Due South
The Dead Sea is shrinking. Its water level has dropped 100 feet in the last 60 years and the pace is accelerating. In 2011 the surface fell five feet, creating sinkholes and further degradation of the fragile ecosystem around the sea. Where’s the water going? Blame a dwindling trickle from its main source, the Jordan River, as crops and people take their shares. Blame, too, industrial exploitation by Israel Chemicals Ltd. and the Arab Potash Co. of Jordan. Through a canal at its southern tip, the Dead Sea is being pumped into an 18-mile expanse of evaporation ponds and salt pools surrounded by heavy equipment and yellow, rust-brown and red hills of chemical dust. Known as the Dead Sea Works, this facility mines potash for fertilizer, magnesium chloride for the preparation of tofu, and raw materials for skin-care and anti-aging products. We pulled off Route 90 and up to a gate at the Works, hoping to find an outlet store or take a tour. The store was closed, the tours unavailable.
Six months later, Elahna got her Dead Sea fix. She was shopping for boots at the Galleria Mall in Cambridge, Mass., minding her business when a sparkling young woman from Israel dragooned her. They talked in Hebrew and English, they talked in Hebrish, and soon Elahna was in the chair trying samples with secret ingredients and accepting flattery and knowing all along that she was being worked, maybe flimflammed, and not really caring. A couple hundred bucks later, she returned home with anti-aging serum for her eyes, a mineral mud mask , soothing Dead Sea salts, etc, etc, and who knows, said my Yale-trained immunologist, such medieval alchemy might just work. Cheaper than plastic surgery, right? Of course, she soon discovered that her magic potions cost twice as much in the mall than on Amazon, but what the heck. The Israeli woman had to eat, had to save for that apartment in Tel Aviv.
Due south of the salt pools, we stopped for the night at the Hatseva Field School. It was a rustic eco-camp for Israeli families, enclosed in barbed wire and deserted on a Monday in the summer. Four o’clock and 112 degrees in the sun. And buggy – bugs diving in your mouth and eyes buggy. The gap-toothed caretaker with bugs crawling on his face told us about the amazing Arabian Babbler and even loaned us a book about it. (Actually, he called it the Arabian Bobbler. Once more, the a-o imbroglio. Israelis have a hard time with the broad a, as in Hal. That’s why they call me Hull or Hole.) In our cabin that night we drank wine, ate bread and cheese, and read about the bobbling, babbling, little brown bird that is the life’s work of Amotz Zahavi, an evolutionary biologist at Tel Aviv University. Elahna got on the phone and reassured her mother that we were safely tucked in nowhere’s land. Then she called our house sitter in Somerville. Bad news: my pots of wax beans had spider mites and were quarantined on the porch.
At 7 a.m., we sallied forth. Nothing stirred except for Thai field workers in pants, long sleeves and scarves wrapped about their faces; they moved between rows of crops sheathed in plastic – tomatoes, watermelons, green veggies. If they can grow it here, I guess, they can grow it anywhere. We drove past a garbage dump and parked in the Shezaf Nature Reserve on a hill of dirt and shale. For miles, on all sides, nothing but hard-packed desert strewn with pebbles and valiant weeds. To the east, the Edom Mountains of the Kingdom of Jordan.
There were two signs on the hill. One was a declaration “In memory of Oren Lior, who died defending the border.” The young man’s life terminated in 1989; his attached photo, alas, was peeling off, dog-eared. The other sign informed us that the five-kilometer Wadi Shahak Loop Trail was a bad idea from June (now) to October. It also suggested, “Have a Nice Walk.” Elahna and I sidestepped down the hill toward a spattering of acacia trees settled along the dry banks of Wadi Shahak. I’d read that Arabian Babblers gravitate to acacia. And…look, there! Brown darts ripped across our view. And gone.
