TRAVELOGUE: OUR HONEYMOON IN ISRAEL (continued)

Bruce David Wilner
April 1999

SAT 10 April

After our obscenely early reveille and our gut-busting breakfast, we piled into our Mercedes bus and headed off to the Old City of Jerusalem, entering through the catchily named Dung Gate. The police are everywhere, and I notice that their uniforms are color-coded. Eytan explains to me that "national police" wear blue but "border police" wear green. The border police, who hang out in contingents of four or five officers at key intersections in the Old City, include large numbers of Falashas (black Ethiopian Jews). Eytan tells me there are 60,000 Falashas in Israel amid a total population of nearly 6,000,000 (which includes over a million Arabs). Interestingly, but not necessarily surprisingly, I have difficulty distinguishing police from soldiers unless I study minor details of their badges, insignia, etc.

Neil dons his tallit (prayer shawl) and tefillin (phylacteries, or "frontlets") and takes his sidur (prayer book) in hand, and I accompany him to the Wall like a proud papa. He then follows the tradition of sticking a note containing prayers (in this case, the prayers of his schoolmates) into a crevice in the wall. I deliver my prayers without benefit of notes: the LORD is telepathic and has a memory that does not require the preparation of written reminders. Indeed, I find this "tradition" frivolous and borderline offensive:

Matt. 6:8 … for your Father knoweth what things ye have need of, before ye ask him.

We headed up the steps to visit the Muslim Dome of the Rock. The walkway between the Wall and the Dome passes through an X-ray security gate attended by officers who manually search hand-carried items. Neil was truly upset when the police insisted that he leave his vestments with them lest the trigger-happy Arabs go apeshit upon seeing a nice Jewish boy wearing his beanie. (The items were a special gift from his congregation, and he is reluctant to let them out of his sight.) After climbing the steps to the Dome, we had to remove our shoes before entering the mosque. Even through my nice, fluffy socks, the stone pavement is brutally cold in the early morning chill, and some of our group are barefoot. The Dome of the Rock is beautiful, spectacular, covered with solid gold filigree and breathtaking mosaics. We marvel at the incredible effort that must have gone into building this structure—a thought that will recur many times at many ancient places throughout our stay in Israel. But the Muslim sextons who rhythmically bark at the crowd, "Quickly! Keep moving! Silence!" detract sharply from the experience. (They probably don’t even have the brains to realize that the crowd includes Muslim pilgrims.) As the tour group moved ahead, Mike shepherded Neil back to the police checkpoint to pick up his gear, and the two of them raced ahead to rejoin the rest of the group.

But for tourists, the items offered are T-shirts, handmade chess and backgammon sets, carved jewelry boxes, camels crafted from wood or leather, trinkets, rugs, shoes (reputable international brands as well as handmade leather sandals), hookahs (nargile in Hebrew), sculptures, shofrot (rams’ or ibexes’ horns), crucifixes, menorahs, mezuzahs, and icons.

The whole Old City is quite intriguing. From any vantage point, one can simultaneously see synagogues, churches, and mosques. One can chat with a Jew in the shadow of a church while hearing the azan. This eclectic mix of religions can lead to confusion and inconvenience. In fact, we find ourselves unable to get into the Church of the Holy Sepulcher because it is the Orthodox Easter and the patriarch himself is arriving for a service. As for the Jewish quarter, most of it is closed since it is Saturday morning, which pisses off Cheryl considerably. The one open site is King David’s tomb (actually a cenotaph, as David is buried elsewhere), where the ubiquitous stapled paper kipot are provided for bareheaded male visitors and where I once again snap a surreptitious photo against posted prohibitions.

We drive over to the Knesset, which is set on a hill in a lovely park. The park features a massive sculpture in the shape of a seven-branched menorah (different from the nine-branched chanukiyah), carved with scenes from the Bible, and Eytan makes a decent speech about man’s evil instincts, Judaism’s give-and-take dialogue with God, and the role of Torah in keeping the Jewish people together. Somewhat disturbed that an avowed atheist would make this speech, I interject the following quotation:

Isa. 40:8 The grass withereth, the flower fadeth: but the word of our God shall stand for ever.

