Shavat vayinafash

Yesterday I told my friend that I wouldn’t be coming to shul on Saturday morning this week, because I was going to a Friday night service at somebody’s house, and I wasn’t expecting to get home until the early hours.

I have since decided that I don’t actually want to go to the Friday night service after all, and instead I am planning to make moqueca, say kiddush, count the Omer, and spend the rest of the evening playing board games with my husband by candlelight.

I’ve always loved the translation of ‘שָׁבַת וַיִּנָּפַשׁ’, ‘shavat vayinafash’ in Exodus 31:17 as ‘God rested, and was re-souled’. It’s something that guides me in my observance of Shabbat: what can I do this Shabbat that will make me feel resouled? Sometimes it’s a happy musical service at my shul, with children crowded around the Torah scroll, my rabbi playing guitar and my friend playing violin. Often it’s a Friday night with friends: a song-filled service in somebody’s living room, filled with kavannah, and a bring-and-share dinner afterwards with lots of talking. And sometimes it’s just a night in at the end of a busy week, with candles and good food and time to relax and talk. I’m looking forward to it so much.

Pesach

I love Pesach. I love it partly because you can’t really observe it by halves – you have to throw yourself into it, cleaning the whole house, planning all of your meals around the holiday restrictions, doing at least one dedicated grocery shop and generally completely altering the way you think about food. For a week you enter this different world of reading all the labels on things and planning packed lunches very carefully before you go out anywhere. It works quite well to keep my mind on the holiday and all its various significances. Last year after Pesach was over, it took over a month for me to stop feeling pleasantly surprised every time I went into a restaurant or supermarket and thought ‘I can eat the food here’ (I also feel much more aware of the complications of having a serious food allergy, and very blessed to only have to deal with this kind of thing for a week every year).

I love it as an opportunity to take a look at my life, to think about my own personal Mitzrayim and Wilderness and Promised Land. At the seder when we say ‘next year in Jerusalem’ I always think about where I’m hoping to be this time next year – what my own personal Jerusalem is, and how I’m going to manage to get there. Thinking about the Israelites and their difficult road to freedom always inspires me to make changes in my life – in fact, I was at a second-night seder with a group of friends on the night I realised I belonged with the Jewish people, and the very next day I phoned the rabbi to talk about converting. I love it because everybody’s seder is different, and at every seder I learn something new (although admittedly my in-laws’ seder could benefit from a healthy dose of Pesach enthusiasm. I try to supply it every year, but so far have always been defeated by the family tradition of Responsive Reading in a Bored Drone. Still, I live in hope!).

I have already made my inventive meal plans for the coming week (there is a lot of quinoa involved). On the agenda for tomorrow: cleaning, tidying, grocery shopping, the traditional post-Pesach-cleaning viewing of Prince of Egypt, and then heading over to my in-laws’ house in the evening. Chag sameach, all!

Spring festivals

On Purim morning my father sent me a text, asking me if I’d enjoyed the festival the previous evening. I was touched that he remembered, but I had to disappoint him – for the past couple of years my Purim celebrations have consisted of a quiet evening making hamantaschen and reading my graphic novel version of Megillat Esther. What can I say – like secular Hallowe’en, Purim is not that much fun if you don’t have (or know) any small children and you don’t enjoy getting drunk. He wrote back: ‘Sorry it wasn’t up to much for you, but then it seems there are always more festivals to look forward to in the Jewish calendar!’ – which is true, and one of the things I love most about it.

In early February I celebrated Tu b’Shevat, the New Year for Trees, at a friend’s house in North London. In Israel the almond blossoms come out around Tu b’Shevat – here in our corner of the diaspora it was one of the coldest weeks of the whole winter, but we sat in her kitchen drinking apricot cocktails and singing Tu b’Shevat songs, thinking about the approach of spring. At the time it felt like spring was still quite a long way away, but now suddenly here we are on the other side of Purim, with the weather so bright and beautiful, and matzah on sale in our local supermarket. I can’t stop thinking about Pesach.

