Last night while R and I were at a poetry reading, we got a good hard jolt--an earthquake--that made me realize that I was well and truly home in Southern California.
All is well, though this made me feel it is probably time to put together, belatedly, the earthquake kit I never quite managed to construct.
But it also set me, as these scares do, looking into the recent past and thinking about the people and places I visited on my journey to Israel.
On my trip, I spent time with people I had not seen or truly spoken with in years, met close relatives who were strangers to me, and learned things about myself and my culture(s) that I had never before grasped.
Most importantly, I realized for the first time that there is no substitute for first-person experience, though armchair travels are pleasant and have their own charm. Steeping oneself in the smells, color, life, and of course the sights of a place is the only way to grasp a culture, a people, a region.
It is hard to believe that not quite a week ago I was in the city of Haifa with my intrepid cousin Dan.
Even before I came to Israel, I knew I wanted to visit the Bahai temple in that seaside city, atop beautiful Mountain Carmel.
Not being a Bahai, I cannot pretend to inside information about the place, but I can testify to the impression it made on me, and also the desire to return to Haifa and explore that city much more thoroughly than I was able to do this time around.
Something I learned: there are a couple of ways to explore a place.
One can get on a tour bus, as I did in Jerusalem, and ride around the city, getting a cursory tour of a place packed with worthy destinations, all with an eye toward coming back later and doing a more thorough exploration.
Or one can pick out one tiny corner of the fabric and explore it as thoroughly as one is able in the course of a day or a few hours, filling the fragments of time left at the tag-end of a trip.
In the case of Haifa, I chose the second course, since there were other things we had to accomplish that day, which called on me to deliver a few copies of my yoga chapbook, Balance, to my cousin Judy, who had brokered the sale of these books to her yoga teacher, whose class I had attended while visiting Judy in the North.
It took a while to find the Bahai complex, which takes up a huge chunk of real estate at the top of the mountain. Initially, we had only one address, but it soon became evident that there were many more ways to approach the temple, more addresses, representing entry and departure gates. And we were on foot, having scored a scarce free parking spot, struggling uphill for much of our day in Haifa in the warm, overly warm, sunshine.
From the street, shielded by discreet greenery, it was impossible to say which of the amazing vistas we saw from the sidewalk overlooking the city was directly related to the Temple, and this of course is part of the effect of the place, when one realizes that the things seen separately, in innocence or ignorance, are actually part of a larger design.
We forged forward, from one false entrance to another, until we found a spot in a queue for tourists, mostly part of organized tours, aboard those lumbering behemoths of tour buses that blocked the narrow roads and made driving the hazardous sport it often seems to be in Israel.
Even then we had to dodge another obstacle: the request by the guard at the gate that I show my passport.
Though of course I have a passport and couldn't have made the trip without it, I didn't make a habit of carrying it around with me. Too easy to lose.
So I took my cousin Dan's advice and let him do the talking for me, as a resident of Israel. I was with him rather than with an organized tour.
If our way up Masada had been haphazard (he lacked a hat, I was wearing long pants in the heat of a desert afternoon), our trip down the temple's 700 steps, carved into the side of a mountain, was also. I had forgotten my hat in the car, where we had also left the large water bottle we shared between us.
Bahai is a recent religion, the most recent major monotheistic faith. Like the cities such as Akko or Caesarea built on mounds constructed of layers of previous cities, this religion incorporates elements of earlier faiths, all with the intention not of superceding them but of embracing them.
Indeed, oneness of peoples and faiths is a major theme in this belief system, which is marked by a modern desire for rationality and a belief that people can turn their collective will toward overcoming the darkness in their own nature.
The building of the Temple itself stands as a monument to such an effort, carved into the side of a mountain and maintained by donations offered by the faithful alone. The Bahai accept no donations from anyone outside this core of believers, though it obviously takes millions to maintain this place, to irrigate the extensive gardens in an arid land, to keep its buildings in good repair.
The tour guide, an observant Jew, regaled us with tales of how difficult it has been to keep up the gardens. He drew our attention to the steep hillsides, where it takes 3 people to mow the lawn: a man and a lawnmower have to be individually harnessed by ropes to keep them from falling off the mountain.
Yet the goal of the Bahai in constructing this place has not been to control the natural world so much as to restore it.
Our guide pointed out some brown spots in the lawn, declaring that these represented the garden's success in attracting local wildlife--wild pigs, whose foraging had gouged the otherwise perfect surface of the green ground cover.
