Missed Connections

The Negev desert north of Be'er Sheva

I was so excited to find out that only the buses in the Territories are bullet-proof, and that I would be on non-bullet-proof buses with clear windows to Beit Shemesh. Or more specifically, the adjoining Ramat Beit Shemesh where my brother is in yeshiva. I watched the rocky soil of the Negev give way to farms and fields and forest. Eged’s website is, as expected, unhelpful, and I was stuck at a bus stop at a highway junction with no idea what to do. Bus drivers on the two possible lines I could take each said to take the other line, and the third listed on the website was not listed at the stop. Luckily, an American-born Israeli soldier overheard my phone call for help and told me he was going to the same place I was and I showed me the way. An intercity bus to Beit Shemesh and a local bus full of rowdy elementary school kids to Ramat Beit Shemesh later—something I’d never have been able to figure out on my own—I was at my destination, and met up with my brother and got some pizza. Oddly, the square looks dirtier than the clean streets of the settlement towns. Everything is under construction and covered in trash. My brother’s dorm/apartment is pretty crowded and seems like it was constructed with efficiency and expediency in mind in this rapidly growing region, rather than comfort and quality. I was reluctant to spend my weekend in isolation with 18-year-olds. We’ll see how it goes.

Most of Ramat Beit Shemesh looks like this, but with more trash.

Territorial Ruminations

Tonight/tomorrow is my Hebrew birthday, so the Be’er Sheva birthday dinner was on again. I prepared my stuff for a long weekend (Shabbat in Beit Shemesh, details to come), walked to the bus stop and got on the 3:00 bus to Be’er Sheva. Again, the bus’s cloudy bulletproof windows were nauseating, but I managed to sit by a relatively clear one. The bus shot nearly straight down through the West Bank, stopping at various yishuvim along the way. We stopped in Kiryat Arba by Hebron, a built-up, well-kept enclave in the middle of a barren, rocky desert, with trees, nice buildings, and lots of children. Army soldiers get on and off. The guy sitting next to me got off at Otniel. We stop at Haggai and Shim’a, turning off the highway, driving the winding roads up the mountains, entering through the electric gates by the security checkpoints. Inside are carefully paved streets, rows of houses, a cluster of trailers, and kids mulling about. Outside are crumbling cement walls littered with broken refuse. Those are Arab homes.

Who are these people who live such cloistered lives in towns enclosed by barb wire, surrounded by desert, among scattered Arab towns? Where do they work? Where do they buy their groceries? What spirit moves them to effect their destiny in the desert, create ex nihilo communities of civic-minded citizens, dedicated to the future of their children? It’s inspiring to see what can be achieved through sheer determination. It’s also striking how weirdly normal they all seem. I stop to wonder what will happen to these oases of civilization should a Palestinian state be founded here. A soldier playing loud Israeli pop in the row behind me interrupts my philosophizing.

I eventually made it to Ben Guiron Univeristy, no thanks to the bus driver who wouldn’t tell me which stop was mine, and we went out for an Indian birthday dinner. We walked through campus to the student center. It’s sleek and modern and collegiate. What a place that builds its dreams with stone and steel and constructs the future it sees for itself.

Yom Huledet M’azben

Today is my birthday. This is the first time I’ve spent my birthday in a foreign country and I wanted to do something fun. A friend from college with whom I share a birthday just started at Ben Gurion University in Be’er Sheva and I was hoping to go down there to have a celebratory dinner. Israel had other plans. I looked on the Eged website (Eged is Israel’s national bus company) to find a bus. I entered “Alon Shvut” to “Be’er Sheva” in the search window, but the website said that “there is no direct route to your destination.” I tried “Efrat” and again no dice. See, the English site will only tell you if there is a bus from the point of origin to the destination, like Jerusalem to Be’er Sheva, but won’t register any cities the bus stops at on the way. It also doesn’t tell you if there is a way to take one bus and connect to another bus. And the website has no maps of bus routes to figure that out for myself.

