A Bedtime Story for Grace

Note: I promised Grace a story or two about our hiking trip to Israel. Here is one.

This is an Israeli goat named Jacob.We met him at an organic farm called Yarok Oz ("Green Goat"), where his girlfriends make goat cheese for sale and where tired hikers or other travellers can sleep in cozy geodesic domes, modelled here by my lovely assistant E.

Probably because the noonday sun interfered with our judgment, we decided to tack on a side trip to Yarok Oz, thereby expanding our 10-mile day (which just that morning had already been expanded by an episode of getting seriously lost looking for a trail marker that turned out to be under a rock). Ok, it was another few miles, but who could resist their organic goat cheese?

No one.

Which is why there was none left by the time we got there.

The owners graciously revived us with water and shade (the true currency of desert hospitality).  And a young Israeli volunteer swinging some mighty dreadlocks and his German girlfriend took us on yet another side hike to see some pretty cool antiquities.

This young Israeli and German couple brings me to the story from our trip that I really want to share. I just didn't have the right pictures to go with it and figured Grace would get hooked by any story that starts with a goat.

The story is about the two German women who were hiking The Jesus Trail when we did. (The trail is self-guided, but the outfitters book everyone into the same guesthouses, where you dine together. And the 12 of us frequently walked together, particularly in those moments when maintaining independence seemed far less important than, say, finding someone who could figure out where the hell the trail went.)

Helga is 72 and lives on a little island between Germany and Denmark. Her friend Adelhaid is 74 and lives in what used to be East Germany. These ladies could hike the bejesus (insert groan here) out of almost any one of us. Helga spoke perfect English, because she escaped East Germany with her family when she was a young girl. She left behind her little friend Adelhaid, who spoke only German,thanks to the black hole of her Communist schooling.  When the Wall came down, the friendship between the little girls grew up.

I have never been to Germany but shared with Helga that my mom had fun travelling through Germany in the 1970s using just her Yiddish.  The next day, she saddled up to me on a winding trail through a eucalyptus forest.

"Can I ask you something, Julie?" she asked. "Was it very hard for your mother and your father to go to Germany?"

Gulp.

Now, my parents were not like some in their immediate postwar generation of American Jews, where the very word "German" turned a heart into stone. They never bought a Mercedes or a BMW, but that was because they were definitely Fords in their lack of materialism. Still, there was a stiffness in their shoulders, a flare in their otherwise gentle eyes...an unspoken fury that I bet every one of my demographic (spoiled white Jewish baby boomer female raised in the "Wonder Years" suburbs) can recognize. 

A fury that we, the next generation, understand, but try to extinguish in ourselves and especially in our children.

A fury that I desperately wanted to hide from this beautiful woman with crinkly pink smile lines around her clear blue eyes. But, hey, if you are going to tell the truth anywhere on this planet, it ought to be on the Jesus Trail. And so I did.

"Yes, it was. They enjoyed so much, but there was ...um...well, there was Dachau."

Helga nodded.  I didn't want to add that there was also time after time where they scanned elderly faces around them and asked themselves the Unaskable. Behavior no one is proud of but that no one of that generation can easily avoid.  Then, she told me about going through the U.S. Holocaust Museum with her college-age son, who was studying in Wash DC. He signed the guest book at the end with words that made Helga well up even as she relayed them to me.

"I am so ashamed to be German."

Through her tears, she shared the agony of witnessing her child's agony. Three generations later. "And yet," she met me eye for eye, "the German people, we were guilty."

Helga? Who remembers meals with no food for the first five years of her life? Adelhaid?  Who had Helga translate stories about American GIs dropping food packages into her sector from the air? There's so much to be said about holocausts and guilt and innocence and fury and forgiveness. Especially in Israel, a country born from the ravages, a country torn by its own injustices. But right then and there, on a eucalyptus trail overlooking an olive farm,there didn't seem to be much else to say but this: 

"No, " I said. "The Nazis were guilty."

And we squeezed hands.

Which brings me back to the Dreadlocked Israeli Boy, who is moving to Germany with his Girl of Long Blonde Braids, to start an organic farm together.

