Ufros Aleinu Sukkat Shlomecha

Fridays in Jerusalem make me feel very anxious. Everyone is rushing around trying to get things finished before Shabbat starts, which happens very early in the winter (sometime between 4 and 5 o'clock during the months that I was there just now) as compared to in the summer which is when I have always been there before. The buses are filled with soldiers headed home for Friday night with their families and heaven help you if you forgot to go food shopping because the grocery store and shuk, or open-air market, are packed and insane. Then in the afternoon, just as the sun sets, the siren sounds to mark the beginning of the day of rest and the city shuts down completely for the next 27 or so hours.

Shabbat shalom, kulam...good shabbes, everyone.

Last Friday, one week ago, was my final Shabbat in Jerusalem. The sky had been dark from morning until afternoon with heavy clouds pouring down rain and so the fading rays of the sun over the hills to the west that normally hint at the coming rest that falls with darkness were not visible. An eye on the clock was the only way I knew the silence of Shabbat was about to descend over the city and I was starting to feel like my predictably agitated Friday afternoon self, so un-Shabbat-like, when Hana came out of her room and asked me if I wanted to go sit outside with her on the patio as the day faded and the evening began.

The evening dripped down around us and the strings of small white lights that frame the windows glittered their reflections along with the raindrops into the large mirrors hanging on the walls between the porch and the winter-green garden. We talked about the siren that we heard sounding to mark the end of the week as we sat there with our tea and about what a crazy place Israel is, about how there is nowhere else in the world that would use the same siren both to summon its people into the bomb shelters constructed within every building and to announce the complete ceasing of work, the celebration of the end of another week that is Shabbat.

As we sat quietly with nothing but our clouds of breath to punctuate the stillness of the delicate quiet, too cold and damp to really take in the beauty of the night falling around us but too unwilling to break the spell of rest and peace that had so pronouncedly descended from the outside and was just now beginning to take hold on the inside, I thought more about these seemingly conflicting ideas of Shabbat and the bomb shelter and of the siren that signals the opening of both. I was reminded about what has for quite some time been my favorite blessing, Hashkivenu, and of its line which seemed to offer a connection between these two strongly opposing ideas of war and peace:

ufros aleinu sukkat shlomecha

There are many suggested translations of this line, many of which I find unnecessarily long and bulky. I prefer the succint "build your shelter over us," a specific request to the God named earlier in the blessing by a people who want peace. The ironic sounding of the siren that brings the people of Israel to both the concrete shelter protecting them from bombs and the temporal shelter, Abraham Joshua Heschel's "cathedral in space and time" that is Shabbat still rang in my ears and in my heart as Hana and I went inside to the shelter of our own apartment and I began my final Shabbat of my time in Israel.