Shalom to Israel for now, Attempt #2

It's probably a cliched place to begin dealing with a country, but the flight into Israel distills much of the country's good and bad parts into a 20-30 minute window, and it's as good a place as anywhere to start, so there I go.

The flight into Israel, however one times it, features a few common elements. First, everybody is usually awake, as a half-hour before the flight lands the flight crew warns everybody over the sound system, repeatedly, that they are not allowed to get out of their seats due to Israeli regulations. Second, passengers feel the anticipation for glimpsing the shoreline, the first view of the Holy Land in all its glory, as it were. Israel is not unique for having its main airport situated a few miles from water. Israel stands unique in the fact that one flies over half the width of the country in about seven minutes from the first sight of the shore to Ben Gurion airport.

So there, all of a sudden, whether in bright sunlight or the eternal electrical illumination of Tel Aviv nightlife, appears the famed Mediterranean beaches, the ever multiplying Tel Aviv skyscrapers, the barren Kikar Ha Medina, and the White City. Two minutes after, the plane is descending over highways and plains, the flat, quiet middle ground between Tel Aviv and Jerusalem. Three minutes or so later, the plane touches down, and the speed of one's journey through Israel slows, at least.

Which leads to the next special moment of the flight into Israel: the inevitable applause. Most flights I have taken into Israel have, not surprisingly, been filled in the majority by Israelis. Politics, existential issues, complaints, and all the negativity aside, the generalization must be asserted that Israelis love their country. It is easy to be cynical or caustic about this, and I confess that too much patriotism, nationalism, or any ism makes me uneasy, but on the surface, the applause is charming, a throwback to the early excitement of intercontinental air travel and also a testament to the genuine excitement that people, both Israelis and those visitors who join in, eager for their visit, feel for this country. Too much excitement? Yes, but still.

The downside of that excitement is felt 15-20 minutes later or so, once off the plane, through the long lines in passport control, and face to face with the border control agent.

Before I proceed, let me make clear that I'm aware the U.S. is harder to get into than Israel. Many other countries surely are just as stringent on their border policies. Stringency is not the issue with Israel, especially since I've never actually been rejected or really threatened with rejection at the border.

Instead, there is the inevitable unpleasantness that greets a passport that is a little bent, features a ton of stamps, especially many stamps to and from Israel, and no active visa. I restrict the tale to my experiences, though I know others hit trouble either at this same point or at the airport trying to leave, and I've written about that before.

But I have tried speaking Hebrew and English at passport control. I have tried being cheerful and confrontational (though my sense of the impending confrontation always drags on my cheerful efforts). I have entered with and without an active visa. I have told my story unflinchingly, never with inconsistencies or things I would think constitute red flags. And considering Israel has tourist visas available for 3-months anyway, I get confused at the reason for the tough questioning.

The tough questioning comes nevertheless.
"Why don't you have a visa?
"Because our school gets us the visa after we enter the country. That's how we did it the last two years.
"So you're telling me how things are done in Israel?"
Hands up in self-abnegation. 
"Tell me, do you think I could show up to the United States without a visa to work, and they'd let me in?"
"I don't know," thinking that I've gotten into Israel without a visa plenty of times, and that maybe she couldn't in the U.S., but at least they wouldn't be total assholes about the process, and yes, politeness does count for something.
"Well, the answer is no, they wouldn't." Stamp on the passport anyway.

Or the time I came back from Rwanda last fall, where I planned to fly out a couple days later from Israel, but didn't have a ticket yet and as such no clear plan. I had no visa that time around.

"Do you have a ticket to leave?"
"Not yet, but I can get one."
"Can you show it to me?"
"I could if you let me use a computer, do you want me to use your computer? Or pull out my laptop?"
"Why should we let you in without a visa?" with a harrumph.
"Why are you not polite? Why can't you be polite?"
In comes the supervising officer in the booth one over. "Polite? This isn't kindergarten, this is border control! We don't have to be polite, this is the border!"
Oh.

Fitting that on that occasion, for the only time in my three years entering Israel, I got sent for a time-out in the back room. Where, ever so maddeningly, all they did was make me wait for ten minutes, then beckon me to follow an adviser to another room, where he had me wait outside, went in with my passport, stamped it, and handed it to me with nary a word. Nothing like a meaningless, no follow-through instance of intimidation to welcome one to a country.

Such are the highs and lows of Israel. The intense joy and pride couples with an aggressively defensive treatment of others from formal agents. There is no distance between private behavior and public-political action. There is little distinction between brother and stranger, for better or worse. All are part of a family, all are treated like family. Family welcomes and opens arms; it also criticizes and smacks harder than anybody else.

***

I do not want to dwell on the negatives. For whatever it's worth, I do love Israel. One's life bristles here, charges with energy and excitement and intensity. Every day poses a fight, a struggle on the streets or the bus or at the market, but the more we fight for something, the more valuable victory feels. It's not for nothing that several different non-native Israelis told me, after a string of complaints about the various things they disliked or even hated about Israel, that they wouldn't want to live anywhere else, that Israel gave them a feeling of truly living, a feeling they thought was not replicable elsewhere.  

I also do not want to dwell on politics, though that's one aspect of the fight that exhausts me here. Caring about the future and actively following the present in the papers leaves me in an inescapable state of frustration, confusion, and doubt, one that may trail me wherever I go but that is also specific to my life in Israel. I make no political comment here except to say that I find it a constant irritant that when I discuss the situation with somebody who holds a different political view, especially Russians whom I speak with about this, I hear the response, "But I worry about Israel, I really love Israel," as if my stance on the left means I have no love or worry for Israel. Though I guess my desire to leave is, perhaps, proof that I don't love or worry about Israel, somehow. In any case, I returned for this shorter stint refreshed and thinking I would be able to steer clear of the politics, only to thrust myself back into it after the series of speeches and rebuttals and standing ovations from a couple weeks ago. I suppose it's an early sign of madness to hear voices in your head, but one morning I biked to work and argued with myself in three languages. Such is the life and the madness that Israel can drive one to.

Again, it looks like I dwell on negatives, and I am trying to avoid that. Or in another sense, I'm trying to avoid the sort of reflection that my Hebrew class gave after my first year in Israel. The four of us sat in class with our teacher, a colleague at the school we all worked at, as she asked us what we would miss about Israel. The other three were all leaving after two years there, and I was to imagine what I would miss. The list sounded like this:

Weather.

Beach.

Hummus. And falafel.

Fresh vegetables.

Weather.

Naomi, our teacher.


In other words, not the most positive collection of views about the people of Israel, about the country in its substance, just its dumb luck natural attributes.

But underlying the intensity I harp on is a warmth, a feeling of togetherness and acceptance that quickly veers to anger or harshness if things go wrong. The willingness of the Arab guys to accept my presence in their football game but to fall into confusion or anger when I play the game my way, physical and all elbows and knees (as with any game I play besides wrestling). (Last political aside: my main man in the group was no happier with President Obama than many Jewish Israelis, calling him better than Bush but still "an asshole.") The aid I received on the streets of Jerusalem last week near the government buildings when I asked for directions to Yad Vashem, ("It's a long walk," he said once he realized I was doing the extra kilometer to the Holocaust museum's campus) and the streets of Even Yehuda when going to a party yesterday. The kindness of the local bike shop guy, a religious Jew who knocked his price down 10 shekels for my most recent repair when he realized I didn't have the necessary small change and didn't want to break my big bill, or the local shoe store attendants, one a classic Israeli well-styled macho guy and the other a nice middle-aged woman from Argentina, as I blundered through a second and third attempt to buy a pair of woman's shoes. I bemoaned the lack of American-style politeness at Ben Gurion Airport, and I still don't understand often why Israel and Israelis don't make a tiny bit more of an effort to put on a good face despite things, in the day to day and in the larger picture, but the freshness of daily interactions, the frank quality that avoids idle superficiality, also cuts out some of the social fat from life and leaves a leaner, more power-packed routine. Even when Israelis fall to pleasantries, as when two men will start a conversation that involves three to four phrases each that are all iterations of "what's up"*, there's a sharpness  or a humor to them which rescues the conversation from banality. Whatever Israel's problems, banality is not one of them.

*(For example, recently I heard a conversation on the street that went something like this:
"Ma nishma?"
"Ma nishma?"
"Ma itcha, ahi?"
"Klum, ma hadash?"
"Ma inyanim?"
"Ma kore, gever?"
"Ani besder, toda, v attah?"
"Gam tov, toda. Y'allah, ani holech."
"Y'allah, tov, bye."
Translated: "What's up (literally, what will we hear)?" "What's up?" "What's up, my brother (literally, what's with you)?" "Nothing, what's new?" "What's going on?" (What are the issues, literally) "What's happening, man?" "I'm good, thanks, and you?" "Also good, thanks. Ok, I'm going." "Ok, good, bye.")

