When someone visits Israel, they want to
experience its unique atmosphere of kedusha,
so it is only natural to think of spending Shabbos in Jerusalem. Who would
think of spending Shabbos in secular Tel Aviv? Well, I did, and this was my
experience.
My friend Chazkel was curious
about a small outreach kehilla in the
old neighborhood of Neve Tzedek. Neve Tzedek, once home to Rabbi Avraham
Yitzchok Hacohen Kook, zt”l, and
other saintly Jews, was Tel Aviv’s first neighborhood. Over the years, it has become
very gentrified, its stylish architecture in stark contrast with some
ultramodern skyscrapers. Some of the side streets reminded me of Manhattan’s West
Village neighborhood.
Chazkel, a real wiz at finding
fascinating things on the internet, found the following announcement for Kehillat
Hhaslat (Chasalat is an acronym
for all the types who gravitate here: chareidi, chiloni,
chasidi, Sefardi, Lita’i, and Teimani.)
In other words, it is a very inclusive shul.
All are welcome.
Finding a place to stay was much
more challenging than we realized. The only hotel we knew about that caters to shomer Shabbos clientele, Hotel Devorah,
was too far away. Airbnb had a few listings in Neve Tzedek, but none of them
allowed for late departure after Shabbat was over. Nevertheless, we tried
booking for two nights – and none of the places we tried ever responded!
(They’re supposed to respond within 24 hours.) Chazkel found a listing – not
under Airbnb, which did have after
Shabbat checkout, for 600 shekels.
We packed food and a Shabbos food
warmer and made our way down to our temporary home at 23 Gruzenberg Street.
There was no street parking
whatsoever, so we parked in a garage whose entrance was just across the street
from where we would be staying. The exit from the garage, however, led to
Nachalat Binyamin Street, around the corner. It was late Friday afternoon, and
the street was full of people sitting in cafes and restaurants. Even in secular
areas of Jerusalem, like near the city center, the coffee shops are winding
down as Shabbat approaches. Not here. It was as busy as Grand Central Station
during rush hour. The weather was warmer, the topography was flatter, and the
people – almost all Ashkenazim – were secular. We felt like we were on a
different planet.
With my tzitizis and kippa, I
felt like an outsider. How would they react towards me? Especially after months
of internal strife and the deepening divide over judicial reform. As it turned
out, my fears were grossly exaggerated.
We found our apartment in an old
building. The place (joint?) looked rather dumpy. It had an old kitchen, a
bathroom, and a bedroom. There was a low coffee table but no dining table. That
would suffice. We set up for Shabbos, hid the key and made our way to shul. We
lost our way, but seemingly out of nowhere, a young man with a kippa appeared and showed us where to go
Did you ever hear of the expression, “Coincidence is G-d’s way of remaining
anonymous”?
We came to a large building with a
sign on it, “Ulpana Bnei Akiva.” It turned out to be a dati leumi high school. The Hasalat congregation was in the process
of remodeling its own building – a building that once housed the yeshiva
Heichal Hatalmud. In the meantime, it was stationed here.
We walked upstairs and passed a
large room with tables set up for Shabbos. In the next room were a few chairs
and tables, a bima, an aron kodesh, and a makeshift mechitza. There were all of three men
there, all Sefardic – and it was getting close to sunset.
Suddenly, a man who looked like he
was in his thirties walked in with the energy of an entertainer walking onto a
stage. That was Tzvi Hurwitz, the rabbi of Hasalat. He was beaming this
positive, vibrant energy. He is on the short side, slim, and sports a black
suit and tie but no hat.
“Don’t worry,” he reassured me,
seeing the worried expression on my face. “There will be a minyan.” And a
minyan there was. The room quickly gathered additional occupants. One of them,
a Yemenite-looking Jew, sat down next to me. Boy, he looked familiar! Then I
recognized him as Mr. Ben Dror Yemini, a columnist for Yediot Achronot, a leading Israeli daily newspaper. That seemed odd
to me. From reading his columns, I got the impression that he was
anti-religious. At the very least, he was anti-“settlers.” Well, how do you
like that; he was davening with
us! And then I realized that he was one of the main speakers.
Rabbi Hurwitz led the davening for
Kabbalat Shabbat – Carlebach style, of course. And he reminded me a little of
Carlebach – clapping, singing, dancing. I wondered whether he was on steroids.
But this was a yeshivishe version of Carlebach with his black suit, and he kept
a distance from the ladies. We were all revved up. When we finished, we went
into the dining room. I would estimate that there were around a hundred people
there. Three long rectangular tables in the middle were surrounded by circular
tables.
My friend and I sat alone until
some French Sefardic Jewish couples joined us. They seemed to be part of
some chamula –
an extended Jewish clan. I looked at the rectangular tables to my side and saw young
people gathered there. They had dyed hair, tattoos, piercings, weird haircuts,
and wild clothes – and almost none of the males sported kippot. I realized that they were the guests of honor – the
survivors of the Nova music festival of October 7th. They were
unusually quiet for people of their age. They were a world unto themselves,
seemingly oblivious to what was going on around them. They looked pretty normal
(if you forgive the bizarre attire) for people who were severely traumatized.
What I didn’t know was that Rabbi Hurwitz had an ongoing relationship with
them, offering them counseling on a regular basis.
