It is Thursday. And yet, for me, it is Shabbat.

I am in northern Italy, in a region that was once part of Austria. My hotel resembles a Swiss chalet—lovely and charming. The room is spacious, with a wood-paneled balcony and a skylight in the bathroom.

Through the arched picture window are vineyards, then hills, and then rows of mountains, one rising behind the other, their peaks still kissed with snow.

A dove calls nearby, insistent, as though its mate has strayed too far.

I am at peace.

I think of the way people sometimes pour themselves a drink in the middle of the day and say, “Well, it’s five o’clock somewhere.”

It is not Shabbat anywhere in the world.

And yet here—where time feels suspended, where a single cloud rests motionless above the nearest mountain—I find myself wrapped in the quiet contentment, the gentle warmth, of Shabbat.

If the dove were to lift its voice and begin singing L’cha Dodi, I would hardly be surprised.

I am told there is a synagogue in Merano, an hour away by train. There were never many Jews in these mountains.

On this Thursday, my Shabbat prayers rise unbidden.

A line from the Shabbat morning service moves through me: Ani Adonai Eloheichem—I am the Eternal, your God—and then: l’dor va dor, hallelujah—from generation to generation, You are praised.

My small travel group and I wend our way through towns and villages, into valleys and then higher still into the mountains. Each stop, each story we hear, carries me farther from the familiar markers of my heritage.

I am the only Jew here. I am alone.

And yet at every turn I feel myself drawn closer to my people. To our stories. To our history, with all its sorrows and joys. To the prayers that have carried us across the miles and the centuries.

From generation to generation, You are praised. Hallelujah.

Shabbat Shalom.