The condensation from my water bottle drips down between my toes and I adjust my backpack, feeling the sweat congregating in the middle of my back. Someone shouts something at me and motions into the distance, perhaps asking for directions, but I just shake my head and say, in English, “I don’t know.” They force a smile and walk off.
At the Carmel market I point to something that has caught my eye and ask “how much?”
“50 shekel.”
I buy it, but moments later, don’t know why. As I leave, I wonder what it is about this black and white photograph of a Bedouin leading a camel into the dessert that fascinated me so much.
A few days here on my own and I’m already gearing up to leave the steam of Tel Aviv. At the restaurant where I meet my friend, finally seeing a familiar face after days of new introductions to people who intersperse English into their Hebrew solely for my benefit, she tells me she has some news.
“I’ve decided to stay an extra month.”
“Really? You like it that much?”
She doesn’t hear me. “I just sublet this place from a girl on Craig’s List. Did you know they have a Craig’s List for Tel Aviv? I’m supposed to meet her to give her the rent later today. Minutes from the beach.”
“What about everything back home?”
“I guess I’m just not ready to leave.”
She sits with her side to me, in profile, and looks out over the street, her eyes brightening greedily to absorb the view, all of it. More than anything, I wish I could love it as much as she does.
Walking back to where I’m staying in Neve Tzedek – the posh, West Village-y part of Tel Aviv – I pass Arab workers on scaffolding, scaling the exterior shell of a hollowed-out brick building undergoing renovations. They watch me as I ascend the sloped street on my way to the new glittering residential tower at the top. I drift past in a haze of uneasiness. The sound of hammering and sawing shakes the windows of the apartments around me but then lulls into a distant trickle of vibration as I turn the corner.
In the room where I sleep, with my green suitcase throw open in the corner, I consider the painting that hangs over the bed. It’s abstract, I can’t make out what it’s supposed to be, but the first name of the artist, it’s the name of the girl who I’ll always associate with this city. It seems too perfect how she has followed me here like this, quiet and subtle in a way that reminds me of what I used to call her in my own head – “little mouse” – because of the hushed presence she always seemed to have around me. I think about this guy I know from home, an amateur psychic of sorts, who would label this as one of life’s many synchronicities. Inevitably, I spend a considerable amount of time dwelling on it.
The room’s floor-to-ceiling windows face west towards the water, and as the sun sets over the Mediterranean I’m given a view of the entire gleaming coast, from Old Jaffa up towards the northern parts of the shore. I throw myself onto the bed under the painting and open the journal I haven’t written in at all during this trip. Nestled between the pages, at the point where I last visited the words, is the postcard the girl gave me a few years earlier.
“It’s this nice little café in Jerusalem,” she said at the time, after just having returned from a visit of her own.
“Exactly the type that you like, in a little nook you wouldn’t otherwise notice. And it doubles as a bookstore. You should go there when you have a chance.”
“No way,” I responded. “We’ll go together. I’ll take you there on a date.”
She rolled her eyes at me, a move that, at some point in our relationship, became automatic for her. “We both know that’s never going to happen.”
I stare at the card, flipping it over in my hands, half expecting to find some personal message scrawled on the back. It remains blank, just as it has always been, and I wonder why she never wrote anything on it. The edges have become fuzzy from wear, from its use as a bookmark, a placeholder.
Out in the hallway, I hear my host coming back into the apartment with her boyfriend. She says something I can’t make out. He laughs. They chat with each other in alternating languages – she in English to him, he in Hebrew to her.
“Tmol Shilshom,” I say out loud. The name of the café.
The next day, I decide, I’ll go to Jerusalem.
Tmol Shilshom lies hidden at the end of an alleyway that cuts away from the busy Ben Yehuda area. I only find it after I ask around, after I speak with a few locals who all claim full knowledge but each of whom only adds a piece to my finding the spot. A staircase lined with hanging plants leads up from the pock-marked streets into a courtyard with slivers of shade and a wide pocket of sun pressing down onto the middle.
I find a seat just at the top of the stairs under a piece of the overhanging roof and take out the postcard. Rubbing at it absent-mindedly, I try drying the sweat that has worked its way through my pocket and contributed to the warp in the cardboard. I notice that the picture on the front side seems to show this same courtyard, except the image is doctored with brightness, glowing in suffused color. It doesn’t look right.
Glancing around me, I wonder where she sat when she came to this place. The seat I’m in, she might have used this exact one at some point, our contact separated by the distance of a few months, a few years, of both consequential and inconsequential occurrences, most of which I can’t remember anymore. We didn’t speak, and then we did, until we didn’t again, and I count that it’s been eight months since the last time, on the phone, with me on a Chelsea street surrounded by hipsters spilling out of art galleries, holding cheap beers and cocky grins.
“This is all wrong,” she said at the time.
She was right.
“What’s happening between us?” she continued.
I didn’t know. “I don’t know.”
“Nothing.” She said it, but I thought the same thing. “Then why keep doing this to ourselves?”
The hang up, the end, capped with a forgettable flurry of text exchanges for a few late-night hours a couple of weeks later, felt like a sigh of conclusion. And yet now all I can think about is how we never managed to be here together, how I took a postcard from her hand and buried it away between dead words, letting years pass with shoulder shrugs and passivity and noncommittal responses to her expectant, wide-eyed pleas for me to notice us. All of it, a dismissed opportunity, so that I’m left with just this picture that’s too cute, too colorful.
I’m busy making the past into something I think it was until a waitress finally notices me and approaches with
a menu.
“Achad?”
“What?”
Another American who can’t speak Hebrew. “One?”
“Yes. Thanks.”
She stalks off and leaves me in the courtyard again. I lean closer to the wall next to me, trying to hide as much of my body under the overhang as I can, away from the exposed sun that’s passing slowly from one side of the Old City to the other. Down below, at the street level, I hear muffled voices, footsteps, and then just the distant tap-tap of work on the rail line that’s supposed to, one day, run down Jaffa St. Then a movement rustles some of the flowers at the bottom of the stairs and I direct my attention at it.
A cheeky smile stretches across her face when she sees me, her eyes narrowed into squinty nonexistence.
“So you made it. I knew you’d find it eventually.” She pulls out the chair on the opposite side of the table and sits down, confident in a way I never remember her being.
I motion to her postcard lying on the table.
“You kept it?” she asks, surprised.
“Of course I did.”
I hold it up so she can see the frayed sides, the evidence of what it has endured over the course of these last couple of years.
She nods sarcastically. “Another story for you to tell.” The smile doesn’t leave her face.
I don’t say anything.
“That’s what it is, isn’t it? A story. You’ll go home and write and brood about it after the fact, when it’s already too late for it to be anything more than your dramatized version of the past.”
“Not always,” I try meekly.
“You still talk to the computer screen when you type? Still make all those faces like you’re having a conversation with it?”
“Maybe,” I answer, feigning shyness. “There isn’t anyone there to watch me and point it out.”
She makes a face and changes the subject. “Ah! So hot.”
“Not as bad as Tel Aviv.”
“Well, nothing is as bad as Tel Aviv.” She fans herself unsuccessfully with her hand and sticks out her tongue for effect.
“Japan. In August. That’s worse than Tel Aviv.”
“Not all of us, sir, have traveled as extensively as you.”
I shrug apologetically. “You should have seen me when I was there, I was like this giant walking around in a tank-top and shorts, popping into art galleries and palaces and getting all these looks from people.”
“Were we even speaking then?”
“You know we were. I called you all the time.”