I also feel like interjecting the following quotation, but I’m afraid it might be lost on the crowd—plus, they didn’t come to Israel to hear me sermonize—so I keep it to myself:

Gen. 8:21 … for the imagination of man's heart is evil from his youth; …

We drive through the New City toward the Mount of Olives, and I notice that the police vehicle that passes by does not display the usual flashing blue lights. I ask Eytan whether this is yet another example of the uneasy tension among the Orthodox, the mildly religious, and the secular, viz., whether the police are permitted to drive on the Sabbath only if they refrain from so flagrantly violating the "no work" rule by flashing electric lights. I don’t get a direct answer, but I think I’ve hit the nail on the head.

On the Mount of Olives itself, I have a run-in with a disturbed Arab. No, I don’t want to ride his camel, I tell him, but I am happy to pet the nice, placid donkey atop which he is mounted. The camel is filthy and ill-mannered and is making disturbing noises in its throat, while the donkey is clean, soft, and quiet. After I gently stroke the donkey’s head, the Arab tells me, "You crazy fuck, you are sick and you make me sick," and rides off. (Interestingly, Cheryl had no trouble dealing with his associate, scoring a lovely poster depicting a panoramic vista of the Old City for the rock-bottom price of NIS 4.)

Jerusalem (view westward from Mt. of Olives)

I confess to Eytan that I find the incessant hawking of the Arabs annoying. Indeed, any time we get off a bus, Arabs appear out of the woodwork to sell junk—rosaries and crucifixes at Christian sites, postcards at all sites. Eytan agrees that the Arabs are vultures and tells me that, if I find them annoying in Israel, I had better stay out of Egypt, where they are ten times worse. He doesn’t mention that there is another reason to stay out of Egypt, a reason of which I’m sure our bar mitzvah boy buddy, Neil, is ignorant, since he toured Egypt before coming to Israel:

Jer. 42:19 The LORD hath said concerning you, O ye remnant of Judah; Go ye not into Egypt: know certainly that I have admonished you this day.

(Now I recall that Linda told me that she would not bother to mention to her rabbi that they visited Egypt along with Israel. Maybe she and Neil know more than they’re letting on.)

I remark to the interpreter that Hungarian seems to be an efficient language, since his translations require far fewer syllables than the English equivalents. He explains to me that this is because Hungarian exploits the principle of agglutination of suffixes (just like Turkish, to which it is related). Thus, prepositions, possessives, etc., can all be indicated by just stringing extra syllables onto a noun.

Walking from the Garden Tomb back to the hotel, it dawns on me that there are probably more tour buses than cars in this city, if not in the country. Indeed, a tremendous variety of tour buses ply the streets. (The ones that I find amusing are the ones that have the name Leibowitz spelled out in Hebrew letters along the side.) We pass the bus station and discover a bazaar. It is indeed a bizarre bazaar. The "merchandise" for sale includes broken, useless pieces of metal, while the "craftsmen" include some joker fixing VCRs on the street while city pollutants and ashes from his cigarette infiltrate the equipment as he works on it. Add to this formula the nag monitim (taxi drivers) who are soliciting riders leaving the bus station by jumping up and down and screaming "Tel Aviv!," plus an Arab who unassumingly rides his camel right down the city street, and you have a Third World (albeit eager) mélange totally alien to the author.

Back at the hotel, Cheryl notices that the maids failed to pass the "hair test." You see, when Cheryl finishes washing her hair, she rolls the shed hairs into a ball and plasters it to the wall of the shower. Discovering that the ball was still plastered to the shower—even though the room was made up—indicated that the maid was, well, less than thorough. At this point I also noticed that the hotel room lacked any sort of clock and that the "radio" built into one of the night tables could be tuned to all of four stations.

