By Amy Kolodny

“Southerner.” “Middle child.” “Kind.” “Funny.” These are just words that describe definitive parts of me. Yet the more I read them, the more the line between noun and adjective becomes blurred. Perhaps this is one of my purposes in life—to change others’ views of common stereotypes because I am consistently different from what is expected. I don’t speak with even a hint of a twang. I never felt that my parents overlooked me simply because I didn’t learn how to tie my shoes first or because I lost my place as the baby of the family. I like doing good things for others but I refuse to be a doormat. I enjoy witticisms and love when people laugh at my musings but still feel surprised when they do just that.

I grew up, in a multi-faceted family in Savannah, Georgia—the only girl sandwiched between a very intelligent older brother and a very creative younger brother. My father was an introverted, scientific, practical, Republican, Conservative Jew from New York. My mother is a people-loving, artistic, emotional, Democrat, Reform Jew from Georgia. Needless to say, there was always much to talk about in my house!

From the ages of three to five, I attended a local Jewish day school where I learned how to read both English and Hebrew, how to tell time, and how to outsmart the boy who replaced my sandwich with one stupid little piece of candy when my head was turned. My first day of second grade marked two huge changes in my world: 1) the birth of my younger brother (who my older brother lovingly assured me was a boy because “Mama and Daddy really didn’t want any girls at all, ever!”) and 2) the start of my public school education. Most years, my older brother and I were the only Jewish kids in our school and, seemingly overnight, I became the token spokesgirl for all things Jewish. This was a daunting task for a shy little girl but one that served me well because it helped me to identify, very early on, what my Judaism meant to me. I grew up learning that to be Jewish was special and rare and that it was steeped in history, culture, tradition, and strange-yet-delicious foods. I also learned that it’s very difficult to explain what it means to be Jewish to someone that is not, but that hasn’t stopped me from trying to do so!

Oh sure, I was made fun of for my unruly curly hair, my ability to break the curve for the dreaded science test, and my inability to eat pepperoni on my pizza during end-of-the-year parties. However, I also had a cute little button nose instead of the large one I was supposed to have, couldn’t have cared less about whether or not my clothes had a fancy label like the ones I was supposed to wear, and I much preferred to be the thoughtful observer and not the brash, loud kid that I was supposed to be given what people knew about Jews. So, I was a sort of an atypical Jew (from a stereotypical point of view). Though my dietary habits have changed much to my late father’s chagrin, I still am not what most non-Jews come to expect when they hear the word “Jewish.” On the flip side, I am likely not what many Jews come to expect when they hear the word “Jewish” either. I never had a bat mitzvah, I know very few Jewish prayers or words in Hebrew, and I cannot stand the taste of chopped liver.

Through many hours of soul searching and conversations with friends, strangers, and myself (and yes, I do talk to myself), I have come to one realization – I am unique, just like everyone else. By this, I mean to say that I cannot control how other people view me or what they think about me. Stereotypes are, after all, just generalizations made about the attributes of all members of a group. If you assume you know what a person is like based on what you think he/she should be instead of learning about the person as he/she is, you are likely to be wrong and miss out on the opportunity to make some really meaningful connections. My individual experiences have made me who I am, believe the way that I do, and I choose to live my life in the best way that I know how to. It may not fit in with how I’m supposed to live it given my age, my gender, and what my society tells me, but being true to myself is a great way to fall asleep at night.
…
Amy Kolodny is a pediatric speech-language pathologist, daughter, sister, aunt, friend, and a championed supporter of the underdog.
…

Photo by Nina Matthews Photography, licensed under Creative Commons

Read more posts from Issue 20: Stereotypes.

By Lisa Kaneff

A hurricane was brewing that fall as I walked my Birthright Israel application from my dorm room at the University of Miami to the Hillel House. The wind whipped through the palm trees, the air was devoid of the humidity I’d come to expect after most of my first semester at “The U.” Barely 18, I was fighting all of the identity demons one would expect to fight when you move at such a young age so far away from home, family, and the life you know. It was 1999, and this would be the first official Birthright Israel trip.

Greeted with fanfare suited more for celebrities than bleary-eyed university students, our welcome to Israel was delayed by three hours thanks to a package allegedly left on our ElAl plane by someone attempting to slip his way back through security. The 747 packed with the young and excited participants was escorted off the plane, and quarantined in the airport lounge until both sets of bomb-sniffing dogs cleared us for take off. It was a dubious start to a trip we were assured would be safe, fun, and above all, meaningful.