Maybe Babblers, maybe not. What, after all, is so special about this bird? Not its sparrow size, dun coloring or whispering, trilling calls. Babblers are remarkable for their aggressive niceness. As in: Here, take this grub and eat it. Sit still while I groom you, you’re filthy! Hey, buddy, I’m taking lookout now and don’t dare try to reciprocate – what’s wrong with you? Amotz Zahavi, after decades of observation, believes that Arabian Babblers don’t behave well to enhance the group’s prosperity or its safety. Nor do these bird Samaritans exploit the kindness of their compatriots, as behaviorists would predict from game-theory analysis. The altruism of Babblers seems to be about status and breeding possibilities. Doing good gets you hot chicks and chucks; conversely, accepting help lowers your prospects. This mismatch in the business of giving and taking creates tension; a dominant Arabian Babbler on the nice operates like a Jewish mother smothering reluctant souls with good deeds and dumplings.
Bird scholars debate. In a world where status is attained through many avenues, including deception, violence and injustice, how did altruism become the favored means of advancement for this little bird? Why not get ahead by fighting, by clashing of claws and beaks, instead do-gooding? Or, put it this way: what do they know that we don’t?
That morning, we saw no other birds. The wadi’s acacia trees looked driftwood-dead except for clusters of green leaves, spiral seed pods and the odd stalk bursting from a bark-furrowed branch. Patient trees these were, waiting for water, waiting for Babblers. We sat, brushing flies from our breath, our lips. No wind, no sound here. I heard a belly squirm – not sure if it was hers or mine. By nine a.m. it was 95 degrees and we ended our vigil, hiked back to the car and drove south to the Red Sea resort of Eilat. It would have been fun to see an Arabian Babbler pull a nice one, even if she’s got an agenda like the rest of us.
@ @ @
From the desiccated land of sand and scrub, date palm plantations lurched up as if worlds were leaking through. A little water, a little potash and immigrant labor: boom, a box of luscious dates at Costco. Our car skimmed the glass-smooth, desert highway that was being widened and given ramps to whatever towns and kibbutzim lay beyond. A billboard with a smiling blonde woman under a hard hat boasted of highway construction across The Land – behold, the 21st Century National Transportation Project, or something like that. That same image on a billboard outside Jerusalem had been draped in a black shawl on Shabbat, the work of ultra-Orthodox Jews who object to the public display of females on holy days.
Hotel towers on the horizon – Eilat. We stayed there for two nights and a few things should be noted up front. First, Eilat is snuggled up to Egypt and Jordan, the least of Israel’s enemies, or perhaps the worst of their friends, but either way there’s little sense of danger. Second, what fabulous views of the surrounding mountains, especially as late-day shadows cloak their sun-streaked shoulders! And third, there’s virtually nothing Jewish or Israeli about the city. It’s an American/European generic destination with a laidback feel. Nineteen-sixties Honolulu probably looked and felt a lot like Eilat.
We checked into the Dan Panorama Hotel. In the lobby a woman in horn-rimmed glasses and a gold lame dress led a game of bingo. Next stop, the beach. Elahna and I planted ourselves in the brown sand as two hulking cargo ships slid across the Gulf of Eilat. No hurry. On the far shore, in the port city of Aqaba, a huge Jordanian flag flew from a six-story pole. It’s not the biggest flag ever, though. That would be the Israeli flag donated by a Filipino evangelist and flown for one day over Masada.
A grandmother, mother and teenage son sat nearby – a triangle of generations. Gramma looked out to sea, wiggled her feet in sand. Mom drank a beer and smoked a cigarette. The boy read a book with an English title on its cover. All three spoke Russian to each other; maybe it was the language of the home, transported here. Several days later, at the family reunion, Elahna’s cousin Arnon gave me his take. The boy speaks three languages, he said, the mother two, the old lady just one. The elderly Russian Jews who Arnon sees in his medical practice immigrated in the 1990s and tend not to know much Hebrew or English. Their children learn Hebrew in order to pursue careers in Israel. The grandchildren, in turn, speak Hebrew to function in society, learn English in the schools and pick up Russian from their grandparents who raise them while the parents work to give their kids a better life. Now I’m wondering this: in 15 years, without babushka, will Russian be spoken in the boy’s adult home? Will his children say no thanks, lo toda, to the mother tongue?