(We pass the first luxury car that I’ve seen yet—a BMW 700 series. The Israelis mostly drive small cars—including Mazdas, Volvos, and Daihatsus—one reason being that, as Eytan later informed us, the sales tax on automobiles is 100 percent.) The show featured a good singer and—well—an ambitious set of dancers. They tried very hard to perform a spectrum of Israeli, Arabic, Druze, and Hasidic dances, but it was clear that only a few of them had benefited from any professional training. The costumes also left something to be desired: my wife has some Hasidic relatives in Brooklyn—the real McCoys—so some clean-shaven kid wearing a black hat and black coat doesn’t fool me for a moment.

My baby is so paranoid. Every time we leave the room, she engages combination locks on all the luggage. She even takes our backpacks and puts them inside the duffel bags before locking the duffel bags. Well, tonight I discovered that there is a method to her madness after all. For, even though we had placed a "Do not disturb" sign on the door of our hotel room, we came back after the folklore show to find that someone had been in our room and opened the window. The window was not only closed, but locked, when we left for dinner. Now I know why we also keep our passports around our waists at all times. Thank you, sweetheart, for taking such good care of me and for preparing so cautiously.

*

Eytan: "A rabbi and a bus driver are friends. Upon their deaths, the rabbi goes to hell, while the bus driver goes to heaven. The rabbi protests to the LORD and asks, ‘Why?’ The LORD tells him, ‘Rabbi, during your sermons, everybody fell asleep; but while this fellow was driving his bus, everybody was praying to me.’"

 

SUN 11 April

Sunday is a free (unguided) day, but we have arranged for Eytan to give Linda, Neil, and us a private tour this afternoon from 12:30PM to 5:00PM. We start out for the Old City first in order to squeeze in some shopping and revisit the Kotel Hamaaravi. Since my calves are aching terribly from yesterday’s ten miles’ worth of trekking in old sneakers, I wear my Birkenstock clogs today, figuring that they’ll be a little easier on my Achilles tendons. An Arab storekeeper offers me one hundred camels for my beautiful young wife and I seriously entertain the offer. After I piss off Cheryl for some reason, another Arab offers the seemingly superficial but actually profound advice, "To every problem there is a solution." An upper middle class American's idea of hardship is different from other people’s, and I realize this when I see an old blind man painstakingly making his way up the crooked, breakneck alleyways of the Old City with a cane. We stumble upon a police station to ask directions, and an accommodating female mishtarah rushes to our aid. We also see endless esh (fire) control stations: the Israelis are evidently fanatical about fire safety.

At the Kotel, Neil and I both pray while the women stay in the women’s section. I then fall prey to what could be considered a scam, though I don’t consider it one. Two Hasidic Jews grab my arm and whisk me into a vestibule that seems to serve as both library and makeshift synagogue. Speaking half-assed Yiddish intermixed with quarter-assed German, I communicate with them. They put tallit and tefillin on me and lead me in a brief prayer. Then they ask for a donation for the yeshiva! I feel badly: one of them has had a tracheotomy (and proudly displays the evidence), while the other one has ten children to feed. I give them 100 shqalim (US$25) and make my escape.

We would like to tour the tunnels under the wall, but we need to make reservations. I have no clue how to operate this Bezeq phone, but an old gentleman who speaks Yiddish helps me. He presses 1-2-3-4 followed by a PIN number and the call goes through. Unfortunately, it turns out that we cannot get a tour today: we must wait until Tuesday. While Cheryl is pouting over this, I lie to her and tell her that I gave the two yeshiva buchers only 50 shqalim, since I don’t want her to be upset at my generosity toward others (which both Kerry and Linda have told her is a good thing). But I cannot lie in the presence of the LORD, whose shchinah dwells over the Kotel, and I reveal the true sum. Deciding for a moment to forgo my generosity, I give the Muslim woman who is begging outside the Jaffa Gate only ten agorot (roughly two and one-half cents), and immediately thereafter I trip on the steps and nearly fracture my ankle. The LORD serves us constant reminders.

