The following morning we arose and tested the local kosher bakery, wandering down a couple of blocks to admire the amazing view across the Hudson (I wish we had our camera with us at the time). David very bravely overcame his fear of heights (and I my fear of bears...not that there were any, but that is irrelevant) to sit on the thick but high retention wall and look out over the vista, munching on danishes and muffins.
That afternoon, I went out to explore the city while David stayed in to prepare for his upcoming talks. I went downtown to Union Square where I reveled in the glorious transformation that sunshine makes to this city, exploring the fresh growers market in Union Square (although $2.70 for two peaches was a bit of a shock) and The Strand bookstore (one of the wonders of the second-hand-book world) as well as the joys (and despairs) of Starbucks...
Dinner that evening was spent, of course, with Mark (Pearlman) now father of the infinitely impressive JInsider.com. After short discussion, we settled on my favourite restaurant in NYC, Deli Casbah, and set the tone for the rest of the trip...eating too much and a great deal of meat.
After two nights of imposing on Danny's hospitality we knew it was time to go into serious mode and to find somewhere to stay. Fortunately, on Thursday morning I found a place on Craigslist in New Jersey (bravely crossing the state border) that was (by NYC standards) very reasonably priced and available for the remainder of the time that we were there and only 20 minutes away from Manhattan. I arranged to go immediately to see it and agreed on the spot to take it for the next day, while David stayed behind to continue with his preparation for his talk with Chulent that evening.
I then made my way back to Manhattan and went to visit one of my favourite shops in NYC, B&H which can never be adequately described (but in essence it is a large, busy and fascinating electrical store owned and run by Hassidic Jews) where I bought a lapel microphone for David which could attach to the MP3 player that Mark had recently given us.
From then I went to join David who was having one of his favourite lunches (a chicken snack pack at Kosher Deluxe) with Jonathan Adam Ross and then, all of a sudden, it was evening and we went back to Danny's...and then we were off to Chulent for the first of David's NYC lectures, The Whole of Jewish Philosophy in One Hour.
This lecture was up there as one of my top picks of the tour...a truly masterful compilation of a vast amount of meaty information. Amusingly (or annoyingly, depending on your perspective) there were two guys sitting next to David throughout the talk who kept trying to discuss points with him and seeming to disagree with him on a number of occasions, but at the end of the talk, they came up to him and were raving. The night was a great success and Chulent's founder and paternal overseer, Yitzchak Shonenfeld - featured as the first person in the clip below) was beautiful and humbly grateful that David gave his time to this group (our pro-bono event for the trip). The whole lecture is posted on YouTube in eight parts, below is part one.Tragically, by the time the talk was over, so was the cholent, so we missed out on Yitchak’s famous spicy vegetarian offering.
The following day we moved to New Jersey (after experiencing the extraordinary galuti kosher shopping delights of Washington Heights) where we spent a very restful and pleasant Shabbat. The moment it was over, however, we were rushing around like crazies in order to make it on time to Bnei Jeshurun in the Upper West Side where David was giving his big talk, The Concept of Teshuva in the Prophets, for the beginning of Selichot (stressfully, we were a few minutes late). The talk went well, although the audience was strange and it was a little difficult to gauge their reaction –
having said that, we sold a number of books and lots of people signed up for the mailing list, which is always a good indicator that a talk was well received. We both walked away from the event feeling a little uneasy, but thankfully over the course of the remainder of the week a range of people told us how much they enjoyed the talk that we felt more reconciled to the event.Following the talk, we made our way to the Carlebach Shul for Selichot, but we didn’t realise was a super fest it was going to be. The place was packed and as time wore on it became even more so as loads of Chassidic men made their way over from Brooklyn. We clearly didn’t realise that the Carlebach Shul was the place to be and it became too packed for me – so that we ended up pushing our way outside for fresh air.
In doing so, we came across one of the chatting boys from the Chulent lecture, Favel, who introduced David to a man named Bezalel Naor. This was the beginning of couple of hours of intense conversation between David and his new friend, so much so that Mark (Pearlman, who came to join us after finishing Selichot at Bnei Jeshurun) and I went for a coffee and waited for ages for David to come and join us (please refer to David for subtext). After experiencing the trials of the New Jersey Path train service in the wee hours of the morning (but appreciating the fact that the platform was full despite it being 4am) we arrived home at around 5am.
