By Benjamin Bar-Lev
Having lived in Jerusalem for almost six months now, I have started feeling more comfortable using Hebrew in my everyday life. I can give a cab driver Hebrew directions to many places in the city. Most of my classes are taught in a combination of Hebrew and English.
Sometimes, in a restaurant, I’ll even demand to see a Hebrew menu, insulted that the waitress mistook me for an English-speaker. Of course, this is usually followed by many sheepish questions for her as I try to decipher the hamburger choices and to pry my foot out of my mouth at the same time.
Nonetheless, I am feeling pretty good about speaking our people’s language. However, recently my “Hebrew ego” took a serious blow.
The outing started as an innocent trip to the grocery store — a near-weekly occurrence that is almost always entertaining. My smile faded though, as I grabbed what I thought was laundry detergent — the same “laundry detergent” I have been buying for six months — and noticed that in small English print on the back it said, “fabric softener.”
Yes, for the last six months I have been washing all of my clothes in fabric softener, and then softening them with a different brand of fabric softener. You can imagine my dismay. I looked at the bottle again — definitely the same one that sat on my washing machine for three months, where its similar predecessor sat before.
Suddenly everything made sense. My clothes always smell great coming out of the washing machine, but they never seem much cleaner than when they went in. All my white socks have turned gray. Dirt from a hike in the Carmel Mountains remained on my shirt after two washes.
After basking in my own ineptitude with my friend Erich, I put the fabric softener down and bought a bottle of Tide, imported from the USA. A bit more expensive? Yes. Actually detergent? Also yes.
Shopping in a foreign country has advantages and disadvantages. OK, maybe only disadvantages.
The grocery store that I usually go to is very close to my apartment. It’s called “Super Sal” or in English, “Super Basket.”
Generally, Israeli food stores have mostly the same things as American food stores, but organized in a more “Israeli” fashion. The salami is kept far away from the cheese, the peanut butter is paired with chocolate spread rather than jelly, and the toothpaste is in the cleaning aisle.
If you’re not a native Hebrew speaker, it might pay to ask one of the friendly Israelis about a questionable product. During the summer, I was surprised to find that some onion rings that I bought for an “American Shabbat” at my apartment actually turned out to be chicken rings. They were delicious but the vegetarians were less than pleased.
Don’t worry, the fun doesn’t stop when you are finished walking the aisles. The architect who happened to design this particular store must not have finished at the top of his or her class.
As one approaches the checkout lanes, it becomes very clear that they are far too narrow to fit a shopping cart through. So, after unloading a cart-full of groceries onto the conveyer belt, it is the shopper’s responsibility to push the shopping cart back into the main part of the store, with the hope of minimal injuries to passers by.
When my Hebrew Union College guidebook told me I was in for an exciting year, I had no idea that everything would be this exciting. Tonight I’ll dream of wide aisles and tomorrow, perhaps, my socks will be white again.
Milwaukee native Benjamin Bar-Lev is a rabbinical student at the Hebrew Union College-Jewish Institute of Religion campus in Jerusalem.
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