Last week, FZY’s Movement Team got in touch with the wonderful Noah Efron—previously a member of our partner movement in USA (Young Judaea) and now a professor at Israel’s Bar Ilan University—about sharing a little of his incredible Promised Podcast via The Young Zionist, our ideological journal/blog/vlog that we share on Facebook.
Please enjoy Noah Efron & his Promised Podcast musings on what makes Tel Aviv such a special, and distinctly Jewish, city. The transcript - below - looks and reads like glorious and gorgeous poetry...
Fighting here to the studio, uh dodging the buses
and the trucks and the cars, things were like
they always are but yesterday and the night
before on Yom Kippur when the buses and the
trucks and cars stopped and the streets are taken
over by people congregating or walking or riding
bikes or scooters. Everything was different and
here are few of the things that I saw:
Someone took out a
bunch of garden chairs and set them up in a
semi circle right in the middle of the street and
then, when I came back a few minutes later, they
were filled with people each holding a beer
arguing loudly, already about politics.
On Nordau, I saw
sitting in the middle of the street two little
kids, brothers I think, one maybe two years old and
the other three. They're very little kids and
each of them holding in each hand
toy trucks.
And they're rolling them up and down on the pavement, while
saying something like vroom vroom vroom vroom vroom,
as their parents at on the bench in the middle of
the boulevard watching them. They were playing
cars on the black top of the street itself and
they were apoplecticly happy about having their
cars right in the middle of the street.
Now on
the corner of Ibn Gvirol and Jabotinsky, after
Kol nidre,
there was a circle of maybe a hundred or
a hundred and fifty people singing songs into the
night in that intersection.
Just up the block
from us, also on Nordau,
the folks who had just
finished building a duplex on the roof of a
building renovated to be earthquake proof on
Tuesday night - the night of Kol Nidre - and they had a
cocktail party on the roof and there were folks
leaning over the rail with drinks looking down at
the huge crowds below and talking and laughing.
On Dizengoff, I saw a 10 year-old crash his skateboard
at a pretty high speed into the curb and go
tumbling off, rolling into the middle of the
street and then, as everyone gasped, as they
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were silenced for a moment in the street... He
laughs and he grabs his board and he skates away.
On Yarkon. A herd of kids on bikes. Maybe
there are 40 of them. I think they were a class
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of kids. Maybe, like third graders, or fourth
graders and they stop then one of them yelled out
hey 'where is Gal?' and they all stopped to look
around and try to figure out where their
classmate had gotten lost. And I saw maybe two
dozen times someone on the Street, throw
themselves around the neck of someone coming the
other way, saying oh my Gd, it's been so long
since I've seen you and stopping to talk now.
Everyone knows that Yom Kippur in Tel Aviv
is something unlike anything else in that on this
day of pollution levels go down by 99 percent and
that you can hear the songs of birds on that day
that cannot be heard on any other day of the year
and that it is the most festive and magical day
of the year on the streets of the city. It's been
often observed that there is a great contrast
between what happens on the two thousand
streets of the city of Tel Aviv and what happens
in the 500 synagogues of the city. The
synagogues, it is said, are gripped by solemnity, and
the streets by life, gaiety which is right of
course, but it's also completely wrong. Tumbling
out into the thronging streets after Kol Nidre,
I felt again how the celebration outside was
somehow a continuation, not an interruption of
the introspection inside and I rolled this around
my mind all day and I spoke to some people about
it and I thought about how Heschel had said that
he had as I've already mentioned, on the show...
He marched, he prayed with his feet, but that's not it
really. That's too pretty a thought and the
people in the streets are not at all praying:
It's disrespectful to what they're doing to call
it that. And so I came to this which is also
wrong. But maybe it's closer.
What we were doing
in both places in the Synagogue and the Street
was that we were narrowing. We were making
ourselves smaller. In the synagogue, we made a
world briefly in which there's no eating and
drinking or work. Nothing against ourselves
and each other and maybe God. In the Street we
made the world briefly in which there is no 'far
away'; There is only here and there are no buses
and cars to take us elsewhere and there's no
noise except for ourselves and the noises that we
make. And in both places,
making things in ourselves narrower smaller, less
able, you feel around you this great rising up of
life itself. The kind of surging of spirit... a
surging of sociability and an emanation of
human energy itself. In the power of leaving your
chavura (Jewish study group) after Kol Nidre to see kids tumbling and
babies pushing cars through the streets and
crowds singing in intersections is that you feel
like that thing that you're struggling to reach
when you're wearing your Tallit (prayer shawl) that connection,
that depth, that meaning... it's everywhere
everywhere, everywhere when you look outside in the
sacred community, that is Tel Aviv - Jaffa.
Listen here or download in your favourite podcast app!
https://www.facebook.com/promisedpodcast/
https://tlv1.fm/podcasts/the-promised-podcast-show/
