by Barry, Dave
We spend about an hour at the wall and, moved by the experience, decide to spend the afternoon in quiet contemplation, by which I mean: shopping. We go to the Jewish street market, which you will be relieved to learn has wifi. Michelle finds a number of items that she is able to obtain at a special price and that will go really well with our living room.
While Michelle shops, I observe the throngs of tourists thronging around. Most are American. It used to be that you could tell which tourists were Americans by the fact that they always wore brand-new white sneakers. I am pleased to report that this is no longer the case. Now you can tell them because they always wear brand-new white sneakers and brand-new sun hats. Apparently word got around to the American tourist community—maybe there are big warning signs in the sneaker stores—that they must at all costs protect themselves from the deadly foreign sun because I’m seeing tour groups in which every single person is wearing either a brand-new sun hat with a floppy brim or—for maximum protection and timeless elegance—one of those sportsperson hats with the long bill sticking out the front and a big fashionable flap hanging down in the back. Take that, deadly foreign sun!
Our evening activity is a lecture at the hotel on “The Labyrinth of Israeli Politics” by Reuven Hazan, a ninth-generation Israeli who’s a professor of political science at Hebrew University and a very sharp, funny guy. He talks, rapid-fire, for an hour, writing with colored markers on a big pad of paper to help us understand the Israeli political situation. It’s complicated because (a) Israel is a democracy with a parliamentary system and proportional representation and (b) no two Israelis (remember Kay and Adi?) agree on anything. The result is that, instead of two big parties, they have many smaller parties, which means that sometimes extremists and lunatics can wield considerable power. As opposed to the American system, where . . .
OK, never mind.
DAY EIGHT
We’re back on the bus, leaving Jerusalem and heading north in the Jordan Valley. Our first stop, near the Jordanian border south of the Sea of Galilee, is Kibbutz Sde Eliyahu, which was founded in 1938 by German Zionists. We get an orientation lecture from a kibbutz member, who tells us that many Israeli kibbutzes have privatized and gone into nonagricultural businesses such as manufacturing. (“Almost everybody’s toilet in the world has a piece that comes from a kibbutz in Israel,” she says.) But Kibbutz Sde Eliyahu is still an old-school socialist agricultural kibbutz, where nobody gets a salary; the idea is that people do what they can and are given what they need.
We tour the fields, where the kibbutz grows a variety of crops using a range of innovative organic farming methods that I would describe to you in fascinating detail except we would both fall asleep. The kibbutz also grows date palms, which are pretty interesting for a plant because—unlike other trees and many married couples—they have sex. Really. According to the kibbutz guide, there are male date palms and female date palms, and in order for a female to have little baby dates, she has to be inseminated by a male. Few sights in nature are more dramatic than a date palm forest at the height of rutting season, resounding with thunderous crashes and splinters the size of harpoons whistling through the air as a pair of male palms clash over a female.
OK, to be honest, I don’t know how date palms have sex in the wild. The guide tells us that at the kibbutz, the females are inseminated by people standing on ladders. This reminds me of the joke about the mouse in the jungle who pulls a thorn out of an elephant’s foot, then demands payment in the form of sex, but since there are young people on the tour bus I keep my mouth shut.*
At the end of the tour, the guide tells us about an agriculture-related sideline that the kibbutz has gotten into: selling specialized insects. She brings out two boxes, one containing bees (this product is called BioBee) and one containing tiny flies (BioFly). Your BioBees are a mellow, laid-back type of bee, so they’re less likely than normal bees to sting you when they pollinate your tomatoes. Your BioFlies kill other flies that you don’t want eating your crops. They are tiny Terminators. So if you’re an organic type of individual who is in the market for a box o’ bugs, Sde Eliyahu is the kibbutz for you.
They also, Michelle discovers, have a gift shop.
We leave the kibbutz and head north, stopping for lunch at a sleepy strip mall with a few deserted stores, a falafel stand and a McDonald’s. My family, which has become addicted, goes for the falafel. It’s the best in Israel.
