Yom Kippur

2 Stories for Yom Kippur: Unexpected Bus Magic

/ IlanaB / Leave a comment

I don’t know how it is where you are, but in Israel most buses have several places where seats face each other. I’m not sure if there is a special name for them. Quad-seats? There are usually two quad-seats in the front reserved for the elderly, and in the newer bus designs, there are several more in the back.

This past week I saw two episodes of Unexpected Magic. (To be honest, I wanted to write something optimistic. I mean, sheesh, are we going to have a government in Israel or a third election in a year? But I digress.)

On the Eve of Rosh Hashana

The #15 bus is crammed with people and their suitcases. Everyone needs to catch the last bus to wherever they’re going for the long holiday. After squeezing my way through the crowds, I find some breathing room at the back and a good place to stand. A few stops later, a seat opens up, and I’m all set.

At the next stop, a kid – 17-18 years old – gets on, and he looks rough. Not dirty exactly, but massively torn jeans, pierced nose, hair shaved on the sides of his head in a kind of messy, flat, dishwater blonde mohawk. He asks the older lady if he could sit by the window, but she points to her giant suitcase taking up two seats facing each other, plus her and another guy in the quad-seat. What could she do? He mumbles, “Why did you even put it there?” I can hear he has a slight Russian accent (maybe Ukrainian). I hope this isn’t the start of something unpleasant.

I see this kid take the suitcase – one-handed – from its perch on two seats, everyone shuffles around and the suitcase is now in the aisle. He takes his seat, pulls out the handle of the suitcase, and sticks his arm through it so it won’t roll away. Then he pulls out a pair of Chinese Medicine Balls and starts a calming clockwise rotation.

chinese medicine balls

I know what they are because I have a set too

The lady asks what they are and he answers that they are a tool to help him stop smoking.

“Oh, but you’re so young! It’s good that you’re stopping now.”

“Yeah, I have this great doctor and he recommended them. They help a lot.”

And the conversation continues from there for a good ten minutes until the end of the ride. He was quite respectful and she was genuinely curious.  It was the best way to ride into Rosh Hashana – the New Year.

And yes, he took her giant suitcase off the bus for her.

Morning Commute

The morning commute is filled with people ignoring each other by being deeply interested in their phones. This morning, there is a woman in the quad-seat at the back of the bus on her own. No one would sit next to her. She looks hostile, and at one point, she jumps out of her seat to open the window and use her newspaper to swat the seats in front of her.

At one stop, as the bus gets more crowded, a woman makes a move to sit in the nearly empty quad-seat, gives the woman sitting there one look, and moves to another seat.

Everyone gives the hostile woman and this quad-seat a wide berth. Mentally ill? Drugs? We don’t know and all we are interested in is our phones.

Then a Haredi lady gets on the bus trying to wrangle two kids (they look like twins about 3-4 years old), she has a baby in a carriage that needs to get strapped into the carriage area. And all this has to happen on a moving bus.

The only seats available are in the quad-seat.

She hasn’t seen all that happened before, so she directs her kids to the back-facing seats. And the woman everyone has avoided carefully picks up each kid and puts them into the seats. When the slightly stressed mother carrying her infant comes to join her kids, the woman moves to the window seat, shuts her eyes and leans hard into the window. But the Haredi mother thanks her, blesses her, and tells her what a big help she is. The poor woman, who is probably not well, has a hard time with this, but knows she did the right thing.

What I Learned

If you look, you’ll find beautiful things happening all around you. You just have to pay attention and celebrate the Unexpected Magic that presents itself to you.

Headlines are just click bait. What really matters is the everyday encounters that remind us the world is not all that bad.

And that is a great way to start the Jewish New Year! May we all be inscribed in the Book of Life!

A Thought about Yom Kippur

/ IlanaB / 5 Comments

When I worked at the University of Washington, I asked to take Yom Kippur off.

“Will you be going to synagogue?”

“No.”

“Will you be fasting?”

“I don’t know. I haven’t decided yet.”

“Then why are you taking it off?”

**what?**

I hated that conversation. And I love the fact that I’ve never had to have that conversation in Israel.

I usually go to the Kotel (Western Wall) for Yom Kippur, but I live further away now and it’s probably going to be hot, even in the morning. I don’t know if I want to walk 2 hours round trip to have a few words with God. God is everywhere, right? So I should be able to stay home.

And that is the beauty of living in Israel. No one will question what I choose to do on Yom Kippur and no matter what I do, I don’t feel any less Jewish.