This year I’m lucky – the Bologna Book Fair has come and gone, and I’m free to concentrate on the festival without having to worry about work (next year the first night of Pesach will fall on the first day of the fair, but I’m trying not to think about that just now!). I’m looking forward to spring-cleaning the house this weekend – we’ll open all the windows and sweep all the dust and chametz out of our sunny yellow kitchen. We’ll seal up all our dried pasta and cereal in a cupboard in the spare room, and I’ll feel lighter, as if I’ve cast away something that was weighing me down. Doing all that cleaning seems to make it easier to cast away the ‘spiritual chametz’ I’ve been carrying with me all year – all the grudges and worries and small obsessions I could really do without (though with spiritual chametz, as with the physical kind, the crumbs creep back a lot more quickly than I’d like). And then a mimouna with my friends at the end of the week, and the counting of the Omer, and then Shavuot. Always something to look forward to.

I have been very neglectful of this blog recently. The thing is, three exciting translation-related things have all started happening at the same time, so I haven’t really had much spare time for anything except translation. This is very rare (last time a translation-related thing happened to me was last July. I suppose they’re a bit like buses…), so I’m trying to make the most of it. I want to write about some minor festivals (Tu b’Shevat and Purim) and some other things, so hopefully normal service will be resumed shortly.

Meanwhile, here is a glorious midrash from the Beauty from Chaos blog, on the crossing of the Reed Sea: http://beautyfromchaos.wordpress.com/2012/02/24/as-good-as-there/.

Stranger in a strange land

Last week I went to a fantastic Yiddish film screening at my synagogue. The film in question was called Yidl mitn Fidl (‘Yidl with his Fiddle’), and was made in Poland in 1936, during the brief flowering of Yiddish cinema before the Holocaust. It’s a musical comedy about a father and daughter who are evicted from their home and decide to earn money as travelling musicians – though the father worries about ‘misfortune’ befalling his daughter on the road, so she disguises herself as a boy called Yidl. It’s a deeply silly and genuinely funny film with happy endings for all involved, and for me it was a window onto a time and place I know very little about.

For my husband, it was a world his family left behind relatively recently – he comes from a long line of Polish and Lithuanian rabbis (one studied under a pupil of the Vilna Gaon) and while his various great-grandparents spent their lives in a number of different countries, culturally and ethnically he’s Ashkenazi through and through. I, on the other hand, am not and never will be. I am Abraham and Sarah’s daughter and I feel Jewish down to my bones, but I also feel very aware that several millennia of diaspora culture lies between my Jewish ‘parents’ and me, and that where others have their own traditions that grew up over the years, their history and their special holiday dishes and vague awareness of another language their grandparents spoke as children, I just have a big gap. I could try to embrace my husband’s Ashkenazi heritage and claim it as my own, but it always feels false to me. I can’t make latkes, I don’t pronounce Hebrew in the Ashkenazi way, and saying things in Yiddish makes me feel like a fraud – on holidays I can’t help but answer my in-laws’ hearty Yiddish greeting ‘gut yontif!’ with my stilted Hebrew ‘chag sameach’, their ‘gut Shabbes’ with my ‘Shabbat shalom’.

Sometimes it’s a blessing. Keeping kosher for Passover is much easier if you don’t follow the Ashkenazi custom of refraining from eating kitniyot, and it’s nice not to feel any kind of obligation to do that – I don’t even have to debate the rights and wrongs of it with myself, it’s just Not My Custom and that’s that. And my husband says I’m lucky because I’ll never feel generations of dead rabbis frowning at me whenever I do something they might have disapproved of – something I was very surprised to hear from him, a secular Jew and an intellectual atheist who has never shown the slightest discomfort about eating bacon or black pudding, avoiding shul on the High Holy Days and, er, marrying a non-Jewish girl. I suppose that just shows how deep these things can run.

I wonder if it would be less difficult to claim a Jewish diaspora heritage for myself if I felt a connection to any of the cultures where Jews have historically made their homes. I do feel slightly closer to Sephardi and Mizrahi Judaism than I do to Ashkenazi (because my father is at home with Muslim cultures and I was born in an Arabic country, I guess), but not that much closer. I do have a grandmother from Switzerland, which is a plausible place for Jews to come from, but she left her home country when she was younger than I am, found work at the Swiss Embassy in Manila and basically never went back home again, so I don’t feel much of a bond there either. My family’s recent history on both sides is all tied up with East and South-East Asia, and that’s where I like to look for Jewish culture. I’m interested in reading about the Shanghai Ghetto and the synagogue built in Nagasaki in the mid-1800s. I like to think about what it must have been like to live as a Jew somewhere where the majority culture wasn’t Abrahamic, trying to explain kashrut to people who had never heard of Leviticus (I have actually tried this on several occasions and it is quite difficult. I don’t keep kosher when I’m in Japan).

