Trip to the Galilee

On the last Thursday in June, A. and I rented a car in Tel Aviv, picked up our friend M., who was visiting Israel from the States, and the three of us made a road trip to the Galilee. What could be more quintessentially American than a road trip? We even took Israel's Route 66 on the way home. We soon discovered that gas prices are much higher in Israel, which puts American kvetching about "high" gas prices in the States into perspective. (Gas here in Israel is almost 7 shekels per liter, which works out to slightly more than $8 per gallon.) Even so, the high cost of gas didn't dampen our enthusiasm. I was especially excited about the opportunity to retrace some more of Mark Twain's "pleasure excursion" to the Holy Land.

Our first destination was the beautiful mountain town of Tzfat (Safed), one of the four holy cities in Jewish tradition (with Jerusalem, Hebron, and Tiberias) and a historical and spiritual center of Jewish mysticism, a topic in which I have long been interested. When the Jews were expelled from Spain in 1492, some of them came to Tzfat. According to our guide book, it was these Jews who "turned Safed into a spiritual center for kabbalah studies," and it was here that the kabbalists established the custom of going into the fields on Fridays at sunset to welcome the Sabbath with prayers and hymns amid nature. Perhaps they were inspired by the breathtaking views the town provides of the Sea of Galilee and Mount Hermon.

M. wanted a kind of spiritual tour of Tzfat from the kabbalah center located there. After we negotiated an acceptable fee, the center paired us up with a guide named Moshe. Moshe was a local resident and a student of kabbalah, in his 40s with an ample beard, and something of an eccentric. (He was dressed in a white Arabic dishdasha and a white head scarf, which gave him something of a Biblical look. At one point, another local resident who was apparently friends with Moshe hailed him jokingly as Spartacus.) For me, Moshe was one of the most interesting parts of our visit to Tzfat, in part because of his unusual and candid anti-American views. (From what I've seen, anti-Americanism is extremely rare in Israel, which is partly why I found Moshe so fascinating.) In his eyes, America represented a greedy commercialism and soulless materialism. Accordingly, he was troubled by American power and influence (political and cultural) on Israel. (Interestingly, if I recall correctly, Moshe said he had never been to America and was a little afraid to go.) When I asked him whether it was Americanism that he objected to or modernity itself, he explained that for him America embodied all of the negative aspects of modernity. But he wasn't anti-modernist, he explained; rather, he wanted to uplift and redeem modernity by suffusing it with spirituality. I thought Moshe's critical views were not completely unwarranted -- after all, Tocqueville too warned about the dangers of commercialism, individualism, and materialism in America -- though I did find them somewhat one-sided and even a caricature. However, unlike my friend M., I didn't want to engage with him, either to agree or disagree; I was more interested in simply understanding his views and what America meant to him.

Mark Twain never visited or wrote about Tzfat; it was not part of his itinerary. However, we passed through other places that he wrote about in The Innocents Abroad. He and his companions went to Magdala to see "a Roman-looking ruin which had been the veritable dwelling of St. Mary Magdalene." He was not impressed. "Magdala," he wrote, "is not a beautiful place." He described it as a "squalid, uncomfortable and filthy" slum inhabited by "vermin-tortured vagabonds" who adorned their houses with dried camel dung. Given this description, who could resist a visit? So when we saw a road sign for Migdal (formerly Magdala), I drove into town to see what it looks like today. I'm happy to report that the city, as you can see below, is much improved since Mark Twain's time.

After his visit to Magdala, Mark Twain camped in Tiberias. He described it this way: "It was built by Herod Antipas, the murderer of John the Baptist, and named after the [Roman] Emperor Tiberias…. The Sanhedrin met here last, and for three hundred years Tiberias was the metropolis of the Jews in Palestine. It is one of the four holy cities of the Israelites [What did I tell you? –W.Y.]…. It has been the abiding place of many learned and famous Jewish rabbis." Mark Twain seems to have been less impressed by the descendants of those Jews. He described the Jewish residents of Tiberias in his own time in very unflattering terms: "They say that the long-nosed, lanky, dyspeptic-looking body-snatchers, with the indescribable hats on and a long curl dangling down in front of each ear, are the old, familiar, self-righteous Pharisees we read of in the Scriptures. Verily, they look it. Judging merely by their general style, and without other evidence, one might easily suspect that self-righteousness was their specialty." In general, Mark Twain found the city just as unappealing as Magdala. "Squalor and poverty," he wrote, "are the pride of Tiberias."

We drove through Tiberias on our way to Tzfat. The authors of our guide book seemed to concur with Mark Twain; they said the city's port and beaches are dirty and that it "has a feeling of a rundown city belonging to a bygone era." Like Rodney Dangerfield, Tiberias gets no respect. We didn't stop in Tiberias or take any pictures of it, but we were not nearly so put off as everyone else seems to be. As far as we could tell, Tiberias is a perfectly charming and picturesque seaside town entirely devoid of self-righteousness. (And most of the city's Jewish residents today lack the hats and side curls that Mark Twain found so strange.)

