"dark and evil and greedy" - and with grace
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[Quotation from a passage by Amir Gutfreund quoted on the October 2009 menu at Chakra, which had been highly recommended here and here. More about the restaurant in a separate post. The Gutfreund quote reads in part: "All this comes to me every October, dark and evil and greedy. Every October - a river of inspiration, filled and milky, awaken songs to be written. October ends, river stops."]
My day has been a melange of cynicism and grace: cynicism from people sounding harsh at each other in the shuq and in traffic; from my damned senators essentially voting in favor of depriving rape victims who happen to be corporate employees from proper recourse; and from an unsettling encounter on Jaffa Street where maybe the guy was harmless, but my gut says I was lucky to get away: I heard him asking another woman on the sidewalk if she knew English, so at first I'd assumed he was another tourist maybe in need of assistance. When we start talking, he claims he needs someone to turn on a light for him, it being shabbat (observant Jews do not operate anything electrical on Saturday before sundown). (Warning bell the first: guy's not wearing any headcovering.) For some reason, being an idiot, I assume he means a ground-floor storefront or office or something; turns out to be three flights up an apartment building. I'm ready to bolt if he closes the door, but it stays open as he instructs me to rinse out his hot water kettle, fill it, and turn it on. (He does also ask me to flip the switch on one of the entrance lights.) He tries repeatedly to find out where I'm staying, how long I'll be in Jerusalem, urges me to stay for coffee, asks if we can meet later. I say no, politely but firmly, and get the hell out of there.
On the one hand, it's funny: not in a million years would I have imagined a guy trying to pick me up by asking me to be his shabbes goy. On the other hand, not so much: Jerusalem's gadzillion winding corridors have me constantly on edge as it is, and the isolated Saturday streets as well, because yeah, it's mostly safe, but as someone who was once attacked in a library, nowhere by myself is truly safe, you know?
But then there is grace: a very small Arab boy (maybe six years old) impulsively wishing me "Shabbat Shalom," right in the middle of the Muslim Quarter; a portly Orthodox man gently murmuring the same to me as we passed each other on King George Street. The sweet man cleaning the hotel rooms asking me if it was still "rainink" ("geshem - see, now you know another word in Hebrew!") (for the record, it's not, but the shawl I wore in Tel Aviv yesterday is still soggy). The surfer-dude bartender at Chakra wearing a jack-o-lantern shirt, and the security guy also rumbling out "Shabbat Shalom" to every customer. Bernie, the gentleman gathering siddurs and refolding shawls at Or Hachaim synagogue after the final prayer (led by him), encouraging me to come further inside.
The synagogue is one I would visit again: the rabbi is Orthodox, and men and women do sit separately, but at least for the parsha shiur, the bench for two of the women was in the same room as that of the men. (There was also a separate adjoining room labelled "women's section" - another woman was following the shiur through the window; I listened to some of it through the doorway and sat on a bench behind me for the rest.) There was a bin stuffed with scarves for women to borrow, but at least two of the women wore neither scarf nor hat nor lace clip (but I am assuming well-made wigs for the time being).
I liked sitting in the women's section in part because its walls are covered with old documents, including letters from the 1930s typed in shades of pink as well as black; stamps bearing the name of chief rabbi Kook. The shiur was intriguing - this week's parsha had to do with Abraham and Sarah, leading Rav Weinberg to expound animatedly on travel and nuttiness (his word) and goals (paraphrasing: only a nut doesn't know where he's going, and Abraham was a nut...) and proper care of the body ("The shape of your body is part of the hole you've dug for yourself" - at which point I really, really wanted to dig out my pen and notebook and start taking notes, but managed to behave) and the body's relation to seemingly nonphysical transgressions (the physiological changes in us when we anticipate gossip, for instance). There was one guy dozing against a wall but others actively listening, bright-eyed and eager to ask questions afterwards, and a husband and wife at the shiur were still discussing the topic ten minutes afterwards as they walked up Rehov Or Hachaim.
My day has been a melange of cynicism and grace: cynicism from people sounding harsh at each other in the shuq and in traffic; from my damned senators essentially voting in favor of depriving rape victims who happen to be corporate employees from proper recourse; and from an unsettling encounter on Jaffa Street where maybe the guy was harmless, but my gut says I was lucky to get away: I heard him asking another woman on the sidewalk if she knew English, so at first I'd assumed he was another tourist maybe in need of assistance. When we start talking, he claims he needs someone to turn on a light for him, it being shabbat (observant Jews do not operate anything electrical on Saturday before sundown). (Warning bell the first: guy's not wearing any headcovering.) For some reason, being an idiot, I assume he means a ground-floor storefront or office or something; turns out to be three flights up an apartment building. I'm ready to bolt if he closes the door, but it stays open as he instructs me to rinse out his hot water kettle, fill it, and turn it on. (He does also ask me to flip the switch on one of the entrance lights.) He tries repeatedly to find out where I'm staying, how long I'll be in Jerusalem, urges me to stay for coffee, asks if we can meet later. I say no, politely but firmly, and get the hell out of there.
On the one hand, it's funny: not in a million years would I have imagined a guy trying to pick me up by asking me to be his shabbes goy. On the other hand, not so much: Jerusalem's gadzillion winding corridors have me constantly on edge as it is, and the isolated Saturday streets as well, because yeah, it's mostly safe, but as someone who was once attacked in a library, nowhere by myself is truly safe, you know?
But then there is grace: a very small Arab boy (maybe six years old) impulsively wishing me "Shabbat Shalom," right in the middle of the Muslim Quarter; a portly Orthodox man gently murmuring the same to me as we passed each other on King George Street. The sweet man cleaning the hotel rooms asking me if it was still "rainink" ("geshem - see, now you know another word in Hebrew!") (for the record, it's not, but the shawl I wore in Tel Aviv yesterday is still soggy). The surfer-dude bartender at Chakra wearing a jack-o-lantern shirt, and the security guy also rumbling out "Shabbat Shalom" to every customer. Bernie, the gentleman gathering siddurs and refolding shawls at Or Hachaim synagogue after the final prayer (led by him), encouraging me to come further inside.
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| From Israel 2009 - set 2 |
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| From Israel 2009 - set 2 |
The synagogue is one I would visit again: the rabbi is Orthodox, and men and women do sit separately, but at least for the parsha shiur, the bench for two of the women was in the same room as that of the men. (There was also a separate adjoining room labelled "women's section" - another woman was following the shiur through the window; I listened to some of it through the doorway and sat on a bench behind me for the rest.) There was a bin stuffed with scarves for women to borrow, but at least two of the women wore neither scarf nor hat nor lace clip (but I am assuming well-made wigs for the time being).
I liked sitting in the women's section in part because its walls are covered with old documents, including letters from the 1930s typed in shades of pink as well as black; stamps bearing the name of chief rabbi Kook. The shiur was intriguing - this week's parsha had to do with Abraham and Sarah, leading Rav Weinberg to expound animatedly on travel and nuttiness (his word) and goals (paraphrasing: only a nut doesn't know where he's going, and Abraham was a nut...) and proper care of the body ("The shape of your body is part of the hole you've dug for yourself" - at which point I really, really wanted to dig out my pen and notebook and start taking notes, but managed to behave) and the body's relation to seemingly nonphysical transgressions (the physiological changes in us when we anticipate gossip, for instance). There was one guy dozing against a wall but others actively listening, bright-eyed and eager to ask questions afterwards, and a husband and wife at the shiur were still discussing the topic ten minutes afterwards as they walked up Rehov Or Hachaim.
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