Nowhere To Dine
And so my first Pesach holiday – also known as Passover - after becoming an Israeli citizen, arrived.
It was Seder night - the day before the night of eating at the family table - and I was in my local Blockbusters when the video swiper, David, said to me, “Where are you going for Pesach?”
All my blood family being in England (something that seems to intrigue and shock most Israelis - “not even a cousin here?” they ask in disblief,) I said that I had no plans except to watch a movie. Suddenly David was serious.
-You Jewish? You celebrate Pesach?-
- Yes.
- So why aren’t you going anywhere? It can’t be. That’s not right.
It wasn’t that this guy was particularly religious but as he explained to me, everybody went somewhere at Pesach.
- But nobody’s invited me, I replied.
- Nobody’s invited you? Are you sure? -
- Yes! Yes! -
Like a computer searching for a programme I could feel him desperate to solve something. Finally he gave me that look that said, Acha! I know what’s going on here...
- Have you, he asked, actually told anybody that you’ve got nowhere to go at Pesach?
- Well no, I replied, at this point fighting back tears of self pity and wondering how I got backed into this therapy-like corner.
- Well that’s it exactly, said the enlightened one, in Israel you have to tell people that you’ve got nowhere to go at Pesach. -
Next morning, now convinced that I must be somewhere for Pesach, I told people that I had nowhere to go, as the DVD Doc had advised.
Showered In Invites
A friendly woman at work immediately gave me her phone number. – No need to decide now. And come casual. You must come! – she begged, waving her mobile around in the hand of an outstretched arm.
I also told a woman friend who I liked to coffee with and she was so over the top in selling me her mother’s cooking, as to whet my suspicious British mind. Later that day, I got another hearty invite from some strangers on the beach, a bunch of bohos, and by evening I was fixed for Pesach at a friend’s house in Gan Galuyot which seemed most appropiate because it translates as Foreigners’ Suburb.
When six months later Rosh Ha Shannah – the Jewish New Year - honeyed into my life, I knew the procedure.
This time I went for a Moroccan experience only to discover that the food was all that my friend had promised but I couldn’t quite enjoy it because I was constantly nagged to take more. The mother and me almost reached war, at least unspoken hostility, as i tried to convince her that her cooking was quality but please, preety please, can I have less?
Eat And Be Merry
The moment I stepped on to Israeli soil I gathered that my new countrymen like to eat. The woman in the office at Ben Gurion airport who gave me 50 shekels for arriving as a new immigrant (i could have been entitled to more if i hadn’t visited Israel so much in the past as a tourist) said to me – Here you go. That will buy you a lunch. -
I come from a country where, at a party, you’ll be offered a bathfull of beers and in Tel Aviv I learn to bring a dish to a rooftop party or a picnic in HaYarkon Park, even to a wedding one time, only not to the Pesach dinner of a Moroccan mother whose spent more than all day sweating in her kitchen.
And so I find myself asking Why do Israelis love to eat? Why do so many, friends and strangers, seem only too happy to invite me to the dinner table on the holiest of nights?
Perhaps the answer is in the Friday night ritual of eating a meal with the family. Togetherness is the lesson that I am learning here – together we celebrate, together we eat, together we will work out your problems even if the other is just the guy who keeps your DVD account. And eating, when it’s not force feeding, nobody can deny, is a good thing to do together.
Or could it be that food and the special meals that are prepared for major holidays are an antidote to all the hardships that locals tell me happen in Israel. Every Friday in my weekend newspaper supplement, I see story after story on politics, history and war and then walla! I arrive at the last pages of the paper for some happy appetite enhancing ending, like how to make the perfect cheesecake or what to do with a pomegrante.
Keeping Quiet
In a month’s time, another Pesach and this time I have decided to go it alone. Brief experience has taught me that every time I go for a festive dinner in a friend’s house, I end up missing my own family and our familial ritual pace.
But in deciding to bring in the New Year alone. I have a new problem. I must NOT tell anyone.
Friends and even strangers will, undoubtedly, rise up in outrage, demanding that I eat at their tables. They will look at me with compassionate eyes, and explain that I don’t have to be alone – we are all one family – and when I try to say that I want to be alone, then they will look at me like I am weird.
So this year I have an imaginary friend near Jerusalem taking me to his family home, and his mother won’t mind that I don’t eat meat, that apparently I eat like a bird, and afterwards, I’ll be watching movies from my local DVD store.
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