JoelNothman.com

The first part of this blog’s story didn’t actually happen in NYC. It happened further up Long Island, when I got off at Woodmere station, not sure of my instructions on which way to head (Reuven hadn’t made the train—he called me instead), and with a little more than a minute’s credit in my phone. I asked for directions (they were wrong, but of course I didn’t know that) while calling my mobile provider to yet again get more fast-consumed credit on my prepaid phone. I waited on a number of holds with 2 different departments, before it was clear that, despite the fact that they managed to the week before, they could not add credit with my non-US credit card. I didn’t see anywhere around that would sell me credit some other way. And even if someone were to call me, it would eat my credit too. I was stranded somewhere very close to safety. I sent a text message to Golda, she replied with a phonecall that would finish off my credit for good, but at least it worked. We met up, I found out where I was going to spend Shabbat, and made my way there.

It was so sudden and short that now, a little more than a week later, I’ve managed to forget my hosts’ names. The mother of the house was Rina. She welcomed and was glad that I had just enough time to get ready and get to synagogue just a little late. I ate dinner with Reuben, Golda and her mother (who lives in the neighbourhood), a relaxing and cheery affair to end a tough day.

Over the day I only attended the one synagogue in Woodmere (although the reason Golda and Reuben had wanted me to come in the first place), known as Aish Kodesh, it’s a fairly young but very successful community following the leadership of Rabbi Moshe Weinberger (”the Woodmerer Rebbe”). The community that attends is somewhat mixed in its background, but the shul has a distinctly chasidic flavour (not really one with a dress-code, but still I probably stood out in white trousers and sneakers instead of a suit) particularly in the magnetism to their rebbe, and the singing style at times. And in the fact that the rabbi (if only him) wears a streimel. Very nice singing, though, and the Rabbi spoke very well (although both times about “the situation” in Israel, rather than his famed talks on faith and lifestyle). His largest talk of the day is usually given in the afternoon, but for my visit he replaced it with a class for women only. The building of the synagogue is also remarkably beautiful. It was designed to incorporate components from synagogues destroyed in the Holocaust, while being built completely with stone from Jerusalem. Certainly a very interesting, lively and vibrant community.

Leaving Woodmere was nearly as much of a rush as arriving. I had arranged to meet up with Yogi, a New Jerseyan who had studied at Melbourne Uni for a semester and who I had met up with (at Nikki’s persuasion) in Surfers’ Paradise in April. But our meeting place would be some club in Manhattan’s Upper West-Side, while I was carrying a heavy bag and the train would arrive only hourly. So I rushed out, caught a train back to Brooklyn, used a key and a code to get in and returned to Manhattan. It was a fun party, just a group of fun people hanging out at a bar (certainly not buying many drinks—they were way to expensive), with a little dancing, and a craziness that is expected when a group of Americans are thrown into a bar (especially when they include Yogi).

Sunday I decided (after the slow start that Sundays always bring) that I would take 2 at crossing the Brooklyn Bridge. It was no Golden Gate, but it’s a nice area to walk, with lots of interesting fellow tourists. A German woman (with a few old and sophisticated cameras) decided that she would take a photo of me with her camera as well as mine (”I usually only take picture of couples…”, so I’m not really sure why me all of a sudden). I landed up chatting and walking along with a group of 5 Jewish folks from various places (NYC, Argentina, other places) for no apparent reason. We parted at the end of the bridge so that they could catch a subway to dinner and I could wander around Downtown Brooklyn, which wasn’t really very exciting (at least not on a Sunday evening). So I took photos of the Borough Hall, wandered about a little, and jumped on the subway as well.

I tried to find something to do later that night, but it seems that the city that never sleeps sleeps on Sunday evenings. And Monday nights too. Really it only stays awake Wednesday through Saturday night (except for Dunkin’ Donuts and a few other places that are hubs of culture and really don’t sleep).

Lots of things also sleep on Monday. That’s what I found out when I didn’t read my guide book correctly and turned up at the Brooklyn Botanic Gardens to find it closed. So most of the plant-life that I found and photographed was dead.

So I wandered around a fairly trendy neighbourhood of Brooklyn called Park Slopes, before heading to the famed Crown Heights to meet up with Meir (who had come to study with Chabad in Sydney and was involved in Hineni with me for most of a year). Getting off the train at Kingston Avenue’s intersection with Eastern Parkway, it was clear I was in Lubavitch territory. The chins that were bare in Flatbush were here full-grown beards to be found all down the street. Standing on a corner waiting, people kept on leaving a building and speaking Israeli Hebrew, which I was a little surprised by. I’m only a little more surprised now, because it turns out that is the main beit midrash of Chabad-Lubavitch at the Rebbe Menachem Mendel Schneerson’s former residence at 770 Eastern Parkway.

This building, of course, was the first stop on Meir’s guided tour of the neighbourhood. He took me up into a small museum room that primarily exhibits some of the items that was given to Rabbi MMS while he was Rebbe of Chabad-Lubavitch. There I wandered among portraits of the rabbi himself, a model of Jerusalem’s Temple, keys to many of the world’s cities, medals from units in Israel’s Defence Forces, and letters of birthday congratulations from various governments. I think for the first time there I really understood how people could come across the thought of this guy being a messiah. In many ways, he had much greater recognition during his life as a “king of the Jewish people” by the wide world than any other prior “messiah” has, while at the same time maintaining a humble lifestyle. A very Jewish picture of the messiah figure. Still not reason to follow with certainty that assumption, but it was an interesting realisation.

