birthright journal

Birthright Journal - Part 11 - On the Last Day: Jerusalem

Joe Getzoff — Sun, 01 Apr 2007 20:27:47 -0400

SoldiersThe sun is going down on Jerusalem today. On Mt. Olive, the graves are silhouetted against the sky. We are back at the Wall and I do tefillin again. I am wearing a yarmulke I bought only a half hour before in one of the many small shops that pocket this quarter. This is the second trip to the Western Wall and this time it is warmer and the rain clouds have dispersed, leaving the sky a patchy mix of gray and light. There is a quiet urgency in our group, a kind of unspoken restlessness because we know that we have a half hour at the Wall before we climb back onto the bus for the last time and head out for the airport in Tel Aviv. I wander off and wrap tefillin like I did the last time. Twice now I have prayed this way and both times here at the Wall. When I get home, I will have to tell Yitzak.

There is a tendency here to feel at the center of the world. The Western Wall marks the outer ring of a Temple originally built at the spot of the biblical Binding of Isaac. And centuries later, when this would be ruins, on this spot where Abraham once raised a knife to his son, Mohammed ascended to Heaven and his followers would commemorate his apotheosis with the construction of the Dome of the Rock. Before and since then, this spot would infinitely change hands. If it is the center of the world, then the world is built on violence.

A British lecturer in Tel Aviv remarked on this. “I’d have liked to see Mohammed ascend to Heaven personally,” he said. “He’d be rising and say, ‘Well, guys, good luck figuring this one out.’”

I do not write a prayer this time. The Wall is crowded. A Hasidic rabbi is deathly ill and his congregation is here to pray for his health. The Hasids push up against the Wall, each struggling to find an open spot to touch, to nod their heads against while they pray. They recite Hebrew under their breath. A man comes up to me and starts speaking in Hebrew. I realize he is homeless and then he pauses and shifts into English and asks for change. His teeth are broken and yellow. I give him five shekels and he thanks me and says, “The air is cold for this time of year.” He rocks back once on his heels and wrapping a tattered talis around his shoulders, walks into the Hasidic crowd.

On the other side of this Wall is the Arab bazaar, a place we were told was too dangerous to visit, though the Israelis say they go there all the time. Behind me, soldiers with M16s pace up and down the marble, with and their backs straight and most of their faces shaved. They are all my age. Today, at Yad Vashem, our eight soldiers stood in a line as they sang the Israeli national anthem. Someone grabbed my arm, and I flushed, feeling awkward for singing an anthem outside the Holocaust museum. We had just walked out of the exhibit. I had lingered behind in the final room, a place called the “Well of Souls.” In the center of this room was a deep hole and above was a dome where images of the victims’ faces faded in and out of the interior. Circling the walls were shelves filled with binders, all information on those who died. There is space on the shelves for more binders. There are words inscribed on a small black plaque next to the well reading, “We are all seized with an overwhelming desire to write letters before we die.”

UntitledThe Kabbalic notion of creation is that we are inscriptions—reality is the lack, the space hewed out from God. God, Himself, carved from His body, we are the borders within the infinite, the tattooed numbers left behind on forearms as revenants. The center of this world is the Wall. It is finite, it is the ultimate religious reality but its back is up against another culture.

Running my fingers along the pockmarks in the Wall, I see the red creases that the phylacteries left in my arm, and like the new wall that crawls towards the center of Jerusalem over this Middle Eastern horizon, I realize that I, too, have been hewn. Tonight, as we float quietly over the Atlantic, I will dream of orchards and islands and lost and lonely shoes.

Birthright Journal - Part 10 - Exhibits at Yad Hashem

Joe Getzoff — Thu, 15 Mar 2007 09:28:27 -0400

Cemetary on Mt. Herzl“Slay them not… scatter them abroad.”
- St. Augustine

“This was a painful, surprising betrayal by a culture on which I had pinned all of my hopes, to which I had devoted all of my admiration, my heartfelt ardor.”
- Albert Memmi, A Pillar of Salt

Softly, softly! Let’s be silent!
Graves are growing here
- Shmerl Kaczerginsky, Vilna Ghetto April 1943

“To have stood fast through this and—except for cases of human weakness—to have stayed decent, that is what forged us. This is an unwritten and never to be written page of glory in our history.”
- Heinrich Himmler, Poznan, 1943

“I know that when I stand before God on Judgment Day, I shall not be asked the question posed to Cain—where were you when your brother’s blood was crying out to God.”
- Imre Bathory, one of the “Righteous Among the Nations.”