After our visit to Tzfat and a brief stop at Rosh Pina, a village founded in 1882 by Jews from Tiberias and Tzfat and later supported by the Baron de Rothschild, we continued on to Kibbutz Ein Gev on the eastern shore of the Sea of Galilee, where we stayed overnight. This lodging arrangement is not so unusual as it may sound. As The New York Times recently reported, many of Israel's kibbutzim (socialist collective farms) have in recent years been transformed from places where one goes to volunteer one's labor into places that provide guest houses and other services for tourists on holiday. While happy to enjoy the hospitality of Kibbutz Ein Gev, I must confess that I found this shift from labor to luxury a bit ironic and a little troubling, especially when we learned that Ein Gev outsources the cleaning and maintenance of its guest houses to an outside contractor whose employees are not kibbutz members. We wondered whether they were they unionized and what kind of pay and benefits they received.

Mark Twain was no more impressed by the Sea of Galilee than he was by the towns surrounding it. "The celebrated Sea of Galilee," he wrote, "is not so large a sea as Lake Tahoe…. And when we come to speak of beauty, this sea is no more to be compared to Tahoe than a meridian of longitude is to a rainbow." He found it to be "dismal," "repellent," and "dreary," surrounded by "unsightly rocks," " banks unrelieved by shrubbery," and "low, desolate hills." His disappointment, however, didn't prevent him from taking three swims in the Sea of Galilee, including one at twilight. We too swam in the Sea of Galilee at Ein Gev, once late at night under the stars and again in the morning before departing. With all due respect to Mr. Twain, I must again dissent from his description. I have never been to Lake Tahoe, so I can't compare the two, but we found the Sea of Galilee to be simply beautiful. Perhaps the Israelis have improved it since Mark Twain's time, when it was under Ottoman rule.

"We did not go to the ancient warm baths two miles below Tiberias," Mark Twain wrote. "I had no desire in the world to go there … simply because Pliny mentions them. I have conceived a sort of unwarrantable unfriendliness toward Pliny and St. Paul, because it seems as if I can never ferret out a place that I can have to myself. It always and eternally transpires that St. Paul has been to that place and Pliny has 'mentioned' it." Since we hadn't read Pliny and Mark Twain didn't go, we had the ancient warm baths all to ourselves and resolved to go. Today they are part of the Hamat Gader Park near the Jordanian border. According to our guide book, these "famous natural thermal springs" were "first discovered by the Romans in the 2nd century" and are supposed to be "therapeutically beneficial." While M. visited nearby Kibbutz Degania, A. and I, in spite of the hot summer weather, took a dip in the baths.

After our dip in the ancient warm baths, we joined M. at Degania and took a stroll around the grounds. Founded in 1909, Degania is Israel's oldest kibbutz. Degania Alef was named after its chief inspirer, A. D. Gordon, and it was later the birthplace of Moshe Dayan. When the Arab armies invaded Israel from the north in 1948, it was the defenders at Kibbutz Degania who stopped their advance. A Syrian tank still stands at the gate to the kibbutz as a memorial to the battle.

All of the farm equipment at Kibbutz Degania reminded me that this year is a shmitah (sabbatical) year. The Bible, you may recall, mandates the shmitah every seventh year for the Land of Israel, during which the land is supposed to be left fallow (Exodus 23:10-11, Leviticus 25:20-22, Deuteronomy 31:10-13). In modern Israel, some Jewish farmers authorize the Chief Rabbi to temporarily sell their land to a non-Jew so that the fields can be farmed (since the commandment doesn't apply to non-Jews). At the end of the sabbatical year, the land is returned to its original owners and the buyer's check is also returned.

Our last stop in the Galilee before heading back to Tel Aviv was the Kibbutz Kinneret Cemetery on the shore of the Sea of Galilee, where we paid our respects to three of the greatest theoreticians of socialist Zionism: Moses Hess (whom Karl Marx derisively called the "Communist rabbi"), Nachman Syrkin, and Ber Borochov. I can't think of a more peaceful resting place for these giants of the Zionist movement.

On our way to the Kibbutz Kinneret Cemetery, we had to cross a bridge over the Jordan River. We excitedly pulled the car over and scrambled out to take a better look. We saw a Christian baptism in progress, which was interesting, but on the whole I have to agree with Mark Twain's assessment of the Jordan: "When I was a boy I somehow got the impression that the River Jordan was four thousand miles long and thirty-five miles wide. It is only ninety miles long, and ... It is not any wider than Broadway in New York." See for yourself.

On the road back to Tel Aviv, I was amused to spot a road sign to En Dor, "famous" as Mark Twain says "for its witch." (En Dor was the village where Saul consulted with the witch in 1 Samuel 28: 4-25.) His description of En Dor is even less flattering than his descriptions of Magdala and Tiberias: the village consisted, he said, of a "horde" of two hundred and fifty "half-naked savages" living in "caves in the rock." "It was Magdala over again…. Dirt, degradation, and savagery are Endor's specialty." We didn't visit, so we can't say for certain, but I think it's safe to assume that living conditions have probably improved there considerably.

Mark Twain also mentions in passing "the insignificant village of Deburieh, where Deborah, prophetess of Israel lived." He adds: "It is just like Magdala." We passed a road sign for Deburieh, took a brief drive through it, and found it to be an unremarkable Arab village, though considerably cleaner and more comfortable than his scathing depiction of Magdala in 1867.