The next day we could have sailed on a 19th century schooner to Taba Beach in Egypt. Or walked through a coral reef via an undersea tunnel striped with picture windows. Or swam with dolphins famous for healing victims of trauma. We could have taken a jeep out to the ancient copper mines at Timna or climbed Mt. Zefahot and from that rocky peak spied on Jordan, Egypt, Saudi Arabia and Iraq on a clear day. Instead, we lounged at the hotel’s outdoor pool. It was packed with Israelis – foreigners avoid Eilat in the summer – and a junior Dick Clark led a rousing game of music trivia. A pixie woman dressed like a cockatoo rounded up the contestants. The pool-crowd showed none of the too-cool reticence you’d get from traveling Americans. When he identified Michael Jackson’s “Thriller” after just three notes, an old geezer pumped his fists.
One man’s tattoo, a head and shoulders inking of himself, his wife and their two grown children, splayed across his entire back. That wife, seated close to him, projected a hostile air but perhaps she just couldn’t relax. (Yesterday I’d seen a lurid tattoo of two naked women kissing, on the chest of a man in his 60s. Beside him sat his chunky concubine.) Elahna did her half-napping thing and I watched a huge, developmentally delayed boy gather up his little brother and toss him again and again into the pool. With each dunking the little bro readjusted his scuba mask and went back on deck for more. Finally he climbed from the water in crashing tears and his mother wrapped him in a towel and rested his head on her ample chest. She patted him, whispered. Another day in the life with her beautiful boys.
That evening the Dan Panorama Hotel offered a free performance of Mamma Mia! in the main ballroom. What, you were expecting Henny Youngman? Eilat’s a long way from the borsht belt. The room was packed, so we stood in the back and watched five young Israelis play all the parts with great, Shakespearian energy and a total lack of camp. They rendered the dialogue in rapid-fire Hebrew; the songs, written by the Swedish super-group Abba, floated forth in English – not that I understood the lyrics. “Tonight the Souper Trouper lights are gonna find me, shining like the sun,” belted the bride to her tall girlfriend, who resembled the wacky neighbor on an Israeli TV sitcom I’d seen in Dishon, or was it Yavne’el? At the end of Act I, my right arm spasmed in clapping and sent my beer flying.
As one of 39 people on the planet who had not seen the play or movie, Mamma Mia!’s plot seemed epically perplexing. A girl on a Greek island was getting married and she’d invited three older men to the wedding because, well, I hadn’t a clue. They’re her mother’s ex-boyfriends, whispered Elahna, and one of them is her father – now be quiet! Madcap mayhem and heartbreak ensued. In the end the identity of the real father remained a mystery as the three “dads” agreed to share the father role, the young couple put off marriage in favor of backpacking around the world like a couple of post-military-service Israelis, and everyone danced and exalted in a shower of unadulterated love. And Meryl Streep got married –
Wait, that’s the movie version of Mamma Mia!, which I’ve since rented. But it wasn’t until months after that, as I watched an episode of 30 Rock on the personal TV screen bolted to the elliptical machine at my Planet Fitness gym, that it dawned on me why Mamma Mia! might appeal to an Israeli audience. You see, Alec Baldwin was looking for his father and it came down to three candidates, one of whom was Alan Alda playing a secular humanist Jew – watch it yourself, very funny – but here’s the thing, what I realized: Israel doesn’t know its real father. It exists in a perpetual state of searching for its identity.
(So, I wonder, do I?)
