About a week in Israel

In the movies, the people who talk to god or to whom god speaks are usually in the insane asylum scenes. Here, they run the whole show. Alright, maybe not the whole show, but they do a lot better than a padded room.

I was told that in Israel, Haifa is a city of work, Tel Aviv is a city of play, and Jerusalem is a city of prayer. That does seem to be the case. I spent the majority of this first week of Israel in Jerusalem and religion is much more visible here than it was in Tel Aviv. I see the ultra-orthodox Jews everywhere, black hats and all, as well as the less orthodox who stick to yarmulkes and the occasional tzitzit hanging out from their otherwise modern clothing. Also ever-present are the soldiers, most of whom look incredibly young to me to be toting around assault rifles wherever they go. I have seen that before so I am used to it, but I had dinner one night with two Austrian tourists who did a double-take when three soldiers with rifles sat down next to us to eat their falafel sandwiches.

Once in a while you see a soldier with earlocks who looks Haredi. Haredi is a word I hadn't really heard much until the last year or two of my life. For those who don't know, it refers to the most orthodox Jews. The word is a Hebrew translation of "orthodox" and apparently it is understood to mean "one who trembles in fear of god." These are the Jewish people who in New York I would've usually called Hassidic, which turns out to be a subset of Haredi belief depending on who you ask. A real look at the Haredi culture here and around the world is probably beyond the scope of this blog, or at least this blog entry, but I can share at least two anecdotes my cousin Sonia shared with me.

The Haredi apparently don't have to work or go into the army here. Sometimes they do, but most of the time they do not. This upsets some of the non-Haredi, religious or otherwise. So my cousin was in line at the gas station waiting for a pump to be free while the Haredi guy in front of her decided that he didn't like the job the gas station attendant had done cleaning his windshield. He was taking his time arguing with the guy that he should have done a better job while people waited in line to fill up their cars and go to work. So Sonia yells out the window that the guy should move so she can go to work and pay taxes so he can get his check at the end of the month which all non-working Haredi get so they can ostensibly spend their days studying the Torah and otherwise fulfilling their religious duty, which apparently many of them don't even do. So the guy turns red and gets out of the way and then motions for her to pull over after she's filled up, which she does, and they have a discussion in which he says he's offended by what she said, and she said well it's true, and you should get a job and work like the rest of us. He eventually says that she's taught him something and that he's gonna go home and get a job. She offers him her number so he can call her and let her know when that happens. He declines.

On the other side, another time she was at the bus station and saw a soldier who had earlocks and said she was surprised to see him cause there aren't so many Haredi who would go into the army. He said he decided to do it cause he thought it was right. As a result, his family disowned him for no longer being Haredi. They sat Shivah for him, meaning they mourned for seven days as if he were dead. Now he no longer has contact with his family. Apparently there are several organizations to help people in this situation, and he was in touch with one of them, though Sonia again offered her phone number to the guy if he should want to come for a holiday or the sabbath or something like this. What is the mentality of a person who would disown their own child for something like this? I will never understand it in my entire life.

By the way, the crazy people who talk to god aren't just Jewish, there are plenty of others all living within the city limits here, but that's hardly news. Let's move on to other things.

I visited Yad Vashem, the Holocaust Memorial museum which was needless to say a very heavy thing to see, but of course also very important. It's a really well put-together exhibit with tons of information, displays, pictures, videos, and artifacts that takes you from before the war until the present day. If anybody should find themselves in Israel, it's something you have to see. I spent a lot of time there and even with as much as I have learned about the Holocaust over the course of my life, there were several new things I didn't know. I'm going to write about two horrible things I learned, which if you don't want to read you can skip the next paragraph.

In the videos there were survivors telling parts of their stories. The two main "oh my god" moments that stood out were children, often infants being ripped out of their mothers' arms, thrown into pits, and blown up with hand grenades. The other was a story of a man who stood next to his uncle on a pile of dead bodies in a mass grave, blindfolded, as they were about to be executed. His uncle heard the order about to be given and started to sing a Jewish prayer loudly called Shemah Yisrael before the gunfire rang out. The survivor telling the story was a kid when this happened, and he fell down on top of the bodies where he laid for an unknown period of time, apparently uninjured. Finally when the noise had stopped, he started to move. A hand grabbed his ankle. It was another kid who was somehow uninjured. They had missed them. They laid in the pile of dead bodies until they somehow were able to escape, though the video didn't let them explain where they'd gone immediately after escaping the pit. There were multiple stories of people who survived a firing squad like this. Can you imagine living your entire life with a memory like this?