My cousin’s wife helped me look up the bus information on the Hebrew page, which lists connections and times, but by the time we finally figured out that there is one bus that stops by here on the way to Be’er Sheva, leaving Jerusalem at 3pm, it was 3:10, and not quite enough time to get my stuff together and make the bus. I tried the website for the relatively new train system, but found the map to be almost unusable, aside from the train not going quite where I needed it to. I could have taken a bus to Jerusalem and then a bus from there to Be’er Sheva, but with the intermittent rain, I wasn’t about to spend the next three hours in frustrated transit.

Putting the failures of Israeli transit system behind me, I went out to dinner with the cousins at a restaurant nestled in the forest with views of the valley below. We ate overlooking the lightening storm brewing in the distance, warmed by a log in the fireplace. It wasn’t so bad after all. Happy birthday to me.

In the Big House

The home of Noam Federman, an activist leader in the Hebron Jewish community was demolished over the weekend and some members of the family were put in jail for the night. One of my cousin’s sisters-in-law was in school with one of the daughters. “Yeah, she’s in jail all the time,” she says.

Fig Natanyahus

I went on a hike today through the fields and hillsides that surround the town with my cousin’s father-in-law and some of his students at the yeshiva. We passed Roman milestones and an ancient mikva with express lanes that was used by Jews on their way to Jerusalem. But the most interesting thing we saw was Khalid.

As we walked on a path alongside vineyards and almond trees, we met a local Arab named Khalid who let us try the figs from his tree. He explained to us, in his heavily accented Hebrew, that he used to work at yeshivas in Jerusalem, but ever since the peace process started he has been unable to enter the city. He even has signed letters from the roshei yeshiva confirming his identity and commending his character that he keeps in his wallet and shows to anyone who cares to look, but to no avail. Since the start of the peace process in Oslo, the left has been pushing for more separation between Israel and the Territories as a move toward eventual separation of the two when the Palestinians achieve statehood. The Wall was a step in this regard. But the effect on Khalid and his family was devastating, costing him his job and hampering his ability to provide for his family.

Khalid hates Fatah, and has no kind words for Arafat or Abbas. He sees the rampant corruption in the Palestinian Authority and decries how the government officials take foreign money and drive around in Mercedes cars and tell him that they have no money while Khalid’s children go hungry. He was much better under Israeli rule and misses the days when he could work in Jerusalem and the Jews shopped in Arab towns.

Which is why Khalid supports Bibi Netanyahu for prime minister. Bibi is the leader of the conservative Likud party and was prime minister in the late ’90s. With a member of the right in control of Israel, Khalid hopes that the PA will not be given as much power and that Palestinian statehood will remain in the distant future. Khalid says to support the right and elect Bibi as the new prime minister of Israel. He would do it himself, except he can’t vote because he’s not an Israeli citizen.

The yeshiva students already had their share of politics that day. They left the yeshiva to see leftist activists standing by as Arabs in the neighboring grove picked olives. One of the activists had an accordion and was singing songs like “Heveinu Shalom Aleichem,” “bring peace upon us.” The irony being that “Heveinu Shalom Aleichem” was a song of the early Israeli pioneers who kicked the Arabs out to begin with. This was likely lost on the activists, who were also more interested in taking photos of the yeshiva students than helping with the harvest. In this area, the Arabs and the Jews live in segregated towns on hilltops opposite each other, and everyone minds their own business and generally gets along. One of the yeshiva students remarked that had the Arab olive pickers asked the yeshiva for help picking olives they would have gotten at least as many volunteers as there were protesters. And who plays the accordion anyway?

Alon Shvut on the hilltop on the left, the Arab villiage on the hilltop on the right.

Si Muove

Today Jews read of the creation of the world in Genesis. While I generally avoid touching musar-y expositions and forced Torah-science rectifications (but see here for the best book I’ve read in that regard), here are a couple thoughts.

