Shabbat Fell on the Second Night, Somewhere Past the Last Fence

Fourteen Years Without a Day Off

I am thirty-four years old, and until last winter I had never taken what a normal person would call a holiday.

My father put me behind a sorting table on Hoveniersstraat when I was twenty. The diamond trade in Antwerp is a small village pretending to be a global industry. I learned to read a stone under the loupe before I learned to read a balance sheet, and I learned, more than anything, that a man who leaves his desk is a man who loses his clients.

So when my wife, Chaya, put a printed photograph of an elephant on my pillow one night in November, I thought she was joking. She was not.

The Argument We Had in the Kitchen

Chaya does not argue loudly. She argues with facts, in a calm voice, while folding laundry. She told me that in our nine years of marriage we had never spent seven consecutive days together without my phone ringing about a parcel. She told me our children, who were then six and four, asked her why Tatte was always tired. She told me she had already spoken to my mother, who would take the children, and that my mother had said, and I quote, "It is about time."

I gave her every reason it could not work. The business. The season. And the big one, the one I was sure would end the conversation: how would we keep kosher in the middle of Africa? How would we keep Shabbat? I pictured us eating tinned tuna in a tent for a week while everyone around us ate grilled meat.

She had an answer for that too. She had been reading for weeks. She showed me pages on her laptop, forums where other Orthodox couples described trips they had taken, with meals prepared under supervision, sealed food, a minyan sometimes, and guides who understood what it meant when the sun dropped on a Friday. One of the tabs she had open was about a Kosher Safari, and I remember staring at the words as if someone had written "Underwater Library." The two ideas did not belong together in my head.

Leaving the Table

The hardest part was not the flight. It was telling my father. He listened, nodded, and then asked who would cover the Thursday meeting with the Israeli buyers. I said my cousin Mendel. He said nothing for a long moment, and then he said, "Your grandfather never went anywhere either. Maybe that was a mistake." I had never heard my father admit a family mistake in my life.

We landed in Johannesburg on a Wednesday and flew on to a small airstrip the next morning in a plane so small I could see the pilot adjusting his sunglasses. I spent the flight with my hand gripping Chaya's knee.

The First Day, When I Could Not Stop Checking

I will be honest. The first full day I was a terrible guest of Africa. I checked my phone every time we had signal. I calculated in my head what the dollar was doing.

Then our guide, a quiet man called Kagiso, switched off the engine for a herd of impala, turned around and said, very simply, "You are not here yet." He had obviously seen many men like me.

That night the food arrived in sealed packaging, double wrapped, with the hechsher I recognised. Chaya watched me inspect every seal like a stone under the loupe and she laughed so hard she had to put her fork down. I laughed too, eventually. It was the first time in months that I had laughed at myself.

Friday Afternoon in the Bush

Shabbat came on the second night. I had worried about it from the moment Chaya showed me that first photograph. In Antwerp, Shabbat is held up by everything around you: the shul three streets away, the eruv, the bakery, the neighbours, the silence that settles over our streets. Here there was nothing to hold it up except us.

On Friday afternoon we came back from the drive early. Kagiso knew why without being told, and he made sure we were back with time to spare. I showered, put on a white shirt that felt absurd in the heat, and Chaya unpacked the travel candlesticks her grandmother had given her at our wedding. We had brought our own wine and two small challahs that had travelled carefully in a cool bag.

That Friday there was nothing to rush from. The sun went down over a dry riverbed, orange and then red and then a blue I do not have a word for. Chaya lit the candles on a wooden table at the edge of the deck. She covered her eyes for a long time. When she uncovered them she was crying, and so was I, and neither of us could have explained exactly why.

Kiddush With the Hyenas

I made kiddush over our wine with the sound of something whooping in the dark. Kagiso, who had stayed a respectful distance away, told me afterwards it was hyenas, and that they were far off. I did not entirely believe him about the far off part.

We ate slowly. We sang the zemirot my father sings, badly, because I have never been able to hold a tune, and nobody in the whole of Botswana was there to complain. Things we had not had the space to say in years were suddenly easy to say, because there was nowhere to go and nothing to answer.

At one point I looked up and the sky was so full of stars that I thought for a moment something was wrong with my eyes. I have spent my whole life looking for light inside stones.

What Shabbat Morning Taught Me

On Shabbat morning there was no drive for us, of course. We stayed at the camp. I davened alone facing north east, which Kagiso had worked out for me with a compass the night before, a kindness I still think about. Chaya read on the deck. An elephant came down to the waterhole about forty metres away and drank for what felt like an hour. We did not take a photograph because we could not, and I think that is the reason I remember every single detail of it.

My father has always said that Shabbat is a palace in time. I had nodded at that line my whole life. Sitting there, unable to touch my phone, unable to make a deal, unable even to take a picture, I understood it for the first time. The palace was not the bush. The palace was the stopping.

Coming Back to Hoveniersstraat

We have been home for nine months now. I would love to tell you that I changed completely, but I sit behind the same table, and I still answer the phone too quickly. What changed is smaller and, I think, more real. I leave the bourse an hour earlier on Fridays. I light nothing, that is Chaya's, but I stand in the room while she does it, instead of arriving after.

People at shul ask me about the trip, mostly because they cannot imagine a man like me in Africa. Two of them have since asked Chaya for advice, and she sends them the same pages she sent me, about planning a Kosher Tour and what to ask about food and Shabbat before you book.

When younger men in the trade tell me they cannot possibly take a week away, I hear my own voice in theirs. I do not lecture. I tell them about the hyenas, and the elephant at the waterhole, and the candles on the wooden table. Then I tell them that whole families now go on Kosher Safaris, that it is not the strange idea I believed it was, and that the only thing I regret is waiting fourteen years.

The photograph of the elephant that Chaya left on my pillow is still on our fridge. I look at it every Friday afternoon, just before I put my phone away.