L’Shana Tova

First and foremost, may it be good new year. Now… Let’s discuss my Rosh Hashanah. You all know me by now… Sometimes I get myself into awkward situations unintentionally… Well this was certainly one of those times…. Friday afternoon I had called around attempting to find somewhere to spend the holidays (I’m not one to miss them and especially this year) so I found the Jewish Center in Madrid. They said I was welcome to come as long as I brought my passport. Fine. So I went.

Allowing myself the “Jason gets lost for at least 30 minutes whenever he goes somewhere” grace period, I headed out pretty early to get to services. When I arrived at the street, there was a large building with no address on it but a man standing in front of it. Oh! Did I mention that the entire street was barricaded by police, yeah, that too… So I walk up to this man and asked “Is this number 3?” He said, “Why do you want to know? What are you here for?” I sheepishly reply “Rosh Hashanah services…” He said “One moment” and proceeded to open the door and take me inside.

Once inside I was asked to hand over my passport answer a large round of questions, empty my pockets and get patted down before being allowed to enter the synagogue… After I was inside I got lost… SURPRISE! Even in a building, I can still get lost… While I was finally walking up the correct set of stairs I heard a voice from behind me in Spanish ask, “Hello. What’s your name?” Long story short I answer and find out the this young man is also an American who happens to be from Chicago and is here on a Fulbright scholarship translating Hebrew texts into Spanish… Yep… Oh, and he’s also a librarian (somebody’s racking up the cool points) Anywho, as he’s the only other American in the place, I stick with him. While waiting for services he asks, “So do you normally go to orthodox?” and I replied with , “I knew it… I knew this was going to be orthodox… Actually no, I’m pretty much reform…” Also I’m an Ashkenazi and these were (of course) Sephardic services. I decided then that it would be interesting to observe a completely different tradition. And it certainly was: The chants are all different, different prayers are recited, there was not English let alone Spanish in sight for the entire time- just Hebrew. Most interesting moment of the service: Madrid is in the center of Spain so there’s no body of water nearby. Therefore we went and did Taslich (sp?) in front of a running faucet… Yep… Look at us Jews being so crafty J. Anyway, after the service (which was not nearly as long as I expected it to be) I headed out to start of the new year right…