Moishe House Seattle, Joel Rothschild, 11/1/07

Third Place

This October could be grist for a whole private Wikipedia of joy and sorrow. My nephew was born. My Honda (and my leg) collided with a much larger Honda. I was reunited after many years with my beloved record collection. I first had to shlep said record collection from my former housemates' basement. (Why couldn't I have just collected stamps?) I had the truly weird experience of discovering that half of my dinner guests somehow happened, like me, to be conservatory-trained oboists. And, of course, I enjoyed my first nights, meals, guests, and dishwashing in the Ravenna Kibbutz Commons, our new Seattle Moishe House.

What I want to tell, though, is a humbler story -- of how Tamar and I went to a pub and carved a pumpkin.

My girlfriend Tamar and I were hanging out with our co-kibbutz/Moishehouse-nik Masha and a friend Marina who had just dropped by to visit. It was Saturday night after our first Shabbat afternoon with only housemates and no guests, so we were all feeling ready for the city to entertain us. Masha, naturally, went tango dancing. Tamar and I meanwhile decided that it was time, after a month in this new place, to see what goes down in our neighborhood on a Saturday night.

It turns out we are perfectly situated to host pub crawls, with a string of four pubs over five blocks beginning mere steps from our door. We began our little pub crawl of two at the farthest stop. The Pub at Third Place is nestled beneath a landmark Seattle bookstore called Third Place Books. The door is massive, resembling a slab of some redwood's trunk, yet manages to purvey a sense of hiddenness, secrecy, as though we would be asked the password from narrowed eyed behind a veil of smoke. (Of course, all Seattle bars are non-smoking by law, but who could say, maybe they had some hot disco and a smoke machine in there...)

It was a handwritten sign on this door that caught our attention:

"Pub-kin Carving! $7 for a pint and a pumpkin!"

So it was that Tamar and I spent motzey Shabbat drinking brew while handling sharp knives.



When we were satisfied with our creation and got up to leave, the barmaid said, "you can't go now, we're about to judge the pumpkin contest!" We hadn't noticed there was a contest. We also hadn't noticed that we'd been joined in the pub by our new neighbor Jacob, who recently arrived in Seattle to spearhead the post-college Jewish community programming at Jconnect, Jacob's fiancee Julie, and Will, the director of University of Washington Hillel. We had just made it through the hellos when I nudged Jacob, pointing "Jew alert," as another neighbor Kira walked in with a couple of her friends.

For the second time in as many months, I found myself sitting around with a bunch of Jews, awaiting judgment. This time it was a lot of fun, though, and herein lies the moral of the story -- I know you were all waiting for a moral to this story -- not that Yom Kipur services need more beer and pumpkins, but that it's kind of awesome to have good neighbors and good places where you can run into them.

In fact, the name of this bookstore-cafe-pub compound, Third Place, is taken from a term in social geography and urban planning. The "third place" is a place where you habitually spend time, that isn't your home or your work. It's the place where you go when you wouldn't mind meeting someone by chance. It's the "home away from home."

Sociologists spend a lot of ink these days on the disappearance of the third place. Between our cars and the Web, we really don't need to spend much time anyplace unless there's a very specific purpose. The freedom is great, but I for one like having random encounters with people every now and then, to shake me out of my set patterns and remind me that there's a world out there. Now I can have random encounters with people at a club or a party -- but in a great sea of strangers, no, that's a bit too random, sometimes overwhelming. (And I'm one of those snobs who goes to clubs for the music, anyhow.)

This is why I'm so dedicated to my coffeeshop. I'm a regular and I know the other regulars. It's small and slow-paced and comfortable. I can read the newspaper or check my email or joke with the baristas. And there's no set rhyme or reason to who I'll meet there, because in Seattle coffee is considered a universal human need.

For years I've been looking for the Jewish coffeeshop. (Yes, Aroma counts but it is too far from my house.) There is more to my life than Jewishness, but I get a special kick out of the company of Jews. The problem is that every place where I can go to find them has an audience-specific agenda: The young-adult mixers are a dating scene, the cultural programs are focused on a speaker or performer, synagogue is for people who like religion or want their children to like it, Jewish Voice for Peace meetings are for the people who can't stand the people at the pro-Israel rallies, and pro-Israel rallies are for the people who can't stand the people in JVP.

Seattle is a genteel (not to say gentile, exactly) place, and it's part of that Wild American West. People don't drop by uninvited. We have too much respect for each other's personal space. But I do hope we can make this house that is our new home into that "home away from home," a third place, for enough of our neighbors and friends that I will grow to take it for granted that whenever I follow a whim to to carve a pumpkin, some folks will happen by to see it -- and not because it was scheduled in their Blackberrys, but just because they were in the neighborhood.