Israel old and new

(Conclusion)

As I was saying last week, one can easily get stuck in the ancient past when visiting Israel — there’s certainly enough of that to go around, just in Jerusalem itself, where traditional attractions such as the Temple Mount and the Church of the Holy Sepulchre draw tens of thousands of tourists every year. That journey back to history extends far out into the desert to Masada, the mountaintop fortress where Herod built a sumptuous palace complete with heated water, and where, some seven decades after him, the embattled Jews were said to have committed mass suicide rather than yield to the advancing Romans.

For someone like me who grew up on Hollywood epics and on profusely illustrated Bibles, our group’s visit to Masada — little more these days than a cluster of rocky ruins offering a spectacularly vast view of the desert and the Dead Sea, with Jordan just across the water — was a highlight not to be missed. The short cable car trip to the top might as well have been a ride on a time machine, to a place whose present solitude might as well be an echo chamber for the clash of swords and the crunch of sandaled feet on the sand.

(This dense and heavy quietude seems to pervade large swaths of Israel. It was inescapable in Jerusalem’s Yad Vashem museum, the country’s memorial to the victims of the Holocaust, where our guide Rita — whose mother and grandmother had been at Auschwitz — invited us to form our own connections to her people’s past. Even so the present kept butting in, like an ironic refrain; hardly had we stepped out of Yad Vashem when “Welcome to Palestine” messages began appearing on our roaming cell phones.)

Not far below Masada, the Dead Sea offers another kind of cleansing, a scouring of the body’s every nook even in the briefest of immersions in its briny embrace. Modern resort hotels have sprung up on its beaches, attracting busloads of tourists from Jerusalem and Tel Aviv, many seeking relief in this sprawling natural spa. This is a sea — actually a lake — without fish and without boats, but it is threatened even in its desolation; the Dead Sea is receding by about a meter a year, and sinkholes have appeared near the shore.

The ride back to the city is a return to life, to the vibrant present. Along the way one passes settlements — kibbutzim — caught somewhere in between, in a communal lifestyle forged in a more romantic, more idealistic past but soldiering on bravely in an age of globalization.

The Ein Gedi kibbutz is nestled in an oasis close to Masada and Qumran, where the Dead Sea Scrolls were found, and archeological studies have turned up many links to the biblical past; in 1956 some settlers went there to carve out a village and a life in the desert. Now Ein Gedi blooms as a garden resort, a burst of bright colors in the ashen landscape. Its botanical gardens, with over 900 species from all over the world (including the Philippines, I would often remark to our host Daniela, herself transplanted from North America), materially express the spirit of struggle and survival that animates the people here, Jews, Arabs, and Christians alike.

But after the dry desert, Tel Aviv’s cosmopolitanism and contemporaneity are like a tall, chilled glass of beer (Goldstar is the local brew of choice). A new city even by global standards — it was founded just over a century ago by people coming out of ancient Jaffa to the south — Tel Aviv is, quite literally, Israel’s modern, Mediterranean face.

That modernity is emblazoned not just on the city’s trademark Bauhaus architecture but in the familiar shouts and grunts of cities everywhere, in the cacophony of traffic and the susurrus of markets. It is manifest in the inventive athleticism of the world-famous Mayumana dance group, for whom body and music seem to be one fluid thing, and in the broad appeal of singer and performer Idan Raichel, whose lyrics we didn’t need to understand to appreciate his art and his passion for multiculturalism.

The future flies in your face in Israel when you confront its advances in technology — no huge surprise for a people who count Albert Einstein among their intellectual fathers, and whose battle-ready mindset encourages innovation. They’re building not just a 100-percent electric car out there in a place called, well, A Better Place, but also the nationwide network of charging stations that the enterprise will require.

Speaking of cars, however, whatever you do, don’t open a car wash or a car insurance business in Israel. Nearly all the cars I saw, old or new, sported a thick sprinkling of dust and a rash of nicks and dings on the fenders. Apparently, unlike some places we know, a slight nudge or bump on the road is no cause to kill or even to get worked up in Israel.

My sweetest hour in that country came, oddly or perhaps appropriately enough, close to the very end, away from all the history, the politics, and the economics that had dominated my visit. With a couple of hours to while away before dinner on our penultimate day, our first free period in almost a week, I went out by myself to the beach behind our hotel in Tel Aviv.

A 30-minute walk in the dry heat tired me quickly, but the sun was setting, and I thought I would watch the sun drop into the ocean from behind the clouds. The “ocean” here was the Mediterranean Sea, and I realized that — despite having visited many European countries and bodies of water — I had never been to the Mediterranean, so I went down to the water’s edge and performed a little ritual I had done on my first encounter with the Atlantic 30 years ago: I bent over, dipped a finger into the swell, and licked the salty drop off.

As I did that the onrushing wave surged around my feet, drowning my shoes, so I parked myself in a yellow plastic lounge chair on the public beach to dry them out. This curve of the beach was apparently for families with children. I hate screaming toddlers, but here I found strange comfort in their gurgling laughter. The children were very small; some couldn’t even walk yet, and a charmer of a girl crept over to me on all fours in the powdery sand, egged on by her father to greet me “Shalom,” although she could talk no more than she could walk. I saw a mother rinse her baby’s face with seawater; these children would lose their fear of the ocean early.

Soon the sun slid beyond the horizon, not in the burst of molten gold that we Filipinos prefer for our sunsets, but in a wash of silver over a leaden sea. I imagined this view as it may have looked a millennium ago, with ancient galleys and triremes coming in on the surging waves to sack Jaffa, just a few kilometers down the same shore. Now I saw a fine young woman wade boldly into the shimmering water, trailed by her boyfriend’s camera; in the foreground, a girl of about ten skipped across the beach, her marriage and motherhood still a decade away.

Just the day before, I had visited other children in a special ward in a hospital just outside Tel Aviv. Here, the Save a Child’s Heart Foundation, founded by a Jewish American doctor, brings a couple of hundred children every year for heart operations they couldn’t afford or couldn’t get; often the mothers come, too. Many if not most of the children treated by the volunteer doctors aren’t even Jewish; when I visited, the children were mainly Palestinians from Gaza, Angolans, and Chinese. Last year an eight-month-old Filipino girl from Benguet named Lyka was flown here for the open-heart surgery that saved her life.

It’s a messy world outside that hospital, but for a moment back there I thought I saw the best of the place and of the people, driven not by governments or regimes but by humanitarianism without borders.

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E-mail me at penmanila@yahoo.com and visit my blog at www.penmanila.net.