ISRAEL STORIES 2014
Five Arrows
Sometimes it’s refreshing just to watch, alert but divorced from petty agendas and the compulsive need to confirm biases, and I may have approached that state of relaxed engagement as I watched boys playing soccer on the main green at Kibbutz Kramim. It was Shabbat, late morning, and the kids ran in slacks and collared shirts, their gone-to-shul clothes, the little ones in sneakers, the teenagers black shoed. They were having fun and not trying too hard, and the oldest teen could have swiped the underinflated ball from the sprite-boy half his age but he let him go, nice and easy, and their heads bobbed on spindly bodies and the sky levitated bluely above this plateau of land on the fringe of the Negev Desert. Some of these kids were good, nifty with the dribble and header, and so much for the bad-Jewish-athlete slur, and so much for my reverie; I’d let in the rotten world.
Elahna arrived in the late afternoon. After a dinner of leftover breakfast we toured the kibbutz’s huge, five-megawatt solar array. Kramim, founded in 1980 by members of the secular, left-wing Hashomer Hatzair youth movement, has reinvented itself as a community of both secular and religious people devoted to sustainable living. Israel’s only such “mixed” kibbutz, Kramim sports one of the biggest solar fields in the country. The juice is sold to the local utility, generating $2 million per year.
Like many things in Israel, the array was fenced off; we drove about the perimeter in the rental car and then I stood on its roof and took video of the thousands of photovoltaic cells on low pedestals angled sunward. They appeared gray in the setting sun – not glittery blue as you might expect – and I wondered if desert sand had coated the cells. But, no, reclaimed water and migrant labor from Thailand kept the cells clean (a solar cell that magnetically repels the desert’s urge to smother is under development). Bumper crops of green energy beneath the unrelenting desert sun – might this be a key ingredient for Israel’s future? Could this new nation, this little powerhouse, lead by example in the great, 21st century struggle against climate change and planetary resource destruction? Or was Israel doomed to fight ancient battles over territory and religion, as if cursed?
On the roof of the Toyota, wife urging me to get down already, I felt a surge of hope. The air crackled with possibility. Maybe my generation can fix its mistakes.
@ @ @
In Arad, the squat desert city where I should have finished this fall’s hike, we enjoyed a scrumptious pizza dinner at Kaparuchka, whose 20-something owners had built the tables, chairs and pizza oven from scratch, and the next morning we visited the Glass Art Museum inside the industrial park. To our surprise, the museum featured the glass art of only one artist, Gideon Fridman. Mr. Fridman also owned and ran the museum. Well, okay, we’re supposed to promote our brands in the 21st Century, but opening a museum about yourself is a bit cheeky, no? Elahna and I sat for a short film celebrating the unique talents of the great artist Gideon Fridman. Then the lights went up and before us stood the great artist Gideon Fridman, a goat-meat stringy old man under a cowboy hat. His white beard scraggled like desert coatzim. He stretched out his arms. Behold, it is I.
Gideon was our tour guide, too. And he was a bit of a bully, ordering us where to stand and how to gaze properly upon his works. The artist prohibited questions because everything we wanted to know, viola, would be answered. He rambled about modern society’s manifold ills, including cell phones. Many people are dead, he said, dead inside. My art is alive. It moves. Indeed, it did. As we changed our angle of approach, the glass faces seemed to change expressions and the transparent female bodies shifted as if growing uncomfortable in their poses. This is not an illusion, he insisted, but the product of his artistic vision which could never be replicated. When anyone called his work lovely – oh, that awful, sentimental word from the mouths of idiots! – he “ran for the hills.” And here he’d run to faraway Arad, a former Bedouin camel station. One more unlovely city grabbing for the tourist trade.
I was amused by Gideon Fridman’s shtick and liked a few of his pieces, but Elahna found our guide and his art tiresome and wanted to smack him. But she’s a good girl, rarely rude, and only griped afterwards over beers at an Irish pub.
@ @ @
We came to Jerusalem for Rosh Hashanah. On the morning of the holiday, in the city’s Rehavia neighborhood, Elahna and I took a stroll. The streets were largely deserted, the shops closed, and turning a corner we came face-to-face with an ultra-Orthodox family: scarfed mother in black dress pushing a black pram; tall, gangly father in black suit and hat; little boy with shaved head fringed by the side locks called payot; and two girls of different ages wearing identical dresses, as if they were twins. The mother greeted us, “Shanah Tova,” a good new year, and we responded in kind. As we walked on, Elahna remarked that it was nice to have a simple exchange with the religious without any nagging, any weirdness.
The ultra-Orthodox, or Haredim, outnumber non-Heredi Jews in Jerusalem, making up a third of the city’s population and 55 percent of its Jewish youth. Their ranks are rapidly growing; by 2030, one-fifth of Israel’s Jewish population will be Heredi.
Then I heard fast footsteps and turned around. There stood the ultra-mother; she’d run after us, as if delivering something we’d dropped. “Are you Jewish?” she asked in Brooklynese English. Elahna said yes, we were. “Do you hear the shofar?” the woman demanded. And again: “Do you hear the shofar?” Slow on the uptake, I tilted my head like a satellite dish positioning for maximum reception but heard no shofar, no horn of ibex sounding the High Holy Day call to worship. My wife bid the woman an extra-polite boker tov, good morning, and walked away. To me the woman repeated, “Do you hear the shofar?” Then I got it – she wanted to know why I wasn’t in service on this special morning, if, indeed, I was Jewish? Why, metaphorically, don’t you hear the call? What’s wrong with you?
I caught up with my wife. Minutes later, we stopped at the edge of a playground exploding exclusively with dozens and dozens of ultra-Orthodox kids. The boys wore black pants and white shirts; the girls were dressed in identical Polly Flindersish dresses, and their hair hung in ponytails. The older boys wore black hats, just like daddy, their payot dangling. These kids were going at it – swirling on teeter totters, swinging high on swings, sliding down slides and clambering back up. They rampaged in the manner of pre-pubescent children the world over. A few huddled in conspiracy, over maybe a spider or You Tube video.
“Children play,” I said to Elahna. It’s true, she said, “but would you want your children playing with them?”
@ @ @
Saturday night, post-Shabbat, at Jerusalem’s renovated First Station: a secular fun-scrum of folks chugging beer and just kicking back, of young women in skimpy outfits and bikinis, of bumbling toddlers and kids riding wheeled contraptions out of a Dr. Seuss book, of locals listening to a singer crooning Naomi Shemar songs plus the occasional American classic. When he warbled “Country road, take me home,” I couldn’t help joining in, and loudly. First Station is a singular phenomenon in Jerusalem, a cultural and recreational hub primarily for non-religious people born out an abandoned railroad station built by the Turks before World War I. Now First Station and its slick restaurants, kiosks, track-imbedded plaza and artificial beach is a toehold of Tel Aviv in the Holy City, a gasp of relief amid ever-escalating tension between Jews and Arabs, Jews and Jews, and Jews and Everyone Else.
“It’s huge,” explained cousin Yossi, for secular people like him. Finally, with First Station, they have a place to call their own. And then, as if drunk with possibility, he blurted it.
“Jerusalem needs a lake.”
‘What?!” replied his wife, Pnina, grazing him with a sideways look.
“A lake,” he repeated, “why not?”
