Destination Jerusalem
Are you the last ones? I asked, a few miles out of Neve Shalom.
"I hope so,” said the young woman, and by some physical inclination, some eye glance or granule in her husky voice, you could tell that she loved the lanky young man. They were a pair of Shvil thru-hikers up from Eilat – they’d left later than their peers, against guidebook recommendations – and the trail was their eternal bond. “I hope so” – what did she mean by that? A Hebrew-English translation glitch, probably, a twisting of believe or desire or think into the willowy hope. Hers was a simple expression of pride, or relief, for having survived the broiling Negev in late spring. Or she meant: I hope no one else has to suffer as we have. Yet they looked content under the houses they carried on their backs.
Miles went by; a fighter jet rumbled overhead. It slipped into a lone, smeary cloud and the engine noise faded as if the plane had run out of gas. A triple-hooting dove had her say. Now the Shvil merged with the fabled Burma Road – no, not the 717-mile road constructed by a multitude of Burmese and Chinese laborers during World War II, a supply route for Chinese forces battling Japanese invaders. The Shvil became the Burma Road named in homage, a 12-mile, switch-backing track built by several hundred Jews in the spring of 1948 and over which trucks ferried food, medicine and arms to besieged Jerusalem. (One of its citizens, 13-year-old Hadassah Nagler, grew up to be my mother-in-law.) The cutting of the Burma Road through steep, forested terrain is as metaphorically potent for Israel’s founding as Paul Revere’s Ride is for the American Revolution. The road arose from desperation and savvy, constructed on the fly by soldiers, quarry men, teachers and shopkeepers – any Jerusalemite with a will and two hands to grab a shovel.
Here, where I walked, defense of the country became a communal enterprise. Never again would Jews hope for the best or scrounge for the mercy of others.
Oddly enough, the man in charge of building the Burma Road was an American Jew raised in brawling Brooklyn: David “Mickey” Marcus, who had parachuted into Normandy on D-Day, witnessed the horrors of the Nazi death camps, and then landed in Palestine as a military adviser. Commanding the Jerusalem front, he led two failed attacks on a fort in Latrun held by the Transjordan Legion; many Holocaust survivors, arrived from detention camps on Cyprus, died in those assaults. Undeterred, Marcus got the Burma Road built and not long after that triumph he was shot by a Jewish sentry. The incident was labeled an accident, but David Ben-Gurion, who had appointed Marcus the first Israeli general in 2,000 years, suspected that rogue elements in the army had him murdered.
Cedar and cypress trees shaded the road. In places it became flat and meandering, then abruptly bulldozed uphill. During its helter-skelter construction, iron gratings were laid on the Burma Road to keep vehicles from sinking into the mud. Now these rusted slabs appeared by the roadside, transformed into upright sculptures of men and women carrying rocks, swinging pickaxes and driving tractors. And so I trudged the Shvil and by mid-morning came to a two-lane highway, Route 38. Cars roared past in each direction at 70 miles per hour. I had two options: crawl through a dark, disgusting underpass on my knees or wait for a break in the traffic. No, I wasn’t going to crawl to Jerusalem. I waited.
Five minutes passed, and then ten. The cars kept coming. It wasn’t even close – there was no chance to cross, even at a sprint, and I stood alone beside this ribbon of hurtling steel. Blessed be memory – I conjured all the hikers I’d met on my 250-mile journey south from Kibbutz Dan and positioned them on the edge of the highway next to me. We waited for the modern, mechanized world to ease off already. I imagined Israel and Aviv and Gilad and Yaniv, Dorit and Kristina cursing a blue streak, Yavne’el and Gior, Joshua and Joseph and Egal and Dal and every Shvil hiker I’d passed including the couple in love I’d chatted with this morning – they stood by me on the side of the road, waiting to cross. Someone asked, Do you have enough water? Yes, toda, and how’s the trail ahead? Easy goes it, sweet as dew. Ein ba’aya. And Hal, someone else just had to say, don’t be such a hurry-up American.
Five, ten more minutes. The cars seemed to be going faster – whoosh, whoosh, just try it, sucker – and my hiking posse scattered. Ghosts are funny that way. Whoosh, whoosh. Would I ever make Jerusalem? See my wife Elahna again? Ayzeh Keta! Ayzeh Gaza! So I walked along the road and came to a gas station where I spent my last 16 shekels on a lukewarm cappuccino and cheese roll. The ATM was broken. I sat outside on the patio deck, pouting a bit and watching folks gas up their cars. Maybe, I considered, someone could drive me the 15 feet across. No, stop it – that’s silly. The good people of 1948 Jerusalem cut a road through the Judean hills and they did it hungry, tired and under sniper fire. Super American Jew “Mickey” Marcus never gave up. The least I could do was conquer Route 38 on my own sore feet. B’regel or bust.
A middle-aged man in beige slacks and a blue dress shirt stepped onto the patio. From an embroidered case he pulled a cape and wrapped it about his body. An ornate, silver strip ran along the shoulders, like an exposed vein. The man attached tefillin gear: a black leather shin box strapped to his forehead; another such box on his left bicep; and black tape wrapped about his left arm and hand. He held a prayer book and mumbled words below my hearing, rocking on the tips of his toes and bending barely at the waist. An observant if not Orthodox Jew, he faced across my nemesis highway, up the Burma Road, toward the beckoning city.
He prayed. I sipped java and studied the guidebook. In five minutes, it was over. With practiced speed, the pious man unfurled the black tape, whipped away his cape and shin boxes, and restored it all to the case. It’s a beautiful day, I said in Hebrew, and he replied with a phrase I didn’t understand. Do you speak English? I asked. He shook his head. Then he gave a little wave and walked over to a Styrofoam coffee cup on the ground by a gas pump. He dumped it in a trash can, got in his car and drove away.
