My Children Clubbed Together to Send Us Into the Bush, and I Spent Weeks Convinced It Could Not Be Done

The envelope arrived at our anniversary dinner, passed across the table by my eldest with the nervous grin of someone who has spent more than they should. Inside was a printed itinerary and a note in my daughter's handwriting that said, simply, You are going on safari, Abba, and no, you cannot give it back.

A man who likes to know where his food comes from

I should explain something about myself. I am the sort of person who reads the small print. I am the gabbai at our shul, which means I am the one who worries about details other people would rather not think about, the one who checks that the wine is right and the times are correct and nobody has quietly swapped the dairy spoons into the meat drawer. This is not a burden to me. It is who I am. My wife says I would audit the Garden of Eden.

So when my children handed me a trip into the African bush, my first feeling, before gratitude, was a cold logistical dread. We keep a strictly kosher home. We have kept it for thirty years, through moves and illnesses and one memorable Pesach where the oven broke. I could not for the life of me imagine how a person like me was supposed to eat in a place that is, by definition, hours from the nearest kosher butcher. I smiled and thanked them and privately began composing the gentle speech about how we might convert it into a nice hotel by the sea instead.

The phone call that changed my mind

My daughter, who knows me better than I know myself, had anticipated all of this. She sat me down and told me she had already done the worrying for me. The whole thing, she said, was built around people exactly like us. A Kosher Safari, run by people who understood what a kosher kitchen actually requires, not a lodge that would cheerfully offer to grill me a vegetable and call it a solution.

I remained sceptical. I have heard the word kosher used loosely more times than I can count, usually by well-meaning people who think it means a plate of salad. So I did what I do. I asked questions. Endless questions. How is the food supervised. Who is the mashgiach. What happens on Shabbat, when I cannot travel, cannot switch on a light, cannot do any of the hundred small things a modern trip assumes I will do. My daughter, patient as her mother, simply forwarded my questions on and let the answers come back until, one by one, my objections ran out of road.

The part I dreaded most turned out to be the point

Shabbat in the bush was the thing I could not picture. At home, Shabbat is a fortress of routine. The candles at the right minute. The walk to shul. The table. I could not imagine holding onto that in a place with no eruv, no minyan I knew, no walls.

What I had not understood, until we were actually there, was that the whole thing had been designed around Shabbat rather than in spite of it. The itinerary of the Kosher Tour simply stopped when the sun began to drop on Friday. The game drives were arranged so we were back well before candle lighting. The food for the day was prepared in advance, kept warm in the permitted way, so that no one had to lift a finger they should not lift.

And so I found myself, on a Friday evening thousands of kilometres from my own dining room, watching my wife light two candles on a table set under a thatched roof with the whole enormous African night pressing in beyond it. There was no traffic. No hum of a city. Just the candles, and the sound of something large moving in the dark beyond the fence, and my wife's hands making the same small circles over the flames that she has made for thirty years. I have prayed in beautiful shuls. I have never felt the words of the Friday night service settle on me the way they did there.

Meeting the other travellers

I had also braced myself for loneliness, the awkwardness of being the fussy religious guests in a group of easygoing tourists. That fear was misplaced too. The others on the trip were people like us. A retired couple from Manchester. A young family who had saved for two years. A widower travelling with his brother. We were all, in our different ways, people who had assumed this kind of holiday was simply not available to us, and who had been quietly proven wrong.

By the second night we were eating together like an extended family, arguing over whose grandchildren were cleverer and comparing notes on which animal had frightened us most. None of us, it turned out, had ever quite believed that properly run Kosher Safaris existed until someone we trusted talked us into one, and we spent a whole dinner shaking our heads that it had taken us this long to find out. The shared food, all of it prepared to a standard none of us had to question, did something I did not expect. It dissolved the low background anxiety that I did not even realise I carry when I eat away from home. For once I was not the gabbai checking the spoons. I was just a man at a table, being fed, among his own.

The morning the elephants came

I will not pretend the animals were beside the point. They were not. On the third morning our guide cut the engine and we sat in complete silence while a herd of elephants crossed in front of us, close enough that I could hear the soft sound of their feet on the earth and see the long lashes over their eyes. A tiny one, all ears and clumsiness, stumbled to keep up. My wife reached over and gripped my hand so hard it hurt, and neither of us said a word, because there were no words that would not have made it smaller.

I am not a man given to grand statements about creation. But sitting there, having lit candles the night before and kept my Shabbat whole and unbroken, I felt something click into a place I did not know was empty. I had spent thirty years believing that my observance and the wild, wide world were two separate things, and that to have one I would have to loosen my grip on the other. That morning, with the dust of the elephants still hanging in the light, I understood I had been wrong.

What I brought home

We have been back for two months now. People at shul ask me about the lions, and I tell them, but that is not really the story I want to tell. The story I want to tell is that my children knew something about me before I knew it myself. They knew that the walls I had built, the certainty that a man like me could not have this, were not really about kashrut at all. They were about fear, dressed up as diligence.

I still read the small print. I still check the spoons. But I no longer assume that the answer to the wide world is no. Sometimes, if you ask enough questions and the right people have thought about them before you, the answer is a table set under the stars, two candles burning steady in the still air, and a herd of elephants walking past at first light.