Vegetableier?

It’s Saturday night, and I go back to school tomorrow morning. Thinking back, I had a really good weekend! With Purim, I only had a three-day week, which is always nice.

Wednesday’s Israel seminar had an unexpected highlight. We were talking about poverty and food insecurity (a fancy word for hunger) in Israel and how it is approached in current times. There are so many more NGOs in this country than one might expect of a teeny country. I don’t remember the exact statistic, but it is something like a ratio of one per 200 people or so. There are a lot. It is partly because there are so many religious institutions, but it is also a reaction from the country’s socialist founding. In any case, we were looking at different approaches to poverty and more specifically food insecurity. We saw several different solutions: forming NGOs to address the problem, trying to solve the problem from the top, making it go away completely, and treating the symptoms, giving people food so that they are not hungry today. One place we visited was a private high school that runs a soup kitchen. The two high school seniors who spoke to us were quite possibly the most well-spoken teenagers I have ever seen, and their English was fairly amazing. It’s a safe bet that my Hebrew will never be that good. I think many of us were more interested in their school than in the soup kitchen. It is a religious school, but somewhat open: there are both religious and secular students who attend the school. The students (both wearing jeans) told us that they must attend services every day, but that they do not have to pray. They study Jewish topics, in mixed-gender classes, but being religious is not forced on them. They focus strongly on community service. We were intrigued. It sounds like a school we could visit as a study in its own right, rather than just as a sidebar on the study of a bigger topic.

Friday morning I broke one of my own rules. I tend to stay out of the Old City on Fridays. It is more crowded, because it is Islam’s day of gathering, similar to our Shabbat. But one of my classmates organized a tour of Christian sites, given by the director of the NFTY in Israel program, who recently earned his tour guide license. I decided that these are sites I would love to visit, and should visit with a tour guide because I don’t know them at all. So I went. About a dozen of us met in front of HUC, groggy, and started the day. (Well, technically my day had begun two hours earlier when I left for the shuk and supermarket. But I was still tired.) First fun fact of the day: in Israel, tour guides must be licensed. I knew that. But apparently, especially in the Old City, some Powers that Be walk around looking for guides who are guiding but not licensed. They can get in trouble. Guiding is serious business around here. We went first to a Russian church that apparently was the original entrance to the Church of the Holy Sepulcher. With various natural disasters, wars, and history in Jerusalem over a couple of thousand years, the church has been destroyed and rebuilt a few times, and one of them turned the church’s entrance around completely. After that, we visited a Protestant church, but we really just went to the courtyard. The point was to differentiate between the incredibly ornate, graphic depictions in one church and the beautiful, quiet spaces in another. Then we walked to the Church of the Holy Sepulcher. (All three were within 5 minutes of one another.) This is the site believed by most branches of Christianity (Protestants excluded) to be the spot where Jesus was crucified, buried, and risen. There has been a church of one kind or another on the site since around the mid-300s, although much of the current structure is “only” about a thousand years old, from around the time of the Crusaders. The church is fascinating. I had visited with Monica, but we really didn’t know what we were looking at, and it was nice to go with a guide. It was also a Friday though, apparently the day that Jesus died, and a popular day for pilgrimages. It was packed. The church itself is owned jointly (and in pieces) by all different sects of Christianity, many of which don’t largely exist in America: Catholic, Orthodox, Coptic (Egyptian), Ethiopian, and I don’t remember what else. The groups don’t always get along. In order to change anything, all the groups have to agree. There are numerous stories or legends about ladders that haven’t moved, light bulbs that haven’t been changed, and repairs that haven’t been made, simply because the groups cannot agree on who should do it. The building is amazing. Having visited so many synagogues, there are some aspects that are similar, like the hanging lamps. Those make sense from a time before electricity. But the figures and paintings and human images in a space of worship are incredibly foreign to me, and especially noticeable in a place like this one.

After our morning of church, the student who had organized the tour was heading to his favorite hummus place in Jerusalem, in the Muslim Quarter, on the Via Delarosa. A few of us went along for the experience…and food! It was delicious. It was a place where you tell the waiter more or less what you want (in a mix of Hebrew, English, and a few words of Arabic that Jon knew): falafel, kibbeh, and hummus. There are five of us. The waiter brought out the food a few minutes later, and a few minutes after that, it was demolished. It was fabulous. We also looked around when we finished. When we arrived at lunch, the restaurant was fairly empty. But if you measure restaurant quality by the number of locals who eat there, this one certainly rated highly; it was completely full when we left. We realized that the noon Muslim service must have ended while we were eating, and then everyone came in for lunch. I was full and ready for an afternoon of cooking…

Amy and Mary, two of my classmates, really like the cook Rachel Ray, and Amy has a stack of her magazines here in our apartment. They decided to have “Rachel Ray Shabbat,” where everyone coming to dinner would be given a different Rachel Ray recipe to cook. It was happening at my apartment; I decided to join the fun. I made “not-zagna,” which was basically lasagna ingredients (including a béchamel sauce!) but with regular noodles in a bowl, not layered in a lasagna. It was more vegetabley than I ever make, but it came out delicious. [For the record, Microsoft Word would prefer “vegetableier” instead of “more vegetabley.”] The rest of the meal was also impressively good. Everything was a fancier dish than most of us would normally make (fennel salad, salmon in a complicated sauce, squash and ricotta pizza, individual cakes with chocolate sauce and crushed candy topping…), but everything was delicious. I spent the afternoon in the kitchen with my roommates, who were also cooking for this dinner, and it was a lot of fun. And now I have leftovers for the week!

Today was a good Shabbat. I did lots of nothing in the morning, a little work in the afternoon, and then went to a wine/cheese/havdalah afternoon hosted by two visiting rabbis. It was a fun break to hang out with friends, catch up, and eat lots of delicious cheese. I made it a point to try each and every one of the cheeses. I still haven’t met a cheese I didn’t like. An afternoon/evening well spent! I then went out for dinner with a few friends, which I have decided I like doing on Saturday evenings before school on Sunday. (Equivalent: Sunday night dinner out at home.) It’s a nice way to stretch the weekend out a little before going back to the craziness of the week. And a great way to put off the last bit of homework just a little longer!

On that note, I need to go to sleep so that I don’t start the week too sleep deprived. Shavuah tov, have a good week!