Yemenite Rosh Hashanah

            Last night my friend Amber and I visited Danny, (one of the Israelis who lives in our apartment building,) and his Yemenite family for Rosh Hashanah. His family’s home was bright and elegant. Paintings of Jerusalem lined the walls and the dinner table was set with shiny plates atop a white cloth. When we arrived, Danny’s father immediately called us over to the kitchen sink where he was thwacking a pomegranate with a mallet.

            “This is the best way to get the seeds, you watch,” he said as he grinned and turned his head back and forth between us and the fruit. "Do you know the meaning? " We watch the juicy, ruby kernels strain through his fingers into a bowl. "Many seeds for many mitzvot," (commandments.)The mother and daughter, two beautiful women with thick, dark hair and glowing olive skin, criss-cross around the room. After he has extracted all the seeds, Danny’s father leads us to the couches where we share our backgrounds and interests.

Danny’s father’s beard is long, grey, and scraggily. His soft brown eyes have a subtle blue hue. Being modern Orthodox, he is nicely dressed for the holiday with a white button up shirt, kippa, and strings of knotted tzitzit hanging over his black pants. When Danny’s father wants you to understand something his chin goes down, his shoulders and right hand go up, and his eyelids droop a little over his eyes. He grins and says, “You see?” This man is a psychologist who also studied mathematical physics. At one point in his life he traveled to Texas to organize tours for non-Jews to come to Jerusalem. Now he teaches the secrets of Kabbalah to Hasidic students. As we sit down at the dinner table, he begins to explain the difference between Yemenite and Ashkenzi- traditions.

A Yemenite Rosh Hashanah platter has pomegranate seeds, dates, apples, pickled leaks, beets, bread, and honey and is therefore about twice as large as an Ashkenazi one. There is also a special green sauce made of hot peppers, garlic, cilantro, and other Yemenite spices. When I smear some on my challah Danny’s father laughs and says he’s never seen an American eat this. Each food represents a different wish for the new year, but most are about eliminating enemies and surviving death decrees. Ancient prayers to ensure survival. We proceed to have a full meal that includes fish with garlic, spices, and tomato, lamb in mushroom sauce, breaded chicken, rice pilaf, and baked sweet potatoes with pumpkin. As we spoon the delicious morsels into our mouths, I listen to Danny’s Aunt and two cousins speak Hebrew. Yemenite Hebrew is known for sounding like the original, biblical language from ancient times.

            At the end of the meal, a dessert banquet is laid out: slices of mango with dates, dried apricots and walnuts, a piece of chocolate mousse cake, fresh figs, and mint tea. As we fill our plates, Danny’s father gives a lesson. He explains the closed-system world we live in, the opportunity the Torah gives us to break out, and the factor of human will. The topic is about Teshuva. There are several things predetermined in an individual, such as whether they will be rich or poor, healthy or unhealthy. What is not determined in heaven is whether they will grow up to be righteous or evil. The difference is between what God says and knows.

            “Whatever God says will be created, it will be so,” Danny’s father claps his hands and opens them up. God knows whether an individual will be good or evil, but he desires them to be good. “He does not speak it. And so a person’s will is more powerful than God’s knowing, you see. A person’s will can change God’s knowing.”

            The warm Jerusalem air wafts in through the screen door and a warm glow of people fills the room. We’ve broken bread together and it feels like we could be in a tent in the middle of the desert. This is a family who truly loves and cares for one another. They are successful, intelligent, and beautiful; secure in their history and culture. The old man continues to talk into the night and all I can do is smile from ear to ear. How lucky to be here right now as a welcomed guest, how lucky to be home when so far away.

Shalom Palestin

Last night I was informed that Israel has announced while the UN deliberation is still going on that it will build one thousand new settlements in East Jerusalem. Today is the first day of Rosh Hashanah and since we have the next four days off, many people have left to visit Israeli families for the holidays. Walking outside, I notice that all the color has drained from the sky. The air is hot and tight. All of the high-rise, white-washed apartment buildings seem to blend together in this thick cloud. I sniff the air, but no one else seems bothered. The streets are sparsely populated. I walk up to the Promenade to see the Jerusalem skyline by myself, but it’s also cloaked in this ashen whiteness. The little apartments around the partition wall look like lines of skulls. The entire Old City is hidden and it occurs to me that the color of death is white, not black.

