Hebron, Merit of our Fathers

The tour I booked to Hebron was set to leave at 9:15 from the Sheraton in central Jerusalem. I tremped into town, but unbeknownst to me, my ride would end far south of where I needed to end up. A local bus took me where I needed to go, but my plan of getting a free ride in backfired when I only saved one shekel by taking the local bus over the bus from Alon Shvut.

Anyhow, the tour bus took us first to Rachel’s tomb in Bethlehem, except you wouldn’t know it to be there. Bethlehem is an Arab city and between violent attacks and peace accords, the place was set to be closed to Jews. But, as our clearly religious-right tour guide retold, enough Jews made a fuss and braved the dangerous territory to visit that the government preserved the site for future generations of Jews. This meant that the Wall would have to be designed in such a way as to allow access from Israeli controlled territory, so a narrow finger was built that extended to the site. We drove down this corridor, surrounded on both sides by tall gray concrete walls, until we reached the building. The tomb used to be a small building in the middle of a larger lot, but after Joseph’s tomb was desecrated by Palestinian rioters, this large structure was built around it to protect and preserve it.

From here the bus drove to Hebron, but the tour guide got off the bus halfway there and said we would be met in Hebron by another tour guide. We drove along through places unknown to us, one man commenting that only in Israel would we be on a tour without a guide. After meeting our new guide, a Jewish resident of Hebron, we stopped in various places where he told us of the history and importance of the community here. Walking through a small museum in the Beit Hadassah building, which featured a moving display on the 1929 massacre, he recounted tales of Jewish valor and heroism, and of the hardships suffered by the Jews who wanted to be so close to this holy place. Without diminishing the real efforts of Jews to maintain this part of their heritage, I can’t omit that the tour was heavy on inspiration and light on facts. I like tours where the guide tells a sweeping narrative of a place from ancient times to present day, but we only heard bits and pieces.

Hebron itself was a ghost town. Very few people—Jew or Arab—walked the streets. Here and there were a hasid or Arab kids on a donkey. The kosher restaurant, which wasn’t so good, blasted Chanukah music as a form of audio assault on the city, across from the only three Arab shops open. I looked around, watched one hand-mold dozens of small cups on his clay wheel, and chatted with another shopkeeper who thanked me for even stopping to talk. Walking into the Ma’arat Hamachpelah, or the Cave of the Patriarchs, the traditional burial place of Abraham and Sarah, Isaac and Rebecca, Jacob and Leah, and possibly others, I was caught off guard by Jews praying under Arabic script. This was converted to a mosque centuries ago, the Ibrahimi Mosque after their patriarch as well, and now arks with torah scrolls and Hebrew biblical passages sit in rooms covered in clashing religious décor. Cenotaphs honoring Abraham, Sarah, Jacob, and Leah are situated among small prayer rooms, while Isaac and Leah’s are in the Muslim side of the building, which Jews only have access to ten days out of the year. The whole complex used to be open to all, until American-Israeli Baruch Goldstein opened fire on worshiping Muslims in 1994, killing 29, and a gate now separates the Muslim side from the Jewish side, with neither allowed on the other’s turf.

By the end of the day I had visited the graves of the Patriarchs and Matriarchs, the holiest places in Judaism after the Temple Mount. I saw the yearning of Jews to be in this place, and heard of the courageous acts they performed to be here. But I also saw a nation divided, justified or not, and the home of our forefathers resigned to rot. We drove through the well-kept Kiryat Arba on the way out, contrasting sharply with the decrepitude of the Hebron streets. I pass no judgment, but I do hope to get an alternate story on a Palestinian tour later this week.

Touring in Stereo

Tomorrow I go on what will be the first of two official tours of Bethlehem and Hebron. Visiting these places and seeing the historical sites and the current situation for myself was a priority of mine when I came here. This was complicated by the hullabaloo over Beit Shalom (a house in the Arab outskirts of Hebron that was bought by an American Jew for Israeli Jews to live in, and because no one takes the idea of residential heterogeneity particularly well here, the Arabs got upset back in late October, the government agreed and told the Jews to leave, the Jews rioted, hilarity ensued, or something to that extent). Now that my time here is running low, I finally made plans to do it. I wanted to find a non-political trip so I wouldn’t be bombarded with whatever propaganda. No such luck. There are no non-political trips. Each has is its own unassailable agenda. Then I had an idea: I will take two tours and get both an education in the history of the region and of the perspectives of the respective groups. Tomorrow I take the right-wing Jewish tour and Thursday is the Palestinian tour, with still-in-flux Christmas plans Wednesday in between.