Sunday was spent catching up sleep, enjoying the sunshine in New Jersey, responding to emails and preparation for David’s talks. That evening, feeling the need to return to Manhattan, we found ourselves again at Deli Casbah, this time trying their burgers. The return journey was tough for the two roly-polys (too much meat in the digestive system can cause near-breakdown).On Monday morning I was party to a most unusual experience. Leaving David in New Jersey for more ‘alone’ prep time, I went to join the Stop Iran rally, taking place ‘outside’ (actually about three blocks away) the United Nations. It was a truly fascinating experience. I arrived at the height of activity and found myself, along with other less diligent late-comers, barred from entering the main crowd by the police, who believed that numbers in that confined area had swelled beyond acceptable levels.
I was soon distracted from this inconvenience by a nearby side-show, the silent protest by Nuterei Karta, holding their anti-Zionist banners and pro-Iran posters. Slipping through an opening in the gate, I moved forward to watch in fascination, disbelief and disgust, both at the profoundly unpleasant banners of these misguided Haredim, but also at the venom and unbridled anger of their opponents who shouted a range of curses including: 'Am Yisrael chai, Neturei Karta die'; 'Traitors! Traitors'; and "Go to hell!'. Below is a brief clip of the middle chant.
After pulling myself away from this disturbing carnival, I made my slowly forward towards the front of the rally, so that around half an hour later I was finally able to see the speakers. The speeches themselves were relatively uninteresting, more interesting was the curious milkshake of humanity brought together in solidarity - 
mostly Jews, a few crazy Christians and a random selection of others. Despite the organisational debacles (see here for more) the rally was a clear and united display of concern about a nuclear armed Iran (but there were a number of other agendas sprinkled through, naturally. It was also very interesting to observe.Following the rally, I walked over for a slice of pizza at Milk & Honey on 45th and 5th and then did a lot of walking. I walked back down to 14th (via a visit to Maisey's - experience the first glimmer of material longing that I have had for some time) to pick up a few more of the berets that I had bought the week before making my way up Midtown where I grazed again for a while in Starbucks.
It was here that we discovered what can happen when you suggest to some New Yorkers the possibility of going out for dinner in a different part of town from their usual stomping grounds...anyway, learning this lesson, we found ourselves back having dinner again at Deli Casbah (somehow, after the third time in a week, the sparkled seemed to have waned on this experience) having dinner with Danny and his friend Leila. Very nice.
Giving David more 'alone' prep time I went on Tuesday afternoon to meet up with Mary Madigan, one of the people I had met at the Jewish Bloggers Convention in Jerusalem in August. We caught up for a veggie curry and a chat, which was great.
Tuesday night was the 'wine' talk for Michael Dorf at his new City Winery which had been causing David some stress. The talk was actually called, Wine and the High Holidays,
and, to David's credit, turned out to be a whiz-banger of a talk - he covered wine and Torah, wine in history, wine and Kabbalah to name a few angles. It was also fascinating to see this new winery, not yet fully complete, to try a couple of new kosher red wines and, of course, to see Michael and his wife Sarah.David had one day to prepare his final talk of the tour, Dialogues with the Creator of the Universe, a Rosh Hashanah talk for the JCC Manhattan. At some ridiculous hour of the night David woke up and started working on the talk and at around 7am he woke me to inform me he had 'cracked' it...which was, in fact, some relief as he didn't really have any idea of what he was going to talk about when we went to bed. So, amazingly, the day progressed relatively smoothly.
Meanwhile (small but significant subplot), David had made an arrangement to catch up with an old school friend from Melbourne whom he had not seen for 27 years. This old friend is these days a big rabbi known as Rabbi Mordechai Becher (during his school days, he was Michael Becher). David and he caught up at the JCC a couple of hours before David's talk and it was quite an amazing meeting - which seemed to touch them both (I ,unfortunately but perhaps not unsurprisingly, arrived too late to meet him). There will no doubt be more news on that front.
The Dialogues with the Creator of the Universe was attended by the hard core of David's following in NYC. And it was well worthwhile. The talk was super - bringing together a range of material, some of which I hadn't heard before, which was great. If you want to watch it, Mark has it on his JInsider site - click here to watch the full lecture.Towards the end of the lecture, Shaul Rappaport arrived (it was lovely to see him) and we went with him for dinner at, you guessed it, Kosher Delight, where David had his final chicken snack box and I had my last hot pastrami on rye for a while.
Being our last night in Manhattan, Mark wanted us to come up to see him so that he could do a few interviews with David. We were tired, but we went and in the end it was nice to hang out with Mark for a bit. Here is one of the interviews and the rest are easy accessible from this point:
Then it was Thursday, September 25th, and we were back to Newark airport, on a plane to Israel, ready to go home. Yay!
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