You Can Date Boys When You're Forty: Dave Barry on Parenting and Other Topics He Knows Very Little About (13 page)

After dinner we sit on a circle of chairs in their backyard, talking, drinking wine and enjoying the pleasantly cool evening. We can hear music in the distance; Adi tells us it’s a wedding celebration in an Arab neighborhood about a thousand yards away. After a while we hear popping sounds—first a few, then many. We ask if these are fireworks. Adi, who served in the Israeli army, says no, it’s celebratory wedding gunfire, but we needn’t worry because they’re shooting blanks. We ask him if he’s sure and he says he is. He describes in some detail the type of blanks traditionally used for weddings. So we go back to talking and drinking wine, with the music and the shooting providing background ambience. It’s a fine and festive night.

DAY SIX

Much of Jerusalem shuts down for Shabbat, so we’re mostly on our own today. Rabbi Eddie leads a small group of us back to the Old City, where we visit the Church of the Holy Sepulchre, by tradition the site where Jesus was crucified and buried. It’s packed, thronging with tour groups and believers. Near the entrance dozens of people—many praying fervently, some crying—kneel on the floor, touching or pressing religious objects against the Stone of Anointing, a slab of rock said to be where Jesus was prepared for burial. There’s a long line of people waiting to enter an enclosure containing what is said to be the tomb where Jesus was buried. I do my best, trying to recall long-ago Sunday-school lessons, to explain the crucifixion/resurrection story to Sophie. I do not sound convincing to myself, which I guess is why I stopped being religious.

We leave the church, working our way out through the steady flow of incoming tour groups, and head toward the Muslim Quarter. We wander through the Arab market, a maze of narrow stone streets kstody flow o where people in hundreds of tiny stalls wish to sell you—always at a special price—a vast array of items, including jewelry, hats, scarves, plates, spices, knickknacks that achieve truly profound levels of uselessness, hookahs and of course T-shirts. Some of the T-shirts reflect the Arab viewpoint on Mideast issues. One has an image of the Google search page, with “Israel” typed into the search box. Underneath that it says:

Did you mean: PALESTINE

The vendors also sell a wide variety of religious souvenirs, including crucifixes, anointing oil, frankincense, Holy Land ashtrays and crowns of thorns. Really. If you are looking to enhance your home décor with a crown of thorns, the Arab market is the place for you.

BONUS:
The Arab market has wifi.

We leave the Arab market and spend the afternoon wandering around Jerusalem. Tragically, because of Shabbat, all the higher-end stores are closed. Try to imagine my pain.

DAY SEVEN

Finally, I get to use my defective forty-shekel-apiece rubber sandals as we tour Hezekiah’s Tunnel. This is an underground aqueduct that was hacked through solid rock several thousand years ago by ancient workers who I bet would have been highly amused if they’d known that tourists would one day pay actual money to go down in there. It’s a claustrophobically narrow, clammy tunnel, a third of a mile long; the water is up to your knees and sometimes higher. There are no guides, no handrails, no place to stop and rest, no lighting. You are given a tiny key chain flashlight, which inadequately pierces the pitch-blackness ahead of you as you slosh your way through the chilly water, keeping a wary eye out for the Giant Hairy Aqueduct-Dwelling Spider and the Fanged Underwater Alpaca of Death, which as far as I know are imaginary creatures, but they are easy enough to imagine down in Hezekiah’s Tunnel.

We finally emerge from the tunnel and hike up to the exposed, aboveground section of the Western Wall. This is the famous part of the wall, a site sacred to Jews because of its proximity to the Temple Mount. The plaza in front of the wall is separated by a screen into two sections: one for men only and a smaller one for women only.

The vibe at the wall is a strange combination of vacation joviality and religious fervor. Some
people are there strictly as tourists, smiling and laughing as they pose for photos with the wall as a backdrop as if it were the Washington Monument. Other people, a few feet away, are worshipping intently, praying and rocking back and forth for long periods of time, walking backward when they leave so as not to turn their backs on the wall. Most people, tourists and worshippers alike, write prayers or notes on pieces of paper, which they stick into cracks between the stones. Even I leave a note,
*
although I feel a little silly.

