i’m in athens right now, and tomorrow i’ll take a five-hour bus ride north and east to the farm i’ll be volunteering at for the next month.
i need a few more days to catch up on sleep before i can do any justice to the last couple of weeks and days i’ve had, which, rest assured, have all been wonderful.
ya sou,
ele
For months, I’ve been trying to get through On The Road, but Kerouac’s manic wanderlust doesn’t quite match up with mine, so I put it down for weeks at a time. While apartment- and pet-sitting for the two weeks immediately after moving off the farm, I picked it up again, and tried to get back into the beat. Then the dog ate my book – but he only ripped out the pages I’d already read, so I took it as an encouraging sign to finish the rest. Eventually, I had to pack up Kerouac in my trusty maroon backpack (aka Wendell Berry) and I headed to Palestine (the West Bank), where another dog named Chlamydia took off with my ragged book, and I haven’t seen it since.
I was staying at a permaculture farm project in the village outside of Bethlehem, where the compost toilet room’s walls are plastered with quotes by Mark Twain, William Burroughs, (the real) Wendell Berry, and, of course, Mr. Kerouac. My favorite lines in the stone outhouse, from the Dharma Bums:
“I see a vision of a great rucksack revolution, thousands or even millions of young Americans wandering around with rucksacks, going up to mountains to pray, making children laugh and old men glad, making young girls happy and old girls happier, all of ‘em … go about writing poems that happen to appear in their heads for no reason and also by being kind and also by strange unexpected acts keep giving visions of eternal freedom to everybody and to all living creatures. . . .”
And I realized I needed to stop looking into Kerouac’s boozy list of half-legal escapades and start looking around, cuz hell, here I am on the road. Am I climbing mountains, writing poems and making old girls happy? Yes, yes, and … yes (given a loose interpretation). At this point, it’s been 25 days without a place to call home, and I’ve been wandering around more or less happily all over the Middle East, relying on good friends and good fortune my next adventure. I spent almost two weeks in Tel Aviv, doing laundry and hanging out with new and old friends (Michal and Shoshi both moved to Tel Aviv for a few months). When city life started to go bland, Wendell and I took a bus to Palestine, where I met up with some people I’d met before at Abed’s, and I stayed for nearly a week at the farm in Beit Sahour. Palestine is a really wonderful place – intriguing, calm, honest; I felt entirely safe, more than welcome, and I gained an entirely new perspective and accompanying vocabulary in just a few days. I helped build a water cistern with cement and bricks (how satisfying!); visited the Church of the Nativity (of”away in a manger’ fame – I touched the rock upon which he was born!); I even got taken out on an extremely awkward Valentine’s Day date (the kind of which is only good for the stories you can tell afterward) …
Along with the Alternative Information Center and a group of internationals, I took a trip to Chevron (Hebron), a city where the conflict between Arab residents and Jewish settlers has brought out the most vile human behavior imaginable. Chevron was the one city I was scared to visit – given its volatile citizenry, riots and shootings are not infrequent – but found there a really pleasant old city and festively active downtown. Without going into so many details, it’s examples like Chevron that shock me into wondering why every person is not committed to fairness, justice and civility: there can be no square inch of land worth stoning a child on his or her way to school, or throwing feces onto shopkeepers, or refusing people a basic right such as water, or, or, or? or … can there?
A 40-minute bus ride and an apathetic wave of a checkpoint guard’s hand (with my Caucasian skin and American passport, there was no need to fingerprint me, search my bag, or question my motives for travel), and I was back in Israel, a little less certain and a bit more humble.
Shoshi, her friend Megan from home, and I then took off on a 7-day desert/sea tiyul; we tremped and camped our way up and down the Negev and Arava deserts, from Ein Gedi to Eilat. Tremping (hitch-hiking) is very common and safe here, just point your finger at the road. We started our trip at a hippie colony on the shores of the Dead Sea, called Mitzuqe Dragot, where we partook in the sublimely bizarre ritual of floating in the Dead Sea (!!! woah !!!) Next, we tremped south to the vacation destination of Ein Gedi, but flash flood warnings kept us from actually hiking in the valleys, riverbeds, and waterfalls for which the spot is known. Instead, we stood on high ground and watched the floods rush from mountains to sea (dozens of Israelis showed up to watch, I guess flash floods are a sort of spectator-sport here). To escape the rain and floods, we headed down to the sunny southern tip of Israel, Eilat, which is on the northern shore of the Red Sea. Eilat is the Las Vegas of the Middle East (not really where we wanted to be), so we dunked in the Red Sea, ate falafel from a guy we think might have played the captain on some version of Flipper, and slept a lot. The next morning we bussed up to Masada, a mountain-top city-fortress built by King Herod BCE and later occupied by a rebel group, the last Jews in the land of Israel before being expelled by the Romans 2000 years ago. All along the way we met and befriended travelers and locals, cooked our meals over open fires, bathed in freshwater sulfur springs, hiked and hitched, and generally enjoyed being young and lucky.
