Synagogue

Last night, I danced around a synagogue while singing and holding hands with a Jewish woman. And I liked it.

Our three finals at long last come to an end, we celebrated last night by going to a Jewish synagogue with our Judaism teacher, Ophir. We glanced a bit nervously at one another as our group of 20 Mormon BYU kids waited to go inside the Orthodox Jewish synagogue. The men donned kippas; us women wore long skirts and anxious smiles. Ophir explained that we would be celebrating the welcoming of the Sabbath day with the sunset, and that the services would be entirely in Hebrew.

I sat next to Lauren and a Jewish woman who wore a cap to cover her blonde curls. Orthodox Jews believe that hair should only be seen by one's husband and family, and her hat marked that she was a married woman. We were divided by the men by a white curtain, and we curiously stole glances at them as the curtain flapped in the breeze of the oscillating floor fan. As the sun set and the congregation sang and swayed to welcome the Sabbath, we tried to follow along by standing when they stood, sitting when they did, and trying to catch the tune of the occasional "la la la"s in the chorus. I tried not to look like I was watching the other women out of the corner of my eye, but in truth I was more interested in how they worshiped than I was in fitting in. With my freckled skin, blue eyes, English and perplexed look, I had already forfeited all hopes of blending in.

At one point, the over-enthusiastic woman on the front row who spent most of the services standing and dancing and clapping grabbed the hand of the woman next to her, starting a train of dancing, singing women around the room. I never mentioned it, but when our group stayed down in a kibbutz near the Egyptian border--Yotvata--we ended the night by singing along to the words of a Hebrew song and creating a psuedo-mosh pit as the eighty of us danced around the restaurant after dinner. And did I mention that at the Hard Rock Café in Cairo, the employees invited us up on stage to sing and dance along to "YMCA"? We're all suckers for that kind of thing...c'mon, we live in Provo. Well, at least we provide cheap entertainment for all around us. At the pool in Cairo, we tried unsuccessfully to build a human pyramid in the pool in front of the restaurant guests for about an hour. When we finally succeeded at 10:50 p.m., we received applauses from all of the amused guests and the restaurant manager).

Anyway, it was the same situation with the Jewish synagogue. I was already a wide-eyed, Mormon American without a clue what I was doing, so of course I couldn't pass up an opportunity like this. The great thing about being a tourist is that you can look like a fool and blame the cultural differences or the plain thrill of the moment. So I jumped up, grabbing the hand of the Israeli woman in front of me. And we danced and danced in a large circle around that synagogue (separated from the men, naturally) like you've never seen. It wasn't too surprising that every single one of us BYU girls were in the dancing lineup, with only about 5 Jewish women. The rest of the women seated smiled politely, nudging one another...I have a feeling that we must have made quite a spectacle of ourselves. At least we had fun.

That night at the kibbutz that we danced the night away, I made an observation that I made again last night: us Mormons would make pretty good Jews.