Shabbos Shoom D'var!

The end of Yom Kippur ushered in the beginning of yet another Shabbos in Jerusalem. Last week, in my Ulpan class, we read a little article about “Yom Shishi” (Friday) in Jerusalem, which explained that only 30% of Israelis work on Friday, a day devoted to food shopping and other errands and to trips to the movies and the mall. On this Friday, Max and I joined the Jerusalem masses, and took the bus to Kenyon Malcha: the Jerusalem Mall.

The Jerusalem Mall, a 3-story structure bookended by a Toys R Us and a Home Depot, is a pretty far bus ride outside of central Jerusalem. Our main goal was to find something for Max something electronic and complicated that I don’t understand … an express card (a new version of a PCI/PCM card) that will give his computer fire-wire capabilities. But the trip to the mall was a cultural experience of sorts, especially considering that Israel ranks 3^rd in the world for mall space per capita. We did not find the express card, but we did check out the price of wireless routers. And I bought a box of pens.

The bus dropped Max off on Ben Yehuda where he met a former camper for lunch, and dropped me on by the shuk. I know I’ve described the shuk’s zoo-like quality in many previous entries but let me assure you that those were petting-zoo days compared to this one. I think a lot of out-of-town visitors come to Jerusalem for the High Holidays, and apparently they all feel the need to shop at the shuk on Friday afternoon. I escaped with my tofu, quart of milk, and challah – and only a few minor battle wounds.

I needed to wind down, so I turned to my new choice of reading material: James Baldwin’s Go Tell It On the Mountain, which I purchased at a used bookstore a few days ago. It is hailed as the first book to be written about African Americans from a non-racial point of a view – and a milestone in American literature. Baldwin’s grandiose religious language is a little hard to get used to, but the characters are captivating.

After a few chapters of Go Tell It On the Mountain (Max was disappointed to discover is not Tell It TO the Mountain, which, in the vein of “talk to the hand,” he argues is a much better title), and then decided to try my luck again at finding some affordable curtain rods. Most of the stores that would sell that type of thing were already closing, but my disappointment was turned around by a phone call from Sammy!

I completely lost track of time while talking to Sam, and realized at around 4:15 pm that I should hang up if I had any hope of buying dessert for Shabbat dinner. But I had forgotten that after we “fell back” with our clocks (Israel does day lights saving too), Shabbat starts much earlier, and I turned the corner to find the shuk almost completely abandoned mid-afternoon. I remembered that there is a little candy shop in the middle of the shuk that is always the last to close, so I jogged down one of the corridors to buy a dark chocolate bar. From the distance, I could see that the candy store was in fact open. But out of nowhere, a charedi man (a very religious man dressed in a black hat) appeared. He was flaring his arms and shouting, “SHABBOS! SHOOM D’VAR! SHABBOS! SHOOM D’VAR,” which essentially means, “IT’S SHABBAT! NOTHING!” I decided not to engage in an argument about how I still had 15 minutes before Shabbos began and could in fact purchase my candy bar, and walked out of the shuk.

Back at the apartment, I decided to start cooking dinner, which with only 2 burners and one very small oven, often takes longer than expected. On the menu for dinner: tofu stir-fry with a garlic-ginger teriyaki sauce, brown rice, sautéed cinnamon apples, and challah. I made the sauce and marinated the tofu. I washed and chopped the red peppers and mushrooms and onions and carrots. I minced the garlic and the ginger. I measured out the rice. But when I turned on the gas stove – nothing. No gas. No flame. Shoom d’var.

Max managed to quell my temporary flip out, and I turned to a rather impromptu Plan B, which was no rice, oven-baked tofu and vegetables, an improvised tzimmes-dish. I missed the brown rice, the oven was too small for me to make a dish large enough for leftovers, and the tofu didn’t have a crispy brown exterior, but all in all it was quite delicious.

Shabbats in Jerusalem has been a little lonely lately. I haven’t quite figured out how to navigate the culture of inviting oneself to a friend’s Shabbos dinner, and there haven’t been a lot of invitations from the community. It’s also a little frustrating to be a non-Shabbat-observant person in a city that (almost) completely shuts down for 24 hours.

But I’d heard rumors of a few restaurants that stayed open on Shabbat, so, after dinner, Max and I, threw on sweatshirts (the temperature has been quickly dropping) and headed downtown. We were pleasantly surprised to find many restaurants, coffee shops, and bars open. (My friend Navah and I went to a delicious waffle shop a few days ago, and I secretly hoped it was open but it was not.) We finally settled on a corner table in little coffee shop called Riff-Raff. We ordered hot chocolate (which came as steamed milk and a chunk of chocolate with the hot chocolate drinker gets to mix together) and read our books and pondered about the upcoming election and strategized about what to do with our defective oven (or empty gas tank.)

If anyone would like to follow in Sammy’s footsteps and give me a call, it’s very easy. You can put money on your Skype account using a credit card or PayPal. And then you can call me at 052-619-9431 for only a few cents a minute. If you have lots of friends or family abroad, you can buy a months subscription for about $10 and have unlimited calls anywhere in the world.