This past Saturday night, lots of local Tzfatim came to warm the home of Elana Schachter, one of our newest residents in the Artists' Colony neighborhood. I know Elana back from when I was living in Nachlaot in Jerusalem. I lent her one of my favorite sci-fi anthologies as a housewarming gift, and she returned the favor by lending me a collection of Jewish fantasy and occult stories. Rebecca and Avraham brought along Ashira, who derived great glee from feeding crackers to Elana's smooth-haired collie, Bright. Ashira thought it especially funny whenever Bright would lick my nose. Lots of familiar faces were around, as well as a few new characters to meet. The climax of the party was when Moshe Tov, Eliyahu, and Dovid sung a rousing (if slightly off-key) round of "Elana, Don't Let Your Babies Grow Up to Be Kabbalists", sung to the tune of Willie Nelson's "Mammas, Don't Let Your Babies Grow Up to Be Cowboys", to which Elana could only reply, "Too late. Way too late." The evening wound down with the remaining attendees flipping through photographs of various quilts that Elana has made.

So, welcome to town, Elana. I only wish you the greatest success. We're all happy to have you here.

Last night I had an interesting dream. I dreamt that I was visiting Rebecca's house to play with Ashira, but Becca had another younger baby there for me play with. He had jet black hair and eyes and faintly olive skin and gorgeous expressive lips. There was a healthy glow about him, despite the fact that his small body gave the impression of fragility. I swung him around in my arms and tossed his head back as he squealed with delight. But then I noticed that his heartbeat felt unnaturally fast, so I switched to less energetic kinds of play for fear of the poor boy's health. Soon after, I was talking to Rebecca again, who explained to me that the baby is an orphan, and his unusually fast heartbeat is actually normal for him due to a congenital anomaly which caused him to be born with two hearts. Since each heart beats independently, it seems like he has twice as many heartbeats as you'd expect. Becca then revealed to me that he could be weaned very soon and that he would be eligible for me to adopt. My heart melted right there on the spot. I had fallen in love with him in the short time I'd spent with him, and couldn't resist the thought of taking him home and giving him all he needed. But I then said to Rebecca that I had serious reservations about the tremendous practical difficulties involved with raising a child before I'd found a partner. I wasn't sure that I was up to the tremendous task of single parenthood. The last moment of the dream was me thinking to myself that despite the difficulty, I couldn't pass up an opportunity like this for my sake or for the boy's sake.

Since I tend toward the cigar-is-a-cigar school of dream interpretation, I'm going to assume that my subconscious is just feeding back to me my impatience to have children. I've been able to feel my biological clock ticking for years now. I remember the secret daydream that I harbored throughout my childhood and adolescence, how all I really wanted was to grow up to be a stay-at-home dad and house-spouse, despite the indubitably clear message sent by Western culture that my only valid role as a man would be as a bread-winner. Now that I'm all grown up, I don't think I'm going to let the world dictate terms to me anymore. Screw building my life around my "career". I'm not going to settle for anything less than making my dreams come true.

I know it's been a long time since I've written anything, but instead of dwelling too much on that mistake, I'll just tell about the excellent fellow I met this past Monday night. I was out on the street near my house, about to run an errand, when I made eye contact with a tourist who was passing by. He stopped to ask me if I had any suggestions for something interesting to do. I never came up with anything good to do that evening (now that tourist season is over, most things close even earlier than usual), but then we got to talking.

I learned that his name is also Daniel and that he's visiting Israel for a couple weeks and would be spending the next couple days in Tzfat. He lives in Miami, but was born and grew up in Venezuela. He works as a writer and reporter for the New Herald, a Spanish newspaper in Miami. During our conversation, he mentioned that he planned to go hiking the next day, and I happily offered to act as his guide. It had been too long since I'd had a good walk, and Daniel was certainly enjoyable company. We agreed to rendezvous the next morning for services at a nearby synagogue. The itinerary for the day was to have breakfast, attend morning classes at my yeshiva, hike all the way to Meron in the afternoon, reach the grave of Rabbi Shimon bar Yochai at about nightfall, and take the bus back to Tzfat.

I felt excited after we parted for the evening. The plans for spending the next day together did have the uncanny feeling of a date hovering around it. But I couldn't be sure it wasn't just the result of the wishful thinking I can't help but indulge in whenever I meet a handsome and apparently eligible bachelor. As I spent the day with Daniel, a myriad microscopic details I noticed about him accumulated in my semi-conscious mind, adding up to a steadily growing hunch that he was, in fact, gay. For instance, there was a certain quality in his voice that reminded me of Moshe, the Brazilian guy I had dated last spring. He exhibited the concern for neatness and cleanliness in his personal surroundings that is so common among gay men. And, of course, he hadn't made even the slightest mention of relationships with women. But I still had nothing firm to confirm my hunch by the time we were about halfway through our hike.

