America (sort of)

The unmarked entrance to the synagogue
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Well, I went home yesterday... sort of.  I had a sampler platter dinner of tex-mex quesadillas, chili con carne, and a piece of chocolate cake, and i washed it down with a genuine, cold Budweiser while I watched the Jets/Pats and the Giants/Eagles games with Penn State and Lehigh kids.  I sat there, elbow-deep in Tabasco sauce, playing Jewish Geography with a girl from Larchmont and talking to a kid who used to row at Penn State.

It wasn't Namibian sand dunes and it wasn't the Outback, but I'll be damned if I didn't have an absolutely great time.  It was completely a-cultural.  No authentic experiences, no weird cultural quirks, no hand-motions or difficult-to-understand methods and traditions.  It was home, or at least a pretty decent imitation of it, and I had a blast.

Jewish museum in Cordoba
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The last few days, actually, have gotten steadily better and better.  I went to services last Friday night and Saturday morning and met the congregation in Sevilla (all like eight of them).  There were fourteen people at Friday night services, but if you subtract myself, Steve Grunthal (coincidentally a Greeley grad from Chappaqua who's in Sevilla teaching English), and the four non-Jews in attendance (they told me that they consider Judaism "the right path to salvation" and I guess the rabbi just lets them come.  Better them than empty seats, I suppose...), there were only about eight full-time Jewish congregants.  The next morning there were six.

Three Kings Day parade in Sevilla. Because modern cultural sensitivities have not yet convinced Spaniards that blackface probably isn't so racially sensitive.
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In speaking with the rabbi (who incidentally used to teach at Bet Torah... his name is Iyal and he worked there about five years ago) and the congregation president, Jose, they told me of their woes in getting people to come to shul on a regular basis.  There are apparently thirty Jewish families in Sevilla now, but most of them obviously aren't religious.  Jose pumped me and Steve for information on how he could reach out to the American study abroad kids, but I felt--and still feel--that to recruit a new crop of Jewish kids from Long Island every few months is a temporary solution to a permanent problem.

I don't know what it is, but there's something not quite right about this community and this rabbi.  He has already asked me to become a advertising salesman for a Judaica phone book he wants to compile, and over coffees and in between his treatises on what it means to be Jewish, he told me about how he would put the wrong tax ID number on his W-2 forms when he taught in Hebrew schools across Westchester so he wouldn't get taxed.  "I could only do it for six months at a time," he said, "And then I would have to go somewhere else."  Riiiight.  It was my first experience with religious clergy and tax evasion.  I don't even know if he was really ordained or not, and neither does Steve.  Whatever.

Interestingly, on the topic of these "quasi-converts" that Rabbi Iyal deals with, he was telling me (either pre- or post-IRS evasion story) that one of these men, Eugenio, began his interest in Judaism after seeing a movie with a Hebrew song in the soundtrack.  As Iyal tells it, Eugenio started crying right then and there, and after that, he has kept kosher and kept Shabbas ever since.  Go figure.  Combine that with the street performer I heard playing "Havenu Shalom Aleichem" on the accordion the other day and the congregation president who learned English from working on a U.S. Marine base in Casablanca, punctuates every English sentence with the word "fuck," and calls black people--without any malice, apparently--"niggers," and you've got yourself a pretty interesting little Jewish community.

At any rate, I'm in a great little backpacker's hostel right now, I have a standing commitment to wake up at 1:30 AM and watch the college football championship back at the Tex-Mex place, and my clothes are all clean.  I'm working on getting to Portugal for Thursday, so as of now, life could be a whole lot worse.