Copernicus argued that we are, in fact, not the center of the universe, a stance that landed Galileo under house arrest for advocating by order of the Catholic Church. We are, however, the center of the universe that we can see. Due to the speed of light, we see things not as they are, but as they were, accounting for the time it took the light to reach us. Thus, looking out into space is a look back in time. Look back far enough and all we see all around us—from inside our 14 billion light year bubble—is light. Specifically, the cosmic microwave background, essentially a wall of electromagnetic radiation created by the big bang. In theory, were we able to see past the light of creation, we’d be able to look all the way back to the dawn of time, and all we’d see, in any direction we looked, is a singularity.

Many consider the turning point in man’s growth as a species to be the act of using tools to make tools. Many hold man’s capability to speak as its most notable trait. Both show a capacity for abstract thought in the act of creation and mark the change from man-like ape to ape-like man. The Bible recounts that Man was created “in the image of God.” To this point, the defining characteristics of God are His role as Creator and as a being that speaks: And God said, “Let there be light.” And there was light. In an interesting confluence of anthropological and religious thought, Man is different from the animals because he has the unique ability for cognition. To take this one step further, Man does not merely have the ability to create and speak, but the predisposition, the propensity, even the desire to create, to make, to build, and to think, to learn, to know, to understand. I feel the urge in myself. I like to think it is the mark of the divine.

Aerated Topsoil and Infant Flatulence

Yesterday I worked a bunch. Today we went to the nursery, bought our own spade, rake, shears, and some flowers, and spent some quality time marveling at our newly improved grass, planting the row of soon-to-be amazing flowers, and maintaining our compost pile. I even got a blister! And then the downpour began. Geshem appears to have worked. Living out here in the ’burbs is relaxing, but a little too uneventful. I feel removed from the rest of civilization. This could make a nice vacation home (though it would be nicer if it had restaurants) but I don’t think I’d want to live here.

On a different note, have you ever felt a fart from the outside? I was holding one of the boys with a supporting hand on his butt and experienced a unique tactile sensation of a rumbling, followed by a soft, staggered expulsion. I figured that I must have perceived a pooping first-hand, in-hand, but he didn’t smell dirty. After consultation, the verdict was that it was “only” a fart, but that doesn’t change the fact that I felt it. Also, have you ever held a baby with hiccups? Or one whose tummy growls? It’s so bizarre to experience bodily functions when they are happening to someone else.

And I heard a man was stabbed to death by a Palestinian in Gilo, a neighborhood in southern Jerusalem. If I seem casual about it, it’s because everyone here seems to be casual about it. This is such a (tragically) normal occurrence that I sense more relief from people than anything that only person died.

I Approve This Message

Today I actually start work. I have a bunch of stuff to do for Micah, so it’s time to start procrastinating. News junky that I am, I’d been following the coverage of the election pretty closely since the start of the campaign season, and it frequently got me pretty worked up. Thus, I pledged a self-imposed media blackout upon my arrival to Israel. That lasted about a week. Today’s news: LA is on fire, and Collin Powell endorsed Barack Obama. I knew I liked him. I support Obama for many of the same reasons Powell does. He’s articulate, thoughtful, and intelligent. I also support the things he stands for, including environmentalism, human and civil rights, separation of church and state, responsibility, pragmatism, etc. I am also put-off with the way McCain has handled himself since 2004, and especially in this campaign. But it’s more than that.

People look at McCain and see a guy who has done good things. People see Obama and are inspired to be better people. There’s an aspirational quality to him and his message. Hope. Change. Yes We Can. These are not slogans but mantras. I don’t need a comfort blanket: I need a raison d'être. I want someone who represents the American spirit, someone who thinks deeply and can speak to me without condescension, someone who understands and embraces nuance and complexity, someone with a force of will and an outstretched hand, someone who truly believes in our potential. I am almost 24 years old and I can honestly say I’ve never been inspired by a politician before. I was born into a post-Watergate America. I was 4 for “Read my lips,” 13 when Lewinsky was news, 16 when W. Bush took office. I am the future of America and I am almost without faith in its promise. Then I heard Obama speak.

