Final Posts: Kelli

Having sent our giant English-Hebrew dictionary home already in friends’ luggage, we’re left during these last few days with only the sometimes-reliable (and often amusing) electronic dictionary Sarah bought at the beginning of the year. Last night’s attempt to decipher cooking directions on a bag of frozen vegetable couscous: “It says something about an anthology…no, wait, it’s the juice of half a lemon.” I guess we shouldn’t have parted with the big dictionary so soon, but having sent some things home with friends means early efforts at packing are looking good; it seems there will be enough room now for what we brought plus what we bought.

The final photo album is up (click here; use sarandkel at yahoo dot com). Pictures run from mid-August through today’s break from packing—a trip to the Jerusalem Zoo, which has a giant Noah’s Ark (where else but in Jerusalem?). I’m sure Rebekka & Tom have some great photos as they took well over 1,000 during their two weeks here. [Update: the final total was 1,981!] It was like having a photojournalist along, documenting our daily lives with shots we would never think to take: our hummus seller (an Arab man born in our neighborhood before the war, when it was an Arab neighborhood) sharing his recipe with Sarah in the market, a major downtown intersection empty after the Shabbat siren, the desert landscape as seen from the whizzing car. And, we had our first rain in 5 months while they were here! It was just a brief spitting from a mostly cloudless, blue sky—I kept looking up, thinking I was standing under a leaking AC unit—but rain is rain, and it means autumn and then winter at last (my favorite).

Reflections… prize for Most Interesting Roadkill goes to the wild boars in the north (3 of them) and the hyena in the south. I’m going to miss eating fresh, as in picking an orange right off a tree. I’m going to miss the kind of safety I feel here; on the other hand, I look forward to less frequent, more subtle harassment. I won’t miss the disruptive movie intermissions, or the car alarms, which the populace as a whole hasn’t figured out how to turn off and has given up trying. I’ll certainly miss the “realness”—eating when I’m actually hungry, sleeping when I feel tired, and enjoying showers because I really need them after desert hiking, rather than having these things dictated by a schedule predicated on work. I neither love Israel less nor detest it any less than before. I’ve developed an even deeper appreciation of the history here, the ruins and the nature. And I’ve learned some things about myself that I want to change, a realization that probably wouldn’t have materialized during “life as usual” at home.

I still don’t understand this crazy region of the world, where the majority of Saudi Arabia’s produce, which comes from Israel, must go through Jordan first for reboxing because Saudis refuse to accept goods imported from Israel (even though both sides know this happens; hat tip to my mom for that one); where Jews and Arabs, united to prevent the separation wall from splitting a Palestinian village in two, can win their case in the courts and celebrate together with a big picnic; and where if you’re unfortunate enough to get into a car accident and it’s caused by the other driver, that driver will accompany you in the ambulance to the hospital, chewing out the emergency medics the moment they turn their attention away from you, while at the same time berating you for your reckless driving.

Here’s a good summing-up comment our landlady made when her family hosted us for Shabbat dinner during the Sukkot holiday: “You don’t just date Israel—you have to commit to it.” She certainly did, having come to the country from the US for a 3-week study program some 20 years ago, then deciding to stay. This mindset of digging in with your whole self is, I think, the only way immigrants who are successful here can approach life in Israel. Our time here was a 9-month “date,” and for the first time I’m leaving Israel without a sense of when I might return next.

And now, a big thanks to those listed below, who helped shape this adventure.
On the home front:
*Sarah’s dad, Bruce, for serving as Post Master General
*Every one of our visitors: Kyla, Bruce, Ben, & Dave Blattberg; our upstairs neighbor, Kelly; friends Meryl & Kyle (and for bringing Big Red gum); friends Rebekka & Tom (and for packing so little that they took back a bag of our stuff, lightening our load); and Jack & Charlie for trying
*Meryl & Kyle, for storing 1,286 boxes in their basement
*Our DC renter, Michele, for providing us with peace of mind about our home, and for express-mailing my replacement driver’s license
*All who kept in touch through e-mail, calls, and letters
*Both sets of parents, whose unexpected assistance made the prospect of a year without income a little less reeling
*Kyla & Bruce, for offering their Manhattan apartment for Phase II of this year’s experience
*All other offers (time-unlimited!) of places to stay in DC until we finally are back in our home in April
*Youtube, for making us feel like we didn’t miss out on every moment critical to American pop culture this year
*Heidi & Barb, for being the first faces we’ll see when disembarking in DC
*Every one of our blog readers and commenters. Thanks, too, to whoever invented the idea of blogs. It’s been a good learning experience.

