As a student at MSIH, you’ll be offered opportunities to attend Shabbat and holiday dinners with families connected to the school. Take them all, even if you’re not Jewish and you’re nervous about what to wear, what to bring, and not knowing the prayers. I wouldn’t have given this advice a couple of months ago, not being much of a fan of holidays. So here’s an explanation for my change of heart.
To make up for it, I’ve included a few photos from classmate Justin Hylarides, who has a real skill with a camera. These are shots from the class trip to Jerusalem, which I missed for the trip to Portland. But after my short holiday, I made it back to sandy Be’er Sheva. I promise the blog post will remain more or less rooted there the whole time.
To start in the middle of things: A few days ago, I was very, very jet lagged. It’s a long trip back from Portland to Israel, and my trip out there was exhausting, so I spent all those long flights as little more than a sentient pile of comfortable clothing with ear plugs, an eye mask, and an endless appetite for free airplane wine. But I was happy to be back at school, and the timing couldn’t have been more compelling: I had arrived just in time for the holidays. In the middle of unpacking and greeting friends and trying to wrap my reluctant, complaining brain around the quantity of class I had missed, I accepted an invitation to attend Rosh Hashanah dinner with a member of the MSIH faculty, a doctor. And on top of my jet lag, yes, I was indeed nervous about what to wear, what to bring, and not knowing the prayers.
But I shouldn’t have been. It turns out that my general rule for these things – dress as if you’re going to visit your grandmother – holds up fairly well here; that you’re allowed to ask your host if you should bring anything; and that nobody expects you to magically be word-perfect on the prayers of a faith that isn’t yours. That’s not why you’re invited.
I’m not a religious person and my sense of holiness is a little vague, so holidays in the States sometime felt to me like very isolating times. As a kid, I associated them with not seeing my friends for a few days, since they were being whisked off on vacation by their parents or staying behind closed doors for what I could only assume was the torment of spending hours and hours with extended family, soberly playing board games and reverting to the behavior patterns of their childhoods. So I went a little nervously to the Rosh Hashanah dinner.
More than anything, it was a family meal. Sure, the host offered a couple of prayers at the beginning, and we all used the traditional greetings and words wishing each other a good new year. But beyond that, it was really a time for these four generations of a family to be together. We talked about the youngest member of the family, the great-granddaughter, who slept through the whole meal. Somebody made gentle fun of one of granddaughters, who is shy in English and apparently very forthcoming in Hebrew. Pictures were taken and shown off, courses came and went, and conversation flowed in Hebrew and English.
Through the haze of jet lag and the stupefying effect of a delicious and very long meal, I realized that I had been asked over for a holiday by a complete stranger. We don’t often consider doing that in American culture. But how special is it to invite somebody into your home? We do it so often on mundane occasions – the repairman comes around to fix your washing machine, or your friend drops by to pick up that book you promised her – that we don’t see it as being that big of a deal. But we know it’s different for holidays. All the traditions your family has spent generations accumulating are there to be shared with a stranger. All the closeness and intimacy of a family gathering are being observed by an outsider. When you bring a stranger to your home for a holiday, you’re inviting them to join this intimate moment of communion: communion both between family members and between what is human and what is holy.
Which brings me back to my reason for missing the class trip to Jerusalem, on top of several days of class. Oregon is ten time zones away from where my classmates were attending class lectures and histology quizzes and important meetings, and I was there for my brother’s wedding. My brother and I weren’t really raised together. Being invited to the wedding wasn’t like being invited as a stranger to the Rosh Hashanah dinner, but I would still be seeing family members I hadn’t had a chance to be with since I was very young. I would be defining my place in this family by attending the wedding.
I could talk about how beautiful the occasion was forever, but I’ll try to be brief. To see my brother and new sister-in-law stand together and make a promise was to witness a miracle, and the act of adding my blessing to those of their other family members and close friends was the closest I’ve felt to holy action in years. Because to be included in a wedding like that is to be invited to a holy day. You come together, everyone gathers close, you sing or speak or whisper a blessing out loud and hope that it comes close to the one that is moving through your heart, mind, and whole body in a way you could have sworn (because you’re a medical student) was reserved for your blood alone, and something about your coming together to celebrate, thank, and bless offers protection, comfort, and joy.
It was a much greater moment of communion than what I would be experiencing in a few days at the Rosh Hashanah dinner, but it prepared me for it: to see the holy and the human, and to accept a place in a community when you’re invited in.
So that’s why my advice to future MSIHers is to go to all the holidays they can. Because attending a brother’s wedding and being invited to a holiday dinner have a lot in common with what it felt like to be embarking upon a public health program, or what I imagine meeting a new patient for the first time will be like. It’s about learning how to accept a generously offered place next to somebody new or in a new world and family, at a moment when something holy is happening.
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