“Hope, I need a favor,” my friend, Sandy, tells me on the phone.
“What do you need?”
“I was supposed to babysit at my temple tonight, but I have a party to go to. Think you could go for me and take care of the kids?” she asks.
“Um, yeah, that should be fine,” I reply. “Text me the name and time and I’ll be there.”
Two hours later, I’m standing in the hallway of Sandy’s temple. It smells of delicious latkes, since it’s the third night of Hanukah. I follow the smell down the stairs, finding a group of people singing holiday melodies. I quietly walk across the room, entering an adjoining room behind it. It’s a playroom and dining room all in one. In one corner, toddlers are squealing with happiness as they run around on a play set. Tables have been set up with food, and two girls are helping a woman make latkes. Unsure of who’s in charge of the temple babysitting program, I walk up and ask a woman playing with a girl on the play set.
“I didn’t know there was a babysitter,” she laughs when I ask.
“Oh. Well, I was supposed to be filling in for Sandy,” I say. There are only about fifty people at the temple, so I figure the woman would know my friend on a first-name basis. But she shakes her head, saying that she doesn’t.
After that, I just wander around a bit. I ask a few more people about what I’m supposed to do, but no one seems to know. After a while, I find myself over by the latke corner, helping a girl flip the potato pancakes.
“I’ve never made latkes before,” I tell her. She smiles at me.
“It’s not too hard. You just wait until they brown at the bottom, and then you flip them. Yeah, like that.” She watches me cook the latkes, and I have to admit, I’m having a pretty good time. I’ve never made them before, and there’s something nice about celebrating Chanukah in a more traditional way than I usually do. It’s more than I’ve done in years, really, to celebrate.
A while later, I’m back to finding out who needs babysitting. It seems as if no one knew there was supposed to be a babysitter, and what’s more, no one knows my friend Sandy. I find this odd, as the temple seems like a tightly knit community.
Still, it couldn’t have been a nicer place. When I ask the rabbi if he knows what the babysitter is supposed to be doing, he answers, “I don’t know, I’m sorry. But please, eat up and enjoy the festivities.” Almost everyone I ask tells me the same thing.
After fifteen more minutes, however, I’m only more confused than ever. Eventually, my dad tells me he’s ready to pick me up, so I pick up my coat and leave.
“Bye, Hope!” calls the girl I made latkes with. I smile and wave at her before going.
Once in the car, I text Sandy and tell her how weird the night was. Nothing made sense.
When Sandy texts me back, I know why it was so weird. I had gone to the wrong temple.
Now, I could end the story there, hoping to have made you laugh. But as the story happened during Chanukah, on Shabbat, I couldn’t help but really think about what this meant to me. Here I was, in a temple by accident. I wasn’t supposed to have come, and no one knew who I was. Yet that temple was a true Jewish community. They took me in without asking questions and offered me what they had for everyone else. They couldn’t have been kinder people--hospitable and friendly.
What’s more, their celebration of Chanukah was simple and sweet. Singing in one room, latke making in the other. No big parties or gift giving, just joining together and enjoying one another.
So by mistake, by going to the wrong temple, I ended up really seeing a wonderful example of what it means to be Jewish.
The Coalition for Jewish Learning is the education program of the Milwaukee Jewish Federation.
