Shoshana in our newly assembled patio furniture in the freshly built sukkah. If you look carefully, you can see the plexiglass panels against the fence.
Panoramic view from the sukkah
Sunset off our porch.
I do not miss three day Yom Tov at all. It's really great having that middle day off! On Friday, we met up with the Rozens, Fisher Cohens, Joseph Gershony and Sophia Gluck for a short hike to a cave with scores of bats (very cool) and then a natural rock slide which the kids thoroughly enjoyed. As a matter of fact, Hodayah's class took a field trip back to the same place yesterday! So she was an experienced hiker there :)
Shabbat was peaceful and then Sunday we headed to a National Park near the Old City where visitors can participate in sifting through the rubble that resulted from less-than-careful removal of material from an area on the Temple Mount. My nephew found a coin from the Second Temple era! Very exciting.
Gefen looking at his coin with his dad. Other noteworthy finds from this project are in the glass display case seen in the picture.
Gefen with his coin! They will take it to the lab and let him know what else they find out about it. They wrote his name and phone number on the little envelope.
Monday we went to Mechon Hamikdash where they are quietly and peacefully preparing the vessels for an eventual third Beit Hamikdash. They have no political involvement and are very careful to stay outside that particular arena but the tour is very interesting. Their plans for the Third Temple include heated floors (for the poor bare feet of the Kohanim!) and an underground parking facility! The copper sink was much bigger than I expected and also is built to have heated water and a built in thermometer. I will spare you all the details but it was really interesting to be in an environment where the Third Beit Hamikdash was seen as a question of when, not if, and there was so much hope and anticipation surrounding it. (We also met up with Lisa there too who was in for a few days from Italy!)
After Yom tov it was good to get back the routine for a week, though because Tiferet's Bat Mitzvah was that weekend we weren't quite back to business as usual yet. We did find her a dress, the Dvar Torah was finished, and the invitations were picked up and delivered by hand (certainly no time to mail them!). We hosted a small kiddush in Shimona and Erez's backyard for about ten families (trying not to create overwhelming experiences) and had my whole family here for Shabbos. Eighteen people in my dining room which still has boxes piled everywhere!
Sunday Tiferet stayed home from school to get ready and practice her speech and the neighbor across the street made her a really cool hair style (which she learned from watching YouTube videos :) It was like a bun of braid and involved a special donut shaped foam contraption that lives inside the bun. Very high level stuff.
Bat Mitzvah was really great; I know it's obvious and I really do understand that it's not a coincidence, but it still felt really cool that I knew and liked everybody in the room! Many friends from Oakland were there and a high school friend from Seattle who now lives in Beitar and a surprise visit from Yitz which was a great moment (sorry, huge!). I did end up hiring a DJ last minute which was absolutely the right decision because tracking the music and getting forty REALLY excited eleven and twelve year old girls dancing is decidedly not my strong suit. Tiferet's classmates and friends from Bnei Akiva were amazingly lively and enthusiastic, they danced up a storm, wrote and performed a song for her, threw confetti on her, lifted her on a chair and sat quietly through all the speeches even though they were in English and I imagine most of them did not understand much. Rabbi Rosenblatt flew in for the occasion and spoke beautifully and I felt that it was celebratory, respectable and not over the top.
The girl who you don't recognize is a very lovely friend of Tiferet's who got a camera for her Bat Mitzvah a couple months ago and took pictures for us.
The other big news of the week is that our bookcases arrived! The carpenter built them for our space and we are very excited to be able to unpack our boxes (and boxes and boxes) of books and I am most of the way done. I had meant to take before and after pictures but you will have to imagine the before and wait for the after because I am not quite done. It's a big step towards feeling normal in our house after months of boxes just piled in an empty room. I drove into Yerushalayim last night and gave Judah and two of his colleagues a ride home. Then I was putting away books and noticed that one of my passengers was the author of one of the books. Then I thought about it a bit more and resisted the temptation to start counting the number of books we have in our library whose authors are now our neighbors... We have about 50 cardboard boxes in the front of the house (which Judah dragged to the covered part after it started raining last night). I need to load them into the van and drive them up to the cardboard recycling bin (ah, curbside pickup...).
I am deliberately avoiding politics here but it was terribly sad for everyone and I was feeling very mindful of the 3 month old baby whose parents had waited for so long to have her and then the 22 year old. Rabbi Glick is the brother of a neighbor here so I first got an email through our neighborhood listserv asking for prayers and then I saw the news. There are no words. Well, there are lots and I make speeches in my car when I am alone and feel probably the same as the rest of us do except that it's in front of me all the time.
Anyway, wishing us all a Shabbat Shalom and a peaceful future.
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