בפרידה יש תנועות של אהבה ותנועות של גבורה וחסד ויש תנועות של דממה, ותמיד הם אותם התנועות

ובפרידה יש תנועות לעתיד כשהפרידה שוב תהיה יחוד

In parting, there are movements of parting, and everyone knows these.

In parting, there are movements of love and movements of intention and kindness and there are movements of stillness, and always these are the same movements.

And in parting, there are movements toward the future when there will again be unity.

We were heading uphill and away from Ramallah in a taxi. Our destination: the Taybeh Brewery. Back in Jerusalem, I called the brewery to ask the best way to get from there to Taybeh. Take a bus from East Jerusalem. Get off there. Find a service taxi near the center of the city. Take the taxi to the brewery for about 8 NIS.

We got the bus part down. We didn’t know this yet, but a service taxi is something different than a taxi taxi. Who would have guessed? Anyway, the meter in that thing was steadily churning and bubbling up, but we thought somehow that it didn’t matter. We would agree on a price later, the driver seemed to agree to then. We found the brewery. Or, we found a building with a big painting of a beer bottle on it. No one was around. We got out. I walked around looking for a soul or an entrance or something. It was maybe five or 15 past 4. Suddenly, a voice from a face on a balcony.

“Are you looking for the brewery?” the face said in perfect English.

“Yea!” I shouted back.

“It’s closed. But give me a second. I’ll be right there to open it for you.”

Problem solved. The face became a body, and a body with keys no less, and soon enough we were inside the Taybeh Brewery for a private tour. Amid the colorful stacked boxes of lagers and ales, the young woman who’d opened the door, sat us down to watch a quick video about how Taybeh was founded. After the video, the woman walked us around to the various tanks and machines and we sampled some of the goods.

Taybeh is sold in the territories, in Israel, in France and Germany and they’re working on Asia. Despite the fact that the family who started the brewery is just a bunch of ex-pats, the U.S. is whole different story. It’s basically an impossibility, she said, to get a box of anything with “MADE IN PALESTINE” stamped on its side into America. And to go the couple dozen kilometers into Israel proper is day-long endeavor for these people. Even so, she was able to rattle off a long list of bars and pubs in the Holy City that serve this Palestinian brew. And in Ramallah and the surrounding towns, there’s a different set of issues. An old Jordanian law, which for some reason still holds influence in the territories, says that one cannot openly advertise for alcoholic beverages. Word of mouth is the way of business here.

Micah, my travel buddy, bought a sixer. I just bought a poster. “Drink the Revolution,” it reads, though its unclear against whom or what or which people this revolution is directed.

We finally got back in the cab and started heading back toward Ramallah, and this return trip would prove to take even longer than the first. There was a pit stop on the edge of village. Thirty feet away a dry and wavy hill of beige grass crackled and suddenly erupted into flame. A tossed cigarette, no doubt. And back on the road we joked about youth and being old, about Obama, about Bush, or we were just laughing because we really didn’t understand who was saying what, and what about.

Then there was another stop so the driver could get another pack of cigs for himself. He hadn’t had one since the drive up the mountain and given that he smoked three in that 30-minute span, I wondered how he had made it this whole time without. Then we were back in Ramallah and after he parallel parked, the meter had ticked all the way over 150.

In the brokenest of Englishes, he told us, after Micah asked, that we could pay whatever we wanted, if we wanted. We realized we weren’t in a fabled service taxi. That became clear when Micah asked our brewmistress friend back in Taybeh how much to pay the man for the ride. She said 40 was a good price. So Micah handed him two of those plastic 20-Shek notes. Immediately,  after all the good-natured chit chat and feeling of universal brotherhood with this man, we had hit a wall, and we had only to pull ourselves out of the wreckage to see that it was bad, real bad. He was insulted. What is this, these two bills? Do you see the meter?! In between our failed attempts to explain why we’d given him that much, he’s asking us if we want him to call the police so they can sort it out. No, definitely not. We get out of the taxi. Ramallah’s a lively city. Even on this side street where we were parked, people were walking this way and that. A handful of women stopped to listen in on the argument. We asked if they spoke English. They did, and the translation mediation began. This goes on for another 10 minutes, and we’ve gotten basically no where. The 40 Shekels was an insult. We either pay the 150 or we call the police. One of the women is asking if we can pay it, not if we want to. Clearly, in their eyes, of course we can. We scream American. We scream tourist. What’s the big deal, you know? And it’s true. We could cover the fare. But that wasn’t the point. We felt cheated. He felt cheated. There had to a compromise. Now, a handful of men approach and are listening in. Micah’s giving me the eyes that say, “let’s get the fuck out of here,” and I’m thinking that 150 doesn’t sound so bad after all.

Finally, our team of translators reaches a breakthrough. The man will take 120, but he’s not happy about it. The money’s exchanged, we thank our new friends who are already walking away and onto something else and we walk fast. Back in the main square, where we’d picked up the cab in the first place, we scan the shops to find coffee. A place to sit and breathe. Up in the sky, above the packed city center and even higher than the banners of green and black and red, a sign for Stars & Bucks.