On the Way Down South

Tomorrow I have a tour booked of Petra. All tours to Petra leave from Eilat, so I took the 4.5 hour bus from Jerusalem to Eilat where I would spend the night. Alone, after various people bailed on me. After a close call (I left my passport in the bag I had left in Emek Refaim and made a few frantic phone calls to have someone take a cab to the bus station and bring it to me) I was on my way, east toward Jericho, south along the Dead Sea, past Ein Gedi and Masada, through desolate desert expanses, to Israel’s prized coastal resort. Which was pretty dinky and kind of a letdown. I checked into my hostel, thankfully the least sketchy looking of the bunch, and commenced my romantic day with myself. I explored the city with myself as my guide. Put my feet in the cool waters of the Red Sea and gazed at the boats bobbing on the cerulean waters and watched the sun set over the mountains of Jordan. I wandered by myself through the promenade, pointed out to myself the interesting people I saw. I marveled to myself at the Muslim girls riding the bungee swing in their hijabs on their Muslim holiday. I took myself out to a delicious steak dinner (across from a Muslim family eating opposite a portrait of the Lubavitcher Rebbe) and then out to a movie. Getting late, I walked myself back to the hostel and prepared for my big day in Petra.

Mount of Olives and Jesus' last days

Going back in time to the day before Jesus’ last, I went to explore the Mount of Olives. Walking the same route as yesterday, I visited the Church of St. Peter in Gallicantu, named for Peter’s rejection of Jesus and his later repentance. The main sanctuary has lovely pastel mosaics in an art nouveau style. Caves on a lower level are believed to be a possible location of Christ’s prison, and an ancient stairway along the side of the church, possibly the path Jesus took down to Gethsemane on the other side of the Kidron Valley that night. Walking along the Eastern Wall, I could see the various churches on the Mount of Olives, to their right the historic Jewish cemetery, and beyond that the town of Silwan.

I descended into the valley and investigated the monumental tombs at the base of the mount. These tombs, traditionally identified as the tombs of Avshalom, Zechariah, and Jehoshaphat—and a fourth marked as the tombs of the sons of the priests—were carved out of the very rock of the mountain. I meandered through the thousands of Jewish graves, some new, some ancient, cracked, and worn to oblivion. The churches were closed for siesta, so I trekked up and up to the top of the mount by the Seven Arches Hotel with its spectacular views of Jerusalem and the Temple Mount. I tried to follow a church spire but got disinterested and stopped partway at the Pater Noster church, close to where Jesus related the Lord’s Prayer to his disciples. The walls of the church, cloisters, and courtyard are covered with translations of the prayer in more languages than I knew were spoken by Christians, everything from Cornish to Tagalog to Hmong and beyond.

On the descent down the mount, a small residential complex also includes an underground complex of tombs, believed to be the burial place of Malachi. I ran into some Americans in the blackness and searched the tunnels with them. Farther down is the Dominus Flevit Church, where Jesus wept for the destruction of Jerusalem. A window at the front of the chapel looks across onto the Temple Mount. The grounds also include ossuaries of the type used at the time. Sadly, the Church of Mary Magdalene, with its gilded onion domes, is only open to visitors for two hours once a week.

At the foot of the mountain is the Church of All Nations, built on the site of two older churches, which sits next to the Garden of Gethsemane. “Gethsemane,” derived from the Aramaic for “olive press,” is where Jesus and his disciples gathered the night before his death. A small olive grove stands there today, and a very forward young Arab man with surprisingly good English offered to show me through, until I mentioned that I was not willing to pay him. The church façade’s stunning mosaic, the colossal marble columns in the interior, and the ornate architecture were the most awe-inspiring I’d seen the whole day. But for all their beauty, I was still surprised that all of these churches were less than two hundred years old. Their locations were historic, but the actual structures less so.

Just outside the garden is the tomb of the Virgin Mary, an Orthodox crypt cut out of the ground, and housing the sarcophagus in a small shrine. As an Orthodox site, the dimly lit space, heavy with smoky incense, profuse with lamps and mismatched art, stood in stark contrast to the elegant, carefully crafted Western spaces I had visited earlier. The father wished me well in very broken English, then I headed back to Emek Refaim, where, in one of the odder sights of the day, saw frummies on Segways. Miracles never cease.

In the footsteps of Jesus

This post is really long and I have way too many photos to post. I'm considering adding them all to a photo site instead of bloating this entry even more. Suggestions are welcome.

I’ve had a fascination with Christian imagery for as long as I can remember. It’s an epic story of good and evil, told and retold in pictures by different people in different times, each giving their own vision to the greater fabric of legend. Years of art history and travels to museums and churches abroad fostered this love of Christian art and thinking, and I was thrilled with the opportunity to see the places recounted with my own eyes. The Via Dolorosa, the route that Jesus walked on his last day, is memorialized as a pilgrimage with 14 Stations of the Cross, tracing his journey through suffering to salvation.

I began walking along the southern wall of the Old City, at times along the ramparts built by Suleiman, and along the eastern wall of the Temple Mount. This side is not seen by most Jewish tourists, though the walk around the southern and eastern sides affords views of the Hulda Gates on the south, the original entrances to the Temple, and the Golden Gate, the gate through which, according to Jewish tradition, the Messiah will enter Jerusalem. Opposite the Temple Mount is the Kidron Valley, and beyond that the Mount of Olives, which also features prominently in the life of Jesus. The Church of St. Peter in Gallicantu being closed on Sundays, I walk along the Muslim cemetery that flanks the Eastern Wall and through the Lions’ Gate to the Muslim Quarter, past the ridiculous traffic caused by a truck trying to go in and a van trying to go out. The first thing I see is a small market in the plaza selling everything from nuts to knock-off Barbies and cologne. Farther down a wall has engravings illustrating the 14 Stations.

