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papersandkeyboards · 7 years

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5/9-15: Went Chicagoan Jewish for a Day (or not really) (aka ‘antek-antek Yahudi!’ as some jerk would say)

33rd WEEK, MAY 9-15, 2016.

Many exciting things happened this week.

But I have the right to prioritize which one deserves to be mentioned first.

This Thursday, I finally (finally) watched Captain America: Civil War.

And if you’re reading this blog for quite some time, it can be seen that I am sort of a hardcore MCU fangirl. At least compared to my friends.

I just died watching the movie. Imagine my heart is an egg and the movie screenwriters and actors were some extremely good scrambled egg makers.

I just can’t.

I cussed and swore so much during the movie, even though I was there by myself (actually—it’s because I was there by myself), and just being emotional in my own little world. By the time the movie was over entirely, I didn’t even have the mood for anything. I was either about to explode or just melt and let myself washed away to the drain and to the Puget Sound. And never come back again.

Huh. I wish my fangirl fellow Darin or Ica was here. They have been the only ones qualified enough to talk the shit out of any marvel movies with me. We can handle each other, and other people, apparently, just can’t handle or understand me being emotionally overwhelmed over some fictional stuff.

Anyway.

Summer is approaching, and on Wednesday the 11th the day hit the thermostat a good 26 Celcius, so after school I went to Capitol Hill and bought myself an unapologetic cup of frozen yogurt across the street from Seattle Central.

However, the highlight of the week, like with almost all cases, came on the weekend.

Karen’s nephew, Gabe, was having his bar mitzvah that weekend. Good news: his family, of course, invited Karen and her family over for it. Good news #2: Karen’s sister and her family lived in Chicago, IL.

Hell yeah! It’s not everyday you can go to big cities like Chicago (unless, well, you live in or nearby Chicago) AND go to a bar mitzvah (unless, well, you happen to have a lot of Jewish relative or friends).

For those who haven’t known, bar mitzvah (or bat mitzvah, for female) is a coming-of-age ritual, meaning a ritual that marks a young person’s transition from being a child to being an adult, that is practised by the Jews—

“Jews?!”

—is probably what your response would be if you’re a typical, religiously conservative Indonesian Muslim who credit most of your knowledge to controversial-titled articles on Facebook that are shared by friends from exclusively your own circle.

But I’m getting ahead of myself, and I’m not supposed to talk about my tolerant/intolerant country in this entry, so let’s get back to my main point.

Gabe here was 13 years old, so, in order to mark his coming to adulthood, a bar mitzvah was held. Let’s say... uhm, a bar mitzvah is an equivalent to Indonesian ‘khitanan’, a ritual after a boy’s circumcision to celebrate his first steps to adulthood.

Karen and Eric and I left Seattle in the afternoon, which means I had to leave school a couple hours earlier to catch the plane. After we arrived, we rented a car and drove to the hotel. Later at night, I finally met Ayesha, Karen’s mother, and us four spent some time talking.

Saturday morning, we went to Downtown Chicago to have breakfast and walk around. We crossed the Chicago River and passed by the Trump Tower. But our main destination was Millenium Park.

You see, when I thought of Chicago, I thought about this particular piece of art I wanted to see for myself. It was this sculpture, sitting right in the middle of the park. The sculpture has a power to amaze everyone who sees it, and at the same time providing a new perspective to see the Chicago skyline and the buildings surrounding it. Designed by an Indian-British artist Anish Kapoor in 2004, the stainless-steel sculpture was initially and officially named “Cloud Gate”. Thanks to public’s creativity and appreciation of its shape, the sculpture is more widely known as... The Bean.

To be fair, it DOES look like a bean. However, I felt somewhat sorry for the artist that had surely thought about the philosophy behind the name Cloud Gate and how the name will inspire people and all that. But I guess the first time people saw the sculpture, they went “oh, it looks like a giant bean!” hence the name.

