Last few weeks/thoughts

So we've finally arrived at my last post, or what I intend to be my last post.

Let it be reflective. To help with that, here's another of the pieces I always listened to in Israel (although there is one particular memory forever associated with it). And, to keep it interesting for everyone who's thinking, "I came here for a look at Israel. What do I want with Luke's thoughts?", let it be scattered throughout with photos.

Like this face, which is on the back of almost all the buses.

First, let me apologize for two qualities of this blog.

One, its length, stems from the subconscious assumption that everything I do and see here is interesting. May the interaction with Israel, at least, have been interesting; and if it wasn't, I hope you didn't read more than you felt like reading.

The other stems from my (perhaps inborn) fear and hatred of travel, which throughout my life has always made each trip a dread to go on and an enemy at first. Combine that with my high expectations for Jerusalem -- after all, there's probably nowhere else in the world I would've agreed to live for a month when I was considering this trip -- and you get a certain ruefulness, expressed in sarcasm. Luckily, two things happened: the dread wore off over time (as it always does sooner or later on a trip), leaving me open to the experience; and with enough time I was able to look past the tourist-y parts, or even the tourist-y-ness, and appreciate the country for itself.

Rather than for the light show / holiest places in the world tour.

More than I originally appreciated it, anyway. I think in five weeks, you can't do much more than just barely get past the "I'm here to take pictures" phase. At least, I couldn't.

So hopefully some of that awe, humbledness, and love I have for Israel came out by the end. I already wish I could go back. Maybe next time I'll go for the other three seasons. They say the desert blooms in February, and streams of water run over it in the winter rains. And in Jerusalem it can snow. If even the summer could tear me from my original grudging dislike...!

And while at the end of most of the trips I've ever taken in my life I'm usually obliged to admit I enjoyed it, hopefully this experience was on a big enough scale to permanently cure me.

So I thank God who gave me this experience through the people who funded it and the encouragement of my friends and family to take the opportunity. Those who know me well were all surprised when I said I went to Israel; it took a lot of convincing to get me out of the house.

Thank you, all.

In return, I give you two of the rarest things there are in Israel.

One is more lumps. Not grey lumps, nor white lumps, nor pink, nor black, nor blue, nay, nor red lumps. The rarest of all lumps: useful lumps.

Actually blocking something! ... They don't look like they're very good at what they do, actually.

Considering the nature of that one, can you guess the second?

Well, here 'tis:

The collared cat. Click for full-screen, and yep, it's wearing a collar. It doesn't stop it from behaving like a stray and getting into fights. I wonder how people really feel about owning cats here.

Now for some final thoughts.

There are two people I didn't mention at all in the blog, but who deserved mention.

One is Eli, who walked in when I was playing piano on campus once. He wanted to join me for some two-person piano, one of us doing the upper range and the other the chords and rhythm.

He had only been playing for two months, and I was able to point out a couple of things it would be good for him to know, like how you can make the same chord out of any combination of its three base notes anywhere on the piano, or how the melody doesn't always have to stay within the chord you're playing at the time, and so on. Just stuff I figured out as slow as anyone else since I started teaching myself years ago, and hoped to save him the time doing the same.

He was a fast learner and even before I left his playing no longer needed the accompaniment. But most of the time it wasn't even teaching, it was just playing. I mention him because he wasn't an insignificant part of my time there; we played together a few times a week.

Hup! Random interlude for "dehydrated yoghurt", which they sell in these piles in the Old City.

The other is Ari, whom Valeria and I met the first day. A hard-of-hearing American computer science graduate, one day he decided to try life in Israel, studying Hebrew, learning more about Judaism, and preparing himself to live in a kibbutz. Yet for his apparently hardcore resolve, he was a pretty laid-back guy who was just enlightening to talk to; for example, he explained the decline of the Communist ideal of the traditional kibbutz.

He also kept turning up now and then when we needed help. For example, once when Simmon and I couldn't identify olive oil in the grocery store, Ari appeared around a corner and read the Hebrew for us and deciphered the sale signs. Another time, when Lyera was frustrated because she couldn't read enough Hebrew to switch her phone's language out of Hebrew, he appeared and switched it for her.

He gave us his address in the student dorms and there was talk of inviting him over for supper. One of my biggest regrets (and, I think, Valeria's) was that we never did so.

Another regret was these white chocolate Reese cups. White chocolate does not work with peanut butter.

So yeah, it wasn't all just us.