Lastly I'll mention that we drove through the Jezreel Valley, also known as the Plain of Esdraelon, which divides the Galilee in the north from Samaria (the West Bank) in the south. According to the Bible, Gideon's armies defeated the Midianites and Amalekites there (Judges 6 and 7), and Saul was killed in a battle with the Philistines on the slopes of Mount Gilboa, which overlooks the plain (1 Samuel 31; 2 Samuel 1). The valley is also the site of the ancient town of Megiddo – right off Route 66 – which some believe to be the location of the future Battle of Armageddon. Mark Twain mentions the valley only in passing: "The Plain of Esdraelon – 'the battlefield of the nations' – only sets one to dreaming of Joshua and Ben-hadad and Saul and Gideon; Tamerlane, Tancred, Coeur de Lion, and Saladin; the warrior kings of Persia, Egypt's heroes, and Napoleon – for they all fought here."

Before returning to Tel Aviv we made one last stop in Zichron Ya'acov, a beautiful moshava (communal agricultural settlement) founded in 1882 by Jewish immigrants fleeing persecution in Russia and Romania.

Here is Route 66 in Israel...

... and in America (as shown on a poster in Zichron Ya'acov).

All of this packed into just two days! We seem to have had a better time than Mark Twain, who perhaps comes across as more cantankerous than funny in these excerpts. But then again, we had more comfortable lodging and means of transportation and a friendlier reception in the places we visited.

American Jazz in Caesarea

The Jewish holiday of Shavuot, commemorating the receiving of the Torah at Mount Sinai, came and went uneventfully for us on June 9. Traditionally, Jews engage in all-night Torah study on the evening before, when the holiday begins. In the States, A. and I would have taken part in the all-night Shavuot activities at the Manhattan JCC, but here in Israel we were ironically limited by the dearth of such activities in English. So the two of us stayed at home, reading and discussing the Book of Ruth together.

The following weekend we attended a concert by the Jeff Barnhart International All-Stars Jazz Band at the 2008 Caesarea Harbor Jazz Festival. The setting was beautiful, the performance was first-rate and lots of fun, and we enjoyed it all immensely. Here we are with our Israeli friends T. and D.

Caesarea (קיסריה in Hebrew) is an ancient port city that now lies between Tel Aviv and Haifa. King Herod once had a palace there facing the sea. According to our guide book, “it took King Herod 12 years to build his much beloved abode on the beautiful Mediterranean coast of the Province of Judea.” (The Jews at that time were under the yoke of the Roman Empire, and it was the Romans who appointed Herod to rule over them.)

Today one can still see the ruins of the hippodrome where horses and chariots once raced for Herod’s pleasure, the 4,000-seat amphitheater where gladiators battled for his entertainment, and of course his once sumptuous palace on the shore.

The amphitheater was locked up for the evening, but we walked through the hippodrome, which brought to mind Mark Twain’s amusing “translation” in The Innocents Abroad of an ancient newspaper review of a gladiator battle at the Roman Coliseum.

Walking amongst the ruins of Herod’s palace, I was reminded of a more sober piece of literature, Shelley’s poem “Ozymandias.”

I met a traveller from an antique land
Who said: Two vast and trunkless legs of stone
Stand in the desert. Near them on the sand,
Half sunk, a shattered visage lies, whose frown
And wrinkled lip and sneer of cold command
Tell that its sculptor well those passions read
Which yet survive, stamped on these lifeless things,
The hand that mocked them and the heart that fed.
And on the pedestal these words appear:
‘My name is Ozymandias, King of Kings:
Look on my works, ye mighty, and despair!’
Nothing beside remains. Round the decay
Of that colossal wreck, boundless and bare,
The lone and level sands stretch far away.

The Crusaders came to Caesarea many years after Herod and built a massive fortress there, which served as the backdrop for the concert. I found it a little strange to hear American jazz in this setting, echoing off the walls of the old Crusader castle.

I know, of course, that according to the public relations and marketing department of Bin Laden & Co., America is the latest incarnation of the Crusaders, but to my mind the Crusaders were in many ways the antithesis of America: Old World, medieval, European, and (as Mark Twain’s Connecticut Yankee in King Arthur’s Court has recently reminded me) the embodiment of a feudal and anti-democratic caste society. (Israel too is identified with the Crusaders in radical Islamist propaganda, which is ironic considering the bloody pogroms that the Crusaders perpetrated on their way to the Holy Land upon Jews.)

I had a great time at the concert, not only because I love jazz music, but also because it was a pleasure to experience an evening of Americana so far from home. A. raised the question whether jazz is still distinctively American music. It would be interesting to know whether Israelis (and, more generally, other people in the rest of the world) continue to associate jazz with America today. To my mind, the two are still very much inseparable. (Certainly, their name notwithstanding, the particular New Orleans style of the Jeff Barnhart International All-Stars is distinctively American.) It was this association that led the U.S. government to send jazz bands on international tours to bolster America’s image during the Cold War. As The New York Times recently reported:

The idea behind the State Department tours was to counter Soviet propaganda portraying the United States as culturally barbaric. [Harlem congressman Adam Clayton] Powell’s insight was that competing with the Bolshoi would be futile and in any case unimaginative. Better to show off a homegrown art form that the Soviets couldn’t match — and that was livelier besides. Many jazz bands were also racially mixed, a potent symbol in the mid to late ’50s, when segregation in the South was tarnishing the American image.