“I don’t remember…”
“You remember. Come on. I got back and called you when I was outside your apartment. I hid behind the corner on 31st St. What was on that corner? Like some coffee shop or something? A Guy & Gallard! I hid behind the Guy & Gallard and jumped out at you as you were coming up Park, trying to figure out where the heck I was.”
“You’re so weird.”
“You totally find it endearing. Stop acting like you don’t.”
“Maybe I did at some point. Maybe that sort of stuff gets tiring too.”
I look away for a moment, dropping my eyes to my hands with their chapped knuckles and dry cuticles, victims of the sand and sea water.
“Have you been inside?” she says when I don’t respond, when she realizes that my smile is gone and I can’t look her in the eyes. “It’s a little library/bookstore sort of thing. But I like it more out here.”
“Coffee?” I ask, trying to match her efforts of pulling us back towards the mundane.
“Yes please.”
I motion to the waitress as soon as I see her again. She stops to take our order.
“One regular iced coffee. Cold coffee. Whatever it’s called. The one with the ice cubes, not the crushed ice thing. I always get those confused. And a second cold coffee with half regular and half decaf. No milk, no-”
“That’s OK,” she interrupts me, “I can order for myself. Besides, I don’t drink that anymore.”
“You always drink that.”
“Not for a while now.” She looks up at the waitress, repeating my order and then adding her own. “Toda.”
“You’ve been good?” I finally ask when we’re alone again, realizing that I don’t know anything about her life over the past few months.
“Yeah, I think so. Mostly good. You?”
“I guess I’m OK. Depends on the day, you know? Like everything else.” I pause. “It’s funny, I actually had a dream about you a couple of nights ago. I think just being in Israel reminds me of you. You float into my consciousness.”
“Well I’m flattered. Do I want to hear this?”
“I’m going to tell you anyway.”
“Of course you are.”
“So in this dream, I find myself in the Upper East Side and I’m just strolling around, which, you know, I don’t usually do.”
“I know. God forbid you should just stroll. Everything has to have a purpose for you.”
“Right, I admit that. I can’t help it sometimes. But, humor me, by some miracle I’m actually doing this strolling and I know that I’m somewhere near where your parents live, just because that’s the sense I’m getting. I don’t see any street signs or anything, but it’s a feeling I have, like in dreams when you just know something without knowing why you know it. I’m strolling. I’m strolling. Nothing is happening. Maybe I start whistling. Doop dee doo. Minding my own business. Strolling.”
“A lot of strolling.”
“Lots. But then eventually I see someone who looks like you, from the back.”
She furrows her eyebrows critically.
“No, not like that, like your hair, and a massive backpack on a small frame. That’s how I remember seeing you so many times, lugging around a crazy backpack. Totally you, with your laptop and huge law books, going to or coming back from studying at some coffee shop. But I’m not sure that it’s you, so I’m all nervous to make a mistake, to come up to some stranger and be like, ‘oh, sorry.’ I would hate that. But at the same time I’m nervous that it is you and that we’ve run into each other so suddenly, unexpectedly, the way we always spoke about, the way we were always scared would happen. No contact for however long and then, BAM, there we are seeing each other again.”
Shouting breaks out somewhere below us and we both turn to listen. It echoes and rises against the tight walls of the alleyway downstairs, and then slips into a dark corner and cuts away. She returns her attention to me.
“So I don’t know what to do, but I just find myself moving closer, coming up next to you. Then you swing around, see me, and your face lights up, maybe despite yourself. You give me a hug, you reach up and kiss me. And everything is just normal. The kiss, it feels familiar, relaxed, like we’ve always just known each other without pause or interruption and everything has always been fine.”
She sits quietly, unsure of whether I’m done.
“And that’s it,” I add. “That’s the dream.”
“What do you want me to say?”
I think about her question. “Nothing I guess. I don’t know. It’s just a dream.”
“You always remember such specific details about your dreams. I don’t know how you do that.”
“Who even knows if that’s how it happened. Maybe I filled in the holes and didn’t realize it. Maybe I made it into what I wanted it to be.”
“Everything is a story with you.” She says it again, without realizing she’s repeating herself.
I start coughing, straightening my body.
“What’s wrong? You sound awful.”
“I’m fine, just some lingering thing from the trip. I always end up getting sick when I come here.”
“I know. You’re a mess.”
“I hope they let me onto the plane.”
“Maybe they won’t let you leave. Keep you in quarantine and then make you do Army service.” She laughs.
“Maybe you have the black lung, like I had a few years ago.”
“You coughed for over three months. Maybe I got it from you back then and I’ve been a carrier ever since. How do I get it to go away? What’s the cure?”
“Well,” she says, giving it some serious thought, “you can do what I did – wait. And then one day you’ll wake up, and it’ll be gone. You just need to give it some time.”
The door to the café opens behind me and I turn to see if it’s the waitress coming with our drinks. But she strolls past again with an empty tray.
“Great service,” I say, to no one in particular. Across from me the chair rests against the table, tucked neatly underneath. The postcard starts a mild flutter in response to a breeze that begins to roll through. I put my hand down on it just as it’s about to fly off, returning it to the journal and shutting the pages.
“Mah?” asks the waitress, accidentally overhearing me.
“Nothing,” I respond. “Klum.”
“Ah, good. Very good Hebrew,” she tells me, and then disappears back inside the café.
That night, on the way back to Tel Aviv, I grab a shared-van Sherut. I’m one of the first to board and I have to wait half an hour for it to fill up so that we can leave. In front of me, an Ethiopian man sends text messages and simultaneously smiles at the ones he receives, his phone making an old-fashioned ringing noise every few seconds. Behind, two couples chatter about something. The Russian driver pulls the van out of the lot and immediately starts speeding his way towards the shore. I begin nodding off as soon as we’re outside of the central part of the city, when we hit the snaking downhill slalom that winds its way past sparse Arab villages and the occasional lone walker strolling through the darkness.
I’m pulled back into a droopy-eyed half-consciousness when the voices around me begin rising, becoming accusatory. The van seems to wobble sloppily between the lines of the road and I can’t quite understand what’s happening, or if it’s really happening at all, if this is all just another dream. I hear shouting, and the driver’s voice, defensive. Somewhere in my head a distant panic builds, the idea that he’s falling asleep behind the wheel and will manage to drive us off the road and into some chasm. But the fear is too far off to grasp and I can’t seem to make myself care. My lids fall heavy, resolved to pull me away, return me into the black.
It’s there that I see her again, walking around in the lobby of her apartment building wearing sweat pants and a t-shirt, relaxed and indifferent. I arrive attired for the evening, ready to go out. There’s the sense that I’m not there for her, that she shouldn’t see me like this. I try hiding, but unsuccessfully, slipping off into the mail room only to find her coming directly towards me, knowing in the way I’m dressed that there’s a whole life I’m leading which she isn’t a part of. She flashes a polite smile that shrouds her surprise and disappointment. I just nod and neither of us says a word. We both disappear.
I’m awake again when the Sherut arrives at the Central Bus Station in Tel Aviv. The passengers disembark and the driver acts apologetic. Everyone seems to be friends again and some of guys pat the driver on the back, laughing everything off.
Outside I find myself among lazing cabbies in lawn chairs and dark men with sweat-glistened faces sprawled out between puddles of motor oil and melting ice cream. Some women watch me pass and lick their lips, shouting something when I ignore them and cast my eyes to the street. A set of people with beers in hand ask me something but I have a hard time understanding them and leave in an apologetic flurry.