I also wanted to mention an appreciation for my likeable and effective professor, and for my classmates, with whom I spent many hours learning Hebrew. A fair number of them were Christians like me, and all of them were delightful people. Mostly they were Americans, but we also had a Spanish priest, a Polish polyglot, and a Dane constantly fascinated by the material (I can still remember his habit of exclaiming, when the professor pointed out some small mistake of his, "No! NO!!"). To Dan, Brad, Caleb, Rebecca, Shezad, Tyler, et al., if you get this far in the post: I regret not knowing you as lifelong friends!

I know it means "no stowing stuff", but I can't help but hear it as a child trying to say "no storage".

On the Tuesday I mentioned at the end of my last blog, there was indeed a morning and an afternoon, like most Tuesdays. The reason I didn't bother with that part is that it just involved going to class and talking about the class, getting my exam back, and playing a last bit of piano with Eli.

I did also visit the military cemetery one more time, though. There were some workers who spoke Arabic sitting at the top, doing construction, and the doors to the sanctum at the top were open. One of them turned out to speak French, and he told me I could go in.

So that was yet another loose end from the beginning tied up at the end.

I also saw a mysterious service being held with what is called "the Israeli hymn" playing.

(Sorry for the still frame. The actual video didn't work out.)

A suitable commemoration for Israel, in a sense. Anyway, after that we're where we left off.

You'd think that would mean everything from this Israel trip is accounted for.

But here, have some random facts and observations I missed throughout the blog, interspersed with a few pictures of signs I liked:

-- A man stopped Brad, a classmate of mine, at the City of David. "Is that the Samsung Galaxy?" he asked, pointing to Brad's device. Brad assured him it was. "How much do you want for it?" asked the man. "I'm looking for a birthday gift for my daughter."

-- There are no pedestrian buttons to cross the street. I guess the roads are crazy enough as it is without introducing yet another variable.

-- Lyera noticed that every washroom in Israel has the same soap. It's a pink liquid.

-- Similarly, there is very little diversity of brands, particularly for food. Most products have one or two main brands represented in every store. The Arab stores have a different set, but still not much diversity. My theory is that it's difficult for companies to produce strictly according to kosher and halal requirements.

-- On the map of the world, the Hebrew for "New York" is pronounced like "Nyu York" rather than "Nu York". For some reason, I actually find this pretty hard to say.

-- Speaking of Hebrew pronunciation, there are a few things in English names from the Bible that are consistently wrong, or at least more wrong than it has to be in English, because the names went through Greek first. One of the most notable is that we say "s" where they often have "sh". So Samuel is Shmu'el, Moses is Moshe, and (my dad's favourite) Solomon is Shlomo.

doubtful

-- There was only time I really felt cold in Israel (the night I got lost coming home from the museum).

-- We had fireworks on Canada Day there. Why? Because there are fireworks in Jerusalem pretty much every day. Why? Heaven only knows. The only hint is that there seem to be more on Shabbat. The girl from the night of the Shabbat dinner claimed that Arabs set them off in order to annoy Jews, but I'm not so sure. (She was pretty brainwashed in general.)

-- When returning from the mountain at Ein Gedi -- which was also, by the by, the first time I was forced to recognize that the heat was much stronger than me and I should fear it -- I said I called Lyera, who was in the tour bus. She had already recovered my stuff from the "cloakroom", which was a small grid of animal cages. But I still had the key in my pocket the whole time. I asked her if she had gone and asked for another key in my absence, and she said no, she hadn't. This remained one of great mysteries of my life for a long time, the Mystery of the Duplicated Key, until we finally realized there had been a miscommunication: she had actually asked for a second key.

-- The scenes of everyday life sneak into your subconscious. I had a dream in which I refused to buy from a woman selling jewellery in the street, and out of spite she said, "Well, you need a haircut!" For a couple days after that I wondered if she was right. I decided she wasn't.

-- In America (or at JFK, at least, where they staffed mostly non-Caucasians), accent doesn't always match ethnicity. The African-Americans have their dialect, but of all the other minorities I couldn't hear any who sounded like they'd ever spoken anything but English. This is such a contrast with Canada, where most people who look different also bear the speech imprints of their first language. Perhaps this is one of those "mosaic vs. melting pot" things?

-- They sell lots of pirated things, like this amusing find in the Old City:

To someone who doesn't play games, it looks fine. But anyone who does might notice that (a) the picture is not from the game they say it is, (b) the game they say it is is not distributed for Games for Windows, (c) it was not made in 2012 but 2004, and (d) nobody but nobody prints the year of the game on the top right of the case for no good reason. I was tempted to buy it just to see what the heck was inside it, but I listened to my better judgement.

