Normally I would spend Friday night together with my family celebrating shabbat. However the past few weeks I have been here in Israel alone while the rest of my family is back in the US. So last Friday night after eating and then reading for as long as I could, I got antsy and decided to go for a walk. When I walked out of my apartment it became immediately apparent that something was different.
It was quiet.
The streets were much more empty than usual and this made the occasional car that would drive by all the more noticeable, as the noise would slowly grow louder and louder then gradually fade away – the noise of one isolated car every so often – much different than the typical background din of the normal traffic flow noise.
As I walked on, I began to notice voices breaking the quiet. I looked around but the streets were empty. Then I realized the voices were coming from open windows in the apartments above. There were multiple voices rising and falling, what sounded like an intense discussion. As I walked on they slowly faded as another from a different location would rise louder taking it’s place. Then the sound of children laughing or playing, then somewhere people singing together, then yelling/talking in the classic Israeli style, each coming from a different location somewhere above me, like a three-dimensional sound-stage as I moved through the town.
These were not annoying individual voices like when someone is talking too loud on their cellphone – rather, each sound from each open window was a blurred soft cacophony of several voices. The same thing repeated itself throughout the city as I walked.
Then I realized that what I was hearing, was shabbat.
Because it was Friday night, the whole city was at home together, all doing the same thing at the same time. These were the sounds of Ra’anana – religious, secular, didn’t matter – all together at shabbat dinner tables. The city streets were quiet enough and the weather just right so that a few windows were open, allowing the sounds to drift through the empty city streets.
I’ve walked the city at night before, many times. Just not usually on Friday night. Or if I did I was with my own family, distracted enough to not notice the organic sounds of the city itself.
As bad as it is to be alone, especially on a shabbat, you experience things perhaps not possible any other way.