This election is as much about narrative as it is about issues. But that is not entirely a bad thing. What is it that moves us, compels us to strive? You’d be hard pressed to find such passion for McCain as we’ve seen for Obama. Something about his presence stokes our creativity, challenges our intellect, and restores confidence in government. He is not the messiah. He is not magic. And yes, he has his weaknesses. But he believes, and makes us believe, in ourselves.

S’chach

Various disjointed tidbits of Sukkot that didn’t fit anywhere else: ¶ Micah and I built, nay, assembled our sukkah motzei Yom Kippur. This was anything but construction, but there was a cool feeling of “I made this” the whole week. Our sukkah is endearingly tacky. ¶ In America, people generally sell arba minim as a set, with the holder things on the lulav ready to go. Here, everything is sold separately, nothing has prices marked, and it’s very frustrating and overwhelming. ¶ On the way to the concert in Beit Shemesh, I saw a random sukkah-shack just sitting there on the side of the highway. ¶ Also on way, driving through the mountains and forests, with the city lights just out of view, I glimpsed ancient Israel in the night, as it may have looked ages ago. ¶ Sukkah parties are fun. People who play three instruments make me feel bad about myself. ¶ I walked across Jerusalem yesterday because I had two hours to kill. This may be blasphemy, but most of it’s not that scenic. But hopefully now I’ll have a better sense of geography and won’t get lost. ¶ My etrog smells nice. There should be more things that smell nice. ¶ Most olim are weird. ¶ I am very not productive this week. Next week I start working for real. Should I be worried?

Vanity and Vexation of Spirit

On the Saturday of Sukkot, Ecclesiastes is read in the synagogue. I know myself to be something of a curmudgeon, and one who is prone to doubt traditional Judaism’s comprehension of life’s realities on occasion. And every year, Ecclesiastes is there to remind me that cynicism predates me by a couple millennia. Futility of futility, all is futile! Kohelet begins. What profit does man have for all his labor which he toils beneath the sun? A generation goes and a generation comes, but the earth endures forever. I am of no consequence. My work is of no consequence. Whatever has been is what will be, and what has been done is what will be done. There is nothing new under the sun. There is no invention. It is useless to try. For with much wisdom comes much grief, and he who increases knowledge increases pain. Ignorance is bliss. Intellectualism begets only anxiety. And so on.

Wise aphorisms speak across the epochs. The uncaring, unflinching eventuality of death is constant, unavoidable. But lo, the occasioned refrain: I observed that there is nothing better for man than to be happy in what he is doing, for that is his lot. For who can enable him to see what will be after him? Halfheartedly uplifting, at best. A carpe diem as a poetic depressive. Yet it remains truth. There is nothing new, indeed. Cynicism is optimism weathered by experience. I need the reminder, and appreciate it. Ultimately, man cannot fathom the events that transpire under the sun; inasmuch as man labors to seek he shall not find it. And even though a wise man presumes to know, he shall not find it. Bleak, yes, but far from disheartening. The world is as it is, brokers Kohelet. Don’t stress yourself out. They are words for all times, and our times.

Confident, Confident, Dry and Secure

Following the barbecue yesterday, I got a ride to Beit Shemesh where I was meeting up with an old friend at a concert. The concert was pretty lame—American-born bands like Schlock Rock and Shlomo Katz playing to an audience of mostly American olim and yeshiva students, a slice of Five Towns NCSY in Israel—but what struck me was all the security I see.

