Every Day is Sunday

We don’t want to get political on this blog, but it turns out that everything about Israel is political.  For example, even the title of this post “Occupied Territories” is political.  We could have called it “Palestine” which most people living in East Jerusalem would prefer because it implies a Palestinian claim of sovereignty over the territory.

Or we could have called it the “Occupied Palestinian Territories.”  This is the term the United Nations and the European Union use, although some Israelis object to this term because they think it disregards legitimate Israeli claims to parts of the West Bank. 

In the end, we settled on “Occupied Territories” because that’s the term the U.S. State Department uses (and also how it was labeled on the map that Avis gave to us when we rented our car in Jerusalem).  This semantic issue gave us some insight into how difficult it will be to broker a peace deal between these parties.

Politics aside, all relevant sides would agree that on our way to Jordan we crossed the “Green Line” from Israel into the West Bank. 

There are many myths about the dangers associated with visiting the West Bank.  We heard, at various times and by various people, that: 

-  you can’t drive your own car into the West Bank (you need a guided tour);

- you need special documents when you cross the Green Line from the West Bank back into Israel; 

-  it could take hours to cross back into Israel because every car is searched; and

- you will be a target if you drive around the West Bank with Israeli license plates on your car. 

Like many of the travel myths we’ve heard on this trip, all of these are false.  The most reliable information we got was from the general manager of our hotel in East Jerusalem who told us we’d have no problem driving in and out.

We began our journey to Bethlehem by driving through the highly controversial West Bank wall (the Israelis call it “security fence” while the Palestinians call it “jidar al-fasl al-unsuri” which means “racial segregation wall).   

The Israeli guard at the checkpoint waived us through and we crossed without incident.  It turns out that Bethlehem looks a lot like the rest of Jerusalem.   

Ironically, we drove from the Jewish homeland into this Islamic territory in order to visit one the oldest continuously operated churches in the world.  The Church of the Nativity in Bethlehem marks the birthplace of JC.

EE:  All week I’ve been touring around synagogues and mosques without a problem.  The one house of worship I get kicked out of is a Catholic Church.  

JW:  If she wasn’t so mad I would have been dying laughing.

EE:  So I’ve been in the church for 15 minutes and this guy comes up to me – he’s a tour guide with a nametag – and he says that I’m not dressed appropriately.  But before I have a chance to say anything he calls over one of the priests and tells the priest that he thinks my shorts are too short.  Am I back in Catholic school??  I definitely would have passed Sister Stella’s “ruler test.” I was wearing backpacker shorts which are just as long (if not longer) down my leg than Jeff’s shorts - which really got me mad. The priest agreed with the tour guide and I got tossed from the Church of the Nativity. 

JW: What I should have done (I found out later) was storm out of the church in solidarity with my woman.  Instead, I found the spot where Jesus was born and took a picture.

JW:  The one mistake we made (Erin doesn’t count the shorts) was not bringing a good map of Bethlehem.  While Erin is going on a tirade about the misogyny of the Catholic Church, I am getting us really lost in the West Bank as the sun going down.  Yikes.  Luckily, everyone we stopped on the side of the road was very nice and they helped us navigate out toward the Israeli side.

It was an action-packed afternoon and a good segue for our trip from Israel eastward into the heart of the Arab world.

A week before we arrived in Tel Aviv we were sitting in a Jerusalem restaurant enjoying a delicious Kosher meal.  Erin ordered the pasta and asked the waiter to bring her some parmesan cheese.  He shook his head. “If you want parmesan cheese on your pasta,” he said, “you have to go to Sin City.”  We gave him a quizzical look – we need to go to Vegas?  No, he was talking about that crazy, wild, meat-and-dairy mixing city of Tel Aviv.

Right away Tel Aviv lived up to its reputation.  It was late at night when we showed up at our rented apartment only to find that it was four floors above a club. Even on the fourth floor we could feel the baseline of “Hungry Eyes” reverberating in the bedframe.  Who in the world is blowing that much voltage for the Dirty Dancing Soundtrack?  Erin put money that we were sleeping above a gay club.  Jeff went to investigate.  Turned out to be a strip club. 

We couldn’t get over how different Tel Aviv was from Jerusalem.  Dirty dancers were working the pole five floors below, but Erin couldn’t even get a side parmesan cheese with her pasta in Jerusalem.  

At least the room was nice.  It looked like a page out of a Pottery Barn catalogue with a wet bar.  And we didn’t even need to carry a key – all we had to do was enter a 4-digit number in the keypad on every door.  We laughed about how this place would be perfect for strippers to take their clients.  Wait a minute… oh that’s gross.  We moved the next morning.