Yes, why not indeed! After all, everything’s better lakeside. So right there I set to devising Lake Jerusalem, to mapping and measuring and pouring gushers of hypothetical water against dumb, golden stone. Okay, a pretty good lake, a pond really, could be made by flooding the plaza in front of the Western Wall. Let it rise about 60 feet high, not quite lapping over onto Har HaByet, the Temple Mount, where the lifeguard and barbecue stations could be set up. But make it plenty deep for divers and cannonballers alike. Cannonball wins them all, right? Cowabunga! Those wanting to slide soggy paper between Kotel stones or get in some underwater wailing can plop down a few shekels for snorkels and flippers, but the separate lines for guys and gals are no more at laidback, trendy Lake Jerusalem. Water polo matches daily at two, Marco Polo at four. The Lord who by legend resides in the Western Wall because it’s the only part of the Temple built by peasants, the Lord who can hold His breath under water no sweat, the Lord whose commandments do not, repeat, do not prohibit fun, would surely approve of a people’s lake here.
Or we could flood the entire Old City – after, of course, an orderly evacuation. First plug the drains and seal the seven gates; the eighth one, the Golden Gate where Jesus entered on the first Palm Sunday, is already shut pending the Messiah’s return. Then turn on all the taps for a couple years. This Lake Jerusalem, about a square kilometer in size, would be perfect for long-distance swim races, sailing and water skiing. Introduction of native fish species will likely attract geese, swans and assorted wagtails and, with luck, coral reefs will colonize the market stalls, churches, synagogues and mosques drowned below. Brainstorm! A zip line stretching from King David’s Tower to the exposed tip of the Dome of the Rock to the high bastions of the Damascus Gate, over the submerged holy territory contested with faithful violence by Jews, Muslims and Christians for millennia, would be a real gas.
Maybe, though, we need to go bigger. Maybe dunking the Old City won’t do the trick; after all, people here are very uptight. Maybe a sea-like Lake Jerusalem is required, a vast body of water snaking among the slopes of the fabled Seven Hills of Jerusalem, fed by a fat pipe running from the Mediterranean, and if that seems a stretch, well, Israelis are technical wizards – they’ll tell you themselves. Yes, an endless Lake Jerusalem as far as the all-seeing eye can…oh, who am I kidding? It’s a crazy idea. And heretical. Stupid to talk about, worse to write down. And yet, there’s no harm in dreaming, is there? And so I dream of Jerusalem underwater, forever preserved but out of sight and beyond the reach of grasping, ecstatic hands – I dream as Pnina gently scoffs and Yossi shrugs, why not a lake, and the singer ends his set and my wife gets up to pee and the audience wanders away.
Then I bought ice cream because ice cream, I’ve found, is the universal antidote.
@ @ @
Elahna and I attended a buffet dinner at Cousin Ruti’s in Holon, a part of the Tel Avian Metropolitan Bubble. She lived in a luxury apartment tower among a score of such towers coated in white, glimmering stone. After giving my regards to Doda Sarah, sunk into a corner chair, grieving for her son Udi but perhaps also in retreat from the swarming comforts of her extended family, I chatted with a cousin in his 30s who spoke English pretty well and had traveled on business to Las Vegas and Orlando; in other words, Ronen was an expert on America. We got to talking about U.S. support for Israel and I put this question to him: why does my country support your country?
The Jewish vote, he responded confidently. I almost laughed out loud.
Jews are a tiny minority in the U.S., I told him. Six and a half million out of 316 million people – what’s that, 2 percent? Two percent is nothing. Unless you are a congressman or senator from New York or Florida, you don’t care about the Jewish vote.
He frowned. Ronen was an engineer and I’d given him solid math and logic. Okay then, he asked, why do you support us?
I could have said that the tradition was established in 1948 by President Harry Truman, who forced his reluctant state department to support the creation of Israel. I could have said we root for the little upstart democracy surrounded by Arab bullies. I could have said we feel guilty about denying thousands of Jews entry to the United States in the 1930s, resigning them to death in Nazi concentration camps, and guilty, too, about not bombing those camps during the war. I could have said how we admire the plucky Jewish pioneers who settled Israel, just as we settled the American West – while leaving out analogies between Arabs and Native Americans. I could have said that American evangelicals feel an affinity for Israel because the Jews keep things humming in the Holy Land before the conflagration of End Times when all souls will be asked to love Lord Jesus Christ or burn in damnation. And I could have gone all geopolitical about the Cold War and oil reserves and Iraq and Iran and Saudi Arabia and Syria and al Qaeda and ISIS and G-d knows what’s next.
All that is true, to various degrees, but went unspoken. It would be hard to get those ideas across in the simple English I employed for Israelis and, besides, I didn’t think he’d sit for a 21-point response. And maybe I wanted to shock Ronen a bit. No, it’s not Jewish votes, I said, “It’s money. It’s Jewish money.” Which, alas, at the peril of echoing the anti-Semitism of Israel’s worst opponents, of lining up with truly loathsome individuals, is also true.
Our election system, I said, is fueled by money. It’s corrupt – not illegal, exactly, but not right either. So politicians need tons of money. Wealthy people and groups – corporations, Wall Street types, hedge fund billionaires, you know, our oligarchs – they make big contributions and then congressmen and senators listen to their viewpoints, come around to seeing things their way, help them out where they can. Now, here’s the thing: there are lots of wealthy Jews in America, and they give money to Congress, mostly to Republicans, and this creates support for Israel that steadily builds over time. All a politician has to do is vote for Iron Dome, for fighter jets, anything Israel wants, plus make angry speeches against the Palestinians and the UN – do that and the cash flows. But stop doing those things – and why stop, it’s not that important to most voters, there’s no downside – and the cash dries up.
Okay, said Ronen, so American Jews use their money. This is done everywhere –
Yes, you’re right. But that money doesn’t mean that most American Jews feel that kind of total support for Israel – I should say, for your present government. In fact, polls show that the majority of American Jews have problems with Netanyahu’s policies regarding the Palestinians and the West Bank. Most American Jews want you guys to stop the settlement building, to pursue a two-state peace deal –
You mean Obama, Ronen smirked. That’s what he wants. The lily-livered, gutless, Arab-loving Obama, he could have said.
I ignored this. And so, I summed up, Congress’ Israel-right-or-wrong absolute support doesn’t come from the American people, or even from the majority of American Jews – it emanates from a small group of rich, conservative Jews and their money.
He nodded, drank his wine. The conversation petered out and Ronen turned to speak to another cousin in speedy, indecipherable Hebrew. About me? Maybe. Meanwhile I was overcome with worry that I had offended Ronen, that he thought I had maligned Israel – a country I’d grown to love. I was tempted to qualify my comments, to throw out the other, less grubby reasons that the United States of America cares so unreservedly for little brother Israel. But then he walked away without a word and, besides, I’d never met an Israeli who bloody well fussed over my feelings.
@ @ @
Enough already. We got out of Dodge and drove to the far north. There we visited Nimrod Fortress, just a few miles from the Syrian border. At 2,675 feet above sea level on the slopes of Mt. Hermon, Nimrod Fortress was diminished on this day by blue-gray, upside down mountains of clouds, so towering that the stone fortress seemed pinched between ranges of sky and land. The closer we got, though, the more mythical and majestic it appeared.
