October 12, 2004
Alison on Aliyah:  The Holiest Day in the Holy Land

             There is a lot one can say about Israel, both positive and negative, and just as many people to disagree with every statement.  But one thing no one can deny is that this country really knows how to honor a holiday.  I have lived in Israel for exactly a year now, and so I have had a chance, for the first time, to experience every holiday during that span of time.  There was something very special about celebrating my second Sukkot in a row in the country, to see how my life and experiences here have come full-circle in the past 365 days.  Truly, holidays here are a way of marking time and of closing and reopening cycles.

             I have loved every holiday here in Jerusalem:  the stockpiling of schach (palm fronds for the roofs of the sukkah) for Sukkot; the dancing around the synagogues during Simchat Torah; the gaudy costumes and kids spraying silly string at everyone on Purim; even the city-wide burning of bread before Pesach.  I was awed by how places of entertainment shut down and all television channels show only memorial programming on Yom HaShoah and Yom HaZikaron.  But never in my life have I experienced anything like Yom Kippur in Jerusalem.

             There is a scene in the popular movie “Vanilla Sky,” when Tom Cruise walks out into a major intersection in New York City in the middle of the day and looks around in amazement at the vast emptiness around him.  Not a single car or other human being is on the streets, and one assumes that it must be the end of the world or something similarly catastrophic.  I was immediately transported into a scene such as this when I left my house on Yom Kippur to take a walk through Jerusalem.

             The major arterial on which my apartment is situated, normally a constant source of honking, squealing tires, and exhaust fumes, was like a wasteland.  As far as I could look in every direction, not a single car could be seen.  Traffic lights were actually switched off.  People were walking in the middle of the streets with young children and baby carriages.  A few yelled to me that I could take my dog off her leash, as there was no danger of her encountering a car today.  As I moved tentatively to strolling down the center of the road -- on the median, no less -- I was suddenly startled by a whooshing noise approaching rapidly behind me.  Then I saw a pack of teenage boys zooming down the center lane on their bikes, weaving from side to side in the sheer pleasure of having room to ride for one day out of the year.

             I have to admit, the whole scene was startling, and profoundly eerie.  But after I got used to it, I fell in love with the city all over again.  There was such a deep sense of serenity in an entire city so quiet, so wrapped up in the intensity of honoring the most solemn day of the Jewish calendar.  Rumors have it that upwards of eighty percent of the population in Jerusalem honors Yom Kippur in the traditional ways, and even my least religious friends still went to synagogue and fasted.  In a city so constantly wracked with disagreements and protests and uncertainty, it is truly breathtaking to take part in a single day during which almost everyone agrees on something, and acts accordingly.

             So I spent the day in the park with my dog, drinking in the quiet and the peace, and talking with other Jerusalemites passing through.  I managed to find a few other dog-owners who happened to be as non-religious as I, and we talked about what the day was like for the minority of us here in the city.  One young woman laughingly mentioned that, earlier in the day, she had been hunched over by her third-floor apartment window, trying to eat a quick bowl of cereal as discretely as possible, when she happened to catch the eye of an Orthodox Jew walking on the street below just as she brought another spoonful to her mouth.  Another woman remembered a Yom Kippur a few years ago when she had seen a group of "anti-religious" Jewish boys having a barbeque in the middle of the public park in which we were sitting.

             Afterwards, as I reflected on my first Yom Kippur in Eretz Yisrael, I realized that perhaps even on this sacred day, not all of us agree on how to behave and how to honor the holiest day of our year.  Even as I ate my dinner and flicked on my living room light, I knew I had witnessed something great that day.  Even those of us who call ourselves non-religious cannot deny the intensity and spirituality of a day such as this.  It is a truly powerful thing, and something I will feel deep inside for a long time to come.  This was one day on which I realized how far Jerusalem can reach into my soul, and how changed I am because of it.