Tel Aviv

Jerusalem is a wonderful city, but it is in no way indicative of Israel as a whole. There’s a phrase that “while Jerusalem prays, Tel Aviv plays.” Or, as Antonio put it after our day in the Tel Aviv area, “Tel Aviv is a modern metropolis. Jerusalem’s just weird.”

So after a lovely evening of feasting on cheeses, olives, wine and chalva [sweet candy made from sesame seeds] with Jonathan, Antonio, Jaimee, Helayne, and Helayne’s two sisters, we got up early to go to Tel Aviv. My father picked us up from the central bus station, and we all went to an arts fair held twice-weekly next to the Tel Aviv shuk. From there we drove to Chetsi Chinam in Rishon Letzion, a HUGE grocery store where you can get anything you want. Picture a Food for Less ten times the size, or a huge Costco where you can buy things individually, not just in bulk. The variety is incredible – there are separate delis for cheeses, salamis, fish, and the dairy aisle alone is about the size of a football field, no joke. While my dad went shopping, the three of us wandered and reveled in glory.

After that was lunch at Avazi, one of my favorite restaurants in old Jaffo. I may have shown people some pictures from last year when we went there – it’s the place that makes its own Iraqi pita in a clay oven, and they serve 13 little salads as an appetizer before they get to the main meal. After a salad variety of at least four eggplant dishes, two types of cole slaw, cabbage, egg salad, humus, techina, etc, we all feasted on skewered meat: I got kabab (ground beef), Jonathan got chicken and beef shishlik (barbequed meat), and Antonio got – wait for it – turkey testicles!! He said that it tasted odd. I can only imagine – I wasn’t brave enough to try it myself.

Lastly we went up to Herziliyah (sp?) to Cinema City. Reflecting its name, it’s a huge structure housing 20 movie theatres, one of them with a screen as big as an IMAX. There are restaurants and shops there too, all built around the theatres, plus a whole bunch of cool wax figures. We saw Happy Feet, which was cute. Pictures of Chetsi Chinam, Avazi, Cinema City, and the snow from two days ago are HERE.

The best part was the cab ride back to the Tel Aviv Central Bus Station, where we picked up our sheirut (10-person taxi) home. I’m making conversation with the driver, asking him his name, telling him that we’re on our way back to Jerusalem, etc. Then he asks what we do. Jonathan and Antonio are easy – Jonathan works in computers, I say, and Antonio travels around selling things (close enough, I figure). But I’m more difficult – the majority of the time I tell someone in Jerusalem that I’m a rabbinic student, I get a negative reaction. But I decide to risk possible backlash, and I tell him, “I’m studying to be a Reform rabbi.”

“Reformi???” he asks, incredulous. “Ken,” I say (yes), “it’s different in America than it is here.” That started off a 20-minute conversation that was well well worth the 85 shekels for the cab ride. We talked all about Judaism, how much rabbis get paid, what my parents think. He asks if I know the story of my name, Michal, and her relationship to King David. He says how David loved her, and arranged for her husband to divorce her so he could marry her. Yes, I say, it’s like the story of David and Batsheva. He isn’t familiar with it, so I launch into the story of him seeing her in the bath, sending her husband off to the front, and Solomon’s birth. What’s so funny is that this is all in Hebrew, and I can’t remember how to say everything, so I'm improvising (e.g. I don't know how to say “the front,” so I say, “not the back, not the middle, but where people die in a war.” He laughed and got it.) Antonio and Jonathan, in the meantime, are cracking up at our quick Hebrew and the fact that we constantly are interrupting each other – only in Israel would a customer and a cab driver be exchanging and interrupting each others' Biblical stories.

When we get close to the bus station, he starts to slow down, and he says that I’ll make a good rabbi. “From today on I’m Reform!” he proclaimed. “You drive on Shabbat, your husband doesn’t have a [black] hat or payes [hair side curls] – you’re so nice, and Jewish. If all Reform is like you, then I am Reform!” And he kept going on about it, until we left the cab. On the way home Jonathan told me mazel tov - because I'm barely a semester into the rabbinate, and I already have my first convert. :)