The Effects of Busing

I think I like Tel Aviv. I had dinner last night at one of the few kosher restaurants in Tel Aviv—Tel Aviv being where the Jews live who want to get away from the Jews. It was a much more familiar experience: people walking around, waterfront views, stores and cars and lights. And the sherut drivers (a sherut is like a shared-ride taxi that essentially follows the bus routes but is faster) were surprisingly nice. One even drove me to the next sherut even though he was off duty because he saw me at the stop. At dinner with an old friend, and now mostly over my stomach-thing, we talked about Israeli culture and bad design.

Getting back to Jerusalem at 2 am posed a slight problem of where I would sleep. PresenTense, the magazine cum institute cum amorphous non-profit, for whom I’ve done some design work and am now assistant art director, has a new office in Emek Refaim in the southern part of Jerusalem, conveniently down the street from my friend. The high-concept office was intended to be a meeting place for young, active Jews, providing a workspace outside of coffee shops for writers, artists, entrepreneurs, etc., in addition to housing the global network’s physical presence. They also have a couple beds for PT staff who find themselves in the area and needing a place to sleep, and soon will have more to allow them to be a sort of hostel for wandering Jews. This being Sunday, people show up to work at 7:30 or 8:00 in the AM because this country hates weekends. I may go back to Alon Shvut today or stick around for the street festival tonight. Updates on that later. Now to work.

Hillel Goes to Yeshiva

The weekend wasn’t too bad. Aside from enduring stomach pains from my bullet-proof windowless-box trip to Be’er Sheva, it was fine. Friday night there was the periodic “ask the rabbis” event, and I was impressed by the truly profound, questioning nature of most of the questions. You’d think that kids who grew up in the Jewish day school system and opted to spend a year or two learning in Israel would have unwavering faith, and yet these kids were asking questions like what is the purpose of learning Torah when we could be helping people, how can God have commanded Jews to kill, and others that showed that these kids were actively struggling with various elements of traditional Judaism. I still don’t think it would have been a good fit for me, but it clearly shows that yeshiva is also for thinking, introspective people still searching for a workable worldview.

Also, at some point between me taking photos in the square around 2pm and leaving for Shabbat services around 4pm, my fleece sweatshirt disappeared. My guess is it’s in my brother’s place, but we didn’t find it, and a search of the square yielded three other sweatshirts/shirts, two pairs of shoes, and a baby stroller, leading me to think that had I left it there it would still be there, among the litter and filth covering most of the area. Six years, two continents and countless adventures were possible because of that fleece. RIP Black EMS Sweatshirt. Now off to Tel Aviv for dinner and the Israel Railways website is down. Figures.

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.