The details I remember: I was on bus #1. As I understand it, Birthright has consecutively numbered all buses since that first trip and I was on #1. I remember Leif, a student from FIU, was #15 during our “did we lose anyone” count-offs. Why do I remember that particular detail? Because we were always losing Leif. The silence after #14 was deafening and memorable as we missed things like sunrise at Masada because of #15 and his predilection for tardiness. I remember that I wore a Superman T-shirt that day we climbed Masada. I remember I was lapped climbing that mountain by a blind student smoking a pipe. And I remember that was the first time I realized my safe, fun, and meaningful trip to Israel would be more of a mental, physical, and spiritual challenge than I had signed up for.

A dreidel tells the story best: “A great miracle happened there,” becomes, “A great miracle happened here.” Here. All of the stories you read, the tales you’re told… No longer are they tall tales told by Hebrew School teachers to purvey a life lesson — a fable told during those painful hours between the long-endured school day and long-awaited television show you knew was around the corner — a piece of the sermon you may have heard during High Holy Day services when you weren’t scribbling notes to your best friend you were lucky enough to sit next to on the longest day of the year. But.

But in Israel, you are forced to confront the reality of religion. You meet faith head on for a jetlagged, spiritual Battle Royale. Could it be that what I had, as an impetuous youth, blown off as a tall tale be true? Could the stories be real? What does that mean for me and my faith? At that moment on the mountain looking down over where tragedy struck thousands and thousands of years prior, I knew things had changed. That Judaism, my Judaism, had just become… real.

Photo by Ani Carrington, licensed under Creative Commons.

Read more posts from Issue #19: Israel.

By Ruvym Gilman

I didn’t come looking for anything in particular, as I had in the past. Particularity breeds expectation, which, more often than not, leads to disappointment. So I came just hoping not to be disappointed.

…

Arriving in Israel for the fourth time in as many years, I feel that same sense of expectation, that all things here will be holier than elsewhere. The people I’m with, all of us on a fellowship for young, post-college, Jewish, soon-to-be leaders, fill the spectrum from disinterested businessman types to a wanna-be-orthodox spiritualist who produces a hidden kippa at just the right moments. A couple of educators and a 20-something Israeli guide top us off at sixteen people. As we walk down the arrival corridor at Ben-Gurion Airport, the spiritualist kid, his voice melting into the softness with which one speaks of a lover, tells me how the original architecture scheme was supposed to have the arrivals climbing an incline, that it was supposed to represent the entry into Israel as a literal elevation, a “going up” or “aliyah.”

“But this is a decline,” I say, also pointing out that the departure corridor offers a similar descent, creating an “X” of opposing ramps.

He shrugs, “What did you expect? That things here should work out as planned?”

Once we’re at our hotel in Tel Aviv, I call up my uncle, a black-hatter who lives in some really religious neighborhood in Jerusalem. I forget the name or where exactly it is, but I remember how you can see the West Bank from his living room window, outlined by a connect-the-dots arrangement of flood lights that announce the separation wall even in the middle of the night, while you stomp blindly towards the bathroom.

I say, half-jokingly, “I’ve arrived. I’m in the Holy Land.”

“Where are you?”

“Tel Aviv.”

He scoffs, “Then you’re not in the Holy Land.” Pause. “Call me when you’re in Jerusalem.”

The way he says “Jerusalem” as “Yerushalayim,” the way the city’s name seems tainted when placed within a sentence with lesser words, nearly convinces me that my trip won’t really start until I’m there, that everything before will be one cheap parlor trick.

Even though I’ve only ever spent a night in Tel Aviv before (not long enough to see much of anything) I want him to be wrong. He’s close-minded, I tell myself, incapable of giving a fair trial to anything in the secular world.

But Tel Aviv just can’t seem to keep its mouth shut. The 70s-style hotels that line the coast and the smell of sunscreen that sits like a thick fog rolled in from the water make the city seem like nothing more than a sad Middle Eastern version of Miami Beach. A few generations of pasty Ashkenazic immigrants have given way to firm, tanned bodies. Bronze Gods, new idols of worship.

