The New Year is Here! A Year Soft and Hairy.

Rosh Hashanah is now over and the New Year begins in earnest. We went to Yedidyah in Jerusalem for services. It is a very warm place and the services were lovely. I heard the longest tekiah gedolah (the biggest of the horn blasts) I have ever heard at the end of davening this morning. But even more moving was the walk to synagogue the first night. The sky was lovely without a single cloud and that deep blue of evening when it is getting toward night, with rose and peach closer to the horizon. The streets were full of people walking to synagogue or to family or friends. There were little traffic jams of people driving to dinner with family, too. Everyone had one of the two looks, either the look of being ready, having scrubbed and cleaned and cooked and dressed and being done and now ready to just begin time at synagogue praying or with family eating or first synagogue then off somewhere to eat. Or else they had the "we're almost there" look, of being on that last important errand, bringing home the drycleaning, picking up flowers for the table, or just getting to where ever they were going, knowing that soon they would be safely immersed in holiday time where the demands are less, and the company is good and you can breathe and reflect and drink a glass of wine. And of course nobody is fed up with the holiday yet, its new and fresh like the shirts and dresses. I wanted to hug everyone I saw. I had a giant silly smile on my face and wished many people shanah tova, a good year, and was greeted in return. This is a little odd in Jerusalem where people are very warm -- once they know you for five minutes they will lend you teh keys to their car, but they don;t generally smile at strangers on the street, I find, but the eveningw as so nice with the warm breeze and the kids all dressed in their nice outfits or maybe it was just because I looked so foolishly wrapped up in it all, that even the hardest nuts wished me a shanah tova in return, and I have the feeling that even if I had hugged them, I wouldn't have gotten punched. Even the birds were mobbing together, screeching at one another in a good natured way and then flitting off to another bush or tree where they would regroup and screech again. It reminded me of the piece of the prayers for rosh hashanah which after all is not just the new year but the birthday of all of creration that says that all the creatures will come together as one group to pray together.
In a similar vein, while we were walking home with the boys we saw an old man being pushed in a wheelchair by a young Asian man. The man in the wheelchair was looking at us so I wished him Shanah tovah. He didn't say anything, the young guy pushing him along smiled and said "Shanah Tova" to us. Everybody seemed to be in a nice and generous mood.
We walked this afternoon to a funny little pedestrian through way in our neighbourhood. It is a set of stairways that run for three or four blocks and have small green spaces on either side of the stairs. The boys played for a bit and I walked a little higher up to explore and came running back down almost immediately to tell the boys to come with me. I didn't tell them what I had found but just that there was something they would like but they had to find it themselves. They looked and then said with unbelief and delight, "A Tree House!" There at the top of the hill in this little pocket park, some industrious group of kids had banged together a tree house out of shipping pallettes and broken shelves in an olive tree which might have been grown just for that purpose. As the sun began to move towards the horizon, the boys happily clambered around, rolling accumulated olives out through holes in the floor thump, thumpitty, thump from a dwelling made for the cost of a few nails but with a million dollar view.
Finally, and on a slightly different track, tonight when I was putting Lev to bed he told me that he would only touch things that he liked, things that were soft or maybe hairy, but that he would not touch plants that were "pricky like cactuses. Or," he added after thinking for but a second, "I won't touch fire or lightning." I don't think it was explicitly part of the New Year's thing but maybe he was tuning in to the season on some level. Goals for the new year etc. Anyway, May you all be blessed with a year of touching only soft or perhaps hairy things and no pricky cactuses or fire or lightning. Amen.