Purim

On tuesday, which was the holiday, Purim, I called Rabbi Simon to ask advice for additional things I could be doing in Ra'anana to enhance my Israel experience. Instead, he immediately invited me, Sam and Leaht (a friend we made here) to go to a Purim dinner. We accepted as we had nothing else to do and there's no reason to turn down a free meal with potentially interesting people. Interesting people who were also all orthodox Jews.

We arrived at the Shul where they were meeting to do their eating and found that there were approximately 30-40 people there for dinner, most of them families. Many people were even still dressed up in costumes too. First I'll comment on the people. They were all so incredibly nice and friendly and they all seemed like successful, intelligent who were quite interesting. I met a Dentist dressed as a clown, a very successful entrepreneurial startup manager and a guy who works for IBM, all of whom I exchanged numbers with as they offered to have us to dinner some time. We then sat down for an amazing meal that involved 3 delicious courses, most of which were homemade by Rabbi Simon. It was impressive that he cooked so much great food for so many people.

Now I don't know whether things went on were part of the Purim tradition, or merely what this group does, but the meal was interesting too. First of all, every so often people would break out in hebrew songs. I didn't know any of the songs, but the frequent singing didn't exactly surprise me. The more interesting part though was that every so often, Rabbi would ask one of the adult men to talk about something. They all began with a joke (some more appropriate than others) and then spoke for a few minutes about some philosophical topic based on the story of Purim. Sam and I were not invited to speak even though our breadth of jokes is wide, our knowledge of Purim is narrow.

After dinner, we helped clean up. The guy dressed as a clown gave me his jester type hat which I wore for the rest of the night (i'll have to get a pic from the evening from whoever had a camera as I had forgotten my own). They also gave us two giant trays of leftovers which we've been eating non stop and are so good. And this friday, Sam and I are going to have Shabbat dinner with Rabbi Simon and his family. Should be another nice time.

i like meeting dogs in the park

ps. still working on the internship but starting to work on getting another one just in case.