We found new digs and explored Tel Aviv.  We discovered it’s a very cool city with a gritty feel to it –the kind of place where artists practice their set while they wait for their clothes to dry in the Laundromat. 

Also, you can’t help but love a city where it takes only 20 minutes to walk from the heart of downtown to fabulous beaches.  

We heard that the club Levontin 7 was a cool place to see live music, and so we decided to take our chances and see whatever band was playing that night.  Headlining was an Israeli singer/songwriter named Hadara Levin Areddy who was like a crazy combination of Tom Waits, Joni Mitchell, and Mos Def.  She sat behind the piano sipping wine and playing upbeat folk ballads for her first set, and then for her second set invited a 6”5’ black guy from Lesotho on stage to beat box while she rapped on top of it.  Somehow she managed to pulled it off.

On our last night in the city we met up with Karen, a friend of Tal’s who works in the Peace Players office in Tel Aviv.  Karen and her husband Tomar took us out for dinner and drinks at a real Tel Aviv institution — a bar that doesn’t look like much from the outside but is full of fun and interesting people on the inside. 

We felt like we had met our kindred spirits in Karen and Tomar.  They told us about how they dropped everything to travel the world a few years ago, which included a eight month stint roaming around India on a motorcycle.  We were blown away.  

We got some great tips and recommendations for our own Indian adventure.  To give us an idea about the crazy traffic in India, Karen told us that when she walked out of the train station in Mumbai she said to Tomar, “Wow, this is the biggest parking lot I’ve ever seen.”  It wasn’t until all the cars started inching forward at once did she realize that they were standing in the middle of the street.

All our talk of traveling the world was giving Tomar itchy feet.  He has a great job working for a multi-national corporation but complained that he can never remember where he parked his car at the end of the day because every day is the exact same.  Over Gelato on Ben Yahuda street, we almost convinced them to join us for another round in India.

Tel Aviv was an amazing secular adventure and a perfect way to round out our Israeli experience.

Israel is a land of great religious diversity. After exploring Jeff’s Jewish roots in Tsfat, we made our way to the shores of the Sea of Galilee. Jesus may have walked on water at Galilee, but Erin couldn’t seem to get the water to cooperate. 

Near the Sea of Galilee are the natural hot springs of Hamei Tveria, which are known for their medicinal qualities.

JW: We navigated our way to the hot springs without a map and discovered that the springs were not free and open to the public. The water was actually collected in concrete pools and accessible only after we paid the entrance fee for a spa.  

EE: Alarm bells started to go off when walked into a complex that looked like a run-down YMCA. It wasn’t exactly what I’d pictured when I heard we were going to a natural spring “spa.” 

JW:  The water in the pools looked a little murky, but I figured the murkiness was caused by all the “medicinal qualities” of the water. . . so I jumped right in.

EE:  As we entered the “therapeutic pools” the first thing I noticed was 20 people wading in a luke warm water.  Hmm, is this a therapeutic pool or dirty bath water?  The only thing medicinal was the amount of antibiotics I was going need to kill the fungi acquired at this place.  

JW: We agreed to disagree about the hot springs.

Not too far from the ”natural springs” was the pure and holy water of the Jordan River - the very place JC was baptized by John.  It wasn’t clear whether we needed a ticket to enter the baptismal site, so we may or may not have snuck into one of the most holy places in the Christian religion.

EE: Feeling a bit dirty from the “natural hot springs” and a bit guilty (damn that catholic guilt) about walking through the entrance gate in the middle of a huge group of Nigerian tourists, I ran for the holy water to cleanse my body and soul.

JW: I wasn’t sure about following Erin into the water, especially because I didn’t have one of those cool white baptismal sheets that everyone else was wearing.  But Erin was pretty persuasive…

EE:  I reminded Jeff that Jesus was a Jew and told him to get his tukas in the water. I read from the Torah on Friday, it was only fair that I get to baptize him on Sunday.

And just when we thought we couldn’t possibly pack any more religion into the day, we stumbled across the beautiful Baha’i Shrine and Temple in Haifa. 

It turns out that Haifa is the world center of the Baha’i religion, a relatively new religion founded in Iran in 1844.  As travelers making our way across the globe, we especially liked the Baha’i central message: humanity is one single race and the time has come for humanity’s unification into one global society.  They had some pretty cool gardens, too.

Our day of religious pilgrimage ended, appropriately enough, with a visit to Gad.  We dropped in on our old friend from Antarctica for some wonderful homegrown tea and conversation. 

We updated him about our travels and itinerary, and he told us about some of his own adventures.  We got really jealous when Gad told us about the time he was stationed in Dahab as an soldier in the Israeli army (when Israel still controlled the Sinai Peninsula) and how he bought his own scuba equipment so he could dive every day.   