A sweet elderly woman at Masada told us she’d never forget our smiling faces and free spirits – a bit of a dramatic statement, but I’d like to think Jack Kerouac would be proud.
When dreidels began appearing in shops in the days leading up to Chanuukah, I thought for a short time that all of them had suffered a serious typo at the dreidel factory: instead of the נגהש letters I was familiar with, all the dreidels had נגהפ (note the last letter is a pey פ not a shin ש). But soon enough I learned the reason for the funky dreidels. The letters on the dreidel are an acronym for the sentence “nes gadol haiyah sham” (nun-gimel-hey-shin) which means “a great miracle happened there.” But that “there” of Channukah legend is here, so the acronymized sentence on Israeli dreidels read “nes gadol haiyah po” – “ a great miracle happened here.”
The miracle did happen here, though time and the hyperbole of folklore has perhaps blurred the truth surrounding the reasons we celebrate Channukah today (say the skeptics). One interesting tidbit I’ve learned is that the Maccabis were residents of my town, Modiin, and there is even a cave nearby the farm in which the Maccabi men apparently took shelter during their struggle with the Greeks in Temple times. And luckily for all of us, miracles of all sizes continue to happen here these days, too.
For example, I found myself on 25th of December (the fifth night of Channukah) in a dome on farm with the Prime Minister of Israel, Ehud Olmert, among a gaggle of security guards, politicians, other MASA participants, and us mud-booted farmers. While the candle-lighting ceremony was one big, ridiculously silly, organizationally nightmarish photo-op, to have Prime Minister sitting in our dome was a bit of an awe in itself. (Thank goodness his security forces ripped up the floors, combed our passionfruit vines, and swabbed our hands for explosives: all was safe for his 30 minute visit.) Here’s the real kicker – I got to give a speech at the ceremony, right alongside the PM himself (his message: make aliyah), the mayor of Modiin, head of the Jewish Agency, and Itzik, the man who manages the farm. Here’s the abbreviated gist of my speech:
The miracle that we’re celebrating now is the miracle of getting something from nothing (there was no oil, and then there was some, hallelujah!) – in Hebrew this concept is called
יש מאין, yesh m’ain (literally “there is from there is not”). Examples of yesh m’ain exist in our lives, from the very mundane to the very extraordinary; one example is the really awesome channukiah (menorah) I helped build out of wood and clay. Last week, the channukiah had been a pile of sticks and dirt, but with a little love and a little artistic talent from Gali, we’d turned those bits of nothing into a beautiful thing over whose light we said the prayer of miracles. That’s something from (almost) nothing, I think. And if you think about it, if you believe that you really can create something form nothing then really anything is possible, because every nothing is an opportunity to create something great. How can we see this concept in our everyday life? Let’s take the bal egan (craziness) of the Middle East peace process; so often I hear that it is simply too complicated a situation to solve presently, that there are too many contradicting opinions, too much at stake, that violence is too deeply ingrained in social identities to tease them apart into, well, peaces. I hear too often, “Where do we start? We have nothing to work with …” But if we believe that truly anything is possible, that we can create something from nothing, then peace among neighbors is not impossible. The nothingness with which we have to work is as good a place as any to start making peace. If something as complicated and beautiful as this world was created in the idea of yesh m’ain, then with compassion and cooperation, love and sacrifice, we can bring peace to this region, and we can build channukiah out of sticks and mud. That’s the belief we need to carry with us not only during Channukah, but every day, too; and then, we’ll see, miracles will happen.