  I sit down to write on one of the stone benches that overlook Jerusalem when suddenly three boys, about ages 14 or 15, run in front of me. Two begin whipping each other with some kind of electrical wire and the sun starts to break through above.  They eye me and move closer. I can’t tell whether they’re speaking Hebrew or Arabic, my music is turned up loud. They’re  trying to get my attention. I think to go, but I refuse to give up my spot. I will not give in to my discomfort and be pushed out because I look like an outsider, because I am a woman. I’ve been told that this is my home. I’ve come here to write.  One boy takes a drink from the fountain less than two feet away from me. I keep my head down and continue writing. Another one walks up,    “Shalom,” he says.

                Glancing up, I read the black letters across his baby-blue shirt: Palestin. He has a closed-lip smile that somehow reveals two crooked teeth.

                “Hello,” I say, taking out my earbuds.

                “Beseder, okay” he says. The boy from the fountain is now standing right next to me.

                “Do you speak English?” I ask.

‘               “No,” the boy with the blue shirt says.

                “Well I don’t speak Hebrew.” I squint my eyes and don’t smile. I’m wearing a dress and the boy looks at my leg.

     “My name is Moshe,” says the boy to my right as he grins and eagerly sticks out his hand.

                I shake it. The boy in blue tells me his Arabic name.

                “Nice to meet you.  Ma nishma, how are you?” I ask.

                The boy looks confused and speaks in Arabic and Moshe repeats the Hebrew word with a different accent.

                “Beseder. Shalom.” the boy nods and begins to walk away.

                Moshe offers his hand again, and I make sure my handshake is strong and hard. They leave and I put my music back on.  After a couple of minutes I take out my earbuds.

Shem

The word shem means both “name” and “purpose” in Hebrew. It's a person’s obligation to live up to their name because it is their calling. My Yemenite Hebrew teacher has dark painted eyes and freckled olive skin. Her English ebbs and flows as she explains her meaning. “Your purpose,” she says, “is to reveal the gift of yourself, to let your true self become exposed.”

My name is not Hebrew but Greek, and means “pure.” I share the same name as St. Catherine of Egypt, the same saint that the monastery at the base of Mt. Sinai is dedicated to. I found this out this year and during my search two other things: that St. Catherine refused to marry unless she found someone who surpassed her in beauty, intelligence, wealth, and social status and that after she died her body was supposedly carried by angels to Mt. Sinai from Alexandria.

It is only recently that I have let people hear my vision of Mt. Sinai. When I was a little girl I kept it to myself, afraid to speak about something so important, afraid of jinxing it, afraid of making it as mundane as everyone else’s you see.

In the middle of class a girl mentions that she’ll never find the perfect man. “Yes you will, yes you will,” my teacher quickly walks up to her. “You must believe it.  Rav Cook said that when you have an image of something you truly want, of something you dream about and you know everything in it, you can describe every single little detail, it has no choice but to come down to earth. It’s not visualizing, this isn’t Buddhism,” she says shaking her head, “this is Judaism and you must speak it,” she puts her hand up to her lips, “speak your reality and it will be created.”

 “I see no difference in a dreamer who believes in God and a dreamer who doesn’t,” one boy says.

“The only difference is if you think there is something other than yourself. If it’s not just you, there’s God.”

Yesterday I met with our Madricha and I told her a little of my story. “This is very interesting,” she says in a quiet voice. “I would like to help you. I would like to help you go to Mt. Sinai. I think it’s possible.”

And I want to say “No, that’s okay. I’ll get there on my own, you’ll see.” But I’ve been thinking, and maybe I am not as great as my name and maybe the point of a dream is to share it.

