Beloved of the soul

I was expecting to enjoy last Shabbos with my cousins who live in Shiloh. I'd very much liked them when I met some of that family in Jerusalem three years ago, and my daughter, who's stayed with them often, had said how lovely they were to be with and how musical they are.

Yes, come, it will be an interesting Shabbat, said Yossi, the dad. We will be having two young soldiers as guests too. They came to Israel as young emigrants without their parents, and they are not Jewish according to Jewish law. But they are interested in converting to Judaism

We got there in the early afternoon. By the time we were settled and unpacked, it was getting near Shabbos. Yossi, the dad, had said that they had their own tradition of how they bring it in, but I hadn't realised what he meant when I first heard Efrat and her sister Asnat playing the piano.

I knew the music so well, and it was a very familiar Jewish mystical song, but I couldn't remember what it was. Efrat, who's fifteen, and has apparently never had a piano lesson, was improvising variations and playing with such style and feeling that I realised I was in the presence of a very gifted player. And the spirit of the music lifted me right out of the world of long bus journeys and a scrappy lunch in the bus station.

The tablecloth was set ready for Shabbos.

And the table was laid for eleven.

And then the whole family and the guests gathered and I really began to understand what was so special about the way they welcome Shabbos.

Efrat and Asnat went on playing, and everyone else gathered round the sofas. David was playing the guitar, and the family spontaneously sang just like a close harmony group. It was beautiful, and lovely to be part of it.

Then we lit the candles and walked down to the shul. It's designed to represent the Mishkan, the portable sanctuary, which the ancient Israelites used during their forty years in the wilderness. It was then set up in ancient Shiloh after the Israelites crossed the Jordan. The ancient site is close by.

Whoever designed the shul must also have had an exceptional understanding of acoustics, for I've never before seen a shul with what looked like carpeting coating its ceiling and most of the side walls. And that was probably no accident, because as soon as the singing started, I could see I was in an exceptionally musical community.

I could hear so many strong, beautiful voices, men's and women's, right across the shul. They spontaneously formed themselves into layers and layers of harmony, so that it was as if I was suddenly in the midst of a first rate choir.

I've only twice previously had experiences of finding myself at the heart of a musical community like this. When I was an  undergraduate at the start of the sixties, I once spent some time in North Wales, visiting a fellow student. We went off on a coach trip organized from their little village. As soon as the coach got under way, they burst into song, and they too spontaneously went into layers of harmony and musicality, singing Welsh nonconformist hymns. And the other was the experience of hearing the singing of a London black church visiting a school I was in.

So I'll remember that Erev Shabbos service as one of the most beautiful I've ever been in. Half the melodies were ones I wasn't familiar with. And the ones I did know, I'd never heard sung with such grace and harmony. I heard what it was that Efrat had been improvising on earlier. It was "Yedid Nefesh", which is a beautiful mystical poem traditionally sung on Erev Shabbos. You can translate that in a range of ways, but I like Beloved of the Soul. It visualises both the soul and the Almighty as both male and female, although most of the English translations tidy this up so that you get a female soul yearning for the Almighty:

Please, my God, please heal her by showing her the beauty of your light.
Then she will be strengthened, and she will be healed, and she will have eternal joy.

By the time we got back to the house, the numbers for dinner had grown to fourteen. Two extra soldiers turned up. And another guest. Yossi said that he thought a few more people would turn up after dinner.

I'd noticed a children's book there of a type you wouldn't find in an English household, although Asnat, who's about twelve, was reading the Hebrew edition of Harry Potter and the Chamber of Secrets while the youngest, Shmuel Yeshayahu, aged eight, was reading Harry Potter and the Philosopher's Stone.This book was called My brother was a hero. The characters were illustrated by photographed clay figures. A little boy, just a bit younger than Shmuel Yeshayahu, has a big brother who's a soldier. The big brother is a hero to him because of the way he plays with him and teaches him things. Then one day, there's a knock at the door. The soldier brother has been killed in a terrorist explosion. The little boy is shown looking at what's clearly a freshly filled grave. The subsequent pages deal with his world that's lost its colour and its meaning. But the family hold each other together. The photo of his brother on the wall at last seems to be smiling. His joy in life returns.