Yep. They love us and they hate us. And we? The wealthy, privileged, free, young American observers of all of this. How do we feel? It’s hard to say. Let’s find our way up there for some coffee and sheesha and talk it out.

A little more than a week ago though, this was my home. I had an apartment with posters and furniture and food. I had bills to pay. I had bills to pay. I had bills to pay. I had final exams and papers at Hebrew University. My mom, dad and sister were here, and I was guiding them down the golden alleys of Nachlaot, introducing them to friends and teachers and my life, my home.

Then, about a week ago, these connections to this city started to become untied, my life became unknotted. I washed and packed my clothes into a few bags, sold empty beer bottles for shekels at the store across the street, left sheets and towels and Sager’s shoes on a table in the street with a sign in Hebrew letting people know they could take the stuff. I sold the fridge. I painted over the mold on the bathroom walls, took my carefully collected stock of music-show posters off the walls and packed away my own drawings, too. In their wake, I painted over the bare spots and finger smudges.  A friend came over, read my meters, called the electricity people, the water people, rattled off credit card numbers in Hebrew, paid my bills. The landlord stopped by. He saw the painted walls and the empty rooms and handed me back a fat stack of deposit money. I handed him the keys. I was standing in someone else’s apartment.

The tests came and went, I finished a paper and hit the road for Fleet Family Fun Week. When we left town, most of the friends I had made over the semester were still there. They were doing the same moving and writing and testing. Most wouldn’t be there when I returned. Some left to work at summer camps. Some went back for summer school. The others, I’m not sure. I don’t even remember where some of them lived. Jerusalem isn’t Gainesville. It isn’t Friends & Friends. It isn’t downtown, midtown, campus. It’s a thousand different neighborhoods with a million different bars and shops and rip offs and revelations. I couldn’t ride my bike for five minutes and be at a friends house where all my other friends would be with their own bikes lining the walls. I don’t have a bike here, for that matter. I could walk a few minutes and visit a couple different people in Nachlaot. I could walk 20 minutes and visit a couple more in Rechavia. I could take a bus from my side of town to campus and spend time in the dorms. But that whole journey would be at least 45 minutes one way. And if I wanted to stay late all the way out there, I could count on having to pay top dollar for a cab ride back. This all amounted to pockets of friends or individuals who were generally mutually exclusive. And there was never enough time to learn about their lives for no fault other than my own.

Anyway, we left town to travel around in a rental car for the week. My parents had planned each day to the minute. We were in five cities in as many hours and the time spent with eyes closed was never enough. One day it was the 5,000-year-old ruins of Beit She’an, fresh fish on the Kinneret in Tiberias with a now-married childhood friend and several cats, a self-guided walking tour of Tsfat that ended in nervous collapse after hours of being lost and getting bad directions or not ignoring instincts, a hysterical drive around Khatzor where we were two hours late to a meeting of the local Jewish Agency where we were supposed to give a gift from some community in Palm Beach in which the entire town of real-live no-English-whatsoever Israelis was directing us this way and that or calling this or that relative for advice or directing us to the police car which then escorted us to a place that certainly was not the place we needed to be until somehow, by the grace of God and dozens of people we didn’t know who had nothing better to do because there is only one traffic light in Khatzor, we arrived at the meeting just as it was ending. Then we drove down the road to Kibbutz Ami’ad where we promptly collapsed.

The next day was less lost. That’s because we had a guide. He sat in the front passenger seat and told my dad where to turn. He was bald, his nose was huge, he spoke basically perfect English in the softest, kindest voice. He grew up in Kfar Blum. He fought in ’67 and ’73 and ’80. He knew everyone, everywhere. He spoke Arabic. He loved Israel, was excited about Obama, felt the suffering of the Palestinians. He knew every back road of the North and took us to some breathtaking sites. There was the Naot factory. The road there is lined with huge cypress trees. The Israelis planted them so that the nearby Syrians couldn’t see who or what was travelling where. Now the trees just block the view of stunning mountains. There was a boutique winery up one of those mountains in Edom. By 11:30, I was drunk. And then we took a quick hike to another beautiful view, stood on the edge of a giant “hole” in the earth where trees grew big and sideways as if they were frozen on the edge of the most fertile black hole this side of the Jordan River. The drives were rife with stories of the wars that had taken place along the roads and in the valleys we were passing. Now, it was silent and so so peaceful. Once, twice, thrice, there was the thunder of battle and the blood of kids trying to change the world, or at least save their own. We were near a lake at some point. I forget the name. Next to it was a Druze village. We ate on a hill in a Druze restaurant by an open, breezy window that looked out over that lake. There was Nimrod’s Castle, its ancient Arabic stones, its hidden staircases, its silence. There was a the highest point in the area, a kibbutz where you could clearly see a town in Syria. It was so close. It didnt’ look any different than the towns on the Israeli side. The meaning of the word boundary began to fall apart in my mind. We ate dinner in Rosh Pinah, drank a bit in a bar there and again returned to Kibbutz Ami’ad to pass out.