Jazz was the country’s “Secret Sonic Weapon” (as a 1955 headline in The New York Times put it) in another sense as well. The novelist Ralph Ellison called jazz an artistic counterpart to the American political system. The soloist can play anything he wants as long as he stays within the tempo and the chord changes — just as, in a democracy, the individual can say or do whatever he wants as long as he obeys the law. Willis Conover, whose jazz show on Voice of America radio went on the air in 1955 and soon attracted 100 million listeners, many of them behind the Iron Curtain, once said that people “love jazz because they love freedom.”

By the same token, hostility to America sometimes expressed itself as a rejection of jazz. In his fascinating and insightful historical study of anti-Americanism in Europe, Uncouth Nation, Andrei Markovits describes the reaction of European elites against jazz in the early twentieth century, a reaction that was often suffused with racism and anti-Semitism: “As would be the case with rock and roll after World War II, after World War I jazz was vilified as decadent ‘nigger music’ purportedly promoted by profit-hungry Jews who, by undermining the authentic and indigenous qualities celebrated by the elite, ultimately seemed intent on undermining the very fabric of European life.” Such reactions to American popular culture have by no means entirely disappeared today; one can still find them, though sometimes in more muted forms, in Europe, the Middle East, and other parts of the world.

There were no signs of such cultural antagonism in Caesarea. On the contrary: For his part, Jeff Barnhart repeatedly emphasized what a pleasure it was for his band to come to Israel and play here, and for their part, the large Israeli audience reciprocated his enthusiasm and seemed to enjoy the performance every bit as much as I did. Of all the countries in the world, Israel is probably the one that least needs American jazz ambassadors. Nonetheless, I was very happy that they came.

Return to Joppa

Back in February, some of you might recall, I blogged about the Biblical city of Joppa, better known in Hebrew as יפו (Yafo). Joppa is within walking distance of Tel Aviv, and I have returned to it several times on various occasions since my first visit.

Here I am with my friend and fellow sociologist B. in the narrow streets of Joppa.

I was delighted to discover that B., whose mother is a prominent Israeli sociologist and whose father is a prominent Israeli archaeologist, helped his father to excavate the remains of an ancient Egyptian arch in Joppa when B. was still a child. Upon learning this remarkable fact, A. and I promptly renamed it B.'s Arch. We hope that the guidebooks will soon follow suit.

B. brought us to an extraordinary restaurant in Joppa that evening called Blackout. What makes the restaurant extraordinary is that the chefs and the waiters are blind, and the diners sit in complete darkness. The idea, I suppose, is to demonstrate that the blind are more capable than one might think, and at the same time to allow diners to experience, even if only for one evening, what it's like to be blind. At first I thought I would find the experience annoying. Imagine how troublesome it is to have dinner without being able to see! Pouring a glass of wine becomes a real challenge, and more than once I discovered that my fork was empty when I lifted it to my mouth. At first, I found the darkness so disorienting that it was hard to concentrate on the dinner table conversation. In the end, however, I found the experience fascinating and -- if you will excuse the pun -- eye-opening. From a sociological perspective, it made me keenly aware just how much the simple act of having dinner with friends is in fact a highly complicated instance of collective action that requires a great deal of coordination to pull off successfully. (Howard Becker once suggested that this is the core problem of sociology: “How do [people] act together so as to get anything done without a great deal of trouble, without missteps and conflict?”) And, of course, it also reminded me of how much most of us rely on sight for such coordination. I wouldn't want to dine this way every night, but I was glad to have had the experience, and I would recommend the restaurant to anyone visiting Joppa. I can honestly say I've never had a dinner like that one.

A. discovered another unusual feature of Joppa: a tree suspended above the ground.

On another occasion we visited Joppa with our friend M.

On that occasion I finally found the house of Simon the Tanner, which I wasn't able to find the first time I visited Joppa. "Simon the Tanner formerly lived here," Mark Twain wrote in The Innocents Abroad. "We went to his house. All the pilgrims visit Simon the Tanner's house. Peter saw the vision of the beasts let down in a sheet when he lay upon the roof of Simon the Tanner's house." (Twain is referring here to Acts 10:9-47 -W.Y.). This is what the house looks like today.

But my favorite thing about Joppa is still the beautiful sunsets on the Mediterranean.

Gay Pride in Israel

Thousands of people attended the tenth annual gay pride parade in Tel Aviv on June 6, including A. and me. Since the parade went up Ben-Yehuda Street, just a block from our apartment, it was easy and convenient for us to attend, and we managed to get a few photos.

The signs in the picture below say "because education brings change."

