big city life

exposed. that is the feeling that builds each time i ascend the hill into Jerusalem. yesterday we moved out of our apartment in Netivot, and moved into an apartment on the hebrew university campus on Har Hatzofim, Mt. Scopus. i always feel a bit uneasy here, like i'm one tiny piece in a 10,000 piece jigsaw puzzle, probably the number of people who live in the area.

i am sad to leave netivot too soon. it is the first time i can remember being sad to leave a place since we moved when i was five, from Waldwick to Ridgewood. otherwise, it has always been the right time to leave. i felt very appreciated. but my presence was also symbolic, and that's exactly why it was so much appreciated. like Roman, one of our Atidim students, told the Board of Governors of the Jewish Agency this Monday, "Because they're [Jeff and myself] here, we know that someone out there in the world, someone in the United States, is thinking about Israel, and about Israelis, and about us." in a country as solitary and enemy-locked as Israel, these kind of partnerships are an essential kind of support, and something that is totally unique, in my experience, to the international jewish community. (i will perhaps write another entry about guiding a tour for the Board of Governors. sorry, dad, if you think this means i've been brainwashed.)

as i rode into jerusalem yesterday, i felt it was a big city life too much for me, a small-town girl from the South, which feels like home. they say the desert is the place to find God. when you're out in the desert, there is nothing to insulate you, no shadow, even, to hide behind. you are naked under a vast, stretched-taut dome of sky. an unambiguous sky one moment storming, one moment blaring sunshine; one day winter, the next day summer. but it is in jerusalem, the city of air, where i feel equally exposed and an intense anxiety of influence--the spirits of the sages and characters who have lived in jerusalem weigh me down as i walk, loafing into the city in jeans and a woven shirt, carrying a laptop and box full of dishes. there is tension in the air, especially on har hatzofim, an israeli educational shrine surrounded by Arab villages.

on sunday i begin three intensive weeks of text study at Pardes, an orthodox-egalitarian yeshiva for English-speakers. i'll keep you updated on how it shapes my religious schizophrenia.

hillula: barbeque or sacrifice?

If I was still clutching at the idea that Judaism was a singular culture, unique among world religions, I lost my grasp today. The past few days have been the celebration of Hillula in Netivot, an annual pilgrimage day when people come from all over the country to pray at the tomb of the revered late rabbi and miracle-worker, the Baba Sale. I saw the devout among us in action--throwing candles into a bonfire, tying a red string around their wrists, buying blessed bottles of water and arak, touching the tomb and praying intently.

I was volunteering, sitting in the ambulance next to the tomb with Shlomi, the driver, listening to Galgalaz* through one ear. Through the other ear I heard a Shas (an ultra-orthodox religious party) campaign song, lyrics set to the primal sounds of Ricky Martin’s “Livin’ la Vida Loca”. Picture the young, black-hat yeshiva guys, stripped down to their four-cornered tzit-tzit undergarments, dancing on top of the van, covering the loudspeakers with plastic when the rain started to fall. This is the kind of excitement Jews can’t display publicly in America, or at least I’ve never seen the likes of it. And this was only one of many vans filled with sticker-friendly Bretslevvers, gregarious Chabadniks, vegan-hippie Carlebachers, and the rest-of-spectrum Israelis who needed to made the trek to ask a special favor. (I realize that I’ve been in Israel a while when I started to identify the different black-hat crews).

But the main reason I take to the keyboard is the sheep. There are Jews who still sacrifice animals!!! Or so one could say. The sheep were dirty, and stupidly tied to a tree in the parking lot. A Carlebacher with a nice rasta hat gave it some grass, but otherwise they only received attention from some little boys, who couldn’t really figure out how to engage them.

Shlomi told me that when someone moves into a new home or requests something from Hashem, they often sacrifice (la-asot korban, he said) a sheep. This baffled me. I was taught that Jews could only make sacrifices at the Temple, on the Temple Mount, in Jerusalem, and they can only be made by the high priests. Since Jews don’t have control over this area, we cannot build the Temple and not make sacrifices, and in 70 CE when the Second Temple was destroyed, prayer replaced sacrifice as devotion to Hashem.

According to yeshivanik friend Feivel, to consider something a real sacrifice it's a really involved process--the high priests have to be pure in their special clothes, anointed in oil, libations of wine have to be made, and it has to be done atthe right time of day, month, year and the right words (it's all in Leviticus, but I don't have a copy on me). Basically, if you slaughter a sheep to dedicate your new home, it's just a barbeque. Thoughts?


