Traveling the right way (if there is one)

            Travel is an interesting concept if you think about it.  It makes it easier to scatter a family around the world, and still remain as one.  To make new friends from different cultures and languages and meet them with understanding instead of pain and violence.  To go, go, go until you’ve seen everything your heart could desire and then search for more, because there’s always going to be more. 

            People spend thousands of dollars to fly across the world, and travel around and see ruins of what once was.  And like I said before, how do we even know that it was this spot that mattered?  And after millions of tourists have trod all over it, how can it still matter?  I mean, the Chapel of the Ascension on the Mount of Olives in Jerusalem is believed to be where Jesus ascended to heaven.  But, what if you don’t believe that happened?  Then what really happened in that church?  And if you do believe that it happened, how can you be sure of where?  How can anything be certain? 

            Yet, it does matter.  It attracts tourists from all over the world, coming to see a spot that someone deemed to be important.  Trying to grasp an image of what life was thousands of years ago, but is the interpretation correct?  Is there anything similar about the ground we walk on now and the ground they walked on three thousand years ago? 

        Tourists, boarding on and off a bus, observing the past in a way the people of the past probably would never understand.  Capturing photographs of sites that were built a thousand generations before photography was a thing.  Subject to opening and closing hours, subject to safety and violence, subject to when the tour companies offer the place you want to go, or your ability to figure it out yourself. 

            And yet, somehow, I’m starting to realize from being here that tourism is founded on more than the sites (or the food).  It’s the people you meet along the way and the stories they tell (okay, that’s incredibly cliché). 

Hot chili Halva?  What?  Well this would be adventurous…
but I'm not looking to go bankrupt on Halva this week.  

We are one hundred percent making circular
Challah when  I get back home.  

    

            I spent this past weekend in Jerusalem and yeah, I enjoyed getting candy, nuts, dried fruit and Baklava in the Machane Yehuda Market and seeing some sites on the Mount of Olives (unfortunately didn’t get a picture, but the Jewish cemetery is awesome.  There are more than 70,000 graves on that hillside).  But, the best part was all the conversations I had with travellers and locals alike. 

            After finally catching a sherut to Jerusalem (after getting boxed off the first one by a bunch of overeager Israelisà limited number of seats = fight, fight) and meeting Isa and Tami for dinner (yes, it was good despite the olives spread thinly across my sandwich J), I checked into the hostel. 

            I sat down with my laptop in the common area on Thursday night around 9:30, but never got past entering the Wifi password before I struck up conversation with the guy across from me (An American about my age on an around the world trip) and talked straight through to midnight.  Comparing notes on the experience of seeing the world, of seeing Israel.  He was just kind of winging it as he went, spending time with friends he met around the way.  He travelled through Iran and Lebanon, volunteered at a hostel for a month in the West Bank (Ramallah), then was planning to take some time to chill out in Tel Aviv and get some work done for his online business, before heading onto Egypt.

            Essentially, I came across a lot of interesting stories over the weekend, and I won’t bore you with all the details, but it was a collection of people from different countries, different religions on intertwining journeys.  I mean, it’s Jerusalem, so you have the very religious Christians, the very religious Jews, the completely secular (but interested in humanity) tourists, and everything in between. 

            A few noteworthy examples: The American couple on a weekend getaway from their new home in Kuwait, the Dutch soldier on a quick trip to check out Israel, the massive group of American med students on a rotation in Haifa for a month (who remarked that in the United States, most attendings wouldn’t give them the time of day but in Israel, they’re all sitting eating pastries together), the forest ranger from Alberta using his three months off to see as many biblical sites as possible, the nineteen year old from Manitoba taking some time on a kibbutz to figure out his life (and not missing an eye opening opportunity to compare costs of living and salaries between his nation and those of his newfound South American and Chinese friends) or the Argentinan rediscovering his Jewish heritage (after his family got swept up by the Catholicism of his country) by volunteering on a kibbutz outside of Beersheeba…

            I capped the weekend off with hot apple cider (they put a cinnamon stick and freshly cut apple in it here; it’s remarkably delicious) and an egg/tuna sandwich with some of my new friends.  Nick’s the forest ranger from Canada, Alex works on an apple orchard in Illinois (he was shocked by the presentation of his cider) and Alejandra is Argentinan but has lived in Jaffa (south of Tel Aviv) for eight years now.  The guys walked Alejandra and I back to the Sherut stop, none of us ready for the weekend and the conversations to end, and Alejandra told me about moving to Israel, learning Hebrew and volunteering at an orphanage in Bethlehem on the weekends. 

