January 31, 2019

I am no longer in Tel Aviv or in Israel, but Tel Aviv was “home” in a country that is an unsettling combination of foreign and intimately familiar.  I was guided by knowing that many, of my ancestry, settled there and that only timing,  fortuitous decisions and the chance of US entry visas (rarely given in the 1930’s) separated us from death or an alternative path to refuge in Israel.

Tel Aviv

For three weeks, I visited and interacted with cousins or other descendants of central and eastern European Jews, a marked contrast to a life lived largely, and at times almost exclusively, among Christians.  For two generations in my family, we have been with others, learned to be like others, shared intimacy with others, deeply loved others, partnered and married others—such that they are no longer others but dear and close to us—and yet we have not lost our Jewish identity,  and there is something deeply familiar about Israelis.

Bauhaus in Tel Aviv

In Israel, it was as though my entire adolescence and adult life had been stripped away.  California, Asia, Europe, and even New York felt like temporary influences.  What I had with Israelis seems to precede these places—I had returned to the home of my parents, my grandparents and my great grandparents.

And yet, as my cousin Miriam said:  we are the stories we tell ourselves . . .

I visited with Miriam, her sister Laura, and two other cousins in Israel.  These cousins share the same great-grandparents or are descended from siblings of the same great-grandmother.  The family moved from what became Poland to Vienna, sometime around World War I; one branch then moved to Antwerp and the rest to New York and New Jersey.  These cousins still know each other, or of each other.  So I was led from those I knew, to two whom I had never heard of or met.  None of them were born in Israel.  They were Zionists who chose Israel.

My cousins have many years and strong bonds in Israel.  One, a retired Belgian journalist, covered the Middle East for Belgian newspapers.  She is disappointed that the path to peace has been so difficult and might have left,  but has nevertheless been there since 1971.   The others are married, or divorced with spouses or partners, friends and children, and one with grandchildren.  One is married to another American Jew, another to an anglo-Canadian.  One does business with the U.S., another is in a close circle of American émigré friends.  They switch back and forth easily between Hebrew and English, and their Israeli children have served in its army.

In Israel, I also had my first close-up view of a world that precedes me, that of Orthodox Jewry.  One Polish great-grandfather was a progressive orthodox rabbi, according to Miriam, and on the lecture circuit in Europe and later in the United States.  Yet I do not know the ultra-orthodox or even many orthodox Jews.  There are many in New York, but generally, like other assimilated Jews, my preferences and geography have separated me from them.  The traditionally religious are often viewed as backwards, insular, clannish, and likely to judge us as non-Jewish. . . and yet these views are based on very little.  I have no knowledge of them, and so Israel was my chance to listen, ask questions and challenge my prejudices.

First in Jerusalem to the tour guide at the Western Wall, a traditionally dressed American woman, who led the English speaking tour of the excavations.  Using a model, she explained the ancient configuration of the Temple Mount and the location of the Holy of Holies, the prayer and celebratory activities now possible in the tunnels, and the prohibition to entering the Mount until the arrival of the Messiah.  Among the tour visitors were a few American rabbinical students, one of whom is the son of the Orthodox rabbi in London, Ontario, where my sister lives.

At the Dead Sea, I initiated a conversation with two more American students, who explained (while floating) that many young Orthodox students come to Israel for a year or two of rabbinical studies, but not necessarily to become rabbis.  The studies are part of an education which encourages them to practice whatever profession they choose, while keeping their minds on the Torah.  They briefly explained the differences between the Jerusalem and Babylonian Talmuds—the latter offering a more varied, subtle, less clearly directive commentary, a more interesting text to study.  They have been reading it, in the original Aramaic, since the fifth grade.

In Israel we also have old friends, and with them too I found the warmth of the familiar.  A brother Ilan (in Jerusalem) and sister Efrat (in the Galilee), whom we knew at school in Singapore and whose parents were friends of our parents.  Both are married, with children, and now their first grandchildren.  I had last seen Ilan, in about 1983, when he recognized me at the Marina Safeway in San Francisco; he then spent a couple of nights sleeping on the floor of my studio.  It was easy to feel the similarity in their liberal education, warmth,  directness, and in the strength of the women.