I noticed, while talking, a few rolled eyes and looks of exasperation; I’m sure the politicians in the room thought me grossly naïve – and maybe I am, but at least I am optimistic. A few days later, Israel launched a huge air strike against Gaza, and we later learned that the Prime Minister had authorized the attack before coming to our farm, that he sat there smiling pleasantly and cracking jokes with the forsight of these current events in his mind. Many people gave me “kol hakavods” (all the respects) for my talk (mostly young people who told me I’m totally right, and the PM needs to hear more words of our wisdom).
But despite my optimism and metaphors, I find myself in a war zone, where fear and distrust, rumors and propaganda are flying in and out of the Gaza Strip alongside the rockets. The farm continues to be a safe place for all of us – we are relatively far away from the violence, and the necessary chores of farm life insure that our days have remained mostly the same, with the addition of news briefings. Yesterday, for example, we heard on the radio of the rockets hitting northern Israel (launched from Lebanon, which poses a potentially large problem, but the fact that they came from Palestinians and not Hezbollah is source of relief); a small group of us were in the greenhouse seeding a second round of winter crops and early summer crops (cabbages, cauliflower, zucchini, heirloom tomatoes, and eggplants), discussing the repercussions of this act, the senselessness of this conflict, the unfairnesses perpetrated every day by both sides. Petra (a biodynamic farmer) forbade us from passing our negative energies to the new plants, so we weren’t allowed to talk about Gaza while putting the seeds in the soil – but the second a tray was done being seeded, our conversation erupted into new angles on the same argument. It’s not humane, and we want it to end amicably. Soon.
There are ten Israelis on the farm doing a year of service before the army, and several who are doing national service instead of the army. So it is their friends who are currently fighting in Gaza and working in a state whose security is deteriorating daily. For us (Americans) this conflict is a war fought by friends of friends; last night, Roni learned that her high school classmate was killed in Gaza a few days ago. We wonder which members of our farm community might get called into reserves. We are safe here, but we are not unaffected. We worry about others, we worry about ourselves (though we are taking great precautions to keep ourselves safe), and we worry what sort of future the world is moving towards.
But we do what we can to retain the relatively carefree lives we were so used to only a few weeks ago. We continue to hope for resolution and harmony, and to cultivate peace within our own community.
Thank you all for your thoughts and concern.
בשלום
in peace,
Ele
i only have a few moments to let everyone know that, while gaza is now always on our minds, we all at the farm are safe and well. gaza is relatively far away from us, and the effect of the military action there is effecting only our emotionally well-being; we, too, are struggling to understand what exactly is going on, why it is happening, and to figure out how we can help spread peace, compassion, and healing thoughts to everyone here. we are being more cautious in our travel plans, but are still relatively unaffected on the farm, where we’ve been spending our days mushroom-hunting in the forest, and celebrating the new year.
love
ele
the list of people who apparently read this thing is growing, and it’s tad bit intimidating (though appreciated!). i wish i had more time and a better internet connection so i could write more complete (and better-edited) entries about all that’s going on. when i came to israel, my intention was primarily to study sustainable agriculture, but as we’re discovering, nothing in this world is truly independent, and both on and off the farm, we’re learning about the connections between food, natural resources, and the land, politics, micro- and macro- economics, religiosity, secularism, militarism, hypocrisy, livelihoods, cooperation, sense of place, housing policies, ancient history, modern history, personal histories, the arts, corruption, heroism, terrorism, zionism, philanthropy, human rights, language barriers, international relations, natural beauty, group dynamics, spirituality, and on and on.
in our very first permaculture class in september, we did an activity where we all held cards with phrases like “medicinal plant garden” “passive solar design” “chickens” and “old-growth forest,” and we had to verbally connect one phrase to another – some connections were easier than others, but in the end, we’d formed a web where “graywater systems” connected to “personal satisfaction” and “cobb bench.” it’s like that now, on a larger scale: for example, at the UJC General Assembly meeting our group participated in a workshop on the creative arts in jerusalem, where discussion went from the lack of funding for the arts, to the local government’s inability to effectively manage/allocate money, to the government welfare-subsidy for ultra-orthodox jews who don’t work, to the situation in jerusalem where housing is generally unaffordable in part because of “ghost apartments” (americans buy apartments to live in for the 1 or 2 months of the year theyre in israel, but they remain empty) so young people and artists are fleeing the city for cheaper homes, which means that the ultra-orthodox population of jerusalem is growing exponentially (because of the subsidised housing), which is changing the face of public representation, and the friction between religious and secular is growing in every facet of life and … and on and on and on …
all this complexity is putting my brain in the blender, and – between this and the powerful wind storms we’ve been having lately – i’ve been feeling a bit like dorothy in the tornado lately. it’d be nice to think that at some point we’ll all wake up in a techinicolor dream of munchkins and poppies and good triumphing over evil, but who knows when we’ll get there. so, what’s there to do but continue trying to learn and understand and connect as much as possible? this isn’t meant to sound so Debbie Downer-ish, but it is what it is.
