Israel

March 10, 2019

 American cartoons with Hebrew subtitles on the TV. Arrived about 24 hours ago through flights on LOT (Polish airlines) not notable except for my heroic sleeping. I went to sleep over Canada and awoke over Denmark. Some mountains between here and Warsaw were covered with snow. The taxi ride was heroic for humor. I told one driver the address and he declined to take me. The next one, in his scant English, kept asking for directions. “Is that the one near the bus station?”

“I don’t know.”

“Do I turn left here?”

“Good God man I have never been to Tel Aviv in my life!”

Residence 26 is a new hotel that declared itself to be a “residence”—ie apartments—to cut down on cost. The first sight of it told me why the price was remarkably low. It’s in the Tel Aviv ghetto. When Yuval picked me up for the Jerusalem trip, he said, “Why are you staying here? It’s all prostitutes and drug dealers.” And so it is, though in my two night here they have not seemed to notice me.   But the young men who opened the hotel are eager and attentive, and I hope there may be some way for it to go well for them. In two cases they are also ravishingly handsome.

My first night here was agitated and sleepless, perhaps because I’d slept so much on the plane. Heard every noise, which is not like me.

Sleep deprived, I was standing on the street at 7 yesterday AM to take a guided tour of Jerusalem and Bethlehem. Yuval Bigio was our guide, an attractive, humorous man enthusiastic about everything. To watch him drink a beer you’d think it was ambrosia. How he ran down the streets to find his clients! Far and away the best guide I’ve ever had, he is a polyglot who could manage conversations in five languages, including Haitian Creole (There was a Haitian grandmother on the bus). Lots of Hispanics, and I must say I got sick of hearing Spanish, though it was amazing how much I could maneuver through it with my bits of French and Italian, and the fact that everything said was vaguely biblical. I even sort of followed an anecdote Yuval related to the driver in Hebrew, clearly concerning an observant Jew giving him grief for working on the Sabbath. I was sort of his pet, he asking me questions, showing me special things, calling my name if he lost me in the crowd. I told him he reminded me of my son, which was a spiritual truth if not a physical one.

Got money from an ATM that spoke only Hebrew.

The tour was both amazing and disappointing. The landscape of the Holy Land is as the bible illustrations led us to believe, though more beautiful and various. The land feels curiously young and untamed, even the terraces near Bethlehem that are three thousand years old.  “Here is the plain where God stopped the sun and the moon so Joshua could defeat the Amorites.” . . . “On this hill David housed the Ark while he was building Jerusalem.” The Vale of Kidron is actually in Jerusalem. The Galilean desert (a rain shadow desert) starts at the city limits with absolute desolation. I wept when we saw Jerusalem from Mount Scopus. Wept seeing Gesthemane from the bus, but “from the bus” is the operative phrase. Everything was seen from the bus or fighting our way through throngs anxious to experience what you are anxious to experience. I could not really encompass it that way. I have to get a hotel in Jerusalem and wander at my own pace.  Besides, my days of lunging up stairs and hills at any rate but my own are over. Thought I was going to die. I didn’t.

Bethlehem is a rope of limestone mountains without a single patch of flat earth. I didn’t expect that. The ancient church is under renovation, so it looks like the local Methodist, complete with Christmas decorations. I’ll contemplate the holiness of it all as it sinks in.  

Rejoiced today to find that the real Tel Aviv lies within a 15 minute walk of my ghetto. Did so. Sat at cafes and wrote. Walked from one end of Rothschild Blvd to the other. Ate at the Philharmonic café for lunch. When I found a supper restaurant on Rothschild, it was exactly the same, same menu, probably the same owner. Some truth must lie in that. Sat on the walk while the Mosque-of-Omar crescent moon passed over.