Identity flows, in part, from one’s origins. If you are a Sinai Jew – here I borrow from the work of Rabbi David Hartman – if you are a Jew whose purpose can be traced to the moral laws passed down on Mount Sinai, all 613 commandments as detailed in Torah, then your father is Moses. A Sinai Jew’s conception of suffering comes from the memory of bondage in Egypt, of living as the Other in a foreign land and of losing and finding one’s way in the desert. But if you are an Auschwitz Jew – thank you again, rabbi – your Jewish identity is forged not in antiquity but in 20th century death-camp ovens. For you, the Holocaust defines suffering and leads to an overwhelming desire to protect the state of Israel against a legion of threats. An Auschwitz Jew’s father, therefore, can only be a Zionist – Theodore Herzl, perhaps, or David Ben-Gurion, Yitzhak Rabin, Golda Meir (!), Ariel Sharon, even Benjamin Netanyahu – any leader who has shepherded Israel after the horror of the Shoah.
Sinai or Auschwitz? Who’s your father, Israel? Or maybe there’s a third choice. A pragmatist, or cynic, might say that Israel’s real father is the United States, the ultimate geopolitical guarantor of its survival. But is that father’s love unconditional?
Recently I did genealogy work on my father’s side of the family. Perhaps I was trying to define myself not as the direct result of a broken man – the spawn of a cruel person, and named for him, too – but as one human element, one brushstroke, in a larger, multifarious scene played over centuries. The indirect result of a multitude. I must admit that I was hoping to find a Jew or two on the paternal side – not to bedevil my anti-Semitic father in death, but to discover a deeper Jewish root than the one I’m fashioning for myself, preparing to plant. Alas, just as on my mother’s side, I encountered a gang of Irish and English folk, a bevy of Brodericks and McCarthys and O’Neils, and not a Jew in the bunch.
Then there’s the LaCroix thread in the tapestry. Meaning the cross in French, LaCroix isn’t exactly a Jewish name. In fact, what’s less Jewish than that? My research into the LaCroix line, my trek down that faint trail has so far delivered feeble results – a few clues trickle to New Orleans, others flee north to Newfoundland – but I have discovered a liberating out: LaCroix may not be these ghosts’ true name. LaCroix was often taken as an alias, or dit, by mercenaries, crusaders and immigrants; it functioned as a cover for any scoundrel/refugee abandoning the French homeland. In this context LaCroix might signify the holy cross that a man fought under as part of an army or navy, or it might indicate the crossroads of the town that nurtured and/or banished him. Either way, it marked you for an individual who had come to a metaphoric crossroads on his life’s rocky road. Such LaCroixs were imposters. They made themselves generic; they passed. Surely their numbers included a few Jews who, out of desperation or cunning, had taken up the cross.
And what’s more Jewish than that, endeavoring to survive? Out of Egypt, out of France, out of Auschwitz…but survival, we eventually learn, isn’t enough. The legendary truths of tribal history and bloodlines aren’t enough, either, and can lead a people terribly astray. This, I suspect, is the simple message the vacationing Israelis perceived as they watched their talented countrymen perform Mamma Mia! in a ballroom in Eilat, not far from Egypt, Jordan, and the Red Sea. Your heritage and its reverberating consequences may be a matter of loss and sorrow, of ceaseless controversy – but here’s your life right now: embrace love!
The next morning, I tried Ben-Gurion’s porridge at the hotel’s breakfast buffet. The founding father and first prime minister of Israel liked a bowl of white porridge with red raspberries plopped in the center. His ever-protective, dragon-lady wife Paula tested the bowl for warmth with her finger, according to Dan Panorama Magazine, until that fateful day when she burned her pinkie. Served her right, seemed to be the subtext. Had someone in the kitchen put out a hit on her baby digit? Russian-born and American-raised, Paula met Ben-Gurion in New York when they were both young, after the Turks deported him as a Zionist upstart. She loved him when he was a nobody from Palookaville.
