Shabbat in Jerusalem

With no foreseeable plans for shabbat, my friend and I decided to take a bus from Haifa to Jerusalem Friday morning. Upon arriving in Jerusalem we checked-in to the Heritage House, an Orthodox youth hostel that provides young adults with free accommodations and home-hospitality for Shabbat meals. The hostel runs on donations, and families throughout the city kindly open their homes to its guests for Friday dinner and Saturday lunch.

We spent Friday afternoon wandering around the Jewish Quarter as store-owners closed shop and residents prepared for Shabbat. At sunset we welcomed shabbat amongst thousands of Jews of all denominations at the Western Wall, known as the Kotel in Hebrew. (The Wall is sometimes referred to by non-Jews as the “Wailing Wall”, because onlookers apparently thought that the traditional Hebrew prayer intonations sounded like wails. The worshippers at the Wall however are praying, not wailing, and the term “Wailing Wall” is not used in Hebrew.)

My friend and I followed our assigned host and his sons back to their home, weaving first through the Arab Market and then along the outskirts of Mea Shearim, a strictly ultra-Orthodox neighborhood in central Jerusalem. The streets of Mea Shearim were lined with young boys playing tag and their elaborately dressed elders walking to and from synagogue.

On shabbat the men in Mea Shearim wear lengthy black robes and wide circular fur hats known as shtreimels in Yiddish. Nearly all of the men sport long beards and curled, shoulder-length sideburns known as payeses. Women dress less uniformly than the men, but their clothes are always very modest. Entering Mea Shearim is like entering a time-warp: Twenty-first century Jerusalem transforms into an Eastern European ghetto from hundreds of years ago.

Our hosts lived in a more modern neighborhood north of Mea Shearim. Even though we had never met before, they went out of their way to welcome us into their home. As it turns out, our hosts were truly a phenomenal family – all eighteen (yes, 18) children of them.

The children ranged in age from pre-school to mid-twenties. Most were present at shabbat dinner, and the older ones were accompanied by spouses and babies of their own. To my complete surprise, each and every one of the children was well-mannered, neatly-dressed, attractive and charismatic. None of the minor pushes and shoves escalated into fights; on the contrary, the kids got along enviably well. Somehow the mother had found time that day to cook an elaborate sabbath meal for over two dozen people; I think she is basically superhuman. She even took time to walk my friend and I part way back to our hostel at the end of the evening. I was pretty amazed by the whole experience.

On Saturday we were assigned to another host family for lunch, and again we lucked out - our hosts were a young couple and their very cute infant son. They entertained nearly a dozen guests, and without hesitation simply added another place setting when someone would walk in through their open door. Shabbat meals are as much about food for thought as for consumption, and we had some animated roundtable discussions during the three hours we spent at their home.

Experiences like the ones I had this shabbat challenge some of my ingrained assumptions and values. The Orthodox women I met were highly educated and well acquainted with feminist ideologies; yet they had chosen, first and foremost, to be wives and mothers. I have a hard time imagining myself (or most of my female friends for that matter) sacrificing careers and financial independence in order to marry young and raise a family. Yet I came away from the weekend with a great deal of respect for the women and families than I met.