By Samantha Frankel
Several weeks ago, during a conversation at dinner near Kfar Hastudentim, a fellow member of Cohort Four used an analogy to express her thoughts on Shabbaton in Jerusalem.
“It’s like the entire city just takes a breath,” she said.
Since then, I have thought about that analogy each week before the alarm sounds across Jerusalem and Shabbat begins. The buses stop running; fewer and fewer cars race down the streets; the stalls in the shuk shut down. As the city comes to a pause, I take a deep breath, go to shul, and let it out as I daven Kabbalat Shabbat and welcome in my weekly 25-hour sanctuary in time.
When we came to Tzfat for our first Shabbaton, this feeling of the city coming to a halt was all the more profound. The stores closed earlier; the smell of challah and soup pervaded the air from early Friday morning; not even an echo of a car horn could be heard. As the city moved into Shabbat mode, I took a deep breath in, walked to shul with several other Nachshon Fellows, and, pressed up against the wall of the women’s balcony, I found that I couldn’t let it out.
I loved to see so many women in shul, standing together, davening together, welcoming in Shabbat together. Yet, as I stood there, pressed up against the wall of the women’s balcony, I couldn’t even hear the men davening below me, let alone join in and sing along with them. Eventually, we pushed our way through the crowd until we made it to the door, gasping for cool air once we made it outside.
Still, I was waiting to release that deep breath that comes with the welcoming in of Shabbat. We wandered around town for a bit, finally making our way to the Breslov shul, preparing ourselves for the unfamiliarity and potential discomfort that we hadn’t been prepared for at the first shul. We walked in to find a smaller crowd of women up on the balcony, but it was immediately evident that all of these women were there, not out of seeming obligation, but out of genuine commitment. They went according to their own pace, but all with a powerful dedication to their prayer. As I joined them and davened my own Amidah, I finally felt that deep Shabbat breath release.
This semester has been full of new experiences—culturally, linguistically, socially, religiously—that I have had to come to terms with as I have met more and more new people and said yes to more and more new things. The discomfort is inevitable, and the comfort frequently comes as a surprise. Learning with people who come from different backgrounds and who envision different futures than I do is overwhelming and powerful, and these moments of expected strangeness, far more often than I would imagine, turn into moments of exploration and self-discovery—a complete deep breath.