1. Jesus is condemned to death

The tour traditionally begins in the plaza of a girls’ school, but unless you take the tour along with the monks on Friday afternoons, this spot, where Pontius Pilate sentences Jesus, is closed to the public.

2. Jesus takes the cross

A complex built here includes the Chapel of Condemnation and the thorn-themed Chapel of the Flagellation. On the floor of the Chapel of Condemnation is some of the original Roman pavement with games carved into it. This is reputed to be the Lithostratos, where the Roman soldiers gambled for Jesus’ clothes. Father down the road is what’s visible of the Ecce Homo Arch where Pilate declared, “This is the man.” Under the church built on the site is a network of rooms and cisterns in use at the time of Jesus. Past the arch is a chapel marking one possible site of Jesus’ prison. Groups of Jews in black hats and coats mill about the shops, crowded among throngs of Arabs shopping in the market. I make a small detour out the Damascus gate for a look at East Jerusalem, where markers of Israeli nationalism and Arab culture butt against each other.

3. Jesus falls for the first time

A small chapel was built here by the Free Polish Army in the 1940s. Beautiful though modern chapels along this route and in Jerusalem in general seem to be common; this was unexpected, as I was hoping for something more ancient. A nearly toothless man named Walid decides that he will be my tour guide and brings me downstairs.

4. Jesus meets his mother

A mosaic on the floor shows footprints of where Mary may have stood. Walid then takes me through an unmarked door on the street to the Austrian Hostel, and to the views of the area from the roof. Realizing I may not finish before dark if I don’t hurry, I plead with Walid that I can do the rest on my own and thank him for his trouble. On the street is another marker of the meeting of Jesus and Mary, though I don’t know if it’s above the chapel below or a differing tradition. Traditions, I find, differ greatly on the locations specified in the 14 stations.

5. Simon takes the cross

Whatever is here to mark where Simon of Cerene took the cross from the ailing Jesus is closed. I keep walking.

6. Veronica wipes Jesus’ face

Story goes that St. Veronica wiped Jesus’ face with a handkerchief and the impression of Jesus’ face was imprinted on the cloth. Known as the Sudarium, it is in St. Peter’s Basilica in Rome. Whatever is here to mark the spot and the home of Veronica is also closed.

7. Jesus falls a second time

This is in the middle of a packed marketplace set up in the narrow streets. Butchers, barbershops, restaurants, and shops selling shoes, antiquities, and pirated movies line the passage. Some guy is blocking the door to the chapel with his stand. No respect.

8. Jesus speaks to the women of Jerusalem

A marker on the wall points to the spot.

9. Jesus falls a third time

I wander through the Coptic monastery at the leisure of some old monk, before getting kicked out by a younger one. Down below a Coptic chapel is Helen’s cistern, allegedly found by St. Helen, mother of Constantine. The acoustics are incredible, and a woman sings a hymn as per the guidebook’s advice, the notes rising and echoing across time. A number of Ethiopian Coptic monks live in tiny shacks on the platform before the entrance to the Holy Sepulchre plaza. They’ve been here for a while, though changing allegiances and feuds between Israel, Egypt, and Ethiopia have kept more of their fellows away. Through an Ethiopian Coptic chapel is the plaza before the Church of the Holy Sepulchre. Stations 10 to 14 are inside.

10. Jesus is stripped of his clothes

A small side chapel viewable through a window marks the event. Walking into the church and up the stairs to the station, the huge diversity of Christian traditions is very apparent. Ancient Byzantine architecture is flecked with Orthodox excessiveness, Catholic elegance, and chapels from diverse groups over the ages.

11. Jesus is nailed to the cross

An altar adorned with silver plates donated by the Medicis sits below a mosaic of the scene in this Catholic chapel. A woman reaches up to touch the wounds on the mosaic, as if the mosaic itself was a holy relic.

12. Jesus dies on the cross

Lanterns hang by the dozens over the Orthodox chapel. Figures of Jesus, bloody and in pain, doting Mary, and doting Mary, stand before an ornate silver wall of reliefs. It borders on gaudy, and exists in stark contrast to the more restrained chapel to its right. This is the climax of the pilgrimage. The emotion is palpable. Women dab at their tears. A line forms to touch the rock of Calvary through a disk under the altar. The mood is only broken by a noisy Israeli tour guide and his boisterous group. I tag along and follow them downstairs to the Chapel of Adam with the Rock of Golgotha, cracked by divine earthquake, Adam having many parallels to Jesus in Christian thought. After waiting for one of the various services to pass, I walk back upstairs.

13. Jesus is deposed from the cross

Nestled between stations 11 and 12 is a small shrine of the Stabat Mater, or Virgin Mary as Our Lady of Sorrows. Down below in the entry to the church is the Stone of the Anointing where Jesus’ body was prepared for burial. Pilgrims kneel to pray and bring their heads to rest on the red rock.