And the various buildings of the complex, like a quasi-Greek temple (the administrative center for the Bahai faith) and others are built mostly underground, extending for many stories down into sheer rock and earth, so as to minimize their effect on the environment and the view.
This is an effort other urban planners could learn from and that all of us could aspire to.
On an earlier day, I had visited the other holy site of the Bahais: burial place of their founder, near the city of Akko. But lacking the attentions of a tour guide like the one we listened to at the temple, we didn't quite grasp the significance of what we were seeing.
And so on this day on top of Mt. Carmel, I saw with new eyes the wholeness of this site, something I had to witness for myself in order to comprehend.
Saturday, March 29, 2014
Thursday, March 27, 2014
Back at Home
After twenty hours in the air, in a huge airbus drawing an enormous arc across a significant swath of the planet, I finally reached the shores of the U.S. .
However, I was fated to spend a couple more torturous hours in a Limbo of airport bureaucracy. Even the Israelis, who are understandably thorough in their efforts to x-ray luggage and search passengers, stand a distant second to us, for we are x-rayed now even after getting off the plane and also closely questioned about what little toxic treasures we might be bringing back in our luggage.
LAX takes the prize for their queue just in front of the exit door, winding as slowly as dinner through the enormous length of an anaconda.
I feared I would never find Richard, but some kind soul lent me his cellphone, and I learned he was waiting for me just on the other side of the door, amid a crowd of excited loved ones. He missed me as I rolled by, trying mightily to keep the luggage cart from taking off without me. No wonder, given how many on both sides crowded the ramp.
Finally though, I spotted him by the information booth, clutching a red rose.
On the way home, we chatted about the trip, the people I saw there and the places I never got around to writing about.
In fact, some of my favorite moments went unrecorded: for example, the evening I spent with cousins Daphna and Miri in Old Jaffa, an ancient city surrounded by a modern one.
We rode to the end of the line, down to the shoreline, after passing through the city of Tel Aviv, dubbed "the Bubble" because its residents imagine themselves insulated from the rest of the country.
This is of course not so different from New York City, which inspires the same sort of feeling in many of its residents--witness Steinberg's New Yorker cover, featuring a a New Yorker's mental map of the US: A proportionally enormous east coast, with New York City by far the largest thing on the map, rivaled only by the west coast, where LA is the only visible sign of inhabitation. The middle of the country is completely absent..
At first, the neighborhood seemed dubious to me, native to a different sort of city altogether, where evening in a dark deserted place is not a comforting sight. But as the full moon rose over the cobbled streets and the marketplace beckoned, I began to see that there was nothing to fear, except my own impulse to purchase the tempting goods in the stalls, which ranged from classic junk to clothing, souvenirs, and food.
We stopped to nosh a bagel at Abulafia's, a venerable establishment selling all sorts of street food and run by several successive generations of the same family.
I should note that a bagel in Israel, while it might sometimes resemble the doughy spheres we are familiar with, can just as often take other shapes and textures, more resembling the soft pretzels of my youth in Philadelphia or an elongated plank of dough dipped in zataar, a tasty spice resembling oregano.
Borekas are turnovers made of flaky filo and filled with various savory fillings, such as potato and onion, cheese, or mushrooms (my favorite!), even a spicy mixture of eggplant and tomato.
In general, I didn't find Israel to be a diners' delight. Probably I could not afford to frequent the gustatory palaces of that country. I have no doubt that they exist somewhere.
But then I was too busy to care.
However, I was fated to spend a couple more torturous hours in a Limbo of airport bureaucracy. Even the Israelis, who are understandably thorough in their efforts to x-ray luggage and search passengers, stand a distant second to us, for we are x-rayed now even after getting off the plane and also closely questioned about what little toxic treasures we might be bringing back in our luggage.
LAX takes the prize for their queue just in front of the exit door, winding as slowly as dinner through the enormous length of an anaconda.
I feared I would never find Richard, but some kind soul lent me his cellphone, and I learned he was waiting for me just on the other side of the door, amid a crowd of excited loved ones. He missed me as I rolled by, trying mightily to keep the luggage cart from taking off without me. No wonder, given how many on both sides crowded the ramp.
Finally though, I spotted him by the information booth, clutching a red rose.
On the way home, we chatted about the trip, the people I saw there and the places I never got around to writing about.
In fact, some of my favorite moments went unrecorded: for example, the evening I spent with cousins Daphna and Miri in Old Jaffa, an ancient city surrounded by a modern one.
We rode to the end of the line, down to the shoreline, after passing through the city of Tel Aviv, dubbed "the Bubble" because its residents imagine themselves insulated from the rest of the country.