What, I joked, would Theodor Herzl have made of this? I don’t know what Herzl would have thought about a gay pride parade – probably it would have shocked his nineteenth-century bourgeois sensibilities – but in a funny sort of way, it seems to me, the parade points to a realization of Zionist aspirations. As David Hazony recently noted in the June 11, 2008, issue of The New Republic, the Zionist movement expressed a yearning and a desire for Jews to become a “normal” nation. (For Zionists, that primarily meant an end to their abnormal mode of existence – “refusing to assimilate into other cultures, they were expelled from countries across Europe, forever needing to regroup in another host nation” – and possession of the “normal tools for [national] survival – such as land and [political] power.”) Hazony raised the questions whether Israel is now a normal country, and whether normalcy is overrated. Leaving aside the second question, it seems to me that gay pride parades have become a kind of indicator of normalcy, at least in the liberal democracies of the West. To put it differently, normal countries (in the West) have gay pride parades, and Israel is no exception. This is not to say there is no hostility or intolerance toward homosexuals in Israel – more on that below – but it does mean that homosexuals are not violently suppressed with the sanction of the state, as they are in the Palestinian territories and in other countries in the Middle East.

In Israel, opposition to gay pride parades is far stronger (or, to put it differently, the parades are less normalized) in Jerusalem than in Tel Aviv. “Unlike similar events in the more religious capital [Jerusalem], which have sparked bitter right-wing protests and violent demonstrations,” Haaretz reported, “the Tel Aviv parade faced little resistance.” “The parade here is different from the one in Jerusalem,” said one Tel Aviv parade participant. “Here, we celebrate the freedom and rights that we have – it's a festival, a happening, it's a joy. In Jerusalem, it’s simply a demonstration for human rights.”

Last year, a group of mostly religious Knesset members tried to ban the gay pride parade in Jerusalem. (According to Haaretz, their effort made little progress.) And, as the date of this year’s gay pride parade in Jerusalem neared, there was a spate of legal maneuvers and public denunciations from the religious sector. (I should add that opposition to the gay pride parade is not confined to ultra-Orthodox Jews, but seems to unite religious communities – Jewish, Muslim, and Christian – that are more often divided. Sadly, nothing unites people like intolerance.) The ultra-Orthodox have demanded a halt to the gay pride parade on a variety of grounds. Some appeals (presumably the ones intended for their own communities) have been overtly religious. For example, one rabbi flatly declared that homosexuals are “evil criminals that have no place with the God of Israel.” Other appeals have been non-religious (probably with non-Orthodox Israelis in mind) or have combined religious and non-religious rationales. For example, it has been argued that the parade threatens public order or (as Jerusalem’s Orthodox mayor put it in a letter to the Israeli Supreme Court) “offends, deliberately and unnecessarily, the feelings of Jews, Muslims and Christians, who view its sheer existence, and the blatant manner in which it takes place, as a desecration of the holy city and of the values with which they were raised.”

All of this grousing in Jerusalem about gay people marching in a parade grates against my American liberalism. (Of course, there is plenty of intolerance of homosexuals in America too, but it doesn’t comport easily with what Gunnar Myrdal once called the American Creed.) The British liberal John Stuart Mill said it best: “As it is useful that while mankind are imperfect there should be different opinions, so is it that there should be different experiments of living; that free scope should be given to varieties of character, short of injury to others; and that the worth of different modes of life should be proved practically, when any one thinks fit to try them. It is desirable, in short, that in things which do not primarily concern others, individuality should assert itself.” That goes for homosexuals, I should think, as much as heterosexuals. So what struck me as interesting about the denunciations of the gay pride parade in Jerusalem was how religious opponents of the parade sometimes used liberal language and reasoning to justify their illiberal ends. I suspect that this reflects the constraints of Israeli political culture (which, though not exclusively liberal, nevertheless contains important liberal components), and the ineffectiveness of overtly and purely religious appeals beyond the ultra-Orthodox sector. I say that these appeals used liberal reasoning because they did not seek to ban the parade for the sake or well-being or salvation of homosexuals (a kind of we-know-what’s-best-for-you paternalism), but rather to prevent homosexuals from inflicting purported harms on others. Within liberal political thought, as the quote from Mill indicates, this is usually deemed a legitimate reason – sometimes the only legitimate reason – for restricting the liberty of competent adult individuals.

I don’t find this ploy very convincing. In his celebrated essay “On Liberty,” Mill defends individual liberty as a necessary condition for individual self-development. Objecting to what he calls the “Calvinistic theory” that “man needs no capacity but that of surrendering himself to the will of God,” Mill argues that G-d could not intend human beings to be “thus cramped and dwarfed,” but rather “gave all human faculties that they might be cultivated and unfolded” and “takes delight in … every increase in their capabilities of comprehension, of action, or of enjoyment.” Regarding the prevention of injury to others, Mill explains that “the means of development which the individual loses by being prevented from gratifying his inclinations to the injury of others, are chiefly obtained at the expense of the development of other people.” In other words, while restrictions on individual liberty are generally bad because they stunt the individual’s self-development, it is justifiable to restrict X when X’s actions would stunt the development of Y. The implication here is that “injury of others” consists chiefly in hampering their self-development. But I don’t see how the gay pride parade hampers the self-development of ultra-Orthodox Jews. On the contrary, it could be argued that the parade fosters the self-development of its religious opponents.