We used to have a kiddush cup that started life as a port glass in the China Fleet Club in Hong Kong. My father walked out of the club with it in his hand by accident, a tipsy young naval officer on a night out. He wasn’t sure what to do with it so he stashed it in his trunk, certain that it would get broken on the long voyage home. Somehow it survived, and it travelled with our family for thirty years until I found it at the back of a cupboard and commandeered it for our Shabbat table. We used it every Friday night for about a year, and when we moved house I carried it to our new home in my hand, for fear that it might get damaged if I put it with the other glassware.

The Shabbat after our move it got caught on a sleeve, fell and smashed on our kitchen floor. I was heartbroken (honestly, tears are coming to my eyes now. Silly, isn’t it? It was only a glass), and I think the reason why I took it so hard was because to me that glass represented my Jewish heritage. My husband has a silver spice box his great-grandfather used, and an antique chanukiah from Poland decorated with roaring lions. I had that port glass – a simple thing which was never intended for a Shabbat table, which travelled long miles under surprising circumstances before it somehow ended up with me. A thing made holy by its use, though it was never meant for holiness. The only Jewish ritual item that will ever be handed down to me from my blood relatives.

To replace it, we’ve amassed a small collection of cups and glasses we use for kiddush – my only rule is that we never acquire a cup that was made intentionally for Jewish ritual use. Instead we have shot glasses decorated with bees (which we use around Rosh Hashanah, for a sweet new year) and a variety of liqueur glasses in different colours and shapes. We even have a port glass from our college at Cambridge – my husband walked out of a formal meal with it in his hand, though I don’t think it was entirely by accident. I hope that at least one of these glasses will travel with us when we leave this country, and when we come back again.

My mother never taught me to make chicken soup or latkes, but she did teach me how to make great hummus – she learned the recipe from a friend in Saudi Arabia. She showed me how to stock my kitchen cupboards when everything in the supermarket is written in a foreign script and you can’t really tell what anything is. I am the very first Jew in my family line, but I understand what it means to be a foreigner, and in the end I suppose there’s nothing more Jewish than that.

I am translating.

I was planning to write another post this evening, but unfortunately last night I dreamed in Japanese for the first time in a couple of months. Whenever this happens, I end up spending the following work day indulging in melancholy and quietly wishing I was back in Japan, and the evening doing some translating, if at all possible. This evening I am translating picture books, which are my favourite things to translate (partly because they don’t take very long, and partly because they are very beautiful).

I am constantly oscillating between my love of Japan and my love of Judaism. Occasionally I go to the Japanese restaurant in Golders Green before going to an event at my synagogue, and that makes me oscillate very fast and I get confused.

In Jerusalem

I’ve realised recently that there are actually quite a number of things I’ve been meaning to write about for a while, so now that I have this blog I’m going to put them all here, in no particular order. Today I am going to write about Jerusalem.

I’m not sure what I can say about Jerusalem that hasn’t already been said by somebody at some point in its long history, but I’ll have a go anyway. Because I didn’t grow up in a Jewish environment, I suppose I never really thought about Jerusalem as a place that people actually went to. It was more the place people talked about in my historical novels, where Crusades and pilgrimages happened and where there probably were not any dark satanic mills. And then I met my husband and made some Jewish friends and heard them talk about the Israel tour they had all been on as teenagers, and all their experiences in Jerusalem, and began to think of it as a real city rather than a place in a story. And then I started my conversion and began to think of it in all sorts of other ways as well. And then when I finally stepped in through Jaffa Gate and saw all the monks and priests and shopkeepers and tourists and Haredim and hawkers and people just going about their daily lives in the city, all of those disparate images of Jerusalem suddenly came together and it felt…enormous. Significant. Overwhelming. I don’t know. We spent days just walking around the Old City, and up on the ramparts looking down on it (that’s where I took the photo at the top of this blog page. Sorry it’s a bit blurry).

