First Meeting: a Poem

Rabbi Angel, who is leading this tour and is also the spiritual leader of Mark's synagogue, has asked those who've signed up for the trip to attend a few meetings beforehand. The first meeting was yesterday evening.

We received copies of the final itinerary, some World Pride info, etc. We introduced ourselves, expressed excitement and worries, that sort of thing. (I came out strong with my ambivalence, and publicly identified myself as a non-Jew. Perhaps I was a bit, er, too resentful?)

What was interesting for me was that she passed out a really beautiful poem by Yehuda Amichai called "Tourists" and asked us to comment. Here's the text:

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Visits of condolence is all we get from them.
They squat at the Holocaust Memorial,
They put on grave faces at the Wailing Wall
And they laugh behind heavy curtains
In their hotels.
They have their pictures taken
Together with our famous dead
At Rachel's Tomb and Herzl's Tomb
And on Ammunition Hill.
They weep over our sweet boys
And lust after our tough girls
And hang up their underwear
To dry quickly
In cool, blue bathrooms.


Once I sat on the steps by agate at David's Tower,
I placed my two heavy baskets at my side. A group of tourists
was standing around their guide and I became their target marker. "You see
that man with the baskets? Just right of his head there's an arch
from the Roman period. Just right of his head." "But he's moving, he's moving!"
I said to myself: redemption will come only if their guide tells them,
"You see that arch from the Roman period? It's not important: but next to it,
left and down a bit, there sits a man who's bought fruit and vegetables for his family."
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Of course, there's the obvious resentment of silly tourists who have no real sense of what it is to live in that place.

But beforehand I happened to be reading my copy of "The Buddha and the Terrorist" by Satish Kumar, and so I gave it a more philosophical reading: those who hold on to the past, and do not concern themselves with the here and now, are tourists in their own lives. They say, "Here is Rachel's tomb!" but beyond shallow desires do not participate in the bustling life and death which always surrounds them. Letting go of the past, or the mandate of the past, frees one to move with the present and notice what's right in front of you, like a man who's bought fruit for his family. In fact, if a Buddhist had written this poem I think the only difference would be substituting the word "enlightenment" for "redemption." By extension, I would read it as an anti-history lesson for Palestine and Israel, where passions run high over injustices from generations upon generations past.

Rabbi Angel gave it another reading, more pertinent for our purpose as a group of travelers. I believe she was saying one can arrive in Israel as a tourist and have a superficial experience, just another vacation. Or one can arrive in the Holy Land as a pilgrim, and take a humbler attitude that allows learning, immersion, and personal transformation. That's a nice reading of the poem as well, and not exclusively religious: we can be cultural and political pilgrims too, and open ourselves to multiple and complex points of view. So I think she'd like this poem to really frame what this tour is about.