Rugelach and Blessings To Go

My friend dropped me off across the street and pointed out the shelter where the minibus stopped. "The 16 sherut will take you straight to the train to the airport," she said. "Don't get on the 4 or the regular bus." I wasn't sure if she was telling me to avoid the normal bus because it didn't go to the same destination as the sherut did, or because the large regular buses are often the target of suicide bombers. (They're larger, and they're government-subsidized; both are attractive reasons for a potential terrorist to get his bomb on.)

Not that it mattered. I liked the feeling of the private minibus. The clientele was a mish-mosh of scraggly hippie kids, snowman-shaped Russians, and old ladies with shopping trolleys bigger than they were. Before that, though, I stopped to pick up some rugelach.

Now, rugelach are an important part of any Israel experience. Fresh from the oven, painted with honey and sticky from melted chocolate and cinnamon that's still oozing out the sides. I know people who've finely tuned the art of buying a box of Marzipan rugelach straight from the oven, hailing a sherut to the airport, and landing in New York 10 hours later with the gummy dough still warm and the chocolate still drizzly.

But Marzipan, and the people buying it, had the disadvantage of being in Jerusalem, which is an hour away from the airport on a good day. I was in Tel Aviv. And I was, by my friend's estimation, 20 minutes from the gates of Ben-Gurion International.

So I popped into the closest store with a kosher certificate. I picked out a selection -- mostly cinnamon, a few chocolates, some savory triangles to satiate that side of our mouths. (And by "our," I mean my wife and kids, because if I got away with one whole piece of the loot, it'd be a good day in Brooklyn.) I picked up the tongs. The guy yelled at me that I shouldn't touch all the rugelach, that I was taking too long. I told him that I was choosing them for my kids; I was about to get on a flight to America.

The other baker looked up from across the room. "Do you live in New York?" he asked, in Hebrew. And, when I nodded: "In Queens?"

I said, well, Brooklyn.

"Do you ever go to the grave of the Lubavitcher Rebbe?" he asked. I said, sometimes. The truth is, I'd only been once, although my wife gets around there fairly often, being of that ilk herself.

But sometimes was as good as yes. He fed out a piece of paper from the cash register and wrote something down in Hebrew. "This is my son," he said, and read out the name. "When you go to the Lubavitcher Rebbe, I need you to ask him for a complete healing. Heal his body, heal his soul. Here." He fumbled in his pocket and drew out a handful of change. I told him, don't worry, I already had tzedakah to travel with, but he insisted. I promised him I would. Then he came around the counter

My first reaction was, Don't you realize I'm going down? When someone moves to Israel, we call it making aliyah. No matter what you think of it politically, the land at the latitude and longitude of 31 o 30' N and 34 o 45' E is a pretty potent place, metaphysically. The only major world religion that hasn't had some sort of epiphany near Jerusalem is Buddhism*, and that's because they're all vegetarians and don't have any energy.** Whereas I am going to New York, which is most famous for people making money and soulless TV shows.

Then he came from around the counter and hugged me. Yes, he hugged me. For something I hadn't even done yet and wasn't even sure I was going to do personally. It was that potential, that in-the-moment energy, that I really could help him out, that I would transverse boroughs for him, or even just that I happened to be in the neighborhood of the Lubavitcher Rebbe's cemetery and I'd blurt out a prayer.

In the moment I said yes, I was a complete tzaddik.

I've been back for 4 days so far. I haven't gone yet, but I'm really going to try.

I wasn't sure about going to Israel for 4 days. It was a hella long flight and an awful long time to be away from a very young baby. But that's the reason why we do the things we do, whether it's going to work to earn money or going to Israel and saying a prayer at the Western Wall -- because in those moments are all the potential in the world. Fate could go any way. And, if we push hard enough, it really might.
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* - Yes, I'm including Hinduism. Ask me about it sometime.
** - Sorry, but it's true. And I know all Buddhists aren't vegetarians; it's just funnier when you say it that way. And, as a further postscript: I am a vegetarian, and I'm feeling pretty tired right now because I forgot to pack some proteiny thing for lunch today (or, I did, but the lentils were crunchy. Ewww). So there.

http://www.myjewishlearning.com/practices/Ethics/Tzedakah_Charity.shtml

Me. Live. Rapping.

Okay, I actually can't watch this. I'm a squirmer. Here's some live video footage of me doing my verse on Stereo Sinai's song "Hafachta Mitzpedi (Dance)," the first time I've ever done it in front of people. "It" meaning "performing the song live," and "it" also meaning "rapping."

Not sure whether this is totally awful or just plain gawkward. Somebody watch it and tell me. If you can't say something nice, you can totally just pat me on the back and say I was wearing a cute shirt. (Or talk about Miriam's sheitel instead, and then go watch Alan and Miriam performing the song Eleven Below from that night instead. Tell me it doesn't make you want to fall in love with life itself.)