I chewed on my bun. Okay, let’s go. I eyeballed the map one more time, running my finger from this very spot to Jerusalem. I secured all straps and hooks and zippers and doohickeys on my faithful backpack. Zip, yank, jigger and shake. I retied my boots, snug but not tight, the laces double knotted. I tugged on my socks. I checked my water levels, returned my Yale cap to its rightful place. I swung the backpack over my shoulders and gripped the cork handles of my trekking poles – after four weeks of hiking they had molded perfectly to my hands – and just doing so brought forth a surge of strength and confidence. I walked along the edge of the highway and back to the Shvil. There, I waited. No expectations this time. Five minutes, ten minutes, cars rushing by. Israelis on the go-go – and suddenly the world ceased. The road became clear in both directions. I looked up and down the empty, quiet space. The cars had parted and I could have sauntered across like bold Nahshon leading the Israelites across the Red Sea. I could have spun like a Dervish on the yellow line. I could have gone back and forth twice. Just in case, though, I ran for it.
@ @ @
Around noon I stopped at a mitzpe on Mt. Orna and ate the last of my food; far below, cars streamed along the four-lane highway into Jerusalem, their hum low and annoying. My feet, alas, had progressed from sore to blissfully numb to killing me. Yes, it was time for a little ‘70s music therapy, so I popped in my ear buds and summoned Crosby, Stills, Nash and Young on the iPod. Brain neurons first excited 40 years ago re-fired, and I sought, as always, to understand the lyrics to Wooden Ships. Are the purple berries really LSD? Who are the silver people on the shoreline? Nonetheless, I sailed, sailed away “very free and easy/Easy, you know, the way it’s supposed to be…” Then I tripped on a root, almost falling.
A twisting, downhill hike through thick woods revealed the B’nai B’rith Caves in the Martyrs Forest, named for Jewish victims of the Holocaust. Iron bars had been pulled across the dark, musty-smelling cave entrances at the foot of a cliff. Maybe things were under repair. Or was that the idea – the way is barred? Real knowledge of Shoah remains inaccessible to anyone but its victims; the horrible reality exists like a demon in the darkness of a cave you cannot enter. But you can look through the bars. You can wonder how, why?
I sat on the ground next to a stone honoring Anne Frank, fated among millions to epitomize innocence butchered and potential squandered. I phoned my wife. All was good; she was on schedule to make our rendezvous in Ein Kerem by late afternoon. I bid goodbye to Elahna with a phone kiss and then closed my eyes and thought about Anne and her diary. Twenty-six million copies sold. Translated into 60 languages. A staple of school curricula in dozens of nations. Anne, dumped in an anonymous grave, one of a million Jewish children slaughtered by the Nazis. Anne, the most famous child of the 20th century.
Twenty-seven years ago, during my single year as a high school English teacher, I taught Anne Frank’s The Diary of a Young Girl to “non-college bound,” non-Jewish seniors who were much more interested in the mechanics of genocide – gas chambers, ovens, mass graves, the harvested shoes, hair and gold fillings – than the writings of a precocious child hiding from that horror. Nonetheless I plowed the text looking for passages that my rough-hewn students could “relate to”: family dynamics under stress, Annie’s yearnings for handsome Peter and her preoccupation with movie stars and royal families. See how she dreams of the future, worries about the world! Just, maybe, like you! I made my students stand and read aloud entries about Anne’s parents (“Aren’t they all stupid!’) and her earnest sister Margot (“She wants to nurse newborns in Palestine. I still have visions of gorgeous dresses and fascinating people.”). We discussed Anne’s poignant morning ritual, a kind of living prayer: “…go to the window, take down the blanket, sniff at the crack of the window until I feel a bit of fresh air, and I’m awake.” How, I asked, do you wake yourself? These lessons were met with dutiful compliance, at best.
Near the end of the Holocaust “unit” I recited Anne’s famous assertion that “in spite of everything I still believe that people are really good at heart” and one student remarked, hell, she clearly got that wrong. I couldn’t tell if he was joking; other kids laughed, he didn’t. A smart kid, in retrospect. I’m not sure why – blame it on the teacher’s guide – but I shied away from presenting the book as a Jewish story and strove to universalize Anne Frank and her plight. I made her into an emblem of hope. Holocaust scholar Alvin H. Rosenfeld cautions against portraits of Anne as “a positive symbol of articulated innocence and transcendent optimism” in a brutal world; such iconic renderings are only achieved, he notes, “by uncoupling Anne’s story in Amsterdam from her story in Auschwitz and Bergen-Belsen” – where she died from typhus, draped in nothing but a filthy blanket – and, even worse, by “uncoupling her story as a Jewish victim of Nazism from that of millions of other Jews who shared her fate.”
No wonder my “real life-bound” students craved concentration camp details over canned pieties. Impervious to educational manipulation, they knew what mattered. I should have asked them to analyze the death machinery of Auschwitz and Bergen-Belsen. I should have had them explain Anne’s anguish over Jewish suffering through the ages – then demanded their opinions of the Jews, give it to me straight – and I wish I’d had them recite these innocent, girly musings: “There’s in people simply an urge to destroy, an urge to kill, to murder and rage, and until all mankind, without exception, undergoes a great change, wars will be waged, everything that has been built up, cultivated and grown will be destroyed and disfigured, after which mankind will have to begin all over again.”
Of course, it’s as foolish to lay the fate of the world on Anne Frank’s slim, prophetic shoulders as it is to globalize and sentimentalize her story. She was just scratching down her life and seeing how it sounded – a talented kid, sure, but not so different than the boys and girls in that class or the boisterous school groups I’d witnessed at historic sites along the Shvil. Anne dreamed of becoming “a journalist, and later on, a famous writer.” Alas for her, and may it come true for others! And now I stood up, stretched and got down the trail only to be interrupted by the receptionist at the hotel in Neve Shalom.