This is of course not so different from New York City, which inspires the same sort of feeling in many of its residents--witness Steinberg's New Yorker cover, featuring a a New Yorker's mental map of the US: A proportionally enormous east coast, with New York City by far the largest thing on the map, rivaled only by the west coast, where LA is the only visible sign of inhabitation. The middle of the country is completely absent..
At first, the neighborhood seemed dubious to me, native to a different sort of city altogether, where evening in a dark deserted place is not a comforting sight. But as the full moon rose over the cobbled streets and the marketplace beckoned, I began to see that there was nothing to fear, except my own impulse to purchase the tempting goods in the stalls, which ranged from classic junk to clothing, souvenirs, and food.
We stopped to nosh a bagel at Abulafia's, a venerable establishment selling all sorts of street food and run by several successive generations of the same family.
I should note that a bagel in Israel, while it might sometimes resemble the doughy spheres we are familiar with, can just as often take other shapes and textures, more resembling the soft pretzels of my youth in Philadelphia or an elongated plank of dough dipped in zataar, a tasty spice resembling oregano.
Borekas are turnovers made of flaky filo and filled with various savory fillings, such as potato and onion, cheese, or mushrooms (my favorite!), even a spicy mixture of eggplant and tomato.
In general, I didn't find Israel to be a diners' delight. Probably I could not afford to frequent the gustatory palaces of that country. I have no doubt that they exist somewhere.
But then I was too busy to care.
Another Ruin
One thing there's no shortage of in this country is contested places. Sitting where it does in the crevice between continents makes it very valuable strategically. No wonder so many have conquered it, though none seem to hold on to it long, when one views this through the long range lens of history, whether it is human conquest that ends an era or natural disaster, or a combination of both.
While we in the States, with our foreshortened sense of history, seem often to prefer to take our leisure in fantasy worlds and amusement parks or else in places as devoid of human habitation as possible, Israelis readily spend their days off in these historical sites.
To me this indicates an acceptance of the wisdom such sites imply, a kind of fatalism I have glimpsed elsewhere in this culture..
My trip to Caesarea with my cousins Daphna and Miri illustrated this beyond much of a doubt.
The crowds thronging the place were composed largely of natives, who favor this place for weddings and other significant events.
But if one stands in one place for a while, it's also possible to hear tours being led in any number of languages, from Russian to English, French, German, and Japanese.
This is yet another awe inspiring feat of human handiwork, from its earliest surviving remnants--one of Herod's palaces, replete with an amphitheater through which one can walk where gladiators and charioteers once played their deadly games.
Far from being sheltered behind gates or protected by barriers, this site affords every visitor the opportunity to stroll the ancient ramparts as kings, slaves, and warriors once did, to sit in the seats of Caesars and nobles.
Fields of ancient marble, weathered as petrified wood, lie strewn like a game of gigantic pick-up sticks. Aqueducts, on the other hand, have been fully preserved, seemingly ready to bear the gush of fresh water through their ancient spillways.
Under the tranquil turquoise surf, a submerged city beckons, calling divers to explore.
Overlooking this site, we lunched on salads and wood-fired bread, then, fortified, continued to wander through the various ruins of chapels and palaces, humbled by a sense of impermanence such a place imparts.
As we headed back along the crowded highways, I maintained the sense of perspective my day among the ruins afforded me, and wondered how much of our present day will be ruins one day, and if so, who will explore them, whether anyone will remain to wonder over what is left.
While we in the States, with our foreshortened sense of history, seem often to prefer to take our leisure in fantasy worlds and amusement parks or else in places as devoid of human habitation as possible, Israelis readily spend their days off in these historical sites.
To me this indicates an acceptance of the wisdom such sites imply, a kind of fatalism I have glimpsed elsewhere in this culture..
My trip to Caesarea with my cousins Daphna and Miri illustrated this beyond much of a doubt.
The crowds thronging the place were composed largely of natives, who favor this place for weddings and other significant events.
But if one stands in one place for a while, it's also possible to hear tours being led in any number of languages, from Russian to English, French, German, and Japanese.
This is yet another awe inspiring feat of human handiwork, from its earliest surviving remnants--one of Herod's palaces, replete with an amphitheater through which one can walk where gladiators and charioteers once played their deadly games.
Far from being sheltered behind gates or protected by barriers, this site affords every visitor the opportunity to stroll the ancient ramparts as kings, slaves, and warriors once did, to sit in the seats of Caesars and nobles.