We leave Alon Shvut through a manned security gate, and we nod to the guards on our way out. On the road, we go through two army checkpoints and they give us a once-over to make sure we’re not Arab (in which case they’d ask some questions and maybe search the car if they think something is suspicious) and wave us on. A bridge in the road has a concrete wall on one side to prevent snipers on the hill opposite from taking potshots at passing cars. I get dropped off outside the venue (a stage set up in the park) and the armed guards look me over and search my backpack. I get a ride from the concert to Jerusalem, passing more checkpoints, and meet my brother at the bus station. My bag is x-rayed and I walk through a metal-detector on my way into the station. The bus has bullet- and stone-proof windows, which makes them cloudy and nausea-inducing (think driving a windy road in a closed box with no windows). The Wall is ever-present in the distance, and each town we stop in on the way has a manned security gate. We get dropped off by the old gate in Alon Shvut, which we find out is locked after 10:30 or so. We call Micah to come pick us up and he takes in through the new gate which closes around 2:00 am. Every home is built with a bomb shelter or safe room. Bags are searched at the entrance to the mall. The synagogue has a guard with an M16 standing outside. The rabbi carries a handgun—even on Shabbat and holidays—when he walks to neighboring Efrat. I feel safe, and question the society that makes these steps necessary.

Smells Like Burning

Today we had an awesome barbecue. Kabob, hot dogs, sausages, circle steaks (not sure what they are supposed to be because I can’t understand the packaging), and chicken skewers. The most interesting part was the conversation. We had over two of my cousin’s friends from LA, their wives—one Israeli and the other from Latin America—and their kids—both have girls about 2-3 and a baby, matching up pretty well with my cousin’s little girl and twin baby boys. My cousin and his wife—American born but raised in Israel—speak to their kids in English so that they can communicate with the rest of the world and the rest of the family, knowing that they’ll learn Hebrew in school and from their environment. The couple with the Israeli wife speak to their kids in Hebrew, this being the land of Israel and Hebrew being the language of the Jews and all. The other couple speaks to their kids in Spanish, keeping that part of her heritage alive. At the table, the men spoke English, the wives had their own conversation in Hebrew, and the three little girls played nicely together, one speaking English, one Hebrew, and one Spanish, and still somehow managing to communicate.

Otherwise Occupied

My cousin and his family live in Alon Shvut, a town in Gush Etzion, a settlement bloc 20 minutes south of Jerusalem. There is archeological evidence of Jewish communities here dating back 2,300 years, and was settled again by Jews in the ’20s, ’30s, and ’40s. The communities in the region were evacuated or killed in 1947 and ’48, and once Jordan took control of the area in the 1949 Armistice Agreements after the War of Independence, all buildings were razed. Following Israeli assumption of control after the Six-Day War in 1967, Jewish communities were reestablished here.

The legal status of these communities remains in question. I am technically on the other side of the Green Line, meaning I am in the West Bank (where to list my location on Facebook?), though in an area that will likely not be included in any peace agreements (the same for which cannot necessarily be said for the community of Tekoa down the road to the east). Israel claims that the land these towns were built on was public Jordanian land, though some Palestinians dispute this and claim that some it was privately owned. Past the edge of town is a small cluster of caravans (what the Israelis call trailers, after their British overlords) in an outpost whose legality and foundation is more tenuous. I don’t fully understand the issues surrounding the outpost, but I heard that the builder of the one actual house there has a restraining order against him that prevents him from living in the permanent building he built, but the wood house, the only other non-trailer home, is fine because wood houses are legally considered temporary buildings.

I bring this up because I went to the outpost today do drop someone off and saw essentially a trailer park that is seen by some as a human rights violation and others as manifest destiny. I have complicated feelings about “land for peace” and a pragmatic endgame to the conflict, but the thing that bothers me the most is the supposition the Jews living here in the Gush would have to leave and their homes possibly demolished should this land become part of a future Palestinian state. It is a given that anyone of any religion or ethnicity can be a citizen of any modern country. Israel is an increasingly melting pot society, and roughly 10% of the Knesset is Arab. Why, then, would these residents not be allowed to stay as Jewish residents of a future Palestine? Settlement expansion in light of International Law is purportedly a hairy topic, but I see this as a fairly straightforward point. Any voices to the contrary?

The caravan neighborhood of Givat HaHish.