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In the US, there’s a lot of effort that goes into maintaining a connection with Judaism. You have to plan ahead to coordinate holidays; if you want a community, you have to join a synagogue or community center (often paying dues and fees); if you want to be more religious, you have to shop at certain stores, live in certain neighborhoods, reorder your life slightly out of step with the surrounding community. It’s hard.

Here in Israel, I can effortlessly connect to my Jewish heritage. The nation functions on the Jewish calendar, I can walk into any synagogue at any time or never walk into any synagogue ever, I’m in-step with everyone and everything around me. I don’t have to try so hard.

I sound lazy, I’m sure. But it feels to me like my soul is planted in the fertile soil that it needs so that I can grow in other directions.

My dad had a pin that he liked a lot. He probably got it from Chabad. It said: “We never lost it.” I asked him what it meant and he said that we never lost the answers. I was about seven, so it didn’t make a lot of sense to me. Now I can see that even if you never lost a thing, sometimes it doesn’t always fit properly. But once it’s in its rightful place, everything else seems to realign itself.

I never lost my Judaism, I just didn’t have a way to make it fit properly for me in the US. Now that I’m in Israel, I feel that everything is in its rightful place no matter what I do on Yom Kippur.

***

I’m sorry if my posts offended anyone. I’m sorry that some posts got a bit too long. I’m sorry if I misrepresented something or someone my writing. I hope you can forgive me. I will try to do better next year.

Wishing everyone a Gmar Chatima Tova!
May you be written and sealed in the Book of Life!
May you have a meaningful fast (if you’re fasting)!

***

Traditional Yom Kippur posts: 2015 | 2016 | 2017

How to Travel Well

/ IlanaB / 5 Comments

Having just returned from Paris, I had some thoughts on traveling. I have always believed that traveling makes us global citizens and shrinks the world.  Here are five tips to travel well.

Set a couple of priorities. The rest is gravy.

For this visit to Paris, my second, I decided that my top two destinations were going to be St. Chappelle and the Rodin Museum.  Everything else that I saw and did was extra.  I made sure to schedule my days around these two things and let go of whatever else I didn’t manage.  The new kiosk appointment system for climbing the towers of Notre Dame didn’t work with my schedule, and as much as I may have wanted to visit those lovely gargoyles keeping the Hunchback company, I let it go.

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St. Chappelle in the morning.

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The Thinker at the Rodin Museum.

Have an open mind and be curious.

I saw many people who seemed to view Paris and all its sights as part of a tourist checklist.  Eiffel Tower. Check. Notre Dame. Check. Louvre, esp. Mona Lisa. Check. And on and on (there’s a lot to see in Paris!)  Moreover, they wanted to get through their list with all the comforts of home.

Instead, appreciate the shoe box-sized, creaky elevator in your quaint hotel.  Pay attention to your surroundings and find out what the cultural differences are between your home country and the country you are visiting.  Then accept them as part of your travel experience.  Embrace them if you like them.

Get some historical background of the place you are visiting.  Do something simple like take a walking tour in the center of the city and listen to your guide.  They function as bridges between you the visitor and the city they love.  Ask questions.  Nothing will endear you more to your hosts than asking about the city and its history.  If you like something, gush about it.

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I know you thought that the Moulin Rouge was just a dance show or a musical film, but actually in French it means “red windmill.”

Buy blister patches, if needed.

On my first day in Paris, I got a monster blister.  It could have ruined my whole trip unless I liked the idea of walking for hours with a limp and in pain.  In Europe, I’ve found these amazing things that specifically treat that annoying blister on the back of your heel.  Usually the patch can stay on for 2 to 3 days and your heel is like new.  They are kind-of expensive, but totally worth it if you have a painful blister.

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I have French ones and Danish ones.

Roll with it.

Sometimes things don’t work out.  It rains on your only day in the Highlands.  The statue you came to see in the museum is not on display.  The tour you show up for is only in Spanish.  These things actually happened to me.  On the Highlands tour, I met someone from China who I still keep in touch with.  I saw different versions of the missing statue and I was able to appreciate the lesser known works more because they were no longer in the shadow of the more famous one.  I walked in a lesser-known neighborhood and found an excellent Korean restaurant.

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Bulgogi (beef), side dishes, and Korean beer.  YUM!!

Sometimes your plan doesn’t work out, but if you roll with it, sometimes an even better plan appears.

Stay in the moment.

I read an article recently that suggested that if you take too many pictures and videos, you lose the experience in the present by trying to document it for the future (or for social media).