Fields of ancient marble, weathered as petrified wood, lie strewn like a game of gigantic pick-up sticks. Aqueducts, on the other hand, have been fully preserved, seemingly ready to bear the gush of fresh water through their ancient spillways.
Under the tranquil turquoise surf, a submerged city beckons, calling divers to explore.
Overlooking this site, we lunched on salads and wood-fired bread, then, fortified, continued to wander through the various ruins of chapels and palaces, humbled by a sense of impermanence such a place imparts.
As we headed back along the crowded highways, I maintained the sense of perspective my day among the ruins afforded me, and wondered how much of our present day will be ruins one day, and if so, who will explore them, whether anyone will remain to wonder over what is left.
Thursday, March 20, 2014
I was not able to check in for a few days because I was staying with an observant cousin. Shabbat around here is a serious business, as it has not been in the US--at least not my little corner of the US-- for many years.
On top of that, it is also a holiday, Purim. As I write this, I can hear cheering outside. People dressed in all sorts of fanciful hats, masks and costumes are partying in the streets. It's considered a good thing to get as bombed as possible while celebrating this holiday. Consequently, as with an carnivalistic atmosphere, people take every opportunity to transgress the usual social rules and expectations.
Perhaps with this in mind, I was able to let go of my lifelong inhibitions surrounding dancing on this trip. Though I grew up in the hub of cool street dancing,Philadelphia, I was a perpetual wallflower, hanging back, dressed in my finery, unwilling or unable to let go.
When I went to visit my cousin Judy, who was a professional dancer in her youth, I thought this might come up, but it didn't till my last evening at Judy's home, when she invited. me to go to a belly-dancing lesson with her.
I thought it might be fun to dress up as a. belly dancer, in layers of diaphanous scarves, heavy with coins. And I also thought that perhaps I might learn a few steps. But I never thought I would actually be able to combine those few rudimentary movements into a free flowing dance, to say that I had actually taken the music into my own body and transformed it.
When I first arrived in the yurt at the end of a dark bumpy road, part of an ecological kibbutz where people lived as we had once imagined in the Whole Earth Catalog those many years ago, nothing had changed.
I had clearly carried my overly self-conscious self with me through space to arrive at this moment, frozen with fears and inhibitions.
When the dance instructor, a lithe and graceful woman of certain years, sidled into the circle of waiting women (and one man, owner of said space)and began to dance, I backed quickly out of the circle while the others, practiced from other classes with the instructor, whirled and turned, lost in the music and the moment.
I watched for a while, until the instructor gently led me into the circle and began, step by step, to teach without words how I could move a hand, a leg, my hips and how these movements might be combined, as one might teach a student to write, sentence by sentence, to make a paragraph.
Nothing really worked until she had the idea to take a yogic turn, gazing intensely into my eyes, into the eyes of all present and asking gnomic questions we would have to answer about the nature of stillness within ourselves.
Soon we were all dancing with our eyes closed. Freed from the necessity of seeing my own clumsy and unresponsive body in the midst of these others, more practiced than myself, I began to combine the movements I had learned, to add others, despite myself.
I learned a lesson that day about the wisdom of the body, wisdom my body had though I didn't know it.
On top of that, it is also a holiday, Purim. As I write this, I can hear cheering outside. People dressed in all sorts of fanciful hats, masks and costumes are partying in the streets. It's considered a good thing to get as bombed as possible while celebrating this holiday. Consequently, as with an carnivalistic atmosphere, people take every opportunity to transgress the usual social rules and expectations.
Perhaps with this in mind, I was able to let go of my lifelong inhibitions surrounding dancing on this trip. Though I grew up in the hub of cool street dancing,Philadelphia, I was a perpetual wallflower, hanging back, dressed in my finery, unwilling or unable to let go.
When I went to visit my cousin Judy, who was a professional dancer in her youth, I thought this might come up, but it didn't till my last evening at Judy's home, when she invited. me to go to a belly-dancing lesson with her.
I thought it might be fun to dress up as a. belly dancer, in layers of diaphanous scarves, heavy with coins. And I also thought that perhaps I might learn a few steps. But I never thought I would actually be able to combine those few rudimentary movements into a free flowing dance, to say that I had actually taken the music into my own body and transformed it.
When I first arrived in the yurt at the end of a dark bumpy road, part of an ecological kibbutz where people lived as we had once imagined in the Whole Earth Catalog those many years ago, nothing had changed.
I had clearly carried my overly self-conscious self with me through space to arrive at this moment, frozen with fears and inhibitions.
