In Israel, a sense of family and some every-day moments we may never know

Don't tell my dad, but it's Friday night, and I'm dancing on a street corner with a gaggle of teenage girls. And I've just agreed to go home with a man who's dressed entirely in black.

All right, fine. So the girls are part of a high school youth group from a town near the Sea of Galilee and we're not so much on a "street corner" as in the courtyard in front of the Western Wall (the "Wailing Wall") in Jerusalem. And it should go without saying that we aren't doing the kind of dancing you've imagined. We're dancing and singing to Jewish folksongs, which involves mostly clapping, stomping, and periodically howling guttural vowels.

Of course, when I say "I'm dancing," I mean they're dancing; I'm mostly employed in embarrassing myself publicly. I'm following along phonetically in a language I don't know, while attempting to mimic the girls' choreographed moves, but doing so a consistent beat-and-a-half behind time. What I lack in competence and grace I like to think I make up in sheer enthusiasm.

In a break in the music, I ask the seventeen-year-old girl next to me — the one who's dragged me from the crowd into this carnival of self-humiliation — what the song we're singing means.

"The whole world is a very narrow bridge," she explains, panting from dancing, "and the main thing is not to be afraid." Behind her, five guards, draped with AK-47s the length of my leg, stoically survey the crowd.

An offer of dinner on Shabbat from a perfect stranger

I bid farewell to the girls and follow the aforementioned man into the street. That man, by the way, is a rabbi, whose wife has sent him to the Kotel to bring home a couple people, with whom he and his family will share dinner on Shabbat, the Jewish Sabbath. He'd set out to bring home two friends and is now leading six of us — five men and me — back to his home.

His wife welcomes us at the door with a polite gasp of disbelief before disappearing into the kitchen with a look not unlike panic on her face. Evidently, however, food multiplication is not limited to Cana, and moments later the crowded table is piled with enough food to feed a soccer team — challah, stuffed eggplants, sweet potatoes, stuffed grape leaves, cucumber salad, garlic chicken, homemade hummus, brisket, and more than enough wine. I eat for what feels like three hours before falling into a delicious-food-induced coma and resigning myself to the rabbi's children, who gleefully decorate me — the only non-Jewish member of our party — with napkin holders and place settings.

Our incredible dinner at the rabbi's house is actually, shockingly, not rare. It is, in fact, not only a widely held Jewish tradition, but also a perfect example of the overwhelming and endearing sense of familial community that characterizes this nation. Here's what I mean: everyone here hitchhikes and, by and large, everyone picks up hitchhikers; kibbutzim, small socialist communities, pepper the countryside and welcome the itinerant traveler to stay for a night or a year in exchange for work; and, although no one seems to agree on politics, everyone is willing to listen to your opinions, so long as you listen to theirs.

And that last bit is really the crux of it. If Israel is a family, it is not one of those beaming nuclear groups that populate the suburbs of Pleasantville, everyone agreeing over their meatloaf each night. Israel is the kind of family that bickers amongst itself, fighting and clawing at each other in the backseat of the station wagon during family vacations. It is, after all, a nation of recent-orphans, who have flocked — at first cautiously at the beckoning of Theodore Herzl (the "father of Zionism") in 1896, and then in droves at the establishment of an independent Jewish state in 1949 — to this fang-shaped nation.

Even within Israel, diversity

The official term for immigrating to Israel is called "making aliyah," which translates literally to "rising up." The term is derived from a topographical truth — most communities in Israel are geographically higher than the surrounding regions, due to the Great Rift Valley running from Turkey to the Red Sea — but, needless to say, it has come to mark an emotional, spiritual ascension as well. Over the last half-century, whole communities of Ashkenazi, Sephardic, Bukharan, and Cochin Jews (to name just a few), have arrived on Israel's shores on their own volition, not to mention the several government-sponsored immigration "operations," which have facilitated the arrival of Jewish populations deemed at risk abroad. Operation Magic Carpet, for instance, airlifted nearly all Yemeni Jews to Israel after Yemen's declaration of independence and Operation Solomon did the same for Ethiopian Jews during the famine years in the 80s and 90s.