As we’re eating at an outdoor table, an IDF vehicle with four soldiers inside pulls up to the curb next to us. A young soldier—he looks eighteen—gets out, goes to the falafel stand, buys a pack of cigarettes and returns to the vehicle. This takes him maybe a minute and he is never more than twenty feet from the vehicle. But he has his rifle with him the whole time. This doesn’t make us nervous; we’re getting used to seeing soldiers. But it’s a reminder that Israel has to always be ready. Always.
We resume heading north. The countryside gets greener as we drive along the western side of the Sea of Galilee. We pass marinas, resorts and beaches; unlike the Sea of Butt Sting, the Sea of Galilee contains actual water.
We drive up high into the hills and stop at the picturesque and historic town of Tsfat, which is a center of Kabbalah, a mystical branch of Judaism that became fashionable in Hollywood in the 1990s; its best-known celebrity follower is Madonna. Tsfat is one of Israel’s holiest cities, and is a place rich in history. Tragically, it is also a place rich in shopping, offering for sale at a special price many items that would go really well with our living room. While Michelle and Sophie investigate this facet of Tsfat, I find a little stone amphitheater, where I sit to rest my weary legs and contemplate the eternal question of whether or not there is free wifi. (No.) As I’m sitting there, an American tour group walks into the amphitheater and sits down. Their Israel guide gives them a little talk on the history of the Jewish mystical tradition, which dates back centuries. When he’s done, he leads the group out. The last two to leave are a young man and a young woman, who have this conversation:
Man: You should take a picture of this.
Woman: Why?
Man: You didn’t hear what he said?
Woman: What?
Man: Madonna lives here!
We spend the night at a pleasant hotel in the Hula Valley operated by Kibbutz Kfar Blum. After dinner, Rabbi Eddie brings out his guitar; he and I entertain the tour group with a medley of classic oldies from the sixties and seventies, when we were young and had many more brain cells. Our act consists of one of us saying, “I got one!” then grabbing the guitar and playing anywhere from seven to twenty-three percent of a classic oldie before reaching the point where he can no longer remember the words or the chords, or both. Then the other one will go, “I got one!” grab the guitar and play another classic oldie fragment. Soon the floor in front of us is littered with the corpses of unfinished songs. It is a wild and crazy night, a raucous rock ’n’ roll riot, Hula Valley style, and it does not end until nearly 10:27 p.m.
DAY NINE
We drive north toward the Golan Heights and the borders with Lebanon and Syria. There has been a lot of fighting over this territory in decades past, so I’m expecting a battled-scarred wasteland. Instead, it’s the most beautiful scenery we’ve seen so far—mountains, hills, streams, rivers, forests, wildflowers. It reminds us of the North Carolina mountains, except for the roadside signs warning you to stay on the road because of minefields. This is a popular vacation area for Israelis and tourists alike. The borders have been mostly peaceful for a while, although, as Doron points out, “In one day, everything could become very problematic again.”
We stop at a hillside overlook, which, instead of overlooking a scenic vista, overlooks Syria. At the moment there’s a horrific civil war going on in Syria; a week earlier, Doron tells us, there was a battle, involving tanks, in the valley right below us. He gives us an explanation of the Syrian situation, which all of us—here, I speak co
nfidently for the group—find utterly incomprehensible.
In the distance, we hear a BOOM.
“That’s artillery,” says Doron.
“Check, please,” says Rabbi Eddie, and we get back on the bus.
We drive a few miles, passing Israeli tanks along the way, to our next tour stop, which—perfectly symbolizing the surreal juxtaposition of military outpost and modern consumer society that is Israel—is a gourmet chocolate factory. There, a factory guide shows us an instructional video, How Chocolate Is Made. It all begins with the cacao tree, which produces beans after having sex with a male date palm.