I’d left without paying, the voice said in the phone. Not true, I told her, you swiped my credit card when I checked in. Well, she replied, perhaps it didn’t swipe properly. So I located my wallet in my backpack and slid out my Chase Visa Amazon.com Reward card and pronounced its 16 raised-plastic numbers as I stood on Shvil Yisrael in a forest with six million trees for six million murders. Somehow, reading the numbers didn’t suffice – would I be willing, she asked, to come back to the hotel so she could swipe the card again? Maybe, she suggested, your card has been inactivated. Do I have another one? Or could someone else call in and pay the bill? We appreciate your business, Mr. LaCroix, but payment is…
Who really cares how it got resolved? I made calls. I chose multiple options on multiple phone trees. I let myself get sucked back in. Soon my Shvil sojourn would conclude in Jerusalem and this, the toxic dreck of modern life, was waiting. Thank G-d my Elahna would be there – how does anyone go it alone?
The six-mile, uphill stretch to Kibbutz Tzova was covered in loose rocks, the worst possible terrain for blistered feet. I took a dose of ibuprofen and imagined the pain as a ribbon flowing from my body into a kind of whirling archery target in the sky, and then the ribbon curled through the bull’s-eye into the vast reaches of outer space where it dissolved like a plane’s contrail into nothingness. I was the archer within, shooting my pain away. At the kibbutz I paused only to refill water bottles in the restroom of their amusement park, the jingle-jangle of a carousel flitting like moths, and then I walked into Jerusalem’s hills.
Oh, right. You’re supposed to write fabled hills, for what other ground has been so trod by desperate, longing souls? I squinted at the hills to see the etchings of ancient stone terraces – there? Is that them? – and drank two liters of water as if refilling a dry reservoir. Eventually I left Shvil Yisrael (which continued south, Negev bound) and headed east on the Jerusalem Trail. The entrance to Shvil Yerushalayim hid behind an electrical circuit box shrouded by a snarl of trees. From there, I ended up lost in a hillside olive grove.
Finally, somehow, as night fell, I descended to the main road outside Ein Kerem and walked in the breakdown lane. The massive structure of Hadassah Hospital, coated in pale Jerusalem stone, and the golden crosses of the Church of the Visitation and the Moskoviya, a Russian monastery, loomed along the ridge. I phoned Elahna; she had ventured to the road, too, so I increased my stride and turned a bend – and there she was! My wife stood 40 yards away, wearing her pink Marion’s Pie Shop t-shirt. To my great relief she looked exactly as I remembered – tall, wiry, brown hair bobbed short, smile like a sunrise – and I waved my trekking poles in the air and she signaled back with fluttery hands. Elahna rushed across the road, traffic be damned and downhill to me, her husband. We hugged and kissed and wiped away tears, and this was the first thing I remember her saying: “You’re so skinny!”
@ @ @
Late the next morning, after she salved and bandaged my feet, Elahna took the lead on the last ten miles of my hike into Jerusalem. She can’t stand not holding the map, although she usually surrenders the TV remote. Starting at Mary’s Well – an empty space/grotto where the mothers of John the Baptist and Jesus Christ scooped water while pregnant – we walked through woods on a dirt path. Elahna caught trail fever, eagerly pointing out the blue and white markers for Shvil Yerushalayim. The trail ran parallel to Yad Vashem, the Holocaust memorial, and then hugged the southern slope of a hill named for Theodore Herzl, the father of the Zionist movement. We emerged from trees onto a city street, Herzl Road, and soon passed the headquarters of Yad Sarah, a charity that loans wheelchairs to the elderly and disabled. Elahna dawdled here, rushed me forward there.
She had been visiting Jerusalem for 44 years and every street corner had become a medley of the new, the old, the changed and the long gone. She time traveled. S.Y. Agnon writes in T’mol Shilsom that “Jerusalem is revealed only to those who love her.” On this day I loved the city for having reached it, and I loved it yet again through my wife’s adoring eyes.
Cutting east, we entered the leafy neighborhood of Beit HaKarem. Elahna had lived here as a nine-year-old girl, and she pointed out the supermarket where she’d dropped off cigarettes and hand-knitted hats for soldiers during the Yom Kippur War. Soon we arrived at an intersection near the Knesset, the country’s parliament. And then, an eruption. A police car flashing red pulled into the center of the intersection and stopped at an angle. Two men in uniform – beat cops? commandos? – jumped out and stood guard with submachine guns pressed to their hips. Their heads turned slowly, robotically, scanning the perimeter. The noontime sun of Eretz Yisrael radiated off their mirror sunglasses. Traffic and passersby piled up, a real mess. Cars honked listlessly. About this drama there was a casual, but also sinister feel – one part day-in-the-life, one part Columbian drug cartel. Five minutes later, a motorcade of black SUVs proceeded through the intersection and up to the Knesset. The security detail quickly drove away. The traffic unclogged.
“Israel, the only the first world/third world country,” said Elahna. Her love can come with a healthy dose of criticism.
Next we followed the trail to a bird-watching station run by the Society for the Protection of Nature in Israel (SPNI). Nothing exotic – an observation hut next to a pond where ducks and birds played. I read an article posted on the hut’s wall about the amazing hoopoe bird, or doocheefat. In a 2008 vote conducted by SPNI, doocheefat was elected the national bird of Israel, outpolling the white-spectacled bulbul and other pretenders. The topside of doocheefat features an elaborate orange crest tipped in black, a pile-driver beak and pinkish chest; the lower region looks as if the poor guy jumped into a pair of black-and-white striped pajama pants. Immediately I bonded with this mish-mashed creature and informed Elahna of our mission to spy one in the wild. She nodded and I thought she was humoring me, but in the weeks ahead she became the biggest doocheefat fanatic of all.
