Yom Ha'atzmaut in Two Cafés (May 16th, 2024)
I would’ve started on the new story this morning, but, despite my best intentions, the narrative remains too cloudy in my mind to begin just yet (until the nucleus collects just enough precipitation, it floats about up-and-down-ways, but eventually, at just the right moment, has no choice and must fall to earth). Not just that, though: my mind is again tending towards my quickly approaching departure from this country, which, although it has always been to me—affectionately albeit cluelessly—‘reishit smichat geulateinu,’ I’ve only now just begun to understand why in the slightest.
Rabbi Joel continues to reiterate his appreciation for us having come to Israel and ‘put our lives on hold,’ for a year, as it were. He said this last night to us at the very end of his shiur, and I, needing for some reason or other to get the last word in for the entire year, responded that his commonly repeated phrase was in fact, nonsensical. When I first arrived, I shared his impression, though. Yeshiva was the ‘year off my normal life,’ and I was ‘putting it on hold’ to come here and study Torah. Perhaps I held this framework somehow in my mind—I think most likely I always find the prospect of ‘putting ones life on hold’ a tad silly (like the similarly oriented ideas of ‘wasting one’s time,’ becoming the person ‘whom I want to be,’ or believing that ‘I’m a future X…’), but the idea that Israel was the somehow the ‘inverse’ of my regular existence in New York held legitimacy in my mind. It would be, certainly, a strange thing to study Torah for a year, and to leave behind all of my family and friends. But again, what I said yesterday was that at some point in the year, maybe even just recently, that framework has inverted itself, turned inside out. Upon the eve of my departure, I ‘almost’ find as if going back to the states will be my strange foray into the unknown; this, what I have in Israel, is, my life, and the return to New York will in fact be the ‘putting on hold’ of this one! I’m sure as soon as I wake up that first morning in my bed at home this feeling will have already dissipated—or perhaps not—and I will begin the slow work of re-acclimating to non-yeshiva life, and to non-Israel life. The two are quite different—even the weeks are structured differently. And I met God here in Akko! How could I leave the place where I met God?
Nightly, the streets grow evermore glimmery here, proportionally so to my departure date. I inch towards my flight, and my tinted goggles grow increasingly obfuscated with pink, foamy, crushed glass. The phenomenon is not new; in fact it haunts me at the end of all things, like a gloved hand hovering in the sky, holding a bookmark and ready to drop it at any moment. He's just ‘saving my place,’ he says, but nevertheless, despite his best intentions to hide from me, I know he's the hand of the surgeon: demarcating, dissecting, slicing. Can I run from him? Unclear. Regardless, fields of red plastic roses hang lazily upside-down in the streets, people mull, friends hover, and this city continues to leave its mark on me while it still has the chance.
Experience report: Lorazepam, 0.5 mg. T:00:01: warming sensation in chest and throat, slightly elevated heart rate, a certain mental sluggishness. T:00:05: slight head rush, slight shakiness of the hands noticed. Mental state doesn’t seem to have been altered so perceptibly at this time. T:00:08: definite slowness of experience—heaviness to limbs and jaw. T:00:10: pressure in front of lower sternum, slight stomach discomfort. Perhaps because I haven’t eaten anything today aside from coffee. Mental state almost as if I’ve had two drinks, although it’s hard to be sure what’s placebo here. T:00:15: sluggishness perhaps giving way to a lightheadedness, and a perceptible levity of thought. Again, could be placebo. T:00:20: definitely has opened up to state of drunkenness/aloofness. There’s a wind pouring in through the window opposite me, it comes in waves, and through my tallis and loose shorts and T-shirt the air coolly caresses my skin. Slightly enhanced sensory perception, pressure and warmth still sitting at what feels to be the antrum of my stomach.
“I can’t wait to go home, to be there when the new world comes… to forget where the old world was…”
The barista (the Italian café one across town, by the botanical gardens) at the register has her lips pursed in the most curious way, fingering one of the buttons of the register—her lips are pulled to one side, the right side, of her jaw, and her cheeks are pulled convex tight over her mandibles. Her gray-green eyes phase through the glass case of pastries—a vast garden of flakey, crumbling flowers—towards who knows what; perhaps the argument she has been in with her boyfriend, or the state of the war—we’ve just invaded Rafah—but no doubt unrelated to her surroundings, which unfortunately for her, are quite the spectacle.
The table directly in front of her and her glass-walled garden seats a grandmother and a granddaughter, the older slurping from a heavy piece of ceramic, and having just finished her round sugar cookie—which she had completed with a too-long dunk into the drink, causing a piece of it to slough off as she lifted it back into her mouth—caused her granddaughter to imitate the action with her Linzer tart. The perfect act of mimicry, which between these two, was in-itself an inimitable art form. Only the granddaughter will figure that out much too late, at exactly the right time…
Still, there’s more enculturation going on here—their polite back-and-forth, the sitting still, the tolerance of brief silences—that the young girl need not commit to memory, for it’s already too late; certain things at this age slip into the back of our memory to stay, perhaps not within our authority at all to accept or refuse. And all of a sudden one day she’ll be dipping a croissant into her coffee and never wonder for a second at her rationale.
One can tell too from how she’s sitting so patiently and cross-leggedly—and she’s grasped the glass of water now, with two hands! An adventurous sip is incoming!—that she’s the perfect learner. It’s the full time job of all children, of course. Only a select few though elevate it to this level of mastery. But there’s a check paid, some chairs scuffled, and just like that the two of them disappear. The younger sends a final glance over her left shoulder, and swipes her lips with her right sleeve. The enculturation, the life lessons, it’s all moved on. Class dismissed.
Their table rests in silence now, crumb-covered and vacant, and noticeably more vacant than other empty tables. Israeli flags, strung up for Yom Ha’atzmaut, wave across the ceiling in synchrony, and the place is the most distinctly American institution I’ve found in Israel so far. It has something to do with the chairs—red faux-leather and chrome—and the near eclectic assortment of decorations on the walls like in the antique store on 2nd street in Mineola. The sugar packet holders too, and the cracked, ceramic light fixtures casting a yellow warmth for it all—truthfully, I could be anywhere in the whole turning world right now; maybe I don’t have to pick after all.
The grandmother and granddaughter walk past the windows again from the other direction now—like they’d just walked the circumference of the earth and are now returning on their second go-round to lap me. They give their still vacant (brushed off and wiped down) table another, now final, once-over. I suppose that somehow means it’s my turn to do the same…