***

Israel exists sui generis, and with contradictory feelings about its unique qualities. On the one hand, many here would like nothing more than to be an ordinary, if warmer, European country, not isolated in the world, not expected to do anything more than any other country, free to establish their bonds with the west. On the other hand, there is the pride of place, the attachment to history and narrative, and the self belief that emerges from 63 years of existence that many feel has been achieved in spite of the world, not with its help. The frank nature of Israeli life, the aggressive defensiveness, and the intensity of the country can all be attributed, I think, in part to the belief imbued among regular Jewish Israelis that we have done what we have done with no help, and things have worked out; those things could all go to hell in a short time anyway, so why bother with the niceties?

As much as many would like to think of Israel as just like Europe, that framing crops out too much. Israel's Middle East location isn't just a question of politics and weather; the influence of Arab neighbors and the minority percolate Israeli society (as a trivial example, the "y'allah" of the above conversation is an Arabic interjection that is used in both Arabic and Hebrew to mean something like "let's go" (though literally meaning "to Allah"). Ahi, "my brother", also may be derived from Arabic culture. Again, something like the influence black culture has on white America). Israel also treats religion differently than Western nations; this too is a fault line in Israeli life, between the secular and the religious, between Tel Aviv and Jerusalem, between the modern and the traditional or, horrors, ultra-Orthodox. I don't mean to claim Israel is more religious than Western Europe, for example, but the deadness of Saturdays everywhere but Tel Aviv, the moratorium on work and commerce on most major holidays, and the actual and enforced solemnity of Yom Kippur is definitely a different approach to religion than what I grew up with in the U.S.A. Not that it's a bad thing, necessarily - I like the solemnity of Yom Kippur, and there's something wise about taking Saturday to pause and do less in and out of the house than on any other day - but it is a fact of life here, and another aspect of Israel's special status.

***

The world is either full of places that are sui generis, or else rapidly losing those unique spots on the map as globalization wraps us all up into its stultifying, intoxicating, all-encompassing, ultimately Westernizing bosom. Either way, I am still at the point where I want to move on to new places. Luxembourg, not necessarily my envisioned wildest frontier, represents a chance to savor Europe's fruits definitively, fully, to luxuriate for a few more years in the West before the possibility of renewed adventures and new discoveries, new at least for me. When we look back on our journeys, everything is given a linear logic, and I'm sure Luxembourg will fall into that. After all, learning French would open a few doors in Africa.

As pertains to Israel, I mean to say that I view this departure not as an abandonment of one place but as a chance to go somewhere else. Mired in the haze of my mid-20s, wondering if jack of all trades really is so admirable after all, I should maybe begin to settle a little bit more, develop more of a clear plan for where I'm going or, at least, what I'm doing. And if I had to settle somewhere, Israel would probably attract me as much or more than my home, for example, or most of the United States.

All of which is to say that my time in Israel, spanning at first 26 months and then another 2+ this time around, totaling about 2 full years of time on the ground here, was a success and a thrill and tiring and complete. The perfect introduction to life abroad, in many ways. Never boring. Full of friends from many walks in life, of interesting opportunities and learning experiences and jobs and fun nights on the beach and concerts and various senses of communities, or various communities with their own sense of belonging, of four apartments in three towns/cities, of three bikes (one stolen, one still for sale on craigslist!), of one p.o.s. car, of blessed health and love, of growing pains and mid-20s angst, of (too few) guests and hosts, of learning a great deal of one language (Hebrew) and a few nice morsels of another (Arabic), of speaking another language almost every day (Russian), of visiting Europe and the Caucasus and Jordan and Bethlehem (but sadly, never Egypt or other parts of the West Bank), of arguments and existential debates, of parties and lines on a resume and old acquaintances and new friends and Shabbat dinners and muezzin calls and quiet Saturdays and frazzled Fridays (though never late nights in Tel Aviv), of Tel Aviv the city that will spoil me forever on the convenience of a small city you can walk through, of late nights last summer where I biked home past midnight and Rotschild Boulevard was buzzing with people and warm air and the feeling that as hard as people try to compare Tel Aviv to New York or to Barcelona it doesn't work and doesn't have to, for Tel Aviv is its own beast, and Israel is its own beast, and my destroyed syntax lets me say nothing more except that I am glad for second chances in life: I meant to write this essay the first time I left for what I thought to be "good", for the near term, last fall, but never got around to it, and so when I received the offer to leave my cat-sitting and go work at my old school for the end of the school year, plenty of good came with it, not the least of which is the chance to write my good bye again, one more time, with feeling.

In Hebrew there's a saying, "anachnu lo omrim shalom, anachnu omrim lehitraot." "We don't say goodbye, we say see you." Sayings can be corny, as can eulogistic writing like this, but my second stint is proof of the ever revolving circles of life and the necessity of saying "see you," rather than "goodbye."

In less than a week, I will be at Ben Gurion again, going through a much easier process (I never have problem with security exiting Israel), and getting on a plane to leave Israel again for a while, though I don't know how long. There will be no applause when the plane touches down in NYC, from me or anybody else.

And I will say as I leave, not shalom, but lehitraot, yisrael.

On Patriotism and Independence

Three summers ago, when I was first preparing to move to Israel, I frequently wore a pair of flip-flops with American flag designs; stars and stripes, red white and blue, non-running colors, and so on. They were my dad's sandals, though, so I had to buy a new pair and give those back to him. When I did, he made a joke about how Israel, "won't be so crazy to have flip-flops like that."

Wolla! Thanks, Google!!

This is where I could paste in a picture of big old blue and white star of David Israeli flip-flops, but I wasn't sufficiently vigilant in finding them on the streets. You'll have to take my word for it: they exist.

Israel is a pretty patriotic place, I'm saying. In a time where some Americans are reconnecting with their patriotic feelings, while other Americans are repelled by the jingoistic overtones that accompany those patriotic feelings, I find myself in one of the few places in the world more patriotic than America. That's not a scientific finding. Nor do I have a lot of hard evidence about how patriotic countries besides the U.S.A. and Israel are; I know Russians are rather proud of their country, and May 8th, V-E day, is a day I'm to remember every year to congratulate my WWII Red Army veteran grandfather for; I didn't notice any overwhelming pride during my two months in Spain, but then not again, I wasn't there during the summer of 2008 or 2010 when the football team, La Furia Roja, took the world and country by storm. I will grant that most countries are patriotic to some degree or another, and maybe it's not fair to rank them on their respective levels of flag-waving and chest-beating. That said, I am sticking to my premise of the U.S.A. and Israel being very patriotic, and focus on those two countries, especially Israel.

(Note: I don't think Luxembourg, my next home, will score very high on the patriotic scale.)

Today is Independence Day. Yesterday was Memorial Day. The juxtaposition is intended to remind observers of the bittersweet struggle for independence and security that has been waged through several wars, ongoing fears, and 63 years, while also attesting to the country's desire for peace and acceptance. (I am not discussing the contemporary political issues of 2011 here, so feel free to read that last clause at face value or as skeptically as you deem necessary.) The holidays, as with all Jewish and Israeli holidays, go from sunset to sunset. Yom Hazikaron (Memorial Day) starts with a siren at 8pm, where the whole nation is to stand still in silence. There are services that night; the next day at 11am, another siren and set of services. And then that night, on to partying.

This year, there was a unique twist to the combination: Euroleague basketball. Maccabi Tel Aviv, one of the strongest European basketball clubs, something of a Yankees of the Israeli leagues, with all the good and bad that comes with such a connotation, was competing in the Champions League finals against a Greek squad, Panathinaikos. The twist was that once Maccabi made the final, they were slated to play at 5:30, an earlier time than originally planned: the final four organizers in Barcelona agreed to bump up the game to accommodate MTA's wishes to not play during Memorial Day, when all the TV stations go black for the siren and then broadcast services or memorial themed documentaries and programs. The nation hung on both the success or failure of Maccabi's game and the time it took to play, wondering if they could go about their rituals and still see if Maccabi would pull it out.

Though Israelis either love or hate Maccabi in the domestic context, once they play abroad, the team has a full country behind them. The Ha'aretz, the center-left newspaper I read, had an article boasting of Maccabi's fervent fans, outnumbering and outbellowing the other Final Four teams' fanbases while adorned in a sea of yellow, Maccabi's color.  Living on a main street in Herzliya, I could hear air horns and cheers from my window leading up to game time, then the hushed attention of people watching the game, and then the dying wheeze of a fanbase that realized it would only be next year - Panathinaikos was too strong.

