For Rosh Hashanah, I went to my friend's house. It was a very last minute plan. Almost everyone else on the Living Routes program decided to go a distant family member’s house or to catch up with relatives they had previously stayed with. The afternoon before everyone was leaving I was talking to my friend on facebook and he said I should just come on over.

I piled into a Kibbutz car with Avi and Avi, Sivan, and Ori and we headed to Tel Aviv. I was dropped off at the Ashdod junction where I met my friend, Ido, to begin my first holiday with a secular Jewish Israeli family.

On holidays at home, my family is always together. We meet for evening meals, saying the blessings with one another-sometimes singing, sometimes reciting. The only blessing that is sometimes hard to remember is the translated version of the blessing over the children, which my parents and my aunt and uncle have always had a hard time with (when I was younger I always thought they messed up on purpose because it was always parts going wrong every week and it would always make them laugh).

This holiday was also full of laughs and confusion when it came to prayers. According to Ido, his family generally meets on the holidays to have dinner together. The blessings are never a part of their customs for observing Shabbat or Rosh Hashanah. In preparation for the evening meal, we printed out the list of blessings for Rosh Hashanah (which I was later told are mostly plays on words in Hebrew that are, at times, rather negative or violent… an interesting way to start the new year). Ido explained that his family never says blessings, and the reason they decided to do them this year was most likely because I was attending dinner with them.

Although I didn’t understand much of the conversation (even the basic Hebrew being spoken to Ido’s one-and-a-half year old sister), it felt nice to be surrounded by a family. Later in the weekend, we met up with some friends from the program in Tel Aviv and, although I got to sit on the beach and make sand castles, I was somewhat sad to leave the sense of family and love that seemed to be the focus of the Rosh Hashanah celebration.