If Tel Aviv and Haifa were more congenial, more familiar, more Western, something kept telling me that they were not the real Israel. I ended up with a gnawing feeling that the real Israel does not belong to visitors—and the longer we stayed, the more we felt like visitors—that is, tourists. Every time our friends Frida and Yaakov drove us from Raanana to their house in Tel Mond, we drove past a prison (another kind of walled city), the last refuge for people who had tried to be self-centered and perversely self-motivated in a land of Torah. It hardly seemed possible that there would be so many prisons in Israel, but we saw another just ten miles away, at the intersection as you turn toward Netanya. David Ben-Gurion said that Israel would not be a real country until it had problems with a Jewish face. Now Israel is home to Jewish prisons and Jewish schizophrenics—to say nothing of the ubiquitous Jewish neurotics who find their way there.
All of that exists side-by-side with the stuff I hoped would inspire and change my life forever: the seemingly endless Israeli willingness to help strangers, acting out a national legacy of the descendants of Abraham; the true placidity of Shabbat, which I had heard about all my life but found for the first time at Yudi’s house in Har Nof, one of the religious sections of Jerusalem where outsiders dare not drive cars on Shabbat. Most of all, those amazing notices at the front of buses in Jerusalem reminding everybody about respect for older people—not as they do in every other city in the world, with the threat of a fine or by trying to embarrass you, but with the Biblical verse “Rise before an elderly person.”
The Israeli willingness to help strangers was conspicuous and impressive. There’s a Middle Eastern radar that zeroes in on strangers and does what it can to make them feel as if they belong. On the bus to visit my Aunt Yetta in Jerusalem, I was following the route with a map. The woman next to me told me to put it away, she would let me know where to get off; in the meantime she wanted to show me the sights: a map can’t help you know a city. That sealed our personal connection to the place even before I saw my aunt. And that connection had started an hour earlier, in the downtown post office, where we had gone for directions to Rechov Rachel Imenu. The postal worker at his wicket shut his eyes and thought for a minute. Then he rattled off the number of the bus to take, told us where to find it, let us know the exact number of minutes we would be on the bus, and threw in a brief list of landmarks we could expect just before our stop. Finally, he explained that as a child he had gone to a school on Rechov Rachel Imenu. He knew all the cross streets, all the buildings. “Before you walked in here,” he said, “it was years since I heard the name of that street. But when you asked, I was a little boy again.”
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It’s a small country, Part 1: My niece Esther lives in Kiryat Sefer, a place with a reputation for fervent religion that makes Yudi’s neighborhood seem like more of a pretender than a contender. Mention the place to anybody in the country and they raise their eyebrows and say, “Ooh! real Haredim!” Mutty studies in the yeshiva all day while Esther takes the bus into Givat Shaul, on the western edge of Jerusalem, to work as a receptionist in a medical office. For the first week in Jerusalem, without knowing where she worked, we took the bus past her office at least twice a day even as we told ourselves we must call her to make arrangements to meet. I had never met Mutty, and it didn’t seem as if we would be able to see him this time either. Two days before we left for Tel Mond (December 25, a day without its own color or flavor or music in Israel), we went to an Internet café and then across the street to a collection of shops where we could call Esther. The phones were in the basement, but not evident at first glance. To get to them, we had to walk past some tables. I hesitated as we approached the phones, stopped in my tracks by something in the eyes of a woman. Most Jewish women in Jerusalem, no matter what age, look the same from behind: dark clothing to the floor, with a nondescript head covering if they are married. Not wanting to stare, I took only a quick look. But she was looking at me too. It was Esther, with Mutty. When I moved forward to greet her, she whispered, “I can’t hug you here.” Well, I know the rules as well as she does. In that place, she is one of the Haredim. I shook Mutty’s hand. But Catherine, who hadn’t studied the rules, shook his hand too. We spent several hours with them, first eating, then wandering around Mea Shearim. When we said good bye and Catherine approached Mutty again, he told her it was hands off. “I didn’t know you before,” he said, “and I didn’t want to embarrass you. But I figured I could tell you now.”
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It’s a small country, Part 2: Not wanting to impose on Yudi and Edie, we had made arrangements with the Aliyah Center in Montreal to move after a week to Beit Canada, an immigrant absorption centre (merkaz klita) in a neighborhood called East Talpiot. We took two gigantic bedrolls assembled by our hosts; and, because of our oversized load, Yudi made a point of negotiating the fare for the ride to the other end of the city. A week later, we returned the bedding and had lunch before heading to the bus station for the trip to Raanana. Yudi again called for a cab, and we again took our luggage down the elevator and piled it in front of his building. As the driver got out of his cab, he asked, “Are we going to East Talpiot again?”
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It’s a small country, Part 3: We made arrangements to spend our last weekend with another of my old yeshiva friends in Karnei Shomron, one of the communities east of the Green Line, surrounded by Palestinian villages and farms. After Larry got his law degree from Harvard and moved to Israel, he began to associate with the Lubavitcher Hasidim and has since wanted to be known as Shimshon. Now he specializes in the legal implications of medical technology. By the end of our trip, not only was Catherine sick; I had developed bronchitis when we were Tel Mond. It was a strain just to think of being sociable in another household where religion was the focus of existence, in contested territory admitted even by Larry to be sometimes under attack. We decided to spend our last few days recovering in what we (wrongly, it turned out) hoped would be the quiet and isolation of Haifa. It was disappointing not to be able to see Shimshon and his wife Miriam (whom I had never met in their 33 years of marriage); but, after three weeks with others, we needed time for ourselves. When that was over, on our last full day in Israel, we took a bus back to Tel Mond. Frida couldn’t pick us up for a couple of hours, so we went across the road to the shopping mall, first to the pharmacy, then to the restaurant at the other end so that Catherine could get a coffee. And there was Shimshon, eating lunch with clients.
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It’s a small country, Part 4: In the month before our trip, a high school classmate now living in San Diego forwarded me some articles on Israel she had received from her nephew. They were written by his boss, who writes a column for a Jerusalem newspaper. I read them several times. In the middle of our trip, while we were visiting the Association of Americans and Canadians in Israel, the person in charge of communications and public relations told me about an editing position that might be available if I called Barry Rubin in Tel Aviv. He was surprised to hear from me—I didn’t know that I had been given his private number and told about a position that hadn’t been advertised. And he seemed sullen, though that could easily have been a telephone persona or the result of being interrupted in the middle of a busy day. When he told me to call back next week, then (when next week came) to call next week again, I felt as put off as Haman must have been when he was invited to a party by Queen Esther only to be told that he was invited to another party next week. I never did call a third time, because I soon decided that no job in Israel would make me stay. Only when I got back to Ottawa and started looking over some of my Israel materials did I realize that my friend’s nephew worked for Barry Rubin.