The positive feelings for the country did not dissipate along with the dreams of Euroleague glory. The next day at school, after a nice, politically correct service about remembrance and world peace put on by high school students, I had a long talk with a new immigrant to Israel, a mother in her late 40s from an NYC suburb who professed Bronx-accented appreciation for her oldest son deciding to move here first and join the army, who wondered how to persuade her younger son to serve the country, and who talked about how her son's commanding officer gave parents his phone number in case of emergency, filling surrogate teacher and parent roles at once. I don't say that I shared oolll of the same views as this mother from oolllmost the Bronx, but it was thought-provoking in the very least.

Last night was the night of the big celebration, from which all these photos (except the shoe) come. I had no plans to go anywhere unless invited to something, but the constant din of horns, both the ones blown by mouth ala last summer's vuvuelzas and the ones kids could just push a button to sound, the little bastards (both kids and horns), and the proximity of Herzliya's festivities spurred me to get out of the apartment. I grabbed my camera and went for a stroll on Ben Gurion street, the main drag in Herzliya, hosting the Yom Haatzmaut (Independence Day) activities and named after the first prime minister and major founding father of the country, David Ben Gurion (the George Washington of Israel, as it were).

The main part of Herzliya, where I am this time 'round, is a nice-sized suburb of Tel Aviv, not far from the city, the beach, or the hi-tech sector buildings located in Herzliya Pittuach, the beach-side of town. Last night, it was mostly host to families; I saw a few older couples, a bunch of high schoolers, but few people around my age who weren't already pushing baby carriages or toting large bellies. The 20-somethings either don't live in Herzliya or make sure to get into Tel Aviv for the night. (Note: last year, when living in Tel Aviv, Amy and I went to a party hosted by one of my M.A. program buddies at which both of us felt awkward, old, and out of place (well, maybe I didn't quite feel old, but you get the point). Then she met up with other friends and went to a party, and I went to bed, this around 10:30pm.)


In that the patriotic holiday in a patriotic country is a family affair, then, it made me wonder about the nature of Israeli patriotism. Undoubtedly, a small nation affords less escape from patriotism and possibly by its size more of a need for unity. At the same time, the contentious nature of Israel's history makes it more essential to cling to the idea of a country. Not to say everyone agrees with "the situation", that all Israelis have conforming views regarding the nation's challenges. More to say that given the ever-present potential for eruption in a political and military sense, and the intense daily behavior everybody engages in, the citizens who stay here will by their nature be committed to the idea of the state; it's the bias of self-selection. I would think that this applies to Arab citizens of Israel and those living in the territories, though obviously through a much different set of circumstances and logic.

There is also the newness of the state and its ongoing sense of danger that propels citizens to celebrate so furiously each and every year (or at least the three I've been here). History has taught us time and again that democracy, while perhaps a noble and desired outcome for all modern nations, does not come about immediately or suddenly, but almost always in an organic process - see Russia after 1991, Germany after WWI, Yugoslavia after 1991, Africa or the Middle East after colonialism, or even the U.S.A. until at least the civil war. Israel is only 63 years old, younger then the U.S. was when it fought itself over slavery; expecting it to solve all its problems is mildly unfair and at the same time a testament to the fact that Israel has done a pretty good job establishing democracy from scratch. At the same time, Israel's situation is unique, and I am one of many who think the country could do much more in seeking a solution, so I'm not nullifying all criticism as unfair.

A local curmudgeon - a mostly left-wing contrarian journalist whom, I sense, most Israelis ignore at this point - argued on one of the previous two independence days that once Israelis get over the celebration of themselves and their great survival that is wrapped in the Yom Haatzmaut national narrative, they can actually take care of the injustice that is the failure to make peace with the Palestinians.

It's mostly a wet blanket argument, one designed to be ignored on the day itself. But removed from the immediate holiday context, it is another thought provoker - would Israelis care quite as much about independence and their patriotism once those things became granted and confirmed in peace treaties and an affirmed right to exist from their neighbors? Is Israeli pride/exceptionalism the result of the conflict, or part of the cause? With peace, would new problems and bugaboos emerge?

Part of that discussion with the Bronxish mother was about how little Memorial Day meant to us in the States as kids - a parade, the beginning of summer, a day off from school, and a barbecue, but not much more. After 9/11, patriotism and the significance of sacrifice and suffering returned to Americans in a way it may not have since World War II. That sacrifice wasn't terribly well shared, and that significance and patriotism became something of a political football, as during the Vietnam War, but in the very least, we became aware of the issues, we Americans who as a nation were and still are, as a Russian condescendingly termed it to me, "childish" in our view of the world, and who have much more to blush and get angry about in both relative and absolute terms than Israel. Is it a good thing that we now think this way, more patriotically and more attached to rituals? That we only got here through a sense of suffering? I don't know.



Just as I was about to go back up to my apartment for the night, where I would stay awake till after midnight, jamming toilet paper in my ears to blunt the incessant if fading blare of the horns, the first round of fireworks went off. Kids previously messing around with skateboards or spray cans shrieked and ran by me to the intersection from where they could see the fireworks. Adults walked over to similar vantage points. I turned around, pulled to the flash and squeal of the rockets.



Fireworks inevitably serve as exclamation points for outdoor celebrations, especially patriotic ones. They are either ineffable joys or simplistic ones, satisfying the inner child's desire to see sparkles and hear explosions. Whatever happens to Israeli patriotism, American patriotism, both countries' desire for peace, or both countries' propensity for war, the ties between fireworks and patriotic revelry are not going to diminish. Neither will the inner logic beneath those ties.

New Orleans Hipsters to Herzliya Arabs - Breaking onto new Pitches

There was a moment in the game that Monday where a player on the other team stood at little past the mid line with the ball. Though it was a football (i.e. soccer - I'm going to use football the whole article, for consistency's sake) game, not necessarily conducive to man-to-man marking ala basketball, we were only playing 4 on 5 and I was ready to cover him. He stood there, however, with nary an eye towards me, nor towards advancing the ball towards our net. Instead, he looked at his teammate and cussed him out. This opponent of mine, the one with the ball, didn't look all that different than me; he berated his teammate in a language I don't speak, one that isn't too different from a language I do speak, but that to the uninitiated ear has a harshness to its beauty, a harshness that lends itself naturally to ripping into friends.

This yelling, back and forth, went on for about 20 seconds. Were this a true competitive endeavor, I would have had no trouble stealing the ball, sprinting to a breakaway against the distracted keeper, and misfiring on an easy shot. This a friendly outing, at least for me, I sat there and watched the conversation. I, the only non-Arabic speaker in the crowd, may have forgotten to keep my lower jaw from slackening. So when the man with the ball finally stopped his venting and turned his head back to the field of play, the nine of us, aware of the absurdity that featured me in the middle, watching all of this, burst into laughter. The laughter lasted another ten seconds, and then we resumed the game.

All the potential fruits of sports and travel, wherein we cross boundaries, realize anew how differences remain, and play on anyway, those fruits spilled out of those ten seconds.

***

For someone who never played formal football, I've had quite a career with the sport, as it were. There was high school cluster (i.e. intramural) football, where I gained rep as a fearless and athletic if not necessarily good goalie, the type of "intense competitor" who stayed on the field after the finals game senior year, one in which I gave up 5 goals, two of which I still don't hear the end about from a friend on the other team. Then there was fall workouts for wrestling in college, where we'd alternate between ultimate frisbee and football as conditioning games; I was notorious for playing hard and for a zero shooting percentage, my misses worthy of an hour-long blooper reel. For my two full years in Israel, I was improbably the assistant high school football coach, specializing on working with the keepers and the reserves; one of this year's captains still calls my motivational speeches "the best", though I should also point out that the team finished 5th this year in the final tournament without me after 7th and 10th (out of 10) with me.

The football career at the center of this post, however, is even less formal. I refer to the pickup games and local gatherings I've taken part of in various places. The excitement of the World Cup 2006 leading me into a regular game during my one summer in Durham, NC. The games I played that fall in the neighborhood rubber court with the boy from the family I lived with in Moscow, notable for the teenagers, two of them, who would smoke cigarettes during the "halftime" break. The game Ben brought me to in Madrid over Thanksgiving 2008, where the best player on the pitch was a girl who played at Oregon St. The game played in the sunset last fall in Rwanda with genocide orphans.