After some zemirot, the columnist Ben Dror Yemini got up to speak. He talked
about the importance of unity, and how close the country could have come to some kind of
compromise with judicial reform were it not for the extremists on both sides who torpedoed
it.
Another speaker got up. He was
young – like the Nova people. He said that he was observant but contemplating
becoming more religious. He told us that, a few years ago, he was standing at a
bus stop in Tel Aviv when he was attacked by an Arab terrorist. He lost consciousness
and described a near-death experience. He saw things as if on a video. Then it
became a still picture, and then it blacked out altogether. As he was “dreaming,”
he was entering another realm of existence. He saw himself clutching onto his tzitzis, hoping that he could bring the
merit of wearing them into the next world. From the blackness came a still
picture, then a video – and then he remembers regaining consciousness. That
memory of the tzitzis jolted him and
sealed his decision to become religious.
He said that he still had many
friends who wanted to go to the Nova music festival and he tried to dissuade
them, to no avail. Had he not become more observant, he would have attended the
festival himself.
I was curious about these young
people, but because they seemed standoffish, I decided it would be better to
just leave them alone and let them have their space.
The next day we decided to go to
the Great Synagogue of Tel Aviv on 110 Allenby Street, not far from the Shalom
Tower, for the 8:30 minyan.
When we arrived, the shul was
nearly empty. There was a small group of religious Zionist high school students,
volunteers from the “territories” (Shomron) who came in to bolster the minyan,
and a chareidi man in his 50s, who
introduced himself as David Shub, a practicing attorney. Mr. Shub, who grew up
in this section of Tel Aviv as a boy, has taken it upon himself to sponsor the
weekly kiddush not only for this synagogue but also for many other minyanim in
the area in order to attract worshippers – or at least attendees.
Mr. Shub told me that the decades
of the seventies and eighties was when religious Jews began moving out of Tel
Aviv for Bnei Brak. I had actually heard that, back
in the 40s and 50s, Tel Aviv was the city of choice for some chasidishe rebbes,
like Belz, because it was an all-Jewish city. After Europe, they didn’t want to
live with goyim anymore. But the
absence of a recognizable presence of religious Jews in Tel Aviv, Mr.
Shub said, has only helped to polarize the secular community because they have not
had experiences of interacting with them. “Everyone wants to do his thing,” he
lamented. “The chareidim live in
their neighborhoods, those boys (he pointed at the religious Zionist teens)
live in the settlements. And now we are experiencing terrible rifts in our
society.”
It made me think. Was Bnei Brak
such a good idea? Maybe in Baltimore it’s good to have frum neighborhoods, but is it good for a little country like Israel
to be so separated from each other? The memories of the marchers against Bibi
and judicial reform were still fresh in my memory. I don’t know.
* * *
Davening started. I was summoned
to lead the Shacharit services. They must have been desperate. It felt more
like a struggling shtiebel than a large synagogue. More and more people came in
– many of them newly-arrived French Jews who had come on aliyah. A policeman sat in the back – also davening, sort of. A
young French boy chanted Anim Zemirot from
the bima. After Mussaf, there was a
kiddush sponsored by Mr. Shub, and afterwards, he offered to take me and
Chazkel for a little walking tour of the hidden minyan gems in the area.
He took us first to a small Chabad
minyan that had dozens of antique clocks inside – as well as a real, life-size,
old gas station pump! He took us to another minyan that attracted artists and
intellectuals who were nonobservant during the week but liked to daven! There I
met a friend of mine and invited him to join us for Shabbat lunch. We saw a few
more minyanim, then made our way home for lunch.
After the meal, we walked to the
beach and watched the fishermen and the waves. Yafo was to our left, only a 15-minute
walk away.
On our way back to our apartment,
the side streets of Neve Tzedek were filled with throngs of pedestrians. It
seemed that everyone was out. Although all the restaurants and coffee shops
were open, I couldn’t help but notice that all the other stores were closed.
After our Shabbos rest, we
returned to Rabbi Hurwitz’s minyan for Mincha. This time, only his core members
were there. We got our minyan, then entered the dining room for the last
Shabbos meal. There were about 25 people, including the rabbi’s wife and
children. I sat next to the rabbi, and he shared with me that he spent a few
years learning in Yeshivas Rabbi Chaim Berlin in Brooklyn and was privileged to
have been a chavrusa with the Rosh
Yeshiva, Rav Aharon Schechter, zt”l.
He told me that Rabbi Chaim Kanievsky, zt”l,
urged him to start a kiruv shul in
Tel Aviv. Sitting across from me was an American man who lives part of the year
in the neighborhood and part of the year in the States. It appears that he is
one of the shul’s financial pillars.
Then Rabbi Hurwitz rose to speak:
One of the problems we have today is that people, leaders, keep
insisting that they know for sure what the solution is for any given problem.
That is not right. We can’t be sure about anything. One of the signs that the
redemption is near is when we will hear the words, “I don’t know.” It is
homiletically alluded to in the psalm we recite for Thursday (Tehillim 81): “When I hear the language of ‘I don’t know,’ then… I will remove the burdens from his shoulder.”
Rabbi Hurwitz told me that if a group of
visitors wanted to stay for a Shabbos event, he could find accommodations for
them in a nearby hotel where chilul
Shabbos would not be a problem.
An event in this shul, plus
a tour with David Shub, would make quite an interesting Shabbos experience. Anyone
interested?