“Even back there, in the shadow of the chimneys, in the breaks between pain, there was something resembling happiness… For me, the happiness there will always be the most memorable experience, perhaps.”
- Imre Kertesz, Fateless

Birthright Journal - Part 9 - Tamar

Joe Getzoff — Mon, 05 Mar 2007 09:38:01 -0500

Untitled Artwork by Tamar HendlerTamar is sleeping against the window as the Negev desert infuses our bus with a sense of disconnectedness. Tamar is using her Army-issued coat like a blanket and her blond head rocks with the rhythm of the charter bus. She has written earlier in the back of the notebook in Hebrew and English instructing me how to say, “I love Tamar,” followed by a note written in a hand unused to English. It is meant to be in my voice: “I came to Israel and met the one and only Tamar Hendler—”, and then hers, “OK Joe… I’m going to bring you back your crapper book don’t worry. There you go.”

It is an English that is pockmarked with strange inflections and words—I had written in my journal that her speech was like a carob tree that suddenly sprouts a rose, but in reflection, it would be as if a rose bush suddenly sprouted a bunch of carobs. These carobs would be in constant danger of pulling the whole rose bush down.

It is not to say she butchered her English—she added whoops and halloos that would rise with her delight or frustration that I, at least, not speaking for some in my group, found to be a fascinating mutation of my own tongue. And in turn, whenever I attempted Hebrew, “Mah otevet atah? (What’s your problem?) she’d laugh and correct my pronunciation. “Errrrr,” Tamar would growl, mimicking a game-show buzzer, “I thank you for trying.”

For her, dogs said, “Hav Hav” and roosters cockle-doodle-dooed a “cocka-rocka-roo.” Her frog sounded like it got in a car-accident: “Feck! Feck!”

If you were misunderstanding what she was saying, you were, “In a totally different movie.” If you wanted everything but gave nothing back, you should know that “you can’t have your pie and all the rest.”

Tamar and me on a camelShivering in Jerusalem beneath the gray rainy sky, she points to her arm: “My skin is like bird skin.” In two weeks she will be “unleashed” from the Army.

She never seemed to get along with the other Israelis. While Duklat tells us over dinner the importance of serving in the army, Tamar wanders away. When Ela leads us in a religious service, telling us of her Orthodox community and emphasizing her decision to skip the nightclub in respect for Shabbat, Tamar plays with her sunglasses. When it is her turn to speak, she says, “I don’t celebrate Shabbat, but you can.” Later, she rips her Sergeant’s strips from off her coat and puts them in my hand.

It is the fourth day she is with us and Tamar once again takes my notebook prisoner. This time I do not get it back for a half hour and each time I look over at her, I get yelled at. “My English is horrible,” she says. “Then write in Hebrew,” I answer. “But you do not know Hebrew.” “I’ll find someone to read it.” “I write in both,” she decides.

At the airport she mills around awkwardly waiting for us to disappear into the security. Her train is coming in a half hour. I am standing behind the velvet rope in line to have my baggage put through the X-ray machine. She comes down the line, saying her goodbyes to everyone from our trip who is returning to the US. When Tamar comes to me, we hug and let go quickly. I do not remember what I said or what she said, only that she takes a few steps, turns, and upon seeing me looking at her, smirks self-consciously, says, “What?” and goes to check her train time.

It is on the plane that I look through my notebook. She has drawn a blobby picture of Israel, inclusive of the West Bank and Gaza, and marks, as the only town in Israel, Kibbutz Metzer-Sireni. She has also drawn a disproportioned house which in front is covered in what I assume are hanging vines.

“In truth, I did not like most people on the trip,” she writes. A few sentences later starts, “The truth is now I’m like all in it. I feel happy of the situation, in the air… It’s hard to respond, to expresse my self bla bla bla… I believe that in a few days or so, it will be quite easy when everything will sink and in the past. I could write you with a “sober mind.” The thing I experience here is really beautiful but I will write about it when I’ll have the mood and you know…”

…

In an email, Tamar writes me that “The higher powers have decided that the time has arrived to show American Joe Getzoff a glimpse of Tamar’s art work.” She then adds, tacking it on in parentheses, “you will get a big “balagan”, “titmoded.” I have no idea what these words mean—I am wondering if they are some perversion of an English word or transliterated Hebrew. There is no way of telling unless she decides to define them for me.
My first reaction to Tamar’s art is a first thought of what I have seen of Van Gogh’s. The works are colorful, the landscapes transient washes of reds, greens, blues, purples—colors fading into each other as if patterns on a scarf. She seems to have no regard for realism.

