This past week has been another filled with travel, though by bus instead of aircraft. When devising spring break plans, I had the option to spend another exciting week in Europe, but opted to return to Israel for Pesach. Every year at the end of the Passover seder, we enthusiastically chant, “Next Year in Jerusalem!”. Well it turns out, this year was in Jerusalem, and since I was given this wonderful opportunity, there was no way I would let it pass.
After my days in Oslo, I returned home at 6:30 in the morning. Surprisingly, I wasn’t very tired after my flight, even though I had received minimal shut-eye, and so I stayed up until around noon running errands and tending to things that required tending. But at the noon-o-clock mark, I succumbed to drowsiness and opted for a two hour nap.
After waking, I showered, got my act together, and cabbed with my friend Brandon to Rabbi Charles Lebow’s house. Rabbi Lebow runs a program on Tuesdays called “Grill and Chill” where students come and discuss their thoughts on some of life’s major themes, such as career paths, happiness, and accomplishments. Our discussion is always centered around quotes from history’s great philosophers, politicians, authors, and media icons. I thoroughly enjoy the program each week, and so when he invited me over to stay with his family for the first night of Pesach, I jumped on the offer.
When we arrived at his place, we set our bags down and promptly began to help him separate the good matzot from the bad. He had purchased a large package of circular matzah for the chag (holiday). When preparing for the seder, one chooses the three best matzot from the bunch, and those three will be the ones used as the centerpiece of the meal, each eaten at a different interval of the night. The matzot are stacked on top of each other in a cramped space, and some naturally succumb to the weight of the next. Hence, when you open the box, you find over half of them cracked and thus unusable for the seder. It is a quite meticulous process. After helping find the three which were most apt for the meal, we set them aside and went down to the basement to set up our bedding. After chilling down there, we got dressed and headed out to services.
When we returned, a long journey lay before us. We were to enter back into the land of Mitzraim (Egypt) and make an exodus back out, all within six hours. Conversation and questions were aplenty, and although this delayed our ETA at the actual Shulchan Aruch (the meal), it was a welcomed delay. My stamina held up for most of the night, especially considering our appetites were not whetted until nearly midnight. But directly after feasting on chicken, veggies, and lots and lots of matzah, my lack of recent REM took hold of me, and I became a zombie, unable to keep my eyes open.
I arose in the morning feeling well-rested and had a nice Shabbat lunch. Then I napped again for three hours. This basically sums up my Jerusalem Passover experience: food and sleep. It was very special to spend Pesach in the holy land, and I look forward to the next time I may return here for this chag.
Coincidentally, this past week also marked spring break for my friend and frat bro Micah Altman, who is studying abroad in Rome. The time allotted to him granted him a weeklong trip to Eretz Yisrael. I put him up on Saturday night, and on Sunday we spent the day meandering through downtown Jerusalem, getting lost in the maze of the Old City, finding our way into the Church of the Holy Sepulchre (an immense church in the Old City which I had yet to visit), and eating about eight helpings worth of schwarma and salad. At night, Micah left my company to visit another friend he has living in Israel.
The next morning, I took a bus with a friend down to Eilat, the resort capital of Israel, to meet up with a group of friends who were already there. We got a late start to the morning, and rushed to the bus station with few minutes to spare. As we made our way up to the ticket counter, we learned that we would have to take the 2:00 PM bus, which was a shame as it is over a four hour bus ride, and we were really hoping to take the 10:00 AM. We bought tickets for the 2:00 PM, but once purchased, Channah, my travel buddy, got the great idea to get in line for the 10:00 AM anyway. As the driver took our tickets, he clearly saw that this was not the appropriate bus for us, but overlooked the anachronism and let us join the bandwagon. Consequently, we took turns sitting on the floor the way there, but this was a small price to pay to spend another few hours on the beach.
Our days in Eilat were mostly marked by soaking up the sun. After a week in Europe, it was a much needed vacation (just kidding). We bused back the next night, and I had Micah over once again. The next morning, we bused over to a city called Netanya, where he would be staying the night with family. Once there, we decided to walk to the beach. On our way there, we happened upon a cliff, off which many people stood watching the skies that were filled with their friends up in the air, paragliding. I immediately decided I had to go. Paragliding is sort of like parasailing, sans the boat. In this respect, it is similar to hang gliding, except that a parachute is what causes us to levitate. I sat, strapped in to a little seat, as the guide led me up through the sky, 300 feet over the Mediterranean, and yards away from the tops of hotel buildings. With the wind in my face, I saw what lies beneath with a bird-eye view. It was quite exhilarating. Afterwards, we kicked it on the beach for a few hours, until it was time to depart, and I bused back to Jerusalem.
This week has certainly been one more exciting chapter in my life, and I continue to experience life’s twists and turns in fresh ways. I will resume my classes on Monday, which I am actually not dreading. It’s been an amazing, fun-filled break, but I really do enjoy the structure of the week. There is about a month and a half left in the Rothberg International School semester, and I cannot believe how quickly the time has gone. Time to go get a head start on the volumes I’m expected to pen for my classes.
Stay classy San Diego,
Zac
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