The next crack of morning we were off to Akko. We wandered around the old city there, ate hummus in a restaurant that didn’t have a menu because it only served hummus and coffee and only charged for the hummus. Found our way to the Ramhal’s synagogue. The man there told a story to us which I then translated for my parents and sister. Here’s the story: The Ramhal was a rabbi who started out in Italy but eventually made his way to Akko via Jerusalem, I believe. He wrote a lot of books. He wrote 71, to be exact. They were philosophical, kabbalistic, moral books. He was brilliant but humble. Normally in a synagogue, the place where the rabbi stands is physically raised above where the congregants sit. In this shul, the bimah was actually dug down below the seats. Anyway, the Ramhal told his disciples to bury all of his books when he died. They did this, but one guy, who knew where the books were, dug one of them up. It was a book about ethics. The man travelled to Vilna where he brought the book to the Vilna Gaon, one of the greatest Jewish thinkers of the past several centuries. He told the VG he had a book from the Ramhal. Ol’ VG asked him to run and bring him the book. The man did so and when the Gaon saw it he went into shock. He then read the book. And read it again. And read it again. The Vilna Gaon then exclaimed that, if the Ramhal were still alive, he would travel from Vilna by foot to study at the man’s feet. He also said that there was not a single unnecessary word in this book.

In Akko, we saw another synagogue that was, from top to bottom, all three floors, covered in mosaics. The man who greeted us at the door and told us about the place was the man who had the idea for the shul and who started working on it. Needless to say, its fucking crazy. Visit it if you can.

When then drove on to Haifa, where we ate falafel, bought memory cards for my parents camera because my dad couldn’t go a single second without capturing the scene, and found the highest, most-unobstructed view of the B’hai Gardens. A young girl was standing up there blowing a shofar. It was chokingly hot. The gardens were almost too perfect. We made our way to the tourist street of Zichron Yaakov. It was ridiculously hot there. We went to the old ruins of Caesarea. It was a sweat lodge there. My head was pulsating. My body was sticky. I couldn’t drink enough water, or keep my eyes open for very long. I felt like a kid again, complaining to my parents, thinking only of myself, staying in the car  in silent protest when we got to the ancient aqueduct toward sundown. But finally, we were in Tel Aviv, in the down-comforter-and-endless-complementary-chocolate arms of a four-star hotel on the Mediterranean and after all was said in done, cold hard sleep did come.

Of course, I can keep going. Do you want to hear the rest? There were so many restaurants. There were so many people on the beach. So many closed museums. Too much to tell really. Saturday night, after Old Jaffa, my sister and I headed out to Flourentine to meet with friends. We wandered over to the Hudna for drinks, met random people there and then got in the taxi of a mad, young, industrial beat-loving Russian. He dropped us off at The Block. There was an trance dance party going on there. It never ends, does it? All of this, the music, the food, the money, the sun, the beach, the moon. We end, I’m sure. But the party rages forever. That’s what Tel Aviv feels like.

My family’s final day in Israel was marked by a bit of tragedy. I won’t recount it, but they got off to the airport just fine and are now back in the waves of Florida heat. My dad thinks he’ll never come back to this place. I think he loved it but, given that it took 50 years for him to make it, I understand why he feels this way. My mom can’t help but start planning her next trip. My sister, B”H, will make on to a Birthright bus or a JLI-type trip within the near future. I saw more in this week than probably during the rest of my time here. But that’s because I can’t do the micro-managed minute-to-minute planning thing. Everything I’ve done since January has been decided upon minutes or, if I’m smart, hours before doing it. I look for quality, not quantity. But I’ve seen that you can have quality in quantity, and for that, and so much indescribably more, I am thankful.

They went off, and I went off. I had a single paper left to write and rework before the whole bridge became undone. Yesterday, I finished that paper, and now it’s three weeks of living day by day. I came back to Jerusalem after a week with the family and I wasn’t quite returning home. I have no keys, and after this paper, no real ties to this city. Most of my friends are gone. New friends have shown up on various summer programs. I can leave at the drop of a thought and only a few people will notice. It’s terrifying, nerve-racking, it’s only three short weeks.

I’ma hit the road, I’ma hit it hard. To myself and to the rest of you, whether you’re still here, back in the South, following Phish again, in India, in NYC, wherever you may be, I wish you safe travels, long cool nights, hot food, smiling friends and peace peace peace.

See you out there…

Also, good luck, Mom. Love you

I was in the computer lab at school, actually starting to get some research done for one of my final papers. Something about the Mystical Proletariat. Sounded cool when I thought of it. What it actually means (or if it exists), we shall see. Then, there in the dark, was that moment when it’s clear you haven’t eaten in enough hours that it’s possible to justify closing the book, clicking restart and getting the hell out of there.

Above the buses, in the Forum, I saw a friend. She was with her newly significant other. I had met him earlier in the day, standing in line for food. We knew each other’s faces and voices from Raz’s, but nothing beyond that. I managed through an awkward bit of Hebrew, got my food, went on my way. And now, above the buses, did more or less the same.

