How did Jeff and I get so lucky? When we arrived here in the last days of May, Ron Singer ("tzinger") dropped into our lives. We thought we were hiring a tour guide, but what we got was an advanced college education from a man who knows more about history, geopolitics, entomology, religion, ornithology, horticulture and geology than any scholar anywhere, period. And this from a man who earned his advanced degree in immunology at Israel's prestigious Weizmann Institute. So he could answer our questions about interleukin 2 in his sleep. Only Ron Singer doesn't sleep. He's lecturing (or as he calls it "blah-blah-blah-ing), gesticulating, exclaiming, beaming in awe, defining, skipping, jumping, hugging and laughing what seems like 24/7.
His brain must be stored somewhere other than his head, somewhere bigger -- his abdomen maybe? -- because in it he has every historical date and fact about any civilization you can name, including our own in the United States. He can name every person, place and thing in Latin and at least 4 other languages. But his vocabulary defaults, too, to youthful adjectives like "super cute," "insanely ridiculous," "total nonsense" and "sababa." He knows what's in every dish you eat, every weapon in the Israeli arsenal and the details of every battle ever fought. He recognizes the song of every bird. He can tell you what those weird markings are on those buildings over there: batshit, for example. Did you know that Swifts you see all over Israel are related to our Hummingbirds? They don't have feet and after fledging, fly non-stop for three years with their mouths open so they can swallow airborne plankton a mile high in the sky and they sleep on the wing. He knows the derivation of words like salary (salt) and sarcophagus (sarco: flesh, phage: eat away). And if we hadn't dismissed him at the end of the day, he would have been telling us bedtime stories long after midnight. Ron is from humble Hungarian roots. His mama, as he called her, survived Auschwitz. His papa, he said, had a smile even bigger than his own. An only child, and still single in his 40s, he has spent his lifetime buried in books and documents, reading seminal texts in their original languages. He has served in the Israeli military, traveled for eight months in India and led history tours in California and along the Freedom Trail in Massachusetts. From our experience in his company, Ron is at least as well known throughout Israel as Bibi Netanyahu and certainly more popular. At almost every turn someone greeted him by name, stopping to slap his back and inform us that we were being guided by a genius. We needed no assurances. We asked him hundreds of questions and he gave us hundreds of answers. But the takeaway we really got from Ron is that what's going on today in the Middle East is just a blip in the history of this region, specifically, and human civilization in general. Conquerers and zealots and despots and common folk have been doing this same dance back to the beginning of the human epoch and will be doing it long after we're gone. Borders are drawn and redrawn. People and organisms adapt and adapt and adapt until eventually they don't. It doesn't seem to surprise or anger Ron when missiles land across the street from his apartment in Ashkelon near Gaza. People on both sides want what they want. And while history does tend to repeat itself, things also are ever-changing. So Ron stays optimistic that this "ridiculousness" will lead slowly to a kind of two-state peace. Wouldn't it be nice if Ron Singer, with his big smile, open heart, love of nature and appreciation of history, got to make some decisions around here?