Now, Grace, turn out the light and go to sleep. 

Me and the Hassidic Rabbi of Ger

"The human being is called a 'walker,' having to go from one step to another. For habit makes things reflexive and this hides the inner light...Whoever stands still is not renewed..."

                                                                        Hassidic teaching, circa 1902

That's from Rabbi Yehudah Leib Alter of Ger, a Polish rebbe who died in 1905. And, yep, that's what was in the Hebrew pages I had to decode for my text class the day after I returned home from hiking with E in Israel.

The hike was definitely about renewal. First, in hiking 10 to 12 miles daily over four days, I remembered with every muscle how trekking has fed my soul since I was a youngster in wilderness camp. Don't you think that which we love in childhood is that which our most authentic self loves? For me, its vanilla ice cream, pine forests, dogs, and the sound of my boots crunching on the trail.

So it was the happiest of reunions to find each other again. [Insert commercial for orthopedic surgeon and artificial knee prosthesis here.]

But it was also about the freshest of new experiences. The Greatest Hits.

Traversing cliff ridges gripping wires and descending via six inch metal rungs... walking alone in a banana grove to suck some shade while belting out the Chiquita Banana song at the top of my lungs...munching on fallen grapefruit in a citrus grove...falling asleep to the fireworks and gunfire that are how Arab villagers celebrate weddings, in a hostel made from the ruins of an Ottoman palace...Scanning every rock,bush and tree for that damned orange and white trail marker...touching the stone of the nook that held the Torah in the ruins of a second century synagogue. Fresh pomegrantes. Even fresher pita.

And our fellow hikers...well, those gentle souls from Australia, Denmark, Germany and the southern US will get their own post soon.

Jesus played no part in my choice to hike The Jesus Trail, but its geography will forever alter how I feel about what I read in the bible. Because this is geography you can feel. Even at its end, the Israeli summer is about sun that can eat you alive. When you feel a journey like this:

You truly understand the magic of this.

How a well was what a Food and Gas Ahead sign is on the long stretch of highway after midnight. How shade, just simple shade, could be the cornerstone of hospitality.

Our journey started in the ancient market in Nazareth and ended on the north shore of the Sea of Galilee. I wished then--and feel it even more now--that I could have kept on going. To walk from point to point as determined by where there is water, listening to the crunch of my boots on the stones and clay shards of an ancient landscape.

But my life is also about Himself, who blew through 36 barbequed chicken thighs and then defrosted a banana bread instead of a turkey meatloaf for his supper (which apparently didn't cause any real change in his dinner plans, except that he didn't have to search for the ketchup).He only likes to hike if there is no other way to get to an intriguing destination.

So I find myself torn between Himself and the Rabbi Yehudah Leib Alter of Ger. He wrote the quote at the beginning of this post. And here's how he ended it:

"The angels above can stand. But the person has to keep walking." 

Things could get serious between us.                                             

לְהִתרָאוֹת

It says "l'hitraot." That's Hebrew slang for "see you later."

In a few hours, I'll be on my way with E to Israel. We will visit friends, binge on hummus and pita almost out-of-the-oven fresh, and, oh yeah, take a four-day walk.

Its called "The Jesus Trail," and you can read about it here.We're going on our own, with the added convenience of the trail folks shlepping our stuff from guest house to guest house. (I love hiking, not hauling.)

For many people around the world, this trail offers a chance to experience religious pilgrimage. For me, it is a pilgrimage, but of a different sort. It is a victory lap, a chance to remind myself why I went through the total knee replacement surgery in the first place. A chance to feel the person I love being. And to do it in the company of my BFF, even if she goes at such a fast clip that I'm sure I'll be Wiley E. Coyote in her Road Runner cartoon.

I prepared myself by reading Zealot, which is an incredibly well written look at the historical Jesus and the world he lived in. And by augmenting my pretty decent conversational Hebrew skills with  important phrases like "excuse me, have you seen an orange trail marker anywhere?"


And because Apple makes sure that ipads can't play nicely with Google Blogger, I'll be back in about two weeks.