chigh cholidays

we had a good time on rosh hashanah - i was at limor's grandparents' apartment, and it was hilarious. i had no idea what was going on. limor has a close extended family (yeah that sounds like a contradiction, right) so there was about twenty people crammed around a long table, reminiscent of another holiday, which is probably why everyone kept breaking out in passover songs. they were having a lot of fun "accidentally" mixing up their songs. it was a big mess, because it seemed like it was "pick your own psalm" night or something, so everybody was singing something different in a different tune or whatever.

yom kippur was very, very different. i will say first, so you can get your "boo-urns" out of the way, that limor and i did not fast. it's too difficult for us, we both feel sick if we do, so we didn't. but at least we didn't go to the kinneret and have a barbeque, like many israelis do.

but yom kippur...wow. it was awesome, because everything stops. literally. it's so quiet once it begins that you can immediately tell the difference. all that background noise that you don't really ever pay attention - random humming as cars go by, the low buzz from appliances, faint strains of television speech - is absent, and noticeably so. for almost half an hour i had to speak in a whisper, because to do otherwise felt like shouting. i was afraid i would disturb the neighbors - the ones across the street.

so there's practically no cars on the streets for 24 hours. it begins a little before sundown, and israelis have this tradition that you MUST walk the streets. generally it's just the first night, as the next day is too hot to walk about. limor tells me that it's so ingrained that parents will buy their children bikes the week before expressly for the purpose of riding it on yom kippur. and in places like tel aviv, people take their bikes out on the highway. strange but true.

when we went out for what was supposed to be a short walk, the streets were pretty much empty of people. at first i attributed it to the fact that we were in a predominantly-student neighborhood, with most of the families (with kids) living elsewhere in the city. but, after about an hour of walking around the roads really started to fill up. limor and i ended up walking for quite a while - it was just so cool to circumnavigate the city just like a car. i even made limor stop at the stoplights and wait for the green signal (which she wasn't too pleased about).

the next day it was so quiet. i cannot stress how quiet it was. it was so quiet it was beautiful. everything was so peaceful, no honking, no speeding vehicles, no old men hollering "used junk here! sell your used junk!" twice a day. it made it very sad when the day ended with the tortured squeal of tires running the red light next to our apartment.

this year we stayed in be'er sheva, but next year i'm making it a point to go to tel aviv and walking from one exit on the ayalon freeway to another. i guess the saying now goes "l'shana haba'ah b'ayalon freeway", right?