From the Occupied Territory to the Sea of Galilee

Sasha

Today was the most peaceful day we've spent in what seems like 6 months.  We woke up in a big, empty house overlooking a valley of olive trees as far as the eyes can see. The sun was kissing our windows, and a dry gentle breeze blew through the screens.  We had nothing that we needed to do, and nowhere we had to be today.  Between planning the wedding, working like crazing all summer long, and then packing up our life in the bay area, it feels like such a long time since we've been able to completely relax like this.  It is as if our honeymoon is finally  here.  (The only disturbance are the pop! pop! pop! of distant gunshots.  I'd tell you what they were from if I knew.)

At this moment I sit in my in-laws weekend home at Kibbutz Moran.  I am 20km Northwest of the Sea of Galilee (also known as the Kinneret), 30km East of the Mediterranean, about 30km South of Lebanon (you can't get there from here) and less than 60km from Syria, (you really can't get there from here).  For those of you more used to miles, I am less than 38 miles away from Syria right now. To give you even more perspecive, this is a little bit shorter than the drive from our old place in Oakland to San Jose.  :-)

We spent our weekend here with Ra's family- an Israeli weekend, which starts on Thursday afternoon, and goes until Saturday night because come Sunday morning, everyone is back at work.  Jean and Oded built the house with the idea of filling it with their offspring.  There is a room downstairs for Ra and I complete with an extra-long bed so Ra's feet don't hang off the edge.  On the middle floor is the room for the youngest sister, Yael and her boyfriend Leron.  At the top floor there were two bedrooms for Nurit and Assaf (Ra's oldest sister and her husband) and their brood of 3 adorable, high energy daughters.  The oldest is a thoughtful 6 year old who clearly adores her uncle, and vice versa, the middle one can talk your ear off whether or not you can understand a word of her Hebrew, and has zero shyness of being center stage in the family and is almost 4, while the youngest one has yet to take ownership of language herself, and prefers to babble baby talk while clearly understanding everything you are saying to her at the age of a year and ten months. 11 people make for a very busy house, and the fact that three of those were high energy kids and toddlers meant that most of our waking hours here involved entertaining the children.  I don't remember the last time I played "aeroplane" (or as they call it in Israel, "superman") or participated the complex hand-clapping games that come after the child has mastered patty-cake.  Thank goodness I still remembered. My  language barrier with the girls made it much harder to teach them songs like "Miss Marry Mack" or "My Sister had a Tugboat."  On second thought, perhaps that is for the best.  We played an odd combination of broken telephone and charades since they don't speak English, and I don't really speak Hebrew.  Every time we successfully communicated I was inclined to do whatever they were asking as a reward, whether that be getting them a glass of water or lifting them into the superman position for the upteenth time because they had learned the word "again! again!"

The last night we were all here, I finally had a chance to talk one-on-one with Nurit, when Eden, the middle girl came up to me and started talking and miming a hand clapping game.  I told her, "Not now, I'm talking to your mother."

Eden turns to Nurit and says in Hebrew, "I understood what she said," then tottered off to play some other game.

I love that by getting married, I gained 3 nieces overnight, and it is such a awesome blessing to get to participate in their lives like we did this weekend.  A very exhausting blessing.  And recovering from that blessing in a quiet house alone with my husband makes it that much better.

*                                                                          *                                                                           *

As I talk and write about the places we go here, there is so much magic in the words.  All weekend I've been trying to remember the rest of the lyrics to a song I sang in bible school more than 20 years ago that included the words "from the . . . to the Sea of Galilee!" to no avail.  As we drove down south to the Dead Sea last Wednesday and saw the signs for Jericho, I couldn't help but sing "the walls came tumbling down" in my head. I'm not a religious person, so these places aren't spiritual for me- it is more like driving along and seeing the road to Camelot, or being told we are going over the river and through the woods to grandmother's house.  They are more like fairy tales that turn out to exist in our very real and mundane world.

And then there are the other words- Golan Heights, Occupied Territories, West Bank, Jewish Settlements. Instead of the magic of fairy tales, these words have the magic that comes from being places on the news that seem scary, and far far away. This week, I find them right in front of me.

Last week I found myself in a car driving through the West Bank from Jerusalem to the Dead Sea. I can say that I walked around in the Occupied territories; We stopped at a gas station, used a bathroom, bought some mango juice, and took a picture of a camel. Some of our American companions purchased their own authentic West Bank kafiyas at the gift shop.

Our favorite place to go swimming in the Dead Sea is just south of  Palestinian Territory, in fact, the way we knew it was time to park the car to hike down to the water is that there is an Israeli military checkpoint just as you come out it  You park in the lot about 20 meters down the road from that border, grab your towel and walk down the hill 'til you find the fresh water springs.  On the other side of the water, perhaps 20km away, you see the hills of Jordan rising out out of the horizon.

As we were driving, Ra pointed out some of the Settlements that have been in the news recently.  In my head, I always pictured pioneering farm houses out in the desert- but in reality, they look more like gated communities in San Diego suburbs- houses with peach stucco walls, red tiled roofs, palm trees in the yard, built one right next to the other, and they all looked just the same. . .

*                                                                        *                                                                     *

Tonight, we met up with our friend Dana.  She took us to her favorite swimming hole through a kibbutz, behind groves of peaches and plums, and fields of wheat.  It was cool evening after a warm day, so we hopped out of our clothes, and got into the water.  Coming from Montana, I'm used to glacial run off, so the brisk waters of Israel were more refreshing than chilling.  Afterwards, we would have sat on the bank longer, but the evening mosquitoes were eating us alive.

As we drove home, I was telling Ra about the songs in my head, and the magical places.  I started to sing about the River Jordan along with all the others.

"You know that we were just at the River Jordan, right?" Ra tells me.

"Soooo. . . we just went skinny dipping in the River Jordan?" I ask. "Awesome."

 And something about this combination of the spiritual and the profane, the wonderland connected with the act of swimming in a river just like I've done a hundred times in my life struck me as the funniest combination I could have imagined.