I stare up at the sleek new skyscrapers, those symbols of Israeli progress and modernity, but have a hard time reconciling them with the squat, abandoned Bauhaus structures that still litter most of the landscape, chipped paint and weeds and trash spilling out from boarded-up windows and doors that have long been propped open. I’m embarrassed when I see Independence Hall with its dilapidated exterior, a makeshift flagstaff at the top, leaning off to one side at a slight five degree tilt, a tattered flag sputtering alongside it. This is where a state was formed? I missed Washington’s white-washed Roman architecture, forgetting, for a moment, that I’d never actually spent enough time in Philadelphia to see where America was born.

In the southern part of the city, lights flicker along the edges of the streets, tacky bright bulbs announcing whorehouses with graffiti painted accents of exaggerated bodies draped in Flashdance-style underwear tearing at the seams. Peddlers spread dusty sheets, once white, across sidewalks to exhibit their worthless wares – rusted tools, used (“vintage”) clothing, manicure sets slipping out of their open containers, unlabelled VHS tapes with cracked plastic screens. It’s all a caricature of the forgotten, a corner of this country that God must not have noticed.

I try to ignore my disappointment because it’s easier not to deal with it. Instead, with the coaxing of more party-minded individuals than myself, I indulge in the familiar comforts that Tel Aviv has to offer. Life becomes one sleepless night of drinks and hookah on the beach, eyeing bikinis and searching for knowing smiles, the resonating slap of matkot paddles off in the distance as the Friday night sun dips behind the Mediterranean and the prayer book grows sweaty in my hands. Most other things recede into the dark corner, just a shapeless mass casting a long shadow at the passing of a light.

The night before our exodus East, I sit out by the sea with a few other people. Our feet buried in the cold sand, each of us contemplates in silence. I allow myself to realize that I’m ready to leave, happy even. I don’t think I will miss having Tel Aviv behind us.

Someone lets out a deep breath. “This place, its amazing isn’t it?”

“Why?” I ask, annoyed at the mere suggestion that there can be anything amazing about it. “It’s so rundown, so seedy. I expected something a little more, I don’t know, developed, advanced.”

“You have to realize,” he says, “it’s still such a young place. All of this was built from nothing, in the middle of a desert, by people who came out of Europe after the Holocaust. And they did it in only sixty years.”

I don’t know that I understand what any of it means. The context, the realities, they seem too far removed from my own life. I don’t have anything to say in response, and so I let his words trail off into the salty air as our conversation devolves back into just the sound of our rising and settling chests, the sleepy lapping of the Mediterranean against the shore.

Ruvym Gilman is a short story writer.  You can find more of his work on his blog, The Kernel.

Photo by Hoyasmeg, licensed under Creative Commons.

Read more posts from Issue #19: Israel.

]]> http://alefnext.com/israel/forgetting-tel-aviv/feed/ 4 http://alefnext.com/israel/if-i-forget-you/ http://alefnext.com/israel/if-i-forget-you/#comments Mon, 23 Aug 2010 17:06:09 +0000 Emily.Comisar@birthrightisraelnext.org http://alefnext.com/?p=8199

Forget Israel’s politics for a minute.  Mike Turner provides us with a video companion to the landscapes of Israel.

if i forget you from Mike Turner on Vimeo.

Read more posts from Issue #19: Israel.

by Arden Joy

“I don’t get it. If someone repeatedly threatened my life if I didn’t move, I’d move. A piece of land is not worth dying over.”

I’m tempted to say that I overheard this statement, but the truth is…it was me, talking about Israel with a friend earlier this year.

Let’s be realistic. My experience of what a country is, well, it’s a little unique. My homeland was built by people deserting their old one, where it’s not uncommon to ask someone’s nationality (and get a laundry list back). I’ve lived through two wars, both viewed safely through the glass window of my television and never once in my own backyard. I am a Millenial, a citizen of the borderless world wide web.

I mean, I love my country but home is where the heart is…right?

This attitude lingered with me during my trip to Israel in March. As I listened to my Israeli friends talk about the passion they felt for their country, as I walked through the military cemetery, as we looked over the borders to Syria and Jordan – it lingered.

I couldn’t help it — I kept thinking. “I don’t get it. How is all this fighting and death worth an invisible border? If they want you out that badly, why won’t you leave?”

And then…

One afternoon, our trip leader was talking to us. He said, “what would you do if America became politically extreme and started kicking out Jews.”

Hmm, I’d never asked myself that before. What would I do? Even though I have ancestors from all over the world, would any of those countries take me in? My mind sifted through the long history of persecution that the Jews have suffered and I began to wonder…was it so unreasonable to imagine that it could happen again today?