14. Jesus is laid in his tomb

In the center of the rotunda is the holy sepulcher itself, the Aedicule, the tomb of Christ. Held in place by steel girders since an earthquake decades ago, cracks and seams bulge with notes left by pilgrims, much like the Western Wall. I can’t bring myself to duck (translation: bow) and go inside the chapel, so I watch the service from outside. I explore the many chapels around the church and then find my way back through the Christian Quarter and back to the German Colony. My feet ache and my entire being is exhausted. Despite not having a personal religious connection to Jesus, I felt the sorrow and salvation. The journey has touched my spirit and I think I have gained a new understanding of the human condition. Congratulations on getting this far. Now we both sleep.

Fleeting

Over the last few days I sulked a bunch, did some work, tended the compost, played with babies, and the like. The poor blog feels very neglected. Sorry, blog. I also planned my forthcoming big travel week: Tel Aviv, Eilat, Petra, take 2. It’s starting to hit me that I only have less than a month left in Israel and that I haven’t done a lot of what I was hoping to accomplish. For Shabbat I’m staying with a friend I hadn’t seen in three years. It seems like everywhere I turn are people from past lives and lives unlived—this one I worked at retreat with, this one knows most of my high school class, this one went to college with my friends, and all the ones I’ve emailed for PresenTense for years but only met in person for the first time now. My brother plays for a flag football league made up of teams from the various American yeshivas. They play Saturday nights at Kraft Stadium, the first American football field in Israel, built in Sacher Park near the Knesset by Robert Kraft, owner of the Patriots. I went to watch their game and stood among the 18 year old boys cheering for their friends and fawning over the 18 year old girls. Good for them that they can find the comforts of home in this foreign land. They seem so young. And only a handful of years until they find themselves in the midst of their own quarter-life existential crises.


American football in Kraft Stadium, with the Patriots logo in the middle of the field.


The shuk at Machane Yehuda at night—a rarely seen view of a place everyone goes. Kinda eerie.

Disaster

I was supposed to go to Tel Aviv this morning to spend the day with a friend of my parents’ but as I was getting my stuff together, Micah informs me of this: there is a terror alert in Tel Aviv and the city is under lockdown, roadblocks have been set up, and traffic is backed up from Tel Aviv to Modi’in, halfway on the hour’s drive to Jerusalem. Everything’s been relatively quiet since I got here, aside from a minor riot in Ashdod after Yom Kippur and the ongoing drama in Hebron with a few Jews who are living in houses they technically own but probably shouldn’t be living in. Stupid friggin’ terrorists. This comes after my proposed trip to Eilat and Petra this week got postponed because my friend who I was planning on going with recently became an Israeli citizen and thus needs an Israeli passport to leave the country, which he doesn’t have yet. (And after the friend I was planning on going with originally tells me she won’t make it to Israel until right before I leave, and then not at all, for reasons that are annoying though not in her control.) I vow to spend the rest of the day sulking.

It's Two Days in Galut

After missing my original Thanksgiving dinner because it was moved to Friday night, Shabbat dinner Friday night at my hosts’ home was, that’s right, Thanksgiving dinner. Clearly, the date of Thanksgiving took too long to get to Israel from the Promised Land of America, so Thanksgiving was celebrated by the traditionalists in Israel on Friday. Or something. Also, Kiss of the Dragon is a terrible movie.

Veneration City

This morning I went to a bat mitzvah by the southern end of the Western Wall. What is today known as the Western Wall is an exposed part of the Temple Mount’s retaining wall built by Herod and used as a place of prayer by Jews who wish to pray as close as possible to the site of the Holy of Holies. While compelling, the place does lack a certain decorum, and the large crowds and separate prayer areas for men and women make it difficult to have family events there. Over the last few decades since the Old City came under Israeli control in 1967, archaeologists have excavated much of the area around the south-western corner of the Temple Mount, exposing the street from the Second Temple period, along with shops, ritual baths, and other structures that had been covered by thirty feet of earth for centuries. This area is now frequently used for small events because of its proximity to the site of the Temple, as well as its relative tranquility. We were the first of at least three private services there that day. This bat mitzvah was celebrated in a more egalitarian style with the bat mitzvah girl leading part of the service and reading from the Torah, which would be impossible at the Western Wall. And praying alongside the mounds of debris, the stones piled where they were toppled by the Romans when they destroyed the Temple two thousand years ago, was a much more powerful reminder of the losses and triumphs of the Jewish people than the Western Wall plaza could convey.

The southern end of the Western Wall and the Jerusalem Archaeological Park. At the top left is what remains of Robinson’s Arch, once an entrance to the upper level of the Temple Mount and the largest arch in the Roman Empire in its day. In the foreground are the stones that once made up the top of the wall before the Temple’s destruction. They rest on the original pavement, part of which is visible above the rocks. Beyond that are three enclosures which were shops, including one of a money changer, where travelers would come to buy sacrifices to bring to the Temple, ritual baths, and other buildings of the era. In the distance is the southern wall of the Old City.

