Israeli Hospitality, or: Why Israel is the Best Country Ever

We do Shabbat dinner at home, and it's nice. We'll have my grandparents over, and maybe some family friends, and all of us sit down to a big, relaxing meal and enjoy being with one another. I did Shabbat dinner at Vassar, and it was also nice. Golan and I would cook all day and listen to obnoxious pop music, we'd have a wonderful service, and treat ourselves to my challah and Golan's pad thai. Something like that.

But let me tell you something. Every shabbat dinner I've ever been to has paled in comparison to the one I had last shabbat. There's a program here that one of our madrichim ("social activities coordinator"), Levi, runs. If you let him know by Tuesday of the same week that you'd like to be put with a family for shabbat, he arranges it. That's how it happened that Levi, Jim, Dave, Caroline, Mike and I all hopped on the last bus out of the university before shabbat (at 3:50 PM) and rode down to the Gurshone home.

So not only is this family willing to have six guests from the university over their house (with very little notice--Jim and I both signed up completely last minute), but they also have five children (four older boys and an adorable 8-year-old girl named Adi), three guests who have made aliyah after graduating from MIT, one set of said students' parents, and several other guests. We arrived at their home, talked for a bit, and walked to beit kinesset, which was about three minutes away. It was an Orthodox service where the women sat way up in the balcony, but Caroline and I managed to enjoy the beautiful kabbalat shabbat service anyway.

When we got back, all 20 of us were seated in their dining room and served:

• two types of soup
• cooked vegetables
• cous cous
• rice
• two types of challah
• wine
• beer
• scotch
• chicken
• turkey
• beef
• pad thai (sorry Golan...it's true!)
• meatballs
• a delicious pepper dish
• personal apple pies
• sherbert
• cake
• two kinds of brownies

Aside from all the delicious food at this humongous feast, the other major reason I so thoroughly enjoyed myself was because Adi, the 8-year-old daughter, sat on my lap or Michael's lap the entire time and quizzed us on Hebrew. If we got a word right, we not only got "nekudot" (points), but kisses on the cheek, too. How's that for motivation to learn a new language?!

The Gurshons were one of the nicest, most hospitable family I've ever met. Every other shabbat they open their home like this to complete strangers, and serve them enough food and love to last way beyond the next shabbat. None of us could stop grinning on the 45-minute walk home (no buses run that route on shabbat). We were all tugging at our suddenly-too-tight pants, too.

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Today I started my volunteer position at the community center. Although most of us are tutoring Ethiopian children in English, my student isn't Ethiopian, because I believe the center and its services are open to anyone in the area. She's 13, very sweet, but very insecure about her English. We spent an hour just talking--about what she likes to do, her favorite foods, her classes at school (which don't exist so much right now, because the high school teachers are still on strike). It was difficult, because a lot of the time she got frustrated when she didn't have the exact words in English for the answer she wanted to give, and she'd just give up and answer "Nothing" or "Everything" to my questions; and a lot of my questions turned out to be yes-or-no questions in the end, even if I didn't intend them to be. It's also difficult because she didn't have a book, or homework, or any assignments, since the high schools have been on strike for so long. Next week I'll have to bring her a book, or some kind of game. Mom, the ESL teacher, do you have any ideas?