Think about nicknames that you give to your friends or that have been given to you by your friends. It’s like how a person is named Richard, but everyone just end up calling him Dick. Or a name as pretty as Zahra but everyone end up calling her Ijah. Or something like that. There are indeed some people in my school who are so widely known by their nicknames, anyone hardly know what their real, birth names are.

However, in any way, The Bean (or Cloud Gate, whatever) is so pretty, no matter the weather. It can be sunny or cloudy and it still manages to reflect the whole scenery around it perfectly.

And right under the bean structure was ever crazier. The structure was bent and shaped in such a way that it provided multiple reflections of you in different forms, like a kaleidoscope. Looking at it was hypnotizing, and making me dizzy if I stared at it for too long.

Oh, and it’s cool that I could see the photographer in the picture because he was reflected by the bean behind me. Ehe.

Then we moved to the next block, the next cool thing about the city, the Art Institute of Chicago. (which is what we could cram in a day of Chicago) More than a place where people study—like the sound ‘Institute’ gives—it was more like a museum, like the Met. It had everything in there, for real.

I would say that the Met has more complete collection than Art Institute of Chicago just because the Met is more famous and the whole building is probably as vast as my neighborhood back home, but AIC contained a lot of artefacts and other kinds of old stuff from different times and places, like Ancient Greece and Roman Empire. There were also extensive collections from the Middle East during the rise of Islam, from India, Africa, China, and Europe, with artefacts related to their respective culture and certain religion the region was dominated by.

I’m a statue person, and most likely not a painting person. Seriously, though, my art senses are probably dull enough that I don’t enjoy paintings as much as people do in general (especially those of abstract paintings). Thus, what I did when Eric and Karen and pretty much everyone in the room were philosophically and emotionally connected to an acrylic representation of grass, I took pictures of them.

Alright. Time to bail as evening was approaching and we needed to be at Karen’s sister’s house for dinner before the ceremony. Karen told me to dress real formal—because maybe last time they took me to a formal event—that was a wedding—I wore a cardigan over a long-sleeved shirt and—wait for it—a pair of sneakers. Karen made sure I did NOT wear sneakers (or shirts) for the bar mitzvah, and thus, left me with the only acceptable shoes I had: a painful pair of high high heels. It was black and fancy and I looked good in it, but it was for sure after the event I decided to throw those elegant representation of hell.

When we got to the venue, it became clearer that it was indeed a black tie event. Good thing about having a dinner party with the Jews: kosher food! Kosher is like food guidelines for Jews, the same way us Muslims categorize food and beverages into halal or not halal. Now, I don’t know the full scope of what makes a food or beverage kosher, but I do know that both kosher and halal guidelines strictly and entirely prohibit swine (or any kind of pig product), and that is good enough for me in this kind of situation.

Quick tip: when you’re in the US and is really self-conscious about your belief in halal diet, if you can’t find a proven halal food, look for kosher ones. (especially for products in packaging like salt or biscuits and such kinds, finding a kosher mark in the packaging is good enough if you can’t find products with halal mark on it)

After dinner we moved with our respective vehicles to the synagogue for the ceremony. Synagogue is a Jewish house of prayer. Before we entered the main room, the men were given this small head covering—that was so small it didn’t really cover the whole head—that I’d later figured is called a kippah. Gabe, the man of the hour, besides wearing a kippah himself, also wore a kind of prayer shawl called tallit.

(illustration--photography was not allowed during the ceremony--at least the one i attended)

During the ceremony, there were chants and songs—in Hebrew—but the main event was the reading of the Torah—big rolls of Jewish scriptures. Presumably just about everyone in the room paid attention to the reading but me, but to be honest it’s not even easy for me to concentrate when an imaam—the leader of a Muslim prayer, when done collectively—recites long verses of the Quran during prayers (being able to read and write Arabic doesn’t help when you can’t understand the language itself), let alone a set of long verses in Hebrew. So what does a girl with zero understanding of the Torah and a quite short attention span do during this time?