But there were differences.  Our friends and their children have served in the army—no one in my world has ever been in the military.  They both married Jews—I’m single, gay, my sister married to a Scots-Irish Canadian.  They seem more closely engaged in the building of their country—in a larger, older country like the United States, fewer of us are able to do this.  They see their children frequently and are often with them for Friday evening Shabbat.  My niece is far away in Liverpool studying theatre.  Seder dinners yes, Chanukah or Rosh Hashanah dinners at my parents in California (years ago) or more recently at my cousin’s in New York, but I cannot think of a sabbath dinner in recent memory.  I was at three in Israel, and the candles were lit.

Tel Aviv has a lot of high-rises, but mostly it is still a city of 4 to 6 story buildings, dating from the 1930’s and later in the 20^th century,  with surprisingly shabby facades, but beautiful tree-lined streets and gardens.  The avenues are filled with stores, and with bakery cafés, seemingly on every block.  The city is relaxed and urbane with wonderful weather and a beautiful, endless, beach, like Los Angeles, but much smaller and more intimate.

The men, or some of the men, in Israel are intense and uniquely handsome.  Some are almost biblical, thin, with darkish skin and black hair, fit from the army and with no other pretense.  Israel, for the older gay man, appeared to offer a paradise–lacking the ageist prejudices of New York.

Since I have relatives there, and the weather is better than in New York, a cab driver asked, why I was not living in Tel Aviv?   The welcome is automatic.   I did not have to blend-in or change myself in any way.  I do not have to be observant (most Israelis are not).  I don’t even have to speak Hebrew.  I was welcomed, my right to be there understood, a unique and wonderful feeling, a sense of belonging (as my pool friend M. described it when I returned).  All of this was wonderful, a refuge, and a kind of liberation, although it does not include the Palestinians.

Independence Hall, Tel Aviv

January 16, 2019

Israel is a complex country, not simply because of the contrast and friction between the Israelis and the Palestinians, but also because of the richness of its historical and contemporary Judaism.

Israel’s conquest of the Old City of Jerusalem, in 1967, was an extraordinary event, since the Old City is majority Arab and the site of important Muslim, Christian and Jewish holy sites.  For Israel, it is for the first time the repossession of the remains of its ancient capital and of its Temple, from which the Jews were expelled by the Romans in 70 AD.

the Western Wall, courtesy Dan Lundberg and Wikimedia Commons

While I believe that religion has or should have evolved beyond its origins in time and place, this is not what others believe.  There is an extraordinary triumph in taking back a place to which access has been denied, or severely limited, for two thousand years, and the triumph is both religious and nationalistic. The formerly-limited praying area in front of the Temple’s Western Wall was enlarged after the 1967 war, by demolishing houses and relocating their Muslim occupants.  Now there is a large plaza busy with visitors and worshippers. What is known as the Old City’s Jewish quarter has been rebuilt and expanded, including several religious institutions and the reconstruction of the city’s most significant synagogue which was destroyed by Jordanians.  And while Israeli security carefully protects the integrity and security of the Moslem mosques on the Temple Mount, excavations around its base are uncovering layers of history, including ancient Jewish history, providing religious Jews with additional opportunities to worship in close proximity to the identified location of the Temple’s Holy of Holies.

a new sanctuary, created in excavations adjacent to the Wall

Alone on this second visit, I covered my head, walked onto the plaza and touched the wall.  Even for the liberal, ignorant, Diaspora Jew, it was impossible to feel nothing.

January 13, 2019

Last night I slept off my jet lag with 10 hours in bed, walked it off from my cousin’s apartment to the Old City, and then swam it off at the Jerusalem YMCA.

Jerusalem’s Old City retains its magnificence.  It is surrounded by medieval Ottoman and earlier Herodian walls, set off from their surroundings.  I have never seen a walled city of this importance.  The great commercial cities of Europe shed their walls—and this was never a commercial city.

