when I was walking up to my room I saw people at the window on my hallway and I heard somebody shout, "Here she comes!" But anyway, it was a really sweet idea, and the first surprise party I've ever had, and it was fun because my room was decorated with happy birthday fingerpaintings and balloons with pictures of trees on them because people call me the tree-hugging hippie. And the theme of the party was Hippie Party, so people dressed as hippies and drew peace signs on their cheeks. But half an hour later Lazar cornered me in his room and asked me if we could get back together again, so that wasn't as fun, but I was firm and said no. So now things are better.
2. I traveled to Haifa last week to get a real haircut, because when I first cut off and opened my dreads, I had a girl on the ulpan do it and it turned out horribly. My hair is even shorter now, but at least it's styled. By the time I come home next year it will have grown out a good amount. I still kind of hate it, but I guess I hate it a little less every day. I guess.
3. The boy that I wrote when to the hospital for psychological issues actually tried to kill himself with a broken piece of razor. He's back home in Ohio now, enrolled in drug and alcohol rehab. He was really messed up on drugs and alcohol all the time, and one of the big problems on the ulpan, so in a sense things are a lot more peaceful and comfortable now that he's gone. Hopefully he'll get the help he needs back home. A friend of his who was messed up with him all the time got kicked out, and he's not longer here either.
4. A third person left the ulpan because everybody hated her. She was a jappy little princess from England, and a huge slut, and when it got out that she slept with her best friend's (and only friend's) boyfriend, she decided to leave. Everbody agrees that things are MUCH better with her gone.
5. I had a deliciously relaxed and fun birthday weekend, which I needed really badly after all the drama that was going on here on the ulpan. I traveled to Jerusalem with my friend Lucy, and we visited our friend Scott there. He cooked a scrumptious dinner for us Friday night, which included a cake. On Saturday, my birthday, we went to the Jerusalem Biblical Zoo which has every animal mentioned in the Bible, and then some. It had been a long time since I'd been to a zoo, and I'd forgotten how much fun it was to stand in front of the monkey cage for an hour and marvel at the resemblance between the gorilla and my friend Scott. But now I remember. But seriously, everybody who knows me knows how much I love playing with children and like a child, fingerpainting and hula hooping and pogosticking and jumproping and hopscotching and listening to Disney music. So it was special to be at the zoo on my 20th birthday. It made me a little less stressed out to be turning 20.

Those are most of the changes here. I'm still cleaning toilets, still finishing by 10AM most days, unless Ariella, whose sole purpose in life and job on this kibbutz is to follow me and Sarah around and tell us to knock spiderwebs off the walls, is on the prowl. Today she trod on my heels for half an hour saying things like, "Ehh, Mehhriel, pleeze empty the ass-tray," when I am about 3 feet from the ashtry and with every intention to empty it, or telling me to please clean other people's congealed cups of green two-month-old rotten milk.

Rosh Hashannah is next week! I still need to figure out what I"m doing, but I'm really excited to be in Israel for the High Holidays.

And one more piece of good news: my good friend Chen booked a flight to Greece, and he's coming with me!