October 18, 2003

Alison on Aliyah:  Sukkot in Jerusalem

When I returned to my neighborhood less than a month after leasing my apartment, I could barely recognize it.  Not because it was unfamiliar to me, but because I arrived on the morning of Erev Sukkot.  I had difficulty even maneuvering my luggage through the alley in front of my apartment – there was a sukkah in front of nearly every door!  I got off the airplane and unpacked to the sounds of the entire neighborhood hammering and hoisting and calling to each other for construction materials.  I have spent the week sitting in my courtyard, just listening to all of my neighbors eating and singing in their sukkot.  I’ve been going on walks through the neighborhood, marveling at the sights:  little boys running around, trying to keep their keepot on their heads; Orthodox men coming home from the market with their arms filled with bags of food; women with their heads covered, pushing their children in strollers towards shul.

This is a magical time to be in Israel, Jerusalem, Nachlaot (my neighborhood).  Sukkot, I have found out and should have remembered all along, is one of the three pilgrimage holidays.  This means that the city has been inundated with tourists, mostly Christian, throughout the week.  No one seems to mind that they aren’t Jewish – most of us are just thankful that they are here and spending money to bolster the Israeli economy.  One of the unexpected surprises of this week, for me, was that there was a huge parade a few days ago, on the very street on which my apartment looks out!  I woke up to the sounds of a loudspeaker and helicopters – of course I assumed a pegooah (bombing) had occurred.  But no, as I walked out of my apartment door and rounded the corner, I saw throngs of people watching as delegations from every country I could think of came up the street, one by one.  I saw groups from Brazil, Italy, Canada, Denmark, Malaysia, even Iceland!  Each group held signs: “Philippines support Israel,” “Austrian Christians love Israel,” “Israel: No Estas Solo.”  I found myself tearing up at every fresh sentiment that made its way up the hill.  I made eye contact with many of the marchers, silently thanking them through my tears.  It is a beautiful thing, knowing these thousands of people got on planes from every faraway country imaginable, touched down in Israel, and came to support us and show solidarity in their own way.

And this weekend the city has been celebrating Simchat Torah, another powerful day on the Jewish calendar.  I spent last night in the Old City, having Shabbat dinner with thirty other new olim from around the world, all of us celebrating our Jewishness and our commitment to our new country.  Tonight, this very moment in fact, there is a concert in my neighborhood.  Not forty paces away there is a live band and about two hundred people packed into a tiny little park, dancing and singing and lifting the Torah to the sky.  I have spent the past three hours watching this celebration, drinking in the energy and the happiness and the sense of community we all feel together tonight.  I have never heard “Shalom Aleichem” being sung with such fervor and power.  I watched an Orthodox man with his daughter on his shoulders, both of them dancing and swaying and holding onto each other, looks of utter peace and pleasure on their faces.  Nothing else exists for them right in this moment.

I know how they feel.  As I stood in my new neighborhood, coming to terms anew with the fact that I live here, nothing else mattered.  Not the bombings, not the danger, not the goodbyes, not the fact that I don’t have any furniture.  This is a truly magical time in my life.  Everything affects me so deeply these days.  I am overcome with pride and satisfaction and peace.  I am so thankful that I made this decision, that I have made aliyah.  I am doing what so many people have told me they wish they could do.  I have refused to let this opportunity pass me by, and I have chosen to fulfill a dream that, unrealized, would have haunted me with regret for the rest of my life.  And in the face of all this, nothing else does truly matter.