-- There's a restaurant called "Burgers Bar" that has outlets all over the country. I was reflecting on the "s" in that name, and how it's not proper English, but then I was wondering: how do we explain "drinks menu"?

-- Maybe it's my unadjusted stomach, or maybe the heat, but most of the time I was there I had no appetite. When I did, it was like "dealing with the need to eat" rather than something I would call "being hungry". After I ate, I usually felt a profound disgust for food, or at best a contented satisfaction -- never the joy I usually get out of a good meal. The only meals I really loved were those we made at the apartment as a "family". So perhaps it was homesickness after all.

-- The default gesture for "I didn't catch that", at least among Arabs, is a head shake and eyebrow-raise that looks like our gesture for "What the ****?" It's very disconcerting at first.

-- All toilets have two toilet buttons, half and full flush. Some kind of national standard.

-- Hebrew interlude! Scribes made errors in ancient manuscripts. They tended to correct themselves, though. One example in the Dead Sea Scrolls is a bit of poetry where the first and third lines are repeated, but the second and fourth lines change. The scribe copied out the first line, then the fourth -- then realized his mistake, and wrote the missing bit between the lines. Just like today!

-- An introductory movie we saw for the City of David makes this astute comparison: "Walking through the City of David today is much like walking through a magical time tunnel."

-- When haggling, there is no correlation between the prices you're talking about and the actual value of the item. If you don't know the actual value of what you're buying, as a grounding in reality, you will end up paying the wrong price for it.

-- Other shopowners, like vultures, watch to see if you can be conned. After I made the lousy prayer shawl purchase I mentioned in the previous post, everyone for five shops on either side became my best friend. One guy, who had a narrow entrance to his shop and a big belly, cornered me in there and blocked my exit. I retreated further into the shop to a wider space where I could squeeze around him, but each time I passed by that shop afterwards, he shouted at me to stop and come in because "I have things you need!"

-- Speaking of which, when Lyera and I took a sherut to the airport, we happened to be sharing one with Ian (don't worry if you don't remember; he had only one obscure mention). He showed us proper bargaining -- at the very end of the trip -- when the driver quoted the price: Sixty-five shekels each to the airport. "Uh, sir, when we phoned to arrange this, they said fifty." The driver insisted that it was sixty-five. "No, sir, it's fifty. You have a sign in this very sherut that says fifty to the airport." Still the driver said it didn't apply; it was for large groups (a common reason for lower fares in Israel). But Ian replied, very matter-of-factly, "Sir, with all due respect, we're only paying fifty once we get there." The driver shut up and we each paid fifty when we got there.

-- Learning Hebrew, with all its complexity and unfamiliarity, made me appreciate knowing English. It's wonderful that in this world, each (healthy) person is given one free language to understand and speak fluently.

-- Most of the time, you could guess pretty well what a Hebrew label said, especially if they bothered to translate a word or two into English. Sometimes there were mistakes -- like the fabric softener one. Similarly, I bought a "bathroom sponge", which I assumed was a loofah, in my first week in Israel. It was very rough on my skin, but I thought, "If it's meant to scrape away dead skin, all the better, right?" In the last few days Seoren, having seen the same kind in the grocery store, claimed to have identified it as a bathroom sponge... for scrubbing the bathroom.

My amusement probably has something to do with not knowing what "broaster" means.
This reminds me of another KFC ripoff I saw: "Rodney Fried Chicken". (Thanks, Rodney!)

And that's that.

On a more serious note, I regret not visiting a church during my stay, excluding that French mass. Or at least a meeting of Messianic Jews, as some people suggested to me before I left. True, I was very busy, but I should have prioritized it. That element was missing from my trip.

Instead I derived a sense of holiness from whistling "Let All Mortal Flesh Keep Silence" in the basement of a cathedral...

I've also been asked once or twice what I think of the Israel/Palestine conflict. I can say that for the most part I remain ignorant, but I did see a few things that convinced me that no matter how "justified" the Israelis might consider their actions, the hardship for the Palestinians is undeniable. Their travel is very limited, their water supply is limited, their territory is being filled with Israeli settlements that the Israeli government rapidly populates and surrounds with electric fencing (sometimes displacing existing settlements), and they don't have access to Jerusalem, which in Islam is a very holy site. They are looked down on or considered terrorists by many Israelis because the latter have been brainwashed (Al'a the taxi driver told me about an Israeli soldier who had been travelling in Palestine, and who had told everyone he was an Italian lest Al'a should murder him), when in fact the proportion of dangerous criminals -- because there certainly are some -- is probably no larger than in any population. Like I said, I don't know much about the conflict and I don't know who's right in doing what, but for the average citizen, it's not good.