The weather had been beautiful from the very beginning of the hike, with just enough cloudiness to keep the sunlight from being too hot. The scenery was as gorgeous as always. Though most of the herbs and grasses in the fields and hillsides were dried up after the recent summer season, leaving only thorns and burrs behind, the woods surrounding the stream at the bottom of the valley were still vibrant and green. The water burbled cheerfully as we chatted about topics ranging from our personal lives to the philosophy and psychology of self-improvement. I segued the conversation into how I had spent my time during the recent war. First, I related the basic details of where I set up lodgings, how my parents came to visit, and Seth's wedding. Then I steeled my nerve a bit and mentioned, as casually as I could manage, how I also had a lot of fun and made a lot of friends at the World Pride week in Jerusalem. Daniel responded with perfect aplomb that he'd heard of the event, but thought it had been cancelled because of the war. We were soon chatting about gay life and culture in both Miami and in different parts of Israel as if it were the most natural thing in the world, which it was, after all. The conversation after that became a lot deeper and more meaningful for both of us, as we compared experiences dealing with how being gay influences relationships with family, friends, and religion. Daniel was pleasantly surprised at how open and out I am to the rabbi and my fellow students at yeshiva without any discomfort. He told me about how he had recently grown so much closer to one of his Israeli cousins who had come out to him through a letter, and how he was going to be spending most of the rest of his vacation bonding with this formerly distant relation.

When we finally got back to Tzfat, we greedily gobbled a schwarma dinner and wandered around the Artists' Quarter a bit. In search of an alleged Torah class that we never found, we wound up discovering a beautiful tea house which was unfortunately reserved for a women's group till late in the night. Instead, we decided to split up for a half hour to freshen up and meet back at Ascent, the hostel at which Daniel was staying, where a small class on the weekly Torah portion was being held. Reluctant to let the night end, we both schmoozed as long as we could after the class was over, but eventually capitulated to the satisfying exhaustion that follows a good exercise.

Regretfully, our respective schedules didn't give us any free time to spend together today, but I managed to catch Daniel at the bus station at sunset to see him off before he left for Haifa to meet his cousin and proceed to more southern parts of the country. My romantic sentimentality made me buy him a small bundle of flowers as a parting gift. I probably won't see him again before he returns to Florida. I'm overjoyed to have made a new friend, and I intend to keep in touch with him. But it's a little too bad: if we both lived in the same part of the world, he's the kind of guy I'd snap up as quickly as I could. Parting is such sweet sorrow.

So, as I expected, as soon as my parents had arrived at the beginning of the month, I got too caught up in the torrent of family events to do any writing. The days leading up to Seth and Rachel's wedding were filled with preparations and lots of family together-time. We held a kiddush at the Kol Rina synagogue in the Jerusalem neighborhood of Nachlaot on the Shabbos before the wedding. The next Sunday I spent shopping for a suit at the mall with Avishai happily helping me out with an extra queer eye to find just the right style. He also loaned me a beautiful black woven kippah trimmed with blue to wear with my new threads at the wedding, and I thought it really made the ensemble.

The wedding itself was wonderful. The locale was gorgeous, the ceremony was tear-jerking, the artwork that Rachel's mother did for the ketubah (marriage contract) and the chuppah (wedding canopy) was magnificent, the food was excellent, and the music and dancing were jubilant. I got plenty of opportunity to wow the crowd by spinning fire with a set of poi that Seth's (now former) roommate David graciously lent me. I consider myself quite lucky for that, since I'd feared that my plans for such a performance would be ruined with all my equipment stuck in Tzfat with the rockets whizzing by. Finally, the wedding was a precious opportunity to savor visits with the various family members who had come and to meet more of Seth and Rachel's friends.

In the weeks before the wedding, I'd heard some friends and family from outside the country wonder if the wedding would even still be taking place. I'm glad that we were able to prove to the world that it takes a helluva lot more than a war to stop this family from celebrating our joy.

I plan to write about World Pride week in my next entry, but for now I'll finish off by linking to Moshe Chaim's blog, which features a lot of reports from my fellow Tzfat residents on the experiences during the war.

It's very relieving to come home to find that the worst damage to my apartment was a month's worth of dust. No broken walls, no shattered windows, no holes in the roof, no looting. The physical damage all around town seems very minor: some broken glass, a foot-wide pothole in one of the roads, a dinged up building here or there. It's hardly noticeable compared to the road construction and crumbling ruins that are par for the course around here. People are wandering around the streets, hunting for spots where ketushas hit. I got home on Sunday night, and I've been staying inside mostly for the past couple days, delving into hermit mode in order to decompress from all the excitement of the past month.

With any luck, I'll have time tomorrow to give a good recap of the whole visit from Mom and Dad, Seth and Rachel's wedding, World Pride, and assorted other events of the past few weeks. But for now, I'll try to get to bed at a reasonable time.