Friday, June 1 (Part 2). On Sabbath here, beginning 30 or 40 minutes before sundown when the siren sounds, the entire city of Jerusalem shuts down— the Jewish part, anyway. I woke up from my nap and tried to focus on answering backed-up emails, but I couldn’t find something important and I felt discombobulated. Little by little I came back into myself and accomplished a little something anyway, heard the siren sound, looked at my little clock that I had taken out of my bag and, ignoring Shabbat, kept working. Suddenly I heard a knock on my door to find David and Laurel Weinberg, who had come to pick me up to take me to Shabbat dinner at Raizel’s house. But I thought they were coming an hour later! Turns out I had forgotten to reset my clock to Israeli time after Italy. So I scrambled to get ready. Truth be told, I was not too excited to go to this Shabbat dinner because it didn’t start until 9:00 PM, and not only did I not want to stay up too late but eating right before I go to bed is not good for me. I had already passed up an invitation to attend synagogue. So I went reluctantly, figuring I would stay for about an hour. We walked the 20 minutes to Raizel’s house, and she met us at the door sparkling as she does, even having worked all day to prepare this dinner. At first I felt completely out of my element among these deeply religious strangers. I am not. But there were some really nice people there—mostly who, like Raizel, are English-speaking people who had moved to Jerusalem within the last five years. After the blessing over the wine and the bread and the washing of the hand ceremony and the singing and prayers—I definitely felt like the odd man out—it was time to eat one course after another. All the food was delicious. At one point, someone at the table asked me a question about the Three Principles. I answered as briefly as possible, but one extremely religious fellow, who took the lead on the prayers, got hung up when I said the words “spiritual essence.” He asked me what I meant, and as I started to answer he interrupted me right away and just started talking intellectually about what he knew. I realized he was not interested in listening at all to what he’d asked about and I’ve learned that there’s no sense in talking to someone who does not want to listen, so I kept my mouth shut and just listened to him. The conversation got way off the original point, until someone brought it back with a really nice statement and story. From that point on, I talked with the people down at my end of the table who were really interested in listening and having a beautiful conversation. So I ended up having a really nice time and staying a lot longer than I had planned. But I was getting tired, so I excused myself and thanked everyone, especially Raizel, and David and Laurel insisted on walking me home. By the time I got home I was wired. As I said, it is difficult for me to sleep if I try to go to bed on a full stomach, and to my great chagrin I didn’t fall off to sleep until about 2:00 AM.