In the first place, as Mill points out, they might learn something from “different experiments of living.” “This cannot well be gainsaid,” he notes, “by anybody who does not believe that the world has already attained perfection in all its ways and practices.” Now, I suppose this argument would hardly convince the haredim because they believe the Torah (as interpreted by their rabbis) has already revealed the best and most perfect ways and practices for them. Consequently, as far as they are concerned, they have nothing to learn from others, least of all from homosexuals. And perhaps they are right. As Mill points out, “different persons … require different conditions for their spiritual development; and can no more exist healthily in the same moral, than all the variety of plants can in the same physical, atmosphere and climate. The same things which are helps to one person towards the cultivation of his higher nature, are hindrances to another.”

Even so, the gay pride may still benefit its opponents in another way: it may force them to reflect upon and better understand the reasons for and value of their own ways and practices. As Mill points out, though customs may be good and suitable to the person who practices them, “yet to conform to custom, merely as custom, does not educate or develop in him any of the qualities which are the distinctive endowment of a human being. The human faculties of perception, judgment, discriminative feeling, mental activity, and even moral preference, are exercised only in making a choice. He who does anything because it is the custom, makes no choice. He gains no practice either in discerning or in desiring what is best. The mental and moral, like the muscular powers, are improved only by being used. The faculties are called into no exercise by doing a thing merely because others do it, no more than by believing a thing only because others believe it…. He who lets the world, or his own portion of it, choose his plan of life for him, has no need of any other faculty than the ape-like one of imitation. He who chooses his plan for himself, employs all his faculties…. It really is of importance, not only what men do, but also what manner of men they are that do it.” Without the stimulus of “different experiments of living,” especially those that are perceived to challenge or threaten one’s own, there is little impetus to develop the human faculties that Mill describes here, and instead of “an intelligent following of custom” one is likely to wind up with “a blind and simply mechanical adhesion to it.”

Three thousand people attended Jerusalem’s seventh annual gay pride parade on June 26, almost three weeks after the Tel Aviv parade. A. and I were not in the city then, so we didn’t attend. I don’t know if any of the parade’s religious opponents used it as an opportunity to develop their mental and moral faculties and to cultivate a more intelligent following of custom. However, I was happy to read that at least they did not mar this year’s parade with violent demonstrations, as they have done in the past. Perhaps that’s a start.

Hebrew Book Week

Dear חברים ומשפחה, apologies for the long hiatus since my last post – the last few weeks have been busy ones.

I’ll begin by backtracking a bit. On May 29, before our trip to Jerusalem, A. and I got to experience what is known here as שבוע הספר העברי (Hebrew Book Week). I had learned about it before in my Hebrew classes (click on the image below to enlarge it):

Here’s my translation for those who are even more Hebrew-challenged than me:

Hebrew Book Week

Every year in June there is in Israel a festival: the Hebrew book festival. In the stores there are books, in the streets there are books; children buy books, ladies and gentlemen buy books, everybody buys books!

Every year in June I have a problem – I want to buy a lot of books… I go from shop to shop, from salesman to salesman and buy books: books for friends, books for children of friends, books for mother, for father, for me.

In my closet there are only books. My shirts are on the chair, the dresses are on the bed, the cassettes are on the table, because I am crazy for books.

But this year, this year I want to buy only one book, something old, something classic and good.

In the street they sell books. I say to the salesman: “Excuse me, mister, maybe you have something by Tolstoy?”

“I have a new book by A. B. Yehoshua, a new book by Amos Oz, a new book in Hebrew by Margaret Atwood, an excellent writer from Canada.”

“No, no, I want to buy only one book.”

“You don’t want to see the new books?”

“It’s possible only to see?”

“No problem! Please.”

I stand and read from the book by Amos Oz, I read a little of the book by A. B Yehoshua, from the book by Margaret Atwood… and I go home with three new books.

Is it any wonder that Israel would have such a festival? After all, Jews have long been known as the People of the Book.

Despite our limited Hebrew literacy, A. and I were excited about Hebrew Book Week and enjoyed it. We even bought a few children’s books in Hebrew to bring back to the States for our friends J.R. and A.G. and their son. Here we are browsing books at Rabin Square in Tel Aviv.

All those books made me dizzy.

Here is A., looking for טולסטוי perhaps?

Happy reading!

Modern Jerusalem - The New City

A. and I devoted the fourth and last day of our Jerusalem excursion to the New City. We didn’t have time to see the beautiful stained glass windows created by Marc Chagall for the Hadassah Medical Center or walk the solemn grounds of Yad Vashem (Israel’s Holocaust museum). We weren’t able to pay our respects to that great visionary Theodor Herzl at his tomb on the mountain that bears his name. We didn’t even tour the Knesset (Israel’s parliament), though it wasn’t for lack of trying. (It was temporarily closed.) All of those places will have to wait for another trip. What we did manage to see on our last day was the Supreme Court and the Israel Museum.