The article also noted that doocheefat’s inclusion as a crossword puzzle clue in a socialist newspaper in Manchester, England, had sparked outrage among anti-Israel activists who accused the Morning Star of abandoning its opposition to the “racist, Apartheid state of Israel” as represented by its odd-duck bird. Everything, indeed, is political.
Shvil Yerushalayim dipped south into Rehavia, a neighborhood of academics, government officials and hipsters – a secular enclave in a city which, increasingly, is dominated by the Haredim (32 percent of all city Jews) and Arabs (36 percent of all residents). On Alfasi Street, we passed the basement apartment where Menachem Begin lived during the 1930s as he directed the freedom fighting/terrorist activities of the Irgun. We turned the corner, onto Radaq St., and air raid sirens sounded. They wailed like inconsolable women for two, three minutes. I didn’t pay it much mind as my entire being was focused on finding a nice café, but I did note that Israelis kept walking along.
Elahna, though, froze. She stopped dead. It was 1973. She was a little girl in Jerusalem again, playing with Bedknobs and Broomsticks paper dolls when the sirens blared. She rushed to the window and searched for fire trucks. Her father joined her. No trucks. And then Elahna’s mother emerged from her afternoon nap, steadied herself in the doorway and proclaimed, “It’s war.” Just like that, war – the start of the Yom Kippur War, 25 years after the War of Independence which Hadassah had endured as a child. Today in Jerusalem, however, the sirens were just a pre-announced test. The next war hadn’t started.
For dinner we stopped at Café Yahushua, which had the feel of an upscale, American diner and even boasted a Philly Steak Sandwich, but we opted for gnocchi in cream sauce, salads and a sampler of little cakes for dessert. Just a few blocks away lives the prime minister. On our previous visit, three years ago, we had stopped in front of his residence at a table manned by the parents of Gilad Shalit, the IDF soldier captured by Hamas and held in the Gaza Strip for five years. In October 2011, he was released in a very asymmetrical trade: one man, Gilad, for over a thousand Palestinian prisoners. It’s best, I think, not to find meaning in the math, to draw conclusions about the relative value of Jews and Arabs or any human being; simply put, that’s what it took to get a deal. I’d like to return to Café Yahushua someday. It felt like a refuge, a mellow place to nosh in a world that doesn’t add up.
After dinner we strolled tree-lined Chopin Street, named for the Polish composer who ranted about swindler Jews. Adjoining streets honored a Jewish scholar (Alon Gedaliah), radical Zionist (Ze’ev Jabotinsky), military hero (David Marcus) and the only Jewish prime minister of England (Benjamin Disraeli). On the Hebron Road – just miles from the Old City, the turbulent heart of Jerusalem – we read from a plaque fixed to a wall: on this very spot on such and such a day a suicide bomber murdered so many innocent…across the road families enjoyed an outdoor book and crafts fair. Yashar, yashar, yashar. (Keep going, in Hebrew. Straight ahead. This is the national mantra.) My forward progress stopped, finally, in public gardens just southwest of the Old City. I let my backpack fall to the ground. I loosened the knobs on my trekking poles and telescoped them down to short sticks. I’d made it to Jerusalem and stood in sight of its ancient, gold-glowing walls.
Elahna snapped photos of a gaunt, wide-eyed man – ketogenic, she said, consuming my dwindling fat stores. To be precise, the stone expanse in the background of these photos is not the original Old City Wall or the next one after that, but an imposing barrier put up by Ottoman Turks in the 16th century. The entrances nearest to this traveler were the Jaffa Gate, where the Turks hung Jewish insurgents in grisly, public display, and the Zion Gate whose stones are scarred by Israeli weapons fire. Between them thrusts David’s Tower, built in the 2nd century BCE and continuously destroyed and reconstructed by conquerors from near and far, within and without. And beyond the tower: the Dome of the Rock, the Western Wall and the Church of the Holy Sepulcher, structures supported – perhaps literally – by Muslim, Jewish and Christian prayers. Structures over which millions have struggled and died.
Keep looking, if you dare, to the far edge of the Old City and the sealed Golden Gate – its doors, we’re told, will open when the Messiah returns. From there expand your gaze to capture the Mount of Olives and East Jerusalem and the West Bank and the thirsty Jordan River, thirsty for souls, and beyond that the Hashemite Kingdom of Jordan. Through a still wider lens behold Syria, Saudi Arabia, Iraq, Iran, Afghanistan, Pakistan…
Soon enough Elahna and I would enter the Old City, swarming with tourists, pilgrims, soldiers, conman, converts and fanatics; with priests, rabbis, imams, sunglasses salesmen, ice cream purveyors and strolling lovers; with Birthright kids, evangelical archeologists and a multitude of dolts, dreamers and adventurers. Down from the Judean hills they come, across oceans and deserts, from every corner of the planet they arrive with unfathomable hope and skin-splitting fervor. Many leave disappointed. Some are transformed. A few stay. All in all, it’s quite the burden for a walled enclave in a tiny, tumultuous country.
But right now – now what? Where would I be without the consoling certitude of the Shvil? It was hard to imagine making my own, lost way again. And who was this person, this almost Jew standing at the end – how different than the fellow at the first trail marker? Would Elahna still like me? Part of that ever-changing but same-old me wanted to grab my gear and keep going – south to Arad, Be’er Sheva, Eilat! – and bring on a scourge of blisters if need be, let the sun over the Land of Israel melt me down. I looked at my wife and she gently suggested that we begin our remaining time on Earth by finding a couple of cold beers.