A block away from the station and Southern Tel Aviv opens into an abandoned expanse of discarded corn chip bags and timid blinking lights directing nonexistent cars and pedestrians. I stroll with my hands on the straps of my backpack, occasionally reaching under my shirt to pat at the building sweat. Ahead I spot the towering residential complex where I’m staying, its bright air-conditioned rooms stacked atop the small hill at the head of Neve Tzedek, announcing the transition from low-income sprawl into comfortable gentrification.
It takes me half an hour before I’m finally in the lobby, heading up to my floor. In the room, I find my host making something in the kitchen.
“Hey, how was Jerusalem?”
“It was OK.”
“Just OK?” She takes a bite out of a slice of apple and holds another piece out to me.
“No thanks.” I wave it off. “I don’t know, it was the same I guess. I’ve been there so many times before. It’s becoming just another place I know.”
“That’s good too, no? That it’s so familiar to you.”
“In some ways.”
She bites into the apple again. “You didn’t do anything new?”
“I visited a café I’ve never been to.” I drop my bag and pull out my journal, removing the postcard from between the pages.
“Tmol Shilshom,” she says, reading the postcard. “It’s a book you know? By Agnon, a very famous Israeli writer.
I shake my head. “I didn’t know.” And then, “what is it? A name? Does it mean something?”
“It translates as ‘yesteryear.’ Like, ‘the times that have past.’” She hands the card back to me and opens the refrigerator, taking out a carton of eggs. “Want an omelet? I’m going to make one.”
“I’m OK, I ate before I came back.”
“Well let me know if you change your mind.”
I leave her cracking eggs into a bowl and head to my room at the back of the apartment. Inside I strip down from the day and jump into the shower. Afterward I sit down on the bed and take out my journal again, flipping to the fresh page marked by the postcard. I notice that the card itself is beginning to come apart. A fissure down the edge, starting from one frayed corner, is splitting the cardboard in half, separating one side from the other. I squeeze the sides tight between my fingers in an attempt to reunite the pieces, but they separate again as soon as I let go.
Throwing myself back onto the bed, I let the journal and the card fall to my side and I stare up at the ceiling. The balcony door is pulled open and the sea breeze coming off the ocean whips up the curtains so that they twist around themselves, tumbling waves rolling into cartwheels of cotton. The humidity pads my skin with a salty powder and I become conscious of my shower becoming undone.
Tilting my head back so that I’m looking at it upside-down, I focus on the painting hanging over the bed, the one with her name scrawled in the corner. I roll over onto my side and consider the image, trying again to decipher the two black lines gliding across the canvass, mingling at a few points but ending at different ends as accented final swirls that cut back just before falling off the side and onto the wall behind.
It’s now that I finally make out what it is, that I notice the scene of complimentary silhouettes, of a man propping himself up on one arm and using the other to drape over the woman that lies beside him, his eyes tenderly downcast, watching her as she sleeps.
“Tmol shilshom,” I say to myself. The words sit there, alone, like an answer to a question I haven’t been asked.
Sunday, December 6, 2009
Monday, November 30, 2009
Wednesday, November 11, 2009
Tuesday, November 10, 2009
To Stay: Part IV
To Stay: Part I
To Stay: Part II
To Stay: Part III
Back in the city the air suffocates after the clean dryness of the desert. A few of us go to hang out in cafes with poor air-conditioning and dirty bathrooms, discovering how impossible it is to find good iced coffee. Some aren’t coming back on our flight, having made plans to stay after the rest of us are long gone. One guy tosses around the word “aliyah,” saying it with the conviction of someone who, in the course of two weeks, has decided that he needs to move here. He alternates between looking up and checking the text messages that are steadily streaming in from the waitress he picked up on Shenkin Street. A torrid love affair seems to be in the works, with her promising to move to New York until he’s ready to come back to Israel. Another guy, a self-proclaimed master couch surfer, scours websites for places to crash – “Dude, this girl’s an anarchist who likes Capoeira. Perfect!” He has separate plans to go diving in Dahab, compliments of an Israeli relative who seems overly eager to fund his misadventures. I imagine that his trip won’t be complete with at least one scar, or a near-death experience.
Despite myself, I’m jealous of them all. Strange to think that only a few days ago this was the city that I was bursting to escape, where the stench of life and industry mix in a way that reminds me of every other city in the world. And yet now, even though it’s still just as frayed and bruised and unkempt as I remember, I don’t want to go.
I call my uncle on the last day – “I’m sorry we couldn’t spend more time together.” Part of me doesn’t know what we would have done even if we had that time, but I say it anyway because it makes sense in my head.
“Soon. When you come next time.”
“Well,” I break in, “I don’t really know when I’ll be back again.” And it’s true, because now I feel a need to see more of the world before I commit to revisiting the same place that I have already revisited so many times.
I can almost hear him grinning on the other end of the line. Have I said the same thing to him before? Perhaps I have lost all credibility in that regard. “Have a safe flight.”
Back in the hotel as I’m repacking my stuff, I look out the window at the Tel Aviv coastline snaking around some hotels and fading into the black remains of an old nightclub. A little further along, Jaffa peeks out into the sea.
I have so much more that I need to see, to ask, to try to understand. Every person who I pass on the street, who walks by and glances at me, they’re a story I haven’t yet uncovered, a world I still haven’t explored. I’d ask for whatever I could get, maybe just a few more minutes before I have to go. But I’m greedy, and so I want months, years, a lifetime to spend in every seedy corner, every holy nook that I can find. Even then, I don’t imagine that I’ll get this place any better than I do now, the way it picks you up and throws you down and leaves you sad and crazy and happy and confused and angry and scared and hopeful. But maybe I’m OK with that. Maybe I wouldn’t have it any other way.
To Stay: Part II
To Stay: Part III
Back in the city the air suffocates after the clean dryness of the desert. A few of us go to hang out in cafes with poor air-conditioning and dirty bathrooms, discovering how impossible it is to find good iced coffee. Some aren’t coming back on our flight, having made plans to stay after the rest of us are long gone. One guy tosses around the word “aliyah,” saying it with the conviction of someone who, in the course of two weeks, has decided that he needs to move here. He alternates between looking up and checking the text messages that are steadily streaming in from the waitress he picked up on Shenkin Street. A torrid love affair seems to be in the works, with her promising to move to New York until he’s ready to come back to Israel. Another guy, a self-proclaimed master couch surfer, scours websites for places to crash – “Dude, this girl’s an anarchist who likes Capoeira. Perfect!” He has separate plans to go diving in Dahab, compliments of an Israeli relative who seems overly eager to fund his misadventures. I imagine that his trip won’t be complete with at least one scar, or a near-death experience.
Despite myself, I’m jealous of them all. Strange to think that only a few days ago this was the city that I was bursting to escape, where the stench of life and industry mix in a way that reminds me of every other city in the world. And yet now, even though it’s still just as frayed and bruised and unkempt as I remember, I don’t want to go.
I call my uncle on the last day – “I’m sorry we couldn’t spend more time together.” Part of me doesn’t know what we would have done even if we had that time, but I say it anyway because it makes sense in my head.
“Soon. When you come next time.”
“Well,” I break in, “I don’t really know when I’ll be back again.” And it’s true, because now I feel a need to see more of the world before I commit to revisiting the same place that I have already revisited so many times.
I can almost hear him grinning on the other end of the line. Have I said the same thing to him before? Perhaps I have lost all credibility in that regard. “Have a safe flight.”
Back in the hotel as I’m repacking my stuff, I look out the window at the Tel Aviv coastline snaking around some hotels and fading into the black remains of an old nightclub. A little further along, Jaffa peeks out into the sea.
