O Israel…

At the tender age of 19 I boarded an Athens-bound train at the Gare du Nord station in Paris. I was on a train because my mother was appalled that I had been thumbing my way solo round Europe and bought me the ticket. I climbed into my assigned sleeper car, shared with two men who were unfailingly polite and respectful. Yea, it was a long time ago but I still believe that the world is not nearly as dangerous a place as CNN and our government would have us believe. From Athens I found my way to the Greek port of Piraeus, where I boarded a boat to Haifa. My cabin mate for the three-day, 829 nautical-mile trip was a much older woman and her cats. But of course at 19, everybody looks old. My plan, such as it was, was to live on a kibbutz though I had nowhere specific in mind. I figured when I got off the boat it wouldn’t be hard to find a kibbutz willing to accept an idealistic young American university student. There are days when I miss that innocence and freedom: no reservations, much of the world wide open to peaceful young travelers out to explore and better understand the world. (Note: I was not a hippie, did not drink or do drugs, and am not Jewish. My parents were atheists or, as my father was fond of saying, “self-respecting heathens.”)

The year was 1971, just four years after the 1967 Six-Day War, and there were young Israeli soldiers everywhere: patrolling the streets, filling the buses, looking simultaneously exhausted and alert to danger as they restlessly scanned the faces of people around them. I began walking through a dense residential section of Haifa, where a boy who looked to be around 9 or 10 (my own grandson’s age) scampered along the roof of a three-storey building, throwing rocks at me as he followed me from above. I was a young blonde hiking-booted foreigner with a battered backpack, someone he instantly recognized as no friend to him. 

From Haifa I caught a local bus to Kibbutz Yasur, east of Acre near the Syria border in Northern Israel’s Western Galilee. The kibbutz welcomed me and assigned me a visitor’s room, which I shared with an Australian woman my age, whose name I have long forgotten. She was travelling around the world and was given to dramatically unfurling her accordion-like plane ticket, which stretched across the width of our room. She also taught me to put sweetened condensed milk in my coffee when it was inconvenient to walk over to the kibbutz dairy, an unfortunate sugary habit I was fortunately able to break when I got home. 

The room I shared with my Australian roommate was part of a visitor’s compound on the kibbutz. Besides my roommate and me, other visitors included two young American men from Ohio whose parents were Holocaust survivors and apparently hopeful that time spent on a kibbutz would broaden their kids’ interest and knowledge beyond their cherry-red Corvettes and all the entitled family wealth that came with them back in Ohio. They were boyish, open, and friendly, traits I came to think of as American. And I suspected even then that those parents knew that this cultural immersion was a fool’s errand. Those young men had nothing in common with the kibbutz’s permanent residents, many of whom still bore faded black numbers on their forearms from World War II concentration camps. One characteristic of being human is the disappointing inability to perfectly graft your own past experiences and beliefs onto your children, however fervently held. The young Ohioans spent most of their time doing drugs and calling us female visitors “sisters.” I should thank them for my one unforgettable experience with opium, however. When I I took a hit of the tarry substance the effect was so incredible that I immediately understood how addicts in opium dens wasted away to nothing as their hunger, thirst, and other physical needs dissolved in ecstatic clouds of smoke. The experience was so intense that I vowed to never touch it again in my lifetime, a promise I’ve kept.

According to the Jewish Virtual Library there are more kibbutzim today than there were back in 1971. But today’s kibbutzniks in some cases have outside jobs or other income and can keep the money they earn. Nothing could be more distant philosophically from the earlier kibbutzim established at the turn of the Twentieth Century, which were straight-up Marxist. They were agricultural collectives back then, and followed the 1875 Karl Marx doctrine “From each according to his ability, to each according to his needs.” And yet, even with all the passion and belief of those early Jewish settlers who scratched their subsistence collective farms out of the desert and shared the fruits of their labor equally, the specter of wealth accrual and unfettered capitalism inevitably sang its siren song. 

Back on the kibbutz, we all got up early for breakfast in the communal dining room. Breakfast was usually diysa, a semolina porridge I liked so much I still make it today, minus the sugar-and-chocolate sprinkles. Then it was off to work, in my case picking lemons in the lemon orchard. Armed with a bucket and a steel pole with a loop at its tip (to ensure that only large lemons were picked, leaving the smaller ones to further mature), I walked over to the orchard. My abiding love of everything lemon was kick started in that orchard, where bright lemons against an impossibly blue sky created a fragrant sense of peace. When I finished my work I often stopped at the dairy and climbed a ladder alongside a stainless-steel milk holding tank to get a drink with the communal dipper hanging from a hook on top. Dinner was something to look forward to; the dishes were cleared (separate dishes and cutlery for meat and dairy) and the wooden tables pushed aside to one wall to make room to dance, a joyous evening tradition at the end of the day.

During my months at the kibbutz there was time to explore other places. One day I walked with a fellow visitor to a nearby Palestinian village, where a family invited us to dinner. The main course was exquisite: a local fish with tiny bones, fried to crispness with lots of lemon. The roof above us was lined with flattened Coke cans and the house itself was tiny. No wealth here. But nobody on the kibbutz was wealthy, either; the differences between the two struck me as small. Today, according to the U.S. State Department, the average daily wage in Gaza is $13, compared with $82 in Israel.

My visit to Jerusalem was nothing short of magical. To a U.C. Berkeley history of art major it was akin to being dropped into the heart of the Promised Land. Jerusalem is home to each of the world’s three large monotheistic religions, and its soil is soaked with centuries of Jewish, Muslim, and Christian blood. (For those interested in the history of Jerusalem I highly recommend Karen Armstrong’s book, Jerusalem.) I walked the Via Dolorosa, where Jesus is believed to have carried the cross to his crucifixion, marveled at the Dome of the Rock, on the Temple Mount, where Muhammad is believed to have risen to Heaven on a white horse; stood long at the Wailing Wall, so named since the destruction of two Jewish temples during Roman rule, around 324-638 AD. To walk that ground where so many others had walked for centuries was a humbling experience I have never forgotten. Throughout those centuries, in between wars, all three sets of believers have claimed Jerusalem as their own, though despite the three doctrines extolling the virtues of peace and love for one’s fellow man, they’ve been at war ever since.