Shabbat Dinner in Joburg

Just when I thought my trip was over, I ended up having my first Kosher Orthodox Shabbat dinner in a beautiful Jewish suburb in Johannesburg. While in Zanzibar, Bri and I met Hayley, a sweet girl from Joburg who has been living in Australia for several years. She became our travel companion, snorkeling and partying with us, and she left with the requisite “If you’re ever in Joburg…” On our way back to Bloem, we decided to take a detour through Joburg. We called information, luckily, bizarrely, got her cousin, and managed to track her down.

We got into the city on a Friday afternoon, just in time for Shabbat dinner. As the sun went down, I borrowed “dinner appropriate” clothes from Hayley, we lit the candles, and Hayley’s father said a prayer for Bri and I, surprised that our fathers had never “blessed us” before Shabbat dinner. Even though I’m a proud, educated Jew from the Upper West Side, I have never experienced such strict practices, and I spent the next five days trying to follow the house rules, and not expose my own rather “flexible” version of Judaism. I learned to use separate meat and milk dishes, separate sinks, and to sit in the proper seat around the table. Saturday was tricky; I wasn’t quite sure what was “resting” and what wasn’t, but I know that Hayley’s father had ripped off strips of toilet paper beforehand, so it seemed like anything I did might violate the day of rest.

But once the sun went down, Joburg far surpassed my expectations. Had some great nights out (although all the clubs play house music - which I think is awful and monotonous, but South Africans love it) and drove through several townships, which were not unlike those in Bloem. Many homes have “domestics,” black women who you see every morning and night, coming and going from the townships to the white suburbs. So it wasn’t entirely out of the ordinary that there was a live-in maid, except that she called the father of the house “Master.” When I first heard this, I could not quite believe it. “Master”? The implications, to me anyway, are appalling and unacceptable, but as a relative stranger and guest, it was clearly not my place to say anything. Needless to say, it made me quite uncomfortable.

Finally got back to Bloem, and within 24 hours of being home, my phone rang with an invitation to Shabbat dinner that Friday. Even though Jews only make up less than one percent of the world, apparently, we’re everywhere. This family was as surprised to meet us, two foreign Jewish girls living in Bloemfontein, as we were to meet them. Until that point, I quite literally thought that Bri and I were the Jewish community in Bloem, and had no idea that there were 120+ Jews in town, and even a synagogue! Either way, I’d missed challah and brisket and kugel, and it felt strangely familiar (and immensely ironic) to be caught up in the dinnertime banter of a nice Jewish family.