Darth Vader mysteriously walks down Ben Yehuda Street. Jewish hippies with huge afros laugh at each others wigs and tie-dyed mohawks. It is Purim, a holiday that celebrates when the Jewish people where rescued from a guy named Haman who wanted to destroy the Jews. Go read Esther if you don’t know the story. Keep reading and you’ll find a video near the end of this post…

Nathan, Dad and I where wandering down Ben Yehuda when we ran into a couple jugglers, they immediately spotted the chinese yo-yo in my hand, and asked me to join them. Soon we had a little circus. We juggled about two hour’s away. Dad stood by, conversing with the onlookers. A drunk man stumbled into the middle of the circle and slowly poured his hard liquor out on the street, and then dropped the bottle. Dad got a broom from a nearby falafal store and cleaned up the broken glass. A lot of Jews, religious and secular, use the holiday as an excuse to get totally drunk.

Now here’s an interesting part of this story: While busking in Spain we had met a Jewish guy who called himself the Holy Juggler. Around six months after that, when we first came to Israel, we met him again! Then, to top it all of, we realized that the circus dudes we were clowning around with knew him too, and he stopped by to perform a bit with us.

Once in a while a talented onlooker would ask to try, and astound the crowd with his ability to juggle pins, or spin a chinese yo-yo. Here’s a video of the mini circus that we participated in:

We had a great time juggling for the crowd of crazies. On our way home a herd of drunk pink bunny guys ran meandering in front of the bus and then pounded on our windows. It all seemed so unrelated to the book of Esther… I wonder what God thinks?

This entry was posted on Friday, March 21st, 2008 at 1:26 pm and is filed under Israel. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.