Happy Holiday (in the singular)

We’ve been putting all fresh vegetable waste (peels, rinds, stems, wilted lettuce, etc.) in a bag and today I started our compost heap by alternating layers of carbon-rich dried grass and leaves from our gardening last week and nitrogen-rich green waste. For now, we’re just putting everything in a pile, but may change to some kind of box or enclosure if we can find or make one with minimal effort and money.

In unrelated news, I’m intrigued by the prospect of my first one-day yom tov. In ancient times in the land of Israel, the Jewish festival days of Passover, Shavuot, and Sukkot were celebrated for one day. Because the first of the month was decided by the Sanhedrin court in Jerusalem based on witness reports of the new moon, Jewish communities outside the land of Israel could not always be sure what day of the month it was if word from Jerusalem took too long, and therefore celebrated the holidays for two days to be safe. This custom of two-day holidays in the Diaspora persisted even after the standardization of the Jewish calendar, with related halakhic repercussions like the prohibition to cook on the first day for the second day.

Most communities in Israel now keep one day, and there is a lingering question of what visitors to Israel should do: hold two days, as is their custom, or hold one day, as is the custom in the community they are visiting. Some authorities say the former, some say the latter, and some propose a sort of compromise of “one and a half days” where no work is done, but special holiday rituals are not performed either. (The same question pertains to Israelis in the Diaspora, but I won’t get into that.) After considering the issues involved, I decided to hold one day as per minhag ha-makom (custom of the place). Granted this does go against another Jewish tradition of asking your personal rabbi’s opinion, but I’ll call myself a Jewish humanist and leave it at that. Chag sameach.

Do They Know It's Sukkos?

On Shabbat, I heard a mother reviewing with her elementary school-age son what he had learned in school about the biblical story of the spies who were sent to scout the land of Canaan. When asked why the spies didn’t take off their kipot and cut their payot so they would blend in better, he responded, because then they’d look like chilonim (secular Israeli Jews).

Then today, among our various errands, we drove out to an outlying community of Jerusalem to buy lights to hang in our sukkah from a woman who sells them out of her house. In a combination of broken Hebrew and broken English, the woman, Asian and married to an Israeli (presumably, though it’s very difficult to get an interfaith marriage in Israel) with a beautiful little girl of about three in a Dora the Explorer shirt, showed us all the various lights she had, and explained that she didn’t know if the lights would survive the rain in the sukkah because she only hangs them around the house. This was a chiloni community, and Micah mused that we were probably the frummest people ever to have ventured there. We bought two awesome strings of lights, and our hosts wished us a chag sameach (happy holiday), though we knew they wouldn’t be celebrating it.

Unlike in America and elsewhere in the Diaspora, Jews are the majority in Israel. Demographics force Diaspora Jews, to some extent, to identify as a unit, despite strong unwillingness to do so by many of them with assorted religious and political leanings. In Israel, Jews are the majority, but the Jews still manage to make things difficult, as they are often wont to do. Here, in an effort to self-define, every little detail is used to separate one group from the next. Various groups dress differently, live separately, and build their own communities. I may have been the only one in shul not wearing a srugi (a kipah srugah, or knitted kipah, mark of the dati leumi, or religious Zionists)—granted my suede one has choochoo trains on it.

But at the same time, as a Jewish state, there is a shared heritage. Everyone here knows it’s Sukkot, regardless of personal religious observance, the same for which cannot be said of America. Here, all the meat in the grocery store is kosher. Traditions, even those of others, are common knowledge. It’s an odd paradox of prizing both personal and national identity. The dichotomy of distancing the other and celebrating commonality is an inherent part of Israeli culture. Achdut, or togetherness, is a virtue here. Kinda.

