The Shloshim

From my seat at the front gate of the campus I struggled to avoid the glare of the sun, from whom I could find no shelter. I closed my eyes and sat fully upright, forearms outwards in a show of meditation, in reality only trying to encourage the slight bloom of brown that had begun to take hold on my arms and face. I wore the last of three shirts I had tried out to be formal enough for what I anticipated to be coming, but no so stylish as to draw attention to myself. My heavy bag sat by my side.

The taxi pulled up twenty minutes later, an hour earlier than the councilors should have summoned it, to take me to the nearby mall where my relatives would be picking me up. I sat for an hour in the lobby, distracting myself from my nerves with the last pages of Twelfth Night which I hoped to direct in the following year. I eventually called them, an unfortunately one way method of communication, and found them at the gate. Suddenly, I was rushed into the back seat of their car, pinned between the door and Meital, a relative of mine who we eventually settled on as my third cousin. Her mother, Liora, was at the wheel, instantly offering me food and family stories in (what I had previously found to be rare) a display of Jewish stereotypes in action. They felt like family all right. I was still quiet and a bit nervous but it was clear to me that we shared some basic aspect at our roots. I was honestly very surprised.

We drove for an hour or so into Jerusalem, where they made a detour to see the parents of an old friend of Liora's. Again, food, family stories (this time not about mine), and a very Jewish vibe. Then Liora tok off to the venue to set up with her husband and younger daughter, who had sprained her ankle, leaving me behind with my cousin and two seniors who I had never met. I was sure they looked at me a dozen times as if to ask 'who is this kid?' 'what's he doing here?' Meital suggested we walk and I eagerly agreed.

The walk took us past a train station from the Ottoman Empire that has been renovated into an open air market. We had been talking and walking and getting to know each other for a while now. She told me all about her school, what she wanted to do in the army, how she wanted to travel to Australia without a plan and just live, but that shed always been a to much of a planner. I knew exactly how she felt. She was surprisingly short though she was my younger by only a year. Her hair looked like it was tossed in the wind and backlit by the sun. She looked like she was always on the edge of the next idea, which, once attained would keep her comfortably six steps ahead of you.

At the station we ran into a friend of hers and a woman I took to be her mother. After introductions she asked "you're not Marty's son are you?". It was amazing. They were bound for the memorial as well, old friends of the family, and had apparently known my grandmother in California. The country is so small, so Jewish, that meeting a long lost relative is commonplace. It blew my mind.

Finally we reached the front gate and ascended the staircase to the door. A smiling portrait of Rabbi Hiam Asa himself beamed down warmly at us. I jumped in with a hand wherever I could. I always feel more in place when I have a job to do. Then people started arriving. Even the slow trickle in was unnerving. Each person gave me a look of confusion as they entered. Who was I? I disappeared into the back hallway to avoid the blatant fact that I was mute, conversationless with the growing crowd of strangers. I tried to eat but the food felt heavy on my tongue and gummed up my throat. I revisited the lobby to see that the crowd had doubled and receded again to my hideout. A light panic started to set in. The cousins formed their tight circles of talk without me. The adults downright ignored me. Why the hell was I there? My group had gone to Tel Aviv that night to take part in a headphones rave that I would be missing. I longed to be anywhere else.

I cracked. I couldn't hide in the back room any more and I would not stand idle in the busy hall with strangers. I broke my contract, I left the building. I walked out of the front door and took a hard right. I just wanted to circle the block, just to get my head straight. I clutched my plastic cup at my side and nervously fiddled with the edge. I turned the next right. The old city wall came into view in the distance. I toyed with the idea of running all the way there, maybe a twenty minute walk, but I put it aside. I was still clutching the cup as I rounded the third corner, that was a good sign. I took it to mean that I intended to return. The wall was ringing with music at my back, alive with some festival for Laila Levan, the White Night. I rounded the fourth corner and reentered the building.

The lobby was now empty but for my two youngest cousins running around top speed.
"We thought we lost you!" they laughed. They pulled me into the hall and sat me down between their two families, front and center, just as the slideshow ended and was turned off. The first speaker took the stand and, in what I assume to be flawless and unfaltering Hebrew, gave his speech.