@ @ @
Are you the last ones? I asked, a few miles out of Neve Shalom.
"I hope so,” said the young woman, and by some physical inclination, some eye glance or granule in her husky voice, you could tell that she loved the lanky young man. They were a pair of Shvil thru-hikers up from Eilat – they’d left later than their peers, against guidebook recommendations – and the trail was their eternal bond. “I hope so” – what did she mean by that? A Hebrew-English translation glitch, probably, a twisting of believe or desire or think into the willowy hope. Hers was a simple expression of pride, or relief, for having survived the broiling Negev in late spring. Or she meant: I hope no one else has to suffer as we have. Yet they looked content under the houses they carried on their backs.
Miles went by; a fighter jet rumbled overhead. It slipped into a lone, smeary cloud and the engine noise faded as if the plane had run out of gas. A triple-hooting dove had her say. Now the Shvil merged with the fabled Burma Road – no, not the 717-mile road constructed by a multitude of Burmese and Chinese laborers during World War II, a supply route for Chinese forces battling Japanese invaders. The Shvil became the Burma Road named in homage, a 12-mile, switch-backing track built by several hundred Jews in the spring of 1948 and over which trucks ferried food, medicine and arms to besieged Jerusalem. (One of its citizens, 13-year-old Hadassah Nagler, grew up to be my mother-in-law.) The cutting of the Burma Road through steep, forested terrain is as metaphorically potent for Israel’s founding as Paul Revere’s Ride is for the American Revolution. The road arose from desperation and savvy, constructed on the fly by soldiers, quarry men, teachers and shopkeepers – any Jerusalemite with a will and two hands to grab a shovel.
Here, where I walked, defense of the country became a communal enterprise. Never again would Jews hope for the best or scrounge for the mercy of others.
Oddly enough, the man in charge of building the Burma Road was an American Jew raised in brawling Brooklyn: David “Mickey” Marcus, who had parachuted into Normandy on D-Day, witnessed the horrors of the Nazi death camps, and then landed in Palestine as a military adviser. Commanding the Jerusalem front, he led two failed attacks on a fort in Latrun held by the Transjordan Legion; many Holocaust survivors, arrived from detention camps on Cyprus, died in those assaults. Undeterred, Marcus got the Burma Road built and not long after that triumph he was shot by a Jewish sentry. The incident was labeled an accident, but David Ben-Gurion, who had appointed Marcus the first Israeli general in 2,000 years, suspected that rogue elements in the army had him murdered.
Cedar and cypress trees shaded the road. In places it became flat and meandering, then abruptly bulldozed uphill. During its helter-skelter construction, iron gratings were laid on the Burma Road to keep vehicles from sinking into the mud. Now these rusted slabs appeared by the roadside, transformed into upright sculptures of men and women carrying rocks, swinging pickaxes and driving tractors. And so I trudged the Shvil and by mid-morning came to a two-lane highway, Route 38. Cars roared past in each direction at 70 miles per hour. I had two options: crawl through a dark, disgusting underpass on my knees or wait for a break in the traffic. No, I wasn’t going to crawl to Jerusalem. I waited.
Five minutes passed, and then ten. The cars kept coming. It wasn’t even close – there was no chance to cross, even at a sprint, and I stood alone beside this ribbon of hurtling steel. Blessed be memory – I conjured all the hikers I’d met on my 250-mile journey south from Kibbutz Dan and positioned them on the edge of the highway next to me. We waited for the modern, mechanized world to ease off already. I imagined Israel and Aviv and Gilad and Yaniv, Dorit and Kristina cursing a blue streak, Yavne’el and Gior, Joshua and Joseph and Egal and Dal and every Shvil hiker I’d passed including the couple in love I’d chatted with this morning – they stood by me on the side of the road, waiting to cross. Someone asked, Do you have enough water? Yes, toda, and how’s the trail ahead? Easy goes it, sweet as dew. Ein ba’aya. And Hal, someone else just had to say, don’t be such a hurry-up American.
Five, ten more minutes. The cars seemed to be going faster – whoosh, whoosh, just try it, sucker – and my hiking posse scattered. Ghosts are funny that way. Whoosh, whoosh. Would I ever make Jerusalem? See my wife Elahna again? Ayzeh Keta! Ayzeh Gaza! So I walked along the road and came to a gas station where I spent my last 16 shekels on a lukewarm cappuccino and cheese roll. The ATM was broken. I sat outside on the patio deck, pouting a bit and watching folks gas up their cars. Maybe, I considered, someone could drive me the 15 feet across. No, stop it – that’s silly. The good people of 1948 Jerusalem cut a road through the Judean hills and they did it hungry, tired and under sniper fire. Super American Jew “Mickey” Marcus never gave up. The least I could do was conquer Route 38 on my own sore feet. B’regel or bust.
A middle-aged man in beige slacks and a blue dress shirt stepped onto the patio. From an embroidered case he pulled a cape and wrapped it about his body. An ornate, silver strip ran along the shoulders, like an exposed vein. The man attached tefillin gear: a black leather shin box strapped to his forehead; another such box on his left bicep; and black tape wrapped about his left arm and hand. He held a prayer book and mumbled words below my hearing, rocking on the tips of his toes and bending barely at the waist. An observant if not Orthodox Jew, he faced across my nemesis highway, up the Burma Road, toward the beckoning city.
He prayed. I sipped java and studied the guidebook. In five minutes, it was over. With practiced speed, the pious man unfurled the black tape, whipped away his cape and shin boxes, and restored it all to the case. It’s a beautiful day, I said in Hebrew, and he replied with a phrase I didn’t understand. Do you speak English? I asked. He shook his head. Then he gave a little wave and walked over to a Styrofoam coffee cup on the ground by a gas pump. He dumped it in a trash can, got in his car and drove away.
