A Brazillion Pounds of Meat

For roughly ten years of my life, I was a vegetarian.  Those were the ten dumbest years I have spent here on Earth.  I never had a Chicago hot dog, I never had Popeye’s chicken, I never had a juicy burger, and certainly never the Kobe beef steak that I absolutely adore.  And if I had never crossed over to the dark side, I wouldn’t have enjoyed my dinner on Tuesday night nearly as much as I did.  That night, the students and staff from my Poland trip had a reunion dinner hosted at an all-you-can-eat Brazilian steakhouse called Papagaio.  For the record, this is one of the most expensive restaurants in the city, and besides devouring heinous amounts of grilled meat and chicken, one of the greatest pleasures of the night was filling our bellies free of charge.  The dinner was sponsored by a man named Asher Milstein, an incredibly generous donor to some of the programs here on campus who also funded that venerable King David Hotel lunch a few months ago. 

Once dinner began, entrecote was brought to us, then grilled chicken, then kebab, then teriyaki chicken, then more steak, then more kebab, and well, you get the picture.  Each dish was more succulent than the next, and before long, although our stomachs were on the verge of total annihilation, they brought out five different dessert dishes.  Meat was eaten in such obscene quantities that we joked that our stomachs wouldn’t be milchig (kosher for dairy) again until Shavuot later that week.   Warm (pareve) mousse cake, pies, sorbets, etc., then entered through us and further inhibited our hunger for the next three days or so.  The dinner served as a perfectly sweet way to complete a perfectly bitter trip. 

Thursday night, I booked a trip to Greece with my friend Roee.  For four days and three nights in Mid-June, we will be exploring the city of Athens and the island of Mykonos.  I am highly anticipating getting in touch with my philosophical roots and navigating through the city where Socrates, Plato, and Aristotle cemented their place in history. 

For Shabbat this week, ten friends or so and myself cooked up a slew of the finest tasting meats and side dishes prepared outside of the kitchens of Papagaio, Yossi and Chaya Witkes, and Jamie Glass-Pestine. This was our second-to-last Shabbat together on campus, and so we wanted to make sure we crafted a memorable repast, complete with pizzazz and shebang.  My cooking prowess is severely underdeveloped, so I took it upon myself to make couscous, a simple, yet delicious stomach stuffer.  The room filled with cheers as we each sampled the food and drink that each other had brought to the table and filled our stomachs to the brim with challah, meatballs, chicken, grilled sweet potatoes and carrots, salad, the aforementioned couscous, and of course, lots and lots of wine.

Around this time last year (on the Hebrew calendar), I was just getting home from a trip to Israel.  I remember it specifically because it was just prior to the Jewish holiday of Shavuot, when the Israelites received Torah at Mt. Sinai, and on Shavuot, my cousin Althea and I stayed up until the wee hours of the night learning Gemara.  On Shavuot, it is custom to eat gross quantities of cheesecake and pull an all-nighter studying Torah.  This year, Shavuot fell on Saturday night.  I celebrated the chag (holiday) by taking advantage of a Conservative yeshiva program run downtown.  A series of lectures, all of which were enlightening and well-orated, ran from 10:30 PM until 3:30 AM, with short breaks in between to stretch our legs and eat junk food. 

At four in the morning, our group, as well as thousands of other Jews, walked to the Kotel to daven Shacharit as the sun rose.  Interestingly, because this was a Conservative group, we held services at the Southwest Wall instead of the Western Wall, where there is no mechitza (divider between men and women).  I never knew such services existed over there.  It was quite thrilling to watch the sun rise over the Kotel.  Afterwards, we walked back to our dorms (it was roughly 7 AM by the time we got back), where I immediately took a necessary snooze.

Since I’ve been here in Israel, I’ve been fortunate enough to experience Purim, Passover, Lag b’Omer, Holocaust Remembrance Day, Memorial Day, Independence Day, Jerusalem Day, and now Shavuot.  But in the British sense, every day here is a holiday.  I’m still in that island in the sun.

Aloha,

Zac