Regardless of the fact that Israel's "family" is now roughly 80% Jewish, that statistic alone hardly qualifies it for anything resembling cohesion or homogeneity. It is a pulsating melting pot of often diametrically dissimilar Jewish communities — and that is to say nothing of the Arabs, Bedouins, Christians, Druze, Circassians, and Samaritans that occupy the smaller slices in the pie chart of the Israeli populous. Tellingly, while Hebrew is the official language here, virtually no one speaks it without an accent.

The tangle of Israeli diversity is most evident to me on May 2nd and 3rd — Memorial Day and Israeli Independence Day. Memorial Day is a solemn affair here, as you might expect from a nation whose half-century history is marred with violence. The day begins and ends with two long sirens, each blasting for thirty seconds over a nationwide PA system. When the sirens wail, the entire nation of Israel stops in its tracks and bows its head. Cars pull over on the highway. People hang up their phones. Pots are left boiling on the stove. It is a nationally recognized moment of reverence — a chilling remembrance of this nation's yearly struggle to survive.

The second siren ushers out Memorial Day and, appropriately, ushers in Independence Day — a festival so raucous it would make Dionysus himself blush.

A consummate believer in the When In Rome clause of international travel, I pack onto an already over-crowded bus and head for the streets Tel Aviv, armed only with a pink, plastic hammer that reports a weak, defeated sort of squawk when rapped upon the head of a fellow merry-maker. Everyone has these little hammers, but I have no idea where the tradition began. Down by the water, the streets are packed with blue-and-white clad people. The crowd does not seem to move by the power of individual actors, but with the surge and undulation of a common will. Everyone is drunk. Silly string drips from girls' hair.

It's a strange, surreal feeling out here — something decidedly different than an equally alcohol-addled 4th of July. It's a sense of fervency, I think. Of pointed, deliberate rejoicing. Below the thronging masses of young people wielding beer and carnival toys, there is an unmistakable layer of trepidation. Of tempered hope.

I remember the words of the song — "the main thing is not to be afraid"

For my own part, I understand the trepidation. I am, after all, on a crowded street corner in Tel Aviv on Israeli Independence Day. If I were a terrorist, I'd look no further for my next target. The thought makes me shudder. The site of the April bombings (not two weeks ago) is about 10 blocks away from here. But looking around, I realize that perhaps trepidation is the wrong word to describe this crowd anyway. People are not afraid so much as they are aware of the transience of the moment. It's an unqualified celebration of something — the continued existence of their nation — which is decidedly qualified.

After a moment, I remember the words to the song I didn't realize I was singing last Friday night. The whole world is a very narrow bridge and the main thing is not to be afraid. Never has that advice seemed more right. The people of Israel — heck, the people of the Palestinian Territories too — continue to live, to celebrate their holidays, to participate in their traditions. What might happen if they don't — if they kowtow to their very real fears and abandon those things that are most important to them — is even more unthinkably horrible.

In remembering that dancing girl, I also remember the five armed guards standing sentry behind her. I'd found it shocking last Friday — those huge guns on display — but after a few days in Israel, I've become accustomed to the sight.

Soldiers are everywhere here. On street corners. On buses. Outside restaurants, in front of every major terminal, at checkpoints on the highways. If the main thing is not to be afraid, it's also not to be caught unprepared.

Every Israeli man at the age of eighteen serves a mandatory 2 years, 8 months in the army and every woman serves a mandatory 2 years. Security, defense, and the pomp and circumstance of force is as common as the corner falafel stand. Soldiers — devastatingly handsome kids bedecked in aviator sunglasses and berets — sit next to me in the cafes, restaurants and concert halls, their AK-47s piled in a heap next to them.

A checkpoint and the longest explanation ever

Because I'm spending my second week in Israel on a road trip, wending my way south along the eastern flank of this New Jersey-sized country, I'm stopped at checkpoints daily. This is a problem for me because there's something about the presence of very large guns that always makes me feel like I've done something wrong. I get nervous and take refuge in overzealous honesty. Here's a typical interaction:

Israeli guard: "So you're traveling with a friend in Israel?"