Untitled Artwork by Tamar HendlerTamar’s paintings avoid allusion. They are dream-like and built around landscapes that are neither here nor there, tangible objects that, because of the constant shift of color, have no set look. There is one painting that sticks out from the others because it seems to lack landscape. On the left side is a rainbow octopus and on the right is a naked woman. The octopus is reaching towards her, its tentacles searching her out, invading, as they wrap around her breast and search between her legs. The woman is set against a dark tiled background—the octopus on a swirling Van Gogh-like sky. The woman seems to be screaming, but she is transient too; her body a rainbow in itself, her legs transformed into tentacles as they hang off of the red and brown tiles and drip into the blue and white swirling sky.

Birthright Journal - Part 8 - A Small World

Joe Getzoff — Wed, 28 Feb 2007 13:10:52 -0500

Wall and Dome“Where are you from?” the Chabad Lubavitcher asks me as he wraps the phylacteries around my arm. He hands me a pink sheet with the prayers to do tefillen.

“New Jersey,” I say. Behind us is the Western Wall. It is a cold and rainy day and the Wall is mostly bare and empty of anyone besides my Birthright group. Soggy paper prayers collect in tangled piles at the base of the Wall.
“New Jersey!” he says, his smile growing underneath his scraggly black beard. “Cherry Hill?”

“Close to it.”

“Do you go to Chabad?”

“Yes. Sometimes.”

“What is the rabbi’s name?”

“Yitzak… Yitzak K—”

“Ahhh!” he says, looping the black leather around my wrist and then two fingers. “Little Yitzak!” He does not look at me as he says this. Only my arm.

The moment reminds me of when I was being interviewed by El Al security in Newark. A woman with a small frame and a shock of curly black hair asked me to which denomination I belonged. I had answered that I did not really identify myself with any. Her next question, monotone and rehearsed, was, “Are you a Bar Mitzvah?”

“Yes. At a reform synagogue.”

“Which?”

“Temple Emmanuel. In Cherry Hill.”

“Ahhh! Yes. Of course.” She made a few quick Hebrew marks on a form and continued asking me questions.

At first, I found the questions amusing. Did she actually know of Temple Emmanuel? Why was I being asked which denomination I came from? As she kept asking, I felt more uncomfortable. Why did she need to know? Was I not allowed on the plane if I wasn’t a Bar Mitzvah? What if her report of my denomination contradicted what I had said? No, I’m sorry, we have you down as conservative…didn’t you also go to Beth Shalom—? Sorry, tickets are only available for denominational Jews… Where do you live? Where are you from? To whom do you belong—
“Chabad and… where else? Somewhere in Cherry Hill, right?” The Lubavitcher tugged tight the phylacteries and pulled them hard around my ears.

Who wants to know?

…

When I fist met Yitzak, I was struck by how young he was and how he pronounced with such fervor and authority that when you slept at night, your weary soul ascends to heaven and there, God gives it a divine charge and sends it back to your body. While he says this, Yitzak’s thumb rotates in a counter-clockwise circle across the glass face of his wrist-watch. He points to the Hebrew letters in his small yellowed sidur and asks me to read the words.

“This is Modeh Ani,” he says, “the prayer to thank God for returning your soul to your body.” He says a line, “Modeh ani—” and I repeat, “Modeh Ani.”

When Yitzak’s son wanders into the room and stops humming and looks up at me with his big brown eyes, Yitzak says, “Say hello to Yosaf. Say hello to Yosaf, Leybl,” and hunches down to scoop his son up into his arms. Me, Caught Dovening

When Yitzak asks me what I think of the Gaza pull-out at the end of the summer, we are sitting in the dark. There is very little furniture in his living room, just a brown couch, a brown chair, scattered PlaySkool toys, and a picture of Rabbi Schneerson. When I say that I think it is a good thing the Israelis pulled out of Gaza, he cuts me off, and tells me that Scripture forbids Jews to return land. I try to say that somebody needed to do something to move towards peace, but he changes the subject, apologizing that he cannot bring me food. It is, after all, “a fast day. Today was the day the Temple of was destroyed.”

The sun is shining through the half-drawn Venetian blinds. Yitzak sits down and asks me, “Would you like to do tefillen?”

“I don’t know.”

“You don’t know?”

I have never done tefillen before. “I do not feel comfortable.”