Dirty Jews

Today Micah and I began our adventure in composting. In conversation, we realized that we were both independently interested in composting, opened his copy of Gardening for Dummies, and resolved to become proficient gardeners. Or at least reasonably competent gardeners. Composting not only reduces the waste that would otherwise fill landfills, but also recycles nutrients back into the earth. Especially in Israel, trash reduction and soil improvement are both essential tasks. We spent much of the day clearing out the weeds, branches, leaves, and dead grass that made up a thick layer above the ground, exposing the topsoil and tiny green grass shoots that Micah thinks have already grown, and starting what will be our compost heap. I had a massive allergic reaction to something in the dried plants and dust, and we were both sore and filthy by the end of the day. It dawned on us that while we’re no Halutzim, we were, for a few hours on a Friday, involved in physically working the land of Israel. Updates on compost, gardening, and our burgeoning rugged masculinity will be forthcoming. Also, any advice on composting would be much appreciated.

Hineni

I find one of the most affecting parts of the Yom Kippur service to be the short prayer the leader recites before the Musaf: Hineni, Here I am, impoverished, trembling and afraid. In it, the leader confesses, I have come to stand before You for Your people Israel who have sent me, although I am unworthy and unqualified to do so. Thus I plead of You … do not hold them to blame for my sins and do not find them guilty of my iniquities. It is a powerful admission, before the entire congregation, that even I, the appointed leader, am not without sin. There is no concept in Judaism of infallibility. Even Moses sinned against God, and willfully, despite his status (according to Maimonides in his 13 principles of faith) as foremost among the prophets. No one is perfect, and at the same time, no one can atone for your sins for you. You’re on your own. As we all accept responsibility upon ourselves for our actions, we pray that God accept our prayers and aid us in our repentance. I ask forgiveness from those who I have wronged, and I pray for focus and direction in the coming year. Blessed are You who hears prayer. Gmar Tov.

Good Walls and Good Neighbors

I landed yesterday, saw the baby twin cousins for the first time, hung out with the family, and successfully staved off jetlag. The secret: sleep as little as possible the night before—I was at the Rocky Horror Picture Show at the NuArt Saturday night and got four hours of sleep—and as little as possible on the plane—three hours Sunday night thanks to a crying, flailing toddler—then sleep a full night on arrival—Monday night, making sure to stay up to a normal hour—and awake on Israel time. Today I walked the Old City, visited the Kotel, got lost in the maze of stone streets, found my way out to the market at Machane Yehuda and then to Ben Yehuda Street. I saw kids no more than fourteen smoking, fish heaving their last in a bin in the market, live chickens in small cardboard boxes in line for kaparot, two people I knew walking on the street, and lots of walls.

There were bullet-riddled walls, 16th and early 20th century, scarred in the War of Independence. Herodian walls with more recent improvements: the Western Wall with Montefiore’s additions, a sleek new area under Wilson's Arch, and spotless bathrooms. Offices with electrical wiring in plastic runners over the stone and swanky new commercial and residential complexes rising above dilapidating homes and shops. Metal gateways, to markets and holy sites manned by army personnel checking IDs of Arabs, and others keeping everyone out of the rampant construction sites. And off in the distance, the new walls separating Israel from the West Bank, demarcating with cement and steel the boundaries of old feuds. In archeological sites around the city, the past emerges from hiding; generations of building, each directly on top of the last, making strata like that of canyons, with the modern city emerging above it. This is a place adamant about living in the past as it reaches into the future. The struggles are apparent. Languages shout for priority in the streets and on signs, dogma fights dogma for dominance, ethnicities hold to their heritage as they navigate the waters of nationality. There are old walls and new walls, and people who build them and curse them. Welcome to Israel.