Haley: "Yes." (Then, getting nervous — was I too perfunctory? Did I just lie? — I go on). "He's a friend from school, but we didn't know each other all that well before the trip, and we're not dating, but his family thinks we are, which is a bit awkward because I'm not Jewish, and anyway, we might be dating I guess, since this once we saw each other naked, but that was a result of extenuating circumstances and doesn't count, I mean, does it? If we were streaking a library? Not that I streak libraries a lot — well, not, habitually, but I guess that depends on how you define habitually. I'm sorry, what was the question?"

Eventually, I'm allowed to pass, light with the catharsis of confession, another vaguely horrified soldier left shaking his head in my wake.

A road trip, from the north to the south

We begin our road trip in the north of the country, where orchards, natural springs, and lush vineyards abound. One day we visit a kosher winery, which operates under the slogan, "Stomped Upon By Very Pious Men." At some point during our wine-tasting, our host quotes some scripture that asserts, in no uncertain terms, that if good wine tastes bitter to a person, it is his soul and not the wine that is to blame. Trapped in a brilliant sales-pitch-cum-catch-22 and unwilling to submit the quality of our souls the scrutiny of a Messianic vintner, we spend an hour cheerfully praising what could only have been lightly carbonated grape juice.

Making our way south through the West Bank, the vibrant greens of the north blanch into a white, painted desert, strikingly similar to the landscape of Arizona and New Mexico. Red-beige mesas and craggy desert mountains fringe the edges of Machtesh Ramon — the spectacularly beautiful and largest crater in the world — on one side and the Dead Sea on the other. Swimming in the Dead Sea is, by the way, more a figure of speech than a plausible activity. Its nearly impossible to tread water competently here, much less perfect a good breast stroke, because our arms and legs keep bobbing to the surface, refusing to remain submerged in water, greasy with natural salt.

Our road trip — our tour-du-security checkpoints — ends in the south of Israel, where the nation comes to a glistening vertex in a town called Eliat, bordering Egypt on one side and Jordan on the other. It is a frolicsome party town, lined by Las Vegas-style hotels, buxom women, buffets, and beach resorts. I spend the majority of the time here under the Red Sea, on my first attempt at scuba diving. Aside from the fact that breathing underwater is an uncomfortable affront to all my a posteriori knowledge of the world, I have an incredible time chasing around an astoundingly beautiful array of tropical fish.

Returning northward, we stop at the old city of Jerusalem — a tiny island of shimmering white stone packed so tight with history, contradiction, and passion it's difficult to breathe. Everyone lives atop each other here, packed into four quarters — Christian, Armenian, Jewish, and Muslim — each district melding, overflowing into one other, the official lines of demarcation conspicuously free of placards or signposts. The entire Old City is also conspicuously free of checkpoints and armed guards.

It was just a firecracker

We make our way through the labyrinthine streets from the silent, immaculate Jewish corner to the raucous chaos of the Arab market. I squeeze my way through the madding crowds of hawkers and merchants, through carts of spices and and the thick aromas of deep-fried meat, when the sound of an explosion silences the din. I flinch, my heart stops. A beat passes before everyone realizes that it was just a firecracker, that another day will come and go without incident. It takes me a good three minutes to remember to exhale. A kid next to me starts to laugh, a panicky chuckle, an earmark of relief.

We extract ourselves from the roar of the market and seek solace and perspective on the rooftops and ramparts of the walled city. From up here, we can see everything. Armenian men with their telltale black costumes make their way past a group of Jewish men, their great furry lifesaver-like hats announcing the sect to which they belong. In the distance, the Church of the Holy Sepulchre — the site where Catholic, Orthodox, Coptic, and Ethiopian Christians believe Jesus was crucified, buried, and resurrected — rises up above the flat-topped residences. The Church is a site so apportioned by those groups laying claim to its holy importance that a ladder leaning against the front window has not been moved for centuries, since no one knows to whom it belongs. Crosses etched in the walls by invading crusaders in the 11th century provide a backdrop to the stone upon which tradition claims Jesus was laid in the 1st century, and upon which pilgrims now rub candles and key chains, hoping to transfer its holy aura to their souvenirs.