in other news, it seems that the prime minister ehud olmert is coming to the farm to light the channukah candles with eco-israel on december 25th – it is quite an honor, although one could say that olmert is not the most beloved politician in israeli politics at the moment (having been kicked out of office, and being widely viewed as a corrupt puppet politician). so, we’ll start preparing by building a menorah out of recycled materials, decorating a dome with farmy decorations, cleaning up the farm, and trying to navigate the annoyances of the prime minister’s security forces (for example, they’re bringing a metal detector to the invite-only lighting ceremony …) for the record, the PM did not happen to mention me in his speech at the GA (susie cohen had a better story, apaprently), and i got several remarks form the lions of judah that the PM made a mistake (again!) but really it was kind of silly anyway.
alright – the day is new, and i’m off to abed’s, the palestinian farmer whom i visited once before; michal and i are returning to his home outside of jerusalem to help build a rainwater catchment system with a group of international activists, and to drink nana tea during the regular tea breaks.
[and, since i'm staying with my madrichah, nomi, right now - happy 98th birthday to popu saul!]
in peace and love,
ele
בשלומ ואהבה
Happy Thanksgiving!!
For the record, only Americans think pumpkin pie is an edible food product – in the past week, I’ve seen numerous Israelis (and Britons and Scotts) turn thier noses up at our beloved desert; no one can really comprehend the idea of putting a pumpkin into a pieshell. But the turkey and stuffing and giving thanks and all that is a big hit. We had a really wonderful cozy Eco-Israel Thanksgiving at the Farm on Tuesday (where we got to explain all our traditions to our resident Australian, Sophie) and express our thanks for things like the beautiful sunsests here, the hospitality of strangers, the chance to be living on a sustainble farm (with donkeys!), being with each other, gratitude for our families, and on and on. On Thursday, Michal and I took off right after Zionism class for a second Thanksgiving dinner in Jerusalem at Ada and John’s house – unforch, J-town traffic was so bad we missed all the thanks part, but we got to stuff ourselves silly on stuffing, sweet potatoes, and all those other tradional foods like grape leaves, tahina, pickles, pomegranate juice, and cake. Yum!
Life at the far is pretty much the same – whenever I see friends here they always ask “what’s up at the farm?” but nothing much ever changes. Not in a bad way, necessarily, but it’s a farm, so we do a lot of weeding and and watering, fixing our ailing compost systems, and natural building stuff like re-plastering the main building with a combination of sand, clay, straw and water. This week we had a demostration lesson on plowing with donkeys, but stubborn old Batia REFUSED to move forward, preferring to step backwards over the plow for long enough that we gave up and did the field by hand. Summer and I build a new set of shelves for our kitchen, that hopfully will give us more workspace and storage in our tiny kitchen. The eggplants are STILL growing, which means that we’re STILL eating eggplant every day except when the cook declares it an eggplant-free day, because we’re all so tired of it. But finally we’re getting some new crops in, like kale and collards, greens, beets, and tons of citrus.
Shoot – I’m out of internet time. I think our broken computer and slow internet connection at the farm got fixed this weekend, so hopefully I can update mjore soon. Hope you’re all well!
Not to brag, but there’s a slight possibility of me becoming a huge celebrity this weekend. Here’s the deal: A group of American women called the Lions of Judah (ie philanthropic Jews) came to visit the farm yesterday – we talked about the farm and our program, and as part of the day, I told them “my story” and gave some of the ladies a tour of the farm. My story was met with great enthusiasm and appluase and a couple of thumbs up. (The extrememly abbreviated version goes like this: I grew up in a secular home, and then I was an environmental studies major in school, and I wanted to farm abroad after I graduated, and I could have gone anywhere in the world, but good golly I wound up in Israel [thanks to philanthropic Jews who gave me a scholarship to come here], and my goodness i LOVE it here…) By the end, the Lions were all but laying gold ingots and first-born children at my feet.