“You do not feel comfortable?” His thumb moves counter-clockwise across the face of his silver wristwatch and he seems embarrassed, unsure of what to say next. I want to reassure him, to direct his attention elsewhere, to say, in a low voice with a practiced lilt, like Yitzak does when reciting Hebrew, “It’s not your fault. It’s not your fault.”

…

The Lubavitcher takes the prayer sheet from me and gives it the next in line. He removes the phylacteries and they leave red creases in my forearm. “Okay. You are good to go pray now,” he says and begins wrapping another American’s arm.

At the wall, I am unsure of what kind of prayer to leave. Around me men, some in jeans and pullovers, others in long black Hasidim clothing, run their hands along the wall and tuck notes into creases. I wonder what they say.

I tear a page out of my notebook and quickly write, “Peace.” I fold it and fit it into the Wall. But, feeling, odd, or simplistic, I unfit it, unfold it, and add, “Shalom.” As it rains, the ink begins to smear, so I brush it on my pant leg where the letters run. I folded the page, once, twice, and tucked it back in the Wall.

Above, cypress trees sway in the wind and rain. The Dome of the Rock crouches opposite from an Israeli checkpoint on this side of the Wall. Off in the distance, I can see the Mount of Olives, and then farther, the other wall, constructed of gray concrete, wrapped in barbed wire, creeping towards the heart of Jerusalem

Birthright Journal - Part 7 - Two Ways to Look at Violence: Part 2

Joe Getzoff — Sat, 17 Feb 2007 19:06:43 -0500

“Lebanon, 1983”

On September 12th, 2001, my high school World Cultures teacher told us a story.Graffiti

Once, years ago, when she made an overnight visit to the hospital, she had shared a room with a woman undergoing another in a series of surgeries. The doctors removed glass from her body. She had been a secretary in the Beirut Marine barracks in 1983 and when the van had burst through the security and exploded, she had been saturated by countless specks of glass. Each surgery removed the newest layer.

As her body renewed itself more glass would push to the surface, painfully and unconsciously as if her body was nothing but soil, fetid and subsumed beneath the seeds planted back in 1983.

Read Two Ways to Look at Violence: Part 1

Birthright Journal - Part 6 - Two Ways to Look at Violence: Part 1

Joe Getzoff — Tue, 13 Feb 2007 12:30:28 -0500

Graffiti: Taken January 2006 in Jerusalem.Mr. Cohen and his Out-house

When they drew the border between Israel and Jordan in 1948, they forgot to ask Mr. Cohen. Waking up one morning, quite early, wondering what turmoil the sunlight might bring, Mr. Cohen is hit by the sudden urge to urinate. He runs downstairs only in his underwear.

This is when Mr. Cohen realizes that his garden is cut in half and his outhouse is in Jordan.

I can only speculate on the thoughts that went through that graying head capped with a black yarmulke. Perhaps they were: borders, in-house, war, “I gotta go!”… Do the Jordanians have my neighbor’s outhouse too? Would they shoot me if I asked about my toilet? Will the UN provide me with a new one?

Mr. Cohen ponders, close to wetting himself. He is standing amongst his peppers and cucumber shoots. The sun is shining and Jerusalem is supposed to be shining with it. He can not hold it in much longer.

Birthright Journal - Part 5 - Jewish Love

Joe Getzoff — Thu, 08 Feb 2007 22:01:19 -0500

People: Collage of Israelis and fellow travelers.
My grandmother on the phone before I leave for Israel: “Joey, don’t get involved with any Arabs or women.”

“We are not a polite people,” says Momo, “my heart speaks via my mouth.” Shlomo “Momo” Lipshitz is president of Oranim Birth-Right Israel, one of the authorized tour agencies that shows Israel to the young Jews brought to the Holy Land for free by Birthright. It is his self-proclaimed duty to “bring one million young Jews to Israel.” Why? “Jewish love. This trip is all about Jewish love,” says Momo, standing before us with his arms crossed behind his back, his belly jutting out underneath a blue collared shirt. “Israel is about love,” says Momo. “You have come to Israel and you will find love here.”

I find Momo’s word’s hard to believe because of how they come out of his mouth; he is not talking to us, but barking orders, “You will find love.” I imagine him not in a blue-collared shirt and blue jeans but instead in green Army fatigues, a maroon beret sideways on his bald head. We sit in a room with a low ceiling. Around me are other Americans. We are all jet-lagged and overwhelmed to be in a foreign country, in a foreign hotel, listening to a man with a strange accent lecture at us.

