Last week someone posed a question to me about the many Asian tourists who visit Solvang each week. What do these visitors from thousands of miles away make of our little village, this person wondered? What impressions of America do they take away from their brief visit?

Last Tuesday, as a reaction to the shootings that have targeted Jews, blacks, gay people, moviegoers, Christians, Muslims and schoolchildren, the Jewish Community held a meeting and invited law enforcement agents from the Santa Ynez Valley to help us with safety issues.

For Jewish people throughout the world, the Sabbath begins at sundown on Friday night and ends at sunset on Saturday night. In these 24 hours, Jewish people traditionally take a break from work, observing, in a variety of ways, a day different than the other six.

We’re in the South right now, Virginia, North Carolina, South Carolina and Georgia, arriving just after Hurricane Michael. But more significant than geographic and weather upheavals, is the experience of being part of two life-events that represent opposite ends of the life cycle.

We traveled East, first of all, for a wedding. On the top of a glorious mountain in Virginia, we listened to a fiddler play Appalachian tunes as a beautiful young bride prepared to walk down a grassy path to meet her groom. The mountain was so green and lush that it hurt our eyes, accustomed as we are to the golden dry grasses of our Santa Ynez Valley. When the hurricane passed through this region of Virginia two days earlier, making its way north and out to the Atlantic, it dumped feet, not inches, of rain. But other than the sparkling greenery, there was no evidence of the hurricane on the afternoon of the wedding. There wasn’t a cloud in the sky and the sun had almost completely dried out the earth as we made our way to our seats for the ceremony.