When the dance instructor, a lithe and graceful woman of certain years, sidled into the circle of waiting women (and one man, owner of said space)and began to dance, I backed quickly out of the circle while the others, practiced from other classes with the instructor, whirled and turned, lost in the music and the moment.
I watched for a while, until the instructor gently led me into the circle and began, step by step, to teach without words how I could move a hand, a leg, my hips and how these movements might be combined, as one might teach a student to write, sentence by sentence, to make a paragraph.
Nothing really worked until she had the idea to take a yogic turn, gazing intensely into my eyes, into the eyes of all present and asking gnomic questions we would have to answer about the nature of stillness within ourselves.
Soon we were all dancing with our eyes closed. Freed from the necessity of seeing my own clumsy and unresponsive body in the midst of these others, more practiced than myself, I began to combine the movements I had learned, to add others, despite myself.
I learned a lesson that day about the wisdom of the body, wisdom my body had though I didn't know it.
Tuesday, March 18, 2014
Almost the End of the Journey
It's hard to believe that almost a month has passed since I came to Israel. In a few days I will head home again to sort out my experiences and impressions, not to mention the many photos I and others have taken.
Yesterday I finally got to the Dead Sea. Spring has come and the rains have passed, so my cousin Dan was able to travel the dramatic road into the wilderness, passing many famous sites, such as the reputed locale of Sodom and Gomorrah, where a free-standing monolith roughly shaped like a person is labeled "Lot's wife," after Abraham's sister-in-law, who was supposedly turned into a pillar of salt when she looked back at her home in the doomed city.
The Dead Sea itself shines in the desert sun with the sort of turquoise intensity one otherwise sees only in travel brochures hawking vacations in Greece.
A popular resort site, the place sports several multistory hotels, yet there is something bedraggled about them, staffed as they are by an overabundance of teenagers, eager only to chat among themselves.
A knot of these kids, bizarrely garbed as ancient Egyptians, posed in the doorway as tourists shopped for Dead Sea beauty products in the gift shop and their children patrolled the arcades.
I walked down to the beach in my newly purchased rubber shoes, having been warned that there are sharp stones in the seabed and on the strand.
In fact, the place was littered with shards of concrete and rebar, and I was glad I had heeded that warning.
It had been years since I had worn a swimsuit or gone to the beach, even ones close to home, but I didn't want to miss the experience of floating in this Sea, which famously contains so much salt that no one can sink in it, not even a non-swimmer like myself.
As I tentatively extended a leg into the water, I was surprised to find that the water did not feel at all cold. Apparently, it coats the skin with oil that makes the water feel like a warm bath.
I bobbed around for a while before rinsing off and changing to prepare for our next activity, climbing up Masada, the hilltop castle of King Herod and most famously, last holdout of a band of Jewish rebels against Roman rule who killed themselves rather than be taken by the enemy, or so the legend runs.
The trail up the mountain looked quite formidable from the ground, and so it was, especially to a pair of aging hikers.
My cousin had forgotten a hat, and I didn't bring a pair of shorts on the trip. None of my relatives is my size.
We started out well though, taking swigs of water to fortify us as we trudged up the rocky trail, steeply etched into the hillside. We could have taken the cableway, but I longed to exercise my aching muscles, having spent too much time sitting in cars and buses.
But the heat got to us both, and we stopped frequently to rest. Three quarters of the way up, my cousin Dan had an asthma attack and had to take medication, but we finally made it, after an hour of climbing
Like Akko, this site contains layer after layer of history, a microcosm of this contested patch of land, taken and retaken by one regime after another..
The storehouses and kitchens of Herod's palace gave on magnificent views of the surrounding desert and Dead Sea, now greatly reduced by depleted stores of the water that feeds it.
Clearly, the view was as available at that time to slaves and commoners as it was to kings.
A sign at the site of an ancient Byzantine chapel told how the monks once gardened the steep slopes, training their donkeys to go unaccompanied down the hill and return laden with vegetables from the garden.
At 4:30, a loudspeaker warned us that the last cable car would be leaving soon, and the site would close. With an hour and a half of sunlight remaining, we decided to walk, and set off on the shaded path., where we chatted with a young monk in training all the way down the hill.
Yesterday I finally got to the Dead Sea. Spring has come and the rains have passed, so my cousin Dan was able to travel the dramatic road into the wilderness, passing many famous sites, such as the reputed locale of Sodom and Gomorrah, where a free-standing monolith roughly shaped like a person is labeled "Lot's wife," after Abraham's sister-in-law, who was supposedly turned into a pillar of salt when she looked back at her home in the doomed city.
