A Day of Extremes

Photo Captions: Attendees at the Tel Aviv Spirit Film Festival enjoy rose water lemonade and reclining in bean bag chairs in the festivals café.

One of the many unusual high rise buildings in the Tel Aviv business district.

Today was a day of extremes. Several days ago, I met a German film maker on the train who invited me to a showing of his latest work on Buddhist Painting in Mongolia at the Tel Aviv Spirit Film Festival. This was his first visit to Israel and he had no special thoughts about Jews and their Holocaust experience, but he did have a lot to say about Buddhism, which I found refreshing. So I got up Saturday morning intent on hearing him speak at the Cinemateque and suddenly realized there are no buses on Saturday. Its hard getting used the the fact that Saturday is not a good day to get a lot of projects done, that’s reserved for Sunday.

I arrived early at the theater and was surprised to see a crowd of about 200 “spirit” people. I felt like I was in a Mill Valley higher consciousness gathering. The air was filled with incense, there were booths selling “hippy” clothes, CD’s of Tibetan bonging, books in Hebrew on the Dali Lama, and lots and lots of beautiful mellow people. I think it was about 5 to 1 women all of whom had that Moonie glow that you generally don’t associate with the Jewish women soldiers.

There was a nice café set up with a lemonade that smelled like roses and a great lentil and rice dish for about $6. After buying lunch, there were no tables but about 20 bean bag chairs where everyone laid down to eat, sleep and yes smoke a cigarette, really? (I’ll save cigarette smoking for another time, but suffice it to say, higher consciousness and the anti-smoking movement have not embraced each other in Israel yet.

Absolutely true story. I was standing by the lotions table and an attractive Israeli man with a Jack Bower “murse” slung over his shoulder, was rubbing different creams on the back of his hands and smelling them. He was exchanging Hebrew with the saleswoman in a low, soft voice while looking meaningfully into her eyes and I swear to god, in the middle of an unintelligible Hebrew sentence I heard him clearly say the word, “metrosexual.” And it seems to me she melted at the word. I thought of the Jerry McGuire line, “you had me at metrosexual.”

Since I had a couple of hours to kill, I decided to walk to the New Bus Station and hang out with the “the other” people. On the way I was befriended by a nice young Israeli couple coming from the movies. They had seen an Amazon Indian film but the Indian voices were dubbed over in English which upset them. They both spoke Spanish and they found it incomprehensible that the movie maker would dub in an irritating American voice every time an Indian spoke. They kind of wanted me, as an American, to defend that or at least explain it. I couldn’t. As we walked I suddenly realized that everyone around me appeared to be Asian of some kind. We went through a park that was solid with people and the best way I can explain it was, the couple and I were the only Jews.

Here is the political analysis the couple gave me, which was excellent and really thought-provoking. They said the basic problem was that (exact words) “There are jobs Israeli’s won’t do.” (So much for Grandpa Abe, coming off the boat and working 12 hour days in a sweat shop.) It used to be that Palestinians did those jobs, but after the Intifada, the government sealed the borders so new workers were found in the Philippines, Thailand as well as Ethiopians. The different groups do not mix at all and eat, sleep and hang out in different areas. On Saturday the Bus Station has no busses but the immigrants use it as a shopping mall because it has long banks of phones where they can call home. The workers are all underpaid, work extremely long hours, and of course for the women there is sexploitation.. When I got to the Bus Station, there were hundreds of Asians and Africans wandering around with long lines in front of all the phones. The Israeli couple agreed with me that this was a huge problem and given the circumstances of Israel there was no way these groups were ever going to integrate themselves into the society. I thought, “great, having found the Palestinian problem insoluble, the Israelis have chosen to introduce a more complex immigrant problem.”

I then walked back to the movie which was attended by about 100 people and featured a hour of really spectacular Mongolian landscapes and Buddhist art. Unlike the Amazon movie the participants all spoke Mongolese (?) which sounds a lot like a Slavic language played backwards (if that makes any sense) and of course the subtitles were in Hebrew. So I just sat there bombarded by the two most impossible languages on the planet. One really cute image, however, stuck out in my mind. The scene is of a lone sheep herder in the middle of a huge valley with no signs of civilization for hundreds of miles. The man is obviously cold and takes one of the sheep, turns it upside down and with his knife cuts a hole in its stomach where he plunges his hands for warmth. The audience, of course, gasps as much as the sheep. Then as the camera pans up to the man’s face, I notice he is wearing a Los Angeles Dodgers baseball hat. Go figure!!

Unfortunately, the director never showed up, which was the whole point of the trip. Luckily by the time the movie got out at around 7 p.m., the Sabbath was over and the buses were running again. As I sat on the bus all I could think of was the poor sheep who most likely was an S.F. Giants fan.