And if it did, where would I go?

“Right now,” my leader continued “if you had to leave America, you would have a home in Israel.”

I sometimes like to think of “understanding” as a glow stick. You can have all the chemicals and compounds (aka book smarts) needed to make it work, but it’s not until that final snap that everything begins to light up. And when he said it – SNAP – my brain lit up.

I imagined the millions of Jews facing racism and persecution at the beginning of the century. And I imagined what would have happened if they had had a place to go. I imagined what would have transpired if they had been able to go to their homeland, to their brothers and sisters, if they had been able to – as one people – rise up and defend themselves.

I got it.

And suddenly I felt honored and blessed to be standing on a piece of land, surrounded by invisible borders that my brothers and sisters were giving their lives to protect so that all of us could be safe and free.

Photo by gnuckx, licensed under Creative Commons.

Read more posts from Issue #19: Israel.

by Yoav Sivan

At almost 90 degrees at noon with 60 percent humidity on a Thursday, one may think the main difference between Manhattan and the Promised Land is that here Jews complain about the weather in Fahrenheit.

There is no better way to see the similarities between the two biggest Jewish communities in the world than observing how their members complain. Luckily God summoned a visit from a Jew from the Promised Land – Prime Minister Binyamin Netanyahu – to the Council of Foreign Relations on 68th Street and Park Avenue to help my cause.

While Netanayahu enjoyed the air conditioning and some refreshments at the Council’s New York office, two rallies took place across Park Avenue. It was 68th Street that parted the anti-Israel and the pro-Israel gatherings.

Walking down Park Avenue, I first encountered the anti-Israel rally. A handsome number of people, considering it was business hours on a weekday, were carrying signs that left little question as to their sympathies. A Palestinian flag gave some color to the otherwise severe scene.

Crossing the street toward the other rally, I realized it was a mirror image of the first. Both were dominated by a diverse group of Jewish people fervently supporting a cause about which they would refuse to compromise. “Israel wants peace,” blasted through a loudspeaker held by a kippah-covered redhead on the right bank of 68th Street. On the left bank, a woman in a blue t-shirt was holding a sign that read: “Palestinians hunger for Justice.” Thank God we all want the same thing.

“Bibi Sink the Ship Next Time”, read a sign on the right, adorned with two small flags. I approached the man, who together with the sign was waving a huge Israeli flag, probably larger than all the Israeli flags I have waved in my life combined. A proud Israeli? I wondered. He lived in Israel, he said, for four years when he was ten, but then his citizenship “expired.”

On the anti-Israeli side, the left side, of the street the best spot was taken by some 20 Hasidic Jews. There was no question about their Jewish affiliation (whoever is willing to wear a heavy black suit in such weather is a better Jew than me) and there was no question about their sympathies. Their “freedom for Gaza and all Palestine” placards, raised voices, and fierce eyes showed me that anti-Israel tendencies can unite Jews of different observance levels and backgrounds.

A photographer, an invested observer like myself, asked me for my take on this peculiarity. He didn’t like my theory that “they just have too much time on their hands,” so I tried to provide him with a description of their political reasoning. Some sects of Hasidim maintain that according to Jewish law, a Jewish statehood should be restored only by the Messiah. Since neither Herzl nor Netanyahu have established themselves as offspring of King David, they consider it heretical for Jews to take their national identity into their own hands.

My problem in understanding them, I shared with him, is probably my first theological reflection. Growing up in Netanya, Israel, I would pass through a Hasidic neighborhood on my way to school. Wearing shorts, I could never understand a belief system that would dictate that someone dress in a heavy black suit in this kind of summer heat.

I was probably about an hour on the scene, and while I did pass through the left bank, I spent most of my time on the right. I crossed back over 68th Street a couple of times to revisit the other side and to learn about the protesters positions, but I kept coming back to my own flag. On the right bank I had a nice conversation with a group of Israeli women, whom I approached after I heard them speak my language, Hebrew. They were like myself; our hearts are in the East, and we are at the ends of the West. (When I asked one of them whether she was a tourist from Israel, she said that it was Bibi who was the tourist.)

I was comfortable and felt welcome on the right bank of 68th Street, but not because I necessarily share their political goals (nor am I even sure what they are) or feel secure from anti-Israeli criticism. I felt at home there, as I feel at home in Israel, because I was among people who are unapologetic about the Israeli flag.

