Free Day

Today (Saturday) is our one and only free day on the trip. Most of the shops are closed for the Sabbath, so that means lots and lots of beach time. I really can’t get enough of the beach here. Yesterday, I spent about four hours out walking along the beach, stopping at a café for a wonderful Halloumi (squeaky cheese!) sandwich with olive tapenade, pickles, and tomatoes and delicious lemonade. The one thing I didn’t expect here is just how good the pickles would be. I love them! I ate my dinner at a table outside next to a big fountain with a good view of the beach. I sat there for a long time reading a little book of Rumi , writing in my journal, and watching the sun set over the water. After that, I took another long walk by the shore before calling it a day.

The food is nice here. I’ve had extremely good hummus and falafel at many places. The pizza is different but very tasty. Coffee = yum! They’re big on salad made of chopped up onions, tomatoes, and cucumbers. I’ve had some good rice dishes and other things that are pretty common at home (for example, at the university I had a veggie-type lasagna).

The beach during the day on a weekend is an experience. It’s pretty packed, yet you don’t feel overly crowded. You can pay about 20 shekels to rent a lounge chair and an umbrella, which I recommend because the sun and the sand gets so incredibly hot, so it’s nice to have some protection. All around is the buzz of voices talking in Hebrew and other languages. The lifeguards entertain me. Sections of the beach are marked as safe or unsafe for swimming, and they patrol what people are doing. They do this by yelling over a PA system. It cracks me up when the guard sighs audibly into the mic before shouting his orders. If it doesn’t appear that people understand, they will sometimes switch to broken English yelling things like, “Guy! Don’t! Come back!” or “Guy! No, no, no!” You can hear the finger wagging in his voice.

When I walk along the beach, I listen to the waves crashing on the shore and watch them make their mad dash back out to the sea. I like the background noise of snippets of conversations I can’t understand. The beach is full of families, couples, joggers, children playing, women sitting in the sand so the waves can wash over their legs, and friends having animated conversations. Pairs of people up and down the water hit a rubber ball back and forth to each other with wooden paddles. When it’s really busy, the most prominent sound of all is the plink! plunk! of the ball as it bounces from one person to the other.

Sometimes I like to listen to my MP3 player so I can take all this in while walking along to my own soundtrack. I set it to random play, and often it brings up perfect artists/songs for my thoughts. A little Goldfrapp. A little Catpower. Some Regina Spektor. A little Belle and Sebastian (song White Collar Boy, which somehow just fit this setting). PJ Harvey’s We Float, which is my fave by her. Band of Horses, Maps, Low. Silversun Pickups Little Lover’s So Polite, which I haven’t heard in a while. Blur, Jarvis Cocker, Lily Allen. All goodies. I walk along listening to this music I love feeling so content, relaxed and at peace. I can think about anything or maybe nothing at all, and keep the same level of tranquility, not to mention a greater sense of objectivity. Any problems or worries or annoyances I have at home seem so far away (and, I mean, they are), and I’m totally connected to this place and moment. I realize that, in spite of what I may think at different times in daily life, overall I am really truly happy.

You know those games at arcades with the claw that you maneuver to try to capture a stuffed animal? Well, they have the same thing here, too, sometimes out on the street, except replace the plush toys with packs of cigarettes. Yeah. It’s funny. There is one in Jaffa, and when someone tries to go for a pack, people often gather to cheer the person on. At the top of the game, there is a decorative band painted on with the words Baby Party. So strange.

I feel like you all have mostly heard about my tales of woe, rather than my actual trip. The amount of learning happening here for me is incredible. It’s intense. I came into this experience knowing very little about Judaism, and while I certainly don’t consider myself an expert by any means, I think I’m way better informed and open to learning more. It’s amazing to me how this religion/culture has survived after facing so much adversity and displacement of its people over the centuries. The Diaspora Museum was a real eye opener. The one thing that really impresses me about the religion is the emphasis on questioning everything, to never stop asking questions. There is a quote by a rabbi in the museum that says something along the lines that a rabbi isn’t doing his job if his congregation isn’t disagreeing with him, and I thought that was cool. I totally respect that.

Yesterday, we met with a person from the NGO Reut, which focuses on relations between the Arabs and the Jews. We got to tour one of the Arab neighborhoods in Jaffa, and all I can say is wow. It’s clear that the government here puts about zero dollars into maintaining these communities. Our guide talked a lot about the history of the Palestinians and the issues related to property ownership by Arabs (which basically boils down to them not getting to own any). A couple of our talks at Tel-Aviv University focused on Israeli/Arab relations, too, and the more you learn the messier and complicated the situation appears.

There has been a lot of discussion as well as some talks on the rabbinical law, especially in relation to marriage and divorce. For orthodox women, obtaining a divorce (called a “get” here) can be very difficult, since under the rabbinic courts a husband has to “grant” his wife a divorce, based on the rules of the religion. Thanks a lot Deuteronomy 24:1! While there is a movement to encourage rabbinic courts to incorporate democratic principles into their decisions, about 38% of women who file are subject to get extortion. This means in the matter of divorce men hold the majority of the power, which makes this a matter of justice that needs to be fixed on a systemic level. Suddenly it’s Judaism vs. democracy, and the goal is to figure out how to make a fair system that also preserves Jewish values. We heard accounts of women who have been held hostage for years (up to 15 in one case), basically, by their husbands who refuse to grant them a divorce, even when the man is off living a new life with some other woman. In 2003, among 11,000 cases filed, the rabbinic court issued only 10 decisions compelling a husband to divorce his wife. The good news that increases a woman’s power a bit now is that she can seek damages from a husband who won’t give a get, but the process is still far from fair. The talk by Suzan Weis at Tel-Aviv U was really interesting, and I encourage you to take a look at the Center for Women’s Justice site.

Also, we’ve learned some interesting things about Israel’s education system, which I’ll probably share in another post, because I hear the beach calling me again on this one free day.:-) More soon!