Alef: The NEXT Conversation

Forgetting Tel Aviv

By Ruvym Gilman

I didn’t come looking for anything in particular, as I had in the past. Particularity breeds expectation, which, more often than not, leads to disappointment. So I came just hoping not to be disappointed.

…

Arriving in Israel for the fourth time in as many years, I feel that same sense of expectation, that all things here will be holier than elsewhere. The people I’m with, all of us on a fellowship for young, post-college, Jewish, soon-to-be leaders, fill the spectrum from disinterested businessman types to a wanna-be-orthodox spiritualist who produces a hidden kippa at just the right moments. A couple of educators and a 20-something Israeli guide top us off at sixteen people. As we walk down the arrival corridor at Ben-Gurion Airport, the spiritualist kid, his voice melting into the softness with which one speaks of a lover, tells me how the original architecture scheme was supposed to have the arrivals climbing an incline, that it was supposed to represent the entry into Israel as a literal elevation, a “going up” or “aliyah.”

“But this is a decline,” I say, also pointing out that the departure corridor offers a similar descent, creating an “X” of opposing ramps.

He shrugs, “What did you expect? That things here should work out as planned?”

Once we’re at our hotel in Tel Aviv, I call up my uncle, a black-hatter who lives in some really religious neighborhood in Jerusalem. I forget the name or where exactly it is, but I remember how you can see the West Bank from his living room window, outlined by a connect-the-dots arrangement of flood lights that announce the separation wall even in the middle of the night, while you stomp blindly towards the bathroom.

I say, half-jokingly, “I’ve arrived. I’m in the Holy Land.”

“Where are you?”

“Tel Aviv.”

He scoffs, “Then you’re not in the Holy Land.” Pause. “Call me when you’re in Jerusalem.”

The way he says “Jerusalem” as “Yerushalayim,” the way the city’s name seems tainted when placed within a sentence with lesser words, nearly convinces me that my trip won’t really start until I’m there, that everything before will be one cheap parlor trick.

Even though I’ve only ever spent a night in Tel Aviv before (not long enough to see much of anything) I want him to be wrong. He’s close-minded, I tell myself, incapable of giving a fair trial to anything in the secular world.

But Tel Aviv just can’t seem to keep its mouth shut. The 70s-style hotels that line the coast and the smell of sunscreen that sits like a thick fog rolled in from the water make the city seem like nothing more than a sad Middle Eastern version of Miami Beach. A few generations of pasty Ashkenazic immigrants have given way to firm, tanned bodies. Bronze Gods, new idols of worship.

I stare up at the sleek new skyscrapers, those symbols of Israeli progress and modernity, but have a hard time reconciling them with the squat, abandoned Bauhaus structures that still litter most of the landscape, chipped paint and weeds and trash spilling out from boarded-up windows and doors that have long been propped open. I’m embarrassed when I see Independence Hall with its dilapidated exterior, a makeshift flagstaff at the top, leaning off to one side at a slight five degree tilt, a tattered flag sputtering alongside it. This is where a state was formed? I missed Washington’s white-washed Roman architecture, forgetting, for a moment, that I’d never actually spent enough time in Philadelphia to see where America was born.

In the southern part of the city, lights flicker along the edges of the streets, tacky bright bulbs announcing whorehouses with graffiti painted accents of exaggerated bodies draped in Flashdance-style underwear tearing at the seams. Peddlers spread dusty sheets, once white, across sidewalks to exhibit their worthless wares – rusted tools, used (“vintage”) clothing, manicure sets slipping out of their open containers, unlabelled VHS tapes with cracked plastic screens. It’s all a caricature of the forgotten, a corner of this country that God must not have noticed.

I try to ignore my disappointment because it’s easier not to deal with it. Instead, with the coaxing of more party-minded individuals than myself, I indulge in the familiar comforts that Tel Aviv has to offer. Life becomes one sleepless night of drinks and hookah on the beach, eyeing bikinis and searching for knowing smiles, the resonating slap of matkot paddles off in the distance as the Friday night sun dips behind the Mediterranean and the prayer book grows sweaty in my hands. Most other things recede into the dark corner, just a shapeless mass casting a long shadow at the passing of a light.

The night before our exodus East, I sit out by the sea with a few other people. Our feet buried in the cold sand, each of us contemplates in silence. I allow myself to realize that I’m ready to leave, happy even. I don’t think I will miss having Tel Aviv behind us.

Someone lets out a deep breath. “This place, its amazing isn’t it?”

“Why?” I ask, annoyed at the mere suggestion that there can be anything amazing about it. “It’s so rundown, so seedy. I expected something a little more, I don’t know, developed, advanced.”

“You have to realize,” he says, “it’s still such a young place. All of this was built from nothing, in the middle of a desert, by people who came out of Europe after the Holocaust. And they did it in only sixty years.”

I don’t know that I understand what any of it means. The context, the realities, they seem too far removed from my own life. I don’t have anything to say in response, and so I let his words trail off into the salty air as our conversation devolves back into just the sound of our rising and settling chests, the sleepy lapping of the Mediterranean against the shore.

Ruvym Gilman is a short story writer.  You can find more of his work on his blog, The Kernel.

Photo by Hoyasmeg, licensed under Creative Commons.

Read more posts from Issue #19: Israel.

Tags: ben gurion airport, city, holy land, Israel, Jerusalem, tel aviv

Posted by Emily.Comisar@birthrightisraelnext.org, Wednesday, August 25th, 2010, 11:43 am, Israel.