My 1 3-Day Chag

The year 5772 has begun.  With it, I have heard the shofar, davened at 4 synagogues plus with Kehilat Nativ, slept too little, and eaten excessive pastries.  I think this is a good start to the year.

In Israel, Rosh Hashana is the only 2-day chag, and with Shabbat right after, it’s essentially a 3-day chag.  Outside Israel, there will be 2 more 3-day chags for the beginning and end of Sukkot.  As much fun as a 3-day chag is, it’s a lot of work and we eat too much food.

So how was Rosh Hashana?  Pretty amazing.  To begin, we davened as Nativ (plus a few guests like our director Yossi’s family), with Yossi leading maariv.  Then we had a dinner of not great food, making me miss home a bit.  Also, for some reason, half of the fish heads we had at the table (a symbol to be a head, not a tail) congregated near me…that was fun.  But after dinner, I stayed up late hanging out with people around Beit Nativ, what I have found to be one of my favorite things to do hear at any time.  (Also noteworthy: this night we established that many of us were Harry Potter characters [I’m Hermione!] and we made plans to watch AVPS.  Never have I disliked the lack of electricity during chag and Shabbat more because we knew we’d have to wait 3 days!)

Thursday morning, I had a fairly long walk to Mayanot (a Conservative synagogue in Talpiot), but with a group of friends, it was not bad at all.  I loved the service at Mayanot- it was very similar to home, but shorter (as all Israeli services are when you don’t bother with things like calling page numbers) and with a few new tunes (many of which I liked, but I do greatly prefer our tunes at home for “Hayom harat olam” and “Areshet sifateinu”).  There were a lot of really cute kids running and crawling around.  Also, the best thing, something I we all decided we should bring back to our shuls at the U.S., was that after Torah service we went outside for a Kiddush, which meant a lot of delicious food and just a nice break to move around and talk for a little before the dvar (sermon).

After services, we (Julia, Mia, and me) went to Marne’s apartment to get food to take to her friend Suzanna’s house.  Well, first we stuck around for a while as Marne was a baal tekiah (shofar blower) and let anyone who wanted to blow her shofar.  We then walked to Suzanna’s for lunch with a total of 14 people.  There we had a lot of great vegetarian food!  After this, I decided to eat as few Shabbat and chag meals at Beit Nativ as possible.  It was a lot of fun talking with everyone and playing with Marne and Suzanna’s 6 year old daughters.  We Nativers would have loved to stay longer, but we left around 4:45 to get back to Beit Nativ at a reasonable time.

At Beit Nativ, we davened mincha at Moreshet Yisrael.  I then left to go to Barbara’s (a yeshiva student) home for dinner.  This meal included me, Barbara, her husband, her son and daughter (both in their early twenties), and her daughter’s friend.  Her daughter is also a vegetarian, so again I had really great food.

I came back to Beit Nativ and again stayed up later than I should have for the time I had to wake up for services in the morning.  I ended up going to Shira Chadasha, which was great!  Much better than the last time I was there.  I love their way of being orthodox and egalitarian.  This service included more new tunes and a lot of singing in general.  We also had kiddush after Torah service here, which not only led to me finding Marzipan rugelach, but I talked with a fellow yeshiva student who happened to be there and we found we were going to the same place for lunch!  We may have arrived late because Shira Chadasha services go later than most other places, but there was no way we could have willingly left this service early.  Lunch at Vered’s was great and, thankfully, light (at least as vegetarian).  I could not eat another big meal.

Again, I stayed well into the afternoon, with little time to rest before Shabbat.  We had mincha and maariv at Moreshet Yisrael, and then I went with 2 Nativers (a different Julia and Aliya) and some others to Rabbi Epstein of the yeshiva’s home for dinner.  This was also a lot of fun, and of course we had great food.  Because a couple people were tired, we did only a little singing before benching and returning to Beit Nativ, but when we got back Julia and I had our own little tisch because we needed to sing more.  Once again, I stayed up late talking with different people.

Shabbos morning I went to Yakar, which was great.  It remains one of my favorite shuls.  We had a kiddush and shiurim before Torah reading.  I went to the English shiur about “Do you pray guilty?”  In the afternoon, I found myself able to nap for a little, but not as much as needed.  Overall it was a relaxing Shabbos.  It was great to be back for more than sleeping and time when I should have been sleeping.

There are still quite a few shuls that I want to attend at least once, plus I want to see some Sephardi services.  I keep on thinking I should do that next week, but that’ll be Yom Kippur.  I’m not sure where I want to go for Yom Kippur, but I think I want to go somewhere I know I like, so it will probably be Shira Chadasha or Yakar, as Mayanot is a bit far of a walk for fasting.

Trivia: What is the translation of kaparah? Atonement.  What is the origin of this English word?  At one, from the days when “one” was pronounced as it is spelled.