It's a small country

Thursday I went to Tel Aviv and stayed with AH. I met up with him at his house, and we went out to meet up for beer with another friend of his (H). AH and H each ordered a hetzi (one half liter), I ordered a shlish (0.3 liter or one third liter). As we got to talking, we realized that H is currently teaching some of my former students - students I taught last year at a dual-curriculum, community Jewish high school on the Upper West Side. The students are on a year-long program of some sort, here in Israel.

After beer, we were hungry, so we went to an Indian restaurant that functions on a unique basis...There is a buffet and you pay as much or as little as you think you should. There is a little more to it than that, actually. There is no host to greet you and explain the unique system, so when you walk you see a bunch of regulars raise their heads and look at you as if to say, "Who's the new guy?" A server hands you a card with a lot of different zones and incomprehensible bubbles and multicolored options on it, with a few holes punched through it apparently at random. You are told not to lose this card. On the buffet, there are no prices, but certain dishes have signs that designate them as "special dishes" - the implication being I suppose that if you take some of the special dish you should pay a little more. Also, there is a chalk board with some suggested price ranges on it, but those guidelines were pretty vague (basically saying you should wind up paying between 10 and 70 shekels, depending on what you take) and I didn't understand much of what the board said. Drinks and desserts are bought on an a la carte basis. After taking our food, we went to the upstairs seating area and joined up with some of H's other friends, so that we were now a party of 6 Americans. I wish I could have relaxed and enjoyed the food and conversation more, but I just couldn't stop worrying about how much I was expected to pay. The atmosphere was Hindu-chintz. Big soft dirty sofas, beads and hamsas on the walls, along with psychadelic posters of many-armed deities. Most of the clientel had dred locks. (The Jewish people has a rich, ancient, cultural legacy of its own; why do so many Tel Avivim feel the need to appropriate the superficial elements of buddhism, hinduism, rastafarianism, islam, chinese culture, tibetan culture, take your pick? The cultural watch word of the city might as well be, "Cast down the kippah, pick up the Che Guevara T-shirt.") During dinner, some people (the band?) were setting up odd props, turning on and off lights, and knocking things over. Two people had brought their dogs into the dining area, naturally off leash, this being Israel, and in the middle of dinner the dogs got into a snarling, growling fight. Honestly, I have never been so uncomfortable in a restaurant before. When it came time to pay, there was no check. The server collected our tickets and then we each took turns agonizing about how much we should pay, making change, trying to do mental math, wondering about how much to tip and when. Someone only had a large bill, and the server was totally unprepared to make change - there seemed to be no cash register. "Well, um, let's see, I guess I could, like, ask around and see if anyone has small money or something...?" she said. It took a long time to pay, and at the end I still wasn't sure whether we had overpaid or underpaid. I learned later that it is a socialist restaurant, that it has stayed in business for at least six months (miraculously, to my mind), and that it is a big hang out for the younger activists in the labor party.

On the way out, I walked right into two other new Jerusalem friends of mine, R and J, who were having dinner together. I was dumbstruck. "I didn't know you were in Tel Aviv tonight." "We didn't know you were." (Actually, I didn't even know they knew each other!) All I could say was, "What a small country." If they were surprised by this chance meeting, they didn't show it.

The thing about it being a small country is that you can't really gossip about people - it will quickly get back to them. Nor can you keep secrets very well. If you want to leave your past behind and reinvent yourself, you can't just move to another state, like in the US. You have to leave the country, because there will always be someone around who knew you when. This situation, AS explained to me, gives rise to a colorful Israeli saying: Anachnu rokdim et hatango, mechazkim ze et ze bebeitzim, which means, in polite language, "He and I work together closely, and neither of us is able to pull away from the relationship, not because there is great affection between us, but because each of us holds incriminating information about the other and could publicize it out of spite."

And as long as I'm on the subject of how modern Hebrew can sometimes sound shockingly vulgar to someone whose primary introduction to the language has been the bible, here is another gem. Kol hazayin, which as an interjection means "tough beans," or "what a mess," but can also have a connotation that cuts a little deeper. Something like, "Do not elaborate too much on the details, lurid though they may be, of how you feel you have been unfairly treated; it begins to give the impression that you secretly relish the abuse."