They spoke and spoke. One after another after another after another. Some in Hebrew, Some in English. They spoke for forty years. As the Hebrew went on, I picked from its indiferentiatable syllables the few words that I knew. People, Connections, Bulgaria, Orange County, Argentina, Memorial, and many others in snippets and unsure parts. I let myself imagine what they were saying about him. I listened to their emotion and their tone. I waited until the last speaker had finished, and then they raised up a song, haunting and minor, that I had never heard. My cousin put an arm around me and an arm around her father and a short chain formed. Then, with many tears, greetings, and goodbyes, the crowd dispersed. It was over.

I was matched to the other branch of my family, cousin Aviva's and they drove me to their home across the green line into the West Bank, a name completely dismissed by her husband Daniel who preferred the Zionist name for the "liberated" Territory. These to, felt like family. I could not tell you why, but even when our beliefs differ so greatly, I can't help but feel a connection.

Thank you to the families of Liora and Aviva for making me feel like part of the family and for giving me this view of the country, unslanted by the classroom setting.

In Memoriam of Rabbi Hiam Asa 1931-2014

The Kotel

Final Part of the Jerusalem Series

My clothes felt wrong. They always felt wrong on some level, some last remnant of my middle school insecurities come back to haunt me, but today I had not packed well. I hadn't known where we were going. Over my shorts, pulled down past the knee for decency but still soaked from the water of Hezekiah's Tunnel, I had buttoned a sea green short sleeve shirt to imitate some semblance of formality for the experience I was preparing for. The clothes would have looked in place on a beach, not so at the Western Wall.

We made our way past security and paused just before we rounded the corner to see what we had come so far to see. Hundreds of people were all facing one direction, marveling at some unseen wonder. I edged forwards and caught the first glimpse of the wall, towering and stark white. Solid and heavy. Full of vegetation and life. A man, no bigger than my thumb at my distance, beat his arm against the rough stones of the wall over and over, pouring his passion all over the stones thrice his size.

I walked towards the entrance, the wall looming higher and higher over my head. To my left I saw Akiva talk with the Chasidics mingling around their booth
"Muss Boys!" one of them yelled excitedly, demanding my attention and drawing me towards him. "Come put on t'filin"
I waited, unsure and nervous for one of the men to help me. Then the man pulled me aside and began to wrap the leather tightly around my arm. The box on my arm to touch my heart. The strap thrice above it to form a shin, then winding down my arm, again around my palm to make a dalet, around my middle finger to make a yud, and back to my wrist to tie it off. One of the names of God had been bound to my arm. The final piece was placed on my head, the box between my eyes, the strap falling down my vertebrae, tying my ensemble together.

I wandered on, read the blessings they had given me, and found a space of the indoor portion to contemplate the wall. I produced the paper and pen I had brought and began to write. I wrote about my awe, then I wrote my hopes, my dreams, my aspirations, and my requests. I closed with a simple thank you. Thank You not for delivering these requests, but for helping me find the words to ask.

I folded the note and shoved it into a cranny where I could. I said a short blessing, and I moved on. I explored the exterior part where I ran my hands along the stones. What had from a distance looked rough and textured, was in fact smooth, nearly frictionless, to the point where it felt almost as if the wall had dissipated from beneath my fingers, worn to the bone by thousands of generations running their hands over its surface.

It struck me then, just how many people must have been there, to that very same spot. More than two thousand years, never closed, never one point in that time when it went unaccompanied or lonely. Thousands of years each made of hundreds of days each filled with hundreds upon hundreds of people. A monument to the perpetual dedication of humanity. At that moment, the concept that there could, out of all that emotion and all that time concentrated in one place, be some divine manifestation of faith, made more sense than anything else. God existed in that moment, pure, built by the people who needed him. It moved me. There is nothing more to say.

The City of David

Part Five in the Jerusalem Series

Thousands of years ago, while King Hezekiah held the throne over Israel and Jerusalem, the Tanach teaches of his great palace. The towering halls and deep caverns of the keep were his home to pass judgment on the people of Israel. After some time, the Assyrians attacked the city, leaving Hezekiah to save his people. In an effort to save his home and his people, Hezekiah commissioned a long, winding tunnel to be chiseled out of the solid rock beneath his palace well away from its gates. When the Assyrians attacked, The soldiers of Israel used the tunnel to catch them by surprise and to drive them back. Then, for thousands of years, they were lost.
Now the tunnel, as well as the ruins of Hezekiah's palace, first built by king David, have been found.

This was the palace I found myself standing on just yesterday, providing physical proof that Jews inhabited the land of Israel before even the Arabs, stretching back for hundreds of generations over thousands of years. We briefly admired the ruins. We learned the history of the castle. Then we sunk into the rocks for the second time that day.

