How The Light Comes In
It’s the sixth night of Hanukkah and the beginning of Shabbat. There are sirens and honking all around me as a power outage has cut off the traffic lights at a busy intersection. I cross against the gridlock, each car vigilant to an impossible balance of fairness and self-righteousness at the peril of each pedestrian. I reach what has become one of my favorite restaurants, one I might never have tried but that I had been invited along for a Manti lunch with some Turkish colleagues. Manti is a pasta dish, something like ravioli, but with a yogurt sauce. As I don’t eat pasta, I requested a selection of zeytiye, which are “olive oil” dishes, consisting of vegetables prepared in a variety of ways and served cold. After fumbling to point at the dishes I wanted and more confusingly, didn’t want, I was aided by the server/chef who spoke English quite well, something rare to find in a restaurant here.
Tonight I found the family that owns the restaurant sitting in the dark near dusk and I almost turned away fearing they were closed due to the outage. I then spotted their son, who is a Red Cross worker in Afghanistan home for a family visit. His father had told me about him, but I’d not met him before. They are Lebanese and I probably would not have known that had they not told me so. Ethnicity is an ever present fact here, and yet the nuances of ethnic distinctions are often lost on me. Looking more closely, they are lighter skinned than most Turks, who, despite having some range of skin tones, mostly fall into the olive complexion range. Turks’ eye color and hair color vary greatly. Descendants of Ottoman warriors, in at least a few cases, are imposingly tall, with dark hair and eyes. But many others are quite short statured, which I’m told is a more modern phenomenon.
The family is quite comfortable in speaking English and greet me warmly each time I see them. I asked if they had food, not knowing how long the power had been out, and they welcomed me in. They also improvised a light for me to use the restroom by supplying a cell phone “flashlight.”
I sat near the window as the sun was setting in an overcast sky and had a delicious assemblage of zeytiye. However, in addition to the zeytiye they had an amazing chicken dish cooked with roasted winter vegetables.
As it started to get darker they again brought over the cell phone light, but the light was harsh and I could still see fine, so they took it away and returned with a single candle.
I have had a hard time of late, struggling with cultural adjustments and shifting expectations. My biome is also figuring out its new threats and so I haven’t felt quite well for awhile, but for a week I have been quite sick, with what appears to have been a virus that opened the door for a bacterial infection. The latter is completely rare for me — I can’t even remember the last time. Hanukkah has been a distant thought — neither it nor Shabbat are a part of Turkey’s rhythms.
The candlelight, the richly oiled zeytiye, the heimische chicken, it all became the sixth night — the union of the above and the below, the moments, if not the day, of rest. Candles are rarely alone in Judaism, but this light was enough, it was unity, all is one.
