Ah, my first full week back in Israel and it was soooo good! I got to hang out with my brother, I got to see my closest friends, I got to go hiking, I got to waste hours lounging on my couch reading, and I got to eat sushi :) Oh, and it started with a holiday and is ending with one. I love holiday season!
So starting with the beginning, Shabbat with Barak was chill and nice and I beat him 3 of 5 times at Yaniv. We went out for sushi Saturday night, and oh, how I had missed the restaurants here! Sunday Barak went back to Yeshiva and I slowly realized that throwing together last minute Yom Kippur plans would not be as easy as I had thought. So I went to Efrat and my adopted family welcomed me with open arms and lots of food. Services on Yom Kippur were beautiful. The chazzan (cantor)
sounded like he was in an opera or a musical. And not in an annoying "I wish he would stop trying to show off his voice and let me pray" kind of way. He sang with such feeling that I truly felt like he was leading us, helping us reach inside ourselves for true repentance and send our prayers up to God. It was an uplifting Yom Kippur that left me looking forward to the coming year.
On Tuesday I had a meeting with the army to discuss my financial and familial situation and got to once again straighten out some small clerical errors like, "no, I did not become an Israeli citizen when I was five" and "no, I am not joining the army for two years". Still dont know what I will be doing though.
Wednesday Barak and I headed to Efrat to go hiking with Eli and Judy (from my adopted fam). We had planned on a short morning hike, starting at 10am. Well, we left at 1:30 for Tekoa, a settlement near Efrat, and got back at around 6pm. Our short hike wandered past some old caves from the time of the Chashmonaim (when the Jews were rebelling against the Romans) and we ended up crawling through caves for about 2 1/2 hours. When we had finished the hike we drove through the four neighborhoods in Tekoa, and I have to admit, I fell in love.
Tekoa is a settlement of religious and non-religious Jews that was started in the 70's. The town is small, isolated, and has one pizza store that is open once a week. They are one of the many settlements on the chopping block for disengagement (making it next to impossible to get a mortgage there) and most of the homes are converted caravans and shacks that make it difficult to tell where their house ends and their sukkah begins.
They sit on a hilltop with one of the most beautiful views I have ever seen.
I am going to live there.
Thursday, we spent the morning helping the Auerbach's build their sukkah and then went to a ceremony for their son Shlomo. He just finished his army training and is now officially a paratrooper! The ceremony was on Ammunition Hill in East Jerusalem and Barak and I ran around in the trenches pretending we were fighting Jordanians while someone important droned on in Hebrew. If you count the caves as battlefields (which they were in a way, all twisting and confusing so as to lose the Roman soldiers), that was two battlefields in two days making me an incredibly cool sister for my war-obsessed baby brother.
Sukkot starts tonight and all of Israel will be partying it up in the huts for a week. I have been watching little huts pop up all over Jerusalem- one of my neighbors has built one to perfectly fit in his parking spot, and more than half the restaurants I walk by now have little shacks perched on the sidewalks. Anyway, lots of good things to look forward to next week :)
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