The Jewish Virtual Library wrongly states that Nimrod Fortress was “probably founded” by the Crusaders. In fact the builder was al-Moatis, governor of Damascus, who fast-tracked construction from 1227-1230 in response to the incursions of German Emperor Frederick II. The fortress was designed to stop the Christians from marching the road to Damascus and, indeed, it fulfilled that purpose in 1253 as the Crusader assault on Nimrod failed miserably. Looking through one of the sun-glowing arrow slits in the fortress wall, surveying the craggy gulleys and steep, wooded slopes below, you realize that an assault by any opponent, belief-crazed or not, would be doomed. But not exactly. In 1260 the Mongols overran and destroyed the place. A couple years later, the Mamelukes did the same. What really hurt Nimrod Fortress, in the end, was neglect. Its crumbling walls became a prison for rebels in the 15th century and, later, a sheltering spot for shepherds’ flocks.
Elahna and I had great fun ducking under vaulted arches into armories and feasting rooms, then scooting along battlements up to the impregnable keep atop the fortress. A moat surrounded the keep, according to the brochure, but I had a hard time pushing my imagination that far. How did they get the water and alligators up here? These ruins were barely excavated – the entire fortress, in fact, seemed to beg for archeologists – and I wondered if the remote location on the edge of Syrian chaos, or perhaps the Arab history of the fortress, put Nimrod far down the reclamation list for Israelis. We returned via the Northern Prison Tower and a secret passage that was, appropriately, hard to find.
Before leaving, we got ice cream at a concessions stand in the parking lot. There I met a young Norwegian – thin, very handsome, with a complicated brace on his foot. At first, from the unaccented timbre of his voice, I thought he was an American. No, he said, “but I wish I was.” I was feeling impish: Hey, what’s wrong with Norway? You put on a great Olympics! True, he said, but that’s about it. Oh come on, I continued, you’ve got reindeer and oil. So does Canada, he said, and we both laughed. Then he explained that he didn’t fit in socialist Norway, as if by some accident he’d been born in the wrong country. His beliefs were with the capitalist system, he asserted, and who knew I’d meet a libertarian, transnational Norwegian on the edge of this nowhere? You should like Israel, I said, it’s becoming more capitalist every day. Kibbutz socialism is almost dead here.
Perhaps, he said, but “first chance, I want to jump oceans” to the USA. Then he bought a Magnum ice cream bar and tried to tip the old man at the counter. Turned down. Then he halved the tip. Turned down again. Our Norwegian friend asked the man if tipping is rude. No response. He turned to us and Elahna explained that tipping conventions were changing in Israel. The rules were iffy. This man was an employee of the park, not a merchant – that’s the main thing to know. “I appreciate it,” said the young dreamer to everyone involved, and he smiled and limped away with his treat. A fellow with such pluck will do well in America, I’m sure, but he may be in for a long wait to jump oceans the legal way.
We stopped for dinner at Kloompus, named for the owner’s mother. A black-and-white photo showed her as a young woman, posed with a rifle across her shoulder. Elahna got a tasty chicken sandwich and fries, but I hit the jackpot with the Kloompus burger – no small feat, as it’s hard to get a decent, American-style hamburger in Israel. Oh, how to sing the praises of the Kloompus burger? The succulent, juicy flavor, the perfect char redolent of ancient campfires, the absolutely correct bun-to-burger ratio! It was the best hamburger I’d had in years, and when I finished I picked up my happy head and looked about. The restaurant was filled with young, Israeli women attacking their Kloompus burgers, absolutely lighting into them with a dark, ravenous ardor. Some of the women had men next to them, men who might as well have existed on planets in other galaxies for the dent they made in the room.
For the women, nothing mattered but their Kloompus burgers. A space, an aching-yawning space, was being filled.
@ @ @
Baron Edmond de Rothschild, according to the teacher on the stage of the indoor amphitheater at Ramat HaNadiv Nature Park, “made money with money.” What did this sulky assembly of 13- and 14-year-old kids think of that? Money from money? After all, the skilim in their pockets and purses didn’t magically multiply in the dark but wasted away with each Katie Perry song download, each bag of barbecue-style Bislis bought from the corner macolet. The teacher, a meaty young man in a polo shirt, exhorted his charges to pay close attention to the baron’s story, to “take responsibility” for their heritage – especially because they’d be receiving their citizenship papers this year.
(These “citizenship papers” are a formality akin to American children receiving Social Security cards. The papers also function as a wakeup call: hey, knucklehead, you’re an adult now, almost, so grow up already, and don’t forget to show for military service in four or five years. Take responsibility. Citizenship papers, not by coincidence, arrive in the same year that most Jewish Israeli children undergo bar or bat mitzvah ceremonies.)
Lights fell and the film began, a celebration of the House of Rothschild with a focus on the baron’s bankrolling of Jewish settlements in Israel between the 1880s and1930s. Grainy video showed a naval frigate bringing the interred remains of Rothschild into the port of Haifa in 1954. This was followed by the tale of a little boy who escapes his group and is given a personal tour of park premises by a friendly groundskeeper. Point One: a film about a kid nipping away during a field trip would never, ever be shown in the child-smothering United States. Point Two: Ramat HaNadiv means “Heights of the Benefactor,” a reference to the baron’s nickname. He was also called the “Known Benefactor,” a wink-wink term for that very rich French Jew who’d like to pretend he’s not keeping us afloat but, of course, everyone knows better. Point Three: memorialized reverence for Edmond de Rothschild the billionaire banker-art collector-philanthropist may be appropriate, even loyal, but it seems distinctly un-Israeli. That the country’s Pioneers couldn’t have drained the swamps and swamped the Arabs without the baron in his chateau doesn’t quite fit the self-reliance script. Yes, I know, King Louis XVI helped us win our American Revolution.
Elahna and I allowed the teens to shuffle from the room – what lurks beneath the slouch, smirk and mumble of Global Teen Nation? – and then we toured the Memorial Gardens at Ramat HaNadiv. It’s a beautiful place, indeed, sporting all the beauty money can buy. Our stroll was capped by a visit to the baron’s elaborate crypt – his son’s idea, the film had made clear, as the baron was far too humble for such indulgence. Exiting, I took a photo of the Rothschild family crest on the main gate. Doubtless the conspiracy minded deconstruct its imagery for evidence of the Rothschilds’ – and by extension, the Jews’ – secret control of the apparatuses of world financial and media conglomerates. The brochure’s explanation: the crest depict fists grabbing the shafts of five arrows that represent Baron Edmond and his four equally rich brothers. The idea, preached by their father, is that one arrow is easily snapped but five together are strong.
That concept – the power of the united group – is very Israeli; it’s the constant lesson given to Israeli children as they approach citizenship and take personal and collective responsibility for the preservation of the nation. It counters the invidious creep of individualism and identity politics, of radically different views held by liberal, conservative and religious political parties, as well as the documented propensity of Jews to constantly, ritualistically disagree with each other. The baron and his brothers were rich, sure, their money even bred itself, but the main thing was they stuck together. That’s the dream, at least.
@ @ @
We spent the Day of Atonement at the beach. Elahna’s family, to her surprise, was busy on Yom Kippur fasting, contemplating and reading the Book of Jonah and, therefore, had no room for drifting Americans. So we hightailed it to Ramat Poleg, a village adjoining Netanya, and walked into the choppy Mediterranean Sea. Splashing in surf, letting it smash into thighs, stomach, chest, face – a perfect way, I found, to scour away the toxins of the old year, to release regrets and emerge refreshed. The water was warm, devoid of entangling seaweed. The sun cooked overhead like a poached egg yolk.