The Shabbat candles, left on a table from the service a half hour earlier, burn low. “If you walk on the beach, here in Tel Aviv, and you see a pretty girl (and Momo tells us this is inevitable; all Israeli girls are pretty) you do not have to ask if she is Jewish. If you find your love on this trip, Momo will personally give you a free honeymoon to Israel.” There is whispering and Momo tenses up. “I am talking! When Momo talks you do not talk! Why were you talking?” He singles out someone on the other side of the room. “But, I wasn’t—” “I may be deaf from my tank service, but I am not blind!”

After you left me
I let a dog smell at
My chest and my belly. It will fill its nose
And set out to find you.

I hope it will tear the
Testicles of your lover and bite off his penis
Or at least
Will bring me your stockings between his teeth.
- Yehuda Amichai – “A Dog after Love”

Birthright Journal - Part 4 - The Dream

Joe Getzoff — Mon, 05 Feb 2007 09:30:16 -0500

Orange TreeIn my dream the sun is hidden behind the dark gray sky and choppy blue water of the Red Sea. The ferry is buckling in the waves and the metal deck and the plastic seats are slippery and cold. You are with me and we hope to reach Eilat soon so we can go deep-sea fishing.

When the crewmen, clad in red El Al uniforms, come around to take and inspect our shoes for bombs, you make a pun, mixing up "Hamas" and "humus," but you are not Jewish and this is your first time in Israel and the pun becomes silly and they laugh and mock your American accent, morphing it into a Mid-Western twang.

A little old woman sits on the metal deck. She is covered in rags. She looks up from the ground and begs me for change. I see that she has a deformed face. The coins in my pocket are cold and wet. When she takes the silver coins from my outstretched hand, she recoils and scowls at me, biting down on her lower lip and glaring at me with her cataract eyes.

"No more," I say, "no more," feeling the impression of her stare, but she holds out her hand again and again I feel for coins and give her, this time, thirty shekels. But no, she scowls again and pulls herself by one arm across the deck and looking at the remaining silver coins in my palm, I realize that I had been handing her British pence.

When they let us off at Eilat, it is raining lightly. We run along the wharf, the casinos and hotels to our right are dark and empty. The only light along the wharf burns brightly from the fluorescent English letters in each hotel's name. Though we run, we see the deep-sea boat that looks like a Spanish galleon drift out into the waves like a castaway holding onto a decaying piece of drift-wood.

StormI realize I forgot my shoes on the ferry and we run back along the docks, our footsteps echo on the quiet wharf. Back at where we arrived, we find nothing; the ferry has left and there is no indication of any return by it or another. The rain is sweeping in on the Red Sea now; we can tell by the way the water flattens and ripples. You are tired of moving and pull your knees up and rub your shoeless feet.

I see an island out in the sea. It is green and has rows and rows of orange trees that sway and buck in the black and stormy air. I shake your shoulder and point towards the island of orange trees and say, "Isn't it beautiful? Isn't it beautiful?" but you rub your feet and your head, with your hair matted down from the cold cold rain—it sinks into your bones—and Eilat is nothing but a dream hidden behind a desert and a sea now overrun by the rain.

Birthright Journal - Part 3 - Taking Flight

Joe Getzoff — Thu, 01 Feb 2007 10:54:21 -0500

SunriseThe engines roar as the plane cuts through the clear sky, but I have ceased listening to these engines; my ears have adapted and now I see only the clear night and the Atlantic peaking through from beneath the clouds.

The Israeli sitting to my right pushes his arm into mine as he rolls, grumbling, in his sleep. His head is shaved and it tosses and turns with his body. I pull my arm closer to my side and push my head back into the small airline pillow that gruffly scratches the base of my neck.

Flight attendants are milling about whispering to people who are still awake—their whispers break the gentle hum of snores. I see heads capped with yarmulkes bobbing in half-sleep. The forty-odd members of my Birthright group are scattered about the plane and I doubt I could recognize them if they walked down the aisle. We have all just met.

The American to my left sees that I am awake and begins talking to me excitedly. She is wearing a round black hat that I associate with Orthodox women. She is flying to Israel to represent the Jewish Theological Seminary.

She lowers her voice and asks, “Why would anybody want to blow themselves up?” Perhaps it is because of my expression that she backtracks. She references the Intafada. Curling her arm around her pillow she asks, “Why would they want to destroy instead of build?” There is a note in her voice which betrays its proximity to breaking.