            There’s a child there that she’s grown to love as her own, but the reality is the Palestinians would never let one of their children be adopted by a non-Muslim.  The irony though is that most Palestinians wouldn’t want any of the children in this orphanage (they have disabilities like Down Syndrome). 

            Israel and the West Bank cover 8,000 square miles, together slightly larger than New Jersey, and yet there is a massive dichotomy between the two.  In Israel, mentally disabled adults can serve in the Army.  In Palestine, only 5 of 20 kids in that Bethlehem orphanage are “true” orphans.  The rest have families who either don’t want them or can’t take care of them.  People who are either too ashamed or too poor to handle them.  I’m not saying it’s any different in the United States or in Israel, but I think the stigma of it has definitely faded more in more developed countries.  And that might just be because it’s so much harder to afford associated medical care and other costs in such places. 

            Two sides of a dividing line, with both sides thinking that they’re right and the other is wrong, but with entirely different perspectives of how to run the show.  Does that come from poverty?  Or anger over their treatment? 

            How come the country accepts that these children go to Church every Sunday living in a Catholic orphanage but wouldn’t allow them to leave Palestine for a better life?  Is it fair of me to say that their lives would be better outside of Palestine when I’m talking about an orphanage I’ve never been to, never seen, a culture I am an outsider to? 

              Will that ever change?  Can it change?  

            I think it was Isa who once told me that the Palestinians were considered second class citizens in the Arab world.  And yet, the world still preferred it when Jordan annexed Palestine, not Israel. 

            I talk to a coworker as we prepare to head out.  He’s about to head home on his motorcycle to the settlement he lives on in the West Bank.  I'm here in Israel too… but I board the train bound straight up the coast of the Mediterranean to Herzliya. 

            So many tourists I have met have their opinions about what should be done in Israel, in Palestine, and so do the people who reside there, but what I’m ultimately struck by, are volunteers like Alejandra, who spend every weekend (from Thursday night through Saturday night) away from home trying to give these kids a semblance of a better life, building relationships with them, coming to love them. 

A tale that shouldn’t be speckled with politics, a life that should be allowed—a child loving someone who could be his mother, a woman wanting to fight for a child, but being blatantly aware that it’s not a battle to be won. 

But, the politics are there.  The threat is always there.  None of us ever really know when (or if) the threat will come down on us.  But, it’s an omnipresent cloud, the expectation that the bubble holding everything together will burst eventually, in the way it has so many times before, the expectation that things will change again, more than they have before, a promise that the myriad of civilizations that have belonged in this world will continue, ever changing, always moving forward, onto a new world. 

            And maybe the bubble will burst and things will change for the better.  Maybe the bubble won’t burst.  Maybe that’s our fears and our anxieties talking, us listening too much to the news that paints Israeli in a dangerous light, even though as Americans, we should probably be looking harder at the safety of the cities that we grew up in, that we will be raising our children in.  

            Maybe appreciation comes in many forms too.  Appreciation for what we have, for the stability Israel has been able to achieve, the way the Palestinians have begun to work in the Israeli world, the way the world has changed over the years and yet still managed to encapsulate and display the past. 

            I don’t know to be honest.  I’m just an American looking at the whole argument from the outside, not far from the borders of the West Bank but not inside either.  And maybe that’s a lesson in reality.  If we’re all just looking at the world from the outside, how do we decide when to step in? 

            Catch you later. 

            Thanks.