Here is where I could insert the cliches about the commonality of sports, the shared experience inherent in a game, the way boundaries can be bridged and friendships made over a meeting ground of rules and end lines and balls, all the stuff included in that "potential fruits" sentence that ended the section above, and then remind that there is no larger, more common meeting ground than football. Cliches are nice to lean on every now and then, as Paul Simon said in a recent piece on inspiration and "genius". As such, I allow you the space to lean on that cliche as much as you'd like.





That taken care of, I'd like to avoid the cliche by going into the particularities of these two recent settings, my last two games, one in New Orleans, the other in Raanana, Israel.

***

I lucked into the New Orleans game. One lucks into all of the soccer games they might play. One also creates their own luck. Seek a game and it can be found, as long as one is open to luck.

I lived in a "communal house", as the owner called it, a five minute walk from City Park in the Mid-City area of New Orleans. The house was freezing; the unadvertised downside of living in a warm-weather area is that all the houses are designed to be cool. This makes sense, is a logical approach even, a pleasing example of the convergence of architectural necessity and environmental efficiency. It also means that if the warm-weather area gets cold, due to a natural cycle, a climate change twisted world, or the impending apocalypse, one's abode is miserable to be in. In Israel, this was a problem of tile floors and windows facing North-South to limit sunlight; in New Orleans, big open wood floored rooms with no heating system made nights cold and rainy afternoons more pleasant outside than in. Add in the inevitable disappointment over the false bill of goods that a warm weather area has peddled to the visitor or transplant in winter, and time spent in the house, even for a homebody like me, takes on a significantly lower quality.

Anyway, in this communal house lived four other people. Two were the owner and her husband, she a New Orleans native who had taken on the hijab, presumably upon marriage, and he a Palestinian-American with a heavy Jersey accent, only slightly ground up by his Arabic tongue. Another was a New Zealand gal traveling around the world, paying her way by working as a waitress (on Bourbon Street here; her next stop was Nashville). The last was a Louisiana native of about my age, a nice guy named Bryant who happened to be on a kickball team and, even more pertinently, to organize a weekly football game. Such was my in.

A weekly game on a highly visible if officially private field opposite City Park (we were kicked off this field once or twice in the three games I played there) is bound to attract four different groups to its games:

1. The originals, meaning the founder(s) of the game and then their initial circle of friends who want to play. Keeping it to just this group will ensure a cohesive vision of what the game is meant to be about and what the level of the players will be; the drawback is that unless the founders are really popular, there won't be very big games. In the Israel game to be covered below, for example, I felt that all the players were of this group, with the exception of me of course. Cohesive, but also only enough for 4 v 4 without me.

2. A group of hardcore players, hardcore in the sense that they will show up come rain or shine, Saturday or Sunday, hard week of work or not. In our case, this group did not consist solely of the original members; Bryant invited one or two of them, who then invited the rest of their group, who then decided they needed to take the intensity UP a notch, leading to some friction between the original members who just wanted to play a nice game of footie and those who wanted to play some fucking football, brah!! This friction was resolved before I got there.

3. The semi-regular friends of the hardcore and originals, those who will play once or twice a month, who view it as either an occasional workout to get back to their athletic roots or a social outing (worth noting here I think that, fair or not, about 95% of the athletes at the NO games were male, and 100% for the one game in Israel). Essential to have a regular rotating cast of this group to have a fun, relatively good level game week in and week out. Conveniently enough, until I move to a place for more than a month or two, I fall into this category.

4. Passers-by and other strangers who happen to stumble upon the game via word of mouth or voracious search of a city's fields for a possible game. The biggest wild-card of the four groups, as the strangers can either add a joyous synergy to the game of unexpected quality or drag on the overall group's harmony or level of play. A tough thing to predict, but one can't turn away strangers.


The first time I played was within a week of moving into the house. I hardly knew Bryant, am not the most outgoing person among strangers, and so stuck to my lane. For pickup football, I interpret that to mean three things: volunteering to do the menial tasks that help the game along (playing goalie, fetching the ball when it goes astray in warmups or game time), playing hard but fairly, and keeping my mouth shut except to respond to people talking to me or making jokes in my direction (a smile and a polite laugh is all I need in those situations). Not integrated into the game and not a dominant player (or personality), I carved out the niche of running hard along the outside, occasionally getting the ball on breaks and creating opportunities for my team. I also leveraged my big advantage, besides hustling: physicality. At one point, I bumped into Bryant, who was playing on the opposing team, and threw some muscle into my efforts to take the ball from him. "Oh, hey roomie," he said in mild surprise as we tussled. I made sure to say sorry and put my hands up after I passed the ball away. In my unofficial stat keeping of the number of positive plays I made versus the number of times I messed up, I think I came out in the black, if ever so slightly.

I have long mulled over the words of T.S. Eliot in Four Quartets - "For us there is only the trying/the rest is not our business," though perhaps denuding the statement of its fatalistic/catholic meaning. I consider that to stand as a general prescription for how to lead one's life when existing in the blessed world of the western middle class, where we can expect effort, meaningful effort, to afford us continued opportunities and at least a reasonable subsistence. In pickup football, where no one can really expect anything of a player except effort, this trying becomes all the more singularly essential.

Why I wrapped myself in the protective shell of hard work and amiability, I observed group #2 in action, exhibiting their New Orleans particularity. A group of young fellows more or less my age, apparently NO natives who used to play together in high school or youth leagues, they offered both the upper crust of talent in the game and the majority of the talking, stamping their personality onto the spirit of the game.

Their personality, collectively, was loud and rowdy, reminiscent of, well, young men who like to play sports. Constant slurs and taunts flew between them as they played on opposite sides. I learned, for example, that "Jamook" is a taunt against people of Italian heritage. Also, I saw the plight of the athletic but not exceptionally talented female when playing in this crowd; every time one of the three girls who showed up over the three weeks would make a solid play, the bullhorn of this group would cheer for her: the intention was good, the result a little patronizing.

That said, this group, especially the louder fellows, consisted of mostly nice people. By my third (final) game, they knew who I was and were happy to see me. There was rarely if ever malice in their voices or taunts, just that constant veneer of shit-talking and easy joking that defines behavior and relationships among young males, in America at the very least.

What football, or any group activity, can provide to the traveler, the visitor, the new implant in a city, is a chance to tap into a new network, to find a way to connect to a new population in a new place, through doing something familiar, old. A friend of mine always said that the best way to meet people (I think she and I were talking about potential romantic partners at the time) is by doing the things you like to do in ways that allow you to meet other people. Fortunately, I stumbled on a romantic partner through a job, saving me from the dating scene. But when it comes to the occasional need that I feel, a need most people probably feel more often, to spend time with fellow humans, to interact, to laugh at dumb jokes about one another's physical incompetence, this strategy becomes valuable. Football as a way to make friends, I'm saying.

***

I didn't join the game in Israel because I wanted to make friends. I'm only in Israel for a total of 9 weeks this time around, and have plenty of friends who are still here. I'm a short-timer through and through, and don't need very many friends anyway. No, that didn't interest me very much. I was just seeking a way to workout, a way to run, to expend physical energy in a way not allowed by standing in front of children for 3+ hours a day.

Shortly after my return in late March, I met with my friend Yehuda, and my exercising desire came up. He, no football player, mentioned that he had a group of friends that played at the Sportek in Herzliya every Monday night. The group was a set of Israeli Arabs, at least a few of them students at the university Yehuda and I had just earned our M.A. from. This certainly intrigued me further, and a couple Mondays later, I was on my way to meet with the gang.

Political discourse in Israel finds itself in an interesting, if troubling place in 2011. On the one hand, the distance between politics and life is much narrower here than anywhere else I've been, closer than the occasionally energized U.S.A. in the last decade, closer than the easy benevolence of Western Europe, the unapproachable abyss sundering citizens from their leaders in Rwanda or Guatemala, or the laughable remove at which Putin and co. operate in Russia. The country is small, meaning that people are more likely to know their leaders or meet with their leaders, but more significantly, the issues are more important, matters not of just getting a job or paying an excessive amount of taxes, but of what the country is to become, of peace and war, of, in a reductive phrasing, life and death.

At the same time, Israelis that I encounter appear to be worn out from caring, eager to submerge political discourse underneath the easy calm of everyday life, an everyday life that, when removed from the question of the territories, the fact that most young people serve in the army, and so on, is pretty nice. The weather is great, the economy has done as well as almost any western economy in the post-crisis climate, and cultural life here is unique, a mix of European heights and Middle Eastern zest. Why bother with the difficult issues that affect the country, especially when they're not going to be solved either way?

