Arrival, Jaffa

The man sitting next to me wound a black cord around his arm, from his wrist all the way up to his shoulder, took out a prayer book and began intoning the words softly. As I watched the snowy runway haloing his gently knodding features slip behind us, I was struck by the suddenness with which history can change. 60 years ago, who would have imagined that I would be sitting next to this man, about to take off from German soil en route to the Jewish homeland?





Jaffa Market

I had spent the previous four months ploughing through 3000 years and 600 pages of Jerusalem, The Biography, but I realized as soon as we started talking that I had only scratched the surface of Israel's fascinating history. Yehoshua was born in Venezuela, moved with his family to Brazil at two, studied medicine in the United States for several years and then finally moved to Israel where he married an Algerian and got a job working at the department of Health. He told me that his story is not that unusual in Israel, a place in which every resident has overcome challenges to be there. I asked how he squares his scientific training with his religious belief, and he smiled widely. "I give talks about this stuff!" His answers were as interesting for their format as for their content. Any philosophical point was made through stories, usually taken from the Tanakh (Hebrew Bible), much as Jesus answered disciples questions in the New Testament.





Jaffa Mosque

He explained that Hebrew, the descendent of Aramaic that is spoken in modern day Israel, finds the roots of many of its words in numbers. Each letter represents a number, much like Roman numerals. For example the first letter is 1, the 11th letter is 20, and so on. The word for hand is composed of the letters for 10 and 4, because the hand's fingers and thumb are made up of 14 segments between joints. The word for hold, as in, hold with both hands, is derived from 2 x 14. The relationship between language and mathematics goes deeper. Geometry is part of the language itself. The famous linguistics example of Inuits having many words for snow came to mind, and I wondered about the effect having such an intuitive understanding of mathematics from the time you learn your first words must have on how you perceive the world. To test the waters I mentioned Noam Chomsky, linguistics expert and fierce critic of Israel but Yehoshua bristled so I dropped it.





San

As we walked off the plane I was immediately singled out by security for having a beard (apparently a capital offence in Israel, the United States and Australia) so Yehoshua and I shook hands and parted. At customs I was questioned a second time, and then sent to the interrogation room. But before they could get out the feathers to tickle me into submission, a guy who looked like he strangles baby penguins for a living asked me where I was staying and for how long, then cut off the answer to the second question with a curt instruction to have a good time in Israel.





Oz, Ben, Ludmi, Joni

Joni and Oz, his brother-in-law, were waiting for me as I came out the doors, exhilarated to finally be here. Oz drove us back to his apartment just outside Tel Aviv, where he and Ludmi live with their one and a half year old son, Ben. On the ride Oz laughed about the numbers stuff, he said that some mystics spend an entire lifetime studying it, and he knows at least one person who started to think in numbers instead of words, and went crazy. I smiled, but I was only half listening as I stared out the windows at this place that I've read and heard and seen so much about, but was subtly different in every aspect. I commented that even the light here seems to have a different quality, and Joni joked that that's because it's holy. That night we ate fried bread with hummus, blended tomato and several weird salty and spicy things that tasted amazing, and drank Maccabee beer, recommended by Yehoshua as being "good, as in good cost/benefit".





Waiting for Aladdin

This morning Joni dragged Ludmi and I on a 7am run around the neighbourhood (it seems no one told him I'm on holiday). The buildings are unlike any I've ever seen before, flat on all sides and made of a kind of limestone that apparently is only used in Israel. There are palm and olive trees everywhere, but it's also much greener than I would have imagined. I immediately noticed the intensity of land use, which makes sense given that the entire state of Israel is not much bigger than greater Buenos Aires. My Dad visited in the 1960s as an agricultural economist to study Israel's water conservation methods in agricultural production, and Yehoshua mentioned that Israel reuses 80% of its waste water to grow crops, something that he is currently studying at the Department of Health to see if it causes any health problems (from toxins in waste water).





Jaffa Fort

At around 9:30 we drove to the historic coastal city of Jaffa. It was here that Saladin, one of Islam's most celebrated and famously tolerant rulers was finally defeated by crusader Richard the Lionheart in 1192. Standing on a wall skirting a square at the top of the ancient fort, Oz beckoned me over and pointed at the sand between the palm trees. "You see that?" he asked, and I followed his finger to a piece of terracotta. "Every time it rains, thousands of Israelis go out and look around in the sand for bits of pottery, coins, whatever gets revealed when the water washes away the sand." Israel has been settled and resettled so many times that there are layers upon layers of history sitting literally just below its surface. A friend of his living in a kibbutz, no where near any current settlement, has a collection of 2,000 coins from myriad empires, discovered in the furrows made every time the plow turns over earth in the fields.





Oz haggles with a coin dealer

We wandered through the flea market for a couple of hours. I went off on my own for a while to buy some cotton pants, for which I bargained the seller down from 45 to 35 shekels (about $10). When we sat down for lunch I realized they'd been stolen out of the top of my bag, so I went back with Joni to buy them again, telling him proudly we wouldn't need to bargain, I'd already taken care of that. On hearing him speak Hebrew the seller immediately offered them to him for 30 shekels, which he refused, and the guy in the next shop gave them to us for 20.





Tel Aviv, from Jaffa Fort

I'm still pretty jet lagged, so we headed home around 5pm. I'm planning to update this blog each day that I'm here, so check back tomorrow. In the mean time you can see all my photos of Jaffa on flickr.