thoughts on vampires in the holy land (traveling pt. II)

During my travels a couple of weeks ago I ended up in Tzfat. Tzfat is one of the four holy cities of the Jews (along with Jerusalem, Tiberias, and Hebron). Safed (the Arabic name) was a safe haven in the 15th century for the many Jews fleeing the reconquista of Spain. The Sultan who was in charge at the time allowed the Jews to settle and live mostly autonomous lives. Safed became a center of Jewish life.

Tzfat is built at the top of a hill. Instead of a grid, or a random zig-zag (which seem to me to be the predominant plans for cities) Tzfat is built in a series of concentric circles with steep alleyways/stairs in between. At the top of the mountain (2600 ft or 800 meters) in the center of the concentric streets of Tzfat, is a park.

Most of the towns, villages and cities in the States are in valleys. Or at least not at the tops of mountains. It's easier to build in valley, it's easier to get to and from places and it's easier to grow things in valleys. This all depends on the a relative peace and calm in the region. If there isn't peace and calm, it's better to be fortified and in the hills. This is the case with Tzfat and most of the old old cities in this area. Jerusalem is in the mountains (also about 2600 ft.), as is Hebron (around 3200 ft). When these cities were established the heights meant security. Today they mean beautiful views and roads that just shouldn't be roads. They twist and turn and go down steep blind curves. On the bus-ride down from Tzfat, the boy sitting three rows in front of me threw up. His father held back his peyos.

I was in Tzfat for Shabbat. Staying in a hotel for Shabbat presents a series of problems involving the prohibted activites of cooking, travelling, handling money, working, and benefiting from the work of others. They've figured out ways around most of these problems. They are somewhat creative solutions including the hiring of non-Jews to be the waiter's in the dining room. Specifically the waiters in our hotel were Israeli Arabs. Their Hebrew was heavily inflected with Arabic. Arabic inflected Hebrew is a bit easier for me to understand, because, when it is spoken slowly, it's constituent phonemes and allophones are more distinct.

For instance, Arabic has a distinction between the Alef and the Ayin (which are pronounced the same in modern Hebrew). Arabic has a distinction between the Tav and the Tet (Yiddish and Ashkenazi Hebrew also maintain a distinction but in a much different way), modern Hebrew does not. This is all an aside. The funny part is that despite the Arabic inflection of Hebrew, the servers managed to use the Ashkenazi pronunciation of all the foods they put down in front of the the Ultra-Orthodox Ashkenazi Jews from New Jersey. I'm not sure whether this was done by choice or by training, or in the immortal style of servers everywhere, in order to humor the high maintenance customers. Regardless it was a funny linguistic moment. And now it occurs to me just how much of a dork I am. Really, who thinks linguistics are funny??

The rest of Tzfat was a bit strange for me. It is ORTHODOX in the most dramatic sense of the word. I'm remarkably uncomfortable with Orthodoxy. I worry about the literalism, fundamentalism and sexism of Orthodoxy. Tzfat is also very well known for it's arts and crafts scene. But having toured the artist's market, none of it was all that special from my snobish perspective. It is also regarded as this very spiritual place, having been the home of the father of Kabbalah (Isaac Luria) and the writer of the most highly respected book of Jewish Law (Joseph Caro, The Sulchan Aruch). Because of it's "spirituality" it draws a huge number of tourist/pilgrims.

For a great number of these tourist/pilgrims, Israel has always been regarded as the center of the Jewish experience. It has not ever been the center of mine, rather, my family, New York City, matzoh ball soup and my grandmother's brisket are my Jewish center. I go to places like Tzfat and as the other tourist/pilgrims kvell about how beautiful the city is, I wonder why there's trash everywhere and why it's so dirty. As they extoll how spiritual it is and how welcoming everyone is, I try to refrain from mentioning that most of the inhabitants of Tzfat are very wary of outsiders and try to avoid eye contact...unless that is you're in their market stall and thinking about spending money. At least we all agree that the view from mountain is stunningly gorgeous.

Alright, you're probably wondering about the name of this blog entry. In Tzfat, one of the artist's Studio's, I noticed this door.

It got me to thinking about vampires and the Holy Land. Something like 45% of the water supply of Israel comes from the Kinneret (the Sea of Galilee). You may recall from my last post that this is where Jesus walked on water. The Kinneret is fed by the Jordan River, which is where John the Baptist did a lot of his Baptizing, including (a bit apocryphally I think) the baptism of Jesus. This makes the Jordan River holy water, and therefor the Kinneret. And so In Israel we drink holy water all the time. Now, according to my source on Vampires (Buffy the Vampire Slayer), holy water burns vampires. This makes us the vampire equivalent of the craziest vindaloo you can imagine. Also, there is a church, mosque or synagogue on every corner, a tomb of some prophet or saint every third corner and people eat an insane amount of garlic. All this is to say that I don't think that it's entirely necessary to put garlic on your door in order to keep the vampires away.

one of those cultural moments...or something (traveling pt 1)

Tiberias is on the coast of the Sea of Galilee [ים כנרת, yam kneret]. It is has a lot in common with every disgustingly ugly resort town I've ever been to: bad seventies architecture; run down shabby feel; hideous boardwalk; bizarre streetmall. You know the type. Tiberias is particularly strange though. The street mall is built next to an abandoned Mosque. The Muslim community fled Tiberias in 1948, under the protection of the British Army. The Mosque hasn't been touched since. Although it seemed to me that the strip mall brilliance of Tiberias was extending into the courtyard of the Mosque.

