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.