A MUTUAL ADMIRATION

So, last night was the second part of David’s course, The Prophets – Isaiah, Jeremiah and Ezekiel, and he spoke this week on Jeremiah. Now, the talk was brilliant, of course, and we had another great crowd (more than 60) and David was especially fiery, which caused people to become very excited. About half way through the talk David began to appear a little less smooth and then he said: I’m sorry; I just got a little confused: is that Rabbi Singer? He asked, pointing to a man in the third row. The man nodded as did his aunt sitting in the front row. David said what a great honour it was to have him at his talk and then resumed a fantastic lecture. Only at the end did he return to say what a huge honour it was to have someone like Rabbi Singer at his lecture and that it was no coincidence that 740 years after the Ramban made aliyah to the Old City of Jerusalem that Rabbi Singer has now done the same.

After the lecture we had arranged to go for coffee with a number of people: Linda Margolis who has been coming to a number of David’s lectures for the past few weeks, two boys from Sydney, Gabriel Sassoon and Ariel Schnapp and Yehudit Cohn (one of David’s most loyal students who is also becoming a friend)…and Rabbi Singer agreed to come with us. It was a fun gathering, but what was most remarkable was when Rabbi Singer (who asked us to call him Tovia) made a very public declaration about how affected he had been by David’s talk and that he had waited his whole life to hear someone speak about Tanach in the way that David had that night. It was a very impassioned speech that made David glow and squirm at the same time...I naturally nodded away in total agreement...

Anyway, at around 11.30 we left the cafe to return to Tel Aviv; we said our goodbyes to Linda, Gabriel, Ariel and Yehudit and walked down Ben Yehuda with Tovia. But rather than head back to Tel Aviv we (Tovia, David and I) all agreed that we were hungry and instead wandered over to Burger Bar for a late dinner. Tovia was hilarious and insisted that rather than have a 150g burger as we normally would, that we instead have the 300g burger because “it’s sick”.

And so, we found ourselves hanging out with Tovia Singer until about 2.30 in the morning when we finally boarded a sherut (shared taxi) bound for Tel Aviv.

On the walk home in Tel Aviv, I took a picture of this grab machine thingy for Bill (my soon-to-be-a-daddy brother) because it is truly hilarious. How much money did Bill and I waste on these machines at the Royal Show?...but really, who would have imagined a machine with packets of cigarettes nestled in between cute little cuddly toys?

This place can be more than a little nuts sometimes!