Kosher Eucharist / יוקאריסט כשר

The story of my life thus far has been one of escape. Not escape from responsibility, love affairs gone awry, illegitimate children, the Mafia and the myriad other regular hellhounds on the trail of the geographically restless (although I’d prefer to avoid all of those things too), but from an evil far more pervasive and insidious, a demon whose pestilent fingertips reach to almost every corner of the globe. He is known by many names to the many different peoples who have found themselves choked in his icy grip, his inevitable comings spoken of in hushed, worried tones as mothers gird their children in armor of cotton and down and fathers stoke the furnaces to prepare for the approaching onslaught. But there is no true preparing for the sheer might of Cold. There is only the choice between huddling meekly before him, wrapped in scarves and ski goggles as his frozen precipatory minions lash at your face and color your cheeks, or running from him to those few places where the sun reigns triumphantly over steaming forests and scorched wastelands which allow no entrance to the forces of frigidity.

I made my choice. I ran.

After my storied escape from the dim, ice-and-caribou-choked wastelands of the Far North, I went to New Orleans, a city wholly Caribbean in climate, temperance and shocking crime rate, cheerfully stagnating under an encouraging canopy of palm trees, shielded from the armies of Cold by mile after mile of fragrant swamp. But just when the 80th day of deliciously, cripplingly tropical weather had lulled me into a false, sweaty sense of security, my foe launched a sneak attack from the air, turning the sweet summer rain into an instrument of his own fiendish design, ushering in a frigid monsoon season of 40-degree temperatures abetted by constant, skin-numbing downpours. That endless cold rain half-destroyed New Orleans for me - soon God would decide to punish the Jews for the Disengagement by sending His Appointed Messenger Katrina to finish the job.

So I found myself in the Middle East, which like New Orleans featured encouraging flora, not to mention fauna - nobody imagines a laden caravan of camels slowly wending their way to Samarkand, or wherever it is camels go, through four-foot drifts of snow. Surely, I thought, in a country 60% barely-inhabitable desert, that I could finally find the respite I craved and bid eternal farewell to my nemesis.

I was wrong.

It is cold in Jerusalem. It is very, very fucking cold. Night temperatures hover just above freezing. Winds howl through the empty streets. Rain pours from the sky, turning the airy golden stone which has inspired so much poetry to a drab, water-stained, Soviet gray. And now they say, it will start snowing later tonight and into tomorrow.

One might think I could deal with one freak snowfall and some inclement weather. But Jerusalem apartments are built as if Jerusalem was a sun-baked Mediterranean city on the fringe of a great desert - which it is, about 8 months of the year - instead of a city which knows the frozen kiss of Cold. There is no central heating. There is no un-central heating. There is no insulation whatsoever. Every excessively large window, every poorly-sealed balcony door, every tile floor is a Trojan horse allowing entry to cold air, from which there is no escape. No sweater, no blanket, no wool socks can keep it out, it will find you, it will chill you to the bone, it will make your days a struggle to keep your teeth from chattering inside the walls of your own house. It will make you suffer.

Snow will only make it much worse.

If I live through the week, I’m moving South. I don’t care if I never see another leaf or another blade of grass in my life, at least I will be free.