We are nearly over Europe and I am watching the screen in front of me. The screen shifts continually from pictures of the Northern Hemisphere, to the Atlantic, to Europe, to the country we are approaching. We are but an animated plane on a flat green and blue map. The city names rock back and forth between Hebrew and English. I am dozing off. A flight attendant offers the American woman next to me a drink. She asks in Hebrew. She answers in English.

The sun is coming up somewhere above the clouds. The pilot comes on the speaker and announces that Ariel Sharon’s condition has not altered. I hear the voice of a Hasid behind me quietly chanting the “Ani Modeh,” the morning prayer. The sound of his voice lulls me back into half-consciousness and the name of the airline repeats in my head: El Al, El Al, El Al… God… Air? This is a strange way to fly.

Birthright Journal: Part 2 - Love the Land

Joe Getzoff — Mon, 29 Jan 2007 09:38:18 -0500

A man in a distant field, no hearthfires near,
will hide a fresh brand in his bed of embers
to keep a spark alive for the next day
- Homer, The Odyssey

The local residents said that monuments had frequently been set over their graves, but they were all destroyed at night; however, I do not know whether this is true.
- Anonymous Disciple of the Rabbi Obadiah, 14951

CrossroadsThere is something about the land that possesses. We are reminded of this constantly in Scripture—we think of lands claimed on divine promise. There is exile too; that soon-taboo word, “Diaspora,” an entire history of not-possessing.

There are the spiritual exiles, the sudden ascensions into the other realm—Mohammed rising from the ruin of the Temple Mount. Words are tied to this land. To go to Israel to live is to make “Aliyah,” to “rise up.” A word for “east” in Hebrew also alludes to “past,” (kedma/yamei kedem) an allusion to the direction of origin and the home of Abraham. We face east when praying, facing towards Jerusalem, towards return, towards the past. There is the recent past: 1948 Independence, wars: ’56, ’67, ’73—the occupancy of Lebanon, the recent Intafada, the Gaza pull-out. The land is overwhelmed with boundaries—with border fences, ancient and modern walls, check-points, mountains, canyons, deserts.

It is hard to ignore the boundaries, the sense of here and there, of us and them. Wherever our Birthright Israel group seemed to go, we were always navigating borders. Lines were in sight, other lands loomed over ours. I was made conscious of my otherness too, of my Americanness; I did not speak the language so I was susceptible to presentation, vulnerable to the way the Israelis turned English against me. The first greeting to Israel was in a literal sense confusing. The way they said, “Welcome home,” was unsettling. It made me feel twice displaced.

The FlagSometimes the land stank of the boundaries. How in the Jordanian city of Al Aqqaba, rubbing up against the border with Eliat on the Red Sea, the authorities flew the largest flag in the world. I could see it from where I reclined on my white beach chair. It flapped slowly in the warm wind. I was told that it is so big that when it flaps, it wakes up the entire neighborhood. How they brought us within a few feet of East Jerusalem just to show us the border.

How they pointed out the wall they were constructing. How in our bus Arik, our tour guide, would always say, pointing 500, 300, 100 yards away, “There is the border.” How when the sun came up it had to first pass over the mountains in Jordan. How on the last day we visited Yad Vashem, the National Holocaust museum, and I realized the scars and how they cut deep into the valleys as if ploughed with barbed wire.

Wall and DomeBut borders are also frames. They define what is on the inside. West Jerusalem would not be without East Jerusalem. Standing before us in Tel Aviv’s Independence Hall, the place where Ben Gurion officially announced the formation of Israel, an Arab-Israeli told us that you cannot be safe without an address. He paced back and forth excitedly on the stage, a portrait of Theodor Herzl hanging behind him. “I am an Arab,” he said, grinning suddenly, “but I am also an Israeli. You wonder who the Indians are. I am an Apache. I am not a stranger here.”

Addressing a room full of American college kids, all exhausted from the twelve hour flight, gave him the energy to confront us. “I am arrogant, yes, but do we not have a reason to be arrogant?” he said, grinning again, showing us his straight white teeth. “God gave us the land of milk and honey, but forgot to tell us about the neighbors.”

¹Fine, Lawrence. Physician of the Soul, Healer of the Cosmos. Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2003. Fine’s endnote for the quotation used: Yaari, Iggrot, pp. 144-160. I have drawn on the English translation found in K. Wilhelm, ed. Roads to Zion (New York: Shocken Books, 1948), pp. 15-27. Fine’s bibliographical note is: Yaari, Abraham. “History of the Pilgrimage to Meron” (in Hebrew). Tarbiz 31 (1961): 72-101.