Israel 2015, Part 1 -- Modi'in and Jerusalem

For Yeshiva Break this year we went to Israel. This was my first time since 1994, U.'s first time since about then and ND's first time PERIOD. Why did we go now? It was time to do so. ND felt (though not quite accurately) that she was the only one in her class who had never been. Likewise, we just wanted to go and to have a nice trip there together. Why during such a short vacation? The summer is hot and more expensive, so this is what we've been planning since last summer when we realized we just couldn't pull off a last-minute summer trip.

The last day of school was Wednesday, January 14. We left school at lunchtime. At the airport we saw two Noam families whose children I'd taught, all of us heading out on the same flight. In stereotypical Israeli fashion, instead of just calmly waiting in seats as I usually do on a flight out, we had extra security and then all crammed forwards in a mob as if it we didn't fight to the front we wouldn't get onto the plane at all.

The flight was mostly uneventful. ND and I watched Bears and then tried to go to sleep as it was already nighttime in Israel. Alas, very little luck. It was just too early to sleep. So we pretended to sleep, tried to sleep and dozed about an hour or two before arriving after 10 hours of flying at 9:25 AM on the 15th in Tel Aviv.



Thankfully, we had taken  jet lag into consideration when making our plans and had set aside the weekend to recover. We stayed in Modi'in which is a suburb. It's an area famous for the Macabbees of the Channukah story, but otherwise is not a tourist destination. It was the place where we stayed with friends, visited a mall to exchange cash and get our bearings, and slept. 

I'm glad we had the chance to see what it was like to just live in Israel. It was an education to see our friends whose children go to school 6 days each week, and to hear their Hebrew, to go to the playground with them on Shabbat and to daven in their minyan. It was interesting to see how their living space has changed (and downsized) and to hear about how much traffic there is on their daily commute. These are not the things we normally hear about from people who encourage aliyah, but they are reality and they are worth it for those who decide they no longer want to live outside of Israel. The adjustment sounds like it has been a challenge, but not necessarily more challenging than for us moving from West Coast to NJ.

The weekend was soggy with constant rain, but Sunday everything cleared in time for our excursions to begin. We picked up our rental car and began our first big challenge of finding our way to our first activity by our noon reservation at The Sifting Project. We had budgeted an extra hour to get there and needed every second of it as Waze dutifully tried to protect us from traffic by taking us to very uncomfortable neighborhoods and eventually depositing us at the wrong place. Around the time I was about to completely melt down I remembered I could actually call them for help and they gave me a new address which I have no idea why I hadn't had before from the website. Confusion aside, we finally made it and walked down a beautiful path of olive trees to the site where the activity would take place.

The long tent in the center right of the photo is where the Sifting Project is housed.

The Sifting Project is an archaeological activity. Years ago when a mosque was built near the Temple Mount, the builders, unfortunately, disregarded rules about excavating appropriately and illegally dumped tons of dirt containing archaeological artifacts. For the past 10 years the Sifting Project has brought archaeologists, school kids and tourists together to help go through all the dirt bucketful by bucketful, putting aside findings from all different periods to be analyzed. We ate snacks while listening to instructions and hearing about the kinds of things they've discovered thus far including coins, vessels, dice and so on.

We each got lucky and found things, my personal favorite was a handle of green glass from a vessel of the Second Temple period which I found. ND was thrilled to find a piece of a ceramic oil lamp from the Byzantine period. It actually showed the fingerprint of the person who made it. Since she had just learned about fingerprints in science class she had a great time deciding whether it was a loop, whorl or what.

After our difficult navigational experience to get to the Sifting Project we decided to cut our time a little short because we had a reservation for Kotel Tunnel Tours at 4. So we headed out, found a hotel, and walked to the Kotel in just enough time to have a quick personal experience
before embarking on the tour.

We had sort of understood it before, but the model made much clearer to us exactly what the kotel is, a retaining wall to the mount which used to house the Beit Hamikdash and Kodesh K'doshim. Inside the tunnels we found a particular place where a group of women were davening as close to the Holy of Holies as they could physically get. It made me sad to think that 1. I didn't particularly experience a holy presence there and 2. that so many groups of people find the place holy but can't get along well enough to share it without conflict.

When we had finished the tour and ND and I went once again to daven at the Kotel I started to feel very sad. We had to exit the tunnel tour in the Muslim area and, as a result, were escorted back to the Kotel area.  It made me sad that this precaution was necessary. I felt beneath it the strong fear, hatred and distrust on all sides. Then, when we came to the women's side of the Kotel again, I noticed how that was the side that was furthest from the Kedosh Kedoshim. I remembered an article I'd read recently about a group that had succeeded in reading Torah at a bat mitzvah on the women's side. To do so that they had to use a miniature Torah and read it with a magnifying glass so that they had time to finish before anyone noticed.

That such an empowering thing must be done in secret in order to hide reading the Torah from Jews is heartbreaking. The article made me feel more sad than triumphant that such a measure was necessary when I would like nothing more myself than the opportunity to read Torah, or have ND read Torah when she is ready, in such an important place.

One of the stories of the Temple Mount tells of two brothers helping each other in secret and then embracing on a mountain top when they learned of what each had done for the other. What a far stretch that image is from Jews fighting with others for this holy space, and then even fighting each other over the ability to worship there meaningfully.

I still feel meaning at the Kotel, but it's laced with a lot of other very hot feelings so that I'm not sure what my relationship with it is. My experience there is linked more with empathizing with the prayers others have uttered there, rather than with being in such a charged place itself.