For two nights we hung at the Hotel Q. The restaurant was closed for the holiday – as was everything else in the country, except for Arab and Christian establishments – but Elahna had made sure we arrived with groceries; she has no tolerance for fasting and finds the practice hypocritical. How about a little discipline the other 364 days? I tried a semi-fast between breakfast and our late dinner, just to feel the feeling, and, damn, I got hungry. It didn’t help to watch families of Russian Jews spread about the hotel courtyard absolutely feasting. They heaped their tables with loaves of bread, jars of nuts and olives, soda bottles, cans of tuna, and plastic and Styrofoam containers from which seventeen-course meals disgorged. Perhaps they’d gotten the holiday backward; after all, who can atone on an empty stomach? Or perhaps this was their rebellion against national orthodoxy, against empty streets (except for kids on bicycles) and empty TV screens (except for static). Or maybe they just had the day off and on days off you stuff yourself silly, comrade.
@ @ @
When have you left a country behind? Entering the airport? On the security or luggage-check lines? No, airports may seem like homogenized, international spaces, but they still betray the idiosyncrasies of their country. When you’re aloft and over a body of water? No, no yet, because there’s no there in a plane’s there, it’s Oakland all over again, and you can’t leave one country behind until you land in another. Okay, how about when you touch down and taxi home? Not even then, alas, not until you have a good night’s sleep and wake up in your own bed. And what if the country you’ve departed has lodged itself in your head and heart? What then? Then, like it or not, there’s no leaving behind. Get used to it.
Near the Air Canada counter, at David Ben-Gurion Airport, a scuffle broke out. A couple of Israelis were screaming at the attendant and it went on and on, the screaming, the finger pointing, the threats, and I turned to the middle-aged, red-headed woman next to me and said, “Do that in the U.S. and you’re tied to a chair in a Homeland Security interrogation room.”
She agreed, chalking it up to tension caused by the recent Gaza war. On this trip – she comes to Israel for a few weeks every year or two, from her home in Los Angeles – she’d found everyone tenser, more on edge. More rudeness and impatience than usual. I’d had the same impression, and we both expressed relief that we weren’t imagining things. Maybe it’ll be better next time, she said. “I’m home six months and start thinking of returning to Israel.” But there won’t be peace, she continued, “until we’ve united.” I concurred and, as an example, brought up the ultra-Orthodox exemption from serving in the military like other Jews. Redhead nodded. Israeli Arabs don’t serve either, I added. That’s because they don’t want to, she explained. If they did, they’d learn the military plans and give them to Israel’s enemies. “Then,” she said, “they’d turn around and fight us.”
The scuffle had ended. The screaming Israelis were now checking their luggage. Peace prevailed, at least for a moment. Well, I said, there are more than a million Arab Israelis and they’re segregated in their own towns, pretty much cut off from the life of the country, and that can’t be a good thing. The woman from L.A. agreed, no, not good at all.
On the plane, I sat next to a Haredi man in full black garb, his black hat in a box shoved into the overhead compartment. Another Haredi wanted me to switch seats with him because for ultra-religious reasons he couldn’t bear sitting next to a twelve-year-old girl. I turned him down, unwilling to be party to his prejudice (or, you might say, unwilling to respect his deeply held viewpoints); in addition, I wanted a chance to talk with my seatmate. The experience might test my aversion to the Haredim.
David, in his mid-thirties, ran a shop in Montreal that leases SIM cards for Israeli cell phones, a service for fellow Haredim traveling to Israel. He showed me photos of his eight children. Eight! (The average Heredi woman has 6.5 kids.) David’s three girls wore identical dresses in one photo and I asked why. “They’re so pretty, aren’t they” was his response. On the subject of women, I continued, why can’t you guys sit next to them on airplanes? “So I do not touch her,” he replied. Okay, I said, I realize it’s tight on these tin cans, but you could be careful…no, no, he stopped me. It’s not just touching. If a woman is close “I may want to marry her.” Marry? But you’re already married, with eight kids. We fumbled forward. The gist, of course, was sex. Lust for the female must be avoided, and so a Haredi man cannot sit next to a girl on an airplane.
It was a long flight, and I asked a lot of questions. David showed me the link to the $180 Shabbos App, a digital workaround that by some ingenious rerouting scheme lets the faithful talk on their phones during Shabbat, when the use of machines is forbidden. Personally, he was opposed to this, as it violates the spirit of the day. On Shabbat, he didn’t even let his children ride bikes. Then he talked about Torah Codes, the theory that the name of G-d is embedded in every line of Torah. In fact, ALL is in Torah, the past, the present and the future. Very smart Haredim, said David, are running Torah through supercomputers to reveal the future, and I learned, too, that handwriting analysis is important in arranging marriages in the Haredi community. It’s common to meet one’s future wife for only 40 minutes before the match is set, so analysis of handwriting gives extra clues to future compatibility. I was a bit stunned. Okay, but why not actually get to know the person? His answer: it’s not our way. And did you do this? Yes, he said, and the analysis showed that he and his wife were not compatible. He’d liked her at the meeting, though, so he went through with the marriage anyway. And here’s the funny thing: she’d submitted her aunt’s handwriting, not her own.
We chuckled together. An amusing twist – but what did it all mean? I couldn’t begin to parse the ramifications. If only we could run the variables through a supercomputer…Lunch arrived and pieces of kosher ziti accumulated in David’s beard. I didn’t say anything.
Prejudice against Haredim was a constant theme for David. He saw this in support for greater separation of religious and national law in Israel, for full legalization of civil marriage and recognition of conservative and reform forms of Judaism. I’m reform, I told him. He didn’t seem to hear or care. I asked: why shouldn’t the Haredim serve in the military? Do your part, like other Israelis. Ah, he said, this is a big issue now. “First of all, they don’t need us. Second, it’s about changing us.” About, evidently, getting the Haredim to have fewer children. About keeping them from imposing their way of life on the country. I interrupted: should Israelis be worried? Are you trying to impose? No, no, he said, we are open-minded, and then he spoke at length about the members of his family who had been killed in the Holocaust. He said he wore their yellow stars on his heart.
Another prejudice against Haredim, according to David, was the idea that they don’t contribute economically, that they’re all on welfare. But, I asserted, most Haredi men in Israel are paid to pray, to attend yeshiva. Yes, he admitted, that is true, but we pay taxes – property taxes, the VAT, and so on. So where, I asked, do you get this money? From the money the government pays us to be in yeshiva, he answered with a straight face.
Finally, I learned from David that devout Jews will be favored above all others in the End Times. We – and I don’t think he scooped this Jew into the net – “will be closest to G-d and won’t have to work and all things will be provided.” I was tempted to make a witty remark, but didn’t. I’d reached my limit. Soon after, David spoke rudely to the female flight attendant who’d failed to bring him the right kind of kosher meal. Or gotten too close and spooked him. Or something else that violated his sacred way of life and, therefore, proved her prejudice. I buried myself in a book as we floated across the Atlantic Ocean.
Eventually, I made it to Logan Airport. I pulled my duffel bag off the spinning carousel and took a taxi back home to Somerville. There I chugged apple juice straight from the fridge, right out of the bottle like an uncouth American barbarian. I looked through the mail, tossing most of it in the recycling bin, and blasted my music as I watered a few sagging plants. In the overgrown, weedy backyard, a squirrel ran along the top of the picket fence. Sparrows gathered, sensing, perhaps, that their feeder had returned. Israel felt far, far away.
But I hadn’t left it behind. I cannot imagine ever leaving Israel behind.