On one walking tour, we saw racing lights on the Eiffel Tower.  It happens every hour in the evenings and it’s really worth seeing!  I took a couple of pictures and a few seconds of film.  And then I put my camera away so that I could just enjoy it.  I noticed out of the corner of my eye a man spending the entire light show trying to get just the right shot.  Will he remember looking at the lovely lights of Paris with his wife or will he remember fussing with his camera and his wife’s framing suggestions?

15 seconds of racing lights.  Go see them for yourself!

A concluding thought for Yom Kippur

This is my late dad’s (z”l) favorite story about Yom Kippur.  The original is much longer, but this shortened version gives you the main idea.

Heavy.  The Yom Kippur prayers were heavy and try as he might, the rabbi simply could not lift them up to Heaven.  A young man came into the synagogue.  He only recently became aware of his Jewish heritage and knew only how to recite the aleph bet.  He didn’t know what day it was or what was going on, but with pure and focused intention he recited the only thing he knew.  Aleph. Bet. Gimel. Dalet. …

The rabbi noticed that the prayers were suddenly lighter.  They floated like feathers on the wind straight up to Heaven.  And he knew that is was because of the young man who prayed with all his heart in the only way he could.

As we travel the world and live as global citizens, we don’t have to be multilingual or the most knowledgeable, but if we approach the world with pure intention and genuine love, perhaps we can lift up everyone around us.

Gmar Hatima Tova! May you be inscribed

and sealed in the Book of Life! 

And for those of you who fast, may it be meaningful!

Yom Kippur – A Crash Course

/ IlanaB / 1 Comment

What is the greeting for Yom Kippur?

The traditional greeting for Yom Kippur, which can be used between Rosh HaShana and Yom Kippur, is Gmar chatima tova.  The words translate to finish, seal, and good.  Chatima is also used in modern Hebrew for a signature.  What people understand when they hear this phrase is “may you be sealed in the Book of Life.”

Yom Kippur sounds pretty serious.  Why is that?

Yom Kippur is the tenth day of the month of Tishrei.  Rosh Hashana, the New Year, is on the first and second of the month.  Between these two holidays Jews are supposed to take a spiritual accounting, a cheshbon nefesh, of their actions in the past year.  During the ten days, you have an opportunity to make things right between yourself and other people.  On Yom Kippur, your actions for the past year are weighed and you have to get square with God.  At the end of the day, your name will be inscribed either in the Book of Life or the Book of Death.

I’ve heard that Kol Nidre is sung to a beautiful and haunting melody.  What does it mean?

Kol nidre means “all promises.”  This haunting, spiritual, moving melody is the tune at the start of the Yom Kippur service that basically uses legal language to nullify all promises made before God.

A cultural aside: Orthodox Jews in Israel often commit to something and follow it up with the phrase bli neder.  This absolves them of the promise that would be among the vows that are cancelled in the Kol Nidre service.

Kol Nidre holds a very interesting place in US movie history.  Al Jolson’s The Jazz Singer was one of the first “talkies.”  In the opening scene we are shown a synagogue with everyone preparing for Yom Kippur.  The cantor is saddened that his son did not come to sing Kol Nidre with him and then we hear the voice of Cantor Yossele Rosenblatt singing Kol Nidre.

Here’s a clip of one of the final scenes where Al Jolson himself sings Kol Nidre.

What is Israel like on Yom Kippur?

Quiet.  Even if people don’t do anything for Yom Kippur themselves, they respect the solemnity of the day and don’t drive.  Everything is closed in the Jewish areas.  (I don’t personally know if stores and restaurants are open in the Arab neighborhoods, but I have seen a few cars driving around on Yom Kippur and plenty of tourists in the Old City.)

I have friends that take pictures of themselves sitting in the middle of normally busy highways that on Yom Kippur are totally empty.  Children in Jerusalem ride their bikes in the middle of the street.

Air quality in Israel is measurably improved on Yom Kippur due to the complete shutdown of transportation. Even Israeli air space is closed.

I can’t statistically prove it but it seems to me that no matter how cold it may have been in the days before Yom Kippur, it is always hot on Yom Kippur.  It’s a 25-hour full fast – no eating and no drinking – and it is so much harder to fast when it’s hot.  By 4pm, everyone is listless and even in the synagogues they are counting the minutes until the fast is broken.  It is in these last hours when you feel that your soul is really on trial.