The walls are surrounded by archeological sites, cemeteries, and plazas, walkways, parks and roads, widened and improved by the Israelis.  The Temple Mount sits high within, on a stone platform of ancient Temple walls.  It has been ornamented for centuries, since the Moslem conquest, by two mosques including the gorgeous Dome of the Rock.  (Despite my love of beauty, I decide to respect traditional Judaism, which does not permit me to visit. )  Mohammed ascended to heaven from the Temple Mount, and my guide tells me that Moslems (some, I later read) do not believe that David and Solomon were Jews or that the Hebrew Temple existed.

The Old City from the Mount of Olives

The Old City retains its holy sites, intertwined with competing narratives, its separate and ancient way of life, its holiness, its craziness, and its mystery.  Its narrow streets and shops cater to residents and pilgrims as they have since the First Temple.  Walking the narrow streets, past holy trinkets and souvenirs, I imagine Jesus walking past the money changers in the old Temple, intent on purifying and elevating Judaism.  Tomorrow I will tour the ancient tunnels under the Wailing Wall and see more of this. Otherwise I’d prefer to avoid the tensions of a place that has been prayed-in for three thousand years and fought-over since 70 AD.  After all we lived here for only a thousand -plus years.  Remembering the tragedy of losing it, we were nevertheless gone for nearly two thousand.

Beginning at some point in the 19^th century, modern Jerusalem, Moslem, Christian and Jewish, grew up around the Old City walls, but it is not up against them.  Outside the walls, we saw or visited relatively poor Arab towns, on and below the Mount of Olives.  We visited important Christian churches and monasteries–where Jesus ascended to heaven (White Russian Orthodox), where Jesus wept for the future destruction of Jerusalem, where Jesus lied down before the crucifixion (Catholic), and where John the Baptist was born (Ein Karem).

An ancient olive tree on the Mount of Olives

Then this weekend I saw the newer city that is Jewish Jerusalem and modern Israel’s capital.  I caught up with a childhood friend, Ilan K., met his family, heard their Hebrew, shared the warmth and familiarity of their family life, and had coffee with a distant Belgian cousin (Renee Ann G.) who settled here in 1971.  I visited new neighborhoods, new shopping centers, and re-imagined, nearby Moslem villages, Ein Karem and Abu Gosh.   Ilan drove me past the Israel Museum, the Holocaust Memorial (Yad Veshem), the Jerusalem Forest,  and the Herzl Memorial.  This city is less ancient,  less mysterious, less crowded, not always beautiful, but more comfortable and appealing.  The tensions and competing claims of the Old City are more distant.  The Arabs are no longer here, or seemingly more integrated into Israeli life.  This may not be the City on a Hill, but it is the refuge of the Jews and of more consequence and importance to me.

Yad Vashem

January 10, 2019

So much has been written about Jerusalem, so my describing the sites is meaningless.  All I can offer here are my observations informed by the knowledge of my guide, Berhanu, an Ethiopian Christian and a close friend of my second cousins, who has studied and lived in Jerusalem since childhood, but is not responsible for my reactions.

I am staying on a narrow lane not too far from Hapalmach Street, formerly a wealthy Arab suburb although the Arab residents left in 1967; the residents are now Jews, and the street names Hebrew.  The buildings are low-rise apartments, built in stone, as is the entire city.  Some of the buildings are new and others were large houses, now converted into apartments, with some stories added, stone over stone, as in the oldest parts of the city.  The neighborhood looks homogeneous and relatively affluent, with here and there interesting shops and small restaurants, an arts cooperative and organic food restaurant in a former leprosy asylum, a wine store with only Israeli wines,  a small café with three tables and breads and pastries, a tired supermarket, lacking a bar of soap, but with salt from the Dead Sea.

My cousins’ aunt owns a long and rectangular ground floor apartment, one room deep, in an old Ottoman house.  The entry is through a gate and a long fenced-in garden, at the rear, with a stone terrace, a lemon tree, a garden shed, path and flowering shrubs.  It was raining when I arrived, and inside, stone walls, a tiled floor, and eclectic fenestration and doors face the greenery.  The aunt, Yocheved, a Zionist now in her 90’s, fought in the 1948 war, lived here for some years, worked for the Anti- Defamation League in New York and has lived, primarily, at 100^th Street and Riverside Drive, for years, just eight blocks south of me.  Her husband was a prominent biblical scholar, and they spent the summers here.  I know her as Judy, who can command a Seder and read complex Hebrew text at the morning service of the  Ansche Chesed synagogue on West End Avenue at 100^th Street.  She is a huge personality and she and her friends, American women,  know the texts as they know Judaism.

