My internet’s back! To celebrate, here’s the post I wrote last weekend:
On Friday night, I headed back to Amsterdam with another intern (I found more Jews!) to attend Yom Kippur services at the historic Portuguese Synagogue. The synagogue was built in 1675 and was the largest shul in the world at that time. Services were held in the main sanctuary, which is kept in its original state, including no electricity or heating. This meant that the entire room was lit with thousands of candles, both hanging from massive chandeliers and affixed to the back to seats. I was certain that at some point someone’s hair would catch on fire from the candles, but we made it through the service incident free. No electricity also meant no microphone, so it was a little hard to follow at times, especially in the traditional Portuguese melodies. In fact, the Dutch men around me kept looking to me to find out what page we were on, but that’s probably because they were all talking nonstop throughout the service.
Thankfully, the sermon was in English. The rabbi welcomed the Dutch Minister of Justice and the Mayor of Amsterdam, who were both in attendance, and talked about how Amsterdam welcomed the Portuguese Jews after they were expelled 500 years ago. When I’m in these historic settings, I like to think about what it would have been like to attend services there in the past. In this case, it wasn’t hard to picture, since it looks like nothing has changed in the last 100 years – all the men were wearing top hats and tuxedos, chanting by candlelight in front of a massive ark. It was an amazing sight to see, and one that will be hard to match in any future Yom Kippur.
Afterwards, we ended up having to cut through the red light district on the way back from the synagogue. It was my first time seeing it at night, and it’s even more gaudy and ridiculous then – like one giant bachelor party. Perhaps Yom Kippur’s not the best time to stroll through, but what the heck. The rest of the holiday was fairly uneventful, and we even made it to a break fast at the end.
Work, meanwhile, has started to get pretty intense. This week is the last week before the closing brief is due, and I think that deadline is only now becoming real to people. Consequently, we’re going to be running around like crazy. I have had to opportunity to write paragraphs of the brief, but most of my assignments consist of “somewhere in the trial someone mentioned this, see if you can find the quote.” I think this week the whole team is mostly going to be checking cites to make sure our facts are correct. Since I basically spend all my time at UCLA cite checking, this should be relatively second nature...
Everything else is going well. I went to “trivia night” at a local bar for the first time this week. All the questions about US pop culture were absurdly easy (e.g. in what city was Rodney King beaten?), but it was a bit trickier when they asked about the rest of the world (e.g. who was the coach of the 1978 Argentinean football team?). Even though my team was mainly comprised of non-Americans, we still were pretty well walloped. We’ll have to try again another week...
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