Friday morning, day four of my trip to Israel, I woke up to my friend’s son practicing guitar and singing This Land Was Made for You and Me, because he’s been taking guitar lessons from a relative in the States. His other practice song was Skip to my Lou, and I’m pretty sure I have the same guitar book somewhere.
It was already drizzling, which just reinforced the plan to stay close to home for the day. Our first plan was to go to a local ceremony naming a path in the city after a fallen soldier, but when we got to the school building where the ceremony was taking place, the crowd had already overflowed out of the auditorium, into the lobby and beyond. Reassured that the family would feel the community’s support, we sent our best wishes through neighbors, and walked back to the car, and on the way back across Modiin, my friend showed me the black fabric covering a new street sign that would tell the young man’s story. A large number of the young people in Modiin had served in the army during this war, either as regular army or in reserves, so these ceremonies were, unfortunately, not uncommon.
One of the first things I’d mentioned to my friend when we started planning this trip, was that I wanted to go to a real Israeli supermarket at some point, so after we dropped her husband back at their apartment, we headed out to the local supermarket. The main shopping for the week had already been done, so we didn’t go to the big supermarket down the road, but this one reminded me of the little supermarket in my own neighborhood on Long Island, which happens to carry a lot of Israeli products. The only big differences were that the majority of brand names were written in Hebrew, even if the typestyle and packaging was the same as in the United States, and, next to the frozen chicken and turkey and ground beef, there was also a quarter of a goat. I don’t usually see goat at my supermarket, but maybe I haven’t been looking carefully enough.
We made sure to pick up more of the fake Krembos, since they still didn’t have the real Strauss brand in stock, and then we got a few other staples: eggs, seltzer, crackers, etc., nothing too big because this shopping trip was mostly for research purposes.
I’d either forgotten how outgoing my friend is, or I’d missed a lot, because I was amazed at how many people she seemed to know everywhere we went, and how easily she made conversation with people here and there and everywhere. She kept telling me that her older daughter is the social butterfly of the family, but clearly, she learned it from somewhere.
After bringing the groceries home, our next event on the schedule was a small outdoor concert, part of a free music festival taking place that weekend in Modiin. The concert was billed as “Kabbalat Shabbat,” which is part of the traditional Friday night services, and it has become popular in Israel to bring religious and secular Jews together early on Friday afternoons, to sing together and welcome in Shabbat, before Shabbat officially begins. Doing it early in the day means that you can play instruments, which aren’t allowed in orthodox synagogues on Shabbat. Because of the rain, the concert was relocated to a school gymnasium, and we found seats near the front just as the show was starting. The small band was made up of four young men: a drummer, a guitarist, one guy on multiple woodwinds, and the bandleader, playing a Persian stringed instrument called a Kenchen that looked like a backwards sauté pan, with strings attached.
They played a few traditional Kabbalat Shabbat songs from the Friday night service first, songs that you would hear at almost any synagogue around the world, and then they branched out into Israeli songs with religious themes (songs from Chanan Ben Ari, and Akiva, and Meir Ariel), most of which I knew well and could sing along with. It felt surreal to be sitting in a gym in Israel, singing along with an Israeli crowd, and just like that moment in the Carmel Market when everyone sang and danced together, I felt the magic here too. The fact that the whole concert was in Hebrew, including the patter between the songs, might have been alienating a few years ago, but now, with all of the Hebrew classes and obsessive listening to Israeli music, it barely registered that I was in another country.
At the end of the concert, which came way too fast, my friend jumped up to thank the musicians and see if they knew some of the same people as her older son, a drummer and a sound engineer in training, but I hung back, as usual. I’ve always been in awe of musicians, especially since my attempts to learn piano and guitar (and ukulele and recorder) have not been very successful, so the idea of talking directly to these magical people was more than I could manage. I mean, I could travel across the world, and speak a foreign language, but making actual conversation was just pushing it.
When we returned to the apartment, the cleaner was already there helping to get the house ready for Shabbat, and chatting to any and everyone in rapid-fire Hebrew, so I escaped to my room to hide, and/or to get myself ready for Shabbat. I tried to remember everything I’d learned from sleepovers way back when about how to manage in an orthodox house on Shabbat, about which lights to leave on (since you aren’t supposed to turn lights on or off during the holiday), and what to wear, and what to say, but I was sure I’d forgotten some of the rules along the way, and I was anxious and self-conscious and, basically, hiding out seemed like a reasonable choice.