I have so much more that I need to see, to ask, to try to understand. Every person who I pass on the street, who walks by and glances at me, they’re a story I haven’t yet uncovered, a world I still haven’t explored. I’d ask for whatever I could get, maybe just a few more minutes before I have to go. But I’m greedy, and so I want months, years, a lifetime to spend in every seedy corner, every holy nook that I can find. Even then, I don’t imagine that I’ll get this place any better than I do now, the way it picks you up and throws you down and leaves you sad and crazy and happy and confused and angry and scared and hopeful. But maybe I’m OK with that. Maybe I wouldn’t have it any other way.
Monday, November 9, 2009
To Stay: Part III
To Stay: Part I
To Stay: Part II
We leave Jerusalem to head down to the desert and already I can count on one hand the number of days before I’m back on a plane. I guess at how many e-mails will flood into my Blackberry when I have to turn it back on. When I think about what I have learned or come to understand, I realize, with regret, that Israel has only become more confusing than it was when I first got there. I can’t shake the feeling that nothing has been gained.
It’s in the middle of nowhere that we find Yeruham, a development community in which we are scheduled to do volunteer work for the day, help some kids paint a couple of murals on the local community center walls. Yeruham was supposed to become a prime example of how Israelis transform dry, hot nothingness into thriving oasis. When the road to Eilat passes through town you expect big things. Then somebody builds another road, a better road, and they forget to tell anybody that you exist. But somehow, even the forgotten manage.
I’m not into crafts and I’ve never been that good with kids, so I’m just wondering how effective of a staffing selection I’ll be and how many brain cells the paint fumes are going to kill before we’re out of there.
When I ask which colors go where, what the plan for the mural is, Emmanuel tells me to chill the hell out. He’s from Chile, and he talks like a surfer dude. “Just paint man. Just do whatever you feel like. Don’t worry, you’ll see, it’ll turn out great. It’ll be beautiful man.”
A little kid saunters up to me and I figure out I can actually communicate with him because we both speak Russian. We mix some paint, I show him where to add color. Because I don’t get the whole kiddie talk thing we just chat about where he’s from, about his sister who happens to be that little quiet girl with the blonde hair painting at another part of the wall. When I walk away to go check on the other mural, he follows, and asks me to come back to the one he’s at. As we’re leaving this six year-old takes my contact info, my phone number and e-mail address, even though he doesn’t have a computer and asks whether it’s expensive to call New York.
Emmanuel wipes the sweat out of his eyes and scratches his nose with the back of his arm. He puts that same arm around me. “It’s so great you came here man. Maybe it’s no big deal to you, but these kids, they got shit lives some of them, and they’re gonna remember this. Maybe one day you’ll come back with your wife and kids, and you’ll come to see this mural and tell them how you helped paint it. It’s beautiful man.”
That night I sleep for three hours, shacked up in a little bungalow near the back of a tourist-trap Bedouin encampment. I drift off thinking about the community center and the kids we met there. All of it, it makes me angry. This can’t be right. Israel is not supposed to have a southern Tel Aviv with Sudanese refugees who will never become citizens, no matter how hard they work or how much they love the only country that has ever let them be human beings. It’s not supposed to have beggars standing by the Western Wall, or communities with trash piling up in the streets and abandoned Pintos rusting on sidewalks, or concrete walls slashing gray chasms between towns to alleviate the fear of sniper fire and tossed grenades. It’s not supposed to have a Yeruham with a sad little community center that caters to children who beg for a dozen Americans to notice them for an afternoon. I can’t help but feel that it’s all so ridiculous, so painfully insignificant, the idea that we made any sort of difference by spending a couple of hours with them.
It’s still dark when the alarm on my rented phone goes off and I don’t remember the last time I’ve seen the sun rise. I’m up within minutes, liberated from the need to shower or put on deodorant or comb my hair, still slightly stained from the mural paint. As I stroll away from where the rest of my group is still asleep, I find myself staring off towards the dull glow that’s growing behind the distant mountains and I hold my breath.
I can’t stand this place of contradiction, where a historically-imbued, genetic Godliness lives in an arranged marriage with the inevitability of human imperfection. And yet in some strange way, in a way I can’t really explain, that contradiction is also what makes everything here feel so alive. In that moment, I’m perhaps the biggest hypocrite of them all, and I don’t want to be anywhere else in the world. It’s like the lover you spurn, but then come rushing back to because you just can’t keep yourself away. You chide yourself for the reckless abandon with which you behave, but you simultaneously understand that without that spinning head of emotion, you wouldn’t be as invested, you wouldn’t care as much as you do.
I exhale when the beams hit my face, reminding me of the stubborn realities of what I’ve seen, of how much is wrong and of all the work that needs to be done. And still I smile. Maybe Emmanuel was just some guy who didn’t know what he was talking about. Or maybe he was right, and the best we can hope for is believing in what we do, and believing that in the end, it could just end up being beautiful.
As the rest of the people from my group wake up, I’m pulled into conversations that displace everything I’m thinking about. The day is spent trekking under the sun as it indiscriminately throbs heat, asserting itself a little more with every minute, draining out of us every ounce of water we put in. I glance over at our Israeli guide squinting beneath the brim of her fisherman’s hat. Our eyes meet and I realize that we haven’t really spoken since that night in Jerusalem. It’s something that just happened, this weirdness that has grown between us over the last few days. I brush it aside and approach anyway.
“What’s it like? Growing up here I mean.” I toss out my question awkwardly, too quickly given the fact that we’ve been silent with each other for some time now. There’s a sadness in my voice, a sense that this is a place of lost childhoods, evenings filled with hushed tensions that cartoon nightlights cannot ease.
“Like anywhere else I guess.” She answers quickly, automatically. She looks at me in a way that reads “oh you Americans” even though her English attests to the fact she was raised by parents more American than my own, even though she’s never lived anywhere else.
When she was 17 she heard the explosion on the way to her medic volunteer job in her hometown of Efrat. Seconds later, arriving on the scene, she found the body parts of the teenager who had blown himself up and the mangled body of the friend she worked with.
I imagine what it must have been like. I imagine her wondering about it afterwards, about the little things that kept her from making it on time, which delayed everything just a little bit. After years of recovery, the friend is alive but has a permanent limp. Other friends have died, either at war or from shrapnel closer to home.
She smiles but it comes out forced, adding a shrug that’s meant to brush something off, maybe the discomfort of the memory or the discomfort of having to speak with me. For the first time I realize that she’s a woman already, a woman still trapped in a girl’s body. I see that when she laughs with abandon, when her eyes shrink into little lines with deep crow’s feet at their ends. I see that when she blushes crimson, shy at the lighthearted flirting that has managed to sneak into our conversation yet again, even while we’re discussing something serious, even while in the back of my mind I still remember the make and model of her boyfriend’s motorcycle. I notice the lime green socks peeking out from the tops of her hiking boots, the sliver of color slashing across the khaki that consumes her. So close that I can smell her lotion, and yet it has become obvious just how far apart we are.
This time there’s no return. After we leave the desert she barely says a word to me for the rest of the trip, as if we’ve crossed a line. Perhaps it’s just that she knows I will never really understand, because I am not from this world, this Israel with its own set of rules that makes girls into women before their time, that takes away the first born with a sigh and stalks the line between honor and disgrace. I think about it all on the bus ride back to Tel Aviv. I’m barely lucid, slipping in and out of sleep as the heat beats a melody in my head. Outside the country glides past and I can’t seem to remember whether I’ve just arrived or if it’s almost time to go home.