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The last time I was in Israel, 40 years ago, I'm pretty sure there was no Al Quds radio. It was more than a dozen years before the first Intifada. I arrived in January of 1974, just three months after the country was traumatized in the Yom Kippur war. Everywhere I went there were uniformed soldiers carrying their Uzis. Military vehicles outnumbered civilian cars on the roads. The landscape outside the big cities was dotted with Bedouin tents, their residents dressed in layer upon layer of wool clothing. Sheep and camels grazed nearby. I was warned against wandering into Arab towns and villages, though there was no prohibition against hitchhiking as a way to get around. Everyone did it. Things are different now. Last Thursday on our way from Jerusalem to Eilat we drove within spitting distance of Gaza. We turned the radio on and the first station that tuned in clearly was 102.7, Al Quds . The digital readout flashed: "Voice of Resistance." That day three young Israeli settlers had been kidnapped while hitchhiking in the West Bank. We had only passed a couple of hitchhikers over the last two weeks. Bedouin tents were few and far between now that the state had corralled about half the nomad population into makeshift villages in the Negev. Despite all these tensions, the Jordanian border near Eilat was open to tourists (Israelis only allowed with visas) like us who wanted to visit the "Lost City" of Petra (think Indiana Jones). Eilat and the Jordanian city of Aqaba sit almost side-by-side at the mouth of the Red Sea. After you show your passport about 10 times, you're on your way. In Jordan, the Bedouins still reign. Their tents are everywhere. At Petra, they hawk camel and donkey cart rides and sell trinkets. Children as young as 5 or 6 are enlisted in the enterprise. The ruins -- basically a 2000 year old city carved into canyon walls of deep red stone -- are awe-inspiring. And even though Israeli customs ripped apart my suitcase before we got on a plane in Eilat bound for Tel Aviv (just because we had been in Jordan), I'm glad we got to see the whole spectacle. I felt like I'd jumped back in time, if not 2000 years, at least 40.
Did you think I was going to end this trip without a comment on what's happening here on the sustainability front? Wrong. Here's what impressed me: solar-powered hot water heaters widespread in cities large and small. Bike riding, compact cars, electric-powered scooters: all super popular. Solar arrays beginning to pop up in the Negev, land of endless sun. Lots of drip irrigation in evidence in city parks, private landscaping and best of all, in agriculture.
But there are some forces, too, in opposition to forward progress when it comes to conservation and zero carbon renewables. Now that Israelis have discovered enormous fields of natural gas in their territorial waters, there's less incentive to subsidize large-scale solar. And now that Israelis are satisfying their water needs using desalinization, there's less incentive to conserve water even though it takes substantial energy to make ocean water potable. Meanwhile, these newfound supplies of water and gas are not making their impact felt in the West Bank and Gaza, where power is intermittent and lands are parched with climate change affecting water levels in rivers and aquifers. But it was heartening to see some small but cooperative projects happening across borders. One in particular makes for a beautiful model. At Kibbutz Sde Eliyahu in Because it's Friday the 13th, I bring you scary stuff on the road from Jerusalem to the Red Sea. For me, being in Israel is as much (or more) about connecting with my Middle Eastern roots as it is about my Jewish heritage. The smell of familiar Arabian spices, dishes and delicacies my grandparents loved, the sound of Arabic language and music that filled their homes, the Arak my grandfather liked to sip, the dates, the roasted seeds, the mud-like coffee, the backgammon games, the loud voices -- is all around me in a way I don't remember from my time here 40 years ago. Today, the Jewish market Machne Yehuda in Jerusalem is culinarily almost indistinguishable from the souk in the Muslim quarter of the Old City. But besides these impressionistic feelings, I've had some powerful moments of deep connection, like when I discovered that one young shopkeeper had been among the very last Jews to leave my grandparents' hometown of Aleppo, Syria, only 8 years ago. Like my mother's father, he had first gone to Argentina and Mexico before finding a new home in Israel. In his shop he sold the same kind of apricot "leather" (we called it amardine) I treasured as a child, and so many other sweet temptations. Then there was the experience of seeing the Aleppo Codex at the marvelous Israel Museum. This treasured ancient manuscript (http://www.aleppocodex.org/links/6.html) is the oldest existing complete Hebrew bible and was kept for centuries in the crypts of a synagogue in the city where my ancestors lived from the time they were run out of Spain during the Inquisition. It was thrilling to think that I was