Crossing for a moment to the left bank, I got a pamphlet from a self-identified Jewish woman that read: “Israeli War Criminal Netanyahu: New York Says You Are Not Welcome Here!” Many organizations had undersigned the message. My favorite was “Jews Say No!” I think that both the right and the left banks could join this group.

Reading in the New York Times the next day I found out what Netanayhu said in his speech, but I realized that I had left the site while he was still enjoying refreshments and air conditioning at the Council. Neither I nor the participants waited to hear what he had to say before we complained.

That was an Israeli moment for me, as neither I nor my fellow Israelis-in-Israel ever waited to listen to what he, or other politicians had to say, before we complained.

Read more from Yoav Sivan.

Photos courtesy of Michael Priest Photography.

Read more posts from Issue #19: Israel.

by Daniel M.

“Welcome home.” These were the first words spoken to me by the leader of my Birthright trip as I exited Ben Gurion airport. Home? This doesn’t look like home. I just flew 13 hours to the other side of the world and entered a place I have never been before; a place where I have no family, and everyone is a stranger. But I never feel like a visitor in Israel. I may be in a foreign country, but I am not a foreigner.

When I step onto Israeli soil, I do what my grandfather did in 1982 when he first visited Israel. The man grew up as an orthodox Jew, he dreamt of coming to the land of Zion his entire life and even had to change his name from Eisenberg to a less “Jewish” sounding name in order to get a job. He got down on his knees and kissed the ground. I did the same, although I didn’t know why at the time—ten days later I understood.

Growing up, I was always aware of what was going on in Israel, but there was never a connection. I felt a part of the global Jewish community, but Israel was not a central piece of that relationship. Being connected to Israel meant connecting to something bigger than myself. Western society is based on the individual, on personal gain, but I had been yearning for a connection to a people and I didn’t even know it. Before visiting Israel I did not understand the concept of “peoplehood”—that I am one of only several million Jews alive. Israel connects me to those millions.

Unlike anywhere I have ever been, Israel does weird things to me. I see things in Israel that I have never seen before—hotel custodians wearing yarmulkes, Jews working at McDonalds. Has a man wearing a yarmulke ever pumped your gas before? Jews building roads, bridges, hospitals—an entire country built on the backs of Jews. Remarkable.

Upon leaving Israel I felt I had to do more to serve the Jewish community. I have become actively involved in various Israeli and Jewish organizations within my community. I used to think observance lines segmented Jews, but the trip allowed me to see the Jewish people in a secular way, and taught me the difference between Judaism and Zionism. Birthright is creating a generation of young Jews who experience Israel first-hand, instilling the notion of a homeland and connecting young Jews to the land and the people of Israel. Israel has made me reevaluate my goals and priorities, not only to contribute to the Jewish community but to help educate people about and work towards the prevention of genocide. Visiting Israel sensitizes you to struggle, to hardship, but it also inspires you with the resilience shown by a tiny country that almost didn’t happen.

I am at ease when I am in Israel. I am amazed at the revival of Hebrew and the Jewish culture renaissance that is Zion. I love the falafel and shwarma stands, haggling with the shopkeepers over five lousy shekels. I love the Dead Sea, even hiking in the Negev in August. I love how everything shuts down on Shabbat, as if the entire country goes into hibernation for just one day. The multitude of opinions is at times exhausting but refreshing, and Jerusalem, oh Jerusalem, your mysticism, your stone, your walls, and your closeness to Hashem—my soul cries out to you. Jerusalem makes my heart howl and beam at the same time. Standing at the Kotel, I felt connected to my family, to my ancestors, and to the Jewish people. While walking through the old city on Shabbat, on the way to the Kotel, I felt as if there was someone walking with me, a strange presence, as if I had done this before, 3,000 years ago perhaps, and that person was leading me back, back to our holiest site.

I may live in the Diaspora, but Israel is in my heart and soul. She is constantly on my mind—the sounds, the sights, the smells. I think of Israel when I wake up in the morning, when I check the daily news, when I touch the Star of David around my neck, which I now never remove. It lies on a long chain, dangling in front of my heart, letting me know that she is always there.

“Welcome home.”

It’s true, it is a homecoming for me and for every Jew. I feel at peace when I am in Israel. Life has purpose in Israel. I have purpose in Israel. I am a Jew, and Israel is my home.