So, was the great man’s breakfast any good? In the conventional sense, no, it was lukewarm and pasty and looked like a bleeding fungus, but as metaphoric mush, as the porridge that powered the man of moxie and myth who willed Israel to nationhood just three years after the Holocaust, who secured Eilat in the War of Independence and declared the Negev to be the country’s pioneer land – as the magic nosh of the endlessly vigorous statesman-blowhard whose desert home we visited later that day, as the elixir of chutzpah, of something from nothing but ashes, well, yes, the porridge tasted pretty good. I made sure to finish the bowl.
@ @ @
Six months later, Elahna got her Dead Sea fix. She was shopping for boots at the Galleria Mall in Cambridge, Mass., minding her business when a sparkling young woman from Israel dragooned her. They talked in Hebrew and English, they talked in Hebrish, and soon Elahna was in the chair trying samples with secret ingredients and accepting flattery and knowing all along that she was being worked, maybe flimflammed, and not really caring. A couple hundred bucks later, she returned home with anti-aging serum for her eyes, a mineral mud mask , soothing Dead Sea salts, etc, etc, and who knows, said my Yale-trained immunologist, such medieval alchemy might just work. Cheaper than plastic surgery, right? Of course, she soon discovered that her magic potions cost twice as much in the mall than on Amazon, but what the heck. The Israeli woman had to eat, had to save for that apartment in Tel Aviv.
Due south of the salt pools, we stopped for the night at the Hatseva Field School. It was a rustic eco-camp for Israeli families, enclosed in barbed wire and deserted on a Monday in the summer. Four o’clock and 112 degrees in the sun. And buggy – bugs diving in your mouth and eyes buggy. The gap-toothed caretaker with bugs crawling on his face told us about the amazing Arabian Babbler and even loaned us a book about it. (Actually, he called it the Arabian Bobbler. Once more, the a-o imbroglio. Israelis have a hard time with the broad a, as in Hal. That’s why they call me Hull or Hole.) In our cabin that night we drank wine, ate bread and cheese, and read about the bobbling, babbling, little brown bird that is the life’s work of Amotz Zahavi, an evolutionary biologist at Tel Aviv University. Elahna got on the phone and reassured her mother that we were safely tucked in nowhere’s land. Then she called our house sitter in Somerville. Bad news: my pots of wax beans had spider mites and were quarantined on the porch.
At 7 a.m., we sallied forth. Nothing stirred except for Thai field workers in pants, long sleeves and scarves wrapped about their faces; they moved between rows of crops sheathed in plastic – tomatoes, watermelons, green veggies. If they can grow it here, I guess, they can grow it anywhere. We drove past a garbage dump and parked in the Shezaf Nature Reserve on a hill of dirt and shale. For miles, on all sides, nothing but hard-packed desert strewn with pebbles and valiant weeds. To the east, the Edom Mountains of the Kingdom of Jordan.
There were two signs on the hill. One was a declaration “In memory of Oren Lior, who died defending the border.” The young man’s life terminated in 1989; his attached photo, alas, was peeling off, dog-eared. The other sign informed us that the five-kilometer Wadi Shahak Loop Trail was a bad idea from June (now) to October. It also suggested, “Have a Nice Walk.” Elahna and I sidestepped down the hill toward a spattering of acacia trees settled along the dry banks of Wadi Shahak. I’d read that Arabian Babblers gravitate to acacia. And…look, there! Brown darts ripped across our view. And gone.
Maybe Babblers, maybe not. What, after all, is so special about this bird? Not its sparrow size, dun coloring or whispering, trilling calls. Babblers are remarkable for their aggressive niceness. As in: Here, take this grub and eat it. Sit still while I groom you, you’re filthy! Hey, buddy, I’m taking lookout now and don’t dare try to reciprocate – what’s wrong with you? Amotz Zahavi, after decades of observation, believes that Arabian Babblers don’t behave well to enhance the group’s prosperity or its safety. Nor do these bird Samaritans exploit the kindness of their compatriots, as behaviorists would predict from game-theory analysis. The altruism of Babblers seems to be about status and breeding possibilities. Doing good gets you hot chicks and chucks; conversely, accepting help lowers your prospects. This mismatch in the business of giving and taking creates tension; a dominant Arabian Babbler on the nice operates like a Jewish mother smothering reluctant souls with good deeds and dumplings.
