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 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. 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. |
AuthorSusan. Traveling again. And writing about it. ArchivesCategories
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