To Stay: Part II
We leave Jerusalem to head down to the desert and already I can count on one hand the number of days before I’m back on a plane. I guess at how many e-mails will flood into my Blackberry when I have to turn it back on. When I think about what I have learned or come to understand, I realize, with regret, that Israel has only become more confusing than it was when I first got there. I can’t shake the feeling that nothing has been gained.
It’s in the middle of nowhere that we find Yeruham, a development community in which we are scheduled to do volunteer work for the day, help some kids paint a couple of murals on the local community center walls. Yeruham was supposed to become a prime example of how Israelis transform dry, hot nothingness into thriving oasis. When the road to Eilat passes through town you expect big things. Then somebody builds another road, a better road, and they forget to tell anybody that you exist. But somehow, even the forgotten manage.
I’m not into crafts and I’ve never been that good with kids, so I’m just wondering how effective of a staffing selection I’ll be and how many brain cells the paint fumes are going to kill before we’re out of there.
When I ask which colors go where, what the plan for the mural is, Emmanuel tells me to chill the hell out. He’s from Chile, and he talks like a surfer dude. “Just paint man. Just do whatever you feel like. Don’t worry, you’ll see, it’ll turn out great. It’ll be beautiful man.”
A little kid saunters up to me and I figure out I can actually communicate with him because we both speak Russian. We mix some paint, I show him where to add color. Because I don’t get the whole kiddie talk thing we just chat about where he’s from, about his sister who happens to be that little quiet girl with the blonde hair painting at another part of the wall. When I walk away to go check on the other mural, he follows, and asks me to come back to the one he’s at. As we’re leaving this six year-old takes my contact info, my phone number and e-mail address, even though he doesn’t have a computer and asks whether it’s expensive to call New York.
Emmanuel wipes the sweat out of his eyes and scratches his nose with the back of his arm. He puts that same arm around me. “It’s so great you came here man. Maybe it’s no big deal to you, but these kids, they got shit lives some of them, and they’re gonna remember this. Maybe one day you’ll come back with your wife and kids, and you’ll come to see this mural and tell them how you helped paint it. It’s beautiful man.”
That night I sleep for three hours, shacked up in a little bungalow near the back of a tourist-trap Bedouin encampment. I drift off thinking about the community center and the kids we met there. All of it, it makes me angry. This can’t be right. Israel is not supposed to have a southern Tel Aviv with Sudanese refugees who will never become citizens, no matter how hard they work or how much they love the only country that has ever let them be human beings. It’s not supposed to have beggars standing by the Western Wall, or communities with trash piling up in the streets and abandoned Pintos rusting on sidewalks, or concrete walls slashing gray chasms between towns to alleviate the fear of sniper fire and tossed grenades. It’s not supposed to have a Yeruham with a sad little community center that caters to children who beg for a dozen Americans to notice them for an afternoon. I can’t help but feel that it’s all so ridiculous, so painfully insignificant, the idea that we made any sort of difference by spending a couple of hours with them.
It’s still dark when the alarm on my rented phone goes off and I don’t remember the last time I’ve seen the sun rise. I’m up within minutes, liberated from the need to shower or put on deodorant or comb my hair, still slightly stained from the mural paint. As I stroll away from where the rest of my group is still asleep, I find myself staring off towards the dull glow that’s growing behind the distant mountains and I hold my breath.
I can’t stand this place of contradiction, where a historically-imbued, genetic Godliness lives in an arranged marriage with the inevitability of human imperfection. And yet in some strange way, in a way I can’t really explain, that contradiction is also what makes everything here feel so alive. In that moment, I’m perhaps the biggest hypocrite of them all, and I don’t want to be anywhere else in the world. It’s like the lover you spurn, but then come rushing back to because you just can’t keep yourself away. You chide yourself for the reckless abandon with which you behave, but you simultaneously understand that without that spinning head of emotion, you wouldn’t be as invested, you wouldn’t care as much as you do.
I exhale when the beams hit my face, reminding me of the stubborn realities of what I’ve seen, of how much is wrong and of all the work that needs to be done. And still I smile. Maybe Emmanuel was just some guy who didn’t know what he was talking about. Or maybe he was right, and the best we can hope for is believing in what we do, and believing that in the end, it could just end up being beautiful.
As the rest of the people from my group wake up, I’m pulled into conversations that displace everything I’m thinking about. The day is spent trekking under the sun as it indiscriminately throbs heat, asserting itself a little more with every minute, draining out of us every ounce of water we put in. I glance over at our Israeli guide squinting beneath the brim of her fisherman’s hat. Our eyes meet and I realize that we haven’t really spoken since that night in Jerusalem. It’s something that just happened, this weirdness that has grown between us over the last few days. I brush it aside and approach anyway.
“What’s it like? Growing up here I mean.” I toss out my question awkwardly, too quickly given the fact that we’ve been silent with each other for some time now. There’s a sadness in my voice, a sense that this is a place of lost childhoods, evenings filled with hushed tensions that cartoon nightlights cannot ease.
“Like anywhere else I guess.” She answers quickly, automatically. She looks at me in a way that reads “oh you Americans” even though her English attests to the fact she was raised by parents more American than my own, even though she’s never lived anywhere else.
When she was 17 she heard the explosion on the way to her medic volunteer job in her hometown of Efrat. Seconds later, arriving on the scene, she found the body parts of the teenager who had blown himself up and the mangled body of the friend she worked with.
I imagine what it must have been like. I imagine her wondering about it afterwards, about the little things that kept her from making it on time, which delayed everything just a little bit. After years of recovery, the friend is alive but has a permanent limp. Other friends have died, either at war or from shrapnel closer to home.
She smiles but it comes out forced, adding a shrug that’s meant to brush something off, maybe the discomfort of the memory or the discomfort of having to speak with me. For the first time I realize that she’s a woman already, a woman still trapped in a girl’s body. I see that when she laughs with abandon, when her eyes shrink into little lines with deep crow’s feet at their ends. I see that when she blushes crimson, shy at the lighthearted flirting that has managed to sneak into our conversation yet again, even while we’re discussing something serious, even while in the back of my mind I still remember the make and model of her boyfriend’s motorcycle. I notice the lime green socks peeking out from the tops of her hiking boots, the sliver of color slashing across the khaki that consumes her. So close that I can smell her lotion, and yet it has become obvious just how far apart we are.
This time there’s no return. After we leave the desert she barely says a word to me for the rest of the trip, as if we’ve crossed a line. Perhaps it’s just that she knows I will never really understand, because I am not from this world, this Israel with its own set of rules that makes girls into women before their time, that takes away the first born with a sigh and stalks the line between honor and disgrace. I think about it all on the bus ride back to Tel Aviv. I’m barely lucid, slipping in and out of sleep as the heat beats a melody in my head. Outside the country glides past and I can’t seem to remember whether I’ve just arrived or if it’s almost time to go home.
Sunday, November 8, 2009
To Stay: Part II
To Stay: Part I
As our little tour bus starts lurching around turns, I can feel that we’re in the hills approaching Jerusalem. I call up my uncle to schedule a time to meet up, pressing myself against a window and covering my mouth, trying to whisper so I don’t disturb the people who are still asleep. Later that evening he and my cousin come by my hotel overlooking the Old City, and we sit out on the terrace sipping wine (my cousin deciding on a caramel milkshake after calculating how long its been since he’s eaten meat). Now what? I look at my uncle in his black-suit/white-shirt orthodox uniform. He sits near me playing with his beard, staring off towards the lights of the Old City as if he’s seeing it for the first time. I kind of expect him to tell me what I’m supposed to feel. Maybe if the wine wasn’t so dry, maybe if it was a little cooler outside, if there was a breeze, maybe then I could sense the majesty of it all. My uncle’s eyes tell me what he’s thinking, that this is really the center of the universe. I’m jealous of his connection even as I have a sudden urge to smile and nod condescendingly, “Suuuuuuure.” After the requisite lecture about the need for my returning to study, to live in Israel, they're gone, and I find myself on crowded Ben Yehuda Street, navigating between throngs of loud, inebriated teenagers that actually make me wish I was back in Tel Aviv.