No, seriously, the way they make chocolate is, they do various instructional things to cacao beans until they turn into chocolate. After watching the video, we tour the factory, then put on paper hats and, using ingredients provided by our guide, try our hand at making and decorating our own chocolates. Despite the fact that we’re amateurs, we manage to produce a variety of creative, personalized confections that look remarkably like cow turds with names dribbled on them. This does not stop us from eating them. Because, dammit, we’re tourists.
Our final activity for the day is rafting on the Jordan River. This is another one of those activities that in the United States would be preceded by form signing and a safety lecture, and would probably involve a guide. Here, we basically pile into rubber rafts and shove off, on our own. The river is crowded. It’s rush hour for rafts on the Jordan Expressway. Some are Jewish rafts and some are Arab rafts, but everybody’s in a good mood. We’re all using our paddles to splash one another—Jews splashing Jews, Arabs splashing Arabs, Jews splashing Arabs, Arabs splashing Jews. Along the riverbanks, people are hanging out, barbecuing and smoking hookahs. It’s a totally mellow scene.
It occurs to me, as we drift along, that maybe the way to achieve lasting peace in the Middle East is to take the leaders of the various hostile nations and put them together in a raft out here on the Jordan River. Call me a dreamer, but I bet that after an hour or so of drifting amid that happy throng of rafters—seeing all these ordinary people of different religions and ethnic backgrounds getting along, having fun together, without animosity or hatred—these leaders would find a way, somehow, to kill one another with their paddles.
So never mind.
DAY TEN
This day begins with one of the most dramatic events in the history of Israel, if not the entire world.
Michelle, who has been following the developments on her phone, wakes me up at 6 a.m. with the shocking news: The Miami Heat, trailing three games to two in the NBA finals, are in danger of losing Game 6, and the championship, to the San Antonio Spurs.
I am not the kind of man to panic in an emergency. Calmly, I leap out of bed, turn on the TV, find the game—which is being broadcast in Hebrew—and begin shouting at the screen. Despite my efforts, the game does not go well. With less than thirty seconds to play, the Heat are five points down. The situation seems hopeless; it appears that the championship is lost. In Miami, hundreds of spectators are streaming out of the arena.
That’s how some so-called fans handle adversity: When things look bad for their team, they give up hope. They despair. They throw in the towel. And that—to put it bluntly—is just wrong. Because now—when the going gets tough—is no time to surrender to negativity and doubt. It is precisely at this time, at the darkest hour, when you need to reach deep down inside and—somehow, some way—find your inner strength. This is the time to believe.
This, in short, is a time for faith.
And at that moment, there in Israel, birthplace of religions, heartland of spirituality, I can feel something. That’s right: Me, the nonbeliever, Mr. Cynical. I can feel it and I know it’s real. I turn to Michelle and I tell her what I am feeling in my heart, my very soul.
“They’re going to lose,” I say.
But somehow, impossibly, they battle back. The arena is going insane. The Hebrew announcers are drenching their microphones in saliva. I am stalking around the room, shouting helpful advice to the Heat players. With five seconds left and the Heat trailing by three, Ray Allen, following my explicit instructions (“Make It! Make it! MAKEITMAKEITMAKEIT!”), hits a three-point shot that historians will someday rank, in terms of historical significance, alongside, if not just ahead of, the Louisiana Purchase. The Heat win in overtime, and cries of joy echo up and down the halls of the Kfar Blum Kibbutz Hotel.
So it’s a pretty good morning.
After breakfast we board our bus and set out to see some more important ancient things that, to be brutally honest, we are not that excited about. If you’ve ever been on a longish bus tour, you know that at some point you just run out of gas. You cannot absorb another fascinating fact. But Doron still has plenty of pent-up information to impart to us and we don’t want to let him down, so we file off the bus and trudge around, dutifully looking at and taking pictures of a series of mosaics, columns, random piles of stones, etc., left by the Greeks and Romans. At this point, we’re wishing, as a tour group, that the Greeks and Romans had just stayed the hell back in Greece and Rome instead of coming here and littering the landscape with all these freaking ruins.