Smooth Sailing

     The word for ship in Hebrew is made up of two parts: the word for "I" and the abbreviated name of God. Ideally, God guides the "I" through life like a propeller. In reality, people steer in their own direction. Our Hebrew teacher pointed out that ships and people are two things that are able to navigate without the use of lanes. A ship must negotiate between upper and lower streams.
      Last night I went to a class on "Teshuva," which literally means "turning around." It represents the repentance someone does before Rosh Hashanah, the Jewish New Year. The word first appears in reference to Ishmael after he has been abandoned by his father Abraham in the desert. It is in the desert that Ishmael reflects upon his evil deeds and  begins to "turn around."  And in that moment of true repentance he is forgiven by God. If a person genuinely repents for even a moment, he will be forgiven, though there is no guarantee  that it will last. So how does a person know when they have done good Teshuva? When they are put in the same situation again and act differently.
     In Hebrew, a righteous man is compared to a date tree whose trunk has husks that zig-zag up towards the fruit. The righteous man diverges and returns, diverges and returns, forming the same shape.
     I find this momentary forgiveness and the image of the righteous husks very beautiful. Beautiful knowing the moment cannot last the lifetime. Beautiful knowing that I am not righteous for I have neither stayed true nor strayed, but meandered in some ambiguous pattern to nowhere. Beautiful knowing people bolder than I who have. You cannot be good by avoiding situations that test you.
      And I almost want to run into the streets
      and pick a fight with everyone I meet
      to feel society's great lattice  framework lifted from my brain
      so I can know what it is I really believe in
      and what directs me after all.

To be Afraid

Our Hebrew teacher told us that the word for “place to live” is connected with the verb “to be afraid.” You build a house when you are afraid, when you cannot live in the vastness of the world and need to burrow inside a safe place.

I am not the hermit artist in the woods, the utopian dreamer, or the devoted scholar. At best, I am a dabbler who tries to combine all three. And by wanting it all and wanting to keep so much for myself, I do nothing. Seeing the fault in every path, I don’t go down any.

I am here because I look at everyone else’s life and become dissatisfied. I clench my image of the Bedouin tent with thick woven pillows at the base of the mountain. I work to be able to lie down and watch the billowing tent flap reveal a grove of palm trees against a crystalline sky. All I want is to close my eyes and listen to the thump of my own spirit. But then my thoughts return to my family, my site-specific childhood, and all the other ways I am bound to this time and place. Peace is not enough and so I force myself out of the tent to climb.

Jazz Night

On our way to the Jazz performance I see a man lying on Ben Yehuda Street in a white hospital gown. His body is curled in a tight fetal position with his hand wrapped around a cup for coins. Oblivious, the world bustles by. A gaggle of girls dressed like Urban Outfitters models laugh, a bald man wearing a kippa and smoking a cigarette plays the Oud, and a crowd beats their drums to Capoeira street dancers. When we  arrive at the outdoor concert, I watch the underage musicians from afar. Within minutes, an old woman with a cobalt blue head covering comes up to me holding a cup. I look down and shake my head.

Earlier that day, we listened to a seminar on the history of Zionism. One girl asked, “How many Arabs lived in the region during the first wave of Jewish immigrants?”

“Not many,” the speaker said, “Not many at all, and they were mostly where they are now—in Gaza and the West Bank.”

 Later, we walked to the Old City and I could see smoke rising from behind the partition wall. I asked our Israeli Madricha,

 “Where do the Arab villages begin?”

            “I don’t know, I really don’t know,” she shook her head. “They’re on the other side, but maybe here too. I went to a conservative school, we didn’t focus on that part.”

With the UN vote, tensions are high and security alerts have been sent. We have been warned to avoid the Old City. But for now, we walk the narrow streets that are choked with paraphernalia of all three Abrahamic religions. Silver menorahs lean against wooden icons on richly embroidered prayer rugs. One girl asks, “Why do Christians use the rugs?”

           “They don’t,” I say, “they’re for Muslims.”

           “Imagine what this would have looked like two thousand years ago,” she says.

           “Similar, there were always merchants outside the Temple,” I say.

