One of the many perks that attracted me to a fall semester in Jerusalem was that I knew I would get to ring in Rosh Ha’Shanah, the Jewish New Year, in the Jewish homeland. I wasn’t sure what to expect, but what I ended up with was very rewarding.
I was in my apartment after a day of prayer services and napping, pondering dinner when I remembered that Jeff Seidel, an absolute caricature of a man who runs a Jewish student center near my university, had mentioned something about setting students up for meals with his contacts in the Old City during the holiday. On a whim, I called my friend Alyssa, and we met up with Mr. Seidel at at the Western Wall to receive a dinner placement.
How lucky that we were paired up with Rabbi Schloss, a member of the Chabad-Lubavitch sect of the Hasidic movement in Orthodox Judaism (a.k.a. very religious and observant), who literally lives five minutes from the Western Wall, this having been my first time in an actual home in the Old City. I have had very limited contact with Lubavitchers, so despite the common denominator of being Jewish, sitting at his table was like entering a different world.
First, the décor: this house is a treasure trove of Judaica, and a Persian Torah scroll Rabbi Schloss found in an antique shop in New York City is prominently displayed among the dozens of prayer books and other Jewish literature that line the shelves. I saw more candelabras and kiddush cups than I could count. Pictures of Rabbi Schneerson, the deceased Lubavitch leader, hung everywhere.
The Schloss family is obviously in the business of hosting people at their house, and our cast of characters, all of them Orthodox Jews, was interesting indeed. There was a young Chilean guy around my age who is studying at a yeshiva (school for studying Jewish texts) in the Old City; a 30-something female accountant from Boca; two very young and recently married couples, both from New York City; and an older couple from California. The most common question I got from my fellow guests was if I was in a seminary, meaning was I an Orthodox girl learning in the women’s version of a yeshiva. I had dressed modestly for the occasion, but I had to tell them all no, that I was a student at Hebrew University, and definitely not Orthodox.
First up was the ritual hand washing before the meal, something I had never done properly. The rabbi’s wife stood over my shoulder and instructed me to splash each hand three times and then say the proper blessing. Then we said more blessings over bread, fruit, and wine, and finally got down to the business of eating the holiday meal, which was incredibly delicious.
Rabbi Schloss didn’t hesitate to share his wisdom. He told us, for example, that the letters of Adam’s Hebrew name add up to 45, which symbolizes his simultaneous male and female attributes (23 chromosomes multiplied by 2, then minus 1 because of the XX versus XY thing), that “the one dollar bill says ‘In God we trust’ because God is one,” and that America is the land of sin. He asked me if I knew my Hebrew calendar birthday, and when I told him I didn’t he whipped out a book and read me my horoscope based on the month, day and Torah portion of my date of birth and on some “notes” he had made in the margins (apparently I’m consistent and I inspire people).
He also took a particular interest in the young couples, asking each of them when they met, how long they went out for before getting engaged, what they like about each other, and what types of obstacles they had had to overcome. One couple had gone out for 3 months while the other had only gone out for 5 weeks, much to my shock, but then again that’s the way it is in these communities. The latter had a unique story because the wife was of European descent, while the husband was Persian. She spoke about her struggle to adjust to her husband’s family and their culture. Keep in mind that she looked younger than me. Rabbi Schloss also told us that the best quality in a married couple was the mutual desire to reproduce. The other woman said that one of the deciding factors for her was that she thought her now-husband would make a “great father.” At the end of this conversation the rabbi asked Alyssa and I how old we were, and when we both answered “twenty-one” he said, “You’ll get there soon enough.”
To summarize, my host was a lively and ebullient character, and my fellow guests were just as intriguing. It’s easy to forget that actual people reside in the Old City amidst all the sites, shops, and archaeological ruins. That night I had a window into how they live. It was a reminder of why I came here in the first place: “only in Jerusalem.”
[...] 25, 2009 by awg9988 My second installment in the Miscellany News‘ “Travel Notes” blog, and thus another round of shameless [...]
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