Photo by E[...], licensed under Creative Commons.

Read more posts from Issue #19: Israel.

By Laura Jo Hess

No place but a sidewalk crack, a bridge across water, the oily death of a crooked coast. Here, you sip tea on a balcony made of wood, spit tears from a hotel roof, jut eyes across a dimmed room. Hammocks are slung between bedposts, blankets pile high on the floor, shadows take the shape of a sailboat. If you try hard, you can recall the angles of the woman in the marketplace and the hue of her orange skin. You can locate love in the zee of two bodies clasped together at a bedside or a coffee shop. All you need to know is this smeared window and the existence of plastic tables and telephone poles. Take your feet and place them down—learn the loose alleyways and etch your face on the tavern wall as you turn to leave.

What life there is, is remembered on the balcony of a soon-to-be vacant room. Shirtless boys with tanned skin bend at the hips and knees; girls in shoes walk like birds to the local bar, kiss gloss to the side of glass and make you remember their scents. I, in canvas shoes, just learned how to breathe. I, an animal, forgot you when the air came through. How must the cracks in the desert hide jewels, a scroll of history, bedposts of old lovers. How must soldiers hold metal in clasped hands and recall, broken, the face of their best friends, their brothers, shema over the arch of a bomb. A man wipes the skin beneath his eyes and his teeth shine as he speaks—I can’t hear the words but his lip movements are inevitable. I can’t see his hands but later they place stones on a grave flat and secure. Later, his chest heaves and his gun sags with the weight of his tears.

But how could this be in a place that just began? Let us recall a boy in shirtsleeves and a tie clip, ten years old, studying letters in black ink, shapes that start with lines and end in squares: moments you mustn’t trust until spoken. Climb aboard, his father says, yelp these words from rooftops havens and hammock beds. Place sounds in wood petrified to stone, in the stratified parallels of doorways, the limestone fibers of a place you claim to love. If you want language, he boasts, learn to love a foreigner. If you want history, memorize these words, tattoo them on the inner side of your wrists; remember them once I’m gone. When addressed in Yiddish, respond in Hebrew. When wide-eyed boys throw stones in your direction, throw back in Hebrew. If you want food, shiny shoes, or a slice of bread, use only Hebrew words.

A hundred and fifty years later, a street moans in language: lamps sway and sound emits from the crown of the head, light from the back of the throat. What you know is limited to distance and boiling points, minutes of mediocrity. Amid a circle, find swans dancing limbs across the radii, blonde arms flailing and torsos aghast, static becoming motion momentarily. Let me explain you the drummers with tanned skin and definition, a shofar in hands callused, lips pursed red. But at a beach in the afternoon, a light splits the air in thirds and a white horse prepares for a ceremony, human legs sturdy on either side of its tough and furless hide. I heave my body upon sand, haul breaths from my open center, pause for heat to gather on my chin, my toes. I suppose it took such a contrast of color to make me weep.

At synagogue, a woman with thick stockings and a wig leads my finger along Hebrew words. She picks the lint from my skirt and covers my calves with fabric. You come to my house, she whispers, you eat Shabbat. If Israel is a moment, then put me in a café with a wooden deck and chairs with straight backs, a cue. Give me a real hand on a real thigh, an instant of smoke billowing from the lungs. If Israel is a day, then sit me on a bench at Jaffa with jagged coastlines and flags folded over in wind. For now, Israel must be larger—sand surrendered in the fiber of a pant leg, a graveyard set at dawn.

Photo by acroll, licensed under Creative Commons.

Laura Jo Hess is a midwesterner living in Brooklyn. She is attending The New School in the fall.

Read more posts from Issue #19: Israel.

By Yocheved Sidof

I left my family and cozy home in the Midwest at a young age and headed out East to attend Yeshiva boarding school. Gone were the Shabbat meals of steaming rice, choresht, and ush (traditional Persian dishes) and in came plates of gefilte fish, potato kugel, and cholent…. It was a lot to get used to. But more than making gastronomic adjustments, I was forced to perfect the art of being a Shabbat guest: the knack of chit-chat, engaging the ’lil ones at the table and finding clever ways, each week, to answer the question – “So tell me about yourself?”…’Not bad for a fourteen-year-old.