Alright, so you get the idea of Yad Vashem. I went to the Israel Museum later. I saw fragments of the Dead Sea Scrolls. FYI, when you walk in the main Dead Sea Scroll museum, there is a dramatically placed display in the center of the room in which a scroll wraps around the entire display. This is not real, it is a reproduction. The guard even thinks it's real, or at least felt like telling me it was, but it is obviously not when you look closely. If you go off to the sides however, there are many real fragments of the scrolls in secondary displays. Also in the museum, there is an incredible archeological exhibit of various things dug up in this neighborhood. I don't think I was anything that was less than 2000 years old. In fact there were many artifacts between 4000 and 6000 years old, and they look practically new. It is amazing how many items like this there were, and how well-preserved or at least cleaned-up they are. Two other amazing things in the museum were the Jewish Art and Culture section, and within that section, I particularly enjoyed the section on Hebrew Manuscripts. There was a video showing the intricate process necessary to write the Hebrew Calligraphy, then to create dyes and inks to color letters, then to attach gold sheets and hand-paint additional ornaments on each page and letter. Here is one of the books I saw.

I spent a few days walking around modern Jerusalem, which is filled with clean streets, shops, restaurants, and an interesting pedestrian friendly nightlife district. I also wandered through various residential neighborhoods. Ohel Moshe is one of the first neighborhoods people moved into when they moved out of the walls of the Old City. En Karen is a former Arab Village, and when all the Arabs left during the war in 1948, other people moved in and now it is an exclusive and expensive community filled with a few restaurants, galleries, and many churches. There is also a monastery and Russian Church there hanging over the whole community which sits on hillsides right within view of Yad Vashem. In my travels around Jerusalem's more modern neighborhoods, I also stopped in and paid a visit to every vegetarian restaurant in the city. I met a woman from Calcutta who runs one of the two vegetarian Indian restaurants here. She has been living in Israel for a long time and decided there was a lack of Indian vegetarian food. Her restaurant and one other vegetarian place are right in the middle of the Mahane Yehuda market, a wonderful market of fruits, vegetables, bakeries, and places selling all other kinds of foodstuffs which are spread out for you to see. Fresh spices, juices, and yarmulkes among other toys and knick-knacks are also available. The market was fantastically clean and a joy to walk around. If I lived in Jerusalem, I'd shop at this market regularly. All the produce here in general seems to be incredibly fresh and the locals often talk about how much better it tastes than elsewhere. Maybe the secret to superior hummus and falafel is not the recipe, but the ingredients.

I spent two nights in Tel Aviv. I stayed at my cousin Avishay's place in a suburban part of Tel Aviv. We had dinner with my cousin Yoav and several of his friends to celebrate his wife Karen's birthday. The restaurant was outside of Tel Aviv in a mall looking out at the Mediterranean Sea. After dinner, I walked with Avishay and his girlfriend by the water and we studies the numerous yachts and fancy houses down by the port. The next day I visited almost every vegetarian restaurant in Tel Aviv, first stopping at Buddha Burger, a must-visit according to an Israeli friend, and then following the trail through the entire downtown area. That evening I met with my friend Mona, a Couchsurfer and Tel Aviv resident who assures me that if I were to one day live in Israel for any length of time, I could not stay anywhere but Tel Aviv since it is the New York of Israel, and she is probably right. I saw almost none of the religious influences that are everywhere in Jerusalem. Mona ferried me around on the back of her scooter, the first time I've ridden on the back of one since maybe Cambodia or Taiwan. There is something about the breeze as you ride through the city with nothing between you and and instant death but the skill of the driver who was in Nascar in a previous life and the ridiculous helmet you've been forced to wear of which I will never get tired. We went to a bar which I will consider "The Room" of Tel Aviv and another with chairs and tables on the impossibly fine sand maybe 50 feet away from the water. She also walked me around and pointed out all of the old buildings which were being turned into new buildings and sold or rented for outrageous prices. That being said, her apartment was much larger and the price much less outrageous than anything you'd find in New York, and that's in what seemed to me to be a very convenient and nice neighborhood in which to live. So when I come back to Israel, I'm probably living in Tel Aviv, though I will visit Jerusalem on the weekend, at least, after Shabbos is over.

Incidentally, the weekend here is not Saturday and Sunday. They work on Sunday. They have Friday and Saturday off. So Thursday really is the new Friday in Israel. Also interesting, they turned the clocks back here last week. The reason they do this is because of the Yom Kippur fast. If they did not turn the clock back, then apparently even though the fast is 25 hours no matter what, you wouldn't really get to sleep for one of those hours. So you are fasting for the same amount of time, but you are sleeping for an extra hour. Or something. This has apparently been going on for a while, but they argue about how retarded it is every year I am told.

So now I'm back in Jerusalem. I had a restful Shabbos and Yom Kippur. I went to Shul on Friday night for Kol Nidrei, but that was enough for me and I slept in on Saturday. Those last two sentences probably make no sense to my non-Jewish friends. Today I went into the city and explored one of the neighborhoods I talked about above. I also met some Couchsurfers unintentionally while visiting the Supreme Court and the Knesset, two places I hadn't really planned to visit but turned out to be really interesting. I caught English tours at both places and learned quite a bit about the Judicial and Legislative systems here. Then with the two German folks I met, we walked around a bit and I got to be a tour guide in a city I've only been in for a week, but hey, it's been a busy week. Now I'm back and tomorrow morning I'm going to Jordan, cause in this entire week nobody has tried to rip me off and that situation needs to be remedied immediately.