I don't mean to simplify the situation, nor to judge, at least not as harshly as the above question might appear to do. Humans do not have the capacity to take on constant complexity and moral ambiguity over a period of 10 years, 20 years, 63 years, thousands of years, depending on how you define the situation. Politics are still talked about, still essential, but there's also less reason to talk; most citizens have made up their minds one way or the other, and either the status quo will hold on for the coming years or the logjam will break and the floods of change will reach Israel as well, for better or worse.

That digression takes me away from the story though, and I apologize. I meant to say all this as an introduction to the fact, unfamiliar to many who haven't visited Israel, that there is a large Arab population within the country itself. About 20-25% of the citizens of Israel are Arabs. They vote, they live in mixed communities as well as their own, and they are a part of the daily fabric of life here (for some obvious examples, often Arabs work as gas station attendants, and not coincidentally many gas stations feature good Arab restaurants). Definitely, there is discrimination for the minority, but from what I can tell over my time here, the best historical analogy of the Arab situation in Israel itself would be to African-Americans' place in the U.S. before the Civil Rights movement. Arabs in Israel have more rights, I would say, but there is more intensity to the feelings between majority and minority.

That further digression is to explain that while I had no intention to bring up politics with these Arabs in either an explicit or implicit sense, I thought it would be very interesting to spend some time with the group. I knew Israeli Arabs, either through school or through frequent encounters, but I wouldn't number any as acquaintances even. This was an opportunity to open a window on a different part of Israel. And to run around and kick a ball.


***

I ran to the Sportek just after 9:00pm on that Monday night. The main organizer, Nabil, had mentioned the possibility that the courts would be full in Herzliya (we would play on a basketball court, basically), and that we might have to drive to the next town over, Raanana. For that reason I couldn't bike over either. I ran to make sure I wasn't late.

I got there, didn't see anybody, and called. Nabil and co. had made the decision to drive over to Raanana and somebody would take me in a car. I gave the description of what I was wearing and where I was, and after a while, a cat named Weill (that's how the name sounded, anyway) found me. He called the driver, who brought the car over, full of passengers already. The driver had a long black beard, the type we associate with religious Muslims named Omar (his name). Another car pulled up with Nabil, who shook my hand happily and said we were going to Raanana, so pile in. I squeezed into the first car, a compact, Weill sat next to me, and we drove with 5 passengers over to the next town, I trying to quiet my inner alarm bells.

As cultured and well-traveled and unfazed as I claim to be as a modern liberal citizen of the world, those bells persisted. My concerns numbered as follows:

1. I have just gotten into a car with five young Arab guys I don't know. The one friend who told me about them is a great guy but who knows if his judgment is always the sharpest? Again, for purposes of analogy, think about getting into a car with 5 locals in, say, East St. Louis.

2. Never mind what they might do to me, that's ridiculous - I had already brought very little money with me, I'm unimportant, they came recommended, that's fine. But what if the cops happen to see a heavily bearded Arab driving a car and notice that he is driving a car with five passengers for 4 seats? Wouldn't it figure that there would be trouble? That might not be good for my job security.

3. Did I remember to put on my Tom's of Maine brand woodspice-scented deodorant that night, or just in the morning, and if not, had that morning application worn off?

As usual, these fears were exaggerated and unrealized (well, except for #3, but then, we were men about to run around: bad smells were typical). Weill and I had a pleasant if mildly uncomfortable talk about our university, uncomfortable not only for the clown car conditions but because he wondered why an American would ever bother to study in Israel. I explained that I came to work here and then just studied while I stayed an extra year, but avoided the subject of the Jewish right of return and the identity Jews around the world feel with Israel, sensing that could get us into a drawn-out political conversation that while likely to be perfectly reasonable, would have perhaps been a little premature in our relationship.

We arrived at the court safely and found a couple guys shooting at a hoop on an otherwise vacant court; the adjacent court had a full football game with Israeli kids going, and so we would have to find a way to convince these guys to let us play. These two players, like many of the kids on the other court, wore kippas, denoting their religious beliefs as Jews: if Herzliya is one of the most liberal and secular places in the country, Raanana is a little bit more conservative and certainly more religious: I remember driving through their once and seeing an ad campaign for women's underwear, a series of ads on the median of the main road, crossed out with big white stripes.

This was the other big inner tension I felt during the game; the possibility of friction between our group and any other groups at the park. Again, any fear was unfounded, but as a dovish, grovelling, peace-loving American from a land where everything works (more or less), as a middle brother in all senses, I was eager to see no further tensions emerge. I imagined how Jewish Israelis might perceive the harsh foreign sounds of Arabic or the accent my fellow football players had when they spoke Hebrew (which they did better than me, of course), I imagined them (the Raanana Jews) finding them (the Herzliya Arabs) aggressive, pushy, rude, and them (the HAs) feeling the same way about them (the RJs), and me stuck in the middle, powerless and in between.

Again, nothing really happened. When balls were kicked from one court to the other, each group helped the other get the ball back, as marks typical football behavior. There was no anger spilled over from one group to the other, no signs of serious tension. Well, except for the anger and tension between the two guys on the other team of my game. And that is all well and good on the court in some measure.

The game then, was like many other football games, for me most reminiscent of the ones I played in Russia on a similar rubber court. 4 on 5 made it hard to play truly evenly, and there wasn't quite as much running as I'd like, but the energy was expended ne'ertheless. I was again about a mid-level player, good at running and hustling, not so great with my touch or shot, better than average when playing in net. The other players were in general better with the ball but not as quick or aggressive. It was just a football game, not much different from the one in New Orleans, and mostly different because of the numbers and the ground we played on.

The difference was all in the details. Like how every call or word the others spoke was in Arabic except when they spoke to me (in either Hebrew or English) and then maybe for a phrase or two afterward as they repeated what they said to me or stayed in the foreign tongue unconsciously. Like how Arabic became slowly more comprehensible to me, or at least the sounds became more distinguishable, rising from an initial bouillabaisse of, "ha-ra-wa-la-err-yuu-fa-ras" to words I could grasp, words I could ask about, like himsa ("five", if I remember right) and erjaa ("get back," yelled all too often for the team of four). Like the yelling I started this piece with.

There is little other profundity or humor that came out of that night. We had a good time, the guys dropped me off at my apartment after the game (only four in the car that time), I said I'd come and play after Passover break, I talked with Yehuda about the guys last night. We didn't achieve peace, we didn't become great friends, we didn't get into any fights. We just had a good game, and plan to do it again.

When moving from place to place, a traveler, me or any other, has to devise a balance between experiencing the new place and keeping a sense of self intact. That sense, that balance, is thrown off at times, which is one of the jarring effects of travel, opportunities to change for better or worse. But one cannot always be jarred, and so there emerges a need to straddle the divide between the world, new and foreign, between being with other people and being alone.

Just as doing things you like to do is a good way to meet people, so is it a way to find that balance abroad. The activity remains familiar, the people different, and the time spent more meaningful and amenable at the same time. And when it comes to finding common activities to do with strangers, there's little better than kicking a ball around and running after it.

We saw it in the Museums, Written in Big Pictures

While it's hard for me to believe each time I'm stuck at a poorly-designed traffic light or a bottleneck intersection, wondering where all those bright young Jewish engineers have gone, Israel stands at the technological frontier. The high-tech industry is a jewel in the country's economic crown (now tarnished a bit by some crisis going on, have you heard?), researchers developed voice mail for cell phones and ICQ (sort of like AIM outside of A) here, and everyday citizens have perfected the technology of transmitting a vulgar gesture while driving crappy boxy cars and talking on a cell phone ear piece here.

So perhaps it's not surprising that technology would transform tourism in Israel as well, and specifically their museum. This country possesses a chain of experiential museums; museums where, instead of walking around and reading information while taking in visual evidence through artifacts or artistic items, the visitor learns about the museum material by watching and listening to a video presentation, a film wrapped around the museum's thesis or message. It's like one of those classes where instead of lecturing about the New Deal, the teacher opts to show a film of FDR and his time.

The first time for me was, as first times often are, unexpected. I had no idea I was in for a whole new brand of museum. Unlike most first times, perhaps, my first time was with my brother, and it was in a small city along the Mediterranean coast, just north of Haifa, a city called Akko.

Akko, a.k.a. Acre, is known for its Fringe Theater Festival, its Crusader history, its mostly Arabic old city, and the mixed population of Arabs and Jews (these elements flared up in riots around Yom Kippur last year). When we went on a damp, cloudy Friday in early January, tempers and temperatures were low, and the port city felt raw and unwelcoming.

Our principal stop was the Turkish Bathhouse, reported by my guidebook to be one of the highlights of a visit to Akko. The book said something about a light show, and between that and my love of saunas, I thought it would be worthwhile. We had a hard time following the confusing signs in the old city were confusing, and we stumbled across the place more than we found it, but at some point a security guard standing beneath an arch pointed out the brown brick hallway we were to walk down and we found the front desk to the museum.