When I was writing about my trip to Bethlehem, I didn't put up many pictures of the Separation Wall because we were warned that they would search our photos and online presence before we left the country, and I was worried about what they'd think. (They didn't search me, but they did interrogate Seoren for another eight hours on his way out, and in the meantime made him delete all his digital evidence of having been here -- they found him suspicious because he was born in Iran...) Now that I'm safely back, here are some pictures of it.

Many of Bethlehem's Arabs are Christians.

I was moved.

To me it seems strange that I should be talking about these things, and it is strange. I've been back for a week and a half now, and already my time in Israel feels like a different time entirely.

(Consider this something like my last poem on Israel, even if it's in prose.)

Yes, I still have vivid images of walking down the filthy but lovely Wadi Al-Joz, of standing atop Herod's mountain and looking out at what I then called the "True Desert", of closing my heavy bomb-shelter window every night to stop the lance of light from waking me at five in the morning, of admitting that I couldn't reach the cave at the summit at Ein Gedi before heatstroke reached me, of wandering the ruins of the palace north of Jericho, of diving in the Sea of Galilee, of the dark, modern streets of Tel Aviv, of being herded into the little tomb in which Jesus may have been laid, of a clutch of birds in the velvet sky that explodes into a patch of black and then vacuums up again, of looking out from the citadel beneath David's Tower at the modern roads, of sitting with the shepherd boy and watching the flock, of navigating the multiethnic crowd of the Old City beneath roof or sky, beneath canvas or stars.

But none of those things sound like me. Could they really have been? When I was there, I felt like I was in a different person's life, that I had left the traditional Luke behind and had accidentally stumbled into someone else's life. I thought that it was this new person who would come back, too, but now that I'm back, it's not clear whether he stayed behind and I'm once again the traditional Luke, or whether such a person did, even could, leave Israel.

(After all, they call this country Eretz Israel, "the land of Israel". It's not redundant. It's the land of Israel the person, and the "Israelis" are the offspring of that person. It's not the land of the country Israel -- it's the land of that people. And foreigners, including Canadians, will never belong.)

Or maybe the metaphor doesn't work, and the normal, "realistic" version is true: that I will just have been Luke, whose experience for five weeks -- such a short time when you think about it -- is trying to survive and integrate itself into his memories and personality.

I don't know.

There's one more piece to the puzzle, but I'm not willing to look at it yet. While I was there, a little after the middle of the trip, I wrote myself a letter and mailed it to Canada. (I actually got here before it did!) I wrote everything I was thinking about the trip, and what felt like it was happening in my life -- thanks to God's giving me the opportunity and, miraculously, making me willing to pursue it. Now it's been about half a month since I wrote it, and most of it is already faded from memory. I have the letter here, but I'm not going to open it. Not now, anyway. I'm going to put it somewhere I can forget where it is, and maybe I'll find it one day -- months or years from now, who can say? Or maybe I won't, and this will be the last "official" word on the matter.

Yep, that's right. You've come to the end of this blog. Oh, I'm sure there's more I could report about that country, and more reflections I'll have, and more questions you might want to ask, as my friends and family who've faithfully read (an excessively detailed blog!) about my whole adventure. But for that, let's talk in person as I get back to living my normal life with you. :)

I leave you with three things.

One: my favourite sign of all.

Awesome partly because of the stylin' man in a fedora sauntering by at the top.
Awesome mostly because it shows that even the city is confused by the lumps.

Two: a video from very early in the trip. It's in an Arab district in east Jerusalem.

(Remember to click full-screen for a better view.)

Three: the sight I saw most often of all the things I saw in Israel.

(Thanks for the heads-up, Simmon.)

Well, I hope you all enjoyed this last post, and indeed the whole blog. Thank you for reading!

P.S. Here's the last of the three songs I listened to over and over again in Israel. It's called "Absalom, Absalom" (by Pierce Pettis, this cover by Steve Bell), a hypothetical version of David's lament for his son's death. While I was in Israel, my reading in the Old Testament happened to include this story. Where I was, what I was reading, and what I was listening to influenced each other, becoming a thing of beauty.