We’d planned to go to Friday night services at the synagogue around the corner, but what with getting the house and ourselves ready, my friend and I missed the Kabbalat Shabbat section of the service, which, given the concert we’d been to that afternoon, worked out just fine.
It had been a long time since I’d been to a synagogue with a mechitza (a divider between the men’s section and the women’s section), and at their shul there were even separate doors to enter the men’s section and women’s sections, and I’m pretty sure I would have walked in the wrong one if I’d been on my own. A lot of the children in the congregation, boys and girls, were sitting with their fathers in the men’s section, but even so, it was hard to find any free seats in the women’s section. At my synagogue, we struggle to get a good crowd on a Friday night, unless there’s a special event going on, but here, on a regular Friday night, the whole town seemed to have shown up to pray, or at least to see and be seen.
The rabbi gave a short talk, in Hebrew, and I was able to understand about 80% of what he said. My friend’s synagogue is filled with olim (immigrants) from English speaking countries, but the rabbi is Israeli, so even if most of the chatting among the congregants is in English, they’re all sufficiently fluent in Hebrew to understand and appreciate what the rabbi was saying. I also noticed that whereas at my synagogue everyone follows the cantor carefully, here they had lay people leading services, and since everyone knew the prayers so well they didn’t bother to sing in unison.
When the service was over, we threaded our way through the sudden crowd, passing a few men with guns on our way out of the synagogue, regular congregants acting as de-facto security guards. It was hard to hear anyone in particular over the hum of neighbors wishing each other a Good Shabbos, but I followed my friend religiously, and was relieved when we found our way out of the crowd for the short walk home in the cool night air.
We had the Israeli equivalent of a traditional Shabbat dinner, with chicken matzo ball soup and challah and grape juice (like we do in the States) and salatim (salads and spreads), very much not like we do it in the States. My friend’s husband, who made most of the salatim, insisted that I try the olive tapenade (I’m not an olive person), and the herring (bad memories of herring in cream sauce from my childhood), but my favorites were the chummus, and the roasted onion dip, and the eggplant. My Mom is allergic to eggplant, so I was reveling in the chance to try every different version of eggplant as a main part of the meal.
We stayed up late chatting, and watching my friend’s youngest daughter practice for her upcoming dance performance, and then run through every TikTok dance she could remember offhand, before going out to see her friends at the local park. There’s a degree of comfort and safety for kids in Israel that just doesn’t exist in New York. I’m sure things are different in different towns, and maybe Modiin is unique, but the idea that my mom would have been comfortable letting me walk over to the park to meet friends at ten o’clock at night, confident that I would be safe, just didn’t compute.
I woke up relatively early the next morning, now that my jet lag was wearing off, but I was relieved that my friend and her daughter didn’t want to go to synagogue for morning services. We hung out in the living room, relaxing, until her husband came back from shul to help set the table for the weekly kiddish. They have a group of friends in their neighborhood who make kiddish together every Saturday after services, with snacks and grape juice and wine, and kibbitzing. The men gathered around the table (aka the food) to discuss American politics, even though only half of them are originally from America, and the women gathered on the couches to discuss just about anything but politics, thank you very much. I felt self-conscious in the one skirt I’d brought with me, but it helped that everyone showed up in various states of rain-soaked-ness, since it had started to pour outside. A bunch of the members of the kiddish group were also invited to (or hosting) the lunch we were going to, so the conversation continued through the short walk over to their neighbor’s house, and then at a long table set up down the center of the dining room, kids at one end and adults at the other. The discussion of politics morphed into a review of popular movies and TV and books, all in English, as we ate all of the delicious food spread out across the table (though the kids hogged the pickles, which was not very nice of them. Harrumph).
