About 3 weeks ago I returned from a trip to Israel with my husband and 4 children. We spent 3-1/2 weeks touring the land, visiting rebbes (rabbis with spiritual guidance and a following), visiting gravesides (a favorite activity for any religious wannabe) and enjoying Passover in Jerusalem. My husband has been telling me for years about his "tish" experiences and how "you would really love going to one." So, on our last Shabbos (Sabbath) in Jerusalem, after I had been exposed to multiple rebbe sitings, I agreed to go "tish hopping." A tish is yiddish for "table." Tish hopping is where you go visiting various rebbes tables, usually located in a large room or hall where he sits and eats and shares his food and thoughts. So, we went. After all I was on a roll. I had experienced a viewing of the Slonim Rebbe burning his chametz and actually had a meal with the Koidenover Rebbe. Now don't get too excited. I had a meal in another room with his wife. As I told my husband when we went to see the Slonim Rebbe burn his chametz and my husband told me to "stay back in the corner," I said, "No one puts Baby in the corner!" So I went behind the fence and got a great video. Anyway, back to my tish hopping. There are many many tishes that go on in the streets of Meah Shearim in Jerusalem on any given Friday night. So off we went down street, behind alleys, around corners to find all these rebbes. "You need to go to the women's entrance," I was told. So up, up, up, up my daughter and I climbed, sometimes 6 flights of stairs to get a "viewing" of a tish. These stairwells took us over rooftops, behind attics and into innocuous rooms where we could get a "rebbe viewing." At this point I was glad for the stair climbing class I was getting for free and decided to rename tish hopping to t-shopping, because girls don't hop, we shop. There we were in a faraway attic, above the streets of Meah Shearim peering down through little slits at a rebbe and his groupies. They were all swaying to and fro humming a little niggun and the rebbe? Well, its hard to say. Most of them don't move too well and don't speak too loud. I looked at the women next to me and wondered how some of them made it up the 6 flights of stairs and how long they had been sitting there and how long they planned to stay. It somehow reminded me of my RV trip a few years ago when we met "regular" RVers who told us they'd been in the same park, same spot, for 2 weeks. I thought maybe these women had been there since the previous shabbos. Anyway, we peered down, spotting our own men and they too were spotting us and smiling as they saw our fingers poking through the blinds. We stayed for a few minutes and then went down our 6 flights of stairs around a corner, down another street and back up to another tish. We repeated this 6 or 7 times until my thighs could handle no more. I did not get the spiritual lift that I've heard of, but when you hop or shop, there's not much time to get a spiritual connection and for sure not from 6 floors up. I love the fact that my husband exposes me to these things, though. I am for sure richer.... if not thinner.... from the experience.
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