Bride of Kokoman

As it turns out, Kokoman is not the only tasty product being marketed in Israel using over-the-top racists caricatures. I recently came across a delicious coffee-flavored brownie in the following packaging:

How I Squandered My Chanukah Vacation

My first week back at school is almost over, and I’ve fully re-immersed in the hectic routines I spent all of Chanukah recovering from.

Originally, I’d had lofty ambitions for my vaction. I would get out of down, explore Jerusalem itself, catch up on correspondence, blog daily, run the erands I’d been putting off for weeks, cook healthy meals, practice the trope for chanting Torah and Megilat Esther, exercise daily and on top of all that, do some serious review for all my classes.

In the end, I made some token efforts towards most of these goals, but spent most of my vacation in my living room, wearing my new teddy bear slippers, reading English language novels and eating donuts and latkes. In short, I acted as much as possible as if I were out sick, instead of being on vacation. It was fantastic.

Kingdom of Pork

Last Thursday, I took a little field trip to Tel Aviv, to meet up with a couple of folks I know up there. I hadn’t yet been to Tel Aviv in the three months I’ve been in Israel, so I was excited to get a little taste of this most secular counterpoint to Jerusalem’s religiosity. I was not disappointed.

After arriving at the bus station, I wandered north in search of a bus to take me to Yitzchak Rabin square, where I was supposed to meet my friend. The bus station in Tel Aviv is surrounded, as bus stations are in cities around the world, by a neighborhood of prostitution, drugs and adult video stores. If that wasn’t enough to remind me I was no longer in the religious haven of Jerusalem, then I for sure knew it when I came across a store whose awning proclaimed in bold letters in three or four languages: Kingdom of Pork. I experienced a brief moment of wistfulness for the days when I would have regarded that sign as an invitation to gastronomic adventure.

This particular storefront was no anomaly. Later, walking around with a secular friend of mine, we discovered that not only are none of her favorite cafes in Tel Aviv kosher, apparently none of the cafes in Tel Aviv in general are kosher, even the chains with kosher branches in Jerusalem. We were finally able to find something I could eat at this bizarre food fair inside of a mall, where in lieu of a food court, various local restaurants were selling samples of their provender.

Later on I met up with a new Israeli friend, and after having a drink at a non-kosher cafe (I stuck with lemonade), we went to an exhibition of installation art at the contemporary wing of the Tel Aviv Museum of Art. The most memorable piece in the exhibition was probably “Tree House” by Guy Ben Ner, which consisted of a carpeted room with a tree in it. A video was playing, in which a shirtless bearded man (presumably the artist) wakes up under said tree and then takes it apart and assembles the pieces of wood which had comprised the trunk and branches of the tree into various furniture items, until by the end he has a cozy little bedroom suite.

It was very refreshing to get a dose of the high-brow secular culture I left behind in New York, but in the end I was glad to get back to Jerusalem, where I can eat in most of the restaurants.

Toilet Talk

I recently received the following email:

Subject: For some reason

Body: It feels weirder to poop with a hat and scarf on than it does to por [sic] with a beer and laptop. Is it just me?!?!

Special Season

In the United States, Chanukah lives in the shadow of his richer, more popular relative, Christmas. It’s a cruel calendric accident that the central holiday of the country’s majority religion should be juxtaposed with a very nice, but relatively minor holiday in the Jewish calendar, a holiday whose theological significance is probably more comparable to that of Presidents Day than to that of Christmas.

The celebration of Chanukah in the US becomes tainted by a sense of well-meaning condescention from the broader, Christmas-celebrating public and the anxious desire on the part of Jews to somehow turbo-charge their holiday in order compete.

My family, in which both holidays were celebrated, was a bit of a microcosm of this dynamic. The Christmas-celebrators were a lot more invested in their holiday, decorating their houses weeks ahead of time, putting up trees and wreaths and creches, planning meals for the eve and day of the holiday. The Chanukah-celebrators, by contrast, contented themselves with one big dinner party and lighting candles. The most important factor in dertemining my childhood understanding of the holidays’ relative importance was of couse the number of presents I received for each. And in this department, Chanukah could certainly not compete. The Christians in my family gave a lot more presents than the Jews did.

So while I always enjoyed Chanukah growing up, it was not a holiday I looked forward to with longing and excitement the way I looked forward to Christmas. As a teenager and adult, I began to find Christmas more and more alienating for combination of theological, cultural and personal reasons (not necessarily in that order), but my love of Chanukah did not grow proportionally, and I found myself dreading the month of December and all its enforced holiday cheer.

Moving to Israel this year, among the things I was happy to escape, was the annual two-month onslaught of Christmas marketing. I was gratified to find that Chanukah here does not fill Christmas’ niche as the high holiday of Consumerism. To be sure, the Chanukah Sufganiyot (more about that later) go on sale several weeks before the holiday and I found one flyer about a chanukah sale on my door today, but other than that the holiday here retains a dignified, quiet beauty that I’ve never noticed in it in the States, where it is almost entirely defined by its calendric neighbor.

I think my first clue that I was going to feel differently about Chanukah this year was a few days before Chanukah, when I was at my weekly volunteer assignment, where I spend time with three young Ethiopian children, who live with their mother at an absorption center for recent immigrants. Throughout the afternoon, the children would spontaneously burst into one of a very small number of Chanukah songs they knew. Their eager anticipation of the holiday was such that they could not contain it for more than a few minutes at a stretch.

I couldn’t remember ever seeing anyone that excited about Chanukah, nor could I remember getting that excited about the holiday myself. Their excitement rubbed off on me, and I found myself looking forward to the holiday in a way I never had before.

The first night of Chanukah came. I lit candles with my roommates. We sang the blessings and traditional songs together, and then I went outside to my balcony to daven mincha (afternoon prayers). I could see our three sets of shabbat candles and chanukah candles while I davened, and my heart swelled. I simultaneously felt gratitude for being able to celebrate this beautiful holiday in Jerusalem, a wistfulness at not being able celebrate with my friends and family back in the states, and strangest and most intense of all, a powerful longing to light candles and celebrate this holiday with my own as yet unborn children.

That poignant mix of emotions was only sharpened as I walked to Friday night services. I passed families walking together. I passed lit oil lights in glass boxes to protect them from the wind, set up in front of garden gates. I passed a group of young chasidic men dancing in a circle on the sidewalk and singing. I passed a haredi yeshiva where the windows were full of menoras being lit by boys who had not gone home for the holiday. I imagined their homesickness, and it brought into relief my own bittersweet feelings at the comencement of the holiday.

That evening, for the first time, I felt the spirit of Chanukah.

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.