One of the topics of discussion was the relatively recent phenomenon among young modern orthodox Jews to get piercings and tattoos. We’d actually had discussions at my own synagogue about the old rumor that you couldn’t get buried in a Jewish cemetery if you had a tattoo or piercing, which turned out to be just a rumor, and we’d even read some of the rabbinic responsa (mostly written by modern orthodox rabbis) that said that as long as you’re not tattooing an image of a foreign god on your arm, you’re ok. I found out that, in Israel, often as a post army celebration, groups of soldiers will go out and get matching tattoos, or a helix, a cuff on the upper part of the ear. One of the men at the table said that his two sons, one finishing regular army service and the other finishing reserve duty, coincidentally both went and got a helix, on the same day, without having told each other ahead of time. My idea of what it meant to be orthodox was changing moment by moment, as I met each new person and realized that the existence of a Jewish State really did make room for a wider variety of religious expression.
I hit my socializing limit somewhere along the way, long before everyone else did (they’re better trained for this sort of thing), but everyone was friendly and welcoming and, given that orthodox Jews don’t watch TV or use the computer or phone on Shabbat, spending the time chatting with friends turned out to be a great way to fill the hours. In Israel, it was as if Shabbat was an essential part of their week, rather than an extra obligation, the way it tends to feel among liberal Jews in the U.S. The sense I got in Modiin, but also from things I’ve heard from secular Israelis, is that Shabbat in Israel is a whole vibe. Transportation is limited throughout the country from Friday night to Saturday night (though I think public transportation is still available in Haifa), but it’s more than just not having anywhere else to go: there’s a basic culture of taking the time to spend with friends and family on Shabbat that’s just taken for granted. Kids come home from the army or national service or college, or just from wherever they’re working and living during the week, to spend time with their parents and visit their friends. It’s something they can rely on and look forward to each week, no matter what else is going on in the world.
Shabbat was over early, given the early sunset this time of year, so we’d made plans to see another friend of ours from high school who lived about thirty minutes away in a more religious area. I was anxious to see her, and self-conscious, worried she’d be annoyed at me for wearing my jeans, or that we’d have nothing in common anymore, but there was no reason for concern, because she was as sweet and bubbly and welcoming as she’d been in high school, and the three of us spent a really nice time going through our old yearbook, reminiscing about all of the people we could remember, and even the ones we couldn’t remember very well at all.
And then, even though it was past my friend’s regular bed time, she decided that we would go to one more free concert. There was a cover band doing classic Israeli rock songs from the 70s and 80s at a small auditorium, and we found seats right up front by the speakers. Every Israeli member of the audience (aka not me) knew all of the songs by heart, and danced and sang along; and even though I only knew one of the songs (Yoya), the band was so good, and the energy was so infectious, that I found myself singing and dancing with everyone else, from the little children to the great grandparents. The songs seemed to capture a time in all of their lives that was simpler, and more hopeful, and the chance to travel back there with them felt like a gift.
It was still raining a little bit by the time we left the concert, but we were buzzing with the joy of the whole thing and barely noticed the outside world. My friend often told me over the years that she felt like there was a big gulf between the people who grew up in Israel and those, like her, who had arrived as adults, because of the musical memories she’d missed out on; but this concert, and the whole trip so far, was making me think that a lot of that gap had begun to fill in over time.
I was exhausted from the long day of socializing, and the singing and the dancing, but also excited for the next day and the next adventure, knowing already that whatever it was would be worth the effort.
Some music to try:
Yoya – https://youtu.be/B5xUiayK-Pc?si=8povEpYqVldozV2Q
Chanan Ben Ari – https://youtu.be/z27MZP_4P_U?si=4slADx6ZjXeUkRgA
Akiva – https://youtu.be/u3n2SLWQsXk?si=UPKkErUg5v3DwaJs
Meir Ariel – https://youtu.be/jnbJk3D5X5Q?si=HcQHAlEWbuV9slwT
If you haven’t had a chance yet, please check out my novel, Yeshiva Girl, on Amazon. And if you feel called to write a review of the book, on Amazon, or anywhere else, I’d be honored.
Yeshiva Girl is about a Jewish teenager on Long Island, named Isabel, though her father calls her Jezebel. Her father has been accused of inappropriate sexual behavior with one of his students, which he denies, but Izzy implicitly believes it’s true. As a result of his problems, her father sends her to a co-ed Orthodox yeshiva for tenth grade, out of the blue, and Izzy and her mother can’t figure out how to prevent it. At Yeshiva, though, Izzy finds that religious people are much more complicated than she had expected. Some, like her father, may use religion as a place to hide, but others search for and find comfort, and community, and even enlightenment. The question is, what will Izzy find?
rachelmankowitz 