Lights (High and Otherwise) of a Long Trip

June 22

This was the first full day at E. and T.'s. They have given over their brand new apartment to us while they go sleep at M. and M.'s place. We drove through some of the West Bank on the way to Jerusalem today. And the wire fences reminded me of apartheid in South Africa. And then, sitting later on the balcony, it reminded me of what was done to the Jews themselves in the ghettos and in the concentration camps. We wandered the corridors of the souks in the old city where three great religions’s icons can be found next to – or at least in the next stalls to – Montreal Canadiens T-shirts with Hebrew lettering. I continue to feel better, although jet lag last night had me wondering if that was so. I have learned some things I didn’t know – the difference between Yiddish and Hebrew, the precise locations of the West Bank and the Gaza Strip. Not feeling at all religious these days, the old city of Jerusalem, the Western Wall, the Church of the Sepulchure, the Dome of the Rock gave me no sense of the presence of God. Instead, it left me bemused at the centuries of fervor, and mostly feeling slightly depressed, hugely jet lagged, and very happy that I had not chosen to be a Middle East specialist in the FS. Tonight, walking down to the Mediterranean, Tel Aviv felt like Miami and Havana.

June 28

At the villa outside Florence. Doing nothing this afternoon but lying around or sitting around and listening to the birds chirp. In the rest of the time in Tel Aviv, we went to Caesaria, a city built by King Herod to please the Romans, and to make a deep water port. This he did very well and the city flourished for some time. Then the old story – attacked, destroyed, rebuilt, another period of prosperity, and then finally overthrown by the Muslims and then abandoned for 700 years until Baron de Rothchild purchased it, I think, and set about – with help of Balkan refugees – to excavate and restore the ruins. So it was never quite clear to me from which period the ruins we saw dated or whether – in fact – we were seeing in parts a partial re-creation. In any event, there was a good movie, and an interesting little museum where you could pick a figure from Caesaria’s history, press a few buttons of questions and a hologram of the person, complete with movements, would answer the questions in a normal speaking voice. I picked Herod, who gets a very bad rap in the stories of Christ and John the Baptist, of course, and probably undeservedly. But history in Israel gets written by the winners there and so his portrayal was an impressive one. Our last full day we returned to Jerusalem to have lunch at a very good restaurant near the souk after visiting the Jewish museum, which was under reconstruction. You could visit the outdoor areas, which included a miniturized reconstruction of Jerusalem as it was in – I think – 66 AD (or CE), just before another destruction. It of course included the Western Wall, but also reminded us a lot of the museum in Queens with low-flying birds eye view of every building in New York at the time of the 1964 Worlds Fair. Jerusalem then was already riven by different camps within the Jews, Christians, and Romans. This drove an all-male group to abandon the city and go live along the shores of the Dead Sea (were they called the Edenites?) and it is from there that the Dead Sea Scrolls were discovered and begun to be deciphered.

On to Florence, a connection through Frankfurt that went flawlessly. Here I am very happy to be back, can envision us spending more time here, contemplating taking up studying Italian because I feel like I should do a much better job than I do of understanding and communicating in it. Nice to be back at “our” old hotel and definitely nice to eat gelato again. Tuscany, near Florence, is being transformed but a farmer plowed his fields right below the villa this morning and the construction crane that symbolizes the transformation is well-hidden by a perfectly placed tree when you are sitting outside for dinner at the Podere Torricella. Couple final thoughts on Tel Aviv – I was surprised once I learned the difference between Yiddish and Hebrew that among my generation W. and L. families only E. seems to speak it at all well. And again, not being of the religious persuasion at this time in my life, maybe all those miracles, Messiahs, and prophets are nothing more than the collective effects of sunstroke induced by the searing heat and powerful sunlight of summer.