A CHOICE EVEN MY DOG "LILY" COULD MAKE

When I first began this blog I assumed the biggest political/social issue I would have to address was the Israeli/Palestinian question. For several months I bounced back and forth between books, movies and friends on either side of that debate. I concluded as almost everyone else has that the issue is far too complex for my little pea brain to understand, let alone solve.

But over time, I have discovered a much more interesting dilemma, one that I actually can wrap my arms around and come up with some preference. I write of the conflict between living in Tel Aviv and living in Jerusalem. Are there two more different places than these? Berkeley and LA come to mind as do California and Illinois (my home state) But TA and J seem to differ on the molecular DNA level.

When I starting planning the trip a friend said, if you are going to TA you might as well go to London or NYC, why bother about a unique experience and then waste it on just another big, modern city? I thought that was a good argument so I settled on either Haifa or Jerusalem or both. I spent time first looking for and then magnifying my spiritual side. I collected nick-knacks to put in the Wailing Wall, and told my born-again Christian friends that I would send them dirt from the spot where Jesus had walked. I prepared myself for crying at the Holocaust Memorial or getting up the courage to venture into East Jerusalem. It was an interesting exercise, not quite me, but I thought if God wants me in Jerusalem, who am I do argue otherwise.

Just about at that point, I got a nice apartment in Tel Aviv, which goes to prove that either we don’t know God’s plans or worse God has no plans. So I threw myself into TA preparation mode, which generally involves a return to the days of sex, drugs and rock n’ roll, plus shopping malls and the beach. What was I to do with all these Wailing Wall trinkets? The Jesus footprint dust was more easily faked, after all who is going to question the receipt of an envelope filled with dirt and a note that says “Jesus Walked Here!”

As I read more I was reminded of the line in Steppenwolf, “in my breast dwells two souls.” According to the travel books, TA is the city that never sleeps, populated by that type A Jewish Israeli personality that bugs so many people. Lots of young people, many with Uzi’s living and working for the moment. It made me nostalgic for my days in the ‘60’s in NYC (only without the Uzi.) Jerusalem, if the travel books are to be believed was heavy, dripping in historical and religious symbolism, filled with another kind of Jew which also bugs people. So many ways for Jews to bug people, so little time! The apartment ads all say things like, “Kosher Kitchen, walk to Temple.” The Tel Aviv ads say things like, “Free internet/cable, near shopping centers.” The problem for me was obvious, I have both of these "souls" dwelling inside me, as do most of the people I know.

The initial draw of this question is not only how do Israeli’s decide where to live, but more importantly how do I decide. I am reminded of friends who come to visit Berkeley and the first thing we do is go to Pier 39 in San Francisco, then a trip to the redwoods, then Yosemite, then Carmel, then back to Golden Gate Bridge and Park, and at the end of the day, we return to Telegraph Ave. Visitors, especially those from the Midwest wonder, how can you decide what to do when you live in California, there are so many choices. Perhaps the answer lies in one of the opening selections from Castanada’s The Teaching of Don Juan, where a group of guys are going to sleep for the night in a cottage in Mexico, everyone picks a mattress and lays down. A dog comes up on the porch and slowly wanders around finally drawn to a spot, where it makes multiple circles before it finally drops to the ground, sound asleep. The lesson being (I think), you don’t pick the place, the place picks you. The men just walked over to any cot and laid down, tossing and turning for much of the night; the dog approached the porch with an open mind (so to speak) and was drawn to the spot where all the forces of rest and tranquility had come together for that particular dog. Assuming one has the luxury of roaming around in ever tightening circles, the decision of where to drop down and sleep should not be that difficult. I have certainly watched enough dogs sleep in my life to know this is a process I should be good at, or so I hope.

Back to Hebrew School

It has been several months since my initial post and my current date of departure is now May 1^st. I had hoped in this long interim to have mastered the Hebrew language at least to the point of being able to write a few coherent sentences. Instead I’d like to present a short narrative of why I think the language sucks.

