Travel Log #26

January 21, 2010

It has been nearly a month since I wrote a proper update. That being said, this might take awhile. Also, because I have written in abundance just not in Blog abundance, about the relevant topics, I will warn some of you now that some passages may seem quite familiar in this entry and in the next one.

I will begin with the present moment: I am home recovering from an illness caused by heater fumes which left me pretty much incapacitated for the entire week. Today is a big turning point; I made it all the way down the hill to the grocery store and back up again (with the groceries) all by myself. On Monday, I literally couldn't move. Now, I'm making chicken soup solo for the first time in my life and I've made it too salty. Good thing I learn from my mistakes.

Now, I'll back up a little bit because I never really told you about what I learned in the army. (This is one of those parts someone will find familiar.) For one thing, I learned that this part of the world really does get cold; cold and dry. The combination of the cold, dry climate with my endless parachute unknotting, hauling, etc. led to the near total destruction of my hands. No joke. I'm talking cracked skin like desert clay with blood oozing in the cracks. All that good stuff. Hand creams gets absorbed so quickly in these conditions by skin and canvas, you might as well not even have applied it. Then, there was the kitchen duty, which basically entails getting screamed at to do something you're already doing (like squeegying the floor) and spending four hours up to your elbows in a garbage bin filled with dirty dishes in dirty water--which I don't mind so much, except for what it does to my hands. Let's just mention that my army stint has been quite over for a month now, and my hands are still not completely healed.

In any case, I have learned that army food can be eaten in every kind of abundance and everyone will still be hungry because stale bread and rotten fish just don't cut it, that most of what you do in the army is wait around and waste time. Of course, here, it's all a joke in the realm of dark humor because while we're sitting around wasting time, training for 10% of it, the waiting around is waiting for the next war to start, which could be at any moment. But the night guards still get drunk on duty because "hopefully that won't be tonight" and for the other 5% of the time that is neither training nor waiting around, there's a war going on and it shows the nineteen-year-old soldiers too much of what horror is, so they drink it away. Not that it helps. Like I keep saying, if you want to compare a nineteen-year-old American to an Israeli one, you'd think that Israeli one is at least a decade older, so 5% really become 200% when it comes to working memory and what goes on just beneath the surface of their minds. It's combated with the dark humor.

Of course, I wasn't really a soldier, but I and the others on the Sar-El program looked like soldiers when we wore our uniforms, and we seemed like soldiers when we lived in bunkers, on metal cots that poked their wires into us through sheet-thin mattresses so we can hardly sleep. I don't know about anyone else, but I know that despite not really being a a soldier or an Israeli, I've noticed that I've bgun to feel like one a little bit. The reality of it is reflected back at me when I look in the mirror. There's just this look that I can't quite describe, something in the eyes...maybe disillusionment to the utmost extreme, so much that it's taken for granted. It's a societal expression here and the way you can tell a tourist from a resident (in most cases). I know I must have it down pretty solidly because when people figure out that I'm not Israeli, they're surprised.

But, because I'm not Israeli, and because I wasn't really a soldier, although I was in soldier garb, I had more time on my hands than even the wait-around-doing-nothing-time. So, in the army, I read seven books in ten days, and had more than ample time to ponder why the only edible food there are jello, packaged cheese, tea (sometimes), and grits. Don't ask me why there are grits, which clearly only belong south of Mason-Dixon, in the Israeli army.

After the army, I went on vacation and traveled around meeting people for awhile. I went to Jerusalem and met a girl I'll be working with during Part III of OTZMA for the internship, named Mollie, met up with another friend, there, too, then spent the night roaming around the Ben Yehuda Street area until around four in the morning and ran into a girl from camp I haven't seen since the last time I was in Israel. I was beyond exhausted by the end, but happy. It was fun and I met many good, new people. I also spent a day in Haifa checking out the University's English program (explained last time), and Acco with another friend.

I then went on to spend the weekend in צפת (Tzfat) with my חב"ד (Chabad) friend from Worcester. It was great! And beautiful. Since I live in the north now, צפת isn't that far away anymore. There's something very special about the blue, mystical city, the city filled with beautiful views of mountains and purple mist, clear night skies, and golden sunsets. And no angelic voices, but thousands of stars. On ערב שבת (Erev Shabbat), a four-year-old child was lost. Helicopters flew overhead, search parties of black-garbed חסידים (Chasidim) roamed the streets, and cars zoomed by, all searching for the child. Eventually, after about five hours of searching, he was found. In the cemetery.

When I tell people I spent the weekend with חב"ד, I get mainly mixed reactions: "How can you stand it?" and "Oh, honey, good luck". It's true, I can't live like that; I can't believe with such intensity, I need to know; I can't disregard my own personal truths or the feeling deeply rooted in me that tells me that there is so much missing from their lives--God didn't just create the world, He created the whole world. They create an isolated community and that isolation breeds a fear of anyone who is different: Jews who live secular lives; non-Jews hardly exist beyond the idea of the Monster. But, undeniably, these people are happy, despite (and perhaps because of) their ignorance of the wider world. And I can't help admiring them for their faith and envying them their happiness. But I see it as a brainwashed happiness borne on the wings of a blind faith that relies too much on a man-made rendition of God.

I can't disregard Darwinian Theory because it makes sense and there is ample proof supporting it. Might I remind you that, like anything scientific, it's still a theory. But I don't see why it can't go hand-in-hand with the story of Genesis. Every day sees the creation of new worlds, after all. Genesis is an ongoing phenomenon. And carbon dating is no hoax (and neither are the dinosaurs!). But I was told (again, like I was told in the fourth grade) that I need "proof" of these phenomena's legitimacy! They're not in the TORAH!

These people ask for scientific proof and refuse to believe it when it's presented but expect blind faith to be taken as absolutely logical, reasonable, no proof needed. For me, science doesn't disporve God, but rather reinforces the probability of Its existence. Then gain, my conception of "God" varies greatly from the general institutionalized kind and I don't try to understand Its nature. I accept my Humanity and therefore, my inability to comprehend such things. Some things just are, simply or otherwise; and I am content to leave them at that. It is the one instance in which I can separate myself from the need for logical "proof" -- I'm just not going to try and convince anybody.

As you've probably figured out, I buy more into angels than deities anyway, even tough all three of us are indelibly linked across the chasm of Creation. The angels suggest a direction and we discover the way, after all. No need for faith in anything but the Self. In צפת, they were silent but the city was full of them. The air in צפת was so full of angels, of high orders, of lesser orders, that we couldn't help but breathe them in. It is a city where communion with the divine is not considered crazy, but commonplace.

"And when are we not?" Uriel asks.
"Never. But you know Humanity."
The angels laugh. Micha'el answers:
"We know Humanity, yes, with all of its gifts, with all of its blessings and curses, we know you. But as you have the ability to change, you evolve to doubt not only your guides but yourself. There are so precious few of you left who can hear us and trust the counsel. But we are creative and the language of Heaven can be translated into the shade of a tree or the path of a friend, or a stranger. The grand design is not altered although you believe yourselves to be so powerful."

In the end, I know, the crust of the earth will bend and crack and shift, but Humanity will not be a factor. Nature doesn't care about us. But what a world we've made! It is truly extraordinary. I still can't decide whether I love it or hate it but either way, I am a part of it, and I live with it. I suppose life is a love-hate relationship anyway; it all depends on the day and on the way we wish to view it.