Touching the Sublime
I went to Israel once, to meet the family of a woman I was dating. She was mad at me for saying that the country was only as big as Houston (I was right, it turns out).
There are so many things I keep remembering. The way that everything was so carefully built so that you never had to see the ugly parts if you didn’t want to. The beautiful beaches in Tel Aviv. The pied crows. The fruit bats hanging from the guava trees. The ficus and the sabra. All reminiscent of home, but a world away, slightly out of place. When we drove the highway to the desert, you could just barely see the fences lining the hill tops, but only if you really tried.
We went to the arts districts, which, like all arts districts, sprung up uninvited in the less desirable parts of town. Along the wharf of Jaffa. In Tel Aviv’s less polished parts, with the graffiti to give voice to those who had so little in other places.
I learned about the mizrahi, the way god’s people, scattered across the earth, learned to stop identifying with each other & learned to identify with the colors they had become in their absence from home. Lessons they brought back with them, like dirt tracked in through the door.
I saw Jesus’ tomb while I was there. Eavesdropped on the American pilgrims who didn’t want to eat hummus, who were pining for a McDonald’s. “Normal food,” they called it.
We had mint tea cooked in the campfire in the desert and looked at 2000 year old graffiti on the rocks. Planes scrambled overhead during their maneuvers.
It was the most beautiful place I have ever seen.
It was also the most terrible.
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