Blog/September 2013/Sep 20th

Sep 20th -- sorry, no devar torah this week!

Hi, again!

Sitting here in my sukkah, enjoying the pleasant weather, it’s hard to recall all the things we did this week… but I’ll try anyway. My brother-in-law and his family came at the end of last week, as I mentioned before. We had a peaceful yom-kippur, though it was very hot. Since it coincided with shabbat, we didn’t have to prepare much in the way of food, which made it an easy shabbat to prepare for! Immediately after the break-the-fast meal, we prepared our bags so we could go to Eilat for a couple days with the visiting family.

However, we (Esther and I) had to take care of some official business, in Modi’in, with our accountant before leaving the area. Stuff requiring both of us, and our signatures. So we couldn’t leave until a bit later than we wanted, and it was with a sense of being in the center of a whirlwind that we finally did head out for the southernmost city of Israel. The “official business” was not over with this visit, more on that later…

So we drove down past the Salt Sea, through the `Arava, past King Solomon’s copper mines and three and a half hours later found ourselves in Eilat. The last time I was there was thirty years ago; the place has changed just a little since then. For one thing, there must be a million hotels there — half of them owned by David Fattal. No idea who he might be, but he’s certainly got a lot of money for investment.

The hotel was fine, the rooms your typical modern hotel rooms. There was no “free WiFi”, which struck me as very odd. But then we noticed there was practically no free WiFi anywhere in Eilat! Maybe it’s a city ordinance; the only places with WiFi we could access were at the beaches. Very odd. Anyway, the hotel did have a very nice buffet, which was included in the price of our room.

One of the interesting things to us was just how many Arabs were also guests of the hotel. Not Arabs from Jordan or Egypt or Saudi Arabia (all of which are close to Eilat), but Israeli Arabs. Esther being one of the only non-Muslim guests with her head covered, made friends with half of the female Arabs there, it seemed. Besides being further proof that Israel is not “apartheid”, it also shows that if ordinary people are left on their own, they tend to get along just fine.

But all vacations must come to an end, and we returned late in the day before (the day before) sukkot; and I was very nervous about finishing our sukkah and making sure I had my four species. It all turned out well in the end. We put the sukkah in the back, this year, because we wanted to try to make it bigger to comfortably accommodate our many guests. I like the new arrangement, because it is less windy in the back and the floor is more level — besides the fact that we can make the sukkah bigger.

After we got back from our road-trip, we had to run off to a lawyer to get some papers signed for the bank (for our commercial account), and then in the morning we returned to the bank to finish off that set of papers and order our checks and other such things. It’s certainly been interesting opening a commercial bank account!

On the actual holiday itself, we did a barbecue. Since my brother-in-law is a real Argentine, he was put in charge of the grilling portion of things — and he did a bang-up job, I must say. I think everyone had a good time; at least the food was great!

So here I sit in my enlarged sukkah, enjoying the fine weather and preparing to thoroughly clean the area in preparation for shabbat. Wherever you are, I hope you have a peaceful and pleasant sukkot holiday.

This week we’ve more than made up for last week’s fast. But for shabbat we’re taking it a little bit easy. For one thing, we’re eating one meal in someone else’s sukkah. For the others, we’ll have:
various salatim, crock-pot chicken, rice, carrot kugel and fruit.

Until next week,
mo`adim lesimeḥa and shabbat shalom!

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