After a long day and many different religious sites, we said goodbye to our hosts and started our long drive down the coast to Sin City (aka Tel Aviv). 

For months Erin has dubbed this leg our trip as her “birthright trip.”  After only a few days in the homeland, she was telling Jeff to “stop kvetching,” to “rest his keppe” and to get his “tuchas into bed.”  Eager to celebrate all things Israeli we made our way to Tsfat, an ancient religious town and center for Jewish Kabbalah.

We asked a local what people do in Tsfat on a Friday night and he told us that the entire town shuts down for Shabbat.  He suggested we attend services with him that night at the Beirav Synagogue.  We thought it was a great idea – so we set out to buy Jeff the appropriate headgear for his first Friday night service in more than 15 years. 

A Rare Sight

In addition to being the center for Kabbalah, Tsfat is also an art center with a thriving artist colony.  We poked our heads into a few workshops and even bought our first major piece of art on the trip.

After a day of wandering around art galleries and trying on yarmulkes, we needed a break from shopping so we stopped into a local cheese shop – Erin was in heaven after months on the African continent without cheese.  We weren’t in a hurry so we just sat in the shop eating cheese and talking with the shop’s owners.  After a while, the owner’s son asked if we were planning on taking a Mikvah because he needed a ride out there.  We had no idea what a Mikvah was or where it was located, but we said we’d be happy to give him a ride.

On our drive out to the Mikvah site, our friend explained that a mikvah (literally “collection of water”) is a pool of natural water.  Men and women immerse themselves in the Mikvah just before the Sabbath to restore their spiritual purity.  Unfortunately there were a number of other men at the Mikvah site and so Erin wasn’t able to participate. 

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Jeff:  We climbed up a steep hill to a concrete structure built into the ground that collected water from a small waterfall.  There were 10-12 men at the site who were either waiting to get into the pool or who had just exited.  There was room for about four people in the pool at a time, but the men were entering one at a time. 

Nobody was speaking and so I just followed my friend’s lead by disrobing and waiting for my turn.  Following the same process as the other men, I entered the pool and dipped my head forward so I was submerged completely in the water.  I dunked myself three times (kind of like a reverse baptism) before getting to my feet, throwing water on my body and leaving the pool.  I didn’t have a towel, and so like centuries of Israelis before me, I moved to a sunny spot and let the sun do its work.  I don’t know whether the mikvah cleansed my spirit, but I felt calm and renewed as I breathed the clean air and looked out over the serene hills of the Galilee.

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After Jeff’s Mikvah we were definitely ready for Friday night services.  Our local friend wasn’t joking about the town shutting down.  There wasn’t a car on the road or a single shop open for business.  We walked through the quiet streets to the Beirav Synagogue. 

Although Beirav is one of the new synagogues in Tsfat, it is probably the most popular.  Luckily we arrived early because the crowd quickly overflowed into the street.  The synagogue isn’t affiliated with one stream of Judaism and so the room was filled with ultra orthodox, Hassidim, and secular Israelis.  After a few opening prayers, the service turned festive.  The rabbi led everyone in lively singing and the men danced around the room in a series of tight circles.  The service was very fun – the only unfortunate thing was that they separated the men and women by a partition and a curtain and so we couldn’t enjoy the experience together. 

It had been a long day and we decided to head back after services.  Our Israeli friend Gad (see Antarctica) graciously invited us to spend a few days at a flat he owned in Tsfat.  After some confusion about the address (and a lot of knocking on strangers’ doors at 11 pm), we collected the key from a neighbor and settled into our new digs.  Gad had just sold the flat (the closing was in a few days) and so the place was sparse, but it was exactly what we needed for a few days and at the right price.

We had no plan for Jerusalem.  When our bus pulled into the station, the only things we wanted to accomplish on our first night was to buy a guidebook and find some Matzah Ball soup.  This magical city had other ideas.  Within two hours we found ourselves standing within the walls of the Old City in a sea of sparkling lights.

It all started when we decided to book the cheapest hostel in Jerusalem.  Coming from Dahab (where our awesome hostel cost a whopping $20 a night), it was quite a shock to see that the worst hostels in Jerusalem start at $100 per night.  Just when we were beginning to give up hope, we saw that Trip Advisor’s #2 hotel in all of Jerusalem was available for just $40 USD per day.  It seemed too good to be true, but the Trip Advisor reviews were so favorable we decided to take the chance.

We should have known something was up when none of the taxi drivers at the bus station seemed to know the hotel.  When we finally found a cab driver to take us there, we discovered that the hostel was in East Jerusalem – the Palestinian section of city. 