The tunnel carried on for a short distance in cool dry levels, and then we reached the water.
"right when we get in it will be the deepest and the coldest" Akiva warned us as he rolled up his shorts revealing his thighs past the well defined tan line of life in Israel. "when we get in don't be afraid to yell and don't be afraid to sing!"

I rolled up my own shorts and steeled my legs against the cold I expected in the well practiced way of a resident of the Puget Sound. The girls ahead of me screeched loudly as, one at a time, they plunged into the stream. I prepared for the worst.

My feet touched the surface to a surprisingly pleasant coolness. Well past what any Seattleite would call natural "warm" water. Like ants in a hive, we walked, unable to stand side by side. The walls sloped inwards. The ceiling was often so low I had to crouch and I often scraped the top of my head. We continued on, and on. I had no Idea where we were going and I didn't much care. As Akiva had suggested, dozens of songs had been raised all clashing and morphing into one. I sang opera, Irish folk songs, Jewish Camp songs, anything I could think of. The girls in front of me were belting a tune from the radio indifferent keys. All the words and the energy spiraled up in a resonant cocktail to the sloping ceiling as it raised above our heads. Up, up, up.

We came to a stop. Akiva silenced us. We extinguished our headlamps. The thick blanket of black returned for an encore demonstration of exploring the senses. Akiva hummed a tune and asked us to add to it. Down the line in succession, each of us improvised a harmony or a single note to compliment the growing barrage of sound. The whole length of our party was united in a chant. Akiva began the Shemah. He drew out each syllable to the absolute end of his breath like a Buddhist Mantra. Only four students separated us and yet I could not make out his place. So, I forged my own. each of us found our own rhythm, complimenting the whole. Layers upon layers of harmonious discord were produced, eventually fading forever into irreplaceable nothingness.

Finally, there came a light at the end of the tunnel. We emerged from the opening sopping wet and grinning ear to ear. The darkness was powerful. We half ran, half limped to the top of the palace again, collected our things, and purchased much appreciated refreshments. Then we changed, the men into dress shirts, the women into ground length skirts. Our next stop, the final passage of not in the Jerusalem Series, was to be The Western Wall. We had been born from the channel of the mountain, now we headed to the most precious place in all of Jerusalem, the most core place on earth.

The Cave

Part Four of the Jerusalem Series

We stayed that night in a youth hostile, leaving first thing in the morning for our second hike of the weekend. We arrived at the mountain early in the afternoon and began our descent. The first stop we made was an olive tree about four hundred meters down the path. Climbing has always been a favorite activity of mine, even more so among the desert climate trees of Israel, crooked and different from the high pines of Seattle, not to mention of course, the hit of admiration I could get by scaling a campus tree in three seconds flat. I arrived at the tree behind the group leader by a ways to find him already seated comfortably in the low branches. All the boys had been awaiting my arrival, eager to see me scale this new obstacle. Quickly scampering up the side, I took a seat on a stylishly twisted knot three feet above the teacher as he began his lesson. It was an olive tree, as he told us. Warped and overgrown by its five hundred years in the soil, but deceptively small for all its years. The branches were tightly interwoven above my head and I could not have climbed further.

When the lesson ended, despite my seat above the rest of my fellow arboreal dwellers, I lowered myself easily around them to the ground and resumed the walk to a nearby pond littered with a solid layer of thick green scum and plastered with trilingual signs forbidding drinking, diving, and swimming. Who the signs were for was a mystery, no one would touch the acrid water. Instead we found its source, a clear stream coming from a hole in the rocks just taller than my head. One by one we ignited our headlamps and delved into the darkness in single file.

We followed the tunnel for a few hundred feet into the bowels of the earth until it opened up into a cavern the size of a small living room illuminated only by our lamps. The group congregated into a circle around the room, and then, at Akiva's instruction, turned out our lights. one by one, the white gleam of our lamps were extinguished bringing the image to my minds-eye of stars blinking out to leave the night sky endless and unlimited in its blackness. I could not see my hands an inch from my face. I could not see my neighbors. I could not see the ledge on which I was perched. I could not see the walls or the floor or the roof. I could only hear Akiva's voice, slow and methodic, as he spoke and then let the cave fall to complete, heavy silence. The blackness weighed on me like a blanket. I felt like if I tried, I could punch through it into who knows where. I felt the presence of everyone around me. I felt unbelievably alone.