The Supreme Court -- which since 2004 has included an Arab Israeli judge among its permanent members -- is the highest judicial authority in Israel and, alongside the Knesset and the executive, the nation’s third branch of government. It functions both as the highest court of appeal and as a high court of justice that can (and sometimes does) invalidate legislation that violates the human rights guaranteed by Israel’s Basic Laws. It is worth adding here that not only Israeli citizens, but also Palestinians in the occupied territories are permitted to petition the court against acts and decisions of the state. Among other things, the court’s decisions have altered the route of the West Bank separation fence to minimize hardships that it causes to Palestinians.

The Supreme Court building, which has only housed the court since 1993, is a beautiful structure flooded with natural light. The architectural design includes many symbolic elements, most notably the combination of lines and circles that represent, respectively, law (“Your laws are straight,” Psalm 119:137) and justice (“He leads me in circles of justice,” Psalm 23:3). Here is a picture of one of the building’s court rooms.

Our other destination for the day, the Israel Museum, is widely considered the acme of Israeli cultural institutions. The museum is extensive and impossible to see fully in one day. It includes the Shrine of the Book, containing the famed Dead Sea Scrolls; an archaeological museum with the world’s largest collection of artifacts found in Israel; the Judaica and Jewish Ethnography Wing, which houses Jewish ceremonial artifacts from all over the world; the Fine Art Wing, which during our visit housed the exhibit “Real Time: Art in Israel, 1998-2008”; the Ruth Youth Wing, which housed the exhibit “Orphaned Art: Looted Art from the Holocaust” (the works that comprised its sister exhibit, "Looking for Owners," had already been returned to France when we visited); and a huge model of Jerusalem as it existed in the time of the Second Temple.

I mainly wanted to see the “Real Time” exhibit and found it interesting, though not for the most part very moving or inspiring. Unfortunately, I can’t show any pictures of the exhibit except this clandestine one of Ohad Meromi’s “Boy From South Tel Aviv.” (I say clandestine, because photographs were apparently not permitted, though I didn’t realize that until a gruff Israeli security guard saw my camera and nearly confiscated it from me.) However, The New York Times published a fairly good and exhaustive review of the exhibit here.

No pictures were permitted in the “Orphaned Art” exhibit either, but for the Associated Press review see here.

Here is the Shrine of the Book from the outside (again, no pictures permitted inside).

And here is the model of Jerusalem. The large structure on the right is the Second Temple.

With the museum closed, we are ready to follow once more in Mark Twain’s footsteps and set out for Tel Aviv (Jaffa in his case). Like him, “we are exhausted. The sun has roasted us almost.” After four days in Jerusalem, we too are “surfeited with sights…. They swarm about you at every step; no single foot of ground in all Jerusalem or within its neighborhood seems to be without a stirring and important history of its own.” We look forward to returning to a modern city where one can “steal a walk of a hundred yards without a guide along to talk unceasingly about every stone you step upon and drag you back ages and ages to the day when it achieved celebrity.” I’m sure we’ll return for more sightseeing. But for now, like Mark Twain, we pause on the summit of a distant hill, take a look back, and bid farewell to the “venerable city which had been such a good home to us.”

Venturing Outside the Walls of the Old City

We began our third day in Jerusalem with a visit to the City of David. This statement is bound to cause some confusion: isn’t Jerusalem the City of David, and consequently weren’t we there already? In fact, despite its name, Jerusalem’s Old City is a more recent settlement than the original city – King David’s Jerusalem – which overlapped but did not exactly coincide with it. If you venture just outside the walls of the Old City on its south side, you can pay a few shekels to see the archaeological remains of a portion of David’s city, including Warren’s Shaft, Hezekiah’s tunnel, and the Pool of Siloam (Shiloach in Hebrew).

When Jerusalem was a Canaanite city, Warren’s Shaft provided its inhabitants with secure access during times of siege to water from the nearby Gihon Spring. The shaft is said in the Bible to have been used by David to sneak into Jerusalem and conquer the Canaanites from inside their own city. But apparently this clever feat wasn’t enough to give David title to the shaft. That honor instead went to Charles Warren, the man who rediscovered the shaft in the nineteenth century before going on to head the London Metropolitan Police during Jack the Ripper’s infamous crime spree. Apparently Mr. Warren was better at finding fissures than murderers.

Here is solid archaeological evidence that the ancient Canaanites preferred Coke over Pepsi.

Hezekiah’s tunnel also provided Jerusalem with water from the Gihon Spring when the city was under siege. Surely you remember Hezekiah. He was the thirteenth king of Judah. The Book of Isaiah mentions his tunnel in chapter 22. Why Warren’s Shaft wasn’t good enough for Hezekiah is a mystery to me, but Hezekiah’s own tunnel remains in good working order 2,700 years later. I waded about knee-deep into it, but A. and I decided against going the whole length because we weren’t properly clothed and equipped. Being supporters of the Jewish Labor Committee, we wondered whether the workmen who dug the tunnel had been unionized and whether Hezekiah had paid them the prevailing wage.