Erin:  As we stood in middle of our sparsely decorated room in East Jerusalem, my first thought was: Should we move?  But before I could even pose the question, the hotel’s manager knocked at our door to deliver a full bowl of fruit and two cups of deliciously rich chocolate ice-cream.  I’ve stayed in a lot of hotels on this trip, but none knew me well enough to deliver ice cream to my door upon arrival.  We had to give the place a chance…

Jeff: This wasn’t exactly where I thought we’d spend our first night in the Jewish homeland.  But everyone at the hotel was very nice and I thought it would be interesting to see the city from a different perspective.

When we ventured into our neighborhood to find some food it felt like we were still in Egypt.  The women wore headscarves, the men looked Egyptian, and all of the signs for the shops and restaurants were in Arabic.  Our chances of finding some Kosher food for dinner fell from slim to none.

Thinking we’d have better luck in West Jerusalem, we started to make our way down past the Old City when we noticed the lights.   

As we got closer, we found ourselves swept into a sea of people all making their way to the gates of the Old City.  It was the first night of the “Light in Jerusalem” festival.  Typically empty at night, the Old City was teeming with people and electricity.

We thought it was exceedingly nice (and truly unnecessary) for them to organize a festival just to celebrate our arrival in the city.  We were a little tired but we thought it would be rude if we didn’t stop and enjoy the festivities they had prepared especially for us.  We spent a few hours enjoying the beautifully lit landscapes and art installations. 

We returned to the Old Quarter the next day to see the place in an entirely different light.  Thursday is “Bar Mitzvah” day at the Western Wall and witnessed several festive comings-of-age.

In addition to being the homeland for Jews, Jerusalem is also an important site in the history of the Christian religion.  We saw where Jesus Christ was born, where he was condemned, where he received the cross, where he died, and where he ascended into heaven. 

Church of the Holy Sepulchre - Site of Jesus' Crucifixion

According to our guidebook, most historians and archeologists agree that many of these revered sites were probably located in a different part of Jerusalem.  We decided not to let a little science get in the way of our Christian pilgrimage through the old city.

Although Jerusalem doesn’t feature prominently in Islamic religious texts (the city is not mentioned in the Koran), there is a strong historical connection between Islam and Jerusalem.  After Mohammed’s death, his successor (Caliph Omar) captured Jerusalem from the Byzantines in 638 and began constructing Islamic sites in the city.  The most famous is the Dome of the Rock Mosque, which was later claimed to be the site that Mohammad visited in a dream before his death.  Various Islamic dynasties based in Syria, Turkey and Egypt controlled Jerusalem for the next 1,300 years and re-built the beautiful mosque several times.

Unfortunately, Jerusalem’s rich historical and religious history is the very thing that tears the city apart.  There is an anxious energy that lies just below the surface of the city, most likely fueled by the strong presence of Israeli army soldiers and by the Palestinian flags that adorn many buildings in the east side of the city.

At first we were apprehensive about staying in the Palestinian section of the city, but in the end we were very glad for the experience.  Jerusalem is a city divided, but it is also integrated in important ways.  We met two of our neighbors who describe themselves as Palestinians but who are students at the Hebrew University and take all their classes in Hebrew.  They went out of their way to help us – giving us a ride in their car, showing us around the University, and helping us navigate the bus system.

Although most of the Palestinians we met in our neighborhood were great, we met others who clearly carried around a lot of anger with them.  One afternoon we hailed a taxi driven by a Palestinian man.  Instead of starting his meter, he began to negotiate a fare for our ride.  We explained we didn’t want to negotiate and told him to either start his meter or let us out.  He didn’t let us out, but he didn’t start his meter either. 

This should have been a routine argument with a taxi driver (we’ve had many in Washington DC and on this trip), but our driver quickly lost his temper.  The situation escalated into a shouting match and then a physical struggle as he tried to prevent Jeff from getting out of the car at a stoplight.  Once we were safely out of the car, he cursed at us and at our country and threw his coffee at us.  Luckily the coffee was cold and he only managed to hit Jeff’s leg.

As we stood on the side of the road in East Jerusalem trying to regain our composure and wiping the coffee of Jeff’s leg, we tried to process exactly what just happened. This may have been an isolated incident by one disgruntled cab driver. But this confrontation could also speak to the resentment that lies just under the surface in Jerusalem. We’re not sure but the tension in Jerusalem is so thick it’s almost palatable.

We decided to cheer ourselves up with a trip to Ben Yehuda street, the pedestrian downtown area in the middle of the west Jerusalem.  We ordered a falafel and some pizza from the street vendors, and had one of the most memorable meals of this trip while sitting on a bench in the middle of the street.  The falafels were incredible and the pizza was as good as anything you can get on the east side of Manhattan. 

Jerusalem was a great introduction to our Israel trip.  We decided to rent a car and set out to explore the rest of this beautiful and controversial country on our own.