In the holy land:
*Friends Jared and Elisa and their kids, Eliana and Aviel, for going beyond the definition of “neighbor” and adopting us into their family. May the Bank of Jared always remain open to those whose wallets are stolen.
*All the acquaintances who, upon just meeting us, invited us to join their lovely Shabbat dinners
*The yummy vegetarian restaurants that kept us happy, especially Village Green
*The people of Ulpan Akiva, who jump-started our Hebrew skills at the beginning of the year, then gently shoved us out of the nest and into the real world of communicating
*Those Israelis who showed patience with our Hebrew—in particular, postal workers for their encouragement, and bus and taxi drivers for the free practice sessions
*The crew at Avis
*The neighborhood vendors we’ve come to know: the staff at Little House in Baka (local hotel), the Fruit Guys, the Laundry Guys, the people at Pizza Sababa, Judy and the owner at the little health food shop, the Potato Lady, and the Crabby Man (who was later upgraded to the Sometimes Gruff Man)

Here’s how Israeli novelist Amos Oz describes his fellow citizens: “a warm-hearted, hot-tempered Mediterranean people that is gradually learning, through great suffering and a tumult of sound and fury, to find release both from the bloodcurdling nightmares of the past and from delusions of grandeur, both ancient and modern.” That’s pretty good.

Be seeing many of you soon, either in DC or NY!

Final Posts: Sarah

I haven’t left Israel yet and I’m already missing it. This surprises me as much as it may surprise you, since I felt very ready to leave about two months ago. Now I’m not so sure. Monday we dropped off our last visitors at the airport, then went to return the rental car. When we told our Avis guy it was our last time, he was so genuinely sincere about us having a good flight back and that it “had been really nice” that I started feeling melancholy. The feeling was to intensify when I went to our local supermarket to do a bit of shopping. (Spent most of Rebekka and Tom’s visit on the road, so the cupboards were bare.) I asked some of the supermarket folks what the secret spice was for couscous (I’m sure there is one! Couscous just doesn’t taste the same at home), and they couldn’t come up with anything more than chicken broth. I was disappointed, but as I was leaving, one of the managers called me back, asked if I spoke French, then gave me his wife’s home AND cell phone numbers. So I had a lovely (halting) French conversation with Suzanne that evening. Would that happen in DC?? I recognize that may very well happen in small-town Iowa or wherever, but this is Jerusalem, Israel’s biggest city (700,000 people). Sigh. (p.s. Suzanne just uses soup broth, too, so I’m still stuck.)

This whole experience has been both exactly what I expected and nothing like what I thought it would be. It’s going to take some time for me to process it all, and by then we won’t be blogging anymore. I came to Israel with the fear that I might be totally changed and lose my sense of self. I come away with a strong belief that I am very committed to being who I am and perhaps too rigid to really allow change. A book I’m reading said it better than I can: “I understand now how little mere travel gives to a man. Unless the spirit expands with the explosion of space about him, he returns the same man as he went out.” (Morris West, “The Shoes of the Fisherman”) I came thinking I might feel a desire to incorporate more Jewish ritual into my life; I *think* I’m leaving with a deep questioning about the value of this (or any) religion at all. I try to approach everyone with friendliness (sort of hard to do given my innate distrust of people) and have found that Israelis (including Jewish, Muslim, and Christian) are, by and large, happy to have us here. It’s yucky in the context of broader politics, but so very nice on a personal, day-to-day basis. Kelli and I agree we won’t ever travel anywhere to such a warm welcome and feeling of belonging. We’ve had more than one person try to convince us to move since, in the words or our health food store owner, “Two such as you, with your wonderful smiles, we need that here.”

Enough heavy talk—on to a brief recap of our last visitors’ visit! We counted having met 6 different deaf people (what a difference signing all the time makes)—Arabs and Jews (Ethiopian, Russian, and ?). The last was during Rebekka & Tom’s final morning as we attempted to visit the Dome of the Rock—no access to non-Muslims as it was Eid al-Fitr, the holiday that marks the end of Ramadan. An Arab motioned that the door I was heading towards was locked, and since he was gesturing, I gestured back. Before we knew it, we were having a long conversation with him, learning all about his history, family, politics, and life in the Arab quarter of the Old City. Finally, we were invited back to his home. We couldn’t refuse. It was a wonderful ending to their whirlwind trip.

Stay tuned for Kelli’s final blog in the next day or two.

A different kind of Tent City

{posted by Kelli}

While students at Gallaudet University resurrect their Tent City from last May to continue their protest of the choice of a new president, we in Israel can’t walk ten feet without bumping into a tent.

Sukkot has begun, the seven-day Feast of Tabernacles/Festival of Booths commemorating the Israelites’ wandering in the desert, where they constructed temporary dwellings, or “booths,” as they traveled. Unlike other holidays on the Jewish calendar, this one is celebrated by all—secular and religious. It involves building one’s own sukkah (rather like a tent) to exact specifications: a temporary enclosure with an entrance and the ability to see the sky, which usually means large palm leaves laid across the top so you can still see the stars. Live in a city apartment? With a few modifications, your balcony becomes your sukkah. Don’t have a balcony? Put a sukkah up in your building’s parking lot, or right out on the sidewalk (see first photo, which begs the question, if sukkahs are on the sidewalks, where will people park now?). Then let the decorating begin. People hang representations (or the real thing) of various produce that is in season, paper chains made by the kids, and silly lights inside their tents. Really religious sukkahs have little hanging Santas(!) A coffee shop in our neighborhood has a sukkah made of burlap coffee bean bags with hanging travel mugs decorating the ceiling in rows. Goofy and tacky are unabashedly the common goals, such that the tents look like rows of playhouses. If you didn’t know any better, you’d think the country was on a simultaneous remodeling spree.

Once your sukkah is ready, what to do with it? All meals for the week should be taken in the sukkah, and some people even sleep in theirs, making it a fun “camping” experience for kids, who are off school all week. What if you don’t feel like cooking? Practically every restaurant has a sukkah right now, from the top-notch establishments to the ice cream parlors to the Burger Ranch. Another requirement is to invite guests and strangers to gather in your sukkah for meals, and this is taken seriously. Tents are set up in public places to feed homeless and poor people so that they, too, can satisfy the requirement to eat in a sukkah. Friday night, the first night of Sukkot (which also happened to be Shabbat), we joined three other guests for dinner in our landlords’ sukkah, which had bunches of fresh dates, a chandelier, and plastic grapes that glowed on and off.

It is an incredibly festive week here, reminiscent of the height of this summer when countless festivals were happening. Having never spent Sukkot in Israel, this is fast becoming my favorite holiday here. Celebrations this week include festivals for tomatoes, grapes, olives, dates (no less than three of these), wine, the desert, film, dance, kites, science fiction, aviation, and New Age music. There’s a circus, the Taste of Jerusalem food festival, city walking tours, and guided hikes in the north where participants help clear and replant forests that saw war damage.

Before Sukkot began, we two took our last little road trip together, this one to the south. I did a couple of somewhat difficult desert hikes around the Ein Gedi oasis, where the rewards come in the form of hidden ruins and surprise springs. At one remote waterfall, I peered down a short, steep rock cliff with about a dozen iron handles sticking out of it—the way down to reach the pool at the bottom. Suddenly, up popped a leathery Israeli woman in a sport bikini and hiking sandals who, when my hesitation about descending the cliff became obvious, scrambled up the iron handles, then pointed down and said, “I’m 71. Now, go.” So I did.

Most refreshing was the swimming pool at Kibbutz Ein Gedi, where we stayed overnight. Such a wonderful setting, and I don’t even like deserts. On the way back home, we stopped at the secluded St. George’s Monastery, which was built in the year 480 CE in a niche in a deep ravine in the desert cliffs near Jericho (see second photo). You leave your car at the top and walk down a steep, narrow road between canyon walls, then come around a curve to see the monastery complex perched on the side of the cliff in front of you. We talked a while with one of the three Greek Orthodox monks who maintain the old chapels there. Another strange sight going back into Jerusalem was all the cars heading from the desert back to the city with palm branches for sukkahs strapped on their roofs. Reminded me of cars carting Christmas trees home.

Just before Sukkot, during the High Holy Days that mark the Jewish New Year, there were lots of year-end retrospectives in the paper, the kind we have in the states around Dec. 31. (Side note: one article examined the current status of Ethiopian Jewry in Israel, numbered at 105,000. You might remember Israel’s airlifts, titled Operation Moses and Operation Solomon, of Jews out of famine-racked Ethiopia in the 1980s. In Israel, where 26% of the population is living under the poverty line, they remain on the lowest rungs of integrated society here economically, socially, and educationally. The article was about Ethiopian-Israeli Jewish kids trying to juggle school (not generally valued by older generations) and family responsibilities, such as interpreting between their parents and doctors, teachers, banks, etc., while also working to earn money for “the usual things we need, like school books, student ID cards, removing the cross tattoos from our foreheads, and bus tickets.” Yes, removing cross tattoos from foreheads—remnants from pre-airlift days when Ethiopian Jews pretended to convert to Christianity but still practiced Judaism in secret—is considered a typical expense in these teens’ lives.)

Anyway, the timing of the year-end reviews rather matches the end of our time here, so it fast-forwarded me mentally to our leaving. We’re planning out the last few movies to rent on our 25-movie membership, and last movies to see with our local theater pass. Yesterday we finally went to the beautiful St. Peter’s Church, the site where Jesus was imprisoned before crucifixion, after a last visit to Sarah’s cousin in the Old City. Rebekka & Tom arrive early Tuesday morning, so they’ll get to see Jerusalem in the throes of Sukkot before we all head south for five days and then north for four. Then, just four days after they leave, we fly home. Only three weeks from yesterday, but I’m not counting ;)