As it was the Friday after New Year's, a crappy day weather-wise, still relatively early, and soon to be Shabbat, it was perhaps not surprising that Mark and I were the only ones there. The man behind the desk offered us admission and handheld audio guides that were required for the exhibit. He then sent us through the open courtyard and to a door with a digital clock counting down in red numbers above it, and when that door automatically swung open, we entered.




In front of us was a gray, waterless fountain in the center, with gray columns on the outside of the room. The color of the walls was a brownish yellow, and pale transparent sheets hung before the walls, depicting typical scenes of a bathhouse. To our right was a big projector screen, and towards that the guard suggested our eyes should be trained. We each took seat in one of the many white plastic lawn chairs scattered about the room, held our audio guides to our ears, and did as suggested.

Soon a well-dressed middle-aged Arabic man stepped into the screen to greet us. While the screen character spoke in Hebrew (or maybe Arabic, I can't remember now), our guide started chirping in Arab-accented English. This was supposed to be the last bath attendant, or a descendant of that attendant, and he was to tell us the story of the bathhouses in Akko.

So far, things were more or less in order. Yes, the English sounded funny, and the speech was a little corny, full of knowing pauses and verbal winks, but there wasn't anything to make one feel strange. If anything, it was an interesting idea, to center a museum around a random epoch in Israel's history (as a location, not a country), and even more so around the main "other" in the country, i.e. the Arabs during the Ottoman Empire.

But then they went into a flashback scene. From the modern, well-dressed descendant we went to four Arabs from times past, gathered around a table in the bathhouse of the clouds, floating above us. They were all wider, older men, and as the voices switched to cover each of them in a different Arab-inflected English, they smoked the nargila and shot the proverbial breeze. Each told the other a tall tale about El Jazzar, the Pasha who built the baths at the end of the 18th century. They also busted on each other and muttered about the "sneaky Jews", in the way of all locker room conversations.

Fortunately for all involved, Mark and I were alone in the room, as I mentioned. This was fortunate because while even at the beginning we were giggling a little bit about the conceit of the museum (Mark is a notorious giggler after all, and it can be infectious), by the time we got to the "bathhouse" itself, the two of us lost it. Giggles turned continuous, laughter turned uproarious, chairs turned over as we fell to the floor, and the whole thing seemed ridiculous.


This was the general gist of the museum. There was one other room, where the actual sauna was supposed to be. Amidst statues of bathers and another video screen, we felt no more serious than before. The big change was that the voice did not only come from the screen, but also from a statue sitting on a beheaded column, his lips moving by holographic projection. This, needless to say, sent us further atwitter.




I didn't realize then that we were experiencing the cusp of a trend. The whole museum exhibit took just over a half hour, and when we finished, we chalked it up to a pleasantly silly diversion that we probably wouldn't spend money on again. Then we walked along the coast and Mark talked me out of buying something and that was that.

A month later my Hebrew teacher, a colleague at the school, asked me to help chaperone the school Hebrew trip to Jerusalem. At first the plan was to go to the Knesset, which would have potentially been fascinating, considering it would have been two days after the elections. And so it also wasn't surprising that the authorities didn't let us go there.

Option #2 centered on the Jerusalem Time Elevator. Located in the Beit Agron building near the center, the Time Elevator takes the interaction a step further, putting it into a ride jam-packed with excitement. Or something.

Our wise-mouthed British locals bragged about how they had been on the ride three or four times already as we filed into the room, 60 of us in all. I sat with my colleagues, grizzled Israeli natives who nevertheless looked forward to the ride. On the walls there were fake old-fashioned hearths and Roman numerals, and on one side of the screen a timeline went up from 1000 BCE to the present-day. A lady in modern tour-guide uniform came on screen, welcoming us to the elevator and preparing us for the journey, as the room shook ominously. The time elevator was doomed to fall out of its groove, and we to plunge into history. And then the main guy from Fiddler on the Roof came on the screen.

He was dressed in rags and quite old, meant to represent a Jerusalem native cursed to live forever in Jerusalem and to tell people about it in this little film. So he took us through David's founding of the city, the Babylonian exile, the return, the Roman exile, the arrival of the Ottomans, and then the reemergence of a Jewish state. All this came with our seat shaking and at one point, a spray of water from the ceiling upon us. The information presented was analogous to what I saw at the Tower of David museum in the Old City of Jerusalem, if a little abridged, but the entertainment and goofy factors were off the charts.

And yet I didn't realize the common thread tying all these museums together until later that day. We drove up to Mt. Herzl on one of the outer neighborhoods of Jerusalem (and Jerusalem, like few cities I've seen, is a city of neighborhoods, confusing to drive through and weirdly disjointed as you go from north to south or from the Old City up to the hills). The mountain featured a park and the graves of a few famous figures, including Theodor Herzl, the founder of Zionism himself (and here I was thinking Herzliya was just a funny name for the town I lived in). But we were not to go walking around the mountain, visiting the graves: we had another museum in store, and another historical experience to live.

The schtick at the Herzl museum was as follows: we entered a room meant to model fin de siecle Vienna. On the screen, a young, attractive-looking Israeli actor (very European though) prepares to audition for the role of Herzl in some play. He expresses ignorance about the man, and the full-bearded wide-bodied director suggests that the actor do some brushing up on the founder. They bring in a Herzl expert - a woman whose age falls right in between the 50-something director and the young 30's actor - to advise the actor on the role. Sexual tension and light humor introduced into the plot, the museum takes us through Herzl's Zionist career (1897, sparked by the Dreyfuss Affair, to 1904, when he died) and puts the state of Israel in its historical background, while the rooms we go through are modeled after Herzl's room, a speaking hall, and a Zionist congress. By the time they get to the big clip show about the history of Israel, and whether or not it lived up to Herzl's vision, the whole thing iskind of hopeful and balanced at the same time. In fact, they concede that Herzl saw this as a more egalitarian society, a place where Arabs and Jews would be equal and safe. Utopianistic, surely, but pleasant to keep in mind.

In fact, that's what makes these experiential museums so interesting beyond the gimmickry. For example, I generally prefer reading to watching, whether it's books to movies or the Tower of David museum to the Timeline elevator. But when well done, these types of museums provoke emotions and a greater connection to the material at hand, along with providing a historical education.

Which is also what makes these museums a little bit dangerous. In Israel, a place where everything is political, it's easy to look twice at just about any statement or historical point. So when a "museum" talks about the history of Jerusalem, or the development of Zionism, there's a lot of room to be subjective. If a museum has a certain thesis that isn't wholly declared, it becomes much easier for that message to sink into the visitors' mindsets, as the connection drives the point further home.

The Herzl museum was fairly balanced, I thought. They tried to point out that the Jewish State hasn't been a perfect creation, and that Herzl would not be completely pleased with what Israel has become in 2009 (and mind you, this was pre-right wing government). At the same time, they pointed out the incredible positive changes that this land has undergone in the past 60-100 years, and suggested that Jews and Israelis (and Herzl behind them) have much to feel proud about.

This is mostly a neutral message, a sort of benevolent nationalism, and while those dialectically opposed to the Jewish state or those critical about how the country has conducted themselves in their history might find a lot at fault with that, a neutral clear-headed observer might find a mostly even-handed presentation that raised questions and interesting points. This is the sort of museum that would suit peace-loving Zionists in Israel, which suits Herzl's legacy as I understand it.

It's important to consider, however, that among those groups attending the museum before or after us were groups of soldiers. Israelis a few years younger than me (and even closer in age to our high schoolers) stood in regimented lines and prepared to learn about their history through this experiential fashion. Certainly, this is a more effective way to teach and to push a message across than sending them to a standard, cut-and-dried museum. It's that question about whether it's right to push across a message in a museum, and how hard messages are to keep historical, that I'm asking.

The question becomes even more pertinent at the Palmach museum in Tel Aviv. The Palmach was one of the main Israeli fighting forces before Israel existed. The British established the Jewish units during WWII to fight the Germans if they invaded the British-held territory, but once that threat was subsumed in 1942, the Palmach evolved into an underground force obsessed with paving the way for a Jewish state. If the Herzl Museum tells the story of the ideological underpinnings to the Jewish state and how they came to be, the Palmach talks about the dirty work that made Israel a country.

I attended the museum a week ago amongst a pack of Australian kids my age or perhaps a little younger. They were in a big group from Masa, an organization that offers programs in Israel to young Jews around the world, to offer them opportunity but also presumably to indocrinate a sense of Jewish pride and an identification with Israel. The kids were loud and rambunctious, and it seemed that a museum could hardly hold them.