I sat down on the 19 and was back near Nachlaot some 30 minutes later. My plan was to stop by my apartment, put down my stuff, then head to a friend’s in Rechavia, grabbing food on the way. In the dark, on the stairs down to my apartment, I felt for my keys. Pockets? Nope. Bag? Nope. Hands? Still, no. Clearly, I had left them hanging from the same key chain as my flash drive which I had left safely in the grip of the computer in the Rothberg computer lab.

Down in the dark of my basement apartment’s “porch”, I thought, how can I avoid getting back on a bus to head all the way back to campus to get my key in order to head all the way back? I didn’t have a roommate anymore. I couldn’t call Jacob and walk to him to borrow his keys, and he wasn’t waiting in the light of the window where we get steal our Internet. No, he was gone, thousands of miles away and keyless. I’d have to rely on the old self, which, it seemed, wasn’t so reliable, as I was there in the dark, 0 miles away, also keyless.

The get-back-on-the-bus option was not an option, I quickly decided. I would stay in town, crash with a friend, wake up in the morning wearing the same Phish shirt and hiking shorts from the day before. I mean, hey, I’ve got the uncontrollable beard and scruffy hair, might as well fulfill all the rest of their expectations and wear the same (Phish) clothes on consecutive days.

Doing more work that night was not an option. It’s incredible how the combination of near-dead laptop and cross-town, early closing computer lab amount to finishing your studies at 9 p.m. At UF, if the library was closed before 1 in the morning, it was an issue. And if the lap top was geeking, any number of friends wouldn’t mind sacrificing theirs’ for an hour or two–anything so that they could avoid doing work themselves. Here, exam-ish week as it is, these just weren’t realities. Like I said, the lights wouldn’t even turn on after 8 in the computer lab on campus. And those ever helpful friends of mine were either using their laptops for their own last minute projects, using other friend’s laptops because theirs’ were stolen or were thousands of miles away, keyless and sleeping probably.

Some hours later though, I couldn’t resist picking up a book and reading more about Rav Kook. I’d checked out a stack of books from the library, and I meant to find a solid-enough chunk of research to write about Kook’s view of early secular-Zionist settlers in Palestine as the proletariat of Messianic redemption. Rav Kook felt that his days were the beginning days of the time of Moshiach. Many people before Kook thought that their days were His days, but this guy, he was on to something. He was the first chief rabbi of British-mandate Palestine and, despite his detractors, he embraced his non-believing brothers with the biggest bear hug of love imaginable. All the writing about his thought talks about the differentiation between things sacred and things profane. In the end, these things–as all other things–are one. For Rav Kook, divinity was infused into all of creation when it was created and there is no perceivably existing thing that does not contain at least the faintest whisper of such divinity. Every act, every thought, every moment is rooted in holiness, whether the actor, the thinker or the bit of time knows it or not. For him, it was fine that the Jews building Eretz Yisrael were heretical halakha-rejectors. They were the Mystical Proletariat. Their action was still the first revolutionary action in the first stage of ultimate Messianic redemption (because in order for the Jewish people to be redeemed, they had to have a land, says Kook).

So what do labels like secular or Haredi matter? What is sacred, what is profane? What is darkness, and what light? What is Hebrew, and what is English? What is confidence, and what is confusion? What is forgetfulness, and what is a two-ton stone? The answer is an upside down question mark in the middle of an endless and silent field.

No worries though. Today is a day later, I’ve retrieved my keys from that kidnapper computer, I’m wearing the same clothes, no one is looking at me (or smelling me (I think)), and I’m getting work done. (Or am I?)

It’s back to the Mystical Proletariat. It’s back to light.

I feel every holiday here is a coupling of extreme happiness and inevitable sadness. The darker part this time around is that fact that my roommate, Jacob, is leaving. It really seems like a couple hours ago that we were making plans over the phone back in The States, lamenting the fact that Carl wouldn’t be able to make it but resolving ourselves to live the dream without him and in his honor. The dream is over, a former Beatle once sang. But a new one begins every second, and I look forward to the colors and creatures in it.

The lighter side of things this time around was the all-night concert last night in Independence Park. As students at Hebrew U’s Rothberg International School, we get “points” that we can spend on various trips and programs. These points are part of our tuition. I hadn’t used any of them up until a couple of days ago. I got a ticket to this concert with a point, a whole 45-Shek savings. It was a strange evening. The headliner was Macy Gray. The audience was 20,000 Israeli college students. The sunriser was Shalom Hanoch. There was Idan Raichel and other Israeli acts.  Macy Gray was hammered, but her back-up singers were quite large and quite in charge. She sang a Radiohead song. That was a trip. I’ll put some pictures up soon.

Just a quick update. Gotta go make a late lunch breakfast.

Bye Sager. You will be missed.

Earlier this week, I turned in a paper about Shabbat in the Zohar. Then I started doing research for another paper. That is, I walked into my Contemporary Issues in Halacha class and our teacher, Pesach Schindler, had a stack of sources waiting for me. We had discussed two days before that I wanted to write about adoption in Jewish law, and there were the texts on his desk, Post-It-ed with my name. That guy’s a mensch.

