Italian Melodies and Spring Weather

Katy’s been continuing along with her ethnomusicology class for cantorial students, the one that brought us to the Syrian synagogue at three in the morning one Shabbat. Last night, we joined the class at Jerusalem’s Italian Synagogue, which offered a spirited prayer experience - every word of the service sung aloud, a healthy contrast to standard Askenazic mumbling - as well as fascinating liturgical variations unique to the Italian Jewish community. The synagogue is also architecturally interesting: after the Holocaust, its whole intricately-carved wood interior was taken from a synagogue built in 1719 in Conegliano, Italy (about 60 miles from Venice) and was brought to Jerusalem. The synagogue has a very informative website if you’d like to see pictures, take a “virtual tour,” or read about its traditions or history from before or after the Holocaust.

After a chilly night last night - we were shivering a little on our walk back home from the Old City, where we had dinner at my aunt and uncle's house - we enjoyed a spectacularly beautiful spring day today. We spent a good portion of the afternoon in the park around the corner from our apartment, reading and talking in the sun. The park lies next to the San Simon Monastery, which was built here in the 1880's by the Greek Orthodox Patriarchate. The monastery has had an interesting history, including being the site of extremely fierce fighting during the 1948 War of Independence. Today, the park surrounding the monastery was simply idyllic, filled with people eating Shabbat lunch, lying in the sun, reading, and playing with their kids.

As you all know, things have been remarkably quiet for some time now in this corner of the Middle East. As Danny Gordis recently wrote, it's been "so quiet, in fact, that people are getting nervous." Israelis are either afraid that the peace won't last, or that they're being fooled by the "moderation" of the new Palestinian government, or that Israel might miss an opportunity to do what it should be doing -- whatever that is, exactly. Gordis writes:

No matter what happens, something is going to change (with some degree of permanence, one suspects) around here. Which is probably why people are unanimous in their nervousness. Because the stakes are very high. Because all of us -- no matter which way this plays out -- are going to have to soon rethink the whole world we live in. But most of the (rational) people who are nervous also understand that there are also risks in not risking. Not risking means that nothing will change, and that, too, is unthinkable.

UPDATE: Breaking the relative calm of the past three months, four Israelis were killed in a suicide bombing in Tel Aviv last night.