The low point comes when our tour takes us through yet another ancient water tunnel. Our feeling, as a tour group, is that if you have sloshed through one dark cramped clammy tunnel full of ancient water that you do not really know the source of, you have sloshed through them all. Nobody wants to do this one. But we do it. Because, dammit, we’re tourists.
From the tunnel we proceed to Caesarea, an ancient Mediterranean port city, where we view, among other things, the ruins of a Roman latrine. Caesarea also has wifi, but that was installed after the Romans.
We end the day back where we started our Israel trip, in Tel Aviv. We have dinner at a dockside restaurant with Chicago mayor Rahm Emanuel. (Not in the sense of eating at the same table with him, but in the sense of seeing him walk past the restaurant while we’re eating.) (At least we think it’s him.)
Our time in Israel is almost done, and together our group has experienced many interesting, even amazing, things. Along the way we’ve been transformed from a semi-random collection of people who happened to be on a tour bus together into genuine friends. So it’s not surprising that much of the conversation at dinner concerns Ray Allen.
DAY ELEVEN
We leave Israel today, so much of the day is spent preparing for the trip home, by which I of course mean: shopping. We also pack. I decide to throw out my defective forty-shekels-apiece sandals, which are pretty funky from sloshing through ancient historic underground water. My hope, as I put them into the hotel-room wastebasket, is that they will wind up in the hands of some less fortunate person, who will burn them.
We have our final group dinner, drinking toasts to Rabbi Eddie and Doron. Then it’s back on the bus one last time for the trip to the airport and a bunch of good-bye hugs. Then we’re on the overnight El Al flight back to the States. We land early in the morning; when we turn on our phones, we learn that the Miami Heat have won Game 7 and the NBA championship. I’m beginning to believe that there might be a Higher Power after all. Here I am referring to LeBron James.
So our Israel adventure ends on a happy note. Which is fitting because it was a great trip. Israel is a fascinating, beautiful place, and surprisingly welcoming. We’d been told that Israelis can be brusque, but almost everyone we encountered was helpful and friendly. The wifi is abundant and the food is excellent; the falafel should win some kind of Nobel Prize. We never felt unsafe, except the times when we were walking backward off the cliff and riding Thunderbolt the Racing Camel, both of which were our own fault.
Would we go back to Israel? We would in a heartbeat. In fact, we’ve already decided that we will and the reason is simple: Apparently we need more menorahs.
Being a professional author is a great job. You get to work at home, be your own boss and wear whatever you want.
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FACT: Ernest Hemingway wrote The Sun Also Rises wearing a penguin costume.*
Another benefit of being a professional author is you also have complete freedom to snack. I eat as many as forty-five distinct snacks per day. My typical schedule is, I spend several minutes working on writing something (this sentence, for example) and then I’ll think to myself, quote, “Snack time!” Then I’ll head to the kitchen to see what’s available. There is basically nothing in my kitchen that I have not, at one time or another, as a professional author, smeared peanut butter on. I include pot holders in that statement.
And then there is the pay. It is excellent. I’m not saying that you will, right off the bat, with no author experience, make the kind of money Stephen King makes. Achieving that level of success can take, literally, months. But the potential is there, especially if you are a fast typist, because the standard practice in the writing industry is to pay authors by the word. Let me repeat that statement for emphasis: The standard practice in the industry is to pay authors by the word. At this point, you are thinking to yourself in your mind: Wait a minute, is he saying that the standard practice in the industry is to pay authors by the word? Yes! That is what I am saying! (Specifically, I am saying that the standard practice in the industry is to pay authors by the word.)
Another thought you may have is: Do I have what it takes to make the grade as a professional writer? I will answer that question with brutal and unflinching honesty: Yes. Don’t be discouraged if you have no formal training in the field of writing. Writing is not one of those activities that require a specific skill, such as golf, opera or radiator repair. You can be a writer. Anyone can be a writer.