*The toe-tapping-est radio station I’ve ever heard. They play the best American and Israeli hits nonstop, and they throw in a few British or French songs too. Try to get it off the Internet!

assimilation and division

assimilation

I was sitting at the table with three women at the Ethiopian Cultural Center here in Netivot at the end of a long day, the first warm day here in a long time. A 17-year-old chick from the Society of the Protection of Nature in Israel (SPNI) wanted to invite the parents of her scouts from this center, so she could meet them, to help herself and their parents become more involved in their after-school activities. As she dictated the invitation in Hebrew, Orit, the 28-year-old assistant director of the community center, transcribed the letter into Amharic, and the girl and I became mesmerized by her script. Orit is one of the women I’ve been tutoring in English, so to see her writing in her third language, in her third alphabet (which is of course her first language and first alphabet) was pretty impressive.
Orit couldn’t remember the word for “nature.” The girl weeded through her own environmental vocabulary, but Orit couldn’t remember how to say “animals” either. She consulted with Ahuva, the center director and Amharic teacher, who was also sitting at the table with us, but Ahuva pshahed her, saying she was the one who actually attended school in Ethiopia and she should remember! After a few more consultations, they transliterated the Hebrew.
Ahuva came to Israel on Operation Shlomo (which I think was the 1993 airlift of Jews from Ethiopia to Israel) at the age of 14. Now she’s 26 and is the Amharic teacher here at Merkaz Orchani. But she said the kids aren’t that interested in learning, that she’s teaching the alphabet to all the age levels (Learning the alphabet doesn’t seem that easy; there’s a different character for every consonant + vowel combination--at least 115, I would guess). á la Hebrew school in America, assimilation breeds apathy.

division

At Bet Sefer Mamlachti (secular high school), we had a great discussion based on whether or not the group agreed with the following statement: I think there’s an unhealthy divide between religious people and secular people in Israel. Six of seven answered with a vehement affirmative.

They talked about the prejudices on both sides, the problem of growing up separated by school and neighborhood, and the problems of hypocrisy, disrespect, and violence, which surface time and time again, even in a small town like Netivot. One of the kids in our group said that when his uncle drove through the ultra-orthodox part of town on Shabbat, they stoned his car and broke a window. Even in Netivot!

Then it was time to begin our Telenovela Mamlachti project. I wanted the kids to write soap-opera-style scenes based on some scenarios I came up with. One scenario was that a guy and girl met in a chat room and wanted to meet for a date. Upon meeting, they realized that one was Jewish and one was an Arab Israeli. One student, the daughter of Russian immigrants, remarked, “Wow, that would make a good scene. It’s a really realistic situation. But I would never ever date an Arab. I wouldn’t even date a Moroccan.” She’s fair blonde maiden, and I guess for her, anyone dark is Other.

That same day there were 200+ casualties at the evacuation of Amona, a Jewish settlement in the West Bank, near Jerusalem. Clashes between religious Zionists and soldiers lasted all day, and many were hospitalized. Some are still in Hadassah Hospital- Ein Kerem, the same facility where Sharon is being kept alive. I wonder if Sharon knows that his Pinui plan has come to blows. I’m glad that the intra-Israel conflicts don’t make the world news. Somehow I think the world somehow still sees Israel as united, and Israel needs that image to stay strong.

journey to ashdod

If you are planning to leave Eilat, you should get your bus ticket from the ticket counter in advance. During peak season, three days in advance. In my case, I only waited one hour for the next bus.
But I didn’t push my way through the line craftily enough, and I was the last one on. It was a 3-hr+ ride on the floor of the bus. There was an extra seat up front near the driver, and a black-haired, dark-skinned lady occupied it, joking for most of the ride with the driver. I sat beside her on the floor, and when an old Phillipino woman got on mid-ride, she took my place, and I crunched myself into the center aisle.
So when we pulled up to the station in Beersheva, I jumped off the bus and ran away. As soon as I entered the shared taxi (sherut) I would take home, the last one of the night, I remembered that I had left my backpack behind on the bus. “Fuck!” I yelled, just in case I hadn’t announced myself as an American. The sherut driver said he would wait for me, and I ran out to look for any sign of the bus.
No sign. But I discovered the black-haired, dark-skinned woman buying a coffee in the bus station. I related my dilemma, and asked if she knew the bus driver personally. She said he was a friend of her friend, and my mind now functioning on Israeli speed, I asked her to take my number, and call me with the number of the bus driver. I had to catch my sherut.
When she called, I was on the sherut, hot corn in one hand, trying to take down the phone number with the other. She spoke so fast I couldn’t get a thing. The boy across the aisle offered to translate.* He gave me the number for the bus company, and told me that when he forgot his bag, he found it later. When we came to talking, I learned that he was studying to be a chef in Eilat, and home on a three-day vacation.
Just as I was patting myself on the back for writing the number of my Israeli cell phone on my backpack, the phone rang. It was the driver. Speaking at a mile-a-minute, he gave me the number of the Central Bus Station in Ashdod, and said the bag was waiting there. “Yesh!” I sighed. (In Hebrew this literally means “there it is” but it also bears a resemblance to “Yes!” said with a lisp, so it’s still funny when I hear it).
The next day at the Ma’agalim School, I asked my friend Zahava if she would call and inquire about the bag. She did, and told me it was being held by the guard at the mall, adjacent to the Beersheva Central Bus Station, where I had originally forgotten it.
Without thinking twice, I trekked during a my long lunch break to Beersheva, to try to retrieve the bag. Well, neither the guard nor the lost and found at the mall knew anything about it, and the guy in charge of the bus station’s lost and found only works two days/week, and this was not one of his days.
When I got home, it occurred to me that Zahava had called the Ashdod Central Bus Station, and she had confused it with Beersheva’s, since both are adjacent to malls. I reprimanded myself for idiocy, and departed for Ashdod, a shipping city on the Mediterranean, south of Tel Aviv.
When I made it there, the ticket-seller closed his window and took me up to the drivers’ lounge. I looked around at the diversity of men--thin and fat, hair covered by kepot and frosted tips, men drinking black coffee and men drinking Nescafé. But they all wanted to know my story, and they crowded around to come to my aid.

