Clothes, Vocabulary & The High Seas: Something Jewish.

3rd July - Shabbat Saturday

Tara

Yiscah + Yael

Spent most of the day lounging around in the sun and attending talks about Jewish law and spirituality. It still sits much too strangely with me - especially the sexist stuff - but it's at least somewhat interesting. It turns out that people with tattoos can indeed be buried in Jewish cemeteries (this must be a lie some parents made up once to deter their Jewish children from getting tattoos...). A note from the future: I would have known this all along had I been to Tel Aviv earlier - EVERYBODY has tattoos here, and EVERYBODY is Jewish.

There's still far too much I don't buy, like the idea that a husband and wife can only touch each other two weeks out of the month, as the other two weeks (surrounding her menstrual cycle) the woman is not "pure". My skin just crawls when I hear this nonsense.

Later in the day I check my emails and when I find nothing from Christopher I get pretty down... it's unreasonable because he doesn't owe me anything and I'm having the best time here regardless, but I watch people getting cosy on the bus and I miss the arms that feel like home. All the Israelis keep telling me I'm like an Israeli girl, and I'm still not sure he can handle the intensity that brings. When we catch each other on Skype in the afternoon, talking to him makes me feel a lot better, and as usual I realise that 90% of the darkness I live in exists only in my head.

On the bus we pass kids of no more than ten dressed in black coats and hats with their hair shaved short and their peyot grown long. They look like little rabbis in the thirtysomething degree heat, and they're eating icecreams like any other kids, and I can't help but think of Dawkins describing religion as a virus. These kids have had the virus of orthodox religion transmitted to them, and they will suffer it for the rest of their lives.

Evening

Shabbat ends, and we head back to the Old City of Jerusalem. We take a short break - some eat pizza, some eat ice cream, and we all take in our postcard surroundings.

(Look closely, that's all Jewish stuff)

Tara + Daniella

Inbar, me + Dominique

Surrogate baby brother Adam + wonderful Joel

At the Kotel (Western Wall) they give us some time to write notes and place them in the cracks of the stones. I felt a bit phoney writing a note to nobody (a wall? God?), but I did it anyway.

There is something weighty about placing my hand on the smooth rock of a 3000 year old wall. Especially when I have to make my way through hundreds of crying women to get to it.

Kotel tunnels

What baffles me is that after we come out of our midnight tour of the Kotel tunnels, it's about 1:30am and there are still so very many people there, praying and weeping. Is it always that way, every minute?