Finally, the Pool of Siloam is the place where Hezekiah’s tunnel brings the water. The pool is mentioned in Isaiah 8:6, it is where Solomon was anointed king, and Jesus is said to have done some healing here. (The Gospels do not record whether the beneficiary had health insurance, but apocryphal sources say his HMO refused to cover the treatment because it hadn’t been authorized in advance.) Mark Twain mentions in passing that he and his traveling companions dismounted from their horses and drank from the Pool of Siloam during their 1867 visit to Jerusalem. “The pool,” he wrote, “is a deep, walled ditch, through which a clear stream of water runs, that comes from under Jerusalem somewhere, … and reaches this place by way of a tunnel of heavy masonry.” “Oriental women came down [to the pool] in their old Oriental way,” he adds, “and carried off jars of the water on their heads, just as they did three thousand years ago, and just as they will do fifty thousand years hence if any of them are still left on earth.” I can’t comment with any certainty on the accuracy of this prediction; A. and I skipped the pool because we were hot and tired from climbing up and down outdoors in the sun. However, Mark Twain might be surprised to learn how well the women of Jerusalem have accommodated themselves to indoor plumbing.

Leaving the ancient ruins of David’s city behind, A. and I returned to Mount Scopus in time for me to teach my afternoon class. But in the evening, we took a bus back into Jerusalem to have a drink at the King David Hotel. On the way to the hotel, we took a stroll through Mishkenot Sha-ananim (“Peaceful Habitation” in Hebrew), the first Jewish residential quarter established outside the walls of the Old City. British-Jewish philanthropist Moses Montefiore built the settlement in the 1850s, but Mark Twain doesn’t mention it in The Innocents Abroad. Perhaps it was too new to interest him and his traveling companions. When it was built, people were still too afraid of bandits and wild animals to live outside the walls of the Old City, and many of the people who bought homes in Montefiore’s new neighborhood refused to stay there overnight. In 1866, the year before Mark Twain’s visit, a deadly cholera epidemic swept through the Old City and changed their minds.

The most notable feature of the neighborhood was the windmill that Montefiore built to provide jobs for Jerusalem’s burgeoning Jewish population and produce cheap flour for the city’s poor. During the British Mandate, the British blew off the top of the windmill (the Jews jokingly dubbed it “Operation Don Quixote”), but it has since been restored and turned into a museum.

Eventually, we reached our destination, the luxurious King David Hotel.

The King David is one of the most famous landmarks in Jerusalem. Its main claim to fame is that an armed Jewish underground organization called the Etzel bombed it in 1946, killing ninety-one people and injuring another forty-five. This act of terrorism committed by Jews in their struggle for independence is sometimes compared to Palestinian terrorism today, with the implication that the movements employed the same methods for the same goals and are thus morally equivalent. I do not condone the 1946 bombing of the King David Hotel. However, this analogy strikes me as misleading for several reasons. First, it is important to recall that the offices of the British military command in Palestine and the British Criminal Investigation Division occupied an entire wing of the King David Hotel in 1946. Thus, the bombing was primarily aimed at the British government and military in Palestine, not civilians. Second, the Etzel sought to avoid civilian casualties by warning the British in advance of the bombing. In fact, according to Menachem Begin, the Etzel issued not one but three warnings: it made telephone calls to the King David Hotel, the French Consulate, and the Palestine Post. The call to the hotel was received but ignored; the British official who refused to evacuate the building reportedly said, “we don’t take orders from the Jews.” (Although the British denied receiving the warning, a British Member of Parliament introduced new evidence in 1979 that the warning had in fact been received and ignored.) Third, the bombing horrified the rest of the Zionist movement, which swiftly, publicly, and unequivocally condemned it. David Ben-Gurion even went so far as to urge Jews in Palestine to turn in members of the Etzel to the British authorities, and the Haganah actively foiled a subsequent Etzel plan to bomb the British police headquarters in Tel Aviv. In all three of these respects, it seems to me, the 1946 bombing of the King David Hotel was quite different from contemporary Palestinian terrorism. In contrast to the Etzel’s operation, Palestinian terrorism has primarily targeted civilians, struck without warning, and is widely lauded rather than condemned among Palestinians. (True, the leadership of the Palestinian Authority issued pro forma condemnations from time to time for public relations purposes, but the involvement of the PA and its officials in terrorist activities during the second intifada has been well documented.)

This post has taken a very serious turn, but I’ll close with a bit of levity. The King David Hotel’s other claim to fame is that it appeared several times in the 1960 film Exodus, which starred Paul Newman as the heroic and dashing Ari Ben Canaan. Newman’s character was one of the good guys, a leader of the Haganah, not a member of the Etzel. Here I am borrowing a cigarette from A., drinking a gin and tonic, and trying my best to emulate Paul Newman in the scene where his character has a drink with the American nurse Kitty Fremont on the balcony of the King David Hotel.

I couldn't help but think that Mark Twain, who so appreciated a good cigar (he once said “If I cannot smoke in heaven, I shall not go”) would have found the King David Hotel much to his liking. Unfortunately for him, it didn't open until 1931.

I can’t close without mentioning a superb little family-run Ethiopian restaurant called Megenana at Jaffa Street 17, not far from the Jaffa Gate to the Old City, where A. and I had dinner after our drinks at the King David. The restaurant is tiny but inexpensive, the couple who run it are very nice, and the food is kosher (despite the restaurant lacking rabbinical certification) and delicious. I highly recommend it.