Bird scholars debate. In a world where status is attained through many avenues, including deception, violence and injustice, how did altruism become the favored means of advancement for this little bird? Why not get ahead by fighting, by clashing of claws and beaks, instead do-gooding? Or, put it this way: what do they know that we don’t?
That morning, we saw no other birds. The wadi’s acacia trees looked driftwood-dead except for clusters of green leaves, spiral seed pods and the odd stalk bursting from a bark-furrowed branch. Patient trees these were, waiting for water, waiting for Babblers. We sat, brushing flies from our breath, our lips. No wind, no sound here. I heard a belly squirm – not sure if it was hers or mine. By nine a.m. it was 95 degrees and we ended our vigil, hiked back to the car and drove south to the Red Sea resort of Eilat. It would have been fun to see an Arabian Babbler pull a nice one, even if she’s got an agenda like the rest of us.
@ @ @
From the desiccated land of sand and scrub, date palm plantations lurched up as if worlds were leaking through. A little water, a little potash and immigrant labor: boom, a box of luscious dates at Costco. Our car skimmed the glass-smooth, desert highway that was being widened and given ramps to whatever towns and kibbutzim lay beyond. A billboard with a smiling blonde woman under a hard hat boasted of highway construction across The Land – behold, the 21st Century National Transportation Project, or something like that. That same image on a billboard outside Jerusalem had been draped in a black shawl on Shabbat, the work of ultra-Orthodox Jews who object to the public display of females on holy days.
Hotel towers on the horizon – Eilat. We stayed there for two nights and a few things should be noted up front. First, Eilat is snuggled up to Egypt and Jordan, the least of Israel’s enemies, or perhaps the worst of their friends, but either way there’s little sense of danger. Second, what fabulous views of the surrounding mountains, especially as late-day shadows cloak their sun-streaked shoulders! And third, there’s virtually nothing Jewish or Israeli about the city. It’s an American/European generic destination with a laidback feel. Nineteen-sixties Honolulu probably looked and felt a lot like Eilat.
We checked into the Dan Panorama Hotel. In the lobby a woman in horn-rimmed glasses and a gold lame dress led a game of bingo. Next stop, the beach. Elahna and I planted ourselves in the brown sand as two hulking cargo ships slid across the Gulf of Eilat. No hurry. On the far shore, in the port city of Aqaba, a huge Jordanian flag flew from a six-story pole. It’s not the biggest flag ever, though. That would be the Israeli flag donated by a Filipino evangelist and flown for one day over Masada.
A grandmother, mother and teenage son sat nearby – a triangle of generations. Gramma looked out to sea, wiggled her feet in sand. Mom drank a beer and smoked a cigarette. The boy read a book with an English title on its cover. All three spoke Russian to each other; maybe it was the language of the home, transported here. Several days later, at the family reunion, Elahna’s cousin Arnon gave me his take. The boy speaks three languages, he said, the mother two, the old lady just one. The elderly Russian Jews who Arnon sees in his medical practice immigrated in the 1990s and tend not to know much Hebrew or English. Their children learn Hebrew in order to pursue careers in Israel. The grandchildren, in turn, speak Hebrew to function in society, learn English in the schools and pick up Russian from their grandparents who raise them while the parents work to give their kids a better life. Now I’m wondering this: in 15 years, without babushka, will Russian be spoken in the boy’s adult home? Will his children say no thanks, lo toda, to the mother tongue?
