Out and About

Upon release from Bidud captivity, our first destination was clearly going to be Raanana, where my sister lives. Now this trip normally would be easy–we would just get in the car and go. Except we don’t quite yet have a car.

During Bidud, we’d done great work at finding a family-appropriate car. My husband, under threat of another minivan, selected a make and model, as there aren’t so many non-minivan 7 seaters that comfortably fit a 6’4″ driver and five children, including two 6’2″ boys, in the back seat.

Once my husband had decided on a Datzia Lodgy (because hey, why not get a strange Romanian car no one has ever heard of), my friend and former squash coach Ari did all the heavy lifting. He checked out different available cars on Yad2.co.il (2nd hand market like Craig’s List in Israel), went and visited the cars and their owners, talked with his mechanic and his neighbor who sells cars, gave us sage advice from his experts on whether we should buy gas or diesel, and ultimately found a lovely guy named Yoav who was selling the car we wanted to buy. Yoav and Ari had a glass of wine in Yoav’s house, and Ari seemed convinced that Yoav was a prince and this was our new baby. Yoav let Ari take the car to Ari’s mechanic and it checked out great. All of this happened while I was in quarantine, and the day before my release, Ari and his father fetched the car from Ramat Hasharon and brought it to Raanana.

Now, in order to fetch the car and reunite with family, the Corona dilemma of which was the least risky mode of transport to Ranaana was upon us. Should we use an app to call a cab, or take a bus or a train, or use Waze/Moovit to hitch a ride? After switching back and forth between various ideas multiple times with certain children yelling ever more loudly, ‘can we just go already???!!!’ we opted for a cab, which pulled up within a minute or two of being summoned. Masks on. Windows down. Haven’t been in a cab in what, five months? But sometimes you just gotta get somewhere. So we took a deep breath (under our masks), opened the doors, and buckled in for the hour long ride.

We left Jerusalem out the back way. Our street, which on a clear day offers a view all the way to the Dead Sea, is appropriately named Yam Hamelach (The Dead Sea). Within minutes we are just outside of the Southern edge of Jerusalem, and the houses have faded away. There is a lone monastery from centuries ago on the side of the highway. We see signs to Kever Rachel, the grave of the matriarch Rachel. “Rachel, you know, Rachel” shares our cab driver. “Who died giving birth to Benjamin.” He mentions it casually, as if speaking about something that happened in his own lifetime and not in the Bible. “And this way is Bethlehem, just over the hill.” Ah yes, Bethlehem. I’ve heard of it.

I look out the window. Olive trees. Terraced hills. Square apartment buildings. Mosques. I feel tears well up in my eyes, and some deep sense of simulatanous hunger and satisfaction. I remember writing about this feeling in my blog from our first stint in Israel 2015-2017. It’s a sort of deep, lusty, literal sensation in my chest. My being–whatever part of the universe is lodged within this particular body–is so happy to back in the Land.

As I am tearing up and waxing poetic, we come to a checkpoint. We speed through. I nod at the female soldier waving us through. I have been through this check point so many times that it seems normal. It’s not normal in America, of course. But here, well…it is normal.

We speed past the gas station with the restaurant with amazing food. This is a big thing in Israel, gas station fancy restaurants. I smile, remembering meals of years past. And then we pass Modi’in, modern metropolis, and site of Hanukkah story. And Neot Kedumim, the Biblical landscape museum. And within minutes we are now past the airport, and approaching Tel Aviv. I see the Tel Aviv skyline in the distance, skyscraper after skyscraper. And then we are driving alongside B’nai Brak, with billboards for Chabad on the highway walls, followed by a run down Coca-Cola factory. Rochniut and gashmiut, the spiritual world and the material world, crowded side by side. The neighborhood is dirty. Multiple water heaters crowd roof after roof of tired stucco buildings. And then, before I have too much time to reflect on the relationship between poverty and religion, apartment buildings have been replaced by orchards, on both sides of the highway. Lush, fertile land. Round bulbous trees, neatly planted in row after row after row, with brightly colored speckles of fruit.

After just a few minutes enjoying the views of the soothing orchards, the midsize office buildings that cleave through Raanana-Kfar Saba sprout up from the orchards. Each building has the name of its hi-tech anchor tenant written in chunky English letters on the top floor of the office building. Hundreds of gleaming emerald windows sparkle in the sun.

During the ride, the three children with me have been peppering me with questions. Remember when we went to the bottom of Israel, where Egypt and Israel touch? Remember when we went to the cafe in the clouds, at the very tippy top of the country, and we looked out on Syria? Remember all the fun things we did with Garin Broccoli (our Berkeley friends who were with us in Israel the first year)?

Talia, 7, is now really in story mode, and she goes into a full press for all her favorites. Tell me the story of when you met Daddy! Tell me the story of when you were my age and you stole a pack of gum but couldn’t eat it because you felt too guilty! Tell me the story of trying to cross the street in Cairo! Tell me the story of trying to cross the street in India, with the cows and the carts and cars and the trucks and cycle things (rickshaws) in the way!

And as we approach Raanana, I think about the stories we tell ourselves. The story of Rachel Imeinu, dying on the road. The story of baby Jesus, born in Bethlehem. The story of checkpoints. The story of Modiin and Hanukkah. The story of the new Jews of Tel Aviv, and the old Jews of B’nai Brak, and the new Jews of the orchards of the moshavim and kibbutzim, and the 21st century office parks being built in those very fields as part of the Start-up nation.

So many stories here. Time itself feels like layers of an archeological dig. We stack memory upon memory, personal memories and national memories upon the same small territory, layer upon layer, Jewish and non-Jewish, congruous and convergent, all ever present.

Now this multilayered view of time has been baked into Jewish life, even in the Diaspora. We are always living within a specific moment of the Bible, and learning Torah that we written as a dialogue between scholars from the 1st to 12th century, and then throwing in holidays like Yom Shoah and Yom Hatzmaut that give events of the past century the same national significance of holidays that Jews have celebrated with more or less the same rituals for at least 2,000 years.

But here, memory lives not just in inter-textual books, but in the agricultural cycles, the architectural ruins, the graves of Patriarchs, Matriarchs and sages of centuries past, and most of all, in the physical landscape itself.

Before I know it, we’ve arrived at my sister’s. Kids pile out of our taxi. My nephews and sister and brother-in-law greet us warmly. We raid their kitchen, of course, and then walk down to the local bakery for bourekas and rugelach and coke zero.

After two weeks in captivity, it all just feels good. Good good good. The sun feels good. The air feels good. The cousin love feels good.

The kids head out on adventures, leaving me a quiet and empty house, save the dog. I smile ruefully. I know it’s a cliche, to those who live here, but sometimes you just gotta say it….only in Israel.