En route to meet a friend for lunch, I went to the Abbey of the Dormition, a beautiful church on the site of the Virgin Mary’s Assumption to heaven (some Christian tradition tells that she did not die but fell asleep and was received by Christ in heaven, hence Dormition). I marveled at the striking Byzantine mosaics and stonework, and only found out later that the reason it’s in such good condition is that it’s only 100 years old, built on the site of an older Byzantine church.

The crypt of the church with a wood and ivory statue marking the spot where Mary fell asleep and passed to eternity.

From there I walked to a building containing three religions’ holy sites. The ground floor features a small synagogue at the site of what some hold is the tomb of Kind David. The entry was packed with people singing and dancing, the songs and drums echoing into the courtyard. The Upper Room on the second floor is venerated as the Cenacle, the site of Jesus’ Last Supper. Arabic writing and a mihrab date to when Muslims took over the building in the sixteenth century and made it a mosque, holy to Muslims who also revere the man they know as Nabi Da'ud. The solemnity of the Upper Room contrasted starkly with the exuberance downstairs. From the roof I had a great view of the church and the surrounding area. Then to koobeh lunch with a friend in the shuk and back to Baka for Shabbat.

The cramped room with the covered entry to the supposed tomb of Kind David, which the Bible says isn't here.

Thankful

I love Thanksgiving. I’m proud of my American heritage, and I’ll take any excuse to eat and party. I wasn’t going to let being in a foreign country stop me from celebrating. After my and a friend’s respective dinners were moved to Friday, we decided to go to a pot-luck dinner at the Merkaz Hamagshimim, a kind of cultural center for Americans in Israel. She got into a bit of a predicament with an Arab cab driver who was saying inappropriate things to her and then followed her to the dinner, but putting that behind us, we showed up to the packed dinner an hour and a half late. Sitting on the stage with the picked-over scraps of turkey we could salvage, we talked about family and friends and misadventures and the things we were thankful for. I’m thankful for my friends and family and the time I spend with them. I’m thankful I’m in a position where I could quit my job and take some time off without worry. I’m thankful for the opportunity to see new things and go to new places. I’m thankful for my safety and that of the people I care about in a volatile world.

The West Bank in Pictures

This morning I took a local bus to the Be’er Sheva bus depot, then the bus up through the West Bank back to Alon Shvut. I learned that the reason the buses that go through the Territories are so much cheaper than the buses that go around (14 shekel versus 29 shekel) is that they are half-price to encourage Israelis to take them. After the Intifada, a large portion of Israelis are still too scared to go through the West Bank. The windows on the bullet-proof bus were the best I had yet. Here are photos of my journey.

The Be’er Sheva bus station, full of soldiers on their way somewhere, and other assorted commotion.

People here pack a lot of heat. I'm still not completely used to seeing it.

Most of the West Bank looks like this. Scrub, scattered fields, sheep.

The entry gate at Otniel with the Otniel Yeshiva on the hilltop.

People getting on at the Otniel stop. The greenery and Western architecture set it apart from the Arab towns.

An aerial view of the Otniel area, courtesy of Google. Notice the American suburb-style layout of Otniel on the right, with small rows of white trailers directly north and downhill of the yeshiva. The town is only accessable from a single road with a security gate. The cluster of white buildings on the northern arc of that road is an army base. On the left is an Arab town, built along the road and without the same kind of meticulous organization.

View of what I think is greater Hebron from inside the gate of Haggai.

My final destination: barricade with soldier, and guy not waiting behind it.

Storytime

In Israel, everyone has a story. Ask someone anywhere else where they are from and what they are doing there and you could get an interesting personal history, or you could get something as simple as “I’m from Boston.” But here, those questions aren’t just ice-breakers; they are a window into each person’s life. For each person who came to Israel, their reasons and their stories give an insight into their personalities and dreams that would not ordinarily come so soon after introductions. And for each person who was born here, that question immediately unloads an oral tradition full of drama and hope.

For dinner we went to one of the deans of the med program at Ben Gurion who had come to Be’er Sheva 37 years ago to start the program. At the time, Be’er Sheva was a small desert town with a small new university and a lot of ancient history. He started the minyan at the absorption center when they moved there, which on Friday night had old Jews from Morocco, Uruguay, and Yemen, and teenagers fresh from Ethiopia. He watched Be’er Sheva and its university grow into a bustling metropolis and a thriving educational center, watched as new neighborhoods sprung up from the empty fields, watched as a new generation of Israelis made the city their own. We went to friends for lunch, each of them too with a tale of searching and finding something here, or of exploring the world, or grandparents’ escape from Europe. Whether seventh generation Jerusalemite or here for two weeks, each person adds to the greater story of Israel.

As a new city, and one in the desert, it was comforting to be in Be’er Sheva, with its cars and broad boulevards and desert air. It reminded me of Anaheim or Sherman Oaks in a way. It was nice to be back in civilization, and Be’er Sheva being a more secular city, I found the cars driving on Shabbat—noticeably absent in Alon Shvut or anywhere else I’ve spent Shabbat so far—oddly normal. Somehow Shabbat seems more different from the rest of the week when I’m the one walking than when everyone else is too.