looking at a manuscript that might have been touched by my very kin in the Middle Ages or that my grandfathers might have been instructed from it while training for their bar mitzvahs at the Central Synagogue of Aleppo, where the codex was so guardedly kept. Three years after his bar mitzvah -- around the time of World War I -- my father's father left Syria to build a better life in New York. But he never for a minute forgot his Sephardic roots and while growing a successful garment business, he began funding Jewish causes both at home and in his spiritual home, Israel. His proudest achievement was helping found a school for disadvantaged immigrant children in Jerusalem called Boys Town. It has grown into an 18-acre technical training institute, housing and educating more than 1,000 boys from 45 countries, 75% of them on full scholarship. Many of them live there year-round. Seeing my grandparents' names on the academic high school building was another one of those powerful moments of connection. My grandfather signed the diplomas of every Boys Town graduate every year from 1948 until he died at the age of 96. Now my father has taken up the mantle. When I stood only a few miles from the Syrian border last week, looking at the plumes of smoke representing the sectarian strife that has torn the country apart and ruined Aleppo, I was overcome by sadness. The proverb "Plus ca change, plus c'est la même chose" seemed apt -- and not just because my grandparents probably learned this in their French schools. Translated, it means, "The more things change, the more they stay the same." Here in the Middle East, this truth seems encoded like some kind of cultural DNA and as imperishable as the Aleppo codex itself. Some random images of things our guide liked to call "crazy" and "super cute". The fish tank was in the window of a Jerusalem cosmetics shop where people were invited to have their feet nibbled by dead-skin eating guppies. I politely declined. BTW, is anyone reading this blog? I haven't seen a single comment! The contrast between old and new, natural and unnatural is stark and often breathtaking in this country. Without belaboring the point, just take a look at the images below. 2 people, 19 Days, 2 mid-sized suitcases, 5 hotels. Here's my secret to staying sane on the road: packing pallets. For a dozen years I've been using these very ones by Eagle Creek. They compress our stuff and keep them from wrinkling and if there aren't any drawers -- which is pretty typical these days because hotel rooms are designed by morons -- I can line them up on the floor or a desk and actually find what I'm looking for. So go ahead TSA, take apart my suitcase. See if I care. I challenge you to try and mess it up.
As I toured one of the most traditional and innovative kibbutzim in Israel, our host pointed out the kindergarten playground. I thought I was looking at the community junk yard. But no, the discarded household objects, clothing and industrial equipment had been salvaged as raw material for the local children's imaginative play. Looking closely, I saw cars, spaceships, homes, hospitals, restaurants, you name it, all assembled by busy little hands and minds. In the US we've long ago regulated against exposing kids to rough edges, rust and loose screws. But most of us have observed how children are less enthralled with the toy than the box it came in. And maybe we can learn some lessons from models like this one on the kibbutz, where, according to our host, he hasn't seen a boo-boo yet that couldn't be treated with a Band-Aid. But he has seen plenty of budding genius and good old fashioned Israeli ingenuity. What we saw and experienced in the Golan Heights today brought into relief the tensions that are so tightly woven into the fabric of this complicated region. From a single vantage point we could see an Israeli kibbutz, a Lebanese Hezbollah-controlled town, a rebel-controlled Syrian city, a UN encampment and a security fence weaving through it all. With the unaided eye, we could see plumes of smoke rising from Syrian territory -- either from battle skirmishes or celebratory fireworks after the "re-election" of President Assad today by a supposed 89% of the electorate. It had been less than 48 hours since Israel attacked a Syrian border military camp in retaliation for a missile strike on an Israeli military intelligence post in the northern Golan. Our jeep driver described being awakened at dawn Saturday by a warning siren at his nearby kibbutz, which turned out to be a false alarm. All this against the backdrop of legions of Israeli families visiting local war memorial sites on this national day off celebrating the Jewish holiday of Shavuot. Despite -- or more likely because of -- protective land mines, fences, ubiquitous military presence and high-tech monitoring equipment, Israelis here seem to feel relatively secure in these beautiful foothills and valleys. And that probably explains why they have the luxury now of worrying about an overpopulation of wolves, a dwindling population of gazelles and an aphid infestation of the beloved Israeli Sabra cactus. Beijing, Paris, New