“Why did you forget it?” one asked.
“I guess I’m a little crazy,” I responded.
“Not crazy, just confused.” he comforted me.

This, I thought, is the ultimate volunteer placement. There could be no greater service to the Jewish people than to teach Israeli bus drivers English. They would be able to communicate more easily with new immigrants and tourists, it would increase ridership and help decrease air pollution, and increase tourism to Israel in general. I could think of no better place for people like me to become immersed in Israeli culture than the bus drivers’ lounge. It could really use a female presence to freshen it up. A fabulous new aspiration.
Anyway, Avi, the bus driver who had driven me from Eilat to Beersheva, was perchance in the lounge at the time, and he told me he’d take me to where the bag was being held. I was expecting him to walk me around the building. He unlocked the bus and we stepped inside. He asked,

“Do you have some time?”
“Well, yes, I think so,” I answered.
“I just have to pick up some people.”

Before I could surmise what this actually meant, we had begun a one-and-one-half hour circuit. A complimentary city tour for a visitor to Ashdod like myself.
Finally he drove to the old bus depot, and there at the entrance my bag was waiting. I jumped out and grabbed it, and Avi asked if I wanted a drink. I asked for a water, the default drink that I hope allows the buyer to see that he’s only satisfying my primal survival need to quench my thirst and nothing more.
“I’ll take you back to the Central Bus Station, but I first have to pick up some girls from school.”
“Alright,” I said. He was doing me a favor and I had little choice.

We swung by a Haredi Girls’ School, and about two-thousand small girls in their long navy skirts and blue Oxford shirts filled the bus. A particularly brash one, aged about nine, with a long caramel-colored ponytail hanging down her back asked if she could sit next to me.
“Of course.”
“Are you the bus driver’s wife?” she asked, as, from their perspective, this was the only probable reason I would have been alone on the bus with him.
I related my story, and she practiced her knowledge of English and Spanish on me, while she directed the bus driver where to turn.
“Driver, left! Driver right at the light!” It’s a peculiar thing that I’ve never traveled anywhere else where it’s customary to address the driver as “Driver”. I guess everywhere else I’ve been people have addressed him as “Excuse me.”
The school had sent two adults with the girls, but both had exited at the first stop. The sun had just emerged from behind a cloud, and the bus had suddenly transformed into a jungle. Students were pouncing on each other, slithering down the middle aisle, swinging from safety handles like they were on a tire playground, walking around, carrying smaller girls, and standing so close to the doors before exiting that it’s a wonder their fingers didn’t get clipped.
The bus driver had already asked me how often I went to Eilat, and said that next time he would invite me, and I could stay with him at his hotel. As he was at least twenty years my senior, I couldn’t quite figure out if he was joking or not. But he had indeed gone out of his way to help me, so I was planning only to give him the wrong phone number, not to reprimand him or spill anything on him.
Then, just before the last group of girls were planning to get off, we passed the Central Bus Station, and I asked if he could briefly stop, and I made a tactful and timely escape.
800 meters down the road, the beach awaited. So much for the Lost and Found.

*Ask me sometime about a story I wrote in second grade, in which the protagonist saves the lives of her family by having secretly learned how to speak German. Ask also about my theory of foreshadowing reality, developed c. age 12.

**ars or arsim is a pejorative term that describes Sephardic males who wear tight clothing, bleach the tips of their black hair, wear heavy silver and gold jewelry, and ridiculous, pimp-worthy sunglasses year-round. It also denotes the pushy, come-on behavior affiliated with such fashion, found in all Mediterranean cultures.