The next day we could have sailed on a 19th century schooner to Taba Beach in Egypt. Or walked through a coral reef via an undersea tunnel striped with picture windows. Or swam with dolphins famous for healing victims of trauma. We could have taken a jeep out to the ancient copper mines at Timna or climbed Mt. Zefahot and from that rocky peak spied on Jordan, Egypt, Saudi Arabia and Iraq on a clear day. Instead, we lounged at the hotel’s outdoor pool. It was packed with Israelis – foreigners avoid Eilat in the summer – and a junior Dick Clark led a rousing game of music trivia. A pixie woman dressed like a cockatoo rounded up the contestants. The pool-crowd showed none of the too-cool reticence you’d get from traveling Americans. When he identified Michael Jackson’s “Thriller” after just three notes, an old geezer pumped his fists.
One man’s tattoo, a head and shoulders inking of himself, his wife and their two grown children, splayed across his entire back. That wife, seated close to him, projected a hostile air but perhaps she just couldn’t relax. (Yesterday I’d seen a lurid tattoo of two naked women kissing, on the chest of a man in his 60s. Beside him sat his chunky concubine.) Elahna did her half-napping thing and I watched a huge, developmentally delayed boy gather up his little brother and toss him again and again into the pool. With each dunking the little bro readjusted his scuba mask and went back on deck for more. Finally he climbed from the water in crashing tears and his mother wrapped him in a towel and rested his head on her ample chest. She patted him, whispered. Another day in the life with her beautiful boys.
That evening the Dan Panorama Hotel offered a free performance of Mamma Mia! in the main ballroom. What, you were expecting Henny Youngman? Eilat’s a long way from the borsht belt. The room was packed, so we stood in the back and watched five young Israelis play all the parts with great, Shakespearian energy and a total lack of camp. They rendered the dialogue in rapid-fire Hebrew; the songs, written by the Swedish super-group Abba, floated forth in English – not that I understood the lyrics. “Tonight the Souper Trouper lights are gonna find me, shining like the sun,” belted the bride to her tall girlfriend, who resembled the wacky neighbor on an Israeli TV sitcom I’d seen in Dishon, or was it Yavne’el? At the end of Act I, my right arm spasmed in clapping and sent my beer flying.
As one of 39 people on the planet who had not seen the play or movie, Mamma Mia!’s plot seemed epically perplexing. A girl on a Greek island was getting married and she’d invited three older men to the wedding because, well, I hadn’t a clue. They’re her mother’s ex-boyfriends, whispered Elahna, and one of them is her father – now be quiet! Madcap mayhem and heartbreak ensued. In the end the identity of the real father remained a mystery as the three “dads” agreed to share the father role, the young couple put off marriage in favor of backpacking around the world like a couple of post-military-service Israelis, and everyone danced and exalted in a shower of unadulterated love. And Meryl Streep got married –
Wait, that’s the movie version of Mamma Mia!, which I’ve since rented. But it wasn’t until months after that, as I watched an episode of 30 Rock on the personal TV screen bolted to the elliptical machine at my Planet Fitness gym, that it dawned on me why Mamma Mia! might appeal to an Israeli audience. You see, Alec Baldwin was looking for his father and it came down to three candidates, one of whom was Alan Alda playing a secular humanist Jew – watch it yourself, very funny – but here’s the thing, what I realized: Israel doesn’t know its real father. It exists in a perpetual state of searching for its identity.
(So, I wonder, do I?)
Identity flows, in part, from one’s origins. If you are a Sinai Jew – here I borrow from the work of Rabbi David Hartman – if you are a Jew whose purpose can be traced to the moral laws passed down on Mount Sinai, all 613 commandments as detailed in Torah, then your father is Moses. A Sinai Jew’s conception of suffering comes from the memory of bondage in Egypt, of living as the Other in a foreign land and of losing and finding one’s way in the desert. But if you are an Auschwitz Jew – thank you again, rabbi – your Jewish identity is forged not in antiquity but in 20th century death-camp ovens. For you, the Holocaust defines suffering and leads to an overwhelming desire to protect the state of Israel against a legion of threats. An Auschwitz Jew’s father, therefore, can only be a Zionist – Theodore Herzl, perhaps, or David Ben-Gurion, Yitzhak Rabin, Golda Meir (!), Ariel Sharon, even Benjamin Netanyahu – any leader who has shepherded Israel after the horror of the Shoah.
