An Odd Assortment & A Personal Request

Dear kind and patient readers,
Instead of a long posting, here's a few notes from my Israelian week. Read them in order or choose your own adventure.

1. On Friday night we discussed ritual bathing over dinner. You learn so much about cultures through their bathing. Japanese baths, Turkish hammams. Etc. This is one of my set/pet subjects. Jews, I said, had ritual baths, but what about Israelis? G. said the Golan heights were full of springs that had been built up with rocks and plants as memorials for people killed, I think mostly in the army or terrorist attacks. Friends come and build the rocks around the spring together, then hikers go and bathe in them.

2. Still chewing on my inability to go to Hebron to see the occupation for myself, or go to a checkpoint to bear witness, and generally take part in political activity here. Is it because I'm lazy, scared, need more time to get into things here before jumping in?

3. Instead of going to Hebron I...went to eat at El Babur, maybe the best Palestinian resteraunt right outside of Um El Fahem in the Galillee and had tiny grape leaves. You could taste the tang of the grape leaf, not all the stuffed pointless white rice getting in the way of the tree.

4. Instead of going to Hebron I...drove with my father from Jerusalem to Tel Aviv at sunset the Northen Way, i.e. through the West Bank, both sides of the road often blocked off by a high cement wall. We agreed to disagree: (Arab)terrorism and the apartheid-state were a chicken and egg question. He told me about a Shabbat he spent in Hebron in 1969 with settlers who seemed very idealistic, very non-materialistic. Everything was less clear cut back then, he said.

5. Instead of going to Hebron I...begged and begged Naama to write in this blog about her trip to Hebron and her witnessing activities. I'm like the child that doesn't know what to ask, but I want to know what was it like there today, this city that is so close and so far away? What did it smell like? Was anyone happy to see you? Grateful? What do you do with what is witnessed - pass it like a hot potato from hand to hand quickly so it doesn't burn you?

6. There are more things I want to say about studying the prophets in Jerusalem and not in Berkeley, broken pots as signs of destruction, the Brutal Architechture of Hebrew University where this takes place -- but I'll save this for now and hope the computer Gods stay with me at least until the next few posts.

(P.S. Family vacation at the Sea of Galilee. A family friend recommends the Pilgerhaus, a German-Christian hotel, because Christianity is so relaxing. Later I hear a friend of a friend went psychotic on *her* family vacation.)