The Dead Sea itself shines in the desert sun with the sort of turquoise intensity one otherwise sees only in travel brochures hawking vacations in Greece.
A popular resort site, the place sports several multistory hotels, yet there is something bedraggled about them, staffed as they are by an overabundance of teenagers, eager only to chat among themselves.
A knot of these kids, bizarrely garbed as ancient Egyptians, posed in the doorway as tourists shopped for Dead Sea beauty products in the gift shop and their children patrolled the arcades.
I walked down to the beach in my newly purchased rubber shoes, having been warned that there are sharp stones in the seabed and on the strand.
In fact, the place was littered with shards of concrete and rebar, and I was glad I had heeded that warning.
It had been years since I had worn a swimsuit or gone to the beach, even ones close to home, but I didn't want to miss the experience of floating in this Sea, which famously contains so much salt that no one can sink in it, not even a non-swimmer like myself.
As I tentatively extended a leg into the water, I was surprised to find that the water did not feel at all cold. Apparently, it coats the skin with oil that makes the water feel like a warm bath.
I bobbed around for a while before rinsing off and changing to prepare for our next activity, climbing up Masada, the hilltop castle of King Herod and most famously, last holdout of a band of Jewish rebels against Roman rule who killed themselves rather than be taken by the enemy, or so the legend runs.
The trail up the mountain looked quite formidable from the ground, and so it was, especially to a pair of aging hikers.
My cousin had forgotten a hat, and I didn't bring a pair of shorts on the trip. None of my relatives is my size.
We started out well though, taking swigs of water to fortify us as we trudged up the rocky trail, steeply etched into the hillside. We could have taken the cableway, but I longed to exercise my aching muscles, having spent too much time sitting in cars and buses.
But the heat got to us both, and we stopped frequently to rest. Three quarters of the way up, my cousin Dan had an asthma attack and had to take medication, but we finally made it, after an hour of climbing
Like Akko, this site contains layer after layer of history, a microcosm of this contested patch of land, taken and retaken by one regime after another..
The storehouses and kitchens of Herod's palace gave on magnificent views of the surrounding desert and Dead Sea, now greatly reduced by depleted stores of the water that feeds it.
Clearly, the view was as available at that time to slaves and commoners as it was to kings.
A sign at the site of an ancient Byzantine chapel told how the monks once gardened the steep slopes, training their donkeys to go unaccompanied down the hill and return laden with vegetables from the garden.
At 4:30, a loudspeaker warned us that the last cable car would be leaving soon, and the site would close. With an hour and a half of sunlight remaining, we decided to walk, and set off on the shaded path., where we chatted with a young monk in training all the way down the hill.
Monday, March 17, 2014
I have been doing and seeing so many things on this journey that it is truly impossible to encompass all of them. I have tried several times to write posts capturing highlights as they happened, but problems logging in, posting, and other technical bugaboos kept me from this. As I speak, there are one or two draft posts in here somewhere that I need to complete, but I don't know how to find them. So I will just proceed and hope I can finish this post and. put it up.
Yesterday I finally made the promised trip to Jerusalem, Yerushalayem, Zion, city of a hundred names. And in my admittedly limited experience, there is truly nothing like it.
We didn't get to explore the place by foot, which is the way one probably should, walking the ancient streets and letting all the senses absorb the ambiance, but at least I had an eyeful, both eyes filled to running over with the sheer density of all these sites in one tiny place, a microcosm of this nation.
We rode a tourist bus of the sort one can board and exit at will, but we didn't exit. We had come in the afternoon by public transport, a trip that took a couple of hours, so we had time for very little that day.
Naturally our plans to go to the marketplace, the museum, and then to make it finally to the Kotel, the Wailing Wall, at sunset were much too ambitious.
The crowds of people and cars all squeezed impossibly into the narrow streets made assured that we'd have to scale back on our plans. Finally, we managed only the Wall, but that was an emotional experience.
The sight of that portion of history, the ancient stones that contain within them all the anguish and hopes of thousands of years, combined with the weeping and ecstasy of the women around me (the sexes are segregated in this place, according to the rules of Orthodox Judaism), reaching out to touch the weathered stone, worked on me as I backed slowly away, cognizant of the prohibition against turning one's back on the wall.
Add to the experience the fact that this day marked the observation of Purim, a holiday from which we get our Halloween, and the strangeness and intensity were multiplied many times.
If the fur hats of the Satmar Chasidim, the ultra orthodox who occupy the religious quarter of the city, seemed exotic to me, how much more so when they and the others ranging the cobbled streets, an amazing amalgam of ancient and modern, were garbed in the clothing of cowboys and aliens, princesses and dragons.
