Travel offers an escape, while simultaneously pulling us back into a schedule. And while there is so much to see and learn on our historic walking tours and museum visits, it is in the unscheduled, unstructured moments that this week has offered which I have found the most reflective experiences of my time here in Israel. Four moments stand out as particularly poignant because they offer various points of intersection upon which to compare, contrast, and process the many layers of Israeli society.
One evening in Karmiel, outside the Children’s Village, we visited a lovely family who hosted us in their home. As a reform JewIsh woman, the mother grew up in Baltimore and made aliya in her early twenties when she met her husband, an Orthodox Jewish man whose family came to Israel from Tunisia in the early 1950s. They had three boys who are both Israeli and American citizens, and who grew up spending summers on the mid-Atlantic coast with family. The oldest boy travels the world, the middle son has a young family in Israel, and the youngest was accepted to do pre-military service starting in the fall. We ate lasagna and couscous with citrus sauce while talking about the Baltimore Ravens, social services, the son’s recent science project–a solar lightbulb, and recent news in the West Bank. It seemed they were not eager for us to leave and we were not ready to go when the night was over.
The gentle rhythm of Jerusalem’s Muslim Quarter hums with trade and children playing, while the bright textiles and smells of coffee, nargilah, and spices flood the street. Vendors call out to you to look at their wares and, if you do, you’ll make a friend. Mousa runs a ceramic shop. He showed us the hand drawn sketches in colored pencil that were his own designs–but those were only two of the patterns, he said. Most of what we saw were made by his family in Hebron, in the West Bank. He is a Palestinian with a residency card, he explained, so he is able to go back and forth across the border; but his family in Hebron cannot come to Jerusalem to visit him and his father. But they all run the shop together. We bartered; we bought.
On Friday night Sabbath, I visited the Western Wall and observed secular Jewish teens dancing joyously together singing praise for Shabbat, and Orthodox people of many cultures praying in the gender-divided sections close to the wall. As I leaned upon the wall and placed my hands and head to the warm Jerusalem stone, the girl next to me started to sing in a language I did not recognize, but sounded Eastern European. At dusk, as we ascended the hill to look down on the wall, the Muslim call to prayer began and echoed over the old city. As it did, the Hebrew prayers continued to lift above the crowds and the cool night breeze floated them up to us, above. The next morning, bells from the Church of the Holy Sepulcher rang out over the city, reverberating on these same Jerusalem stones.
In our time at the Israeli Museum, we took a break from antiquities to enjoy some contemporary art installations. We went into Big Bambu, a huge outdoor structure of bamboo with stairs cases, cushioned seats, and hammocks. Inside the museum, after a brief visit to the sarcophagi and history of Jewish dress exhibits, we spent some meditative time in rooms of light. The temperatures changed in some rooms, while others felt misty; one room was full of pink light while another had a small rectangle of green in an otherwise black room. It was not just the experience inside that was affecting but the act of leaving the room was dually–if not more– transformative. After leaving the pink light, I entered what was once a white hallway but, now, appeared to be light blue. I imagine that experiences in our own life and travel can be this way; we immerse ourselves and absorb the perspective, only to see things– things we once experienced with reliability– differently, finding that we see them in a whole new light.
In these meditative pauses, I am most able to see the micro and the macro at once. I walk away with stories of innovation, beginnings, entrepreneurialism, and humanity. My senses are flooded. I gain context. I reflect.
This post was originally posted at my travel blog Israel 2014: an Educator’s Study Tour