Closing Reflections

Return to Tel Aviv, Departure from Israel

After a leisurely morning of writing and drinking in the view on the rooftop terrace at the Sisters of Zion Convent in Jerusalem, I walked west through the Old City to Jaffa’s gate one last time and then traveled back to Tel Aviv by bus. My own body was in a somewhat compromised state those final days in the country as bus travel down out of the Jerusalem hills left me partly deaf with clogged ears & sinuses.

I was warmly received back into the little family in Tel Aviv. We shared some time getting their new house ready. They have invested an extraordinary amount of work in the cleaning, painting and fixing of this rental house to make it acceptable for their needs. They will move in the week after my departure. Lisa, the girls and I had a last morning at the beach. The waters have turned cold in just in these recent days. So rather than submerging in the Mediterranean, time was spent lounging in the warm sun, Laila and I searched for shells to decorate her sand castle. Laila, the eldest of Ron & Lisa’s girls, was evidently pleased with my return from Jerusalem. Building upon our relationship back in the US, we shared some particularly precious time in my final days.

On our Shabbat drive up to visit Ron’s mother Daisy, we stopped in to see the yoga studio of some friends in Lisa’s yoga community. They recently built the studio themselves, a beautiful light filled space of straw bale construction. Stairs leading up from the road have been fashioned out of old artillery casing crates, ‘The best wood in Israel,’ Ron commented. I found their presence an intriguing juxtaposition. Again, Ron’s mother Daisy fed us lavishly, lamented her grandchildren not yet speaking Hebrew, and sent us home with all manner of containers filled with leftovers, pastries and the contents of her emptied fruit bowl.

I am pensively amazed by the breadth of experiences afforded to me during my time in Israel. I remain strikingly ignorant of the complexities of that place. While I feel I had more multifaceted exposure than perhaps the average visitor, it is also quite clear to me there is no average visitor to that unique and complex country.

As I have tried to elucidate through details of individual interactions with those I’ve encountered along the way, people are drawn to Israel for tremendously wide and varied reasons. From volunteering with a parent Christian organizations to traveling on a globally oriented pilgrimage fostering peace, from traveling to Jerusalem’s Old City to pay homage to the stations of the cross to studying Environmental studies and living on a Kibbutz in the Arava desert, from conducting PhD research on local Palestinian government structure to facilitating mediation and dialogue between Israeli & Palestinian individuals.

Rather than a lengthy contemplative summary, I would steer readers back to my posts over these close to 3 weeks and the more thoughtful details scattered throughout. There are plenty of threads to explore. One closing comment regarding safety. Had I been traveling during the summer of 2006, my thoughts would assuredly be different. Furthermore, the situation in Israel being quite…dynamic it could change at any moment. During my weeks in Israel in November 2007, I had not a single experience in which I felt in any way unsafe. Certainly no more unsafe than anytime I chose to get into a car and drive on the highways of the US. This included my experiences of the extensive security screenings upon my departure at the airport, during which I had the entire contents of my backpack expulsed and examined in detail. It is, by necessity, a rather routine price of the journey. I would encourage anyone so inclined to travel to this fascinating and multifaceted land. There is so much to learn.