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.