Chutz mi’zeh, Shabbat Shalom everyone. I miss you.

And some things to hear/read/play:

• The Happiness Project (thanks Evan)

• Let Me Die in My Footsteps by Bobby D…its just G and C. So easy to set yourself free if you want to be.

• New stuff over at Friends & Friends, including some words by me.

I’m sitting here in the Library West of Hebrew University. The atmosphere is just as club-like, and if you cross your ears it’s almost possible not to notice that virtually no one is speaking in English.

This is the Israel that didn’t take long to get used to: loud, obnoxious, inappropriate, distracted. And also, plugged in. There, on every other ear is a cell phone. On every other ear than that is an iPod earbud. And if they had more ears, Israelis would fill them with other as-yet-uninvented media machines. And there go their fingers pecking half-heartedly away at their chicken-meal Mac keys. It didn’t take long to get used to because this, my friends, is America.

I found Israel a couple days ago. It started when I went to the Kotel at night for a Yom HaZicharon ceremony. Once inside the Old City, there was a clique of two or three or four Israeli soldiers every five yards. This holiday is a day of remembrance for the thousands of Israeli soldiers and citizens who have died throughout this country’s short history of war and life. Not on this day will an Israeli needlessly die, the streets didn’t whisper. But every five yards were a few large guns held by a few young Israelis ready and ordered to wield them if necessary.

At the Kotel, President Shimon Peres and other officials spoke. I didn’t know this until afterward. Everything was in Hebrew. Fast and somber Hebrew. No translation. No clapping. No excess. Just flames and pressed uniforms and lost lives.

With friends on the walk back, I found twenty-odd twentysomething Israelis sitting in the middle of Ben Yehuda Street. It’s normally a surprise to hear Hebrew at night on this tourist shop-lined pedestrian walkway. But here were real, live Israelis sitting. One of them was reading a Hebrew poem. Another was holding a small classical guitar. Another was holding an accordion. Another a recorder. The rest were holding sheets of paper. The band began to play. The twentysomething twentysomethings began to sing. They sang so softly and with such sadness. Their hearts were breaking all over again and mending simultaneously.

I don’t know who these people were or are. We sat down with them. Others came and went. We kept turning pages. The songs kept coming. A couple hours went by and they were still singing, but I had to leave. The connection I felt with these kids when we first stumbled upon their circle had turned into a flesh-like wall. At some point, I felt like I was sitting inside the dream of Eliezer Ben-Yehuda, the guy who basically revived Hebrew from the dead-and-dusty to the living, breathing language spoken by millions that it is today. These people were singing page after page of songs written by Israeli songwriters in the land of Israel in the last half of a century. I thought I grew up with Israeli songs. I didn’t recognize any of these. And I realized then that if I wasn’t sitting in the dream of a guy who died in 1922 before this state even existed, then I must be sitting in a reality, a collective consciousness that, at least for these couple of hours, excluded me. These were not the songs of my youth or even my parents youth. These few tears were not because one of my friends or relatives had been lost in the decades of fighting. I was imagining what it maybe might be like to have lost someone. I was inserting into these words and verses a meaning that may or may not have been there. And I realized that even if I decided to move to this country and join its army and fight its wars and really let its language soak into my pores, I still would not be able to fully relate to this moment or to these songs or to these people.

The next day was basically uneventful until the evening. A group of us took a cab out to the Tayellet which is across the valley from the Old City and has the view of views, day or night. There, a group of (who else?) twentysomethings, hundreds this time, was davenning the evening Maariv service with a special section added in for the holiday that started that night: Yom HaAtzmaut: Israeli Independence Day.

The service, Hallel specifically, was drawn out beyond belief. Each verse or group of verses had a segue of joyous song and dance with guitars and djembes aplenty–a glaring shift from the sobriety of the day.

After this, I had another “How did I get here?” moment while sitting in a car with four Israelis whom I’d met minutes before and who, I was told, would take me to a happening  party. A friend was walking to that party with another group of Israelis so I was supposed to meet up with her whenever she arrived. Benny was the one driving but his girlfriend and the other couple in the car might as well have had their hands on the wheel, too. At every traffic light (ramzor) an argument ensued as to which way Benny should turn. By the time a light change came, each and every direction had been suggested and the one chosen was always the wrong one. With this I connected. While I sat quietly in my cluelessness, happy to go with the flow, everyone else in the car yelled their thoughts at everyone else at the same time at the same blaring pitch and with so much love. Fleet family Passover Seder in Florida, anyone?

So eventually we made it to the party. This place was definitely tucked away from the eyes and GPSs of foreigners.  It turned out to be a charity event for needy children put on by, among others, Hitorrerut Yerushalayim (Jerusalem Awakening). Remember that sad somber circle of Israelis in the middle of Ben Yehuda on Yom HaZicharon? The guitar and accordion players from that night were here at this party and were charging through a barrel full of Israeli classics with a full band that included drums and horns and a synth organ.