Coincidentally, there is a huge conference called the General Assembly this week in Jerusalem. It’s a meeting of Jews from all over the world, and apparently it’s a pretty big deal to go, and it’s a $300 per head per day to get in. But, becuase being green is so hip right now, our whole sustainble program was invited to the summit day on Sunday, where Ehud Olmert, the Israeli Prime Minister is speaking. And apparently, the PM wants to tell the story of some young Jew who was able to come to Israel and LOVE IT first hand, and apparently the Lions made some calls, and while I was eating mashed pumpkin for lunch yesterday, I got a call from the Prime Minister’s office asking me for “my story” for the PM to mention in his speech. It sounds like it’s between me and some other kid doing a MASA program, whoever’s stopry is more appealing will get mentioned. But I was told to prepare for lots of cameras at the conference, anyway. I think my next step is to locate a set of clothes that is neither filthy, shredded, nor a costume article I found in a trash heap …. which, unfortunately, is easier seaid than done. (I’ve also been advised that now is the perfect time for a mohawk and to break out the green felt mumu-bathrobe (with embriodered gold chest plate!) that I found on the ground in Tsfat last week …)
I’m thrilled if the PM just wants to say “Hey, Ele is a great kid and we sure are happy she’s in Israel,” but I have no desire whatsoever for becoming a posterchild for MASA or “my story” becoming a commodity item to be touted about in search of more donations. So we’ll see what happens. I’m just keepin it real.
There is so much to talk about, it’s overwhelming! Here are a few high lights from the past few weeks:
- Along with my friend Dan, I’ve been on the bread chore for the last two weeks. This means we bake a few loaves of break once a week for our community on the farm. The Tassajara Bread Book has been utterly invaluable during this experience! To bake bread in our mud oven, here is what one must do:
1 – gather firewood. this is the frst big obstacle, because there is not much wood in our parts, so we end up burning a lot of date palm fronds, which burn very quickly, so you need a lot. the wood we do have is in huge chunks, and the farms seems oblivious to the need for an axe with which to chop the wood, and sawing it is rather tedious.
2 – light a fire in the oven, and let the metal box part of the oven heat up.
3 - put in 2-3 loaves of bread, or anything that fits into about 2 small cake pans (we also make granola, and goodies)
4 – wait about 8 years for the things to finish baking. we’re not sure how hot the oven gets, but everything takes about 2 or 3 times as long to bake as it should, and nothing ever really comes out perfectly …
While Dan and I have had to pull some late nighters waiting for the bread to bake, it is very satisfying to wake up the next morning to big doughy loaves of cinnamon-raisin-date honey rounds, or sourdough sesame seed rolls. The other day we were thinning out our strawberry patch (which has been continuously producing berries for well over 3 months now!), and I picked a bunch of overripe berries and made a quick batch of jam. And it was mightily enjoyable to eat my hot homemade jam on my hot homemade bread. Worth the effort? I’m still not sure yet. Next, Dan and I get the chore of taking care of our compost systems, which doesn’t have quite the same charm.
Last week, we went on a Tiul (fieldtrip) up North to check out sustainability projects, hike and swim, and learn about water issues and the military history of the North. It was a fantastic trip!! There are 3 main tributaries to the Jordan River, which feeds the Kinneret (Sea of Galilee), which is Israel’s only lake, and only freshwater source. (A country of only one lake?!) We hiked along two of the three tributaries, and swam in both streams, as well as the Kinneret. The hiking paths remined me of California, and I sat in enough waterfalls to last me a while.
We drove through several Druze villages, and stopped twice for knaffe, which is this awesome Arab pastry with philo dough, cheese, honey syrup, and sometimes rosewater. It is either baklava-colored or neon orange (no joke). Druze are a very interesting people – their M O for survival is to co-operate with the ruler / empire du jour, so long as they are allowed to saty on their land. So they switched relatively easily (though of course not without their own issues) from being Syrian citizens to Israeli. I’m really interested to learn more about the Druze.
We toured the Golan Heights, and were at various times a stone’s throw from the Lebanese and Syrian borders. Neither country officially recognizes the state of Israel, and there are many, many abandonded bullet-riddled cement buildings to recount the history of that dispute. We woke up ealry one morning and had a yoga session atop the former Syrian army headquarters, which is now a delapidated pile of concrete in Israeli territory. For the Warrior pose, our directions were “Face me, and point your left foot towards me, and your right foot towards Syria …”
We also spent a day and a night at Moshav Nahalal, the first moshav in Israel, where a young woman is starting a permaculture community. We fit in all together quite well, and in exchange for a place to sleep and the MOST AMAZING foccacia ever, we helped work on their garden beds and plaster the outside of their natural mud-builidng community center. It was really nice workign with their international crowd, and many of us plan to go back at somepoint to hang out and do more natural building and basketweaving with them.
This is probably way too long as it it, so I’ll sign off by saying I hope you’re all well and happy.
Wait – also: OBAMA!!!! we stayed up all night in an American bar in Tel Aviv watching the results come in, and 2, 3, 4, 5 in the morning, although we had to leave before we got the final counts that Obama one. All of us on the farm are possitively beside ourseleves with joy, though this sentiment is not shared throughout Israel. Most American-Israelis were/are staunchly pro-McCain because McCain is staunchly pro-Israel. Because, don’t you know, Obama is an anti-semetic Muslim terrorist who wants pull the American military-aid rug out from under Israel. I heard somethin crazy like 79% of the American-Israeli vote went to McCain. Luckily, Obama’s pledge to suport Israel and his appointment of a cabinet member whose family is Israeli is a source of some relief for people here. Israel held elections two days ago, and the biggest suprise is that a secular candidate won the mayoral race in Jerusalem, where the Haredi (ultra-orthodox) candidate was expected to win. Change is in the wind?
Love
Ele
It’s finally beginning to feel like autumn here!! Nights are cold and we’ve been getting lots of rain this week, the earth is beginning to smell alive and the hills are slowly sprouting flowers and vines and weeds. It’s hard ot believe that it’s almost Halloween, though – we might try to throw together a Halloween party, but we’re likely all going to dress up like farmers …
Right now I’m at Itzik’s house in Reut – he’s the guy who founded our farm, and we’ve been harvesting olives from the trees in a park near his house. Harvesting of particular foods is so valued here, there is a different word for each kind of harvest – olive harvest is called massik. We’ve been harvesting olives of all descriptions (I didn’t know they came in so many varieties!) – green olives, black, purple, speckled, blue, large, small, round, oblong, dimpled … it’s endless. We’ll take the olives today or tomorrow to an olive press housed at a Franciscan monestary nearby – we’re excited to see how our oil turns out! This morning we picked about 100 kilos of olives, which should produce about 10 gallons of oil, depending on the oil content of the fruits.
I had the most upliftingly woderful weekend a few days ago – I mailed off my absentee ballot (which cost 75 shequels!!! (about 20 bucks)), bought lots of yarn for new knitting projetcs, swam in the sea, and spent all day with new friends. We cooked lots of amazing food, played with teeny-tiny kittens and a puppy (one woman rescues kittens, and she had several days-old and week-old kittens she was taking care of), watched movies andate ice cream. It was great, especially because all of the women were gay, and it was so comfortable to be with them, since I’ve been made to feel like such an alien almost everywhere else in Israel.
Next week all of us on the program are going on a week-long field trip to the North, where we’ll see lots of great sustainability projects – very exciting.
Love! And happy Halloween!
Ele
Chag Sameah some more – we had a nice, low-key Yom Kippur at the farm, and we’re gearing up for a big Sukkot celebration starting tomorrow. I’ll be glad when all the holidays are over, so we can get back into the rythym of things at the farm.
This weekend I was in Be’er Sheva, an unapologetically gritty city in the Negev desert. I went with two girls from the program, Anna and Michal (who studied abroad at Ben Gurion U in Be’er Sheva last year), and we stayed with an American girl, Tess, who runs the Green Community Center for an organization called Bustan, which works on sustainability projects and with Bedouin communities. The Bedouins, I’ve learned, are treated almost as badly as the Palestinians by the Israeli government, but in different ways – they’re essentially forced in to townships (which is very different from their traditional nomadic ways) that have no infrastructure like roads, schools, or medical care, so life is very difficult. There are only 8 recognized townships, but also many other unrecognized townships which are periodically bulldozed …
Our weekend, however, was pretty chill- we helped do a bit of work in the garden, played music, ate good food, knit and read all day. On Friday we went to the shuks, which were far more chaotic than any of the other shuks I’ve been to – everything you can imagine for sale, out of folding tables or overflowing from shops, rotten produce underfoot, hawkers shouting out prices in Hebrew and Arabic, smells and sounds crowding your sences. We bought olives and goat cheese, tomatoes, pita, and rugelah for the weekend, and then took a break for some nana tea – black tea with mint and lots of sugar – an Arabic drink that is DELICIOUS.
On Saturday, we took a walk down the same streets and pedestrain mall that the shuks had overwhelemed the day before, but, because it was shabbat, the streets were totally deserted, we didn’t see people for for half an hour at a time. We walked to Abraham’s Well, some biblical well for which Be’er Sheva is partially named (meaning Seven Wells); there were tons of kids and adults picnicking and a birthday party with bouncy castles going on. Nest to the park is a small valley and spring, through which a sheperd was driving her flock of about 70 goats (and 8 donkeys and two dogs) – that was interestig to watch.
Her ein Jerusalem, there is a special Sukkot shuk that sells only the 4 plants special to Sukkot – citron, willow, myrtle, and date palm. Each represents something specific: citron, the heart; willow, the lips; myrtle, the eyes; and heart-of-palm, the spine. Together, tehyre shaken and are a special holiday mitzvah. There are hundreds of Hasidic men at the shuk now, carfulling inspecting every palm frond and willow leaf in the market. I actually saw one old man with one of those squinty-jewel-appraiser-eye pieces looking at a citron we was thinking of buying. Partying is serious stuff here.
Next week we have almost a whole week off, and I’ll probably go to up north to Haifa to stay with a friend from the farm, and also visit Harduf, a kibbutz that includes a community for adults with developmental disabuilities (similar to the one I worked at in New York this winter -spring). These anthroposphic communities do inpiring work – check out Hardou here: http://www.kamah.org.il/eng/elisha.asp
Michal, Anna and I visited one of Michal’s friends at the soup kitchen where she used to volunteer, and we got this great advice (said about the ups and downs of running a soup kitchen without many resources): “Sometimes it is more better, sometimes it is less better, but always it is better.” That’s a good attitude, isn’t it?
What an awesome week!
They say that whatever happens during the two days of Rosh Hashanah will foreshadow the rest of your year – in that case, I’ll have a very interesting year filled with challenges overcome by adventure!, relaxing time with friends, long walks in the forest, and a crowd of generous stangers being kind to me.
Tsfat is a fairly small city up north in the Galilee, and it is the center of Jewish mystecism, where the Kabbalah and the Zohar were written and studied. The old city is filled with ultra-orthodox families, many artists, and a bunch of Jewish-mystic-hippies. Our hostel was nice, though occupied by a host of interesting characters (the room-keeper, and a few men who either lived there or stayed there often) who were nice enough, but not entirely sane or helpful people. The first eveing, as we were hurriedly preparing for services, the key broke off inside the lock, meaning that Beth and I were trapped outside of the room, and Shoshi and all of our stuff was trappe dinside the room. After several failed attempts of Beth body-checking the door open, and the owner of the hostel insisting (by phone) that Shoshi sit and wait in the room for a few days until he got back (there was no spare key, of course), Shoshi had to break open a window, and I climbed over several roofs until we found a way for her to get down safely. Later that night we had to break back into the room via roof and window to get things like our toothbrushes and contact solution. The next day, we went back in and rescued all of our stuff, and helped ourselves to a private room at the hostel. Everyone was so confounded by the door that could not open (and for which no key existed, anywhere) that no one cared we’d taken a much nicer room (and since the keeper refused to discount our pre-paid stay for our troubles, it all worked out). All that time roof-hopping, however, proved worth it, because we found access to the most amazing storage area/trash heap, from which we harvested several forgotten hats, sweatshirts, dresses, bags, and shirts. It had been abandoned for a very long time, and it really was more trash heap than anything else, so we didn’t feel guilty, and we washed everything well.