I stayed in the second seediest hostel I've ever seen. What it lacked in character and cleanliness, it made up for in people who were just slightly off. The only other person in the dorm for instance, was a man from VanCouver, originally from Mumbai. He was a Christain, who felt, wholeheartedly, that things have clearly gotten so bad in the world that Jesus should be coming back any day now. I can't say I disagree with him about the state of the world. But I'm as yet unconvinced that that leads to the return of Christ. He journeyed here so that he could experience the holy land before Christ came back. He tried to explain why buy I lost him a little. Something about how dramatically it's all going to change and wanting to see it first.

The manager of the hostel was a very nice guy, he even complimented my Hebrew (should have been my first clue). Everything seemed normal until I realized there was a parrot flying around the reception area. Then the manager sat down to watch TV. The TV in the lounge kept flickering on and off, broken, unwatchable (at least if you want to avoid having an embolism). He sat there, unconcerned with his impending brain hemorrhage, smoking cigarettes at an astounding rate. Eventually the parrot came over and stood on the back of his chair and squawked in his ear. I must be in the twilight zone I thought to myself.

One of the Rabbis at my Yeshiva told me that Tiberias is the home of the best Kosher Chinese restaurant in the country. I asked the manager (in Hebrew) if this was true and where it might be. He told me that it was indeed the best Chinese restaurant in the land and told me how to get there. Pagoda, spelled out in Hebrew characters is the restaurant in question (for the record Pagoda is the English corruption of the Dutch corruption of a Sanskrit word). As I walked out the door he threw a fifty shekel note at me and asked me if I could bring him back some food. Sure, why not.

Pagoda is on the shore of the Sea of Galilee, where you know who walked on water and fed a lot of people with not a lot of bread or fish. Specifically, it is on the boardwalk. I sat with my water view and my view of tourists reveling in the run down resort town glory. The food was delicious. Certainly the best Kosher Chinese food I've ever had (but to be fair, it was also only the fourth time I've eaten at a Kosher Chinese restaurant). There is something about New York style chinese food that really does transcend the need for pork or the five boroughs. It hit the spot, and gave me some reason to think that a pilgrimage to Tiberias isn't completely bizarre, some people go for loaves and fishes, others for tombs of Jewish philosophers. I went for the dumplings.

There isn't much else about Tiberias worth reporting. The Sea of Galilee is stunningly beautiful , the towns surrounding it are not. There are a myriad pilgrimage sites for Jews and Christians. The Christian association with the place is obvious. The Jewish one is not quite as obvious. After the complete destruction of Jerusalem (c. 160 CE) Jewish life in the land of Israel centered on Tiberias. It is one of the locations that saw the transition from nationalist sacrificial cult to a prayer and law and prayer focused community (an important step in the direction of our understanding of religion today). It is the home of many graves (some of them are likely to be apocryphal). Maimonides, the Spanish born philosopher and doctor was re-interred in Tiberias. I have a hard time relating to pilgrimage sites that are so touristy. Capitalism and the selling of souvenirs and cultural artifacts doesn't really relate to my sense of spirituality. Then again, fried dumplings do, maybe I'm the crazy one.



More to come on my trip to Tsfat, and the Golan and Tel Aviv.

dwelling in booths and waving palm fronds

In my Yeshiva, we study the holidays as we approach them. This seemed like a very good system until we got to Sukkot. All the lectures went so far over my head that I was left wondering not only what the Holiday was about, but was I in the right religion. Did I take a wrong turn at Yom Kippur? My confusion happened for several reasons. The first is that there are a huge number of practical things that an observant Jew is supposed to do on Sukkot. One of the Rabbis here spent about four hours (in several class sittings) describing the correct procedure for building a sukkah (a booth, dwelling in which helps the Jews recall the Exodus from Egypt). This is all very interesting stuff, for instance, you can use an elephant for one of the three walls of the sukkah, but not a camel. If the elephant dies and falls over it will still be the minimum height of a sukkah wall. If the camel dies and falls over it might not be tall enough, therefor it cannot be used as a sukkah wall. WHAT??!???!?

If one is travelling, it is possible (and even desirable) to build a sukkah on the back of a camel (providing as explained before) that the camel doesn't make up one of the walls. REALLY??!?!?!?!?

Three people holding up Schak (organic material that makes up the roof of a sukkah) can make a sukka for a fourth person who sits underneath the schak. Somehow this doesn't make sense given the camel rules we just talked about but whatever, let's just move on. The problem with this sukkah is that on the first day of the festival (it lasts seven days) it is forbidden to build or unbuild the sukkah, so the three people would have to hold the schak for the entirety of the first day (first two days in the diaspora). Boy are my arms tired...

