Womenspeak

After six months I am still startled when Israeli women open their mouths to speak. Not so much with Israeli men - they are after all, men. Even when they speak English, they speak a different language, but the women look like women I know, like women I've grown up with like my cousins and my aunts, my friends mothers and my mother's friends, they look like they should sound like them too, but they don’t. Israeli men are different - they all look like members of the Mosad, or ex members of the Mosad. They wear dark glasses and jeans and walk around with attitude befitting a middle-eastern man who works for the Mosad. Even the softly spoken more evolved ones look like they work for the Mosad – in a different department – in higher intelligence.

The women however look the same, apart from their shoes they dress the same, they mother and shop and act the same, but when they open their mouths to speak, from deep within comes a gruff loud voice that scares the hell out of me. I look around to see who's fallen, whose run into the traffic, only to realize that they are talking to me, making very small talk in very big voices.

There's a woman I dance with who's had more roadwork done on her pretty face than is seemingly healthy - full lipped, long haired big boobed and skinny. Modeled on Stacy (as opposed to Barby) she moves around the dance floor in her own bliss, childhood patterns of ballet classes long passed restricting her free movement. She is tall and wide eyed and looks like a child who has not yet moved from innocence to power. Light and slight, awkward and fragile she twirls around blissfully in her own make believe world. We greet each other and smile, but she knows I speak little Hebrew and until last night we had never actually exchanged words.

Then after the teacher-DJ gave instructions for a new dance momentarily in English, she brushed passed me and turned to say " In your merit, he spoke in English" (Well that's not exactly what she said - what she said was " because of you he spoke English " but the word she used was 'schut' which in Chabbad-speak means merit. Its how you say 'because' when the outcome is positive). In the moments between hearing and understanding what she had said, I nearly jumped out of my skin. This beautiful sculptured childlike overgrown ballerina spoke in the deepest voice, and uttered the most guttural and loud Hebrew. She was simply making small talk and thank G-d I understood what she said or I might have left the class running.

There are others too, the homeopath who looks like the Rebbitzin, the woman outside drinking coffee who looks like my brother in laws mother, they all startle me when they speak. Perhaps it's the language itself, and perhaps when the time comes that I finally speak it, I too will startle. After all I look like I was born here; I walk the same, apart from my shoes I dress the same, mother the same and shop the same. People assume I'm Israeli, they ask me directions in the street, questions in the mall, and perhaps they too are startled when I open my mouth and meekly stumble out in my softly spoken foreign accent my apologize in broken Hebrew for not understanding or speaking the language of my face.

They turn to their friends and say – wow, I never expected that, she looks just like one of us.

Nachlaot Hippies on my Kitchen Floor

It's Simchat Torah. Small groups of families and teens drunk with wine and song decorate the street. The heat of summer has lifted and daylight savings brings in the dark sky well before its time. Elijah runs in to the house ahead of the rest and calls out in great excitement as if to warn me "the whole of shule's coming to our house, now!" Earlier I had sat outside alone under the light of a few scattered candles and remembered how this festival had been for me in the years before. If you were a mother of small children – which I had been for many years, it was a 'boys club'. More often than not, I chose to stay home with sleeping toddlers whose routine was more important to keep than my need to be part of the fun. Now my sleeping toddlers had all grown up and were fiercely independent and more than capable of getting themselves home from shule alone, in the dark.

Still these days I choose to stay home, treasuring my few moments silence after a long month of festivities and too much food. Finally the house is quiet, I am alone. And then they arrive –in a pack, a tribe of three or four families, assorted singles, young ones and couples. It's hard to tell who belongs to who as their ages span from infant to elder and they huddle together on our kitchen floor in rustic clothes made of cotton and hemp. The High Priest leads them in chant. They "Om" at his gesture and he invites us all to join in. My kids come down stairs with friends who've come to stay for the chag and join in the circle on the kitchen floor and we all "Om" a little more, though my Om is more of an Um? as I contemplate the logistics at hand.

Expecting no more than a few odd drunk blokes, some hummus and olives were all I had planned for the often forgotten late evening meal that usually accompanies Simchat Torah. Luckily I was inspired by Abby's Minestrone for which we had shopped together a few days before, so I had spent the day cooking a big pot of soup and had pitta and bread for tomorrow's lunch. Together with Yossi's pasta and a few extra salads it would stretch just far enough to feed the hungry masses. The High priest blesses the space; I look across at his Moroccan (could be Navaho) wife, her long curls streaked Grey by the wisdom of time, motherhood, life – 'looks like we've joined the circus', I mouth to her over the crowd. She laughs.

The high priest senses a certain tension. "What do you need he asks?" I need you all out of my kitchen I reply, shuffling them out with my broom. There is work to be done here and no amount of chanting G-ds holy name is going to turn the lettuce in the fridge into salad or slice the tomatoes. The men may well reach for the stars, but it's the womenfolk who feed them when they land back on the planet. Hungry children, breastfeeding mothers, starving teens will join in the song and dance, the spiritual high of endless celebration in the name of the good Lord, but hallelujah brother, I say, let the hungry amongst us eat.

We sit outside drinking wine and singing Jewish and American Folk Songs. Kumbaya My Lord, is spontaneously remixed into a politically correct "Someones perpetuating racial steriotypes -Kumaya..." - by Yossi of course and young Elijah orchestrates "Let It Be" to the enthusiastic cheers of the drunken crowd.

The next day we debrief over tea. My daughter said " "Nachlaot hippy's have babies and move to Pardes Chanah". She's right. Whats more, we would have been those Nachlaot hippies had we moved to Israel instead of to Mullumbimby twenty years ago. We would have joined the Shlomo Carlebach and or Rainbow Kehilla's, and at some point lived in Nachlaot with the chevrah. Later we would have moved somewhere greener, somewhere less expensive, maybe camped in a caravan for a few years on Shlomo's Kibbuts Mod'in , but ultimately we would have landed ourselves on a rustic and rundown property in Pardes Chanah with a large leafy yard and some free range chooks.

For us back then, Mullum simply wasn't Jewish enough and so we spent the next twenty years compromising our hippy values for a seemingly spiritual but largely just religious education. I can't claim to be a hippy anymore, I shave under my arms, and as much as I have embraced my inner Kundalini, I will always have a primal fear of snakes. My house is not warm and rustic, full of books and herbs, but rather Star Wars blasts forth from the flat screen TV and our food scraps rot in plastic bags.

Still when the Nachlaot hippies arrive, something in me wants to be part of it. I want to live in a tee pee and cook over an open fire. I want to pick berries and herbs and heal my children with whole foods. I want to sing to an open fire and weave baskets and rugs and blankets. I feel connected to the earth through the women in my life who make soup and garden and make mugs from clay, and I feel connected to the heavens through the men who pray and chant and make blessings over bread and wine as if theirs were the first and last.

The next day after the service was over and the regulars went home to sleep off hangovers and continue private celebrations, the hippies stayed on to dance. They procured a private and much treasured Sefer Torah for a few hours, one which had survived the Holocaust and they danced and sang and danced and prayed all afternoon in the courtyard of the local school until the day turned cool and they finally conceded to join the rest of us for a piece of bread and a cup of wine.
This year Simchat Torah came to me, and like one of my seven soul mates, for a night and a day I bathed in the likelihood of what might have been with Nachlaot hippies on my kitchen floor.