Nothing here is a coincidence. These songs were a complete about-face from the previous night. With two projectors beaming the song lyrics up onto some screens and the yard filled with hundreds more twentysomethings, there was no reason not to feel included. It’s much easier to relate to joy and independence and freedom than death and sadness and a national identity that had war and loss and confusion programmed into it.

On the way back to Nachlaot, I walked through Ben Yehuda, which was filled with Israeli kids spraying white foam from cans on passersby, playing with blow-up Israeli-flag hammers (apparently, a beloved Israeli tradition) and generally being loud and obnoxious. Nothing new or unique here. But then I heard that there was a party a few streets away from my apartment. Like Purim, people were standing and dancing in the street in Nachlaot outside of a bar called Slow Moshe. It was across the street from this scene, in the direction of a Sharpied arrow on a white sign, down a tiny street which I’d never thought to explore, that the real party was raging. From the main road you couldn’t hear it, but once you made it down there to the somehow-enclosed courtyard there was bumping trance, tents with homemade pita and hummus and chocolate treats and hundreds of raving Israelis packed in and grooving.  I met up with some friends there. We stayed and danced for a bit. The trance went on and on. We left. We came back. It had switched to Hebrew-flecked reggae which then switched to electronic takes on old Israeli folk songs (there’s nothing like hundreds of Israelis screaming in unison to cheesy Israeli folk music) which then snapped to rootsy hip-hop and then on and on. And it was 4:30 in the a.m. at this point.

The next day meant thousands of people in Gan Sacher (a park close to Nachlaot) barbecuing to their hearts’ content in the springtime sun.

Maybe I wasn’t looking hard enough before. Or maybe I was slipping into surrounding myself with Anglos and with English because its so damn easy to in this city. But Israel actually came out of hiding over the past couple of days. And today, officially, I have less than two months left to get to know her.

]]> http://followingfleet.wordpress.com/2009/04/30/yom-hametziyut/feed/ 3 lyleismo http://followingfleet.wordpress.com/2009/04/21/unassigned-readings/ http://followingfleet.wordpress.com/2009/04/21/unassigned-readings/#comments Tue, 21 Apr 2009 18:27:31 +0000 Josh Fleet http://followingfleet.wordpress.com/?p=149 ]]> The Word of God (the white letters)

Elie Wiesel’s Great Regret (The Daily Beast)

Ahmadinejad entourage brands Elie Wiesel ‘Zion-Nazi’ (HaAretz.com)

Behind Bars in Iran (the New York Times)

Wall: A Monologue (the New York Review of Books)

The Beats: A Graphic History (macmillan)

Morning meant SHPiEL. Clearly, years writing for (and running) the paper has not taught me to get things done early. I knew Zahara would be putting the paper together that day so this was really the last opportunity to not fuck it up. It’s not that I can’t get things done early. It’s just that I want to write something as up-to-the-minute as possible, and having an open-ended period in which to turn in my column isn’t conducive to being on top of things.

I wrote the previous post that morning and left the apartment to grab something to eat. Every other restaurant on the street  here is closed during Pesach. The ones that are open aren’t always appetizing. Then there’s this one cafe that doubles as a book shop just off of Ben Yehuda. I met Sara G. and Jacob and his sister Jessica, who was visiting for the holiday, there. Tmol Shilshom is overpriced, the service is usually infrequent and it’s overpriced. But they have real coffee! But, I would find out, not on Pesach. They were finishing up, but I was OK with that. I got shakshuka. Jacob wrote a few short poems on his reciept and gave them to me before he left. Here’s at least two of them:

Uncle Morty’s tape recording / are all we have left of him. / but Aunt Lula pawned the tape player / to pay off his gambling debt / so we won’t hear his voice again

Matzah cracked / covered in sand / by a people celebrating / in their own land / but when the tents are packed up, / the toilets are backed-up / & there’s trash everywhere

Then I was alone with my fried eggs over tomato mash and matzah and cafe americano and so I wrote something on my placemat:

An open window / in a coffee house / in Jerusalem / during Pesach / is a tree dripping with fruit, / and leaning hard / into the wind.

Then I over paid and dipped. Went to get a Lonely Planet for Israel and the Palestinian Territories. Over paid for that, too. Went to meet Chana and her cousin (Tsip was there, too) who would be driving us up to Haifa. They had chosen to eat at a a place with awfully overpriced selection of awful Passover pasta. Mmmm.

Yisrolek (a.k.a. Ari), Chana’s cousin, dropped me off in Haifa. He, his silent-type brother who we picked up on the side of the highway just outside of Kfar Chabad and Chana were driving on to go to a family reunion of sorts. The Port Inn, where Lonely Planet told me to stay for the best price, was all booked up. I took the underground (Israel’s only) up the mountain to get to a hotel where I knew Jacob and Jessica would be staying that night. Haifa is on the side of a mountain on the edge of the Mediterranean. There’s stuff on the bottom, on the side and on the top. The B’hai Gardens is one of those things that is on the side of the mountain. The Port Inn is on the bottom. A lot of restaurants and expensive hotels are on top. The Carmelite subway is underneath all of that. It costs less than six sheks to ride.