We spend about an hour at the wall and, moved by the experience, decide to spend the afternoon in quiet contemplation, by which I mean: shopping. We go to the Jewish street market, which you will be relieved to learn has wifi. Michelle finds a number of items that she is able to obtain at a special price and that will go really well with our living room.

While Michelle shops, I observe the throngs of tourists thronging around. Most are American. It used to be that you could tell which tourists were Americans by the fact that they always wore brand-new white sneakers. I am pleased to report that this is no longer the case. Now you can tell them because they always wear brand-new white sneakers
and
brand-new sun hats. Apparently word got around to the American tourist community—maybe there are big warning signs in the sneaker storese fi kr sbranthat they must at all costs protect themselves from the deadly foreign sun because I’m seeing tour groups in which every single person is wearing either a brand-new sun hat with a floppy brim or—for maximum protection and timeless elegance—one of those sportsperson hats with the long bill sticking out the front and a big fashionable flap hanging down in the back. Take
that,
deadly foreign sun!

Our evening activity is a lecture at the hotel on “The Labyrinth of Israeli Politics” by Reuven Hazan, a ninth-generation Israeli who’s a professor of political science at Hebrew University and a very sharp, funny guy. He talks, rapid-fire, for an hour, writing with colored markers on a big pad of paper to help us understand the Israeli political situation. It’s complicated because (a) Israel is a democracy with a parliamentary system and proportional representation and (b) no two Israelis (remember Kay and Adi?) agree on anything. The result is that, instead of two big parties, they have many smaller parties, which means that sometimes extremists and lunatics can wield considerable power. As opposed to the American system, where . . .

OK, never mind.

DAY EIGHT

We’re back on the bus, leaving Jerusalem and heading north in the Jordan Valley. Our first stop, near the Jordanian border south of the Sea of Galilee, is Kibbutz Sde Eliyahu, which was founded in 1938 by German Zionists. We get an orientation lecture from a kibbutz member, who tells us that many Israeli kibbutzes have privatized and gone into nonagricultural businesses such as manufacturing. (“Almost everybody’s toilet in the world has a piece that comes from a kibbutz in Israel,” she says.) But Kibbutz Sde Eliyahu is still an old-school socialist agricultural kibbutz, where nobody gets a salary; the idea is that people do what they can and are given what they need.

We tour the fields, where the kibbutz grows a variety of crops using a range of innovative organic farming methods that I would describe to you in fascinating detail except we would both fall asleep. The kibbutz also grows date palms, which are pretty interesting for a plant because—unlike other trees and many married couples—they have sex. Really. According to the kibbutz guide, there are male date palms and female date palms, and in order for a female to have little baby dates, she has to be inseminated by a male. Few sights in nature are more dramatic than a date palm forest at the height of rutting season, resounding with thunderous cra
shes and splinters the size of harpoons whistling through the air as a pair of male palms clash over a female.

OK, to be honest, I don’t know how date palms have sex in the wild. The guide tells us that at the kibbutz, the females are inseminated by people standing on ladders. This reminds me of the joke about the mouse in the jungle who pulls a thorn out of an elephant’s foot, then demands payment in the form of sex, but since there are young people on the tour bus I keep my mouth shut.
*

At the end of the tour, the guide tells us about an agriculture-related sideline that the kibbutz has gotten into: selling specialized insects. She brings out two boxes, one containing bees (this product is called BioBee) and one containing tiny flies (BioFly). Your BioBees are a mellow, laid-back type of bee, so they’re less likely than normal bees to sting you when they pollinate your tomatoes. Your BioFlies kill other flies that you don’t want eating your crops. They are tiny Terminators. So if you’re an organic type of individual who is in the market for a box o’ bugs, Sde Eliyahu is the kibbutz for you.

They also, Michelle discovers, have a gift shop.

We leave the kibbutz and head north, stopping for lunch at a sleepy stri ka se dp mall with a few deserted stores, a falafel stand and a McDonald’s. My family, which has become addicted, goes for the falafel. It’s the best in Israel.