An Israeli soldier managed to grab their attention while giving the introduction to the museum. She called out one of the kids, saying, "Purple sweater, you're really annoying," to a girl in the group. Still, in the first room in the museum, somebody from the group was making animals with their hands against the light, so they had an irreverent attitude at the outset, to say the least.

The museum also took a different approach to the translation issues posed by an English-speaking group. Whereas the Herzl museum overdubbed every part in English and played the sound through the stereo system, and the Akko museum did the same overdubbing but played them through headsets, the Palmach museum played through headsets and didn't overdub everything. The screen introduced about ten characters that made up a Palmach unit, yet instead of offering a voice for each of them in English, the display only gave us a narrator who indirectly covered everything they said, either through quotation or through summary. Only when it was completely unavoidable, as when a character was reading a letter, did they allow for a "character's" voice to speak.

Maybe the Palmach was the first experiential museum and so those behind it hadn't mastered the formula, but this weak translation limited the effectiveness of the presentation. All the humor, cheesy as it probably was, bled out of the process, and it was harder to connect with characters when they were largely indistinguishable. (They did have the moving lipped statue trick though, which drew laughs).

And yet, by the time they got to the final fighting that marked the 1948 Arab-Israeli War and the founding of the state, where the wise-cracking nerdy lieutenant to the main commander begs to go into battle in the Negev and then dies, the presentation hit its mark. Emotions were stirred, connection was made, and all those Aussies were silent as they watched.

But then there's that nagging question. You find out in the museum that the Palmach bombed every bridge connecting Israel to another country in 1946. You hear about the fighting between Jews and Arabs who lived together. You learn about the struggle and the cost and the lives lost. But you hear about this all from the Israeli side.

There is no balance at the Palmach the way there is at the Herzl Museum. And the Palmach's topic is much more controversial on its own. The exhibit then leads a visitor to two likely sets of responses (assuming that they would be the type of visitor that would actually go to the Palmach museum - Hamas members are unlikely to have either of these reactions): the first would be a conscious empathy with the story and the characters they've seen, leading the visitor to a stronger understanding of the history behind the state and hence, subconsciously, a stronger connection with Israel. I may be patronizing in suggesting that the Aussies fell into this category, but I will suggest it ne'ertheless.

The other reaction would be to wonder where the distinctions are drawn in these identities and these namings. Is the bombing of every bridge connecting pre-state Palestine to the countries around it an act of war, an act of liberation, a guerilla tactic, or even a terrorist move? Is the victory over fleeing refugees and hated rivals something to be proud of or something to consider deeply? I'm not trying to jump on Israel and, if I fell on the Israeli political spectrum, it would probably be as a Herzl nationalist type, but watching that history unfold on the screen from room to room leads to either subconscious agreement (since after all, the Palmach soldiers were presented as good guys, and did "win") or substantial questioning.

None of this is meant to imply that somehow the technology or idea of experiential museums was developed in Israel as a way to propogate propaganda. Or that other museums don't exist in Israel, more straightforward exhibits indoors (Tel Aviv Art Museum, Tower of David Museum, Diaspora Museum in Tel Aviv, Massua near our school, for examples) or set in Israel's natural beauty (Masada is the most obvious example).

It's just that as we propel forward into a bolder, more technological world, the new opportunities that the technology offers are also new opportunities to be misused in some way. Some are more obvious, like mind-reading or students screwing around on facebook on their laptops in class, and others are not quite so obvious, like these museums. This has always been true, of course, but as the technological advances come faster and faster, the questions, challenges, and temptations follow with them at an equally rapid pace. It's just something to watch out for, and it's another place where Israel is at the cutting edge. For better or for worse.

Meditations After the War

Because after all, war grants even the most unimportant thoughts gravitas. Anyway, collected herein are a few different observations, short tales, and comments on life in Israel, or more specifically, my life in Israel. Scattered within are photos taken either by me in Masada or Akko, or pictures from my brilliant photographer cousin.




It's a small thing, but in two of the three movie theaters in our area, and I presume in movie theaters around the country, an intermission is taken during the showing of the movie. Sometimes, it's at the midway point, like when we saw the urban gritty Linha da Passe, and sometimes it's well past that, as with Oscar darling Slumdog Millionnaire stopping with our chai walla just about to answer the final question, it seemed. It's an interesting non sequitor for a society that always seems to be rushing, a contradiction among many.

***



Just this weekend I made it out to my first show in Tel Aviv of live guitar-based music that portends to be modern. Really, I made it to two shows, if briefly.

It started with a certain colleague, call her, say, "Amy", and I picking up another colleague and friend, Karyn. The three of us drove down Ben Yehuda and then Allenby, driving on streets officially reserved for commercial traffic, and after some circling, we found a parking spot near the club we had our eye on, on Lillenblum St. Lightning lit up the sky to our south, ominous but we hoped not impending.



The gate was 25 shekels to get in (these days just north of $6). We paid for three and walked in to a dark, crowded bar room. The bar itself was opposite the door, with high tables and stools to the right of the door, along the wall, and a stage area in the opposite corner. The place was small but packed (i.e. about 40 people). On stage, a girl with curly brown hair that almost covered her face when she leaned over her acoustic guitar sang in Hebrew. While we couldn't understand her, the mood translated quite well: gloomy, emotive, and dark. Even though she was an opening act, the singer's downward pull, combined with the lack of seats, pushed us out of the bar. Fortunately, it was a quick enough rejection for us to get our money back.

This led to plan B. We called a fourth friend, Andrea, who was stationed near her home in Florentin, a working-class neighborhood in south Tel Aviv known for its nightlife. She was at the 8'' MM Pianobar, and they too had live music. This would reunite our dinner/bar group of a weekend before, and seemed like the only appropriate option.

Well, we did try to add someone else to the mix, but she was driving from somewhere amidst a pounding hailstorm and so was unenthusiastic about continuing her night.

Anyway, after some wandering the wrong way down one way streets in a strangely deserted Florentin, we found a decent parking spot. I ingested a quick dinner as the girls drank coffee and warmed up, and then we walked over to the bar.
This was also a crowded bar, but bigger, with a second tier for the bar itself, the lower floor reserved for the stage, the piano, and a few tables. Andrea and a friend saved us seats, and so we squeezed into the corner of the bar and watched the show.



The show was put on by the performer Zaak. Zaak, I gather, is the singer, a handsome sabra with a high voice who strummed on the acoustic like all folkies should, except with a little more South American-styled rhythm. With him was a shaggy-haired bassist who looked quite similar to the girl on stage at the other bar, except he was a smiley dude rather than a mopey woman.

It was a cute enough performance. Zaak held sway in two languages (Hebrew and English), and played a few cards nicely, if repetitively. The big one was the covers card; first he played back to back Prince jams, which was fun, but for every surprising Pearl Jam tune ("Indifference", though he muffed the poison lyric) there was a too cutesy reach into "No Diggity" land. And on all the covers, the bass player had a little bit too much fun with upper registers and wah-wah pedals. Add that to the crowd being a little bit over clappy (i.e. clapping out the beat for every song), and the show dragged a little bit.

Some of that dragging was saved by the fact that we apparently sat at the VIP table. Squeezed next to Andrea was the father of the artist, and his family spilled around the table. While sitting next to them, we found out that Zaak is fluent in a bunch of languages, that all the songs he played were original (well, except the covers), and that, well, he's a charming young man.

Anyway, an inroad of some sort has been made. Will this lead to another true breakthrough performance? Future remains hazy.



***

A fantastic window into any society, if the opportunity presents itself (so perhaps we should qualify that as a fantastic window into any urban society), is the train system.

I ride the trains twice or three times a week. The ride from Herzliya to the south Tel Aviv station is just under 20 minutes, a huge save on gas and aggravation in evening TA traffic. Then there's the chance to catch up on reading my morning paper - usually by that point I've finished the Israeli paper, the Ha'Aretz, and I'm on my way through the IHT. Round trip costs me 15 shekels, and the only real drawback is that I usually have to wait for the return train twenty minutes longer than I'd like.

There are a few basic facets of the train system that one has to accept in Israel. There's the obvious - it's not a metro, it's more of a commuter rail, riding along the eastern frame of the city, side by side with the main highway, the Ayalon. The ride is much more comfortable than one in Moscow, or even Madrid, as the trains are amply sized, suited for the amount of passengers that ride the rails. I rarely have to consult guides for how to get a good spot on the metro, for example, as a seat is almost always available.

