Hebrew Table

Back to back posts! I guess that by this point in the year you should know that that means one of two things. Either I have something really interesting that happened, and I don’t want to wait almost a week to write about it, or I have a lot of work to do and I don’t feel like doing it. In this case, it’s both.

For Shabbat dinner last night, I was invited to my friend Kim’s house. She warned me that it might be a Hebrew-heavy dinner. I’m not sure I fully grasped that idea. I arrived, and was greeted (in English) by Kim, her boyfriend, who is also in Jerusalem on an American program studying to be a rabbi, and a friend of hers from a college year abroad in Israel program. The friend made aliyah several years ago and now lives in Israel. We spoke in English, and I doubted Kim’s warning a little bit. Then the next guests showed up, two friends of Kim’s boyfriend from his summer ulpan. They came in and we introduced ourselves in Hebrew. That was the end of speaking English. They are studying to be ministers, and I was impressed with the breadth of their Jewish knowledge. Another friend from Kim’s boyfriend’s classes came a few minutes later. It turns out that these three friends were from Switzerland and Germany, and also studying here for the year. I never found out whether they spoke English well or not, but I’m guessing not. Hebrew was the common language, so that was the language used throughout the evening. Conversation flowed pretty freely, with some fumbling for words on all parts, some laughing corrections of grammar on all parts, and lots of patience, especially by the friend who has lived here for years and is really fluent in Hebrew. There was no sense of awkwardness that we were holding an entire evening in what was a foreign language for every single one of us. Even when Kim and I spoke to each other in our own conversation, we spoke in Hebrew, probably partly out of respect for the company, and partly because it is hard to switch back and forth! Either way, we never mentioned that we were speaking to each other in Hebrew; it just happened that way! We covered all topics. We tried to solve the peace process. We talked about families. We discussed our programs and classes in Israel. We talked about food. It was a typical Shabbat dinner, aside from the Hebrew thing. I was almost home when I realized that I was still thinking, more or less, in Hebrew.

Shabbat shalom!