Two street signs on opposite crosswalks. Clearly they still have a ways to go.

Every Day I Have the Blues

At 11:30 last night, my friend in Be’er Sheva emailed me, asking if I wanted to come down for Shabbat. My cousin’s wife looked on Eged’s nearly useless website and saw that there was a bus leaving Jerusalem at 9:30 this morning. I packed my things, got up early, and made it to the bus station at 9:45 with time to spare before the bus was set to arrive. I waited. Two cars came by and rolled down their windows to ask if I was going to Kiryat Arba. This is not unusual for Israel, as it is common to tremp when one needs to get somewhere; tremp, from the German tramp, i.e. to be taken for a ride. But Be’er Sheva is a ways past Kiryat Arba, so I declined the rides and waited, not knowing that there were buses from Kiryat Arba to Be’er Sheva because the website doesn’t list connections or have a map of the system.

Not my stop, but a good example of why I hate the bus system. Can you tell what bus stops here?

I rested on the edge of the barricade as the soldiers paced behind me. A checkpoint near here was declared “an obstacle to peace,” and yet when it was dismantled peace did not come and people were killed. A few years ago, some kids were run down here while waiting for a ride. A pile of stones marks the spot, and a concrete barrier and armed soldiers protect the bus stop, though everyone waited for their rides 15 feet or so down from the protection of waist-high cement. An army lookout sits on the mound on the other side of the highway and the soldiers remain. People and buses came and went, but not my bus. By 10:20 I was getting anxious. I called the house and apparently the website now said the bus was not running today. Instead, I crossed the street to catch a bus to Jerusalem to get a bus from there to Be’er Sheva.

Soldiers guarding the bus stop, which is behind me, protected by a barricade. A monument on the left, and people waiting on the right not by the bus stop for a bus or a tremp, whichever comes first.

The bus, with the clearest windows of any bus I’d been on so far in the Territories, and with a clear view of the ultimate Barrier on the hillside, took us to the train station on the outskirts of Jerusalem where we switched to a non-bullet-proof local bus, and went from there to the central bus station, passing walls of Tzipi Livni billboards and one for a noodle house on the way, up in advance of the forthcoming national elections. I grabbed some Chinese food from a stand in the food court, where the girl told me I was wasting money getting the small instead of the large box because the large was only 5 shekel more, despite me not being that hungry. Also randomly in the bus stop was my brother and a bunch of kids from his yeshiva on their way down to Hebron for Shabbat, this week being the week Jews read of Abraham’s purchase of the Cave of the Patriarchs, in which he would bury his wife Sarah. I do intend to go down there, but I’d prefer to go at a time that is not a romanticized mob scene.

In the central bus station in Jerusalem. Notice the man praying in the candy store by the liquor.

On the bus south to Be’er Sheva, this time on the “right” side of the Green Line, the name rang true. Fields of green dotted with sparkling white homes on rolling hilltops under open skies. Highway overpasses and train tracks and power lines and crop dusters—it was hard not forgetting I was in Israel and not central California or the Midwest. Green became tan as the desert took over, clouds drifting gently along. Count Basie played and sang me the whole way down, trumpets clamoring and piano keys tinkling along roads of majesty.

Heading east.

The Negev.

Life of a Modern Bum

I had an emergency conference call about the forthcoming issue of PresenTense. In long-forgotten times of twenty years ago, an international phone call was something special. “Excuse me, but I have a long distance call,” was a valid exit from any situation. My cousins have an internet phone line with a local Los Angeles number. We talk, make plans, and only have to worry about not catching the other one at breakfast. Micah says his office has conference calls with various people in Israel, all routed via the internet and American phone numbers back to home offices in Israeli suburbs. Global telecommunications hurts my head.

Without a segue, I haven’t showered since Tuesday. Most homes here have a dood shemesh, or solar-powered water heater. The morons who built this house put the dood on the side of the roof that doesn’t get sun until about 11:00am. By nightfall, unless you supply an external power source, there is no more hot water. This leaves a roughly five hour window in which to shower, and one that falls squarely on my peak work hours. I blame Herzl for my BO.

Of Friends and Fueds

My cousin’s wife had a driving lesson today and I got a ride with her into Jerusalem. Annoyingly, there is no concept of a learner’s permit here, so there is no way to practice driving in advance of the driver’s test outside of lessons. We drove around, practiced parking, and the instructor, who spent a bunch of time on the phone, told me that I needed to speak only Hebrew in Israel. While waiting for a college friend to get out of class, I sketched in my sketchbook for the first time in years. It took me a while to get into it, slowly remembering the process of drawing. We had lunch at “Kuppah Gh’oh” and then walked around the scenic HUC campus where all HUC rabbinical students from the various campuses in the US spend their first year. She told me about the wall built with narrow windows to minimize exposure to then-neighboring Jordanian shooters. Now squarely in Israel, the campus was an oasis of calm in the bustling city.

View of the Old City walls and the Tower of David from HUC.