I chewed on my bun. Okay, let’s go. I eyeballed the map one more time, running my finger from this very spot to Jerusalem. I secured all straps and hooks and zippers and doohickeys on my faithful backpack. Zip, yank, jigger and shake. I retied my boots, snug but not tight, the laces double knotted. I tugged on my socks. I checked my water levels, returned my Yale cap to its rightful place. I swung the backpack over my shoulders and gripped the cork handles of my trekking poles – after four weeks of hiking they had molded perfectly to my hands – and just doing so brought forth a surge of strength and confidence. I walked along the edge of the highway and back to the Shvil. There, I waited. No expectations this time. Five minutes, ten minutes, cars rushing by. Israelis on the go-go – and suddenly the world ceased. The road became clear in both directions. I looked up and down the empty, quiet space. The cars had parted and I could have sauntered across like bold Nahshon leading the Israelites across the Red Sea. I could have spun like a Dervish on the yellow line. I could have gone back and forth twice. Just in case, though, I ran for it.
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Around noon I stopped at a mitzpe on Mt. Orna and ate the last of my food; far below, cars streamed along the four-lane highway into Jerusalem, their hum low and annoying. My feet, alas, had progressed from sore to blissfully numb to killing me. Yes, it was time for a little ‘70s music therapy, so I popped in my ear buds and summoned Crosby, Stills, Nash and Young on the iPod. Brain neurons first excited 40 years ago re-fired, and I sought, as always, to understand the lyrics to Wooden Ships. Are the purple berries really LSD? Who are the silver people on the shoreline? Nonetheless, I sailed, sailed away “very free and easy/Easy, you know, the way it’s supposed to be…” Then I tripped on a root, almost falling.
A twisting, downhill hike through thick woods revealed the B’nai B’rith Caves in the Martyrs Forest, named for Jewish victims of the Holocaust. Iron bars had been pulled across the dark, musty-smelling cave entrances at the foot of a cliff. Maybe things were under repair. Or was that the idea – the way is barred? Real knowledge of Shoah remains inaccessible to anyone but its victims; the horrible reality exists like a demon in the darkness of a cave you cannot enter. But you can look through the bars. You can wonder how, why?
I sat on the ground next to a stone honoring Anne Frank, fated among millions to epitomize innocence butchered and potential squandered. I phoned my wife. All was good; she was on schedule to make our rendezvous in Ein Kerem by late afternoon. I bid goodbye to Elahna with a phone kiss and then closed my eyes and thought about Anne and her diary. Twenty-six million copies sold. Translated into 60 languages. A staple of school curricula in dozens of nations. Anne, dumped in an anonymous grave, one of a million Jewish children slaughtered by the Nazis. Anne, the most famous child of the 20th century.
Twenty-seven years ago, during my single year as a high school English teacher, I taught Anne Frank’s The Diary of a Young Girl to “non-college bound,” non-Jewish seniors who were much more interested in the mechanics of genocide – gas chambers, ovens, mass graves, the harvested shoes, hair and gold fillings – than the writings of a precocious child hiding from that horror. Nonetheless I plowed the text looking for passages that my rough-hewn students could “relate to”: family dynamics under stress, Annie’s yearnings for handsome Peter and her preoccupation with movie stars and royal families. See how she dreams of the future, worries about the world! Just, maybe, like you! I made my students stand and read aloud entries about Anne’s parents (“Aren’t they all stupid!’) and her earnest sister Margot (“She wants to nurse newborns in Palestine. I still have visions of gorgeous dresses and fascinating people.”). We discussed Anne’s poignant morning ritual, a kind of living prayer: “…go to the window, take down the blanket, sniff at the crack of the window until I feel a bit of fresh air, and I’m awake.” How, I asked, do you wake yourself? These lessons were met with dutiful compliance, at best.
Near the end of the Holocaust “unit” I recited Anne’s famous assertion that “in spite of everything I still believe that people are really good at heart” and one student remarked, hell, she clearly got that wrong. I couldn’t tell if he was joking; other kids laughed, he didn’t. A smart kid, in retrospect. I’m not sure why – blame it on the teacher’s guide – but I shied away from presenting the book as a Jewish story and strove to universalize Anne Frank and her plight. I made her into an emblem of hope. Holocaust scholar Alvin H. Rosenfeld cautions against portraits of Anne as “a positive symbol of articulated innocence and transcendent optimism” in a brutal world; such iconic renderings are only achieved, he notes, “by uncoupling Anne’s story in Amsterdam from her story in Auschwitz and Bergen-Belsen” – where she died from typhus, draped in nothing but a filthy blanket – and, even worse, by “uncoupling her story as a Jewish victim of Nazism from that of millions of other Jews who shared her fate.”
No wonder my “real life-bound” students craved concentration camp details over canned pieties. Impervious to educational manipulation, they knew what mattered. I should have asked them to analyze the death machinery of Auschwitz and Bergen-Belsen. I should have had them explain Anne’s anguish over Jewish suffering through the ages – then demanded their opinions of the Jews, give it to me straight – and I wish I’d had them recite these innocent, girly musings: “There’s in people simply an urge to destroy, an urge to kill, to murder and rage, and until all mankind, without exception, undergoes a great change, wars will be waged, everything that has been built up, cultivated and grown will be destroyed and disfigured, after which mankind will have to begin all over again.”
Of course, it’s as foolish to lay the fate of the world on Anne Frank’s slim, prophetic shoulders as it is to globalize and sentimentalize her story. She was just scratching down her life and seeing how it sounded – a talented kid, sure, but not so different than the boys and girls in that class or the boisterous school groups I’d witnessed at historic sites along the Shvil. Anne dreamed of becoming “a journalist, and later on, a famous writer.” Alas for her, and may it come true for others! And now I stood up, stretched and got down the trail only to be interrupted by the receptionist at the hotel in Neve Shalom.