As I moved through my adolescence and went to seminary in Israel, my skills flourished. I wasn’t shy about sitting at a table I’d never been at before, especially not in the Holy Land, where it took little more than a heartfelt “Shalom” to feel like you’d known someone forever. I became an expert at securing invites and finding the “best” places to spend Friday night dinners; “best” being defined as tasty food in abundance, a “cool crowd,” and of course, the makings of a good story to tell my friends at school.

Back in New York, living the single life, the definition of the “best” place to spend a Shabbat meal became even more nuanced. More than the right food and the right crowd, it became a space to share thoughts and ideas, create community, and bond. Shabbat wasn’t complete unless I was with others, at a Shabbat table, experiencing something enchanting together.

I got married in my mid-twenties. I was no longer a nomad, seeking out meaningful Shabbat experiences; I was finally able to have my own Shabbat table, to create my own ambiance. I remember the first Shabbat meal I had guests for; I was giddy with pride. I cooked some Persian food (kuku sabzi) along with the Ashkenazic staples I’d grown accustomed to (always with my own little cumin-turmeric-cilantro spin on them), and invited a bunch of our closest friends.

If I had grown to love being a guest at Shabbat meals, I was head-over-heals in love with the experience of being a host. It was electrifying… The planning, the shopping, the cooking, the last minute calls asking if someone could bring along another guest, or two, or three… I felt honored.

Fast-forward a couple years of steady meals and steady guests. A good friend of ours (and Shabbat regular), Saadya, asked if we could host a meal for a large group of his friends – Jews he met from all walks of life, from all over the world, who now lived in New York. Of course, we obliged.

That Shabbat meal was incredible. About twenty-five beautiful people crammed into our living room space (the most guests we’d ever had!), eating, drinking L’chaims, singing songs, deep in discussion…there were no pretenses, no inhibitions; enjoying Shabbat together with fellow Jews created a camaraderie that was truly uplifting and inspirational.

We knew we had to do it again, and so, the “Big Shabbos” was born. And now, every couple of months, we host another big Shabbat meal. Each meal takes a couple of weeks to plan. We send email invites, create an RSVP list, shop, cook, schlep tables and chairs. It’s a frenzy of activity that crescendos when the first guest walks in the door, and doesn’t die down till hours later. Artists, writers, lawyers, students; Americans, Israelis, Brits, Turks; mothers, daughters, sisters, girlfriends; the whole spectrum of Torah observance…Thank G-d, our Shabbat community has grown, and friends always bring friends.

At times we’re anxious that we’ll be filled beyond capacity. “Maybe we invited too many people?” “What if there’s no room?” “What if there isn’t enough food?”

Call it serendipity if you’d like (I’d call it a message from the Big Guy, loud and clear), but on those weeks when we were nervous that we were overbooked, we’d always “lose” a guest or two (which, despite our anxiety, was always a bummer). My husband and I vowed that we’d put our worries aside; there would always be enough, we could always make more room…Our apprehensions were never worth an empty chair at our Shabbat table. And so, we stopped worrying. (And truly, there always is room for one more…)

As I’m developing identity as Shabbat hostess, I can’t help but remember places I’ve stopped along the way, hosts who influenced me and my home in profound ways: The Mendelsons in the Old City, for example. An elderly couple in their eighties who only spoke Yiddish and Hebrew, yet whose tables were always filled with English-speaking college students. He poured cups and cups of wine for his guests as he spoke animately about G-d, the parsha, and his childhood in Chevron, all in Yiddish – and yet, we understood him. There was no language barrier (and it wasn’t because of the alcohol). And his wife, whose food was always beautifully presented, down to the potato-salad-shaped-like-a-fish with a little olive for it’s eye. Every detail mattered.

And there were the families back in Crown Heights who always welcomed me to their table, even at the last minute, and made me feel like I was a part of their family, like I really made their Shabbat table complete… Of course, something tells me, all their guests felt the same way.

I think back to myself, that fourteen-year-old girl with glasses and a retainer sitting at a table full of strangers, desperate to feel at home. And then I look around my own table these days, full of people who may have been strangers only moments before but who, in the magic of Shabbat, now feel like family. And finally, finally (!), I feel I’m home. So here’s to the guest I once was, the guests I’ve been honored to host, and ones I’ve yet to meet…you’re really something.

If you live in the NY area and would like to come over for a Friday night meal, please contact Yocheved at yochevedsidof@gmail.com.

Read more posts from Issue 18: Friday Night Lights.

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