I walked around a bit after she left for class, finding myself on front of what will be the Waldorf=Astoria Palace. The designers of the building appreciated the old façade so much they gutted the building and are constructing the new one inside it. Across the street I sat down in the park to check my map and call friends. Among the trash, graffiti, and the odd man peeing, I saw what looked like old grave stones with Arabic writing, now cracked and broken. This was a Muslim cemetery, long since deconsecrated, and under auspices of the Muslim Waqf who clearly didn’t take such great care of it. It is this same cemetery that is now the center of controversy because of plans by the Simon Wiesenthal center to build part of a new Museum of Tolerance here. Without taking sides, I’d hazard that they might take better care of it.

Construction on the new hotel, built in the shell of a hotel built by the Ottomans—on cemetery grounds.

The Mamilla cemetary as it is now. The trash, graffiti, and neglect are just outside the frame.

I walked down to Emek Refaim to meet friend #2 who I just discovered lived there. He had also given up a job in a thriving economy to come here and now is gainfully unemployed. Passing time until meeting friend #3 for dinner, I stopped by the PresenTense office, where I overheard someone lament that they’d prefer to eat free-range eggs, but most free-range eggs come from the Territories, and it was a tough call for him because he didn’t support that either. Upon relating this to Micah, he pointed out the irony that the farmers in the Territories were more humanitarian. At dinner at New Deli we caught each other up on what our high school classmates were up to. Friend #4 had passed on free jazz to go to bed, bringing my friend-filled day to an early close. I hoofed it over to the bus stop, and despite getting temporarily lost on account of Israeli fear of street signs, made it safely home.

The Moses Montefiore Windmill, built in 1857 to grind flour in the first Jewish neighborhood outside the Old City.

A modern masterpiece. How tastes have changed.

Ani Ohev Vafel Kreesp

Best. Cereal. Ever. Also note the milk in a bag.

While nigh impossible to find in most local supermarkets in Los Angeles, on a lark we happened upon a stash of crunchy maple perfection in a grocery store here. I am in 8-year-old with type II diabetes heaven. This is the breakfast cereal of the sweet-toothed gods. I almost forget that I inadvertently paid 28 shekel a box for it. It’s so worth it, though.

Acceptable Bigotry

Being sick on “vacation” sucks. I didn’t take a sick day in the last year and a half at work, and now that I’m jobless I waste my time on the couch watching movies with tissues stuck in my nose.

In other news, Nir Barkat, secular Israeli and former hi-tech businessman, won the election for mayor of Jerusalem yesterday, beating out the haredi Meir Porush and other smaller candidates. The election results, with an almost Western 40-something% voter turnout, were decried by many as showing a deliberate prejudice against the ultra-Orthodox haredi communities. Which is essentially true. A sizable portion of the country sees the haredi community as little more than a drain on national resources. They don’t have jobs and rely on welfare to provide for their large families, don’t practice any form of family planning, don’t serve in the army, and don’t contribute much to Israeli society as a whole. In an already cash-strapped country and in such turbulent times, the Israeli public, including the more left Orthodox, has made clear that they want someone who won’t continue the system of government handouts to those they see as leeches. Porush made an interesting move in depicting himself on his campaign posters as a cartoon character, likely in the hope that this would make him less scary to the rest of the electorate, though it clearly didn’t work well enough. The rift between the haredim and everyone else is so severe that even the Orthodox think that a secular candidate better shares their values. Barkat did come out against the almost-nascent Jerusalem light rail system, but hey, at least he’s not haredi.

It's in the Bible!

We wanted to make fish for dinner and went to the butcher to get some. He recommended we get amnoon, St. Peter’s being the only English name for the fish he knew. We cooked it and it was good, but we still had no idea what it was. A quick search online later and we discovered that it was tilapia, so called St. Peter’s fish because of a story in the New Testament of Peter catching a fish in the Galilee with a shekel in its mouth (shekel being the name of both the currency used today in modern Israel and the currency in ancient Israel from which it took its name). At some point one kind of tilapia found in the Galilee became associated with the story, and the name stuck. I was just at the Galilee. I walked the paths of history. It seems almost unavoidable here.

Norther Exposure

I was sick for a few days this week and it took me a while to post this. Photos will be forthcoming.

On Friday the cousins and I drove up to the Golan for the weekend. A couple errands in Jerusalem and a pizza later, we were on our way. First we drove west, into the West Bank, and watched the markers noting we were at 0m, 150m, 300m below sea level in the Dead Sea basin. The barren rocky bluffs of the Judean Desert rose up on all sides, flecked with manicured Jewish towns and haphazard Bedouin encampments. We saw Jericho in the distance, road-side lawn ornament sales, and palm tree-filled desert oases. Before hitting the Jordan we turned north. Every so often we passed rows of green houses and date palm groves, small villages, some Jewish, some Arab, a rusted hull of a tank, left to the sun forty plus years ago, and the odd camel dawdling by the highway.

