Didn't I See You at the Chicken Slaughtering?

Well, folks, it's been an exciting few weeks. The month of Elul ended in a flash and it felt like the High Holy Days would never end- although thankfully, they did.

Rosh HaShanah was a bit too long... two full days are celebrated here and then at the sundown of the last day, Shabbat began and it was another day of everything being closed. We were all going a bit stir crazy.

So there's this crazy old tradition here for Yom Kippur... apparently, you (and I mean, anyone with a strong stomach) can go down to the Shuk and transfer your sins to a harmless chicken- swing it around your head- and then slit it's throat. Good times. So Rachel M. and I went down to the shuk and made a day of it. You'd have to see it to believe it.... crates and crates of chickens- alive, dead, in between? The whole ritual was so 2nd Temple- I don't understand why it's still done. I'll have to ask Moses. After that experience, I vowed never to eat chicken again. But just a few hours later as a pre-fast meal, Rachel the Roomie cooked chicken and flanken soup and pasta with chicken and pesto for dinner.... so my oath was broken. Such is the spirit of Yom Kippur.

About an hour or so before sundown on Yom Kippur, all of the traffic lights go out to remind the secular Israelis to stop driving. EVERYONE stops driving- no buses, no cabs, no cars, and most importantly- NO HONKING! We got to walk right in the middle of the street. After Kol Nidrei all of Jerusalem goes down to Emek Refaim in the German Colony and walks up and down the street chatting. It's quite a sight- kind of like Mardi Gras without the booze and flashing and vomit.

As soon as Yom Kippur was over, our whole class headed out for our first tiyul (field trip). We took a bus up to the northern part of the country.

On the first day, we stopped in Rosh Pina, a settlement of the religious immigrants of the 1870s. The Jews were trying to recreate themselves by working the land... they wanted to make a physical connection and did so through agriculture and archaeology. The archaeological aspect is interesting because it links those settlers to the people today- they wanted to find a connection to the people of Biblical times to say, "We didn't just come here on a whim, we're RETURNING... there was always a Jewish presence here." This is a pretty important ideology for the people who live in the North, so close to Lebanon and Syria.

Our next stop was Ma'ayan Baruch for kayaking. I think we all had a pretty great time rafting the rapids of one of the tributaries to the Jordan River. At least, it was a great time until we floated into some thorny bushes that caught on my arm, leaving a trail of blood for the pirahnas (i have pictures). Our group of 6 made a great team effort to ford the river... and then a boat of Israelis attached themselves to us and called us "retarded", but one of the Israelis was a little unnerved when I started talking back to them in Hebrew. Despite the malaria I probably contracted (I can feel it coursing its way through my veins), it was a fantastic time filled with good laughs (and screams).

All dirtied and smelling of "river" water, we headed to our hostel for showers, dinner, wine, and some much needed sleep. The hostel was right on the Kinneret, so as we bonded outside, we could hear the lapping of the water nearby.

Up super early the next morning for Shacharit services at Tel Dan. Steve-o was pretty jazzed up that we were visiting Tel Dan as he was there at the dawn of time (1970). I am eager for him to see the pictures and tell me what's changed. In 1970, it was just a nature reserve as the excavations of the area didn't begin until 1977. It is now known to be a big religious cultic center of the Biblical times first mentioned in Judges. Our guide (the director of the school of archaeology at huc) informed us that this site refutes the "fact" that God wrote the Torah (I love when that happens) and that he's always amused to see Orthodox Jews wandering around the site because it's quite obvious they don't understand what Tel Dan (the ancient city of Laish) was. Apparently, after Israel was split into two kingdoms, Laish was resettled by the tribe of Dan and it became a cultic center for Jews in the Northern Kingdom headed by a non-Levitic (gasp!) priest! Orthodox Jews in the know say that Tel Dan is an affront to God because the cultic center for the Jews is Jerusalem. Ha. The excavations were really interesting to look at and hear about- but the real beauty was in the nature reserve area. Waterfalls, streams, pools...absolutely beautiful scenery--- definitely preferable to Jerusalem. The tribe of Dan had it right.

We continued the day with a stop at Har Bental- a mountain with a view of Syria--- with some bunkers (still in use) from the war of 1973. We learned just how important it is for Israel to keep control of the Golan Heights- and the incredible story of the few soldiers who kept the Syrian tanks at bay for 36 hours on Yom Kippur while waiting for reinforcements.

Lunch, another fantastic audio-visual representation of Israel at a mall, and a discussion with an californian ex-pat Golan Heights resident who named her two children Kinneret and Golan. I wonder if they got beaten up at school.

We returned to the hostel and had a bbq- complete with a guitar and accordion! We were taught some songs about the Galilee and Golan and had a dance party.

This morning we were up early again to head out to another settlement in the "panhandle" of the Golan. As it turns out, I had been to this spot before. We arrived at Tel Hai and I had a moment of deja-vu and realized I was here in 1999 under very different circumstances. Tel Hai was an important spot for the Labor Zionist movement and continues to be an important spot today... the original settlers including the one-armed Yosef Trumpledor and the people of today understand how important it is to remain in the very very northern settlements because it creates visible borders. It's hard to redefine the borders if people are living there.

We left there in a hurry to get up to Metulla, which is the absolute northernmost point on the panhandle. What an incredible view!!!!! Right in front of us was Lebanon, and off in the distance- the mountains of Syria. We met some soldiers who were patrolling the area who were thankful to be alive after last year's war. One of our professors, Paul (my Rhodesian homey), gave us his personal account of the Lebanon War of 1982. It's really amazing to hear his personal stories- I always end up with tears, naturally, no matter how many references he makes to his "sexy knees".

After Metullah, we went to Kiryat Shmona to speak with a psychologist about "life under fire". Turns out, those people are pretty f-ed up. Everyone is suffering from post traumatic stress disorder, and who can blame them? But yet, they all stay. Hm.

We ended the day at the Kinneret Cemetery, right on the lake, looking at the graves of the great poetesses Rachel and Naomi Shemer and Zionists Moshe Hess and Berl Katznelson.

Awesome trip... learned a lot... little sleep... exhaustion.

Peace.