I rode it to the top of the mountain. The Carmelite has a total of five stops. I guess its not a very tall mountain. Up there, I spent a few hours killing time in Aroma Espresso Bar updating my journal (Since when do I have a journal? We’ll see how long it lasts.) and later at the only kosher-for-Passover place I could find. I got a corned-beef sandwich, and on the TVs there Macabee Tel-Aviv got beat by Macabee Haifa.

The Sagers arrived. The hotel was expensive and made me sleep deep. After “free” buffet breakfast, I took a bus to meet Chana, who’d taken a bus to meet me, so that we could take a bus to Tzfat.

Oh, Tzfat. We decided that Jerusalem is, at least these days, too hot and heavy. There’s spirit dripping all over everyone, and everyone is freaking out about it, always. Jerusalem is fire. Tzfat is air, mamesh, air. The second we got there things were light and cool and calm. Chana and I found ourselves in the Artist’s Quarter and later in a Joseph Carro’s synagogue. Some of these people take some trippy pictures of old rabbis. Wowoah.

Two restaurants were open in Tzfat, one meat and one dairy. We chose The Meat Restaurant and weren’t disappointed. They brought us endless Israeli salads and chips (fries) and some meat on a skewer. Two hours and a few more friends arriving later we were off to Mordechai’s place, where we would sleep and live for the proceeding night and morning. I’ll leave it at the fact that the man had courtyards met by rooms met by courtyards met be meditation wombs met by roofs that met other roofs, and somehow we ended up several houses away, down the mountain, singing nigunim in the light holy sun.

Chana, Tsip, Adiella and I eventually found our way down to the Ari’s grave. Below Tzfat on the mountain is a sweeping cemetery specked with blue. When you’re down in it, those specks are the sky-blue-painted graves of tzadikim, righteous Jews of old.  People pray by/on/all over the graves of tzadikim. It lifts them higher.

On the way to the cemetery we stepped into the Abuhav Synagogue, just off of the main drag of the Artist’s Quarter. It took about five seconds to realize I had been in this place nearly four years earlier while on USY Pilgrimage. Four years ago, I remembered, they had dropped us off in Tzfat for a few hours. It hadn’t been enough time. Now, as we stopped to marvel at the shul, I think I began to make up for the earlier insufficient experience.

You walk in and there’s a massive sky-blue bimah in the center of the room. Above this is mural swirled around mural ending in the center with a massive Holocaust-memorial chandelier. Around that bimah are four pillars. Built in to ones of the walls are three separate arks for Torah scrolls, each serving a different context and purpose for yearly Torah readings.

Like I said, Tzfat is air, and this place was one of the many pure embodiments of that. As we stood in wonder and silence, a few birds flew into the shul and began flying loops in and out and around the pillars, chasing each other. It was possibly the most graceful/peaceful thing I have ever seen. The old man who let us into the shul and sat quietly while we looked around told us, in Hebrew, that the same birds come back every spring and fly the same loops.

What next? Every day that I’m back and don’t finish writing this post, the things we did in Tzfat seem to be one wonderful blur of holy happiness. It’s hard to put things in order. In any case, after Abuhav and after the Ari we stopped in a dusty supermarket on the way back to Mordechai’s. We were looking for something to cook for dinner. Mordechai didn’t have much in the way of pots or pans or plates that were kosher for Passover, so we had to improvise. We got some chicken and potatoes, a hand-held grill-ish thing and marshmallows.

A couple hours later, when we were full from such improbably delicious fire-cooked cuisine, the four of us decided to venture back out into the world and visit Ascent, a retreat center in Tzfat that offers lodging, tours, classes in Kaballah and Hasisdut and the occasional farbrengen.

Adiella taught me a fire nigun on the walk over: “Nigun Moshe” brought down by Yehuda Green. I have since, as always, forgotten how this song starts and haven’t had any luck finding it online. But I know you’re out there somewhere, and I’m coming for you.

When you walk into Ascent you have two options. Take the stairs that go down or take the ones that go up. I started walking down because I knew that the action would be down there. Adiella did the same because she was looking for a friend. Chana and Tsip, on the other hand, stopped and sort of just stared up at something. They were looking at an older couple sitting in the waiting room upstairs. A dozen exclamation points later I realized that the couple sitting up there was the parents of our friend Micah. They were a bit distraught, but only, they said, because Micah was distraught. Nothing was working out. They came to Tzfat to have a holy experience and things had just turned sour. This ran completely counter to the experience we were having in Tzfat. I know that I was unable to stop smiling and/or singing and that everything felt really right and light and sweet, not sour or wrong. I had to cut them off. Where’s Micah? I wanted to know. Downstairs, they said. So let’s find him! and we ran off. I can only say that while this was entirely unexpected it was entirely meant-to-be. Our friend was definitely out of sorts, but I hope that our presence eased his mind for the night.