It's a book produced by an Israeli organization which supports the families of victims of terrorism. Just over three years ago, Shmuel Yeshayahu's oldest brother, Noam, was shot by a terrorist. He was an off duty soldier serving as a volunteer in the kitchen of a West Bank yeshiva one Erev Shabbos. With his dying strength, he locked the door into the dining hall and threw the key away. Though he died, the dozens of people, including young families, in the dining room were saved.

I don't know how any parent copes with the loss of a child, in whatever circumstances. I can't imagine anything worse that can happen, because nothing in the world, no achievement, and certainly no possessions could ever match the privilege of having and raising a child.  Yossi and his wife  Piki devote part of their energies to talking about Noam and what he believed in to groups of  young people, mainly off-duty soldiers, who, like the dinner guests, chose to emigrate without their parents to Israel, and now are searching for encounters with Jewish life and values as they have never experienced them.

After dinner, thirty eight of them showed up. Yossi and Piki didn't turn a hair, but laid out bowls of fruits and nuts and endless plates of cake. Everyone introduced themselves. There were girls originally from Ukraine, Russia, Rumania and Holland. Young men from the USA and Ethiopia, Norway and South America. They may have been searching for something more, but they all struck me as being full of life and optimism, proud of having made their way through the choices they'd made. The family had a book of Noam's writings printed, around which Yossi and Piki weave their talk about who Noam was, what he meant to them, and what he stood for.

Most of them were in the shul the next morning, and I realised some of them had been amongst the strongest singers I'd heard the night before.

I've never eaten so much cake in twenty four hours. But this was a Shabbos about a loving family and the way they welcome so many people into their home and their lives. Being a religiously observant couple, Yossi and Piki do not do public displays of affection with each other, though they do very much with their children. But their body language when they sit next to each other, and their quiet and tender way of talking to each other shows how deep and strong their love for each other is. Piki told me they first went out as teenagers together in Petach Tikvah, where they grew up, when she was sixteen. Then they had a year apart. And then they chose each other again, and they were married when she was twenty and he was twenty three.

They have had nine children, of whom seven survive, for Noam's twin sister died soon after she was born. The whole family is exceptionally calm and loving, full of care for each other.

On Shabbos morning, I came down to find David, who's twenty-one, was reading Mesillat Yesharim. I nearly fell over, for this book of eighteenth century Jewish ethical and moral advice is one that I have been reading avidly recently, and it keeps coming into so many of my conversations. I find it quite as sophisticated as any of the fashionable philosophy or social psychology books I sometimes read. I asked him what he thought about it, and he seemed fairly lukewarm. I was trying to say that I thought that one would get the most out of it only after enough years of maturity to have made rather a lot of mistakes, and to have had plenty of opportunities to begin to come to terms with one's own inadequacies and fallibilities. I was at the limits of my Hebrew, which became not so much broken as shattered into tiny little pieces. But one of the guest soldiers helped out and I think we all understood what I'd been trying to say by the end of our conversation.

When you've had twenty six hours sharing the life of a family like that, and hearing and being part of that extraordinary musical harmony, you come away feeling your life is richer and fuller of meaning than you knew.

It felt like a magical time. And the last time I had that sort of experience was when I first got to know my family of entirely secular left wing socialist cousins in Tel Aviv, back in 1962. They too had a home which was full of love and welcome, and which overflowed with warmth and hospitality.

Comments

[Huldah]

Thank you so much, Judy, for such a wonderful and uplifting account of Shabbos in this loving home.

I feel sooooo envious that you are in Israel. However, God willing, I shall be back in October, and bringing with me 4 people who have never before been there!

Roll on the months...

[Yisrael Medad]

Sorry I didn't know you were by us at Shiloh. Lovely portrayal of the Apters. Thanks for the writing.