Travel through life, travel through Israel

I received a beautiful and enlightening email from a college classmate I hadn’t talk to since 1997. It’s the best thing that happened to me on Facebook. The guy, let’s call him Mike, says that over the years he came to see himself as having serious flaws in his character, he made a point of addressing these issues and he’s become a better person. This is not the average reconnect letter you receive on Facebook. The average letter is from someone who tells you about how many houses he owns, how much he travels, how successful he’s become and how busy he is, except five minutes later you find out he’s just become a fan of emmenthal cheese. Most of the time catching up with friends becomes nothing but an account and collection of individually unimportant, material things. Mike’s letter made me realize how we travel through life asleep to what really is important, spending all our time and energy on the small stuff and what it means to really strive to live with meaningful purpose.

Moreover in his letter Mike apologized to me for all that happened in Israel in 1997. That summer we volunteered on a kibbutz. We were not friends. It’s just that it was my first time in Israel, in the middle of a terror campaign, I wanted a travelmate and Mike was the only guy I knew in my super-conservative slightly anti-semitic university who was crazy enough to accept my invitation.

Our trip was like living in a Problem Child movie, without the fun. A real troublemaker, Mike managed to turn pretty much every ordinary day into a mess. The worst horror story is when Mike went missing in Jerusalem.

We went to Jerusalem for a long week-end. The fist night we walked around the Old City, had a frugal meal in the Arab quarter where our hostel was located, and booked a trip to Masada. We had separate plans the following day but had agreed to meet for dinner. He didn’t show up. The day of the Masada tour I waited in vain at the reception desk. By 2 pm, descending Masada, I started worrying. I pressed the panic button when I got back to the hostel and there was still no sign of Mike. My first thoughts had been:

- How to cope with the first body identification of my life;

- how to inform the parents whom, to make things worst, were told by Mike he was going “somewhere in Spain”.

Around 7 I was at the police station. Somewhat to my amazement I wasn’t asked the usual questions “when is the last time you saw him, what was he wearing, etc…”. Instead the officer wanted to know if he was my boyfriend.

-No, I said.

-So why do you care?

At that point I was about to lose it. That was the epiphany of the old Jewish joke that goes why do Jews always answer a question with a question, why not? Is there anything more frustrating that being denied the possibility to file a missing person report on the ground of not-your-boyfriend-why-do-you-care reasons? After I provided a thoroughly ethical and torah-inspired explanation of why I cared, he shot his second bullet: “do you have a picture of him?”. When I said no, although we took pictures in the last few days but they’re still on film, he announced “without a photo I can’t do anything”. I remember trying to broadcast hate-rays to incinerate him as I stood there staring at him and thinking: “Where the hell do you think I can find an open photography shop in Jerusalem on Shabbat, you a--hole?”. All of a sudden everything became clear: it was Shabbat and that cop had no intention to move his ass for the following 24 hours.

In the Christian quarter, the only place where an open shop could possibly be found on a Friday evening, I had my film developed at Photo Christo (no joke). Back at the police station the cop called my kibbutz. Nobody picked up the phone. It’s Shabbat, he said with a shrug. I hadn’t notice, I replied. I decided not to leave the picture with them and try my luck elsewhere. Like in the movies, I pathetically walked around the bazaar and the narrow streets of the arab quarter showing Mike’s picture to vendors.

I went back to the hostel where everyone had been put on high alert, meaning that every time I stepped in, the reception desk guy and his friends, slouched around a white plastic table sipping Wissotzky tea and playing cards, would turn to me and ask “Found anything?”

I have this dim, blurred memory of a woman lingering around the place, I don’t know in what capacity. A weird, skinny and tall foreign woman in her fifties, totally out of context in a youth hostel, dressed in a long flowery gown. I was ready to swear she was affected by the Jerusalem Syndrome, although I’ve never seen a real case (i.e. the phenomenon whereby a person who seems previously balanced and devoid of any signs of psychopathology becomes psychotic after arriving in Jerusalem, Wikipedia.). In her attempt to help, we embarked on a surreal conversation, starting with her asking in what kibbutz we were working. Maoz Chaim, I said. She had never heard of it. Nevertheless, “It’s a moshav”, she claimed. No, it’s a kibbutz, I corrected her. It’s a moshav, she insisted. It’s a kibbutz, for god’s sake, I live there, I know. And by the way, what impact does the collective organization of labor and decision-making in the State of Israel have on my search? Our kafkaesque exchange went on for a few minutes. It was like playing ping pong in a psych ward. Anyway, it’s a kibbutz.

At the end of Shabbat the volunteers coordinator at Maoz Chaim, a 90 year old German Holocaust survivor who by the end of our stay hated us more than she hated the Nazis, received a phone call that almost gave her a heart attack: “Ms Finkelstein, this is the Jerusalem police. It’s about one of your volunteers.” Mike was at the kibbutz. He had left the morning after our arrival because of sudden intestinal problems (gee… didn’t he read the health warning section of his lonely planet before ordering a GREEN SALAD in the Arab quarter?). He rushed to the bus station early in the morning where he happened to have another attack, left his backpack on a bench and run to the bathroom. Reemerging from the bathroom he found two armed soldiers waiting for him for a little… two hour “Q&A session” about his unattended luggage.

I never told Mike the whole story. When I saw him back at the kibbutz he was laughing his head off over my going to the police, and I wanted to deny him any further satisfaction. As far as I remember I gave him a dirty look (or the finger?) and walked away in rage.

I have to thank Mike for his totally unexpected, touching letter and his life lesson. And because now that the last traces of anger have been buried I can finally laugh my head off too.