Thrilled by my oven in Jerusalem, I baked chocolate chip cookies when my neighbor invited me to dinner. Eli is a professor of Jewish philosophy from Belgium with an accent slowed by his thoughtful spirit. I timed it so I could bring them fresh from the oven next door and ring the bell. He winced thanking me and disappearing into the bedroom with them. I realized I hadn’t researched at all what Shabbat means. Even my making food was not kosher, let alone after sunset, let alone dairy. I think I made every classic error that night, even asking for a selfie. Eli politely responded, “Um, well, we don’t use electricity on Shabbat, so no.” Then he smiled and produced a shiny bottle of brandy with a yellow pear inside. “Welcome to Jerusalem, my friend.”
A month later I grabbed pear brandy for Eli in Vienna. His eyes lit when I rang the bell, and he took me straight to his sukkah, a shelter he built in his backyard to celebrate the Jewish holiday where we talked Kafka, and he cradled the bottle admiringly. “You know how they do this, no? In Austria, they hang the bottle just when the bud appears, so that the pear grows inside. So there are these magical trees hanging with bottles as if they were some kind of bottle tree.”
A week later at his synagogue, I found everyone out on the street. I was the only person wearing jeans and made some excruciating small talk before finding a place to plant myself at the edge of a dancing circle. Then an arm from the crowd squeezed my waist. “Joe, you came!” Eli laughed delightedly. “What, did you think you could come without dancing?” And he pulled me to the center where another arm wrapped my shoulders, and we ran and jumped around a huge scroll, cradled and bouncing in someone’s arms.
Breathless at the edge again, Eli said they would celebrate all night. Annie Dillard says, “I cannot ask for more than to be so wholly acted upon … so in the clustering thick of things, rapt and enwrapped in the rising and falling real world.” For me to be where they love reading so much they … dance? What even is life?
