While my family was not particularly religious, I was sent to a Jewish day school for elementary school and at home we always had a traditional Friday night dinner that was preceded by the appropriate blessings over candles, wine and bread - and sometimes a lusty round or two of "Shalom Aleichem", the traditional hymn that welcomes the Sabbath angels. My mother is a kick-ass cook who could give Jamie Oliver a few tips. In those days she was "into" traditional Ashkenazi Jewish cooking, which she learned to prepare from my erstwhile Hungarian-born great grandmother, Rose. Later Mom went on to prepare more "sophisticated" stuff, like wild mushroom soup and roasted Moroccan chicken with almonds and apricots, but I still remember her gefilte fish (which was peppery, in the Hungarian style, and not sweet as Polish Jews prepare it), tzimmes (a stew made of sweet potatoes, carrots, prunes and honey) and roast brisket (with tons of fat) with huge fondness. I am sure that, if Israelis could taste Mom's version of Ashkenazi Jewish food, it would lose its local stigma forever and ever, amen.

On Friday afternoons when I came home from school, swinging my schoolbag and wearing a dark school uniform with blue knee socks and scuffed oxfords, the house was filled with the smells of baking challah, roasting meat with garlic, simmering chicken soup (with light-as-a-feather kneidlach - dumplings made of matzo flour) and a cake or pie for dessert. We laid the table with a clean cloth, set it with the "good" dishes and cutlery, washed, changed, and drove to fetch my great grandmother so that she could join us, my grandparents and any other relatives who'd been invited, for dinner.

I wouldn't describe my childhood as a particularly happy one, but my memories of those Friday nights are suffused with warm yellow light. There was a sense of community and continuity that is so important - particularly to children. Four generations of one family were gathered around the table, neither arguing nor tense, singing, joking and telling oft-repeated stories of family lore. My great grandmother, who had taught my mother all her recipes except the one for cheese danish, which was top-secret and went with her to the grave, inevitably reached out to pick up the challah my mother had baked; she'd examine it critically, then use her knuckles to rap sharply on the bottom crust. This was how she judged whether or not it had been baked properly; and if it hadn't, she immediately and sternly informed my mother of the fact.

One day, when I was about 8 years old, I came home from school and told my mother that my teacher - an Orthodox Jew of the black hat variety - said it was a sin to drive on the sabbath, and that we should not drive my great grandmother home on Friday nights after dinner. Well, my mother said, you tell your teacher that it is a bigger sin to leave your great grandmother home alone on Friday nights. She's too old to walk, she's too old to sleep on the couch and anyways she needs to go home to her own bed. (OK, I'm paraphrasing a bit here, but you get the idea).

I was thinking about that story on Yom Kippur, as I wandered around Tel Aviv enjoying the one and only day when everything - really, everything - is closed and there are no motorized vehicles on the streets. It was like a huge celebration. Crowds of kids were whizzing down the middle of normally traffic-clogged roads on their bicycles or rollerblades. Families were strolling together. On Rothschild Boulevard I ran into groups of friends sitting on various benches, chatting and reveling in the quiet, in the totally relaxing knowledge that there was absolutely nowhere to be and nothing to do but where they were and what they were doing. You don't realize how disturbing urban noise is, until it's absent. And then your soul expands.

On Allenby Street I saw a group of foreign workers' children - Filipinos, Africans, Chinese - riding their bikes in a group, calling to each other in completely unaccented Israeli Hebrew. Suddenly a moped came buzzing towards them from the opposite direction, shattering the peace and quiet. (sidenote: it's not technically illegal to drive in Israel on Yom Kippur - it's a custom and a social contract that the vast majority respects, but there are always some assholes who are just "anti" and need to demonstrate the fact). The foreign workers' kids yelled at the moped driver, "Hey, you jerk, it's Yom Kippur! What's the matter with you?"

At Neila, the closing prayers of the Yom Kippur liturgy (your last chance to beg God's forgiveness for the sins you committed over the previous year), I happened to be outside a synagogue and heard the cantor singing the familiar prayers. Dusk had fallen and I stood outside the open window of the synagogue, humming along to the words and remembering Yom Kippurs past: the synagogue I'd attended with my family in Canada; the synagogues I'd attended in New York (including the year I dragged my avowedly secular, raised-on-a-kibbutz ex-boyfriend with me; he sat next to me for about 30 minutes, yarmulke perched at an awkward angle on his bald head, looking alternately bored and confused until he leaned towards me and whispered, "THIS is NOT for me! I'm going home to make coffee. See you later."); the bizarre synagogue I attended in Tokyo, together with a bunch of ex-pat Israeli men and their Japanese wives, a few Israeli and Jewish diplomats and assorted Jews who were working mostly on temporary assignment for investment banks, like me, and some rather odd Japanese who had decided that they were Jewish. And there I was in Israel, feeling absolutely no desire to enter a synagogue and pray.

Because for me, synagogue attendance abroad is an expression of tribal identity. It is not an expression of faith. I'm not one of those Jews who gets bored during synagogue services: I know the liturgy and the customs; I don't need a rabbi to announce the page in the prayer book and instruct me when to stand and when to sit. And I do see the beauty of some of the liturgy, in an objective sense. It's just that it doesn't speak to me. I am not a believer. So when I'm abroad I attend synagogue to feel that I am part of a community. In Israel on Yom Kippur I feel part of a community when I join my friends on a bench on Rothschild Boulevard and chat, or when we walk down to the beach together to watch the sunset.

I know that I remember those family dinners on Friday night not because I felt God's presence at the table, but because I felt the presence of family and communal ties. And I think, really, that's what religious practice is based on: community. Whether you express it by praying and fasting, or by holding your child's hand as he tries to keep his balance on his new rollerblades.