The Crime of Wearing a Tallit

The Jewish Daily Forward has published a letter from Nofrat Frenkel, the woman who was arrested last week for wearing a tallis and carrying a sefer Torah at the Kotel.

Woman arrested for praying

A lot of my classmates from Pardes were at the Kotel this morning when a woman got arrested for wearing a talis and carrying a Torah scroll. It’s a sobering reminder that this country does not cherish the civil liberties we hold so dear back home in the U.S.

The Jerusalem Post has the story.

Bamidbar

Last week, I went on a three day trip to the desert organized by Pardes. There’s no better cure for the inevitable restlessness, stiff muscles and tired eyes that come with spending one’s days indoors poring over ancient texts than to spend a few days hiking around in a magnificent landscape.

We stayed at a weird B&B in an agricultural moshav, where guests sleep on the floor of a big bedouin tent. Lest you think we were seriously roughing it, there was a jacuzzi, pool table and table tennis, plus spiced tea and turkish coffee available at all hours of the day and night. A friend of mine described the place as the Holiday Inn of Bedouin Tents.

The highlight of the trip for me was a makhtesh, a geological feature I’d never heard of before this trip, probably because there are only a handful in the world, and they all occur in the Negev and the Sinai Peninsula. Looking something like a giant crater, a makhtesh is basically a mountain which has harder, erosion-resistant layers of rock on top of softer more readily eroding layers. As the softer layer are washed away, the mountain collapses in on itself, leaving a enourmous cirque.

We climbed to the rim of Makhtesh Hakatan and hiked a ways along it before descending to meet our bus. Even though its name means literally “the small makhtesh”, it was still too big for my non-wide-angle lense to capture it’s full scope.

Nature, Red in Tooth and Claw

This is a cross-post from These and Those.

During a Shabbat picnic in the Tayelet, the group of Pardesniks I was with was approached by the most evil-looking tomcat I have ever seen in my life. Of all the feral cats I’ve encountered on the streets of Jerusalem, none approached this one for pure badness. This was the Leroy Brown of cats.

Fortunately for you, Dear Reader, it was Shabbat, so I wasn’t able to take a photo of the horrible creature, but if you picture a feline verion of Hollywood character actress Anne Ramsey (of Goonies fame), you will begin to get a sense of what the thing looked like.

The infernal beast squinted at us for a while, meowling. When we refused to offer him any food from our holy Shabbat picnic blanket, he proceeded to sit and glower at us with a look that seemed to say “I could kill you in 15 seconds if I chose to.” I was genuinely frightened.

At one point, the monster got into a stand-off with a five-year-old child from another group of picnickers who had been foolish enough to approach it. The cat was crouched as if about to pounce, and I have no doubt that he could have taken the kid down if it had come to it. The little beastie was finally frightened off when another child ran to the defence of the first. Later, we saw the brute scale a vertical stone wall, offering further proof of its unnatural powers.

I know that feeding the stray cats only makes the problem worse, but I wish we had made an exception in this case and bought the bully’s good will with a little bit of food. I live a good mile or two from the Tayelet up four flights of stairs, but after the way that child-hunting, wall-scaling monster looked at me, I’m planning to lock all my windows and doors tonight. And I wouldn’t even dream of venturing back to the Tayelet without a sachet of catnip on hand with which to propitiate the unholy villain.

Sweet Apricots!

My chevruta and I were in the Beit Midrash, studying a section of Gemara dealing with the obligations of a husband to his wife when we came across the phrase משמשין מטותיהן. In a hurry to finish the section before our next class, my chevruta quickly translated the phrase as “Sweet Apricots”. This seemed odd, but the Gemara had been saying something about Persian customs, and they have apricots in Persia, so it sounded good to me.

“Sweet Apricots!” we both crowed, perhaps a little too loudly for the dignity of the Beit Midrash. Without a second’s pause, the voice of Yaffa, our teacher, called back from across the room. “No! Not sweet apricots!”

The phrase actually means “using their beds” (i.e., having sex), something that at least according to one Rav Yosef in the Gemara, the Persians were in the habit of doing with their clothes on, and that Jews have to do naked.

In any case, “sweet apricots” is my new favorite euphemism for the dirty deed.

Sad Mac | Happy Birthday

I am not very good at birthdays. I get nervous and cranky in the days beforehand, and find myself unable to plan anything because nothing seems like it will achieve the combination of meaningful reflection and celebration that I want from my birthday. This year, I was also a little
sad to be away from my nearest and dearest on my birthday, and unable to celebrate the conclusion of a decade with anyone who’s known me for more than a couple of months.

On top of this, a few prosaic stressors were aggravating my propensity for birthday-related anxiety. Among other things, I discovered upon moving in to the furnished apartment I’d rented for the year that I didn’ quite trust the kashrut of the kitchen in the furnished apartment I was moving into. Never having kashered a kitchen before, I was dreading the task and kept it putting off. Then my computer died, which made everything in life more difficult (including checking my email and posting to this blog – sorry friends and readers).

By the eve of my birthday I was in full-on pre-birthday freak-out. I hadn’t really planned any celebration, my kitchen was still not kosher and my computer was still dead and the solutions to these objectively simple problems seemed impossibly far off. But then, that night, I kashered my kitchen with one of my roommates and a friend with lots of exprience kashering kitchens. By the time midnight rolled around, I could pronounce my kitchen kosher and sit down to reflect on my milestone birthday.

The next morning, I spent the morning studyingTalmud, which felt like the perfect way to celebrate this birhday. In the afternoon, I bought a new netbook, which solved problem number two and also made a nice birthday present to myself.