Aunt Judy’s garden

Berhanu’s tour of the old city began outside the walls, which date from Herodian times and were built up by the Ottomans.  Our first stop was on Mount Zion, which surprised me, but it was the site of either King David’s first castle or alternatively where he first,  temporarily, placed the tablets and the arc of the covenant.  The main church is German Catholic, built over much earlier ruins. The Christians first focused on this site because of its earlier importance, and because Mary, the mother of Jesus, was linked to earlier Hebrew symbols.  Architecturally, the building resembles Greek Orthodox churches and Greek Orthodox art, which, more than the Roman, inherited the earlier Hebrew aversion to statuary and three-dimensional representation.

Except at limited hours, the Temple Mount is not readily accessible to non-Moslems, a disappointment, as I had read that it is extremely beautiful. The Turkish market, a long vaulted street, lined with shops and stalls and crowds, leads directly to a main entrance to the Mount.  But access is now guarded by Israeli soldiers, who guarantee its security and would allow me no further.  The Jordanians rule from within.

The Dome of the Rock (691 AD), built on the even more ancient Temple Mount    (500-1000 BC) and photographed from the Mount of Olives.  Grave stones in the foreground

the Turkish market

The plaza in front of the mount’s Western Wall (the focus of Jewish prayer), is protected by security personnel and scanners, but otherwise it is easily accessible.  The Israeli military has a presence just above it, and military induction ceremonies are held in front of it.   Close to the wall, men and women, worship in separate zones, with men having about two thirds of it.  The plaza is guarded by young Israeli soldiers shouldering guns.  At this visit, I am unable to feel inspired by the Herodian wall or its later additions.  Perhaps mistakenly, I do not approach or touch the Wall. ( I did that, in 1969, when my father brought me here.)

Walking the streets of the Old City is an intense and ancient experience.  The city feels older and more complex than anything I have seen in Europe—something like the ancient complexity of Rome, an imperfect comparison. The streets of the Moslem section are crowded with shops and people, a warren of narrow, often covered, pedestrian streets shared by Moslem and Jewish visitors.  This is the Middle East, and the city is also a crowded bazaar, with cheap clothing, houseware, and hardware stores, spice shops and food markets, and in the less crowded Christian section, store after store of religious objects and art.  People live here in tight conditions, even in this relatively quiet post-Christmas season.  Hostility is unpredictable and there is no easy escape.

The Church of the Holy Sepulchre is where the mother of the first Christian emperor, Constantine, found the true cross and the burial tomb of Jesus.  We enter from crowded streets through small chapels controlled by Ethiopian (and therefore African) orthodox clergy.  They sing and worship in an ancient semitic language, and the two chapels each reproduces the ancient Temple’s Holy of Holies, a small room with an Ark of the Covenant and tablets within.  The Ethiopian Orthodox Church is said to date from 43 AD, belying the ancient presumptions of Christian Europe.

The Church of the Holy Sepulchre

The main church is shared by the Greek Orthodox and Catholic, and to a lesser degree Armenian, churches, all struggling for relative control and the primacy or legitimacy of their various theological interpretations.  The church is gorgeous and ancient and strangely intimate, with a long line of pilgrims waiting to enter Christ’s Byzantine tomb, all standing beneath the dome of its grand Crusader chapel.

This is a city that is a living place, much more than a series of churches and museums. It has been worshipped and fought over, but it is the latter, the struggles for power, identity and theological interpretation, that I am feeling everywhere.  The struggle is very ancient, so much older than we commonly reference, of religions and sects fighting for legitimacy, as defined by control, or asserting control or re-asserting control of holy and previously holy places.  I am fascinated to see it but recoil from associating with it.