York, Berlin, Amsterdam and now Tel Aviv. We've biked them all using their bike share systems. Great way to get to know a city, easy on the wallet, good exercise and uber eco-friendly. My advice to Tel Aviv? Rename your bike share system. Tel-O-Fun sounds like something that has to do with your cell phone. And when you're wrestling with the kiosks that repeatedly reject your day pass, say you haven't returned your bike when you have and charge you three times for one bike, that's not FUN! The last time I was in Israel was four decades ago -- a newly-minted high school graduate. On the advice of a much-loved English teacher, I went to live and work for four months on a kibbutz where some of her relatives lived, midway between Tel Aviv and Jerusalem. While many kibbutzim have drifted out of existence, their communal way of living no longer popular in this increasingly consumer-oriented society, "my" kibbutz, called Na'an, is still alive and thriving -- home to some 1300 people. Yes, like many of the other surviving kibbutzim, they've privatized some of their operations and have added some country club-like amenities. But when I paid a visit, I found many things surprisingly the same. Husband Jeff sportingly agreed to accompany me on my nostalgia tour of Na'an. We picked Shabbat, when many businesses are closed in Tel Aviv. I went prepared with pictures on my phone to prove I had once lived and worked there, in case security wanted to keep me out. And I hoped those pictures would lead me to reunions with members of my kibbutz family. When we arrived, the security gate was formidable looking, but the first car that came along let us trail them in. Among some impressive new buildings, I found the old dining/multi-purpose hall, looking exactly the same and hosting a chess tournament. A hundred or so people milled about. The first person I approached wasn't a resident, but he directed me to a woman who looked to be in her 70s who might be able to help me. She didn't speak English, but she looked at the picture on my phone of me with my adoptive kibbutz mother, father and brother. Her steely expression brightened. "Yes I know them," she said, nodding excitedly. "They are my family." I quickly engaged a translator from the chess spectators and learned that, as I had expected, Chayala and Aryea had died some years back, but their son Giddy was still living on the kibbutz with his family. The woman promptly dialed him on her cell phone. He was away from the kibbutz and wouldn't be back for some time. From her end of the conversation and my limited understanding of Hebrew, I gathered he didn't really remember me. Who knows how many kibbutz volunteers his family had hosted over the years. Jeff and I pushed on to find the cement shed out near the chicken coop where I was housed with some of the other volunteers. And lo and behold, we found it -- abandoned but recognizable. A rooster crowed incessantly in the background. And at that moment, among all the strangeness and after four long decades, I felt very much at home. In case you're wondering, every day is a cheat day here in the land of milk and honey and falafel and kibbe and knafeh and halva and sambousek and hummus and almond pudding with rosewater and on and on and on. Here are scenes from the Carmel Market in Tel Aviv. Warning: just looking at these pictures may cause you to put on extra pounds. There's so much history of conflict everywhere you go in Israel. Even so, it was surprising to see what looked like bullet pockmarks on so many of the Bauhaus apartment buildings along tony Rothschild Boulevard in Tel Aviv. Well, on closer inspection, those marks are really something else altogether. Turns out, the gracious trees that line the boulevard are fig trees that for many years after they were planted bore no fruit at all. But when somehow in the 1970s a special breed of fig-boring wasp found its way to Tel Aviv from India, whether by air current or suitcase, the trees were pollinated and fruit began to appear. And that's when the bats showed up. In case you didn't know, bats love figs. Those pockmarks? They're really brown shmears of bat guano. Thought you'd like to know. One sure way to get over jet lag after a 10-hour flight to the other side of the world is to go straight to a Justin Timberlake concert after dropping your bags at the hotel. If like us you're lucky enough to get comped some premium tickets, you, too, can have the sensation of having a subwoofer implanted in your chest that is connected directly to the amps onstage. That and a high-wattage light show were enough to keep me and Jeff awake. And even though JT only played one song I recognized, I thought he put on a great show and was about a 10 on the charisma scale. At one point he got down from the stage to take a selfie with a couple who got engaged right there and then while 40,000 witnesses cheered the spectacle on giant monitors. Next up in Tel Aviv, the Rolling Stones on June 4th. Unfortunately, we'll be up north in the Galilee by then. But I'm sure we'll hear it loud and clear. |
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