My eyes clawed at the darkness, desperately searching for some light, counter to the peacefulness I found in my mind. I could only find a faint patch of lighter blackness to my left where the sneakiest light from the long distant entrance had managed to wriggle its way past the long length of tunnel. I turned my eyes away to rejoin the blackness...

After a time, Akiva raised up a song. The cave filled with a rousing cacophony of slightly out of key high schoolers singing away the dark, and the lights were relit. As the class began lowering themselves down the entrance one at a time, posing for pictures and resuming their lighthearted conversations, a few of us hung back and found the back wall of the cave where water, filtered by 100 years of seeping through the dirt and stones of Israel, dripped off the rocks as pure as rain. We drank straight from the wall of the cave, letting it drip into our hands and our mouths. We were connected to its lifeblood. Then we turned and left, never to see it again for the rest of our lives.

Both Profound... and passing.

Yerushalayim shel Zahav: Jerusalm of Gold

Part Three of the Jerusalem Series

Again we sat on the crowded bus as we neared the holy city of Jerusalem. The landscape, as always, was dry and brown in every direction. We had been traveling for over two hours now and the air in the bus was beginning to hum. The mic clicked on as the teacher took the stage to usher us into this holy place. We woke our neighbors and listened to him talk, his calm steady voice always a comforting source of meditation-like peacefulness. We entered a long, high tunnel, lit by the orange glow of lights filling every corner. As his speech came to its gradual conclusion he said,

"there is a light at the end of every tunnel, but only at the end of this tunnel... is Jerusalem"

Suddenly we came out into the stunning light of the late evening, Matisyahu's Jerusalem blasting over the sound system. The golden sun was low and tinted by the desert sky, sending long shadows across the city as it fell upon hundreds upon hundreds of buildings, reflecting its own brilliance off every possible surface. From our vantage point on the road, we could look down on the boundless expanse of the city with easy view of every possible detail.In the center of it all was an enormous dome, glinting of real gold in the early evening light. I would later know this to be the Dome of the Rock.

The bus rounded an exit and parked at a small terrace where we sat to see the splendor of the city. We sat, we looked, and then we started to sing. There is a song in Israel called Yerushalayim shel Zahav, or Jerusalem of Gold. As Akiva taught us, it had been commissioned only a year or so before the Six Day War to fill the space of counting votes in the Israeli National Songwritting competition. The managers wanted a song to reflect their city, possibly bring some good publicity to the Jews in what looked like a hopeless time. No one they asked wanted the challenge of writing the song. Jerusalem has been written about by prophets and poets and kings, how could they compare? Finally they found a songwriter, Naomi Shemer, to write it and a singer, completely unknown (as insisted upon by the author) and they prepared the song. On the day of the festival, the girl took the stage alone with her guitar, the blinding lights stopping her from seeing the crowd, and she began to sing.

Yerushalayim shel Zahav veshel nechoshet veshel or
Ha'lo lechol shir'ayich ani kinor
Jerusalem of gold, of copper, of light
Behold I am your harp for all your songs

She sang until the song came to a close. She was met with complete, terror inducing silence. She stepped out of the light with no applause, scared that she had made some flaw and looked at the audience. Every person in the stands, every person that had come that day, was crying.

/this is the song we sang as we overlooked Jerusalem, as I viewed it for the first time. We sang and sang. We sang Deep Inside my Heart. We sang One Day. We sang Jerusalem. We danced we cheered. And we returned to the bus. The day was over. We had arrived.

Hagan Shloshah

Part Two of the Jerusalem Series

The bus drove us from the mountain in our bedraggled state across a huge part of the country, nearly a two hour drive. We disembarked, sweaty and most of us still half asleep from the drive into Hagan. The Garden. The oasis. Imagine, if you will, a swimming pool, completely natural but for the occasional railing to aid its inhabitants. The water is clear and blue, luminescent of its own volition against any reasoning and lit brilliantly by the high middle eastern sun. Around the pool is grass, real, wet, grass. On the grass lie dozens of sun-browned Israelis on their towels. Three large hookahs smolder lazily around its perimeter. And among the epitome of glamor in the desert, among the dark rich tones of the locals, stands a boy as white as the smoke slowly spiraling above his counterparts' heads. Whiter even, than the brood of Americans surrounding him. Whiter than he can stand for much longer.

Isn't this country supposed to dye your skin? When do I get that sexy bronze complexion I see so often? Or must I just accept that I can be as white as the smoke of the hookah...or as red as its coal.