The farther north we traveled, the more lush the landscape became. From bleak white rocks to scrubland, to grasses grazing the most pitiful cows I’ve ever seen. The neat green rows under the tan, brush-covered mountains and the Arabs riding in the back of a flatbed reminded me of California. Some ways up, the highway runs just off the Jordan River, really just a trickle, and by extension the border with Jordan the country. Over fences and access roads were Jordanian towns and fields, just out of reach. A sign on the side of the highway had posted times for Shabbat services. We stopped at Mehola where one of my cousins-in-law is doing her national service, a community of both new suburban homes and older, smaller, weathered ones. Changing standards, I guess.

Crossing back into Israel proper, we continued north, across the Jordan (on such a small bridge, I didn’t even notice), and along the banks of the Galilee. We stopped to touch the water, and as we walked to the receding water’s edge, I couldn’t help but envision Jesus walking here along the seashell-covered sand. On the other side of the road were banana trees enveloped in netting, and above them the mountains from which Syrian tanks descended on Israel in 1967. Up the winding road into the mountains, and we arrived at Nov, a mostly agricultural moshav where friends of my cousins’ live.

We had Shabbat dinner with some of them in their gorgeous new house. I was trying to imagine what he must do to be able to afford to build a house like this, and then he dropped the bombshell: the plot cost 100,000 shekel. The existing homes like the one we were staying in cost 120,000 shekel. That’s about $35,000. I couldn’t believe that we were in a place where I could just about afford to buy a house on my savings and credit alone, no mortgages needed. The caveat being that in order to prevent people from just buying cheap vacation homes here, one would need to live there for a year before being able to buy a home. While many of these homes stood empty for a decade or more, being built to house some of the influx of Russian immigrants in the ’80s, this was now a very popular place to live and there was a wait list to get in. Our dinner host’s parents moved there and all their children stuck around to raise their own families there.

On Saturday afternoon, we took a walking tour of the town. We saw the rows of flowers and myrtles grown for sale domestically and for export to Europe and big pens of cows raised for the dairy, which gave the whole area its inescapable smell. The residents swear they’re used to it, but I don’t think I could ever. The plains stretched into the distance, tractors and big skies, in a panorama that could easily be mistaken for America’s breadbasket states. This is the agricultural heartland of Israel. It was really awesome to see people so attached to the land, so invested in working the land and tilling the soil. I’m a romantic at heart, and I find it affirming to interact with people so in touch with their environment.

After a very pleasant afternoon and evening, we drove back to Alon Shvut, stopping at the kosher McDonalds in Beit She’an. Micah and I just had to stop there, the American in us finding the concept unendingly funny, and I ate my “double royale” and “chips” with a smirk. And then the long drive home. The weekend was great, and Nov is a lovely place where I could own my own home, but with one catch. On our way out we stopped to say goodbye to our friends. They were on their way out to spend the night elsewhere, anywhere, because “you get trapped sometimes and don’t leave for months, and you need to get out.” Maybe I will just buy a vacation home.

Energia Ha-Atikah

After two days in Emek, I finally left the PT office. Micah picked me up on the way to a film shoot, and then we went to the Old City where he had meetings. Without anything specific to do, I got myself intentionally lost and spent the better part of the late afternoon and early evening wandering. I heard visitors speak German, British, Russian, various east Asian languages I couldn’t pinpoint. I walked above and below on the multi-level pathways, houses stacked on offices stacked on yeshivot, passing the same features over and over and trying to remember how I got there. A Greek Orthodox priest in full regalia, carrying a Greek flag, danced to an Israeli clarinetist in the square. Slender women in well-tailored clothes and hijabs hurried by. An overweight Hasid mumbled to himself and walked in circles. At a great observation point overlooking the Kotel plaza, a couple asked me to take a photo of them in front of the Dome of the Rock. The muezzin called out the adhan from the minarets on the Temple Mount, alerting the faithful it was time for prayer. The booming song echoed through the city. I explained to two young boys with blond payot and huge multi-color kipot that this is how the Muslims know it is time to daven, and one promptly excitedly explained it to his mother. A young Arab explained to his white boyfriend the nature of the conflict. The stones changed color as afternoon faded to twilight faded to dusk. I found myself following a Russian tour group through the Arab quarter to another entrance to the plaza. The soldier at the security check got mad at me for taking his photo. I walked toward the wall, all around me tourists taking photos, soldiers in formation, a man sitting on the ground, reading aloud softly from a handwritten sheet of notebook paper. I joined a minyan led by man with a stutter, in front of one with Tourrette’s. Along the wall, soldiers in uniform prayed next to men in black hats and coats and tourists in the white paper kipot those without a head-covering are requested to wear. I made my way back to the square where I was to meet Micah. Little girls played jump rope and argued in Hebrew about whose fault it was. I overheard a guy in a large white kippah on a skateboard tell a girl that Obama is up by 11 points in the polls. I found internet and saw that CNN.com had both candidates at 0%, this being about 8am PST. A girl walked over and asked to see poll results. She saw the senate count—more Democrats than Republicans in seats not up for grabs—and said, “There’s still hope,” I think implying she doesn’t have the same leanings I do. American yeshiva students passed by talking loudly. The Old City lives. I set my laptop to hibernate and go back to Alon Shvut after a long weekend.

Palestine is for lovers.

If you lived here you'd be home now.

Surely the man on the left is talking to God.