Flying

I’ve always loved flying. Not the experience of sitting in the same position for untold hours, stuck between a plastic pillar and a feisty two-year-old, but the feat of human ingenuity that propels a big machine into the sky, rising high above the land to afford impossible views of the world below. Today I saw the wasteland of the Mojave, unimaginably huge, stretching out endlessly to the distant horizon. I saw its mountains, thrust upwards by the earth itself, its fine filigree of dried riverbeds, each in actuality wide enough to swallow city blocks. I saw its splayed fingers of plateau dropping sharply to the flats below, spawning smaller cliffs, ultimately feeding into an extinct mesh of varicose rivulets leading to nowhere. There was water here once, a lot of it, successive riverbeds and shorelines carefully tracing the desert’s history over the eons. Layer-cake strata appear where the land melted away before forgotten torrents. I watch the ochres and umbers give way to Martian red, knowing that millions of tiny ferrous ions erupted from stars to color the landscape I see before me, the earth Cartesian-smooth until broken by bolts of rock violently ejected through the surface. The clouds float in, a small delegation at first, then a quilt of gray and white, as topographically exciting as the ground it cloaks. I feel incomprehensibly small.

I know what it is to be Moses, leader of the people, but awed to the extremes of humility by the sight of the corner of God’s throne. Harassment of stones and chattering masses are inconsequential amidst mountains that dwarf cities. Man is from dust and returns to dust, and Thou art King, living and everlasting God. And I have to close my window so as to aid in the creation of an artificial night for the rest of the passengers on board. We pray this week and throughout the year for healing, for providence, greedily for personal things alongside our pleas for forgiveness for similarly insignificant transgressions. And then we cry out that we are but clay in the hands of our Maker. Like the microscopic minerals that paint the desert, do our strikes to the chest make up something bigger, or are they largely irrelevant in the greater scheme? An optimistic view says this is the actualization of unified field theory. The micro and macro are different aspects of the same process. A compassionate view says it’s just different strokes. Now over Vinland, with my window open to see the circuit board towns pulse in the dark, I can’t say. I feel entitled to my bitterness by the flailing toddler in the seat next to me and the belligerent El Al flight attendants. But I am also overcome by majesty of the world.

To Begin

Google/Blogger blocked my blog almost immediately after I created it, so these first few entries were written earlier but only posted now that Google no longer thinks I'm spam.

I write this from 33,000 ft somewhere over the Plains and Midwest on my direct flight from Los Angeles to Tel Aviv. For the last year and a half I worked as a production artist at a TheHuckGroup, a litigation graphics and legal consulting firm in downtown LA, and online at thehuckgroup.com, putting together presentations for attorneys visually illustrating their cases. I left my job a week ago for a number of reasons, among them an ongoing frustration with always being on-call to provide the clients with whatever they want whenever they want it, and a desire to do something more stimulating than legal support. As I figure out where to go from here, I will be spending the next three months in Israel, partly working for my cousin Micah’s film production company, and partly taking time off and getting a change of environment.

I’ve never been to Israel longer than two weeks, once on a family trip when I was about twelve and then on Birthright in 2004. I never had the allegedly formative experience of a gap year program in Israel, nor a high school summer program in Israel, nor study abroad in Israel. Rabbi Daniel Gordis, thinker and family friend, wrote a book called If a Place Can Make You Cry. I don’t have anything remotely resembling that kind of deeply rooted emotional attachment to the land of Israel, and I’m curious to investigate what it is that inspires such passion. I spent my semester abroad in London, which was an indescribably inspirational experience, and there developed an intense wanderlust that recently awoke from dormancy to push me to quit my job and fly across the world. I also figured that three months in Spain or Thailand would elicit raised eyebrows and assumptions of slacking, while three months in Israel garners congratulations. I come to this with no real expectations, only the hope of finding something that will help me see what it is I will do next.

It is fitting that this juncture falls on the cusp of the new year (intentional as it may be: I quit when I did so I wouldn’t have to deal with missing work for the holidays). A new year marks a new beginning, grants new opportunities to move forward, provides a fresh impetus to explore and try new things. I stopped for tashlich on the way to the airport, appropriately on a bridge, shedding the last of the past year into the mildly pathetic waters of Balogna Creek before leaving everything behind and watching it get smaller and smaller and disappear from view. Among other things, I resolve on this new year to work on being more self-disciplined and productive with my free time, and I hope to share the results here. I am starting this very blog to share my thoughts with those of you who care to read and keep you updated on what I’m doing. Shana Tova.