@ @ @
Sometimes it’s refreshing just to watch, alert but divorced from petty agendas and the compulsive need to confirm biases, and I may have approached that state of relaxed engagement as I watched boys playing soccer on the main green at Kibbutz Kramim. It was Shabbat, late morning, and the kids ran in slacks and collared shirts, their gone-to-shul clothes, the little ones in sneakers, the teenagers black shoed. They were having fun and not trying too hard, and the oldest teen could have swiped the underinflated ball from the sprite-boy half his age but he let him go, nice and easy, and their heads bobbed on spindly bodies and the sky levitated bluely above this plateau of land on the fringe of the Negev Desert. Some of these kids were good, nifty with the dribble and header, and so much for the bad-Jewish-athlete slur, and so much for my reverie; I’d let in the rotten world.
Elahna arrived in the late afternoon. After a dinner of leftover breakfast we toured the kibbutz’s huge, five-megawatt solar array. Kramim, founded in 1980 by members of the secular, left-wing Hashomer Hatzair youth movement, has reinvented itself as a community of both secular and religious people devoted to sustainable living. Israel’s only such “mixed” kibbutz, Kramim sports one of the biggest solar fields in the country. The juice is sold to the local utility, generating $2 million per year.
Like many things in Israel, the array was fenced off; we drove about the perimeter in the rental car and then I stood on its roof and took video of the thousands of photovoltaic cells on low pedestals angled sunward. They appeared gray in the setting sun – not glittery blue as you might expect – and I wondered if desert sand had coated the cells. But, no, reclaimed water and migrant labor from Thailand kept the cells clean (a solar cell that magnetically repels the desert’s urge to smother is under development). Bumper crops of green energy beneath the unrelenting desert sun – might this be a key ingredient for Israel’s future? Could this new nation, this little powerhouse, lead by example in the great, 21st century struggle against climate change and planetary resource destruction? Or was Israel doomed to fight ancient battles over territory and religion, as if cursed?
On the roof of the Toyota, wife urging me to get down already, I felt a surge of hope. The air crackled with possibility. Maybe my generation can fix its mistakes.
@ @ @
In Arad, the squat desert city where I should have finished this fall’s hike, we enjoyed a scrumptious pizza dinner at Kaparuchka, whose 20-something owners had built the tables, chairs and pizza oven from scratch, and the next morning we visited the Glass Art Museum inside the industrial park. To our surprise, the museum featured the glass art of only one artist, Gideon Fridman. Mr. Fridman also owned and ran the museum. Well, okay, we’re supposed to promote our brands in the 21st Century, but opening a museum about yourself is a bit cheeky, no? Elahna and I sat for a short film celebrating the unique talents of the great artist Gideon Fridman. Then the lights went up and before us stood the great artist Gideon Fridman, a goat-meat stringy old man under a cowboy hat. His white beard scraggled like desert coatzim. He stretched out his arms. Behold, it is I.
Gideon was our tour guide, too. And he was a bit of a bully, ordering us where to stand and how to gaze properly upon his works. The artist prohibited questions because everything we wanted to know, viola, would be answered. He rambled about modern society’s manifold ills, including cell phones. Many people are dead, he said, dead inside. My art is alive. It moves. Indeed, it did. As we changed our angle of approach, the glass faces seemed to change expressions and the transparent female bodies shifted as if growing uncomfortable in their poses. This is not an illusion, he insisted, but the product of his artistic vision which could never be replicated. When anyone called his work lovely – oh, that awful, sentimental word from the mouths of idiots! – he “ran for the hills.” And here he’d run to faraway Arad, a former Bedouin camel station. One more unlovely city grabbing for the tourist trade.
I was amused by Gideon Fridman’s shtick and liked a few of his pieces, but Elahna found our guide and his art tiresome and wanted to smack him. But she’s a good girl, rarely rude, and only griped afterwards over beers at an Irish pub.
@ @ @
We came to Jerusalem for Rosh Hashanah. On the morning of the holiday, in the city’s Rehavia neighborhood, Elahna and I took a stroll. The streets were largely deserted, the shops closed, and turning a corner we came face-to-face with an ultra-Orthodox family: scarfed mother in black dress pushing a black pram; tall, gangly father in black suit and hat; little boy with shaved head fringed by the side locks called payot; and two girls of different ages wearing identical dresses, as if they were twins. The mother greeted us, “Shanah Tova,” a good new year, and we responded in kind. As we walked on, Elahna remarked that it was nice to have a simple exchange with the religious without any nagging, any weirdness.
The ultra-Orthodox, or Haredim, outnumber non-Heredi Jews in Jerusalem, making up a third of the city’s population and 55 percent of its Jewish youth. Their ranks are rapidly growing; by 2030, one-fifth of Israel’s Jewish population will be Heredi.
Then I heard fast footsteps and turned around. There stood the ultra-mother; she’d run after us, as if delivering something we’d dropped. “Are you Jewish?” she asked in Brooklynese English. Elahna said yes, we were. “Do you hear the shofar?” the woman demanded. And again: “Do you hear the shofar?” Slow on the uptake, I tilted my head like a satellite dish positioning for maximum reception but heard no shofar, no horn of ibex sounding the High Holy Day call to worship. My wife bid the woman an extra-polite boker tov, good morning, and walked away. To me the woman repeated, “Do you hear the shofar?” Then I got it – she wanted to know why I wasn’t in service on this special morning, if, indeed, I was Jewish? Why, metaphorically, don’t you hear the call? What’s wrong with you?
I caught up with my wife. Minutes later, we stopped at the edge of a playground exploding exclusively with dozens and dozens of ultra-Orthodox kids. The boys wore black pants and white shirts; the girls were dressed in identical Polly Flindersish dresses, and their hair hung in ponytails. The older boys wore black hats, just like daddy, their payot dangling. These kids were going at it – swirling on teeter totters, swinging high on swings, sliding down slides and clambering back up. They rampaged in the manner of pre-pubescent children the world over. A few huddled in conspiracy, over maybe a spider or You Tube video.
“Children play,” I said to Elahna. It’s true, she said, “but would you want your children playing with them?”
@ @ @
Saturday night, post-Shabbat, at Jerusalem’s renovated First Station: a secular fun-scrum of folks chugging beer and just kicking back, of young women in skimpy outfits and bikinis, of bumbling toddlers and kids riding wheeled contraptions out of a Dr. Seuss book, of locals listening to a singer crooning Naomi Shemar songs plus the occasional American classic. When he warbled “Country road, take me home,” I couldn’t help joining in, and loudly. First Station is a singular phenomenon in Jerusalem, a cultural and recreational hub primarily for non-religious people born out an abandoned railroad station built by the Turks before World War I. Now First Station and its slick restaurants, kiosks, track-imbedded plaza and artificial beach is a toehold of Tel Aviv in the Holy City, a gasp of relief amid ever-escalating tension between Jews and Arabs, Jews and Jews, and Jews and Everyone Else.
“It’s huge,” explained cousin Yossi, for secular people like him. Finally, with First Station, they have a place to call their own. And then, as if drunk with possibility, he blurted it.
“Jerusalem needs a lake.”
‘What?!” replied his wife, Pnina, grazing him with a sideways look.
“A lake,” he repeated, “why not?”