It seemed somehow natural to me that these creatures of fancy should walk among the all too human. In this city, if anywhere, it did not feel surprising.
And yet this was a real place, not a trip through history's looking glass, a gallery of our conquests and efforts to exceed time.
I headed home hoping I could return again soon to see and experience at closer range all the other places of the city I was able to take in only in a cursory glance.
Certainly this is an extraordinary place, worthy or a lifetime of exploration.
Yesterday I finally made the promised trip to Jerusalem, Yerushalayem, Zion, city of a hundred names. And in my admittedly limited experience, there is truly nothing like it.
We didn't get to explore the place by foot, which is the way one probably should, walking the ancient streets and letting all the senses absorb the ambiance, but at least I had an eyeful, both eyes filled to running over with the sheer density of all these sites in one tiny place, a microcosm of this nation.
We rode a tourist bus of the sort one can board and exit at will, but we didn't exit. We had come in the afternoon by public transport, a trip that took a couple of hours, so we had time for very little that day.
Naturally our plans to go to the marketplace, the museum, and then to make it finally to the Kotel, the Wailing Wall, at sunset were much too ambitious.
The crowds of people and cars all squeezed impossibly into the narrow streets made assured that we'd have to scale back on our plans. Finally, we managed only the Wall, but that was an emotional experience.
The sight of that portion of history, the ancient stones that contain within them all the anguish and hopes of thousands of years, combined with the weeping and ecstasy of the women around me (the sexes are segregated in this place, according to the rules of Orthodox Judaism), reaching out to touch the weathered stone, worked on me as I backed slowly away, cognizant of the prohibition against turning one's back on the wall.
Add to the experience the fact that this day marked the observation of Purim, a holiday from which we get our Halloween, and the strangeness and intensity were multiplied many times.
If the fur hats of the Satmar Chasidim, the ultra orthodox who occupy the religious quarter of the city, seemed exotic to me, how much more so when they and the others ranging the cobbled streets, an amazing amalgam of ancient and modern, were garbed in the clothing of cowboys and aliens, princesses and dragons.
It seemed somehow natural to me that these creatures of fancy should walk among the all too human. In this city, if anywhere, it did not feel surprising.
And yet this was a real place, not a trip through history's looking glass, a gallery of our conquests and efforts to exceed time.
I headed home hoping I could return again soon to see and experience at closer range all the other places of the city I was able to take in only in a cursory glance.
Certainly this is an extraordinary place, worthy or a lifetime of exploration.
Thursday, March 13, 2014
Rainy Thursday in the North
This end of the country seems to be very different from the other. A bit like Northern California in comparison to the Southern part of that state, the philosophy and attitude of many here differs from that of the south and central regions.
For one thing, it appears that remnants of the 60s and 70s counterculture came here to stay, where they are apparently right in tune with the religious zealots and mystics who have sought to retire from the world or the social revolutionaries who engineered the collective farms we identify with Israeli society, which bears in actuality very little relationship to the variety of pure Socialism once common to kibbutzim or monasteries, except in a few places.
My parents were pioneers in Israel in the 1940s, part of the Zionist Habonim movement. Though they and their families had emigrated from Eastern Europe long before the Nazis' reign of terror, they saw a world indifferent or indeed hostile to the survivors of the Holocaust, so they went to Israel to build a new society.
Unaware at the time that they brought with them narrowness and prejudice from the old society, they build a collective based in principle on pure socialism.
However, my American-bred father soon found this system unworkable. For one thing, as an electrician, he could not accept the idea that the teacher, who knew nothing about dealing with electrical problems, would be assigned the job of electrical repairs, while he was sent to the fields to pick bananas.
My parents, disillusioned, brought me up on tales of Israelis' impractical social system and material privation. But they would be very surprised to see what Israel has become, particularly the mutations of the collective system.
My cousin Judy and her husband Gary live on a kibbutz. It is still a collective enterprise, where there are factories and other businesses owned by all the members, though not all of the residents by any means work there.
Rather, these people work at their own chosen professions, if there is a need for them and a place in the economy. And if the community requires a skill not present among residents, employees will be brought in from outside.
People are paid for their work, and aside from certain payments they have voted to make to the entire community for roads,etc., own their homes and cars, live in individual houses with their children, and can make changes and improvements to them as they wish.
Yet this is still a collective, where people can go to eat in the cafeteria if they wish rather than shopping and cooking for themselves, and where they are part of something close to a purely democratic society, or so it seems from the limited exposure I have had to this way of life the past couple of days.
