Shavuot

Shavuot is one of the five major Jewish holidays. It marks us getting the Torah, but compared to the other holidays, you really don't do that much. I mean the main custom is that you stay up the whole night studying, but since it's generally in late May, a couple weeks before finals, that's really not so hard to deal with.

So, at the Yeshiva, we had the classes and all, and at around three in the morning we would go to Western Wall. That was the idea, since we're in Jerusalem, and you're supposed to stay up all night, we'd walk to the Kotel, and pray there at sunrise.

This idea is comparable to saying, hey it's the day before Christmas, there are a lot of good sales around, let's go shopping. This is what everyone does.

Well, it would have been impossible, even for me, to get lost, going there. Well, it is technically one long road most of the way there, but more importantly, was the massive flow of people pouring down this street on their way to the kotel.

Seeing the myriads of people on the way there confused me. This is a country where, for whatever reason, people are always cautious of an Arab attack. Yet here we are at the kotel, a spit away from the Arab quarter of Jerusalem, (I know that may not be the best choice of words, but the phrase "a stone's throw away" is even worse.) in a crowd so tight, that I was half expecting people to jump on other people's heads, and start another layer above us. If any fight or skirmish, or God forbid, an explosion, were to occur, the death toll would be staggering. It's eerie that this hasn't occurred to either side. Then again, maybe the solution lies in the fact that were there to be outbreak, tens of thousands of half crazed Jews would go running down into the Arab quarter.

In any case, we were packed in so tightly, that I half expected some people to jump on top of somebody else's head, and start a second minyon over us.

Well, whereas we couldn't get lost on the way there, it proved to be of absolutely no difficulty whatsoever to get separated from the group. I did the famous turn around, and, poof, they're gone. I bumped into people I hadn't seen in a long time, actually due to the population density there, I bumped into a lot of people I hadn't seen in a while, and bumped into as heck of a lot that I had never met. Unfortunately, though, I did not bump into somebody who I had seen recently.

So, I decided to start the service, minus the group, but this proved difficult, as I realized that there was no way I was going to be able to take three steps forward or backward without killing a couple of people.