Yes, why not indeed! After all, everything’s better lakeside. So right there I set to devising Lake Jerusalem, to mapping and measuring and pouring gushers of hypothetical water against dumb, golden stone. Okay, a pretty good lake, a pond really, could be made by flooding the plaza in front of the Western Wall. Let it rise about 60 feet high, not quite lapping over onto Har HaByet, the Temple Mount, where the lifeguard and barbecue stations could be set up. But make it plenty deep for divers and cannonballers alike. Cannonball wins them all, right? Cowabunga! Those wanting to slide soggy paper between Kotel stones or get in some underwater wailing can plop down a few shekels for snorkels and flippers, but the separate lines for guys and gals are no more at laidback, trendy Lake Jerusalem. Water polo matches daily at two, Marco Polo at four. The Lord who by legend resides in the Western Wall because it’s the only part of the Temple built by peasants, the Lord who can hold His breath under water no sweat, the Lord whose commandments do not, repeat, do not prohibit fun, would surely approve of a people’s lake here.
Or we could flood the entire Old City – after, of course, an orderly evacuation. First plug the drains and seal the seven gates; the eighth one, the Golden Gate where Jesus entered on the first Palm Sunday, is already shut pending the Messiah’s return. Then turn on all the taps for a couple years. This Lake Jerusalem, about a square kilometer in size, would be perfect for long-distance swim races, sailing and water skiing. Introduction of native fish species will likely attract geese, swans and assorted wagtails and, with luck, coral reefs will colonize the market stalls, churches, synagogues and mosques drowned below. Brainstorm! A zip line stretching from King David’s Tower to the exposed tip of the Dome of the Rock to the high bastions of the Damascus Gate, over the submerged holy territory contested with faithful violence by Jews, Muslims and Christians for millennia, would be a real gas.
Maybe, though, we need to go bigger. Maybe dunking the Old City won’t do the trick; after all, people here are very uptight. Maybe a sea-like Lake Jerusalem is required, a vast body of water snaking among the slopes of the fabled Seven Hills of Jerusalem, fed by a fat pipe running from the Mediterranean, and if that seems a stretch, well, Israelis are technical wizards – they’ll tell you themselves. Yes, an endless Lake Jerusalem as far as the all-seeing eye can…oh, who am I kidding? It’s a crazy idea. And heretical. Stupid to talk about, worse to write down. And yet, there’s no harm in dreaming, is there? And so I dream of Jerusalem underwater, forever preserved but out of sight and beyond the reach of grasping, ecstatic hands – I dream as Pnina gently scoffs and Yossi shrugs, why not a lake, and the singer ends his set and my wife gets up to pee and the audience wanders away.
Then I bought ice cream because ice cream, I’ve found, is the universal antidote.
@ @ @
Elahna and I attended a buffet dinner at Cousin Ruti’s in Holon, a part of the Tel Avian Metropolitan Bubble. She lived in a luxury apartment tower among a score of such towers coated in white, glimmering stone. After giving my regards to Doda Sarah, sunk into a corner chair, grieving for her son Udi but perhaps also in retreat from the swarming comforts of her extended family, I chatted with a cousin in his 30s who spoke English pretty well and had traveled on business to Las Vegas and Orlando; in other words, Ronen was an expert on America. We got to talking about U.S. support for Israel and I put this question to him: why does my country support your country?
The Jewish vote, he responded confidently. I almost laughed out loud.
Jews are a tiny minority in the U.S., I told him. Six and a half million out of 316 million people – what’s that, 2 percent? Two percent is nothing. Unless you are a congressman or senator from New York or Florida, you don’t care about the Jewish vote.
He frowned. Ronen was an engineer and I’d given him solid math and logic. Okay then, he asked, why do you support us?
I could have said that the tradition was established in 1948 by President Harry Truman, who forced his reluctant state department to support the creation of Israel. I could have said we root for the little upstart democracy surrounded by Arab bullies. I could have said we feel guilty about denying thousands of Jews entry to the United States in the 1930s, resigning them to death in Nazi concentration camps, and guilty, too, about not bombing those camps during the war. I could have said how we admire the plucky Jewish pioneers who settled Israel, just as we settled the American West – while leaving out analogies between Arabs and Native Americans. I could have said that American evangelicals feel an affinity for Israel because the Jews keep things humming in the Holy Land before the conflagration of End Times when all souls will be asked to love Lord Jesus Christ or burn in damnation. And I could have gone all geopolitical about the Cold War and oil reserves and Iraq and Iran and Saudi Arabia and Syria and al Qaeda and ISIS and G-d knows what’s next.
All that is true, to various degrees, but went unspoken. It would be hard to get those ideas across in the simple English I employed for Israelis and, besides, I didn’t think he’d sit for a 21-point response. And maybe I wanted to shock Ronen a bit. No, it’s not Jewish votes, I said, “It’s money. It’s Jewish money.” Which, alas, at the peril of echoing the anti-Semitism of Israel’s worst opponents, of lining up with truly loathsome individuals, is also true.
Our election system, I said, is fueled by money. It’s corrupt – not illegal, exactly, but not right either. So politicians need tons of money. Wealthy people and groups – corporations, Wall Street types, hedge fund billionaires, you know, our oligarchs – they make big contributions and then congressmen and senators listen to their viewpoints, come around to seeing things their way, help them out where they can. Now, here’s the thing: there are lots of wealthy Jews in America, and they give money to Congress, mostly to Republicans, and this creates support for Israel that steadily builds over time. All a politician has to do is vote for Iron Dome, for fighter jets, anything Israel wants, plus make angry speeches against the Palestinians and the UN – do that and the cash flows. But stop doing those things – and why stop, it’s not that important to most voters, there’s no downside – and the cash dries up.
Okay, said Ronen, so American Jews use their money. This is done everywhere –
Yes, you’re right. But that money doesn’t mean that most American Jews feel that kind of total support for Israel – I should say, for your present government. In fact, polls show that the majority of American Jews have problems with Netanyahu’s policies regarding the Palestinians and the West Bank. Most American Jews want you guys to stop the settlement building, to pursue a two-state peace deal –
You mean Obama, Ronen smirked. That’s what he wants. The lily-livered, gutless, Arab-loving Obama, he could have said.
I ignored this. And so, I summed up, Congress’ Israel-right-or-wrong absolute support doesn’t come from the American people, or even from the majority of American Jews – it emanates from a small group of rich, conservative Jews and their money.
He nodded, drank his wine. The conversation petered out and Ronen turned to speak to another cousin in speedy, indecipherable Hebrew. About me? Maybe. Meanwhile I was overcome with worry that I had offended Ronen, that he thought I had maligned Israel – a country I’d grown to love. I was tempted to qualify my comments, to throw out the other, less grubby reasons that the United States of America cares so unreservedly for little brother Israel. But then he walked away without a word and, besides, I’d never met an Israeli who bloody well fussed over my feelings.
@ @ @
Enough already. We got out of Dodge and drove to the far north. There we visited Nimrod Fortress, just a few miles from the Syrian border. At 2,675 feet above sea level on the slopes of Mt. Hermon, Nimrod Fortress was diminished on this day by blue-gray, upside down mountains of clouds, so towering that the stone fortress seemed pinched between ranges of sky and land. The closer we got, though, the more mythical and majestic it appeared.
