Blog/October 2008/Oct 10th

October 10th (See this week's devar torah)
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Hi again!

This week we had Yom Kippur, so between preparation for the day and the full-day in synagogue, and preparing the sukkah for next-week's festival of Sukkot, we don't have much "news" to tell.

Well, not exactly... On Sunday we took my mother-in-law to Jerusalem, and decided to eat out. Since we've had good food there before, we decided on the "Cafe Rimon" in the center of J"M. It's a bit expensive, but we figured the view of all the people would be interesting. Well: we had the worst service I have ever had. I mean, it was slow. Excruciatingly slow -- and the restaurant was not busy at all (the servers were 'hanging out' waiting for stuff to do). There were four of us, but they brought one drink at a time, with a five-minute wait between them. Then they brought the entrees one at a time, same deal. My water only showed up when I asked for it again. Esther's "iced" drink had no ice. The food itself was good, but when we got the bill and it said "Service not included", we wanted to write underneath, "yes, we noticed".

But our Yom Kippur was excellent, thank you for asking. People who might not go to synagogue all year, and who don't even know what the word halacha means, don't drive. There was not one car driving in Maale Adummim (well, not in the area we are in). There was only one car driving on the J"M - Dead Sea highway, presumably an Arab, when we looked (it's usually full of cars). The kids all were out on their skates and bikes; and as we walked to synagogue we were asked several times by anxious kids, "when does the fast start?" -- because then the streets would be totally empty. One thing, both Esther and I wanted to yell out, "that tune is wrong!" several times... it's amazing what imprinting will do.

More interesting to me is that everyone started working on their sukkah -- even people one might not think would care to make the effort. Practically every house has a sukkah, and we don't even live in a particularly "religious" area. We've got ours up as well, but we had to halve it since it was way too big for the areas we have. We also had to trim trees so the sukkah is not shaded by them. Now we'll see how well the sukkah withstands the mighty afternoon winds here, and we'll know if we have to make changes.

Just when we thought only Israeli politics could get this dirty, up comes the Obama campaign and lies about Israeli general's opinions. More correctly, they misled the generals. Good to know about a potential President of the United States. Of course, US presidents lying to Israeli governments is nothing new - the Embassy of the US is still in Tel Aviv instead of Jerusalem, despite every president promising to move it to J"M since ... well, for a long time.

Until next week,
Shabbat shalom!

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