----- Forwarded Message -----
From: Linda Whittaker <olsvig2000@yahoo.com>
To: olsvig2000@yahoo.com
Sent: Thursday, April 12, 2012 5:27 AM
Subject: shabbat shalom 12.04.12
Hi everyone,
It's Thursday, but feels like Friday because the country is gearing down for the last day of Passover, a formal holiday like the first day. That means all businesses closed early today and will be closed tomorrow, but at sunset tomorrow there will be a major scramble because - everybody can eat bread again!!! Remember, Passover is the Feast of Unleavened Bread, so for about a week now most Jews have been eating souvenir, matzo, matzo. Matzo and cheese, matzo brye (dipped in egg and fried), pulverized and used like flour for cakes and cookies, etc. The stuff has the taste, texture and nutritional value of corrugated cardboard, but 100 calories per slice, and has an effect on the digestive system that is the opposite of prunes....It's not called the "bread of affliction" for nothing, as any Jew can tell you.
I dodged it, of course. God doesn't require a humble Gentile like me to cork my colon for a week, so I had bread in the freezer. There's a lot of things I'm spared by virtue of not being Jewish, but not having to eat matzo is probably of the aspects I appreciate the most....The only pity is that with a week of holiday, all the tasty street food is not out there, like falafel and burekas. Oh, probably just as well.
I've enjoyed this week off work. My first task was to put away the winter clothing, get out the summer clothing (the procedure is reversed in Sukkot, the Feast of Tabernacles in the autumn); I then cleaned the shed out back, washed out the dog houses (all had an impressive deposit of loessial soil). I took my car to the local Arab garage to get the year's accumulation of dents fixed, and then (God laughs) I no sooner got it home than I backed it into a garbage dumpster and got another scrape on the perfect, shiny backside. Gotta put in some sensors in the back end; can't back up worth squat, since my one-eyed vision can't judge distance.
Yesterday I went with a friend to the Ela Valley, where we climed Lupine Hill (Givat HaTermosim) where Saul's Israelites faced off with the Philistines on the opposite hill. It was crowded with hikers, but then everything in Israel is crowded with hikers during these intermediate days of Passover. I did see some of the last lupines, and a beautiful view.
Next we went to the Everest for lunch. The Everest Hotel is adjacent to my village and is my local restaurant. Right now they are making additions to the hotel, including a beautiful mosaic wall on the side of a new souvenier shop where they will sell things from Bethlehem and Hebron. The mosaic was made by an expert from Hebron. The owner pointed out to me the image of Mt. Everest on it was taken from a poster I brought back for him from Nepal, which is now proudly hanging in the hotel. That's nice!
Today I met with my sponsee (61 days, you can imagine how jumpy she is), then an AA meeting, then off with my little wheeled shopping cart to the great Mahane Yehuda open air market. I had gone for strawberries and salads, but the fresh garlic is now on sale, and I got three kilo of it. Ever see fresh garlic? It comes with a long "tail", the stem of the plant, and can be braided to hang on the wall to dry. But most of these bulbs I will use now, to make roasted garlic for tomorrow's dinner. (You drizzle olive oil over the cut top of the garlic bulb, bake it, and then squeeze the garlic toes like little tubes of toothpaste to get the soft roasted garlic out onto bread, or in this case, matzo. (I'll save mine for baugettes, like it's supposed to be eaten....)
So Passover comes to a close tomorrow, and on Saturday everyone scrambles to get some bread at last. I'll be back at work on Sunday. It's been a very nice holiday, beautiful weather, but I'm starting to get just a little bit bored and it is time to get back to work. If I had another week, I'd start on renovations in my house but the holiday is too short for that and too long just to sit around.
shabbat shalom,
Linda
No comments:
Post a Comment