Tuesday: Leaving Chevron
On Tuesday morning we left Chevron with our guide for the day – Shalom Alkabi – in his big jeep. Shalom and his family (7 kids) live on a hilltop community next to Chevron called Givat Gal. This is one of the hilltop communities that the government wants to destroy, ostensibly because they feel it interferes with the “peace process.” We had Shalom take us up to his home. It’s a group of about 7 families. Most of them live in caravans, but Shalom actually built a very nice permanent home. The first family to move up here actually lived for years in an old bus – no electricity, no running water, bitterly cold and fierce winter winds – while raising a large family. When they were finally able to slap a caravan onto the side of their bus/home, their family had expanded to 9 kids. These folks are the toughest of the tough. Shalom and his family face the government’s threat to destroy their home with incredible faith in G-d. I asked him what would he do financially if the government bulldozed his home and left him with a mortgage and no home. He said he wasn’t troubled. He says he knows that they’re doing the right thing, putting their lives on the line in the service of the ideal that this land is ours, and he has complete faith in G-d’s providence. Hadassah and Mendel had a great time petting the goats and chickens that the families up here own.
In the Jeep
From the hilltop community we headed for the day to the Dead Sea and to the Ein Gedi spring on its shore. The regular road there is through Jerusalem. However, we were in a jeep, so roads were optional. We were on roads for the first 45 minutes or so, but for the last 2-1/2 hours we were on camel trails, bumping and jostling in our jeep through the starkly beautiful Judean desert. The scenery here is really breathtaking. People tend of think of Israel as a tiny place, which is true. Its total area is about the size of the state of New Jersey, and only a relatively small part if mountainous desert. However, from our camel trail vantage point, these rocky and barren Judean mountains stretch to the horizon in every direction.
Whose Land Is It?
One of the curious and troubling things we noticed driving through Judea is that the Jewish towns are surrounded by fences and barbed wire (and by the way, they are now forbidden by the government to build anything, even additions to existing structures) while the Arab towns sprawl freely, without any fences, and they’re building freely without restrictions. Judging by appearances, it would appear that we’re the foreigners while the Arabs are the ones at home here, with no need for fences.
Ein Gedi
The kids had a blast playing in the pools and waterfalls (with their clothes on) and Hadassah just had to stop and oodle over every rock hyrax (furry little creatures) that came close to us. It is amazing how close the long-horned ibex (local mountain goats) come to the people. It seems very unusual for such wild and exotic looking large mammals to be living in apparent harmony with the large flow of tourists. Perhaps it’s a model for wild animal/human cohabitation that could be applied elsewhere as well.
Dead Sea
Right across from Ein Gedi is the Dead Sea, but the public beach there has no separation between men and women, and though it was getting late, the kids really wanted the experience of floating in the Dead Sea. This day was the only big outing we had planned for our whole trip, so even though it was getting late, we had our driver take us 35 minutes further South along the Dead Sea to an area called Ein Boqueq, where there are a number of hotels and a beach with a mechitza separating men from women bathers. We were rewarded for our effort by the opportunity to davven mincha with an impromptu minyan right on the side of the beach as well as by one of the funniest scenes I’ve seen in quite a while. When we got into the water (which is quite an experience in itself) I found myself right next to these two Chassidic men in the water with the faces and heads coated with (therapeutic) mud. They were both wearing thick glasses and they were conversing in Yiddish. There was something absurdly incongruous about the mud coated faces and the peyos hanging down and the thick glasses and the Yiddish here in the middle of the Dead Sea.
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