We wandered through the house a little, and down into the beit midrash (house of learning) where books were strewn over tables, and students young and old sat, stood, talked, read, wandered, taught, learned. Thousands of books piled along the shelves were sorted into general sections. Prayer groups were setting up and completing service constantly on the side. One hundred and thirty-six small holes in a wooden cabinet collected money for as many organisations, although children made their way around the room with open hands for any further spare change. Outside in an entry foyer, many watched RebbeTV (okay, they didn’t call it that) which 24/6 plays various recordings of the Rebbe in his daily events, activities and teachings. We soon left to Eastern Parkway, where outside the building lay piles and piles of garbage bags; around the corner a man sold stock from the nearby printing press.

On our way to lunch at Crown Heights’s newest bagel place, we did a little catching up. And I asked what JB was up to. JB had been in Sydney studying with Meir and helping at Hineni, but I’d failed to contact him before my trip and would not be getting to his home town of Miami, Florida. A moment after we began to talk, Meir received a phonecall. It was JB. He was back from a summer camp in Los Angeles and was in fact with his family in Borough Park, New York. With this surprise, we all planned to meet up for dinner.

In the meantime, Meir had things to do and suggested maybe somewhere to see would be the shore of Manhattan up along the Hudson River. In the end I did the walk, but it wasn’t really so exciting—there wasn’t really much of a shore to see. A little water; otherwise mostly joggers, cyclists, tourists.

Meeting Meir sometime later back at 770, we walked down to the restaurant where we would meet JB’s family for dinner. Although one of his sisters turned out sick, leaving only a few of us there, it was great to meat up with the two bochurim. And for a couple of hours before the night had to end, I sat outside with JB and his brother Velvel (and later some other friends who stopped by) having a small kumzits (singalong) on the street.

The night had to end, because the morning was bound to come. I was to meet up that Tuesday morning with Simi, a friend who I met in 1999 on a short trip to Israel. We were to meet at 10am (although I promised to be late) at the Metropolitan Museum of Art. So we finally met up at 10:40, her recongisable even from a distance despite the seven years between sightings. The vast museum includes collections from Ancient Egypt to Modern Japan, from armory to jewellery. Of course, their intriguing permanent exhibition of musical instruments was closed for the moment. One room just displayed row after row of the museum’s American collections from recent times on numerous sorted but unlabelled shelves of everything from portraits to drinking glasses to picture frames.

Close to closing, we exited the museum, and found a group of street performers amassing an enormous crowd of escapees from the Met. Their acrobatics wasn’t bad either, but we decided we would go elsewhere instead. Simi would show me around her former campus of Columbia, which had been suggested (by someone a little biased) as something nice to see. Its buildings were reminiscent of a common style for official American buildings. Lots of big stone columns, and often domed roofs. We soon found ourselves outside the Cathedral of St John the Divine, an enormous structure begun construction in 1892 and still unfinished. It is also accompanied by a somewhat unusual statue of the Saint with many animals and the Devil. We landed up talking for some time at the Riverside Park before parting (and me on my way home eating the worst pizza in the US so far…).

After Tuesday comes Wednesday, to be my last full day in the USA for some time. I decided I would finally see the Brooklyn Botanic Gardens, which I had already failed to get to a few times. A spectacular collection of gardens (although I came out of bloom for many of their flowers), among my favourites was definitely the Fragrance Garden. Here you can walk around and smell a collection of common and uncommon scents and flavours, from parsely, sage, rosemary and thyme to “popcorn bush”. By the end of my time there (somewhat longer than expected) I had filled my camera with so many photos of roses, cherry trees, lilies and bonsais, that I needed to return to the Flatbush apartment before continuing with my day as a tourist.

On the subway southward to home, I met a man on the train who was in NYC for a wedding and to explore graduate study options. So I helped him by showing him to Brooklyn College (he had heard it was pretty, and it was, but nothing so special IMO), and soon to the Jewish area of Flatbush where he could find kosher pastries much more readily than in his home of Michigan. I also showed him to Eichler’s, the “largest Judaica store in the worled” which, when visiting a couple of days earlier, I had found hard to leave once in there. This time I had the specified mission of finding something for my hosts (Reuven and Golda) who most certainly would not require or desire anything from me. It is always a hard type of gift to find. Still, I think I found it.

Eventually checking out, I looked at the time and realised I was certainly too late to bring the gifts back to the apartment. After all, it was 5:30 and I wanted to make it to a 7pm baseball game in Shea Stadium, Queens. So I took the wrapped glassware and caught the subway, to switch at Times Square. Running to the number 7 train (which would take me to the Mets game), it took a while to realise why there were two trains standing there for such a long period of time (while I was going to miss the singing of the anthem). It turns out there was a fire further on down the track, and Mets fans would have to catch a “W” or “B” and change to a “7″ at Queensboro. So that’s what I did: I crammed onto a “B” but only having met a group of people who would help me with my baseball cluelessness for the rest of the night. It turns out they were to be assistants at the residences belonging to the Jewish Theological Seminary on a group outing to the ball game. So we made it there late, but it seems that’s fairly normal. My new friends guided me in buying a ticket, and once seated in what was going on on the field below me, and where to find a kosher hot-dog vendor. It was a fun and new evening for me, even if I didn’t know how to sing along to “take me out to the ball game”.

Only by that time, I was just starting to realise that I was coming to the end of my USA travels. That within half a day I would be in another country. That I would be soon moving into a room with drawers and cupboards awaiting my clothing. Relieving, saddening, overwhelming.

I stayed up quite late scratching out a thank-you note on the computer and packing my belongings back into their bag, and finally slept for 3.5 hours before having to prepare and leave for a 10:30am flight (ie leave the house 7am latest to get there 2 hrs early as recommended; of course I got there late). Ticketing counter for Air Canada, please?