I went to the Western Wall twice. The first time I just went to see it – I brought my little red siddur and prayed Mincha quietly to myself, and then I sat down and watched for a while. There weren’t very many people there: the women’s side was crowded, but there was plenty of space on the men’s side. The second time, it was the morning of Rosh Chodesh Elul, and I was going to pray with the Women of the Wall.

I got there early – it must have been about 6:30, and the plaza was beautiful in the early morning light (I love that quality of light you get in very hot countries before the day has started to warm up, when everything looks so clear and bright and fresh, and the shadows are so sharp and the breeze smells good). This time the men’s side was more crowded – groups of men swayed and sang and chanted together, some of them dancing, some blowing shofarot for the first day of Elul. I sat and listened for a while – I’m not used to the Orthodox style of prayer (where you basically just pray away at your own pace and everybody starts and finishes at different points), and I was surprised at how beautiful it sounded. Their voices were like waves, rushing in and out and occasionally coming together in a great swell of feeling when they all reached the same bit of text at once, and the wail of the shofar over it all. Our side was silent, of course, though there were many women standing or sitting near the wall, whispering tearfully into their siddurim, or pressed up against the Wall, appearing overcome with emotion. It’s actually only just occurred to me that none of them appeared happy in any way – they were all either on the verge of tears, or solemn and devout-looking. Perhaps it’s hard to express joy silently (though that can’t be the whole story – I know I’ve expressed silent joy before). The silence felt thick and liquid, like oil, and I couldn’t quite believe that in a few minutes a group of women was going to arrive to break it. It seemed like such a brave and impossible thing to do.

They turned up with their assigned policeman (who nodded at us in amused tolerance, like a sympathetic policeman of the 1900s keeping an eye on suffragettes: ‘all right, ladies? How are we all this morning?’), and six soldiers stationed themselves discreetly on the men’s side of the mechitzah to prevent any trouble. The silence on our side of the mechitzah shattered as the service began, and their voices climbed high as they sang the Hallel psalms. It was beautiful. I was moved. The men turned up the volume on their side to drown us out, and a few women came to shout at us, tell us how we were disturbing others’ prayer and we should be ashamed of ourselves and all the rest of it, but nobody threw anything at us, and the anger couldn’t spoil the simple, amazing experience of standing there in joyful prayer in the place where Jews prayed two thousand years ago, in a different world, before a long exile. I didn’t actually intend to attach such significance to the Wall – it’s just a wall, right? The Jews who built it would barely recognise us as Jews, anyway – but I found that the significance attached itself anyway, and I could do nothing to stop it. I lost myself in singing the words עָזִּי וְזִמְרָת יָהּ וַיְהִי לִי לִישׁוּעָה, ozi v’zimrat Yah, vay’hi li lishuah, ‘God is my strength and song, and will be my salvation’ and joy welled over in me.

Women are still not allowed to read from the Torah at the Wall, or to blow the shofar, so halfway through the service we headed away from the plaza to Robinson’s Arch, an archaeological site a little way away. We sang as we walked, and as we passed, Charedi men closed their eyes and stuck their fingers in their ears so they wouldn’t hear our voices. I am genuinely saddened that our form of prayer disrupts the prayer of others (though if those others recognised women as actual people with equal rights to men we wouldn’t have this problem in the first place), but…they presumably come to pray at the Kotel regularly? Surely they know the Women of the Wall meet every Rosh Chodesh at 7am – if they can’t bear to hear the voices of women is it really that much trouble to stay away for one hour a month? So I have to admit I felt a certain sense of power watching them turn away from us.

We finished our service at Robinson’s Arch. There was a Bat Mitzvah. A woman leyned beautifully, and another blew the shofar for us, and then we dispersed. I headed back to my hostel to meet my husband for breakfast and tell him all about my experience. It’s easy to feel angry about the Charedi monopolisation of the Wall, about the many limitations placed on the people who go to pray there and especially about the silencing of women. I get angry about it often (even though it’s only a wall and I don’t believe in fetishising masonry, etc etc). But when I think of my experience at Rosh Chodesh, my memory is all joy – the proud voices breaking the silence together, the morning light, the birds wheeling overhead, the sound of the shofar. God is my strength and song, and will be my salvation.