As we’re eating at an outdoor table, an IDF vehicle with four soldiers inside pulls up to the curb next to us. A young soldier—he looks eighteen—gets out, goes to the falafel stand, buys a pack of cigarettes and returns to the vehicle. This takes him maybe a minute and he is never more than twenty feet from the vehicle. But he has his rifle with him the whole time. This doesn’t make us nervous; we’re getting used to seeing soldiers. But it’s a reminder that Israel has to always be ready. Always.

We resume heading north. The countryside gets greener as we drive along the western side of the Sea of Galilee. We pass marinas, resorts and beaches; unlike the Sea of Butt Sting, the Sea of Galilee contains actual water.

We drive up high into the hills and stop at the picturesque and historic town of Tsfat, which is a center of Kabbalah, a mystical branch of Judaism that became fashionable in Hollywood in the 1990s; its best-known celebrity follower is Madonna. Tsfat is one of Israel’s holiest cities, and is a place rich in history. Tragically, it is also a place rich in shopping, offering for sale at a special price many items that would go really well with our living room. While Michelle and Sophie investigate this facet of Tsfat, I find a little stone amphitheater, where I sit to rest my weary legs and contemplate the eternal question of whether or not there is free wifi. (No.) As I’m sitting there, an American tour group walks into the amphitheater and sits down. Their Israel guide gives them a little talk on the history of the Jewish mystical tradition, which dates back centuries. When he’s done, he leads the group out. The last two to leave are a young man and a young woman, who have this conversation:

Man:
You should take a picture of this.

Woman:
Why?

Man:
You didn’t hear what he said?

Woman:
What?

Man:
Madonna lives here!

We spend the night at a pleasant hotel in the Hula Valley operated by Kibbutz Kfar Blum. After dinner, Rabbi Eddie brings out his guitar; he and I entertain the tour group with a medley of classic oldies from the sixties and seventies, when we were young and had many more brain cells. Our act consists of one of us saying, “I got one!” then grabbing the guitar and playing anywhere from seven to twenty-three percent of a classic oldie before reaching the point where he can no longer remember the words or the chords, or both. Then the other one will go, “I got one!” grab the guitar and play another classic oldie fragment. Soon the floor in front of us is littered with the corpses of unfinished songs. It is a wild and crazy night, a raucous rock ’n’ roll riot, Hula Valley style, and it does not end until nearly 10:27 p.m.

DAY NINE

We drive north toward the Golan Heights and the borders with Lebanon and Syria. There has been a lot of fighting over this territory in decades past, so I’m expecting a battled-scarred wasteland. Instead, it’s the most beautiful scenery we’ve seen so far—mountains, hills, streams, rivers, forests, wildflowers. It reminds us of the North Carolina mountains, except for the roadside signs warning you to stay on the road because of minefields. This is a popular vacation area for Israelis and tourists alike. The borders have been mostly peaceful for a while, although, as Doron points out, “In one day, everything could become very problematic again.”

We stop at a hillside overlook, which, instead of overlooking a scenic vista, overlooks Syria. At the moment there’s a horrific civil war going on in Syria; a week earlier, Doron tells us, there was a battle, involving tanks, in the valley right below us. He gives us an explanation of the Syrian situation, which all of us—here, I speak confidently for the group—find utterly incomprehensible.

In the distance, we hear a
BOOM
.

“That’s artillery,” says Doron.

“Check, please,” says Rabbi Eddie, and we get back on the bus.

We drive a few miles, passing Israeli tanks along the way, to our next tour stop, which—perfectly symbolizing the surreal juxtaposition of military outpost and modern consumer society that is Israel—is a gourmet chocolate factory. There, a factory guide shows us an instructional video,
How
Chocolate
Is Made
. It all begins with the cacao tree, which produces beans after having sex with a male date palm.

No, seriously, the way they make chocolate is, they do various instructional things to cacao beans until they turn into chocolate. After watching the video, we tour the factory, then put on paper hats and, using ingredients provided by our guide, try our hand at making and decorating our own chocolates. Despite the fact that we’re amateurs, we manage to produce a variety of creative, personalized confections that look remarkably like cow turds with names dribbled on them. This does not stop us from eating them. Because, dammit, we’re
tourists
.