The Jewish Virtual Library wrongly states that Nimrod Fortress was “probably founded” by the Crusaders. In fact the builder was al-Moatis, governor of Damascus, who fast-tracked construction from 1227-1230 in response to the incursions of German Emperor Frederick II. The fortress was designed to stop the Christians from marching the road to Damascus and, indeed, it fulfilled that purpose in 1253 as the Crusader assault on Nimrod failed miserably. Looking through one of the sun-glowing arrow slits in the fortress wall, surveying the craggy gulleys and steep, wooded slopes below, you realize that an assault by any opponent, belief-crazed or not, would be doomed. But not exactly. In 1260 the Mongols overran and destroyed the place. A couple years later, the Mamelukes did the same. What really hurt Nimrod Fortress, in the end, was neglect. Its crumbling walls became a prison for rebels in the 15th century and, later, a sheltering spot for shepherds’ flocks.
Elahna and I had great fun ducking under vaulted arches into armories and feasting rooms, then scooting along battlements up to the impregnable keep atop the fortress. A moat surrounded the keep, according to the brochure, but I had a hard time pushing my imagination that far. How did they get the water and alligators up here? These ruins were barely excavated – the entire fortress, in fact, seemed to beg for archeologists – and I wondered if the remote location on the edge of Syrian chaos, or perhaps the Arab history of the fortress, put Nimrod far down the reclamation list for Israelis. We returned via the Northern Prison Tower and a secret passage that was, appropriately, hard to find.
Before leaving, we got ice cream at a concessions stand in the parking lot. There I met a young Norwegian – thin, very handsome, with a complicated brace on his foot. At first, from the unaccented timbre of his voice, I thought he was an American. No, he said, “but I wish I was.” I was feeling impish: Hey, what’s wrong with Norway? You put on a great Olympics! True, he said, but that’s about it. Oh come on, I continued, you’ve got reindeer and oil. So does Canada, he said, and we both laughed. Then he explained that he didn’t fit in socialist Norway, as if by some accident he’d been born in the wrong country. His beliefs were with the capitalist system, he asserted, and who knew I’d meet a libertarian, transnational Norwegian on the edge of this nowhere? You should like Israel, I said, it’s becoming more capitalist every day. Kibbutz socialism is almost dead here.
Perhaps, he said, but “first chance, I want to jump oceans” to the USA. Then he bought a Magnum ice cream bar and tried to tip the old man at the counter. Turned down. Then he halved the tip. Turned down again. Our Norwegian friend asked the man if tipping is rude. No response. He turned to us and Elahna explained that tipping conventions were changing in Israel. The rules were iffy. This man was an employee of the park, not a merchant – that’s the main thing to know. “I appreciate it,” said the young dreamer to everyone involved, and he smiled and limped away with his treat. A fellow with such pluck will do well in America, I’m sure, but he may be in for a long wait to jump oceans the legal way.
We stopped for dinner at Kloompus, named for the owner’s mother. A black-and-white photo showed her as a young woman, posed with a rifle across her shoulder. Elahna got a tasty chicken sandwich and fries, but I hit the jackpot with the Kloompus burger – no small feat, as it’s hard to get a decent, American-style hamburger in Israel. Oh, how to sing the praises of the Kloompus burger? The succulent, juicy flavor, the perfect char redolent of ancient campfires, the absolutely correct bun-to-burger ratio! It was the best hamburger I’d had in years, and when I finished I picked up my happy head and looked about. The restaurant was filled with young, Israeli women attacking their Kloompus burgers, absolutely lighting into them with a dark, ravenous ardor. Some of the women had men next to them, men who might as well have existed on planets in other galaxies for the dent they made in the room.
For the women, nothing mattered but their Kloompus burgers. A space, an aching-yawning space, was being filled.
@ @ @
Baron Edmond de Rothschild, according to the teacher on the stage of the indoor amphitheater at Ramat HaNadiv Nature Park, “made money with money.” What did this sulky assembly of 13- and 14-year-old kids think of that? Money from money? After all, the skilim in their pockets and purses didn’t magically multiply in the dark but wasted away with each Katie Perry song download, each bag of barbecue-style Bislis bought from the corner macolet. The teacher, a meaty young man in a polo shirt, exhorted his charges to pay close attention to the baron’s story, to “take responsibility” for their heritage – especially because they’d be receiving their citizenship papers this year.
(These “citizenship papers” are a formality akin to American children receiving Social Security cards. The papers also function as a wakeup call: hey, knucklehead, you’re an adult now, almost, so grow up already, and don’t forget to show for military service in four or five years. Take responsibility. Citizenship papers, not by coincidence, arrive in the same year that most Jewish Israeli children undergo bar or bat mitzvah ceremonies.)
Lights fell and the film began, a celebration of the House of Rothschild with a focus on the baron’s bankrolling of Jewish settlements in Israel between the 1880s and1930s. Grainy video showed a naval frigate bringing the interred remains of Rothschild into the port of Haifa in 1954. This was followed by the tale of a little boy who escapes his group and is given a personal tour of park premises by a friendly groundskeeper. Point One: a film about a kid nipping away during a field trip would never, ever be shown in the child-smothering United States. Point Two: Ramat HaNadiv means “Heights of the Benefactor,” a reference to the baron’s nickname. He was also called the “Known Benefactor,” a wink-wink term for that very rich French Jew who’d like to pretend he’s not keeping us afloat but, of course, everyone knows better. Point Three: memorialized reverence for Edmond de Rothschild the billionaire banker-art collector-philanthropist may be appropriate, even loyal, but it seems distinctly un-Israeli. That the country’s Pioneers couldn’t have drained the swamps and swamped the Arabs without the baron in his chateau doesn’t quite fit the self-reliance script. Yes, I know, King Louis XVI helped us win our American Revolution.
Elahna and I allowed the teens to shuffle from the room – what lurks beneath the slouch, smirk and mumble of Global Teen Nation? – and then we toured the Memorial Gardens at Ramat HaNadiv. It’s a beautiful place, indeed, sporting all the beauty money can buy. Our stroll was capped by a visit to the baron’s elaborate crypt – his son’s idea, the film had made clear, as the baron was far too humble for such indulgence. Exiting, I took a photo of the Rothschild family crest on the main gate. Doubtless the conspiracy minded deconstruct its imagery for evidence of the Rothschilds’ – and by extension, the Jews’ – secret control of the apparatuses of world financial and media conglomerates. The brochure’s explanation: the crest depict fists grabbing the shafts of five arrows that represent Baron Edmond and his four equally rich brothers. The idea, preached by their father, is that one arrow is easily snapped but five together are strong.
That concept – the power of the united group – is very Israeli; it’s the constant lesson given to Israeli children as they approach citizenship and take personal and collective responsibility for the preservation of the nation. It counters the invidious creep of individualism and identity politics, of radically different views held by liberal, conservative and religious political parties, as well as the documented propensity of Jews to constantly, ritualistically disagree with each other. The baron and his brothers were rich, sure, their money even bred itself, but the main thing was they stuck together. That’s the dream, at least.
@ @ @
We spent the Day of Atonement at the beach. Elahna’s family, to her surprise, was busy on Yom Kippur fasting, contemplating and reading the Book of Jonah and, therefore, had no room for drifting Americans. So we hightailed it to Ramat Poleg, a village adjoining Netanya, and walked into the choppy Mediterranean Sea. Splashing in surf, letting it smash into thighs, stomach, chest, face – a perfect way, I found, to scour away the toxins of the old year, to release regrets and emerge refreshed. The water was warm, devoid of entangling seaweed. The sun cooked overhead like a poached egg yolk.