In the evening I went out to a fancy Asian Fusionish restaurant and had duck for the first time since I started keeping kosher.

All day there were songs and little presents and sweets and a general fuss being made over me, which is exactly what I needed to distract me from the melancholy of turning another decade older, and to remind me that even though my oldest and dearest friends may not be here with me, I have wonderful new friends, some of whom may be old and dear friends by the time (please G-d) my next milestone birthday rolls around.

Special People in Special Places

There’s a soup kitchen in central Jerusalem where a number of students from my yeshiva volunteer on Friday mornings. The dining room is overwhelming and disorganized, as people jostle for a place line and literally try to yank trays of food out of volunteers’ hands. It’s not a pleasant or particularly heartwarming environment; volunteering in the dining room, one gets yelled as often as one gets thanked by the people eating there.

The first time I volunteered there, my second week in Jerusalem, I was bending down in the middle of the crowded dining room to tie up a bag of garbage, when I felt a kiss on the back of my head. I looked up to see the smiling face of an eight or ten-year-old boy with Downs Syndrome. It was a tender gesture in the midst of a dirty, distressing and fairly un-tender environment, and I felt like the boy had given me a real blessing.

The experience reinforced my believe that people with serious developmental disabilities have something powerful to offer to the rest of us. In metaphysical terms, I believe that retarded people are agents of blessing, and I am always very grateful for chance encounters with those whose minds work differently from my own.

Two days ago, I was davening mincha in the beautiful Abuhav Synagogue in Tsfat, the mountain town in Northern Israel, which has been a center of Jewish mysticism for centuries. I had finished my silent prayer, and was standing, waiting for the shaliach tzibbur (service leader) to begin his repetition when I noticed some movement behind me out of the corner of my eye. I turned and saw a boy with Downs Syndrome sitting next to my seat, waving in the direction of the bima and the ark. I wasn’t sure if he was waving to the shaliach tzibbur or just for the fun of waving, or if perhaps, as I imagined, he was waving to G-d. The boy stopped waving after a few seconds and began turning the pages in the two siddurim (prayerbooks) he had open in front of him. After a minute, he stood up, shuckled for a couple of seconds, sat back down and pulled a third siddur off the shelf and held it in his lap. An adult who seemed to have something to do with him came over and tried to get him to close at some of the open siddurim but the boy held his ground. I felt honored to be able to sit next to this boy and enjoy his kavannah for the brief mincha service.

A Little Outing

Last night, my new flatmate wanted to go out dancing for her birthday. After four weeks in the Anglo Bubble of South Jerusalem, during which almost all my time and energy went into Torah study and other religious activities, it was very refreshing to go out and get a taste of secular Israeli life.

I met my roommate and some other kids from our yeshiva at a lesbian bar, where the unpretentious vibe immediately reminded me just how much I like going out on the town in towns where there isn’t much out to be gone. I realized just how thoroughly I’d succeeded in passing for the pious, straight-laced type, when I walked into the club wearing the sort of synthetic floral print shirt that used to be a staple of my wardrobe (and which has now gone thoroughly out of style for at least the second time in fashion history), started dancing like the fool I am and was met by a look of pleasant surprise on my fellow students’ faces.

The Zionist Ex-Girlfriend had warned me that Israelis don’t care if they look like idiots when they dance. This charming trait was in fully evidence at the lesbian bar, where on one side of the room gay boys were doing contact improv (when was the last time you saw people doing contact in public in the States?) and on the other, a butch dyke was using a tallit katan in a most sacrilegious manner. It was a great pleasure to dance my heart out and think that just possibly I was not the most ridiculous-looking person on the dance-floor.

Contrast this with the scene at the other bar we went to, where dozens of dudes in tight polo shirts hugged the walls, not dancing, while an equal number of girls in tight dresses stood in the middle of the room smoking and also not dancing. My friends and I stood out like sore thumbs not only because we weren’t dressed like everyone else, but also because we seemed to be among the only people in the place who were not afraid to laugh and dance. It was somewhat gratifying to the ego to feel that though perhaps no one else there would have agreed with us, in our own eyes at least we were by far the coolest people in the room. It was also pretty sad, though, to see so many people so obviously worried about how they looked that they were unable to even pretend to have a good time.

New Digs

I just moved into my new apartment on Rechov Tarfon. Rabbi Tarfon is credited with two of my favorite mottos in Avot: “The day is short, the task is great and the workers are lazy, but the wages are high and the master of the house is insistent,” and “The task is not yours to complete, but neither are you free to desist from it.”

I hope the novelty of living in a place where my favorite rabbis from the Mishnah have streets named after them never wears off.

The World’s Tastiest Racist Junk Cereal

In a smart and generous move, the yeshiva where I’m studying provides cold cereal and milk for the students and teachers who show up for morning davening before class. People will often contribute boxes of kids cereal to supplement the healthily bland options that the yeshiva provides. Normally I stick to müsli and bran flakes, not being in the habit of starting my day with heavy doses of sucrose, but when I saw the box of chocolate children’s cereal on the table this morning, I decided to make an exception.

First of all, let me point out for you non-Hebrew readers out there, this cereal is called “Kokoman.” Please note the racist charicature adorning the box.

Now that you’ve absorbed just how ludicrous the existence of this cereal is, let me tell you that it’s actually quite tasty. This is not just some knock off version of Cocoapuffs; it has it’s own unique shape and texture. Seriously, I think this was the best junk cereal I have ever eaten.

And check out the flagrant mistrelry of the Kokoman TV commercial: