The Shabbat before Pesach is called Shabbat Haggadol, the great and special Shabbat. Shauna and I left our comfortable home in Neve Daniel and took part in a Shabbat program at the OU centre in Jerusalem where we met up there with my mother-in-law Myra, visiting from Toronto, and my children Ariel, Rachel, and Akiva. The lectures and singing were a bonus. However, the main purpose of our excursion was to avoid preparing meals and cleaning dishes in a kitchen that was 90% Kosher for Passover (KFP) while jugging Hametz and preparing food that was not KFP in the other 10%. Not surprisingly, the events of the day ultimately included a number of inspiring spiritual experiences. Here are my observations related to a few of them.
The hotel bed ejected me at about 6:30 in the morning and rather than wander around aimlessly, I grabbed an apple and my Talit and meandered down to the Kotel. My route took me past the King David Hotel, Herod’s family tomb, the underappreciated park in behind the King David, and then through Yemin Moshe and the Jaffa Gate. Descending the steps in the Arab market, deserted, but for the flow of daveners returning from vatikin (sunrise) prayers at the Kotel, and the odd tourist, I decided to get creative and take a new route though some unfamiliar deserted alleyways in the Jewish quarter. Suddenly, I found myself on the Galicia Rooftop Promenade, thus called because it once was the location of a Yeshiva from Galicia. I had gotten turned around in the winding streets and begun walking north towards the Muslim quarter instead of east to Har Habayit. The last time I had visited this particular spot was during my nephew Ori’s Bar Mitzvah tour of the Old City several years ago, but that is a whole other story. As I looked around trying to regain my sense of direction, I came face to face with the larger than life Golden Dome of the Rock, looking more or less the same as it had for over a thousand one hundred years. I was overcome by familiar feelings of disjointedness and incongruity. Going back two thousand years in another time and another era I would have been looking at the upper floors of the Beit Hamikdash and imagining all the Pesach preparations that would have been underway in the courtyard in preparation for the oncoming celebrations. My imagination took flight and I found myself lost in a colourful day dream for several minutes. Then I remembered where I was headed, and descended the stairs to make my way back to the Jewish Quarter.
Arriving at the Kotel, I joined a 7:30 minyan run by an elderly gentleman who carried his own personal Torah scroll and Haftorah scroll to the Kotel every Shabbat morning transported in a custom designed knap sack. He regularly ran his own Shabbat morning minyan around two tables at the Kotel. We were joined by an interesting assortment of faces and individuals. I recognized a Rosh Yeshiva from YU, then an old business acquaintance from Toronto, a classmate from my Tour Guiding course, and a well known professor of Roman history from Bar Ilan University. We prayed slowly; standing and sitting in the early morning shade provided by the Kotel; uninterrupted by any sounds other than the murmur of the prayers of our neighbours; and flocks of birds shrieking as they flew overhead. To my delight, we were also graced by the familiar scene of a young secular Jew with long curly locks overcome by private emotion, but unable to participate in the sequences of traditional organized prayer all around him. I watched entranced as he wandered back and forth groping for ways to express himself before G-od, his G-od, whose presence could be felt focused somewhere in the other side of this immense man-made wall.
The next event I would like to describe caught me totally by surprise. The family was relaxing on a Shabbat afternoon in a delightful little park just west of Keren Hayesod Street near the OU Center. We were surrounded by families with young children playing ball, eating a snack, or just talking. Me, I got the chance to play frisbee with my son. Now to visualize what happened you need to know a little more about the geography of this small park. It is oval in shape with entrances on all four sides of the oval, something like the story of the Eshel tree of Avraham near Beer Sheva. The grass covered lawns were sprinkled with mature oak trees and numerous painted wooden park benches. At about 4:00 p.m. from the western entrance to the park we noticed an elderly man walking up the path, carefully placing his cane before each step, and carrying a couple of large plastic bags. We noticed him because several children playing in the park left what they were doing and ran out to meet him and help him with his bags. Please excuse the metaphor, but he looked like a Santa Clause except that he was dressed all in a black suit with a broad brimmed hat and white shirt instead of the familiar bright red jacket and hat with white trim. He confidently walked up to the closest bench, asked the adults sitting there to please move and promptly sat himself down while groups of children gradually wandered over to his bench and sat down in front of him. One industrious little girl produced a large rubber mat that was large enough to accommodate about half of the gathering crowd of 20-25 children.
He began to speak in a soft lilting voice asking the children questions and teaching them the meanings of Hebrew words and Jewish concepts. Why do they call this Shabbat - Shabbat Hagadol? What did the Jews separate out on Shabbat Hagadol? Why do you think the Haftorah reading ends with a passage that discusses parents reconciling with their children and children with their parents? The entire conversation was in Hebrew of course. His voice was animated, but he spoke slowly in calming relaxed tones. Sometimes he got very knowledgeable answers to his questions. Sometimes he taught new concepts and ideas. Clearly, this was a routine that the children in the park were quite familiar with, and we soon guessed that the bags contained not only resource books, but candy and other treats that were reserved for the end of their Torah discussions. It was an amazing and a very moving scene. I remembered the Torah passage often quoted from the vision of the prophet Zecharia (8:4). “So said the Lord of Hosts: There shall yet be old men and women in the squares of Jerusalem, each with staff in hand because of their great age. And the squares of the city shall be crowded with boys and girls playing in the squares.” It occurred to me that this precious old man had gone beyond this vision of Zecharia. He was sitting and interacting with the boys and girls that he had befriended like a pied piper in the park, and he was teaching them wisdom and Torah in the squares of a new Jerusalem, rebuilt with the sacrifices of tens of thousands of Pascal lambs. For me, Eliyahu the prophet had arrived early this Pesach.
Nice imagery!
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