For two nights we hung at the Hotel Q. The restaurant was closed for the holiday – as was everything else in the country, except for Arab and Christian establishments – but Elahna had made sure we arrived with groceries; she has no tolerance for fasting and finds the practice hypocritical. How about a little discipline the other 364 days? I tried a semi-fast between breakfast and our late dinner, just to feel the feeling, and, damn, I got hungry. It didn’t help to watch families of Russian Jews spread about the hotel courtyard absolutely feasting. They heaped their tables with loaves of bread, jars of nuts and olives, soda bottles, cans of tuna, and plastic and Styrofoam containers from which seventeen-course meals disgorged. Perhaps they’d gotten the holiday backward; after all, who can atone on an empty stomach? Or perhaps this was their rebellion against national orthodoxy, against empty streets (except for kids on bicycles) and empty TV screens (except for static). Or maybe they just had the day off and on days off you stuff yourself silly, comrade.
@ @ @
When have you left a country behind? Entering the airport? On the security or luggage-check lines? No, airports may seem like homogenized, international spaces, but they still betray the idiosyncrasies of their country. When you’re aloft and over a body of water? No, no yet, because there’s no there in a plane’s there, it’s Oakland all over again, and you can’t leave one country behind until you land in another. Okay, how about when you touch down and taxi home? Not even then, alas, not until you have a good night’s sleep and wake up in your own bed. And what if the country you’ve departed has lodged itself in your head and heart? What then? Then, like it or not, there’s no leaving behind. Get used to it.
Near the Air Canada counter, at David Ben-Gurion Airport, a scuffle broke out. A couple of Israelis were screaming at the attendant and it went on and on, the screaming, the finger pointing, the threats, and I turned to the middle-aged, red-headed woman next to me and said, “Do that in the U.S. and you’re tied to a chair in a Homeland Security interrogation room.”
She agreed, chalking it up to tension caused by the recent Gaza war. On this trip – she comes to Israel for a few weeks every year or two, from her home in Los Angeles – she’d found everyone tenser, more on edge. More rudeness and impatience than usual. I’d had the same impression, and we both expressed relief that we weren’t imagining things. Maybe it’ll be better next time, she said. “I’m home six months and start thinking of returning to Israel.” But there won’t be peace, she continued, “until we’ve united.” I concurred and, as an example, brought up the ultra-Orthodox exemption from serving in the military like other Jews. Redhead nodded. Israeli Arabs don’t serve either, I added. That’s because they don’t want to, she explained. If they did, they’d learn the military plans and give them to Israel’s enemies. “Then,” she said, “they’d turn around and fight us.”
The scuffle had ended. The screaming Israelis were now checking their luggage. Peace prevailed, at least for a moment. Well, I said, there are more than a million Arab Israelis and they’re segregated in their own towns, pretty much cut off from the life of the country, and that can’t be a good thing. The woman from L.A. agreed, no, not good at all.
On the plane, I sat next to a Haredi man in full black garb, his black hat in a box shoved into the overhead compartment. Another Haredi wanted me to switch seats with him because for ultra-religious reasons he couldn’t bear sitting next to a twelve-year-old girl. I turned him down, unwilling to be party to his prejudice (or, you might say, unwilling to respect his deeply held viewpoints); in addition, I wanted a chance to talk with my seatmate. The experience might test my aversion to the Haredim.
David, in his mid-thirties, ran a shop in Montreal that leases SIM cards for Israeli cell phones, a service for fellow Haredim traveling to Israel. He showed me photos of his eight children. Eight! (The average Heredi woman has 6.5 kids.) David’s three girls wore identical dresses in one photo and I asked why. “They’re so pretty, aren’t they” was his response. On the subject of women, I continued, why can’t you guys sit next to them on airplanes? “So I do not touch her,” he replied. Okay, I said, I realize it’s tight on these tin cans, but you could be careful…no, no, he stopped me. It’s not just touching. If a woman is close “I may want to marry her.” Marry? But you’re already married, with eight kids. We fumbled forward. The gist, of course, was sex. Lust for the female must be avoided, and so a Haredi man cannot sit next to a girl on an airplane.
It was a long flight, and I asked a lot of questions. David showed me the link to the $180 Shabbos App, a digital workaround that by some ingenious rerouting scheme lets the faithful talk on their phones during Shabbat, when the use of machines is forbidden. Personally, he was opposed to this, as it violates the spirit of the day. On Shabbat, he didn’t even let his children ride bikes. Then he talked about Torah Codes, the theory that the name of G-d is embedded in every line of Torah. In fact, ALL is in Torah, the past, the present and the future. Very smart Haredim, said David, are running Torah through supercomputers to reveal the future, and I learned, too, that handwriting analysis is important in arranging marriages in the Haredi community. It’s common to meet one’s future wife for only 40 minutes before the match is set, so analysis of handwriting gives extra clues to future compatibility. I was a bit stunned. Okay, but why not actually get to know the person? His answer: it’s not our way. And did you do this? Yes, he said, and the analysis showed that he and his wife were not compatible. He’d liked her at the meeting, though, so he went through with the marriage anyway. And here’s the funny thing: she’d submitted her aunt’s handwriting, not her own.
We chuckled together. An amusing twist – but what did it all mean? I couldn’t begin to parse the ramifications. If only we could run the variables through a supercomputer…Lunch arrived and pieces of kosher ziti accumulated in David’s beard. I didn’t say anything.
Prejudice against Haredim was a constant theme for David. He saw this in support for greater separation of religious and national law in Israel, for full legalization of civil marriage and recognition of conservative and reform forms of Judaism. I’m reform, I told him. He didn’t seem to hear or care. I asked: why shouldn’t the Haredim serve in the military? Do your part, like other Israelis. Ah, he said, this is a big issue now. “First of all, they don’t need us. Second, it’s about changing us.” About, evidently, getting the Haredim to have fewer children. About keeping them from imposing their way of life on the country. I interrupted: should Israelis be worried? Are you trying to impose? No, no, he said, we are open-minded, and then he spoke at length about the members of his family who had been killed in the Holocaust. He said he wore their yellow stars on his heart.
Another prejudice against Haredim, according to David, was the idea that they don’t contribute economically, that they’re all on welfare. But, I asserted, most Haredi men in Israel are paid to pray, to attend yeshiva. Yes, he admitted, that is true, but we pay taxes – property taxes, the VAT, and so on. So where, I asked, do you get this money? From the money the government pays us to be in yeshiva, he answered with a straight face.
Finally, I learned from David that devout Jews will be favored above all others in the End Times. We – and I don’t think he scooped this Jew into the net – “will be closest to G-d and won’t have to work and all things will be provided.” I was tempted to make a witty remark, but didn’t. I’d reached my limit. Soon after, David spoke rudely to the female flight attendant who’d failed to bring him the right kind of kosher meal. Or gotten too close and spooked him. Or something else that violated his sacred way of life and, therefore, proved her prejudice. I buried myself in a book as we floated across the Atlantic Ocean.
Eventually, I made it to Logan Airport. I pulled my duffel bag off the spinning carousel and took a taxi back home to Somerville. There I chugged apple juice straight from the fridge, right out of the bottle like an uncouth American barbarian. I looked through the mail, tossing most of it in the recycling bin, and blasted my music as I watered a few sagging plants. In the overgrown, weedy backyard, a squirrel ran along the top of the picket fence. Sparrows gathered, sensing, perhaps, that their feeder had returned. Israel felt far, far away.
But I hadn’t left it behind. I cannot imagine ever leaving Israel behind.
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