Shabbat Shalom from Jerusalem

What a difference 24 hours can make.

Yesterday at this time we were walking through the area of the Warsaw Ghetto, crunching on snow underfoot, contemplating Jewish loss and Jewish heroism, and feeling chilled to the bone despite all our layers. Today we spent time in the Shuk Machaneh Yehudah, in t-shirts, and where it seemed like the entirety of Am Yisrael was not only present, but agitated, late in making their Shabbat purchases, and determined to walk through exactly where you were already standing. And it felt great.

We had a relatively smooth experience at the airport, and against the travel agent’s predictions, every one of our bags made it on the flight! We collected all of our bags, loaded our buses, did our requisite air raid siren drill, and set off for Jerusalem.

Light was just beginning to come over the horizon as we entered the city, so we stopped for a brief Shehechiyanu and overlook of the Old City from the Tayelet, before pulling up at the hostel and settling into our rooms to sleep for the morning. Breakfast was on offer, but most students chose to skip breakfast and sleep through till noon when we gathered for a walk to the shuk for lunch and shopping before Shabbat.

In a few minutes we will walk to Yemin Moshe to daven Kabbalat Shabbat and bring in Shabbat together. We will likely use some of the same melodies that we did last week in Krakow, but with a completely different valence. After walking through nearly 1000 years of Jewish history in Eastern Europe, including the most painful years in our people’s history, we are now in Jerusalem, capital of the beautiful, always complicated, and never boring Jewish state, the State of Israel, appreciating and understanding all that our ancestors have been praying for, for 2000 years.