I figure the Old City must hold more answers. I mean, the Wall on Friday night, that’s supposed to be the beating heart of the Jewish people, right? But in thinking back to my previous visits, I realize that I’ve never really been emotionally impacted by the space, at least not in the way that I imagine I should be. On my first visit, during a Birthright trip, I was blindfolded and led up to the Wall with a group of other first-timers. This really dramatic and impactful moment was brewing in my head, and the first thought I had after the blindfold came off? “This is what it looks like in all those pictures.” I angrily challenged one kid who claimed that everything’s was “getting blurry,” that he was being infused with some single-serve spirituality after touching the stone. Another time, exhausted from the night before, I rested my head on the Wall to pray and quickly fell asleep, awakening as soon as my knees gave way and I jolted back to attention. Once, I admit, I actually got myself to cry. I had defined this as a prerequisite for connecting to God, because, of course, you’re not really affected by something unless you cry. But then it only happened because I made myself focus on the Holocaust, psychologically embedded within me through a few very specific scenes in “Schindler’s List.”
This time I pull off to the side, trying to find a secluded spot where I can clear my mind and commune with the universe. But there are just too many people, too many swaying bodies and chanting voices to develop any sense of concentration. Performance anxiety, you might call it. So I pray for quiet, for the ability to feel alone even while I’m being inundated by the sweating humanity around me, the reek of body odor so close that it could be my own. When all that fails I feel cheated, again. I guess I’m just God’s sense of humor, his love of clichés. I’m the guy who just doesn’t get it.
When my group leaves at the end of services, I walk at a pace slower than everybody else, purposely allowing myself to fall behind, hoping that they’ll make a sudden right turn and I’ll hear their light-hearted chatter grow dim as they disappear behind a corner of Jerusalem stone. But that kid from the airport, he scurries back when he sees that I’m lagging. I notice that, sure enough, his kippa is still on his head, clipped to his thinning hair. Meanwhile mine lies buried deep in my pocket, growing warm from brushing up against my leg.
He smiles. His eyes watery, it’s as if he’s looking through me. “Wow,” he says. And again, after a moment, “Wow.”
I look at him, and I can’t stand his smugness. He’s beaming cockiness, self-satisfaction at having made some “connection.” Part of me doesn’t believe any of it. This has to be an act, just him being who he thinks he needs to be. And I guess that makes me his dupe, a necessary witness he can always point to later for affirmation.
“There’s just…Something…It’s so special.”
This time he loses the words and I feel like gagging. Every additional, wordless, shake of his head is an affront, a mirror thrust in my face so I can see just how inadequate I happen to be. Glancing helplessly at the still-growing distance between us and the rest of the group, I realize there really is no way to get out of this conversation.
I want him to leave me alone, to find someone else to bother. I think about pretending to answer my phone, maybe acting as if I need to go back because I’ve left something behind. But then he offers up his question – “You felt it too, didn’t you?”
And I know that from amongst the rest of our band of mostly cynics, he has, for whatever reason, come to me searching for camaraderie. I suddenly feel bad for him, for his poor judgment. It’s just his luck that I can’t relate to him at all, that I happen to be one of the unworthy.
It’s to their ranks that I flee, letting myself get pulled towards the sages of Ben Yehuda with their yeshiva-bred American-English-accented Hebrew. Boys and girls, some as young as 16 or 17 years old, who by day feign the part of young religious devotees, and by night escape to their temples of overpriced drinks and pumping Western music. I belong here, enveloped in cigarette smoke, tipsy from vodka tonics, lightly-clothed hips grinding against me. This is real and tangible, something I can actually feel. This is the best that I can hope to find.
On my return back to the hotel at the end of the evening, I find our Israeli guide standing around in the lobby. I realize she’s dressed as she always is, in jeans and a t-shirt, except that perhaps for the occasion of the Sabbath, her shirt is a little nicer than it has otherwise been. She grins at me as I approach, beginning a controlled swaying motion and stuffing her hands in her pockets.
“You’re OK?” She asks, her smile wide enough that her words come out a little mumbled.
“Me? Yeah, I’m fine.” I realize that my face must be red from the drinks, my hair slightly fro-ed from the humidity. I feel my shirt soaked through, sticking to my back. “And you? You’re OK?” I ask, just to make conversation, to find a reason to stay down in the lobby with her instead of head back to my room.
She nods and looks away, pressing her lips shut over her teeth, the edges of her mouth still tensed in a smile. Finding myself completely alone with her for the first time over the course of our entire trip, I don’t know how to behave or what to say. She’s younger than me and yet I feel like the kid.
“Why are you standing around down here?” I muster, realizing too late that it’s the wrong question for the night.
“Waiting for my boyfriend.” She refocuses her gaze on me, and this time she’s pure confidence; it’s this look of hers that I’ve become familiar with. It’s a pure Israeli look, the one that flashes passion, that tells me she knows exactly what she wants, or thinks she knows. I’m intrigued, I want to find out more. There are so many questions I still need to ask.
But it all comes down to the bad timing I’ve become so used to in my life. We look up almost simultaneously to see a young bearded man with a buzz-cut securing his motorcycle in front of the hotel. She follows his motions with her eyes.
I excuse myself and wave goodnight before she has a chance to suggest introducing him. I purposely let the Sabbath elevator go up without me and smile drunkenly when I press the call button and see the little circular dot in the center light up.
As our little tour bus starts lurching around turns, I can feel that we’re in the hills approaching Jerusalem. I call up my uncle to schedule a time to meet up, pressing myself against a window and covering my mouth, trying to whisper so I don’t disturb the people who are still asleep. Later that evening he and my cousin come by my hotel overlooking the Old City, and we sit out on the terrace sipping wine (my cousin deciding on a caramel milkshake after calculating how long its been since he’s eaten meat). Now what? I look at my uncle in his black-suit/white-shirt orthodox uniform. He sits near me playing with his beard, staring off towards the lights of the Old City as if he’s seeing it for the first time. I kind of expect him to tell me what I’m supposed to feel. Maybe if the wine wasn’t so dry, maybe if it was a little cooler outside, if there was a breeze, maybe then I could sense the majesty of it all. My uncle’s eyes tell me what he’s thinking, that this is really the center of the universe. I’m jealous of his connection even as I have a sudden urge to smile and nod condescendingly, “Suuuuuuure.” After the requisite lecture about the need for my returning to study, to live in Israel, they're gone, and I find myself on crowded Ben Yehuda Street, navigating between throngs of loud, inebriated teenagers that actually make me wish I was back in Tel Aviv.
I figure the Old City must hold more answers. I mean, the Wall on Friday night, that’s supposed to be the beating heart of the Jewish people, right? But in thinking back to my previous visits, I realize that I’ve never really been emotionally impacted by the space, at least not in the way that I imagine I should be. On my first visit, during a Birthright trip, I was blindfolded and led up to the Wall with a group of other first-timers. This really dramatic and impactful moment was brewing in my head, and the first thought I had after the blindfold came off? “This is what it looks like in all those pictures.” I angrily challenged one kid who claimed that everything’s was “getting blurry,” that he was being infused with some single-serve spirituality after touching the stone. Another time, exhausted from the night before, I rested my head on the Wall to pray and quickly fell asleep, awakening as soon as my knees gave way and I jolted back to attention. Once, I admit, I actually got myself to cry. I had defined this as a prerequisite for connecting to God, because, of course, you’re not really affected by something unless you cry. But then it only happened because I made myself focus on the Holocaust, psychologically embedded within me through a few very specific scenes in “Schindler’s List.”