Just to be clear, I did try my best. Every time I went for a walk, I listened to my 6 CD Pimsleur Learning System. (well maybe not every time) Then I took 12 one night a week classes and finally, then I went to Friday night services and read all the prayers in Hebrew even when the rest of the congregation was following along in English. What do I have to show for all this work? Well, I can say hello, goodbye and peace. I can also say “besader” which means “OK.” I know how to say “what” (ma), “where” (afo), and thanks (toda). I also know “see you later” (lahetraout), but only because it’s part of a song I can’t seem to get out of my head. After all this time and all this work, I keep asking myself, where did I go wrong and here is the answer(s) I came up with.

First of all, I was shocked to learn that Modern Hebrew was invented by Eliezar Ben Yehuda in the early 1900’s and did not really come into its own until after 1948. The Israeli founding fathers/mothers had a dilemma, namely what language should a good Israeli Jew speak. Arabic, the predominate language of Palestine was rejected for “obvious” reasons, after all if Jews and Arabs spoke the same language, how would you tell people apart. There, of course, was English which was discarded as too colonialist, German which was too Nazi, and Yiddish which was too old world. That left Hebrew which almost nobody spoke in the old country (Eastern Europe), certainly not in the Diaspora and hardly in Palestine. So the great insight of Yehuda and his supporters was to come up with Hebrew and basically create a following from scratch. The minute I heard this explanation in my first day at Hebrew school I felt deceived and ripped off. I was no longer learning a vibrant language which was 5,000 years old, but merely following some artificial Zionist invention created within my own lifetime. Honestly, I never overcame that barrier.

As for the language itself, there are so many levels of difficulty, it’s hard to know where to begin. Most obvious is that the alphabet is different and the words move from right to left. In the class I took about half of the students were theology majors who were learning Hebrew to read the Bible in its original form., which seems like a silly reason, but who am I to judge. For them the alphabet was tough, but for me, it only took about a week or so before my 5 years of Hebrew school at the age of 8 caught me up to speed. But, just as I was getting the hang of the printed letters, the teacher introduced the script form. Not only is this a completely different set of letters, but it is written so quickly that everything looks like a doctor’s prescription form. To add one more level of complexity, in modern practice all the vowel sounds, the little dots and dashes that give the words distinctive sounds, are dropped off. The effect is to force the reader to guess at the meaning and sound of words based on his previous knowledge of what the word looked like before all the vowels were dropped off.

Putting all that behind a tov yelid (good student) like myself, one gets into the real mechanics of the language. Most words are either male or female and there seems to be no rules for which are which. We are told that it is mildly offensive to confuse the gender orientation of words. After numerous classes it finally occurred to me that every verb I used was in the present tense. I naively asked the teacher, “does the verb change with its tense?” Of course it does! So that means that after all this effort I could never speak of the past or the future and forget the condition future or pluperfect, whatever that is. My speech became very Be Here Now! Then comes the final nail in the coffin. On the last day of class the teacher informs us that most Israelis talk really, really fast. They talk so fast that the words are blurred and the real secret is to watch their hands. Ultimately Israelis don’t communicate with their words, but with their hand gestures, which, of course, one doesn’t have to go to class to understand.

Actually, I misspoke, the real, final nail came when a student asked how many people actually speak Hebrew in Israel. The teacher got reflective and admitted that most people now speak Russian,(2 million new immigrants) some Ethiopian, a hard core group of Arab-speakers, a smattering of Thai (foreign workers) and fortunately almost everyone uses English as the fall-back language. An observation was made that most teenagers speak Spanish because the hugely popular after school TV shows which were Novellas from South American exclusively in Spanish without subtitles.

One curious result of all this Hebrew study was how rapidly my high school Spanish seemed to come back to me. When the teacher asked me “ata medaberet ivret?” (Do you speak Hebrew?) I instinctively replied, “un poco.” When a fellow student greeted me with “naim maod” (how’s it going), I blurted out, “Que passé.” The more Hebrew words I heard, the more Spanish came pouring out of my mouth. I don’t understand it, but there must be some kind of poly-lingual portion of my mind that stores foreign phrases and once I went down the Hebrew road, it unlocked the Spanish door. Maybe I should go to Mexico City for a couple weeks and hope that my grade school Hebrew suddenly makes an appearance in my conversations.