Israel: Part One

A Jerusalem Sketch

Israel's hot.  It's brown and messy with unpolished silver, hot tea sipped in glass cups... that kind of thing.

Israel's a big flirt.  Paris flirts too, but Paris is sluttier.

Israel's mystical and grungy.  It's four cardboard walls stapled together and somehow it stands straight up.

Israeli soldiers, in their muddy green outfits, red berets, pants tucked into their shoe-shined boots, and a rifle criss-crosses their chest.  And through all my traveling, never have I met people more devoted to their country.

It's mismatched, biblical ruins on the street-sides and shawarma.  It's quartered and sectioned-off and there's no real explanation to this controversial parcel of land, the approximate size of New Jersey.

It's Israel... and it is said that my father's father stood on a corner, in his Eastern European shtetl of Antepol, Poland, and, way before 1947 and the Six Day War, he spoke passionately about returning to the homeland.  And in these shtetles, Hebrew was the language you studied, but Yiddish was the language you spoke, but he defied that, on a soapbox, in the middle of the square, speaking in Hebrew, telling the people to go to Israel.  And that's what Hilda says.  Hilda said, "he had a million dollar brain with a ten cent screw."  He spoke in Hebrew, a little before Hertzl, and he never went.

I come from seven or eight generations of Rabbis, this lineage of clergymen... it's the family business.  And then my father, with five daughters and no sons... no Rabbis to continue the familial tradition.  I go to Israel with Birthright, at first, one week and a half, and then travel this country for about a month after wards, maybe a little less.

And there's Jerusalem.  It's the biblical city with white buildings that look like chalk, dotting brown mountainsides, and old patchwork stones.  Clotheslines zig-zag in the distance.  And Old Jerusalem, the tour-guides with their red flags and the tourists with fanny packs and orthotic sandals, is over-crowded. Sight-seers and religious zealots jam-packed into this small city.  It's extremism to the max with black burkas and white tzit tzit.  Of course, it's overwhelming and it gives you a panic attack to stand in the center; your clothes cling to you, drenched in sweat, as swarms of people swish past.

The Kotel, this Western Wall, King Solomon's temple, the ideal Masonic form, with pigeons cooped inside gaps in the wall, looking down and cooing.  Folded paper crammed between the slabs, and green moss spilling over.  It's still chaos because there's singing and praying and people walking backwards.  Squat women with long black skirts touch it, their head turned down, bawling.  It's the people, rocking back and forth.  It's the plastic white lawn chairs and it's the pigeons.  First, you wait in line and people cut in front of you, but you wisen up and elbow your way up to the front.  You face the slabs of weathered stone and you're so close you can kiss it.  You look up at this wall and marvel, "This was in the Bible."  (I never read the Bible; I studied it, but that's it.)  And when I'm at this wall, which I studied for countless years in grade school (with pop quizzes and finals), all the sounds hush and I squeeze my folded paper into a crease between two stones.  There's this buzz, like a television set to mute, and this static.  This is my moment with the wall, white pigeons staring down.  When I'm done, I walk backwards because that's what they tell me to do.  "Never," they say, "have your back turned to the wall."

And there's the shuk, the public market, with dates and fruit and nuts, haggling, no plastic bags, and no standard health practices.  The orthodox and the secular, scrambling for last-minute deals, before the Shabbos.

And there's the Dead Sea, it burns your scabs as you float.  Sulphur baths that smell like rotten eggs.  You pay for entry and then you take a shuttle, but I walk because the shuttle just left... and there are signs, water-marks where the sea used to be, and I walk past "1999" and "2000" and then, as it gets closer to the stinging water, "2009" and "2010."  It's too much salt for life to exist...the lowest elevation on this planet.  It's a good 15 minute walk.  And soon, this narrow strip of water will dry up.  You finally reach the water, and people float by you.  And just across the way, not so far-off, there's Jordan.

So, it starts with birthright, traveling alongside forty-or-so Jewish young adults, still gangly and still baby-faced.  It's ten days, going from one place to the next, sitting in an air-conditioned bus, as this massive vehicle snakes around narrow cliffs.  It's hyper-accelerated and it's like speed-dating.  There's no time to sleep or really connect or process.  This is the Wailing Wall and this is the Dead Sea and this is King David's toilet.  And it's a ten day blur of name games and icebreakers.  There's the girl who, every two days, is with a different fellow, and she leaves a messy trail of boys in her wake.  And there are two religious kids and there are cliques.

With no time to waste, ten days later, after beckoning my fellow birthrighters farewell at the airport, I'm hopping trains to Haifa with Tzlil, the armed guard.  It's Goldstars at the pub and the next morning, just before she drops me off at the bus station (where, for the first time in ten days, I'm all alone and my bus is late), I meet her grandma.  She's a holocaust survivor from Hungary and she can't speak English and I can't speak Hebrew, but I like her.  She feeds me fiber cereal.