I’d left without paying, the voice said in the phone. Not true, I told her, you swiped my credit card when I checked in. Well, she replied, perhaps it didn’t swipe properly. So I located my wallet in my backpack and slid out my Chase Visa Amazon.com Reward card and pronounced its 16 raised-plastic numbers as I stood on Shvil Yisrael in a forest with six million trees for six million murders. Somehow, reading the numbers didn’t suffice – would I be willing, she asked, to come back to the hotel so she could swipe the card again? Maybe, she suggested, your card has been inactivated. Do I have another one? Or could someone else call in and pay the bill? We appreciate your business, Mr. LaCroix, but payment is…
Who really cares how it got resolved? I made calls. I chose multiple options on multiple phone trees. I let myself get sucked back in. Soon my Shvil sojourn would conclude in Jerusalem and this, the toxic dreck of modern life, was waiting. Thank G-d my Elahna would be there – how does anyone go it alone?
The six-mile, uphill stretch to Kibbutz Tzova was covered in loose rocks, the worst possible terrain for blistered feet. I took a dose of ibuprofen and imagined the pain as a ribbon flowing from my body into a kind of whirling archery target in the sky, and then the ribbon curled through the bull’s-eye into the vast reaches of outer space where it dissolved like a plane’s contrail into nothingness. I was the archer within, shooting my pain away. At the kibbutz I paused only to refill water bottles in the restroom of their amusement park, the jingle-jangle of a carousel flitting like moths, and then I walked into Jerusalem’s hills.
Oh, right. You’re supposed to write fabled hills, for what other ground has been so trod by desperate, longing souls? I squinted at the hills to see the etchings of ancient stone terraces – there? Is that them? – and drank two liters of water as if refilling a dry reservoir. Eventually I left Shvil Yisrael (which continued south, Negev bound) and headed east on the Jerusalem Trail. The entrance to Shvil Yerushalayim hid behind an electrical circuit box shrouded by a snarl of trees. From there, I ended up lost in a hillside olive grove.
Finally, somehow, as night fell, I descended to the main road outside Ein Kerem and walked in the breakdown lane. The massive structure of Hadassah Hospital, coated in pale Jerusalem stone, and the golden crosses of the Church of the Visitation and the Moskoviya, a Russian monastery, loomed along the ridge. I phoned Elahna; she had ventured to the road, too, so I increased my stride and turned a bend – and there she was! My wife stood 40 yards away, wearing her pink Marion’s Pie Shop t-shirt. To my great relief she looked exactly as I remembered – tall, wiry, brown hair bobbed short, smile like a sunrise – and I waved my trekking poles in the air and she signaled back with fluttery hands. Elahna rushed across the road, traffic be damned and downhill to me, her husband. We hugged and kissed and wiped away tears, and this was the first thing I remember her saying: “You’re so skinny!”
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Late the next morning, after she salved and bandaged my feet, Elahna took the lead on the last ten miles of my hike into Jerusalem. She can’t stand not holding the map, although she usually surrenders the TV remote. Starting at Mary’s Well – an empty space/grotto where the mothers of John the Baptist and Jesus Christ scooped water while pregnant – we walked through woods on a dirt path. Elahna caught trail fever, eagerly pointing out the blue and white markers for Shvil Yerushalayim. The trail ran parallel to Yad Vashem, the Holocaust memorial, and then hugged the southern slope of a hill named for Theodore Herzl, the father of the Zionist movement. We emerged from trees onto a city street, Herzl Road, and soon passed the headquarters of Yad Sarah, a charity that loans wheelchairs to the elderly and disabled. Elahna dawdled here, rushed me forward there.
She had been visiting Jerusalem for 44 years and every street corner had become a medley of the new, the old, the changed and the long gone. She time traveled. S.Y. Agnon writes in T’mol Shilsom that “Jerusalem is revealed only to those who love her.” On this day I loved the city for having reached it, and I loved it yet again through my wife’s adoring eyes.
Cutting east, we entered the leafy neighborhood of Beit HaKarem. Elahna had lived here as a nine-year-old girl, and she pointed out the supermarket where she’d dropped off cigarettes and hand-knitted hats for soldiers during the Yom Kippur War. Soon we arrived at an intersection near the Knesset, the country’s parliament. And then, an eruption. A police car flashing red pulled into the center of the intersection and stopped at an angle. Two men in uniform – beat cops? commandos? – jumped out and stood guard with submachine guns pressed to their hips. Their heads turned slowly, robotically, scanning the perimeter. The noontime sun of Eretz Yisrael radiated off their mirror sunglasses. Traffic and passersby piled up, a real mess. Cars honked listlessly. About this drama there was a casual, but also sinister feel – one part day-in-the-life, one part Columbian drug cartel. Five minutes later, a motorcade of black SUVs proceeded through the intersection and up to the Knesset. The security detail quickly drove away. The traffic unclogged.
“Israel, the only the first world/third world country,” said Elahna. Her love can come with a healthy dose of criticism.
Next we followed the trail to a bird-watching station run by the Society for the Protection of Nature in Israel (SPNI). Nothing exotic – an observation hut next to a pond where ducks and birds played. I read an article posted on the hut’s wall about the amazing hoopoe bird, or doocheefat. In a 2008 vote conducted by SPNI, doocheefat was elected the national bird of Israel, outpolling the white-spectacled bulbul and other pretenders. The topside of doocheefat features an elaborate orange crest tipped in black, a pile-driver beak and pinkish chest; the lower region looks as if the poor guy jumped into a pair of black-and-white striped pajama pants. Immediately I bonded with this mish-mashed creature and informed Elahna of our mission to spy one in the wild. She nodded and I thought she was humoring me, but in the weeks ahead she became the biggest doocheefat fanatic of all.