            Walking back from the Jazz concert, I talk with a girl from Australia. “The English stole our country,” she says, “I suppose that’s why we have to follow their rules. The true bred Australians—

            “The Aborigines?” I interrupt.

            “Well, uh, yea I guess. I didn’t mean them. The Aborigines are really nobodies. They’re really poor and live in remote areas.”

            “Oh,” I say, “I see.”

When A Dream Ends, Living Begins.

            I only have one good memory of going to synagogue as a little girl and that was during the High Holy Days at Temple Emanu-El. I remember dancing with a group at night, hand-in-hand with heads thrown back. We bounced to Middle-Eastern melodies in the warm sweet air of their courtyard’s garden and I dreamed up the Holy Land. As amber lamplight reflected off the slick peach stones of their fountain, the walls of the ancient world expanded across a marbled desert. But as I grew up this image became entangled and pinned with symbols and history, enhancing the mystery but burying the joy until it was deeply lodged in the clay of the ancient world.

Walking back from the Kotel at night, I fall into conversation with a young woman from Venezuela. I tell her that I’ve stepped into my dream and want to run out of my skin. She tells me the story of a soldier who was caught with a grenade in-hand. In that moment, every instinct must have told him to throw it away, but he clenched and blew off his own arm instead of risking the lives of those around him. That soldier became a veteran who told her, When a dream ends, living begins. The dream will take you far, but the dream is only the drive and it cannot sustain my life forever.

First Visit to the Western Wall

At eight o’clock at night we reach the Kotel. The illuminated wall is smaller than I expected, with two-thirds of it designated for men and one third for women. I write a note to stuff between the sand-colored stones, but an attendant stops me, “Please, no writing on Shabbat.” So I move on and weave my way through a thicket of Heredi women. Some are dancing in serpentine circles, others shake forward and back with eyes tightly closed. As their singing gets louder and I get closer, I stare up at the drooping ferns that have pushed their way up and out of this ancient relic. Suddenly, I begin to cry. I am standing in the oldest land I have ever known, in one great suction cup of time. These are indigenous roots that have been ripped and transplanted back in. It is my people who worshipped this mysterious and awesome God who broods behind the wall as a still small voice, as a funnel of warm wind. And we have survived, I have survived through these thousands of generations. 

The Dead Sea

On the plane ride here I met a U.S. ambassador who had just been transferred from Iran to Israel. When I mentioned to him my apprehensions about culture shock he told me, “Israel is Europe with a bit of Middle-Eastern flavor.”

Today I saw Jordan, a faint fusion of blue and lavender mountains across the Dead Sea. I ask our Madricha, our counselor, “Is there a crossing point? Are there any bridges?”

            “You would walk that distance?” one girl asks.

“It’s Jordan,” I say, “look.”

“It is for vehicles only.”

Entranced, I wade into the sea that separates the two countries. The buoyancy is so high that my legs rise swiftly and I’m carried to the surface. The Dead Sea is the lowest point on earth, all weight floats. If it gets in, the dense salt stings your eyes, mouth, open wounds, and any other orifice of your body. I lie in the thick turquoise water, stare into the bullseye sun, and try to force myself into prayer. Doesn’t work. I listen for the faint sounds of goat bells and herders in the wind. Nothing but whispers come from a family of vacant faces as they bob on by. I see an anorexic woman in a red bikini cowering on the beach, tan leather hide pulled tight over bones.

Last night I walked by the exterior wall of the Old City. I try to crop out Mamilla, the outdoor trendy mall, shut out the rushing light rail crisscrossing along the streets, block out the 15^th century penguin men with their cascading ringlets. I walk along the perimeter of the ancient polis, head cocked back so I can only see the moon, palm leaves, and limestone slabs.

“Do you want to go in?” someone asks.

“Not now, I have to see it in the daylight.” Looking back down, I find a man pissing in a corner of the wall. I’ve come too late.

           I try to turn around in the sea, roll onto my stomach and do a dog paddle. I look across at Jordan, vast and melting into the sky and wait for the Holy Land.