Cheryl’s mother’s friend, Mrs. Diamond, had told us that Yirmiyahu’s on Rechov Yanay in the New City is the place to buy Judaica. (Mrs. Diamond seems to know her onions, as we were to see Yirmiyahu's merchandise sold all over Israel at significantly higher prices.)

Diamond mavens at Yirmiyahu's

The shop is a tiny two-story wholesaler with sewing machines and hatter’s molds. We buy tablecloths, covers for matzot and afikomen, and a hand-embroidered kipah. While the kipah is drying in the sun with dozens of others atop a car’s hood, Yirmiyahu’s brother, who worked in the diamond industry for many years but now passes the time loitering in his brother's shop, kvetching and kretzching with his top-hatted buddy, tells us some "unpublished secrets" of the diamond trade, which I now share with the public for the first time ever:

• Draw a dot or a dash on a piece of paper and put the diamond on top, table down, culet up. Looking downward through the culet, if you can see a circle around the dot or dash, the diamond is fake.

• Draw a line across the table with a felt-tipped pen. If the line has any breaks, the diamond is fake.

Walking back to the hotel, we withdraw NIS 2500 (US$625) from the Bank Leumi ATM. We pass a car that has its windshield protected from the blazing sun not by a cardboard visor, but by a Persian rug. We get back to the hotel just in time for Eytan to pick us up at 12:30PM (right on schedule, which is absolutely astonishing for Israelis, who, we have repeatedly been told, usually run on "Israeli time"), and we pile into his Mazda 323. It may not be spacious or luxurious, but it is clean and the air conditioning is serviceable. Since Eytan advised me to get a hat so my brains don’t bake, I visited the hotel gift shop and bought the tackiest possible hat—a white horror that looks like Gilligan’s, except that it is bedecked all around with blue maginim David (Jewish stars). Eytan assures me that, in this hat, nobody could possibly mistake me for anything but a tourist.

We first head off to Soreq cave; we will later head off to the Israeli War Museum. (This is to please Neil, who is a military buff; I sincerely hope he doesn’t end up in the military.) On the way to Soreq, we nearly drive off a cliff several times, and we pass a handful of forest fires (drought is a serious problem in Israel) and the ubiquitous power lines. Now, Soreq is the first—and only—place we visit that will not take U.S. dollars. Our guide, who sounds French, points out the various formations (Jesus, Moses, frog, hand, etc.) and—talk about chutzpah—tries to offer me an English etymology lesson: helictite derives from helix. (That’s funny: I thought the word was pronounced /’hi:liks/, not /’heliks/.) I never have trouble recalling which speleothem is which: years ago I developed my own mnemonic, viz., a stalaCtite Clings to the Ceiling, while a stalaGmite Grows from the Ground, so I enlighten other visitors who are confounded by the difference. After touring the cave, we visit the gift shop, where I am so friendly to the shopkeeper’s nice, clean boxer that she (the boxer, not the shopkeeper) knocks me off my feet and drools all over me.

We head to the Israeli War Museum at Latrun. It lies across the valley from a Trappist monastery where they make wine. It turns out that much of the museum is closed for renovations, but there is an astonishing outdoor display of captured tanks and other heavy materiel. Since the auditorium is not working, we see a makeshift film that is clearly a propaganda tool targeted at children (it talks about "men of steel, chariots of iron" and incorporates rousing, sing-along songs). After seeing the war museum, I realize that the Israelis have fought hard for this country. To us, a war is something abstract, fought thousands of miles away. To them, a war is very real, being fought down the street, certainly no more than 200 miles away and probably more like ten. Israelis are killed, maimed, even kidnapped and tortured. These are not just any people: they are sons and brothers, fathers and uncles. Every Israeli has lost family members in one or more of the frequent wars.

Our share for this private tour was NIS 380 (US$95). I give Eytan NIS 300 plus a $20 bill and he is happy as a clam. (Once again it is made clear that the Israelis would rather have our money than their own. Surely, USA is the heart of Jerusalem.) Unlike most days, when Eytan regales us toward the end of the day’s shlep with Israeli folk songs (Hevenu Shalom Aleychem, Finjan, Hallelujah, Yerushalayim Shel Zahav, etc.), he gives his vocal cords a rest today.