Let’s give these ancient sites to those who define their beliefs by control of them. I see nothing in it but pain and grief.  Judaism survived and evolved for two thousand years without Jerusalem, although Judaism brings me here again as I seek to redefine my relationship with it.  I need Israel, but perhaps I do not need ownership of this old city or control of it.  I want to honor it, but I do not want to repeat the past and fight over it, even if others would inevitably and again, deny me access to it.  In my view, and perhaps that of others, we created what underlies it and can be proud and honored by what arose from it.  We no longer need to control it to define us.

My trip to Israel began at my building at 108^th Street and Riverside Drive.  I had plenty of time before the 6:30 pm flight so took the subway:  first the #1 train to the B at 59^th Street, then a change to the E at 7^th Avenue, and finally the JFK Air Train at Sutphin Boulevard.   All typically New York so far, with many different types of people including a young couple from Moscow on the E—all in a system that moves quickly but cannot be described as clean or attractive, excepting perhaps the Air-Train.  It was midday, and not too crowded, and I had a nice conversation with an MTA employee who clarified my transfers.   Then at Kennedy’s Terminal 4, a helpful young woman, directing passengers, told me that that I was too early for El Al check-in and placed me at the beginning of what became a long passenger waiting line.

The crowd was eclectic—a number of older American couples traveling to the Holy Land, by their look Christians, mostly white some black from the continent’s interior—and a number of Israelis. I had a pleasant conversation with an older Israeli  who was directly behind me.  She frequently visits her son and grandchildren in Cleveland and was on her way home.  The food she said is not good in Cleveland, so she did a lot of cooking, but her grandchildren are learning Hebrew as their mother is a Hebrew teacher.  She is round, casually but carefully dressed, with hair too-perfectly-set against an elderly face, and she is warm and genuine.  Her antecedents were from both Europe and Syria, an unusual blending for Jews in the United States.

When El Al is ready,  I am the first to line up at one of the small standing desks for interviews, and a young Israeli woman asks me a number of security questions:

Why are you visiting?   I’m seeing friends and cousins.

Do you belong to a congregation?   No

Do you celebrate the holidays?   Passover, with a shrug that indicated some of the time.

What are your cousins’ names?    These were given.

Do you have any plans to visit the surrounding countries?  No.   Have you visited the surrounding countries?  No

Do you know anyone in the surrounding countries?   I have a Palestinian American friend who visits her family in Jordan.  How often do you see her?   Every few months.  When did you most recently see her?  A few weeks ago.

And then the usual . . . but with the explicit reference to protecting against explosives—did you pack your own luggage?  Yes.  Did anyone else give you anything else to carry?   No

All very friendly, but she spoke clearly and with authority.   She then walked me over to the ticket agent,  an American, and waited a few moments while the agent began to check me in.  The ticketing, but not the security, is delegated to local ground staff.

At the gate I was early, so it was quiet for a while, but soon there was an animated and interactive crowd that was surprisingly religious, including Americans and Israelis.  At about 5 o’clock a number of men, seemingly unrelated to each other, some in kipa, others in the black suits and fedora of the more orthodox, gathered to face a large east-facing window, praying, with a series of shallow bows known as davening.  I had seen this before, but now I was moved, among Jews and in Israel, well before boarding.

courtesy Wikimedia Commons

On the plane, a  young American mother with a baby and her sister asked me to switch seats with a third young woman behind me, so that they would not be sitting next to a man.  She later found an empty aisle seat, elsewhere on the plane and then asked the third young woman to move to that seat, so that she and her sister could better manage the baby.

The mother was friendly, not insistent, but without embarrassment for these requests.  Her daughter, reddish-blond, round faced, and two years old, was charming, happy and interactive.  The mother entered the plane with her head uncovered, but later put on a head scarf. Her sister, perhaps twenty, was very beautiful–in her face, figure, movement and extraordinary golden hair.  Her modest clothing did not conceal her looks. Meanwhile to my left, two young Israeli men barely said a word and did not get up once, during the entire 10 hour flight.  As is occasionally the case around straight men and beautiful women, I seem to be doing all of the looking.

January 10, 2019 

prayer at the Ben Gurion Airport in Tel Aviv