Hospitality in Israel is an entirely different creature than in America (or anywhere else I’ve ever been). Aquaintances become friend very quickly, and friends-of-friends might as well be your friends. People are quick and generous to open their homes to stranges for meals, or places to sleep. We were told that if we went to Rosh Hashanah services, we would almost certainly be invited home afterwards for dinner, as no one would think to let anyone go without holiday meal. So off we went to servies (which were segregated by sex and it felt extremely awful to be a woman, there), and by the end, we’d been accepted to a a meal with a young couple named Gabriel and Yael.
Gabriel was 18, and Yael 19, and they’d been married less than two months; we three girls were their first guests, and they were so warm and open to sharing their meal with us. Gabriel explained everything about the different parts fo the meal to us, and translated everything into Hebrew for Yael. They were so young and giggly and in love, and they were so glad that we had come, that they could do that mitzvah for us. As is traditional we ate certain foods that represented good things for the new year: honey and apples for asweet new year, fresh dates and beets to represent that we overcome the challenges both within and outside of us, a fish head to show we were the head and the not the rear end, pomegranates which prototypically have 613 seeds to represent the 613 mitzvot (good deeds / commandments) in the Torah, and on and on.
The second night, we were invited to the home of a modern orthodox family with 5 very active children under the age of 11, so that meal was more casual and a lot of fun – there were at least 15 people at the meal, and everyone spoke English (the parents had emigrated from America and South Africa/Canada), and kids were throwing bits of bread and arguing over who had to sit next to the fish head, and singing kid songs. Again, the family was so warm and generous – how can we ever thank them for this?!
There’s more to say about Tsfat, but I want to also write about this weekend, which I spent in Palestine, and learned a whole lot about Palestinian rights.
There’s a Palestinian man named Abed, who is very unique in that he has reclaimed his family’s farm land and continues to live there, despite constant threat of bulldozing by the Israeli army and condo developers. We are literally across the road from Jerusalem, in fact we were directly across from the Jerusalem zoo, so we heard elephants, lions, and other animals all weekend. Abed, along with several young activists, helped create a community meeting called the International Cafe or Cafe of All Nations, where people come to meet, get to know one another, and discuss strategies for helping Abed stay on his land, and help other Paelstinians, too. On both Friday and Saturday about 35 people from ALL over the world – Israelis, Palestinians, Jordanians, Americans, Italians, Swedes, Norwegians, Britons, Germans, Belgians, Canadians, and one American woman on vacation from her aid work in Afghanistan – came together to pick olives so Abed can make olive oil to sell, and dig an irrigation trench for rainwater collection, and helped water all of his plants and trees. As a Palestinian, he’s not allowed to access municipal water or dig a well, or to have electricity (even a generator) so, he hauls water from a nearby spring and hand water his hundred or so trees. He uses some really ingenious methods of desert-agricultures, including using old uptunred soda bottles with a hole punch in the lid as a drip-irrigation system. Abed is safe as long as he doesn’t leave his farm, and soon when a separation fence is built to ‘protect’ Jerusalem from the Palestinian refuge camp, we wont even be able to visit his family in the camp, or else he’ll be arrested, and his farm destroyed.
I’m in a rush for time at this internet cafe, so I don’t hink I’m doing a good job of extplaining this situation, but this was a really important learning experience for me this weekend, and I definitely am getting a perspective here that I never would learn at the farm. It’s SO EASY to ignore the Israeli-Palestinian conflict here – really, it is. I think I could easily spend all 5 months here and not really notice. But this weekend I got a taste of check points and separation fences, and police searches (nothing too dramatic) and struggle for livelihood. Talking with everyone from all over the world was the best part of the weekend, and of course thats the point – we ate a TON of amazing Palestinian food and drank so much sweet mint tea and talked and talked, thus giving life to Abed’s idea of a Cafe of All Nations. He is a really wonderful, peace-minded man, and he wants his home to be a place of love and dialogue, and I’m quite grateful for my weekend there.
Last night, the mother of one of the young activists invited us home to spend the night, so we got to stay in a real house! with a real shower! and real beds! the mom, Adah was a psychologist who worked at Yale for a long time, and her husband is an American geneticist, and we had a wonderful evening and morning with them talking politics, travel, Palestinian rights, genetics, etc etc etc. When did stranges get so nice?
I really do miss you all terribly (all 2 of you who read this thing), and I hope you’re all doing well.
Chag sameah from Israel!! (Happy holidays!)