At first I was very impressed with the speed and punctuality of the trains. This was mostly because the impression I got from past teachers at our school was that the public transportation system in Israel was in shambles, a no man's land of dirty buses running on disjointed schedules. Of course, those teachers were trying to sell me cars. Anyway, that positive first impression wore away as I realized that trains often showed up late and I got used to having a pair of seats to myself, an accomodation that the trains could not always meet during rush hour.



The other things that you have to get used to are particular to Israel. Like the prevalence of rifles on the train. Assault rifles or sniper rifles, occasionally handguns, all a part of your trip into the city. Now, they're not quite floating around; usually they're in the hands of a young man or woman dressed in dull green army garb, a soldier for the land. Nowhere else in Israel have I encountered such a concentration of soldiers in uniform with their guns in tow, and the viable reactions are two: to get used to it and pay no mind, or to freak out and jump one of the soldiers, breaking the end of the gun with your bare hands so that they can't use it to fight back, and then continue in their humiliation by stomping on the gun, confirming your overwhelming masculinity and alpha male status. Or you can just not take the trains, I guess.

Then there are the non-stop political ads. Billboards line the train station tunnels, representing not only the big three parties (Likud, Kadima, and Labor, from right to left), but also a few of the fringe outfits. In addition, the big ones often campaign against each other, so you might see a picture of Tzipi Livni (Kadima) looking leaderly and strong (as well as pretty) on her own party billboard, then an unflattering picture of her along with an imposing picture of Bibi Netanyahu flanking the strong yet shrewd Ehud Barak on his Labor party poster, and then a picture of Livni getting a midnight phone call and looking in distress for the Likud poster. The three faces of Tzipi Livni, you might say.



The trains most especially offer a glance into the mindset of the Israeli people. There are the simple reactions, like when a soldier cries out, "Of course" after it's announced that the train will be five minutes late. There's the general habit of leaving a bag on a second chair on the train or in the station, even when the crowds would dictate giving up that luxury. If you leave something or have shampoo leaking in your mesh bag, they'll point that out for you, a kind gesture in a gruff voice.

But the Israeli character at its most prickly is seen in the way that, almost unfailingly, those in the station waiting to get on the train will try to squeeze into the train car even as the passengers leaving the train are fighting to get off. The courtesy of allowing your neighbor to go in front of you is a rare discovery in the Holy Land. After all, you have to make sure you get into the train so you can choose between any of 20 empty seats to get the best one for you and your bag.

***

But if the trains show the negative potentiality of Israelis, there are times when the citizens remind you of their sweet, kind cores.



I wanted to buy a home stereo system. Nothing fancy, just a system that played CDs and had decent speakers, so it wouldn't be completely rinky-dink.

I went to a strip mall near our school on the way home one day. My first stop was at Best Buy, a store whose goods match its American counterparts in theme, but whose scope is laughably limited. Also, it looks kind of junky on the outside. And small.

They didn't have what I was looking for, so I walked over to Home Center, another store in the shopping complex. After a little bit of looking, I found the stereo section, and then I narrowed down my choice to a black nakasumi model. It looked basic but effective, with two nice handheld speakers and a cd player. There was no corresponding price tag, so I figured I'd go for help.




A man came over, and in my pidgin Hebrew I found out from him that this was the last one in the shop, that it cost 200 shekels (just about my budget), and that if I wanted, we could test the cd player. We couldn't find a CD to test it with, however. The radio worked fine, and I felt like going home, so I told him that I was sure it was fine and I'd take it, so no worries. Or I told him, "I have horns sticking out of my side and it's giving me cramps." Either way, I made my choice.

The purchase itself hit a snag, as the stereo was not only the last one they had, but also not even in their system. So they gave it a different serial number - 9090803838, as I remembered from them typing it in a few times - and sold it to me. That different serial number carried a 400 shekel tag, but they knocked it back down to the promised 200 and I went home.

There should be no doubt at this point that when I went home to try the stereo, I found out the CD player didn't work. The disc wouldn't spin, and there was nothing that could be done about it (at least, nothing that could be done with my technological illiteracy). It would have to be returned.

Here's where the drama raises a notch (and you're wondering how a story about a broken stereo system could get any more dramatic, aren't you?). Despite remembering when I bought the stereo, which did not come in a box since they didn't have any for it, that I must keep the receipt, because there was at least a 50% chance the stereo wouldn't work, I couldn't find the receipt. So while I was right about the unreliability of Home Center's random stereos, I was wrong in my method for holding onto the receipt. I turned my car and my bedroom upside down, but I couldn't find the thing. And why didn't I just keep it with the stereo? Because it was a gift, and I thought it would be tacky to have the receipt near the stereo, even though I told the recepient of the gift the price just like that. It's just my foolish pride.

Anyway, I decided I'd go to the store after school on Tuesday, a day after I bought the stereo, in hopes that maybe they'd remember me and help me out with the stereo regardless. I didn't have much hope, but I didn't have many other options either.

I arrived to find the woman behind the help desk already engaged with a customer in a heated discussion. The woman looked to be in her early 30s, with that darkly Caucasian Israeli skin tone and long gold curls that had a brassy tint to them. She looked like a regular spitfire, hardly someone who would help me in my sorrow. Besides, she and the customer were going back and forth in loud tones, he a little bit more aggressively, about a phone he had bought at Home Center and how they weren't responsible for the service plan, or something.



A younger, pudgier girl, a cashier, came over and told me to wait. Since there were no customers at the checkout line, she decided to try to help me. In Hebrew, I explained that the stereo wasn't working, or more specifically the discs, but that I didn't have the receipt (kabbalah) or the bill (heshbon), and I knew you needed that, but I had lost it, and was looking and looking and couldn't find it, so she told me the verb for search, and then she said she'd check with the manager behind the counter and maybe she could help, and I said I bought it yesterday and pointed out the picture on the wall from the Home Center staff retreat of the manager who sold it to me the day before, as if that would help. I had my most resigned, world-weary face on, prepared for the inevitable teeth-pulling argument that would get me nowhere.

It may have been that my face is what saved me, not so much for its stunning form and general presence as for that "I give up and just want to go home and curl up" aura glowing around it. In any case, by the time the manager turned to me, I had a well-practiced story about my situation (in Hebrew), an advocate in the cashier, and a steady lean on my right elbow as if I knew I had no chance of getting anything. Because that's what I thought.

After confirming that I was dumb enough to request a return for a stereo without a receipt, the
the manager pulled out the purchase list from the day before. I recited the serial number at some point, and while I wasn't sure if she heard me, the manager managed to find my purchase. It was a day before at roughly the same time, and so it wasn't perhaps as hard as it seems. It made me think that for all the wonderful things that technology has done, it still hasn't completely eliminated the need for holding onto receipts. But Home Center is close.

It was easy after that; she took my name, number, and a few other details down, and promised that in the next couple of weeks I'd have a new stereo system to replace this one. She printed out a new receipt for me, one which I actually held onto. She even switched to English a little bit for me, speaking it much better than I speak Hebrew. It was a happy ending.



And one with a nice epilogue: when I came to get my new system about a week later, not only did it work, but it was a fancier, nicer version, without costing me any more. So if you go on a scavenger hunt and find the last piece of a type of merchandise, grab it and hope it's broken. Then you can get an updated version for the same price and a little extra time.

Also, Israelis can be very, very nice when they allow themselves to be. Which is good.

***

And there are the times when I'm in a restaurant in the old city of Yafo, hearing stories about how Golda Meir was known as "the Mattress", for the relative ease which it took to lay on her. The eggplant is bad but the company is just fine, and we're late for the show we're going to but the waitstaff is very nice, if a little inattentive, and work and politics and gruffness seems faraway even as we're talking about someone's stolen bike, and when we go to the next bar and there are vulgar visual puns on common ad themes, like a grotesque alien baby sucking on a voluptuous woman's breast as "Got Milk" is written above his head, or a Coke bottle turned to a phallic image, replete with phallic wordplay (think about it), and a little brown dog runs under tables, stopping only to be petted and held, and then only for brief periods of time, and the night goes late but not too late, then the place becomes unimportant and the people and the haze and the combination make up for everything, and Israel is ok.

Or when I'm in that same restaurant with somebody else, and while we talk about giving and receiving, the soundtrack features three Leonard Cohen songs, two of them outright classics and one a less obvious pick, and Dylan's "Don't Think Twice" rolls out of a Neil Young jam, and all of a sudden the potential has exploded into a humble happy home. Then all is ok. Israel is ok.



Next post will be a little more focused, on the many ups and downs of contemplating life-changing decisions. Or getting into a country for good. Cheers!