Nobody in my family was really into religion. Sure, a few went to synagogue occasionally, and most of us went to Hebrew school as kids, but practically none of us kept kosher or wore a yarmulke other than on holidays.
So when my second cousin Miriam turned religious, married an Orthodox Jew and moved to Israel, no one in our family knew exactly what to make of it. Her conversion to that way of life came as quite a shock to everyone.
I myself didn't have much of an opinion on it. Spiritually, I'm agnostic but have always felt one's religious beliefs are personal and that as long as they don't force those beliefs on me, I could care less.
Miriam's whole religious awakening was never an issue for me, and when I came to Israel for the first time, to travel and see the country, I wanted to see her and where she lived, the North, which is where our ancestors originated from millenniums ago and which had looked so beautiful in the pictures I'd seen of it.
My first couple months in Israel, I lived and worked on a Kibbutz in the South, near the Egyptian border. The Kibbutz was predominantly American, so it didn't feel much different being there than it would in a gated community somewhere out in the desert of Arizona or Nevada...
Although in contrast to an American gated community, the Kibbutz had a high, prison-like barbed wire fence surrounding its perimeter, bomb shelters, burly security guards roaming the grounds with fully automatic assault rifles, and five or six nights a week one could hear the claps of gunfire and feel the thuds of practice bombs coming from the IDF base nearby ...
Miriam and I were in regular contact since I got to Israel and she invited me to celebrate the upcoming Passover holiday with her neighbors and family. I gladly accepted the invitation, and Passover morning I took an Egged bus up to see her.
The bus ride took around six hours. The bus itself was crammed with machine gun toting, uniformed IDF soldiers and there were people sitting, standing, (and some even sprawled out sleeping) in the aisles. I got fairly lucky and found a seat on the steps next to the door in the middle of the bus. It was anything but a comfortable ride, though.
When I finally arrived to Tiberius, the closest city to my cousin's village, I got out and walked around and was amazed by the scenic beauty. The city was built on the hills encircling the Sea of Galilee and from almost anywhere you could gaze out at the dark blue water of the sea.
In stark contrast to the Arava desert, which looked like Mars, Tiberius was amazingly green. Perhaps I'd just been in the dead of the desert for too long, but the landscape in Tiberius seemed like the most beautiful I'd ever seen.
Shortly after my arrival, my cousin met me at a coffee shop in the city. I'd expected her to be a total religious hardcore, clad in a black robe, with some kind of head thing, but instead she looked like a normal middle aged Jewish woman- aside from the long sleeved shirt and ankle length dress she wore on an unusually warm and humid spring day.
We hugged and caught up. I'd actually not seen her since I was little and she was in college. After truncating the last couple decades over iced lattes, she drove me up to her village, which was about half an hour outside Tiberius, and I marveled at the jutting, rolling green hills and epic peaks and cliffs along the way.
Her village was also gated with a large barbed wire fence, though it wasn't as heavily fortified as my Kibbutz. After passing through the front security gate, we drove slowly up a winding, steep hill that went on for ages, until we arrived to a block full of caravans at the hill's apex. From there you could see out to a stunning valley that led all the way to the biblical (and now predominantly Christian Arab) city of Nazareth.
Atop this hill, in this neighborhood of caravans, was where my cousin and her four kids lived.
It kind of shocked me that they lived in a caravan, the same sort of doublewide type contraption I'd always ignorantly associated with Jerry Springer guest, white trash Americans. But it was common in Israel to see American Jews who'd made Aliyah abandon their larger houses and creature comforts in order to live out the Zionist dream. Still though, it was weird to see a bunch of trailers all huddled together in such a picturesque surrounding.
Looking around this lot, it dawned on me how the old stereotype of all Jews having tons of money was so very untrue, as many of the trailers appeared to be in various states of disrepair. Hers included.
It was homey, however, and comfortable and she welcomed me to her house with a large plate of food, which was quite the custom in Israel—whenever you went into anyone's house, the second you stepped in, they plied you with plate after plate of food.
I then met her kids, who were ages 8-17, and lovely. Following the barrage of (mostly sweet) culinary delights, my cousin and I took a walk through her neighborhood and she showed me the nicer part of it, where there were some three to four bedroom houses and villas, a few of which were impressive but still modest by American standards.
Miriam took me through a bit of wood, up to an empty pass, and showed me a plot of land, with an incredible view of the valley below, and she told me how she owned it and planned to build a house there one day.
Walking around her neighborhood, I met and saw many of her neighbors, some American, some Israeli, some French, and all religious. None were the black hat, Hassidim sort, but every one of the men and boys wore yarmulkes, several with long beards and peyos, and the women and girls all wore ankle-length dresses and long sleeved shirts.
Whatever was this place, although it was kind of strange to me, I did start to feel very at home there. I felt like I was amongst my people. Not being religious myself, there wasn't any kind of spiritual connection, but I did feel a strong cultural and ethnic connection that I'd never had before.
Perhaps it was because, for the first time, as a Jew, I wasn't a minority. I was part of the majority. Not only that, but I was on the very same soil my ancestors walked. It was an amazing and indescribable feeling.
However, that feeling wasn't long lived. One of my cousin's neighbors, a forty something, Mizrahi Sabra named Aaron, came storming into Miriam's house only a few minutes after we returned from our walk. The second he barged in through the creaky front door of the trailer, he and Miriam got into some bizarre screaming match over an air conditioner, part of which was in Hebrew.
He stormed out of the house as quickly as he came and returned twenty minutes later acting completely normal. This was typical of Israelis. They get into hysterical screaming confrontations with one another, then only a few minutes later act as if nothing happened.
Aaron introduced himself to me and I must say I was instantly taken aback by him. He was loud, even for an Israeli. Just his normal speech pattern almost sounded like yelling. His English was broken and he acted nervous and fidgety and had a perpetually agitated look to him. His tiny blue yarmulke hung from his curly, unkempt salt and pepper hair at such a weird angle I couldn't figure out how it stayed on.
Not long after we made our introductions he asked me to speak to him outside Miriam's trailer for a second. We went out there and he placed his hand on my shoulder and asked me not to touch any of the wine bottles on the table during the Passover Seder, which was to be at his house.
He said I was welcome in his house but again asked me assertively not to touch any of the wine bottles on his table. Then he hurriedly walked over to a clunky old van idling out front and peeled off in a cloud of exhaust smoke.
I didn't really know what to say or how to react. I hadn't even responded to him verbally, I'd only nodded. I stepped back into the trailer, completely puzzled, and my cousin's seventeen year old daughter saw the expression on my face and asked what was going on. I told her what happened. She seemed confused and said she didn't understand it, either.
Then Miriam came out of the kitchen, where she'd been preparing food for the Seder. She brought me into her bedroom and told me matter-of-factly how non-Jews aren't allowed to touch the wine bottles on the Passover table, how it had something or other to do with the "goyim's" idolatry.
But I wasn't a "goy," I told her. She seemed uncomfortable and without eye contact told me how because my mom's mother wasn't Jewish, even though her father was, technically I wasn't Jewish, either. Then she abruptly ducked out the door and left me in her room by myself.
