This week marks the day two years ago that we moved to New Jersey. It is always easy to remember because we arrived on the second anniversary of Hurricane Sandy. She was our welcome!
It has been suggested that we should be changing the name of this column considering the fact that it is now two years and we are no longer newcomers to this area. In no way can we agree with that assessment. The question is what makes people feel comfortable enough to believe that their home is where they belong? In Montreal it took no time to meet all of our neighbors. In our new home we know both of our lovely next door neighbors on either side of our house who present us with Christmas cookies at the appropriate time and we are thrilled to have one neighbor (the Perls) across the NASCAR track of New Bridge who shares yom tov treats with us. After davening on Shabbos we walk across New Bridge from Beth Abraham with many who either turn down Surrey or Cameron and other than offering a Shabbos greeting we have no idea who they are.
We still go to many public places, restaurants, communal gatherings, malls and stores not seeing any familiar faces at all. As ridiculous as this may seem, we still miss the frenzy at the Cavendish Mall in Cote St Luc where we could not walk 50 feet without meeting someone we knew. We relished walking into a store and having the owner greet us as if we were their best customers; we loved the fact that Rafi the Armenian owner of the local Shell station sponsored the Kiddush every year for Sukkot at the shul near his garage as he had such a great relationship with his customers, and we miss Gabi from La Marguerite who insisted that we take some “Moroccan” salads home with us to titillate our palates.
We were mastering French after so many years of living in a Quebecois culture to find that now Spanish is the language of the land. Don’t count on us learning that.
Yet all of these arguments are not the most important factors in feeling as though we are still strangers. We need to be able to walk into a room where there are a group of people who are in the midst of a discussion about a local issue or person and have a clue of what they are talking about. When newly acquired friends talk about their children, we need to know who they are. We have no knowledge of anyone’s history here and it is taken for granted by others that everyone knows everything, Guess what, we don’t.
We are extraordinarily grateful to our new friends who have reached out and are trying to make us feel at home. We are not sure how long it will take for us to catch up with everyone–perhaps never, but we will keep trying. At that time we will declare that we are no longer “new in the neighborhood.”
By Rabbi Mordechai and Nina Glick