On the way back up to our hotel room, the Ving card malfunctions (so our door won’t open) and Cheryl again suspects funny business. The hotel manager graciously sends a complimentary fruit basket (oranges, pears, apples, bananas, and kiwis), a cappuccino, and a Diet Coke® to our room to make up for the screwup.

This evening, we set off toward the pedestrian mall on Rechov Ben Yehudah, stopping at Mama Mia, which, Mrs. Diamond has told us, is a nice restaurant. The food is excellent (of course, since it is a kosher place, there are no meat dishes). Despite the excellent food—which includes fresh minestrone, a calzone, fettuccine with gorgonzola cheese and butter, a luscious chocolate mousse, and the sine qua non mineral water (Mey Eden brand)—there is no carpet, the décor is bare-bones, and the two bathrooms share a common sink that is outside in the corridor. We chit-chat with an Israeli lady who is sitting with her son at the next table. The kid laughs when I mistakenly say asher tov instead of erev tov ("good evening"). Screw you, you little momzer, your English isn’t that great either. I leave a U.S.-style twenty percent tip and the lady, whose eyes nearly pop out of her head, informs me that this is much too much: ten shqalim (US$2.⁵⁰) is more than sufficient.

On Ben Yehuda, they sell the same crappy merchandise that one finds in the Old City, but the prices are much higher. I am alarmed upon seeing a policeman who casually walks down the street with an Uzi, but, hey, this is Israel. There are liquor stores and gun stores right in a fashionable shopping district, something that you would never see in the U.S.. There are also street musicians, homeless people, and nutty-looking characters. My sister-in-law, Amy, told us that this was a "cool" place to hang out, but to me it is just a shallow imitation of Greenwich Village or Georgetown or Palo Alto. There are Carvel, Sbarro, McDonald’s, Pizza Hut, and Kentucky Fried Chicken to be found, plus the oft-seen Lotto booth. (The Lotto booth can be identified by the word loto, which in stylized Hebrew script looks like the English word ibis, topped by a silly poster depicting a smiling man wearing a bejeweled turban.) The fact that every business seems to steal an American name and transliterate it into Hebrew letters causes me to point here and chuckle, point there and smirk. Passersby probably think I’m nuts.

Next I cast my eyes downward. I am curious: what do sophisticated young Jerusalemites wear on their feet? Sneakers are popular here, typically ongepotchket Adidas and Diadora styles that one does not find in the U.S.. Sandals are popular, too, ranging from Birkenstocks to the Israeli-made Naots to very exaggerated platform sandals worn by teenage girls. The teenage boys are into army boots that don’t go very well with their short hair and earrings. Birkenstock clogs in both leather and suede are all over the place. I don’t see any Rockports, Mephistos, or Doc Martens, nor do I see any loafers at all. I also haven’t seen any Clarks Wallabees, even though these have been a hit in the U.S. and UK for over thirty years. Price could be a factor: Birkenstocks go for NIS 400, but Wallabees would cost about NIS 650.

We take a taxi with a very friendly driver (nag hamonit) back to the hotel. He tells us that Israel is the world’s best country (what a surprise). After our brief ten-sheqel ride, atop which the usually niggardly Cheryl offers a four-sheqel tip, we return to the room to freshen up and then head downstairs to the lobby piano lounge. Susan, Kerry, and Al are there and are feeling quite chatty. We endlessly discuss how oddball this country is and how our respective native lands are the best thing going. The Russian immigrant pianist is quite good, and when I ask him for an impromptu performance of Chopin’s Fantaisie Impromptu, he does a workmanlike job with relatively few errors. I reward him with NIS 10 for his trouble.

*

Herel, Berel, and Shmerel are moving to the U.S.. Of course, they must change their names to something more acceptable. Herel says, "I’ll take the name Huck." Berel says, "I’ll be Buck." Shmerel yells, "I quit the business!"

 

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