Ahem. On to me.

G-dcast: Babies and Hippies

Okay, I was uneasy about this one. Because you guys know me as the big tough punk of G-dcast, and this is SO SWEET AND HIPPY. But it's pretty damn praiseworthy, and Chanan makes it so beautiful that it's kind of inevitable how good this is. If I do say so myself. And it's possibly one of the most abstract G-dcasts we've done, for a just-as-abstract parsha, which led to some interesting discussions about animation, and about the Torah. And now that you're watching it, hopefully, it will lead to some more.

Matisyahu: Return of the "King"

Although I can't actually remember whether he played "King Without a Crown," that iconoclastic first single that a friend swore was going to condemn him to one-hit wonder status forever, it didn't feel like Matisyahu's brief history was being reinvented last night. On the seventh of his eight-night Hanukkah stint at the Music Hall of Williamsburg (insert the appropriate jokes about how Shabbat makes Orthodox Jews late for everything here), he played a more-than-two-hour set that was alternately pensive and meandering and quietly grooving and straight-ahead all-out rocking.

Matis's music has always lived in the space between worlds -- the secular and religious, the contemplative and the party vibe, the reggae and the rock. (Here's an article about his new work, just to get you caught up.) Last night, the wings of the place were filled with Hasidic Jews who wanted to come to the show but were avoiding the dancing, and the tiny two-steps-up division served as a makeshift boundary for them. The crowd was all over the place -- I was skeptical that it would be mostly Orthodox Jews, and afraid that it would be mostly hippies, but most of the folks there were just regular people. Good-looking people, too, as opener Mike Doughty pointed out repeatedly in his set*.

The couple in front of us were these Asian-Australian cool-kid transplants who wouldn't have been out of place at the Yeasayer show down the street, which gave me hope that (a) the one-hit wonder thing isn't happening, and (b) his music really isn't as insular as my default listening position (jumping on the furniture around the house, payos bopping, shouting out Aramaic phrases at the top of my lungs) might give one reason to think. And when a hippie did finally pop up, it was onstage -- this dreadlocked kid going wild on a whole array of percussion instruments, doing intense and admirable things to a tambourine.

Which brings us to the music. The band started playing before Matisyahu came onstage, which in normal circumstances I always think of as an egotistical pretense -- the crowd raves, the band builds up, and the singer ascends to his place of glory. But when Matis came on, there was none of that -- it wasn't like he was ignoring it, but more like he was unaware that it was happening at all.

The band launched into "Sea to Sea," which I always used to call "the Amidah song" before I looked it up on Amazon twenty seconds ago -- it's the song that opens his live album, which is the band doing their low bass funk thing while Matis sings the Hebrew words that introduce the silent devotional. It was faster than the album version, and the band was putting in everything, and Matis was holding his own but not going crazy.

Turns out he was just building up.

From there they blasted through "Youth," which gave the crowd the requisite recognizable song before launching into the meat of the set. It leaped between hard, driving guitar rock and more chill, rhythm-propelled stuff. At times it didn't seem like songs so much as ideas, Matis and the band tossing freestyles at each other. At one point, he was alone on stage with Shalom Mor, an Israeli oud player who flew in especially for this series of concerts, and a harpist, and -- after nearly an hour spent beatboxing-free -- he dropped into a fast beat.

That was the pace of the entire show. Usually, you see a band play three songs, and, boom, you know what they're about. Here, every twenty minutes it was a completely different concert. I started to get bored during the first extended jam (although it might have just been annoyance with the cloying pot smell that suddenly sprang from half a dozen different places...damn Hasidim), and then the guitarist started plucking a pop song, the drummer jumped in, and Matisyahu started freestyling over it -- well, not exactly freestyling so much as an impromptu rendition of the liturgical song "Yibaneh Ha'Mikdash," which roughly translates to "building the Temple."

I think the best songs alive are cover songs. Maybe it's because they stick around forever; maybe because they're the songs that are so good that they're addictive. That is, I think, where prayers com from. They're essentially cover songs that we perform every day.

I couldn't tell you why, but "Yibaneh" is the moment I realized that I really love what Matisyahu is doing. I've never been that big a fan of reggae, and though I've warmed to Jewish music, I still mostly feel like Jews and I live in two different worlds: they don't get me, and I don't get them. But that moment when he was screaming out the words -- words that most of the crowd probably didn't understand, and even more of them weren't paying attention to the meaning of -- I felt like I was in the middle of his lyrics and like I understood. There's a midrash that says that the Third Temple isn't going to be built by the Messiah; that we're going to have to start building it ourselves. Not to be *too* cliche, but it seems like Matisyahu's doing exactly that.



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* -- who is an amazing musician in his own right, and has a huge archive of concerts on mp3 here. I might write about his set later, but we'll see.