Via Dolorosa — the path that marks the Stations of the Cross — wends its way through the Muslim quarter, humble placards posted timidly above the doors of beauty parlors, vegetable markets, and hardware shops, reminding me that this city, in all its historical import, remains a living place. The Dome of the Rock, a fabulously beautiful gilded mosque built on what Jews believe to be the Temple Mount, shares the skyline with satellite dishes and flapping lines of laundry.

From up here, enjoying a panoramic manifestly free of cement barriers and armed kids, I'm almost ready to believe again that Jews and Christians and Muslims and everyone else can live together peacefully, forced into compromise by mutual resolve. But its hard, even from up here, to be so naïve. Each group's claim to ownership harkens back to events that occurred in 10 4th century BC, to stories preserved in ancient texts, interpreted and translated in a 3500 year old game of telephone. Imagine a place where an archeological discovery on the corner of 7th and Broadway could fundamentally shake the political viability of your right to your backyard. So is the way here. Also from up here, I can see the wall — a formidable gray slab of concrete — that's being built between Israel and the Palestinian Territories. It looks like a great Mobius Strip, a curving flat plane, endlessly doubling back upon itself, carving out an ominous path through the neighborhoods on the hillside.

The robot blew up my homework

The next day, I'm walking back to our hostel when, not shockingly, I'm stopped by a young soldier and told I have to wait. All four roads in a central intersection have been cordoned off. Pushing my way to the front of the crowd, I see a three-foot tall robot tottering up to an orange backpack, leaning against a light post a block away. It was probably left there by a kid on his way to school, who is just now realizing that he doesn't have his things. After a moment, the robot grasps the bag and, in an anti-climactic puff, it self-destructs, leaving bits of clothing and paper in a ring around it. Sorry, teacher, the robot blew up my homework.

Putting aside the nefarious situation that necessitates such precautions, and at risk of sounding like an 8-year-old boy, the spectacle of a remote-control robot blowing up on the street is pretty awesome. The crowd thankfully shares my perspective. Someone cheers, people are clapping. The man next to me grabs my shoulder and we laugh inexplicably.

Our reaction is, after all, not un-Israeli. Over the course of its 57 years, Israel has never known complete peace. Its people are tenacious, impassioned, and abide by a pervasive insistence on continuing to live as they always have. One day on our road trip, we stopped at an old fortress called Masada, built upon an enormous mesa, protected by sheer, shale, yellow cliffs on all sides. In 93 AD, a group of nearly a thousand Jewish zealots took refuge in that hilltop garrison when the Romans were conquering the countryside. That Jewish community holed up there for nearly three months, as five legions of Roman soldiers fruitlessly attacked from below. The Romans eventually built an enormous ramp up the side of the mesa and conquered the hill, but that fact interests me less than what those 953 men, women, and children were doing up there in the meantime: They were living life as normal. Ruins and accounts by survivors indicate that there were regular meetings, bath houses, meal times, and even a swimming pool. So the Romans were down below, futilely hurdling flaming arrows and in Masada, they were spending the afternoon playing Marco-Polo.

All right, so maybe my historiography is a bit off, but the essence remains true: The main thing is not to be afraid.

Its my last day in Israel and I'm wandering around Tel Aviv on my own. Roving groups of tanned young men drink beer and tease each other, fascinated by this blond who insists on writing in her journal in the shade. I agree to act as a bulwark, behind which some of them take refuge after a water fight breaks out.

Don't worry, if I go home with anyone and my dad doesn't find out, the Israeli soldiers at the airport will certainly hear all about it.

Haley Edwards, 23, lives in Seattle and is a senior writer for Internationalist Magazine, published in the city. She is on a solo, four-month, round-the-world journey and will be filing occasional reports for us from the road.