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.

Week 12

As I reentered the dance hall, I watched about sixty dancers from all over the world speaking dozens of different "languages" - some lifting one another, others finding rest and support in one another's weight, yet others using mime to make visible and traverse their inner world.  As dozens of bodies adorned the space in momentary and unrepeatable tapestries of stillness and motion, two women stood in the middle of the wood floor with their arms around each other, solid as an ancient oak tree.  Now, with them as my reference point, all the other dancers suddenly became as inconsequential as autumn leaves, drifting around the rooted stillness of these women's bodies.  One woman leaned in for a kiss, her mop of hair covering both of their faces, and the other kissed her back on the cheek.  This was the opening jam of the international Israeli Contact Improv Festival.

As I relaxed back into my native language at the Contact jam (since it's officially an "international" language), I gained more perspective on a hunch I had that speaking Hebrew (or any language for that matter) is a constant act of midrash (an often imaginative commentary on, and fleshing out of, a "text").  All the words in this blog, and your internal dialogue as you read is always commentary, a risky

Week 11

On Friday night, as I meandered toward the beach to listen to the white feet of the sea paw at the rocks near Jaffa's old city, and savored one of my last days living alone, I passed a band warming up at the end of Rothschild Street.  A few blocks later, my feet left the concrete and breathed into the sand.  A cluster of people sat on a stone wall nearby, smoking hookahs and grilling meat, and I savored the unregulated chaos that sometimes leaks into the seams of this place.  A beach shower behind a cafe splattered the dark sands with water hours after someone had used it to rinse off their sandy feet.  I walked up from my wordless conversation with the sea, and tugged the chain into silence.  In the distance, Jaffa's Old City pulsed above its blinking blue and white footlights, like a stage set for some childhood dream - a dream of stone alleys, clock-towers and bats.

The endlessly searching sea knocked at the shore's rocky threshold, reached its fingers between the rocks, leaned in and whispered through a chink in the invisible walls of my solitude - and its soft roar began to echo into this sprawling concrete and glass city, the pulse of the street, the endless particularities of Mystery.  The water sung to me of softening, of slowing into a point of contact with the Other - of rededicating myself to paths of light and connection in this week of Hannukah (literally,