In addition to my lesson in modern collectivism, I spent a few hours in an outstanding museum of the holocaust, built by survivors and their descendants themselves.
It is called The Ghetto Fighters' House Museum, and is located in Western Galilee. It sits adjacent to the Beit Lohamei Haghetaot, a kibbutz founded by Holocaust survivors, including those who survived the Warsaw Uprising.
Like everyone else of my generation in the States, I was foggy on what went on in the Underground in the Warsaw ghetto and elsewhere during that period, but this museum offered three or four floors packed with particulars about those people--their names, their deeds, even their actual testimony.
I learned that women of the Ghetto as well as the men resisted actively and were feared by the German forces.
In the exhibit on the "Final Solution," I saw the only known photographs of the actual gassing of people in Auschwitz, surreptitiously snapped by inmates. And I listened to as much as I could stomach of the testimony of a survivor who had served as a Jewish policeman of sorts in the camp, forced to dupe inmates, leading them to their deaths in the showers and gas trucks.
After a couple of hours of this, my body felt heavy and my mind as well.
We walked up to the roof, where we surveyed a panorama of the entire region , the kibbutz, the sea, the Lebanese border off in the distance, which was not all that distant, all things considered.
After living in such a large country as the US, coming here takes some adjustment in scale.
Tomorrow I head back for the final section of my trip, before I resume my life at home.
For one thing, it appears that remnants of the 60s and 70s counterculture came here to stay, where they are apparently right in tune with the religious zealots and mystics who have sought to retire from the world or the social revolutionaries who engineered the collective farms we identify with Israeli society, which bears in actuality very little relationship to the variety of pure Socialism once common to kibbutzim or monasteries, except in a few places.
My parents were pioneers in Israel in the 1940s, part of the Zionist Habonim movement. Though they and their families had emigrated from Eastern Europe long before the Nazis' reign of terror, they saw a world indifferent or indeed hostile to the survivors of the Holocaust, so they went to Israel to build a new society.
Unaware at the time that they brought with them narrowness and prejudice from the old society, they build a collective based in principle on pure socialism.
However, my American-bred father soon found this system unworkable. For one thing, as an electrician, he could not accept the idea that the teacher, who knew nothing about dealing with electrical problems, would be assigned the job of electrical repairs, while he was sent to the fields to pick bananas.
My parents, disillusioned, brought me up on tales of Israelis' impractical social system and material privation. But they would be very surprised to see what Israel has become, particularly the mutations of the collective system.
My cousin Judy and her husband Gary live on a kibbutz. It is still a collective enterprise, where there are factories and other businesses owned by all the members, though not all of the residents by any means work there.
Rather, these people work at their own chosen professions, if there is a need for them and a place in the economy. And if the community requires a skill not present among residents, employees will be brought in from outside.
People are paid for their work, and aside from certain payments they have voted to make to the entire community for roads,etc., own their homes and cars, live in individual houses with their children, and can make changes and improvements to them as they wish.
Yet this is still a collective, where people can go to eat in the cafeteria if they wish rather than shopping and cooking for themselves, and where they are part of something close to a purely democratic society, or so it seems from the limited exposure I have had to this way of life the past couple of days.
In addition to my lesson in modern collectivism, I spent a few hours in an outstanding museum of the holocaust, built by survivors and their descendants themselves.
It is called The Ghetto Fighters' House Museum, and is located in Western Galilee. It sits adjacent to the Beit Lohamei Haghetaot, a kibbutz founded by Holocaust survivors, including those who survived the Warsaw Uprising.
Like everyone else of my generation in the States, I was foggy on what went on in the Underground in the Warsaw ghetto and elsewhere during that period, but this museum offered three or four floors packed with particulars about those people--their names, their deeds, even their actual testimony.
I learned that women of the Ghetto as well as the men resisted actively and were feared by the German forces.
In the exhibit on the "Final Solution," I saw the only known photographs of the actual gassing of people in Auschwitz, surreptitiously snapped by inmates. And I listened to as much as I could stomach of the testimony of a survivor who had served as a Jewish policeman of sorts in the camp, forced to dupe inmates, leading them to their deaths in the showers and gas trucks.
After a couple of hours of this, my body felt heavy and my mind as well.
We walked up to the roof, where we surveyed a panorama of the entire region , the kibbutz, the sea, the Lebanese border off in the distance, which was not all that distant, all things considered.
After living in such a large country as the US, coming here takes some adjustment in scale.
Tomorrow I head back for the final section of my trip, before I resume my life at home.
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