It’s not that we didn’t do more after this, it’s that I’ve already written far too much and, honestly, I need to go shower, eat and try to find a place to go to in the North for the rest of my break. That night we slept in The Womb (The Woom) and in the morning made our way to the bus station to catch a ride back to Jerusalem. It was almost noon by the time we got there. Buses to Jerusalem had stopped at 11 a.m., so we hopped on to a bus that took us to Tiberias where we could then hop another bus home. In Tiberias there were literally hundreds of people waiting in the line for the bus to Jerusalem. We couldn’t dig our way on to the first bus. So after taking out some money and unexpectedly running into some friends who were also traveling, we literally clawed our way onto a bus that ended up being overfilled by at least 15 people. Meaning to say, every seat was taken, some seats were shared by more than one and the aisles and stairwells of the bus were filled to the last inch by flesh and luggage. Chana, Tsip and I had a nice cozy piece of aisle for the three-hour ride. And in such conditions, it was impossible not to meet the young Israelis all around us: new friends who I’ll probably never again see but who were beautiful and blessed nonetheless.

And, oh, there’s so much more, but it looks like I’ve crossed everything off the list from a couple posts back except the camping in the Golan. Let’s see what the Lonely Planet has planned for me today…

I didn’t know this when I ordered my ticket over the phone the day before the festival began. I still didn’t know it on the bus ride to the beach between the Israeli cities of Ashdod and Ashkelon where it would be held. I think I started to figure it out when the bus dropped me off in a field a few miles from the festival’s site.

In that field on the edge of that beach, things started clicking. I was surrounded by packs of chattering Israeli brace-faces smoking cigarettes and 16-year-old boys acting like the overgrown 20-year-old warriors they hoped to become. Some of them were dropped off by their parents. I hadn’t noticed it, but some of the others came on the bus with me from Jerusalem.

I started to feel old, which made me feel self-conscious, which made me feel crazy. And so, feeling like an old, almost-cracked nut, a seed of thought began to form in my head: Boombamella is not a music festival. It’s a three-day gathering disguised as a music festival made up of unsupervised Israeli hormone machines on the Mediterranean.

Then, because of that thought, I really felt old. But then, something a friend said to me earlier in Jerusalem began to make sense. That thing, I realized, was actually the main reason why I chose to come to Boombamella.

Back in Jerusalem, before I got on a bus with dozens of Israeli spring-breakers, before I ordered my ticket, before I was even capable of deciding what to do for my break from classes, a friend said she was going to the festival to bring the spirit of Shabbat. Back in Jerusalem, this didn’t really make much sense to me.

The City of Gold is Shabbat incarnate. Everything in Jerusalem feels like it builds and builds during the week and keeps building through Friday afternoon when the streets and markets are packed with panicking people. Then everything stops, and it is Shabbat.

Jerusalem is a bubble. It can go one of two ways if you choose to live here. You’ll go crazy after a few weeks and need to speed off to a far-flung beacon of secular society, or you’ll never want to leave and you think that if you do leave, the rest of the country functions the same way.

In reality, Israel is a country of bubbles. Tel Aviv is a bubble of an entirely different shade and shape. (There’s even an Israeli film called “HaBuah,” “The Bubble,” which addresses this phenomenon.) Eilat, in the south, is an even stranger bubble. In every case, the bubble makes you think that the rest of the world thinks thoughts likes you and lives lives like you, and so you need not leave the bubble because everything you need and know is inside. Outside is some foreign redundancy. Don’t go there, says the bubble. It’s a waste of time.

So back in Jerusalem, when my friend talked about bringing the spirit of Shabbat to Boombamella, it didn’t quite click. The spirit, whatever that means, would be at the festival, I posited. I mean, the festival is in Israel, right?

Still, something pulled me to order a ticket at the last minute and to wake up earlier to catch a bus to a foreign land. I didn’t even check the list of bands or events online before I left.

And then I arrived and reality hit. I was on a beach with thousands upon thousands of young Israelis (read: Jews) in the middle of the holiday of Passover and on the verge of the Shabbat, and the girls were basically naked (OK, some were completely naked) and the tents were bumping and blaring and the non-Kosher food was frying and it was Spring Break ’09. The Jewish State seemed a lot less Jewish and a lot more like any other place in the world.

Boombamella is not Bonnaroo. The live music doesn’t start until night time. The music tents seem like caricatures of tents at big festivals in America. There was the One Love tent that featured standard reggae tunes and a smattering of crappy American rap mixed in. There was the Tribal Beat tent, which featured endlessly bad trance music with bass that made the beach shudder. And so on.

Starting Friday afternoon and continuing through Saturday night, I spent most of my time at a tent just outside the festival proper. It had a big Hebrew sign that read “Kfar Tefillah,” which means “Village of Prayer.” The people who set up this tent are the sort of Israelis who might as well be living during the time of the First Temple. These people just look biblical.

They lead a service on the beach at sunset and a meal after that back in the tent. Any person–shirtless, spiritless or otherwise–was welcome to join, for free and without question. The story was the same on Saturday. Tales were told about rebbes, rabbis, prophets and priests. Songs were sung. Wine was drunk. Shaloms were Om’ed. Circles of dancing souls were spun. And in the end, the spirit of Shabbat, whatever that means, had some life breathed into it.