The article also noted that doocheefat’s inclusion as a crossword puzzle clue in a socialist newspaper in Manchester, England, had sparked outrage among anti-Israel activists who accused the Morning Star of abandoning its opposition to the “racist, Apartheid state of Israel” as represented by its odd-duck bird. Everything, indeed, is political.
Shvil Yerushalayim dipped south into Rehavia, a neighborhood of academics, government officials and hipsters – a secular enclave in a city which, increasingly, is dominated by the Haredim (32 percent of all city Jews) and Arabs (36 percent of all residents). On Alfasi Street, we passed the basement apartment where Menachem Begin lived during the 1930s as he directed the freedom fighting/terrorist activities of the Irgun. We turned the corner, onto Radaq St., and air raid sirens sounded. They wailed like inconsolable women for two, three minutes. I didn’t pay it much mind as my entire being was focused on finding a nice café, but I did note that Israelis kept walking along.
Elahna, though, froze. She stopped dead. It was 1973. She was a little girl in Jerusalem again, playing with Bedknobs and Broomsticks paper dolls when the sirens blared. She rushed to the window and searched for fire trucks. Her father joined her. No trucks. And then Elahna’s mother emerged from her afternoon nap, steadied herself in the doorway and proclaimed, “It’s war.” Just like that, war – the start of the Yom Kippur War, 25 years after the War of Independence which Hadassah had endured as a child. Today in Jerusalem, however, the sirens were just a pre-announced test. The next war hadn’t started.
For dinner we stopped at Café Yahushua, which had the feel of an upscale, American diner and even boasted a Philly Steak Sandwich, but we opted for gnocchi in cream sauce, salads and a sampler of little cakes for dessert. Just a few blocks away lives the prime minister. On our previous visit, three years ago, we had stopped in front of his residence at a table manned by the parents of Gilad Shalit, the IDF soldier captured by Hamas and held in the Gaza Strip for five years. In October 2011, he was released in a very asymmetrical trade: one man, Gilad, for over a thousand Palestinian prisoners. It’s best, I think, not to find meaning in the math, to draw conclusions about the relative value of Jews and Arabs or any human being; simply put, that’s what it took to get a deal. I’d like to return to Café Yahushua someday. It felt like a refuge, a mellow place to nosh in a world that doesn’t add up.
After dinner we strolled tree-lined Chopin Street, named for the Polish composer who ranted about swindler Jews. Adjoining streets honored a Jewish scholar (Alon Gedaliah), radical Zionist (Ze’ev Jabotinsky), military hero (David Marcus) and the only Jewish prime minister of England (Benjamin Disraeli). On the Hebron Road – just miles from the Old City, the turbulent heart of Jerusalem – we read from a plaque fixed to a wall: on this very spot on such and such a day a suicide bomber murdered so many innocent…across the road families enjoyed an outdoor book and crafts fair. Yashar, yashar, yashar. (Keep going, in Hebrew. Straight ahead. This is the national mantra.) My forward progress stopped, finally, in public gardens just southwest of the Old City. I let my backpack fall to the ground. I loosened the knobs on my trekking poles and telescoped them down to short sticks. I’d made it to Jerusalem and stood in sight of its ancient, gold-glowing walls.
Elahna snapped photos of a gaunt, wide-eyed man – ketogenic, she said, consuming my dwindling fat stores. To be precise, the stone expanse in the background of these photos is not the original Old City Wall or the next one after that, but an imposing barrier put up by Ottoman Turks in the 16th century. The entrances nearest to this traveler were the Jaffa Gate, where the Turks hung Jewish insurgents in grisly, public display, and the Zion Gate whose stones are scarred by Israeli weapons fire. Between them thrusts David’s Tower, built in the 2nd century BCE and continuously destroyed and reconstructed by conquerors from near and far, within and without. And beyond the tower: the Dome of the Rock, the Western Wall and the Church of the Holy Sepulcher, structures supported – perhaps literally – by Muslim, Jewish and Christian prayers. Structures over which millions have struggled and died.
Keep looking, if you dare, to the far edge of the Old City and the sealed Golden Gate – its doors, we’re told, will open when the Messiah returns. From there expand your gaze to capture the Mount of Olives and East Jerusalem and the West Bank and the thirsty Jordan River, thirsty for souls, and beyond that the Hashemite Kingdom of Jordan. Through a still wider lens behold Syria, Saudi Arabia, Iraq, Iran, Afghanistan, Pakistan…
Soon enough Elahna and I would enter the Old City, swarming with tourists, pilgrims, soldiers, conman, converts and fanatics; with priests, rabbis, imams, sunglasses salesmen, ice cream purveyors and strolling lovers; with Birthright kids, evangelical archeologists and a multitude of dolts, dreamers and adventurers. Down from the Judean hills they come, across oceans and deserts, from every corner of the planet they arrive with unfathomable hope and skin-splitting fervor. Many leave disappointed. Some are transformed. A few stay. All in all, it’s quite the burden for a walled enclave in a tiny, tumultuous country.
But right now – now what? Where would I be without the consoling certitude of the Shvil? It was hard to imagine making my own, lost way again. And who was this person, this almost Jew standing at the end – how different than the fellow at the first trail marker? Would Elahna still like me? Part of that ever-changing but same-old me wanted to grab my gear and keep going – south to Arad, Be’er Sheva, Eilat! – and bring on a scourge of blisters if need be, let the sun over the Land of Israel melt me down. I looked at my wife and she gently suggested that we begin our remaining time on Earth by finding a couple of cold beers.
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