First Impressions

August 29, 2009
Okay, I’m now living here 4 days including a Shabbat, so I am ready to give a first impression. Mind you, I have lived in Israel 10 years already, five as a kid and five as an adult, so it’s not like I don’t understand what’s going on around me. But here’s what I have to report as a first impression regardless of my somewhat veteran status.
But first a joke.
Sherlock Holmes and Watson go on a camping trip. They set up their tent, put their things inside, roll out their sleeping bags and go to sleep.
In the middle of the night, Holmes wakes up and says to Watson, “What do you have to say about that sky?”
Watson, always swift to answer, responds in his usual character. “Well Holmes, from a cosmological perspective, this is proof that we are just a small speck in the vast universe. And from the astronomical perspective, I think Jupiter is aligned with Mars. From a meteorological perspective, it doesn’t look as if there is a cloud in the sky which leads me to believe that we will have a rather nice day tomorrow, and from a astronomical perspective, I think the moon is in the seventh house.”
Holmes responds, “Watson, are you a bumbling nincompoop?”
“What so ever do you mean, Sherlock?” Asks Watson.
And Holmes responds, “Can’t you see, my dear Watson, they’ve stolen our tent?”

Get it? You don’t have to answer. My point is that it is hard to answer the question about first impressions and give a single, comprehensive answer. So I will segment.
For many people moving to Israel is a very Jewish thing, so I will say this from a Jewish perspective, I am not impressed. Well, I am actually impressed, but poorly. For instance, the most Jewish thing I have seen repeatedly is a poster explaining why the war of Gog and Almagog, part of the end of days, has already started. You could ask me to qualify why I say the most Jewish thing when everyone around me is speaking the Jewish language, but I would answer that there are plenty of Philippines’, Taiwanese and Africans here who speak Hebrew and are not Jewish, let alone Palestinians.
Of course, the buses all stop for Shabbat and many stores are closed, but in Tel-Aviv plenty are also open; more than I ever remembered in the past, and it seems that the city comes back to life well before three stars appear to end the Sabbath.
Something about living here makes me want to be a secular Jew; especially when I see the behavior of the ultra-Orthodox, who this weekend rioted again to keep a parking garage closed on Shabbat. Maybe that’s part of their values, to break Shabbat in order to force others to keep it. Go figure.
And now for political impressions, maybe you should sit down. Today the former finance minister started serving time for taking bribes, and the former prime minister, Ehud Olmert, was indicted for criminal behavior and abuse of power.
When I asked my brother in law where he thought I could find a political home here he said that Meretz, the left of center party I supported in the 90’s, has become an Ashkenazi, libertarian elitist party that is out of touch with the country. The Labor party is run by a squad of corrupt veterans that have replaced vision with a lust for power. Chadash, the communist party, is openly anti-Zionist and claims that Israel was a mistake, even though they support a 2 state solution, and Kadima, other than some bold ideas on the diplomatic front, visa vi the Palestinians, is a party with a Republican social-economic agenda.
The advice I was given, and I may follow it, is to join Labor and help create a coup. I don’t know if I will have the time or political capital to do this, but I want to discuss the question with my friends in Peace Now and others.
From a moral perspective, I am completely appalled by this place. Everything is corrupt from the bottom up. When we got our cell phones set up, the people at the phone company told us where to get our iPhones unlocked. When we went to do it, we were charged value added tax for the service. In essence, what this guy was doing, which Apple Computer would consider a violation of its intellectual property rights, was fine as long as he paid taxes on the money he collected.
When we went to Maya’s school, we told the principle that we expected extra tutoring hours for Maya, which the Ministry of Absorption promised us, and we were told that the Ministry of Education never pays its bills when they provide these hours, so they had no plans on helping. The list is long, and these are not the best examples, just the most recent.
Last but not least, from a purely patriotic perspective, things haven’t changed. My barber, who 13 years ago told me I would be a fool not to go back to America, now tells me that things here are wonderful and “there’s no place like Israel.” And then there is the cab driver today who told me I was a fool for coming back. Yes, there was the religious woman in line beside us as we bought lunch who said she didn’t mind the long process of my kids ordering as long as we were happy with our return to the country, and there was the bank manager who said that he wanted to improve service so Jews all over the world wouldn’t feel like they were going down in quality of life when they came here.
So there’s my answer. My first impressions are all over the place. I love and hate this place, just like I do in Chicago. Here I curse the heat, there I curse the winters. Here I am astounded by the fundamentalist religious just as much as I am in Chicago, and here I have a hard time finding a political home just like I have experienced my share of unsettledness in Democratic circles, at times. Most of all, just as I love my home town, that toddling town, I love Tel-Aviv with all the good and bad, and I’m happy to be here for now, especially while I have no worries about missing a Cubs World Series.