***

Let me take this opportunity to apologize for any wrongs I may have committed, or wrong information I may have provided.  I apologize for any offense my blog posts may have caused.  I also want to apologize for writing long posts and not always editing properly.

Gmar Chatima Tova!

At the Kotel on Yom Kippur

/ IlanaB / 1 Comment

It’s my tradition to go to the Western Wall (the Kotel) on Yom Kippur in the morning before it gets too hot and too crowded.  I use this special time to be grateful for all the blessings in my life and think about the upcoming year.  I try to limit my asking for requests for other people.

Here’s what I saw and experienced:

  • It’s always hot on Yom Kippur – no matter the weather the day before or after.
  • The streets were gorgeously quiet and empty.
Yom Kippur 8:45am

Yom Kippur 8:45am

Overlooking the valley outside the walls of the Old City 9am

Overlooking the valley outside the walls of the Old City 9am

  • When I arrived at the women’s section, I saw two female soldiers praying, in uniform and with their guns.  Later one of them went up to the wall and said a few prayers, with her gun.
  • At the wall, the woman to my left was praying in a romance language (Italian, Spanish?) quite loudly.  I heard her say “gracias a Dios,” which seemed fine, and then “benedictus Christos.”  Hmm.  Probably not Jewish.
  • The woman to my right was reading a bible in Chinese.  Status unknown.
  • When I sat down, I looked around more carefully.  More than half of the people there were drinking water and didn’t quite fit.
Bird's eye view 10am

Bird’s eye view 10am

  • When I left, there were large tourist groups – with their cameras – entering the Western Wall plaza.
  • I wondered if all these non-Jews thought that God was only answering calls at the Kotel on Yom Kippur; perhaps the connection wasn’t as good at other holy locations.
  • I didn’t see as many people in the Jewish quarter as I expected, but it might have been too early.
Not the Jewish quarter. This is Jaffa Gate at 9am.

Not the Jewish quarter. This is Jaffa Gate at 9am.

  • There was a police presence.  At around 9am, it was calm and relaxed.  By 10am the Border Police were stationed with a much stronger presence.  (It hasn’t been calm, so they were expecting trouble.  In the end, it was a quiet day.)

I completed the fast and even though I didn’t spend the entire day in reflection, I did feel renewed and ready to start a new year.

I promised a post about my trip in Romania, but I had such a great time that I think the trip would be better served in several short entries (coming soon!).

Until then, Shabbat Shalom!  May we all have some peace and quiet, renewal and reflection.  And birthday cake.  We should all have some cake.

Yom Kippur and the Revolution

/ IlanaB / Leave a comment

Upon arriving in Timisoara, Romania, this week, my first visit was to the Museum of the 1989 Revolution. I remember the events of 1989, but somehow I had forgotten that Romania was also one of the countries that overturned its government.  I learned a lot, earned a few points with my hosts, and saw Timisoara in a whole new light.  This was the birthplace of their revolution.

Timisoara

Timisoara

Since Yom Kippur is next week and I wanted to write about that too, I thought about how the two things fit together.

The 1989 revolution started with a small demonstration with something like 20 people who didn’t want their priest to be arrested.  One thing led to another until the Opera House in Timisoara became the headquarters of the revolution and the frenzy of it all swept across Romania.  Change begins with a small action; sometimes it’s hard and painful, but hopefully things will be better afterwards.  There are no guarantees.  You just have to believe in the cause and keep moving forward with your hopes and dreams to guide you toward something better.

Yom Kippur is not so different.  Yom Kippur is the 10th day of reflection at the beginning of the Jewish New Year.  The religious tradition is that for 9 days, you make peace with your fellow human beings.  On the 10th day, you make peace with God.  On Yom Kippur you fast for 25 hours (no drinking either!) and you dedicate yourself fully to prayer, reflection, and confession.   By the end you are an empty vessel ready to start anew.  For the next year, you start small and try to fill up your vessel self with something better.

In my own attempt to make peace with my fellow human beings, let me apologize for any slights or insults.  If I hurt you in any way, I’m sorry. I know that a general blanket apology pales in comparison to a real and personal apology, and I’m sorry for that too.

This year Yom Kippur falls on my birthday.  While I’m not looking forward to fasting on my birthday, perhaps this is an interesting coincidence that serves as a reminder that every year begins anew, with a clean state, full of potential, a chance to refill my newly emptied vessel self with something better.

G’mar Hatima Tova! (May you be written in the Book of Life!)

***

Next week I’ll write about my visit to Timisoara.  I still have 2 days left of my trip.