An Aliyah Journal

After six months I am still startled when Israeli women open their mouths to speak. Not so much with Israeli men - they are after all, men. Even when they speak English, they speak a different language, but the women look like women I know, like women I've grown up with like my cousins and my aunts, my friends mothers and my mother's friends, they look like they should sound like them too, but they don’t. Israeli men are different - they all look like members of the Mosad, or ex members of the Mosad. They wear dark glasses and jeans and walk around with attitude befitting a middle-eastern man who works for the Mosad. Even the softly spoken more evolved ones look like they work for the Mosad – in a different department – in higher intelligence. The women however look the same, apart from their shoes they dress the same, they mother and shop and act the same, but when they open their mouths to speak, from deep within comes a gruff loud voice that scares the hell out of me. I

It's Simchat Torah. Small groups of families and teens drunk with wine and song decorate the street. The heat of summer has lifted and daylight savings brings in the dark sky well before its time. Elijah runs in to the house ahead of the rest and calls out in great excitement as if to warn me "the whole of shule's coming to our house, now!" Earlier I had sat outside alone under the light of a few scattered candles and remembered how this festival had been for me in the years before. If you were a mother of small children – which I had been for many years, it was a 'boys club'. More often than not, I chose to stay home with sleeping toddlers whose routine was more important to keep than my need to be part of the fun. Now my sleeping toddlers had all grown up and were fiercely independent and more than capable of getting themselves home from shule alone, in the dark. Still these days I choose to stay home, treasuring my few moments silence after a long month