There are more rules, many many more rules. But even the ones that weren't quite as specific or far out as the camel laws weren't particularly pertinent to me, because, I don't have a place to build a sukkah. Oh well.

Jerusalem is now a city full of sukkot. Almost every building has at least one Sukkah in the front yard, on a porch, on a roof, etc. No elephant sukkot yet, but I'm hopeful. I don't have any pictures yet but will try to take some in the next few days.

Another part of the part of the holiday is waving of the Four Species: Lulav (Palm), Etrog (Citron), Hadass (Myrtle), Aravah (Willow). In a particularly beautiful (but bizarre) ceremony, the four species are waved around and marched around the synagogue. The four species are mentioned only rather cryptically in the Torah. Rabbinic tradition holds that they were part of the rites in the Temple, and that their inclusion in modern synagogue rites today is a reference to that tradition. Really, I think its a very old agricultural rite that became part of Judaism as it evolved. Later, when the Exodus narrative became so central to the Jewish religion, the celebration of the Festival of Booths was added to the existing agricultural rites. But I could be totally wrong. The lectures on the four species weren't any more accessible than the lectures on how to build a sukkah.

Overnight, a market sprang up in the religious neighborhood in Jerusalem. Going there to buy the four species was a cultural experience. I don't think I can describe it, I'll just show some pictures and we'll call it good.

dumplings, new years and absenteeism

Some of you may know that I am a big fan of dumplings. Rather than have one of my parent's write in and remind all of us how far back this love goes, I'll just fess up now. When I was a little guy, I used to just eat the skins of the fried dumplings from the Flower Dragon, this American-Chinese restaurant not too far from our house. I was afraid, I think, of the onions and chives in the (pork) filling. Later, I grew to love even the onions and would eat the entire thing.

I discovered (at some point) that there are many categories of dumplings, the filled and the solid, the poached and the fried, the potato and the pasta, the list goes on and on. I love them all. My favorites are the matzoh ball, and the fried American style Chinese dumpling (whose resemblance to traditional dim-sum is passable at best), filled with chicken, beef or vegetables please as I am off the pork.

קובה [Kube] are a very popular dumpling here in Israel. Like a great many of Israel's culinary delights, Kube are borrowed from neighboring traditions. Kube, are Kurdish in origin, but are popular in many middle eastern cultures. Kube are a remarkable combination of the boiled dumpling and the filled dumpling. A semolina and bulgar dough is stuffed with spiced beef or lamb. The dough cooks up like any good gnocchi, matzoh ball, or southern american dumpling. The meat inside is just delicious. Kube can be fried or served in soup. There are probably other ways too that I haven't encountered yet.

The most uniquely Isreali (read middle eastern) restaurants I've been to are humus restaurants (מסעדות חומוס). They sell humus, topped with cooked vegetables or meat, red or green Kube soup, (red is a tomato and pepper base, green is delicious, but as yet unidentified), shakshuka (an egg and tomato stew that merits and will have it's own blog entry soon) and other things as well. Whatever you get at a humus restaurant, it comes with a plate of pickles, probably a small cucumber-tomato salad, and pita. It's delicious. Down the street from my house is a little restaurant called מאזא לברלין (It's at the corner of Azza [Gaza in Hebrew] and Berlin Streets, hence it's name From Azza to Berlin. They have wonderful humus, usually freshly pureed. This is the most recent meal I had there, sitting outside enjoying the views of passing traffic (Israeli drivers actually do provide interesting entertainment in that edge of your seat horror movie kind of way). Instead of the kube soup, I had a fried kube with my humus.

A little more than a week ago was Rosh Hashanah, for which Ilana and I cooked a large celebratory lunch on the second day. I made kube soup. Or rather I should say I made a fusion version of kube soup. I made kube, and put them in an Ashkenazi (Eatern European Jewish) chicken soup instead of the traditional green or red variety. Something like matzoh balls only filled with beef and no unleavened bread in sight. I have to work out some kinks in the recipe. The kube were a little dense, not as fluffy as they should have been. Once I work on the recipe I'll post it here. I'll try and do a vegetarian version as well.

To make them, you roll little balls of dough, essentially make a pinch-pot, fill it with the meat and close it up. They were a pretty big hit at our lunch.

Rosh Hashanah itself was very nice. With the minor exception of my ability to sit still, which does fine for the standard two and half or three hour Shabbat service. Past four hours, I get antsy. Past five hours, I get positively squirmy. But the services themselves were very beautiful, with lots of good singing and even some dancing at the small Shlomo Carlebach (a twentieth century Rabbi who sang a lot) inspired shule we went to on the second day...But really, do they have to last almost seven hours?

Yom Kippur starts tonight. Well really Yom Kippur starts this afternoon. We've studied Yom Kippur in all of my classes, from quite a few perspectives. It will be interesting I think to experience it tomorrow with all these things in mind, I'll try to post more about it after the fact.

On one final note. My absentee ballot is on it's way back to the lovely state of Maine. I'm not going to say who I voted for, but let's just say that neither the candidate nor the running mate is a moose hunter of any renown. Can you imagine if Dick Cheney had been using a moose rifle instead of a vintage bird gun?