Sinai or Auschwitz? Who’s your father, Israel? Or maybe there’s a third choice. A pragmatist, or cynic, might say that Israel’s real father is the United States, the ultimate geopolitical guarantor of its survival. But is that father’s love unconditional?
Recently I did genealogy work on my father’s side of the family. Perhaps I was trying to define myself not as the direct result of a broken man – the spawn of a cruel person, and named for him, too – but as one human element, one brushstroke, in a larger, multifarious scene played over centuries. The indirect result of a multitude. I must admit that I was hoping to find a Jew or two on the paternal side – not to bedevil my anti-Semitic father in death, but to discover a deeper Jewish root than the one I’m fashioning for myself, preparing to plant. Alas, just as on my mother’s side, I encountered a gang of Irish and English folk, a bevy of Brodericks and McCarthys and O’Neils, and not a Jew in the bunch.
Then there’s the LaCroix thread in the tapestry. Meaning the cross in French, LaCroix isn’t exactly a Jewish name. In fact, what’s less Jewish than that? My research into the LaCroix line, my trek down that faint trail has so far delivered feeble results – a few clues trickle to New Orleans, others flee north to Newfoundland – but I have discovered a liberating out: LaCroix may not be these ghosts’ true name. LaCroix was often taken as an alias, or dit, by mercenaries, crusaders and immigrants; it functioned as a cover for any scoundrel/refugee abandoning the French homeland. In this context LaCroix might signify the holy cross that a man fought under as part of an army or navy, or it might indicate the crossroads of the town that nurtured and/or banished him. Either way, it marked you for an individual who had come to a metaphoric crossroads on his life’s rocky road. Such LaCroixs were imposters. They made themselves generic; they passed. Surely their numbers included a few Jews who, out of desperation or cunning, had taken up the cross.
And what’s more Jewish than that, endeavoring to survive? Out of Egypt, out of France, out of Auschwitz…but survival, we eventually learn, isn’t enough. The legendary truths of tribal history and bloodlines aren’t enough, either, and can lead a people terribly astray. This, I suspect, is the simple message the vacationing Israelis perceived as they watched their talented countrymen perform Mamma Mia! in a ballroom in Eilat, not far from Egypt, Jordan, and the Red Sea. Your heritage and its reverberating consequences may be a matter of loss and sorrow, of ceaseless controversy – but here’s your life right now: embrace love!
The next morning, I tried Ben-Gurion’s porridge at the hotel’s breakfast buffet. The founding father and first prime minister of Israel liked a bowl of white porridge with red raspberries plopped in the center. His ever-protective, dragon-lady wife Paula tested the bowl for warmth with her finger, according to Dan Panorama Magazine, until that fateful day when she burned her pinkie. Served her right, seemed to be the subtext. Had someone in the kitchen put out a hit on her baby digit? Russian-born and American-raised, Paula met Ben-Gurion in New York when they were both young, after the Turks deported him as a Zionist upstart. She loved him when he was a nobody from Palookaville.
So, was the great man’s breakfast any good? In the conventional sense, no, it was lukewarm and pasty and looked like a bleeding fungus, but as metaphoric mush, as the porridge that powered the man of moxie and myth who willed Israel to nationhood just three years after the Holocaust, who secured Eilat in the War of Independence and declared the Negev to be the country’s pioneer land – as the magic nosh of the endlessly vigorous statesman-blowhard whose desert home we visited later that day, as the elixir of chutzpah, of something from nothing but ashes, well, yes, the porridge tasted pretty good. I made sure to finish the bowl.
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