It's no matter. I leaped into the pool as quickly as I could, joining my friends in water much deeper than it looked. I quickly realized that, despite growing up on the Puget Sound, the next best thing to the Pacific ocean, my swimming skills were weak. Floundering around like a fish on land, The city boy had fun in the water.

Swimming to the other end, we found a small waterfall where fish would nibble on your feet. We broke for lunch, sandwiches, and rejoined the water. I became dedicated to the task of catching a fish. A challenge which my friend Ben was wonderfully willing to help accommodate. His feet provided the bait for my elusive prey as I crouched in wait. After dozens of attempts, leaving me gasping for air and somewhat disappointed, I gave up. My feet had been cut raw by the sharp rocks of the spring.

Shortly after, we reloaded our bus and took off again, this time for Jerusalem. I closed my eyes... and waited.

First Hike of Many

I'm sorry, my dear readers, for my long absence from the keyboard. Just preceding the would be publication of my previous post, as I scrambled to sort and upload the photos from my Tiyul, I was forced to run out of the room to catch the bus for our second, the later being two full days in the city of Jerusalem. I was, as such, unable to write in that time and have, as a result, accumulated quite an array of new stories, the writing of which I suspect will take me the better part of tonight. I'll be splitting the days up as I go to help avoid the feeling of no-end-in-sight in both myself, your dedicated author, and in yourselves. Unfortunately, I realized only as I sat down on the bus itself that my camera had not in fact charged despite the afternoon of leaving it attached to the computer so I will do my best to accumulate a portfolio from the other various cameras I managed to jump in front of. Here goes.

Part One of the Jerusalem Series

The bus ride was not unbearable by any means, nor was the hill to the lookout point over the west bank of which my peers found great pleasure in complaining about loudly and often to my thinly veiled amusement. And yet, right from the start, the view was amazing. As I rounded the top of the incline I looked around me and realized that, for the first time in my life, everything around me was completely unobscured. There was no next-mountain to get in the way. No thick cluster of trees to obscure my line of sight. The land was just rolling hills forever, until the buildings were the size of the rocks in the wall at my feet, and then until the mountains in the distance matched the size of the diminutive buildings from my perspective and every color faded to a nearly uniform blue. As I marveled at what would become almost a common sight over the next day and a half, my class settled down for the lesson.

As we concluded and headed down the hill for our hike, I purchased yet another bottle of water and tied my hair up in the Bedouin style that the councilors had showed us in order to poorly imitate the function of the hat I had forgotten to pack. We began down the trail, I myself in the front dozen, and promptly failed to go any further. What must have been less than three hundred feet down the trail, those of us in the front realized that we were no longer being followed. The conundrum took us a solid twenty minutes to navigate and, eventually, remedy, but once our party was reunited we continued on our way shortly to come out from the partially wooded area in which we had waited and came out on the summit of a cliff from which the view would topple even the magnitude of the previous peaks significance to me. On the rocky ledge of the mountain I could see nearly straight down. down. down. The cliff face of painted orange and white sloping so steeply beneath me that I could see the foot of the mountain clearer than the winding path in front of me. We began our descent.

I decided, in a flash of cocky self-confidence, that I would take the, often vertical descent, without once using my hands. I slid, edged, leaped, crouched, and scurried down the many crevices and rungs in the mountain without using my hands a single time. My arrogant challenge had attracted the competitive nature of a few of the boys, only one of which was even a challenger, but who too eventually failed. There I was, scaling a literal cliff overlooking the mountain on which the Judge Gideon had fought off the Philistines. I was blown away.

After a time, we reached the foot of the mountain. We were tired, sweaty, and most of us were complaining of how badly we had to pee.
"Come" said Guy, our councilor "It is bonding"
We stood single file just outside of and with our backs to the bus in an empty field of dirt six of us in all, no cover in sight. The wind blew firmly against my left cheek.
"look out at the mountains and just let it go" He said, a few feet to my right...
I think, dear readers, you can conclude what, because of no fault of mine, happened to our dear friend Guy.

To his credit he stayed, as is his fashion, perpetually in good spirits. He told us that in the army they would go in the group showers to talk to their friends and pee on their legs.
"By the time they notice, its too late!"

This country is one enormous oxymoron. Allow yourself in, and there is so much brotherly love. Stay out, and be forced out. The Jews hate the Arabs, the Arabs hate the Jews, everyone hates the government, and the Chasid's hate everyone. And yet I am finding so much love, and above all so much awe.