Week 19

I ate a breaded salmon fillet on a bed of zucchini with my bare hands, breaking it apart piece by piece.  Aviva, Michal and Diana sat in a pitch black restaurant with me for my "goodbye" dinner.  Two of us  ordered the chef's surprise so we wouldn't have any idea what we were eating.  Desert felt like a bunch of tiny ladders covered with whipped cream.  The waitress jangled with bells like a belly dancer so we could hear her, and when she sat us, she lifted and placed our hands on the table, and tapped our glasses with a fork so we could hear where they were.

After an hour or so, my eyes began to grasp at the impenetrable black and started creating multicolored chimneys above the table.  We got shooshed a few times since the folks I was with didn't seem to have "indoor voices" - and though we heard the other people in the restaurant, we couldn't see them, so resumed our former volume soon after.  After three hours, we finally ask our waitress to thrust us past the blackout curtains back into the dazzling light of Na Laga'at, on time to see the chef - the MC of our olfactory, gustatory and tactile experience - departing after a long day of work.

Week 18

At Nava Tehilah dozens of arms swayed toward the ceiling.  We had begun to sing a pasuk related to the week's Torah portion, in which as long as Moses's arms are raised, his army defeats the mythical eternal persecutor of the Jewish people (and if you rub the text with bits of Hasidut, the internal voice of doubt).  As soon as they begin to grow weary and sink, Amalek, the voice of doubt, begins to win: "No, you won't go to Mt. Sinai...nothing important awaits you there, anyway".  It's hard to imagine the pain Moses must have endured: in Israel everything feels more painful, exhilarating and pregnant with meaning than anywhere else I've been, and in this heavy place, doubt grows strong.

I slid my feet around on the floor and let my arms expel energy from my core in gentle waves, while another rabbinical student jumped up and down with all his might.  Eric and Eduardo sat behind the Nava Tehila band, and as I glimpsed up at them, my gaze slid past them and landed on two friends who I hadn't seen in over five years - one of whom I started an intentional community with at Elat Chayyim.  I walked over and squatted behind their chairs to get their attention: "Adam?!" "Oh my God!" "You look older, but it's been a while." "I don't think he has.  Do I look younger?"...

Week 17

As I made my way to the gym, I noticed pedestrians and cafe goers craning their heads every which way, and a few seconds later, a man's screams shuttling down Rothschild Boulevard.  Perhaps I imagined I was joining them as I, too, paused for a minute or so to try to find the source.  The sound hid and revealed itself in the hundreds of surfaces and textures of this urban labyrinth of buildings and trees.  It seemed to have no origin, and to be Tel Aviv spontaneously crying out from her concrete and cement anonymity, asking to be known.  Almost two hours later, as I returned from the gym, I heard a woman's wordless, sourceless screaming.  I wondered if it had been going on for two hours.

*

Last Friday I walked from Zion Square in Jerusalem to Yakar before heading to Aviva Zornberg's house for dinner.  It was raining, and my hemp shoes and cotton jacket were darkening with damp.  As I stepped through the streams of water that coursed through the winding streets, it splashed over the

Week 16

The details of my experience here are beginning to fragment and stutter, like a Skype video conversation, as the bigger goals I have for myself before I leave loom large, and at moments cast a shadow over the three weeks that remain here.  Since I'll only have three days between landing and starting my job and then classes, I'm trying to use this time to reflect on my experience, and begin to soften into the last 1.5 years of school ahead of me.  I'm starting to "zoom" out and lose a sense for the details, the textures, the moments when the sensuous body of time dances in my perception before shuttling forward again.  I'm sure some wiser part of me knows that I can only take any piece of this experience - my last three weeks here, my studies and teaching when I return, my last definite year and a half in Boston - as it unfolds, moving through it, one hour and day at a time. 

On New Year's Eve I handed Rafi a pump to inflate his tires so we could bike to Kehillah Yachad together for Shabbat services.  Some special rabbi doctor guest offered the d'var Torah (in Hebrew), and spoke about the exodus from Egypt and, from what I gathered, the way that short term solutions cause more problems and importance of stating a long-term vision to people, even if people can't hear it at the time. 

Week 15

There's so much I can hear from the merpesset of my building.  Over the past few weeks, someone in the electric guitar shop next door played the same five notes over and over again, with a vibrato here and a staccato there.  Then over the last week, I could begin to feel his fingers reaching out through the shape of the sounds articulated by their contact with each string.  The other day I think I saw him, in his 50s with a ponytail...pretty much what you'd expect: he was playing around again, weaving those five notes into song.  But on Shabbat, his song was replaced by a woman's voice, quivering loudly and full of tears.  In trying to ground myself against the cascade of fury next door, I used my small vocabulary to enter the language of her cries and could only understood enough to know she felt alone.

To have a social life on Shabbat in Tel Aviv, I often need to go out for meals.  Last Saturday, yet another unseasonably warm winter day, I met Rafi at a beach-front cafe on for lunch.  We ate sandwiches, and agreed we couldn't resist the gigantic desert that passed by us on the way to another table, with its pile of whipped cream, scoop of vanilla and warm chocolate cake.  After our meal, we walked on a dock that reached out into the Mediterranean Sea, and gazed at an island we

Week 14

I walked home from the gym and reentered the chaos of shuk Levinski.  The glare of street lamps revealed traces of the day freshly past: sidewalks slick with greasy water, the unpredictable traipsing of late night spice hunters - and to my excitement, mountains of boxes.  I was on a hunt for the perfect container, since over the last few months I've realized how many belongings I won't need in the time remaining here (or have never used) - my bike gear, camelback, sport coat, red boots, dress shoes, menorah and candles, cookbook - and have decided to mail them back to Boston.  When I spotted one that seemed the right size, I carried it down the street...until I found what I truly sought.  It was sitting on the corner, alone, and was stuffed with other crushed boxes, banana peels, bottles of beer and pistachio shells.  This was my box, full of shuk, filled to the brim with my experience.

I'm still aching from a combination of lifting people with my back for hours during the Contact Improvisation Festival last week, and now from carrying the now-full box several hundred meters to the Post Office today to ship it.  As I slid its seventy pounds across my shoulders as if I were dancing with another body, then placed it on my belly and grabbed it by the corners - I whistled breathlessly to the only song of Edward Sharpe & The Magnetic Zeroes I felt worth buying, "Home", on repeat:

Week 13

Last weekend my classmates came to Tel Aviv for a program organized through Hebrew College.  After an enormous dairy dinner on Thursday night that could make anyone lactose intolerant, they all had this immense thirst for the normal.  Since I don't go out, I called a friend.  He took us to a bar that looked suspiciously like a house.  When I went to the bathroom, bath towels hung on hooks, and toothbrushes and toothpaste were crammed in the little shelf above the sink.  In the back room of the bar stood a glass shower stall.

This week was the second week of the International Contact Improv Festival, and I had signed up for two intensive workshops that took place in Tel Aviv.  But I managed to get a cruel cold over the weekend, so skipped the opening jam of the Festival on Monday, which gave me a full day to sit at home and worry that my roommate was pissed off at me: it seems like since I've come I've broken the refrigerator and the water heating switch...and the previous night the shower attachment stopped working when I went to use it.  I decided she was going to kick me out.  I decided she was avoiding me.