She decided to open the holy book in front of her seat and tried to decipher the Hebrew alphabet.

Prepare for a quick elaboration on her observation regarding Hebrew and its comparison to Arabic. (<--calon judul skripsi S1 Sastra Arab/Ibrani)

I guess now I understood why people who don’t understand Arabic see nothing but unreadable wiggly lines—even I’ve heard people said to me that all the scribbles look the same. It took a while for me to figure out that Hebrew and Arabic have pretty much the same system. (uhhh I don’t know how to explain this. But like in Arabic a letter needs to have an accent that serves as a vowel, in order for the letter to be readable. So, for instance, if there is a certain accent above the Arabic letter ‘s’, that accent’ll give an ‘aah’ sound so the letter will be read as ‘saa’. Another accent gives the ‘ooh’ sound, hence ‘soo’, and another gives the ‘eeh’ sound, hence ‘see’) (why am I suddenly giving Arabic lessons)

Anyway, it’s not exactly the same, but some letters in Hebrew, if accompanied by certain accents or additional wiggly line, will be read differently than without accents.

(I can’t give you an example) (because by the time we all got home in Seattle I already forgot the whole thing) (not that you asked for one anyway right)

(well, I guess it would be kind of cool if I preserved on deciphering Hebrew. Albeit the language itself I can’t understand, at least I can write things I don’t want people around me to know in Hebrew letters)

After the whole ceremony ended, we moved to another room, which was a vast hall, where we had dinner (again) and heard speeches and overall celebrated Gabe’s first step into adulthood. Pictures would’ve been cool, but photography weren’t allowed during such ceremony.

The next day, on a nice Chicago Sunday morning, all the family members gathered in a cafe for brunch. Got into some more talking with Karen’s extended family members, since I didn’t do so much talking during dinner the previous day.

It was quite a small place for such a big family and it wasn’t as easy to move around, but I got to one point where I met one of Karen’s family members (I forgot who, sorry) who happened to be the heart surgeon for Indonesia’s back-in-the-day famous General A.H. Nasution. (General Nasution was a member of the military who was lucky to escape the terror attack from rogue members of Indonesian Communist Party in 1965) (it took a while for me to figure out when he was telling me he did a surgery for Nasution, because apparently if you pronounced the name ‘Nasution’ the English way it sounds waaaaaay different than the Indonesian way)

As if it weren’t enough, I met Karen’s brother-in-law and he told me he’d met Indonesian former president Susilo Bambang Yudhoyono. Give me a break. I technically live closer to President SBY and I’ve never seen the guy live, or even General Nasution.

(well, probably NOT General Nasution, as the guy had died long ago)

We went back to the hotel and took off to the airport right after, Karen’s mom Ayesha came with us to the airport so she could tell me about my personality and prospect for the future through my birth date and place and chakra flow. Accompanied by good thick Chicago pizza. Mmm.

It wasn’t exactly a trip to Chicago a tacky tourist like me would expect because we barely got around Chicago, because it really isn’t a tacky tourist kind of trip, but a family event. Nonetheless, if I think wide and positive enough, chances of me visiting Chicago as a tacky tourist is bigger than chances of me attending a bar mitzvah. Therefore, one shall not remorse on being unable to explore Chicago, because one can always come back.

(aamiin)

(brb melamar jadi buruh cuci tetangga)

And I shit you not, the experience of attending a bar mitzvah is one of the most impressive point in my exchange year I will always remember. Thinking about the time where I could casually walk into a synagogue without being questioned (maybe Karen gave a heads-up to the family, I assume?), and imagining how a Jew—or anyone else, for that matter—should always be treated the same way if the situation were to be reversed.

Peace out.

Salam dari yang baru pakai high heels dua kali langsung dibuang,

Nabila Safitri.

#langkahanakbangsa #chicago #bar mitzvah

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