This time I pull off to the side, trying to find a secluded spot where I can clear my mind and commune with the universe. But there are just too many people, too many swaying bodies and chanting voices to develop any sense of concentration. Performance anxiety, you might call it. So I pray for quiet, for the ability to feel alone even while I’m being inundated by the sweating humanity around me, the reek of body odor so close that it could be my own. When all that fails I feel cheated, again. I guess I’m just God’s sense of humor, his love of clichés. I’m the guy who just doesn’t get it.
When my group leaves at the end of services, I walk at a pace slower than everybody else, purposely allowing myself to fall behind, hoping that they’ll make a sudden right turn and I’ll hear their light-hearted chatter grow dim as they disappear behind a corner of Jerusalem stone. But that kid from the airport, he scurries back when he sees that I’m lagging. I notice that, sure enough, his kippa is still on his head, clipped to his thinning hair. Meanwhile mine lies buried deep in my pocket, growing warm from brushing up against my leg.
He smiles. His eyes watery, it’s as if he’s looking through me. “Wow,” he says. And again, after a moment, “Wow.”
I look at him, and I can’t stand his smugness. He’s beaming cockiness, self-satisfaction at having made some “connection.” Part of me doesn’t believe any of it. This has to be an act, just him being who he thinks he needs to be. And I guess that makes me his dupe, a necessary witness he can always point to later for affirmation.
“There’s just…Something…It’s so special.”
This time he loses the words and I feel like gagging. Every additional, wordless, shake of his head is an affront, a mirror thrust in my face so I can see just how inadequate I happen to be. Glancing helplessly at the still-growing distance between us and the rest of the group, I realize there really is no way to get out of this conversation.
I want him to leave me alone, to find someone else to bother. I think about pretending to answer my phone, maybe acting as if I need to go back because I’ve left something behind. But then he offers up his question – “You felt it too, didn’t you?”
And I know that from amongst the rest of our band of mostly cynics, he has, for whatever reason, come to me searching for camaraderie. I suddenly feel bad for him, for his poor judgment. It’s just his luck that I can’t relate to him at all, that I happen to be one of the unworthy.
It’s to their ranks that I flee, letting myself get pulled towards the sages of Ben Yehuda with their yeshiva-bred American-English-accented Hebrew. Boys and girls, some as young as 16 or 17 years old, who by day feign the part of young religious devotees, and by night escape to their temples of overpriced drinks and pumping Western music. I belong here, enveloped in cigarette smoke, tipsy from vodka tonics, lightly-clothed hips grinding against me. This is real and tangible, something I can actually feel. This is the best that I can hope to find.
On my return back to the hotel at the end of the evening, I find our Israeli guide standing around in the lobby. I realize she’s dressed as she always is, in jeans and a t-shirt, except that perhaps for the occasion of the Sabbath, her shirt is a little nicer than it has otherwise been. She grins at me as I approach, beginning a controlled swaying motion and stuffing her hands in her pockets.
“You’re OK?” She asks, her smile wide enough that her words come out a little mumbled.
“Me? Yeah, I’m fine.” I realize that my face must be red from the drinks, my hair slightly fro-ed from the humidity. I feel my shirt soaked through, sticking to my back. “And you? You’re OK?” I ask, just to make conversation, to find a reason to stay down in the lobby with her instead of head back to my room.
She nods and looks away, pressing her lips shut over her teeth, the edges of her mouth still tensed in a smile. Finding myself completely alone with her for the first time over the course of our entire trip, I don’t know how to behave or what to say. She’s younger than me and yet I feel like the kid.
“Why are you standing around down here?” I muster, realizing too late that it’s the wrong question for the night.
“Waiting for my boyfriend.” She refocuses her gaze on me, and this time she’s pure confidence; it’s this look of hers that I’ve become familiar with. It’s a pure Israeli look, the one that flashes passion, that tells me she knows exactly what she wants, or thinks she knows. I’m intrigued, I want to find out more. There are so many questions I still need to ask.
But it all comes down to the bad timing I’ve become so used to in my life. We look up almost simultaneously to see a young bearded man with a buzz-cut securing his motorcycle in front of the hotel. She follows his motions with her eyes.
I excuse myself and wave goodnight before she has a chance to suggest introducing him. I purposely let the Sabbath elevator go up without me and smile drunkenly when I press the call button and see the little circular dot in the center light up.
Saturday, November 7, 2009
To Stay: Part I
I didn’t come looking for anything in particular, as I had in the past. Particularity breeds expectation, which, more often than not, leads to disappointment. So I came just hoping not to be disappointed.
Arriving in Israel for the fourth time in as many years, I feel that same sense of expectation, that all things here will be holier than elsewhere. The people I’m with, all of us on a fellowship for young, post-college, Jewish, soon-to-be leaders, fill the spectrum from disinterest businessman types to a wanna-be-orthodox spiritualist who produces a hidden kippa at just the right moments. A couple of educators and a 20-something Israeli guide top us off at sixteen people. As we walk down the arrival corridor at Ben-Gurion Airport, the spiritualist kid, his voice melting into the softness with which one speaks of a lover, tells me how the original architecture scheme was supposed to have the arrivals climbing an incline, that it was supposed to represent the entry into Israel as a literal elevation, a “going up” or “aliyah.”
“But this is a decline,” I say, also pointing out that the departure corridor offers a similar descent, creating an “X” of opposing ramps.
He shrugs, “What did you expect? That things here should work out as planned?”
Once we’re at our hotel in Tel Aviv, I call up my uncle, a black-hatter who lives in some really religious neighborhood in Jerusalem. I forget the name or where exactly it is, but I remember how you can see the West Bank from his living room window, outlined by a connect-the-dots arrangement of flood lights that announce the separation wall even in the middle of the night, while you stomp blindly towards the bathroom.
I say, half-jokingly, “I’ve arrived. I’m in the Holy Land.”
“Where are you?”
“Tel Aviv.”
He scoffs, “Then you’re not in the Holy Land.” Pause. “Call me when you’re in Jerusalem.”
The way he says “Jerusalem” as “Yerushalayim,” the way the city’s name seems tainted when placed within a sentence with lesser words, nearly convinces me that my trip won’t really start until I’m there, that everything before will be one cheap parlor trick.
Even though I’ve only ever spent a night in Tel Aviv before (not long enough to see much of anything) I want him to be wrong. He’s close-minded, I tell myself, incapable of giving a fair trial to anything in the secular world.
But Tel Aviv just can’t seem to keep its mouth shut. The 70s-style hotels that line the coast, the smell of sunscreen that sits like a thick fog rolled in from the water, make the city seem like nothing more than a sad Middle Eastern version of Miami Beach. A few generations of pasty Ashkenazic immigrants have given way to firm, tanned bodies. Bronze Gods, new idols of worship.
I stare up at the sleek new skyscrapers, those symbols of Israeli progress and modernity, but have a hard time reconciling them with the squat, abandoned Bauhaus structures that still litter most of the landscape, chipped paint and weeds and trash spilling out from boarded-up windows and doors that have long been propped open. I’m embarrassed when I see Independence Hall with its dilapidated exterior, a makeshift flagstaff at the top, leaning off to one side at a slight five degree tilt, a tattered flag sputtering alongside it. This is where a state was formed? I missed Washington’s white-washed Roman architecture, forgetting, for a moment, that I’d never actually spent enough time in Philadelphia to see where America was born.
The southern part of the city, away from the water and tourists, is crammed with very non-Jewish-looking people of African, South Asian, and Indian origins. Most are workers, living in purgatory, ready to be tossed back home if their jobs suddenly come to an end – if Shlomi, who runs the laundry service, sees a drop-off in demand for talis dry cleaning, or Mrs. Gittleman decides she doesn’t want her house cleaned twice a week anymore. Lights flicker along the edges of the streets, tacky bright bulbs announcing whorehouses with graffiti painted accents of exaggerated bodies draped in Flashdance-style underwear tearing at the seams. Peddlers spread dusty sheets, once white, across sidewalks to exhibit their worthless wares – rusted tools, used (“vintage”) clothing, manicure sets slipping out of their open containers, unlabelled VHS tapes with cracked plastic screens. It’s all a caricature of the forgotten, a corner of this country that God must not have noticed.
I try to ignore my disappointment because it’s easier not to deal with it. Instead, with the coaxing of more party-minded individuals than myself, I indulge in the familiar comforts that Tel Aviv has to offer. Life becomes one sleepless night of drinks and hookah on the beach, eyeing bikinis and searching for knowing smiles, the resonating slap of matkot paddles off in the distance as the Friday night sun dips behind the Mediterranean and the prayer book grows sweaty in my hands. Most other things recede into the dark corner, just a shapeless mass casting a long shadow at the passing of a light.
The night before our exodus East, I sit out by the sea with a few other people. Our feet buried in the cold sand, each of us contemplates in silence. I allow myself to realize that I’m ready to leave, happy even. I don’t think I will miss having Tel Aviv behind us.
Someone lets out a deep breath. “This place, its amazing isn’t it?”
“Why?” I ask, annoyed at the mere suggestion that there can be anything amazing about it. “It’s so rundown, so seedy. I expected something a little more, I don’t know, developed, advanced.”
“You have to realize,” he says, “it’s still such a young place. All of this was built from nothing, in the middle of a desert, by people who came out of Europe after the Holocaust. And they did it in only sixty years.”
I don’t know that I understand what any of it means. The context, the realities, they seem too far removed from my own life. I don’t have anything to say in response, and so I let his words trail off into the salty air as our conversation devolves back into just the sound of our rising and settling chests, the sleepy lapping of the Mediterranean against the shore.
Arriving in Israel for the fourth time in as many years, I feel that same sense of expectation, that all things here will be holier than elsewhere. The people I’m with, all of us on a fellowship for young, post-college, Jewish, soon-to-be leaders, fill the spectrum from disinterest businessman types to a wanna-be-orthodox spiritualist who produces a hidden kippa at just the right moments. A couple of educators and a 20-something Israeli guide top us off at sixteen people. As we walk down the arrival corridor at Ben-Gurion Airport, the spiritualist kid, his voice melting into the softness with which one speaks of a lover, tells me how the original architecture scheme was supposed to have the arrivals climbing an incline, that it was supposed to represent the entry into Israel as a literal elevation, a “going up” or “aliyah.”
“But this is a decline,” I say, also pointing out that the departure corridor offers a similar descent, creating an “X” of opposing ramps.
He shrugs, “What did you expect? That things here should work out as planned?”
Once we’re at our hotel in Tel Aviv, I call up my uncle, a black-hatter who lives in some really religious neighborhood in Jerusalem. I forget the name or where exactly it is, but I remember how you can see the West Bank from his living room window, outlined by a connect-the-dots arrangement of flood lights that announce the separation wall even in the middle of the night, while you stomp blindly towards the bathroom.
I say, half-jokingly, “I’ve arrived. I’m in the Holy Land.”
“Where are you?”
“Tel Aviv.”
He scoffs, “Then you’re not in the Holy Land.” Pause. “Call me when you’re in Jerusalem.”
The way he says “Jerusalem” as “Yerushalayim,” the way the city’s name seems tainted when placed within a sentence with lesser words, nearly convinces me that my trip won’t really start until I’m there, that everything before will be one cheap parlor trick.
Even though I’ve only ever spent a night in Tel Aviv before (not long enough to see much of anything) I want him to be wrong. He’s close-minded, I tell myself, incapable of giving a fair trial to anything in the secular world.
But Tel Aviv just can’t seem to keep its mouth shut. The 70s-style hotels that line the coast, the smell of sunscreen that sits like a thick fog rolled in from the water, make the city seem like nothing more than a sad Middle Eastern version of Miami Beach. A few generations of pasty Ashkenazic immigrants have given way to firm, tanned bodies. Bronze Gods, new idols of worship.
I stare up at the sleek new skyscrapers, those symbols of Israeli progress and modernity, but have a hard time reconciling them with the squat, abandoned Bauhaus structures that still litter most of the landscape, chipped paint and weeds and trash spilling out from boarded-up windows and doors that have long been propped open. I’m embarrassed when I see Independence Hall with its dilapidated exterior, a makeshift flagstaff at the top, leaning off to one side at a slight five degree tilt, a tattered flag sputtering alongside it. This is where a state was formed? I missed Washington’s white-washed Roman architecture, forgetting, for a moment, that I’d never actually spent enough time in Philadelphia to see where America was born.
The southern part of the city, away from the water and tourists, is crammed with very non-Jewish-looking people of African, South Asian, and Indian origins. Most are workers, living in purgatory, ready to be tossed back home if their jobs suddenly come to an end – if Shlomi, who runs the laundry service, sees a drop-off in demand for talis dry cleaning, or Mrs. Gittleman decides she doesn’t want her house cleaned twice a week anymore. Lights flicker along the edges of the streets, tacky bright bulbs announcing whorehouses with graffiti painted accents of exaggerated bodies draped in Flashdance-style underwear tearing at the seams. Peddlers spread dusty sheets, once white, across sidewalks to exhibit their worthless wares – rusted tools, used (“vintage”) clothing, manicure sets slipping out of their open containers, unlabelled VHS tapes with cracked plastic screens. It’s all a caricature of the forgotten, a corner of this country that God must not have noticed.
I try to ignore my disappointment because it’s easier not to deal with it. Instead, with the coaxing of more party-minded individuals than myself, I indulge in the familiar comforts that Tel Aviv has to offer. Life becomes one sleepless night of drinks and hookah on the beach, eyeing bikinis and searching for knowing smiles, the resonating slap of matkot paddles off in the distance as the Friday night sun dips behind the Mediterranean and the prayer book grows sweaty in my hands. Most other things recede into the dark corner, just a shapeless mass casting a long shadow at the passing of a light.
The night before our exodus East, I sit out by the sea with a few other people. Our feet buried in the cold sand, each of us contemplates in silence. I allow myself to realize that I’m ready to leave, happy even. I don’t think I will miss having Tel Aviv behind us.
Someone lets out a deep breath. “This place, its amazing isn’t it?”
“Why?” I ask, annoyed at the mere suggestion that there can be anything amazing about it. “It’s so rundown, so seedy. I expected something a little more, I don’t know, developed, advanced.”
“You have to realize,” he says, “it’s still such a young place. All of this was built from nothing, in the middle of a desert, by people who came out of Europe after the Holocaust. And they did it in only sixty years.”
I don’t know that I understand what any of it means. The context, the realities, they seem too far removed from my own life. I don’t have anything to say in response, and so I let his words trail off into the salty air as our conversation devolves back into just the sound of our rising and settling chests, the sleepy lapping of the Mediterranean against the shore.
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