Where Miracles Once Were: Traveling Israel Beyond Labels

Travel in Israel: Finding Meaning Through Taste & Connection

Note: This piece shares my personal experience traveling through Israel in May of 2022 - before the current war. It is not an attempt to speak for any group, religion, or political reality. Rather, it is an honest reflection on how it felt to move through a land layered in beauty, conflict, and contradiction. I hope it is received in the spirit in which it was written: with reverence, responsibility, and the belief that stories – especially difficult ones - can help us see each other more clearly.

In 2022, before coming home from a work trip in Antalya, Turkey, I made a 10-day solo stopover in Israel.  While both Turkey and Israel can be very complicated countries to get in and out of, as well as move about in, Israel cast off the most uneasy energy I had ever experienced traveling abroad up until that point and quite frankly ever since.  Of course, circumstances are wildly different today so I can - and will - only speak to my personal window of experience there in May of 2022. 

As I made my way from jet bridge to customs through the Ben Gurion Airport in Tel Aviv, there was the typical international terminal chaos and confusion.  But there was also a hard to ignore amalgam of hyper-alertness, vigilance and aloofness in the air. Initially, I took everything in through the eyes of a seasoned traveler – confident, calm and collected.  I’ve got this, I thought. Then, a few wrong lines later, no… I don’t have this.   I remember so vividly how uncomfortable and frustrated I became trying to navigate this completely unfamiliar labyrinth of incoming flight and arrival security procedures.  In a matter of minutes, I had come to adopt the iconic, defeated posture of the first-time traveler who can’t help but wear exasperation all over her scrunched up and tired face. 

If there was any doubt, I did eventually make it out of the airport that morning where I would come to have the first of many fortuitous collisions during my stay.  My Uber driver, an older Israeli gentleman with kids and grandchildren in the US, would not only take me around Tel Aviv but to and from Jerusalem.  As I think about him dropping me off that first day at this amazing hotel - The Jaffa in old town Jaffa, Tel Aviv – still one of my favorite properties in the world - I run smack into what’s been troubling me behind the screen as I think about the arc of this piece I’ve set out to write.

In giving this travel account, can and should I simply transition as I usually do to what I ate and how it moved me? Am I allowed to talk about the most perfect Shakshuka I ever ate, the loaf of bread in the hotel restaurant I came back for every single night because honestly it was the best damn bread I’ve ever had or the gold-standard of gold-standard poolside lunches – The Jaffa’s fresh watermelon feta salad?  Should I dare talk about the oil painting I bought in this super cool gallery on the boardwalk in front of the Mediterranean Sea, the handcrafted jewelry I still wear from Neve Tzedek, this hipster neighborhood in Tel Aviv, or the olive wood nativity sets I gifted from Bethlehem?  

Is it possible to talk about a trip to Israel and not feel swept up in its polarity, in the tragedy of its war and the hunger raging through Gaza just right next door? Is it insensitive to talk about good things when so many innocent people are suffering and dying everywhere in the Middle East - for that matter in the Ukraine, Russia, Africa, the streets of Chicago and so on?  Is it tone deaf, in poor taste, self-aggrandizing?

Or… it this grueling ambiguity the very gateway we must pass through in embracing and sharing the transformative power of travel? 

Each and every question slows down how my fingertips strike the keys in front of me.  It’s not long before all they can do is hover, tap impatiently, squeeze my bottom lip – waiting in suspense for some small tell, a hint of wisdom, a glisten of truth. Direction.  I type and then I redact this sentence, and then that one.  I find myself going down one rabbit hole after another.  I’ve written pages from the heart only to reread them and discover I’m drowning in an ambiguous swirl of what to say, what not to say, and if - in my lifetime - there will ever be a good time to talk about the joy of travel in this region again. 

But as I put proverbial pen to paper - homing in on only my window of experience in Israel as I promised I would - I can’t escape the lingering feeling that even then in May of 2022, Israel was a hotbed for hard core issues we don’t traditionally confront head-on when traveling. On bare and naked display in front of me – over and over again – were flagrant exhibitions of gender inequality, religious and minority intolerance and undeniable humanitarian crisis.  Please don’t misunderstand. I’m not saying some of these issues aren’t live wires in other countries I’ve visited or the one I live in too.  What I am saying however, is during my ten days in Israel I felt disillusioned and worn out by their unmistakable, oppressive presence.  I can’t brush that aside today any more than I could back then.  Nor would I want to; I was there to listen and learn.

My experiences weren’t headlines, statistics, or nameless faces I could just scroll past. They were actual conversations I was having, things I was hearing or scenes I was watching play out in front of me - most notably across all the religions – that for lack of a better way to put it seemed to be in constant, clamoring competition for good favor here. 

My mind raced taking in one egregious affront after the other.  There was so much anger, sadness and bitterness.  My soul ached in hearing one “side” so casually tear down the other.  There was so much systemic hate, dehumanization and prejudice.  My body tensed in its resignation this was an impossible place - not for me to be in this moment - but for peace to prosper.  And finally, my gut registered the kind of punch that stays with you for a lifetime.  I would never be able to shake off the deeply personal realization that this Holy Land I had longed to see felt more like a broken, battered façade, desperately in need of the very humanity and holiness it promised and symbolized.  I couldn’t find a pair of blinders big enough to block that out as I searched my heart desperately to feel what everyone else around me was taking in.  I felt hardened, ashamed and shut out.

Roadside Sign between Jerusalem and Bethlehem

 And so it’s not surprising to me, that the last time I went to mass on my own on vacation was in Tel Aviv just before visiting some of my faith’s most sacred sites – the birthplace of Jesus, the church on the banks of the Sea of Galilee where Christianity was founded and the tomb of Jesus. It’s also not surprising to me that that faith all but collapsed while driving past idols of conflict like the Banksy murals on that imperious, imposing Wall, the heavily armed security check points between Jerusalem and Bethlehem and the roadside signs that altogether forbid the passing of one ethnic group or another.  God and holy never seemed so, so far away.

I was constantly asking myself what was wrong with me that I could be standing on the very ground where miracles like The Loaves and Fishes, The Last Supper and The Stations of the Cross took place and all I could fixate on - wasn’t who had come before here - but what was falling to pieces around it now?  Even worse, I found it impossible to re-center and course correct as throngs of tour bus travelers weaved in and out of places like it was a Madame Tussaud’s Wax Museum.  Once more, I felt hardened, ashamed and shut out.  I couldn’t see beyond these flashy, distracting displays of superstition, sanctimonious pretense and unnecessary opulence, the worst of which surrounded the tomb of Jesus, the humble carpenter… It wouldn’t be the last time my head would drop in disappointment imploring stronger now – why did God and holy seem so far away?

While this trip seemed to pull me further and further away from my religion – an ironic, unexpected and deeply troubling experience to have in the Holy Land – I did come to realize through months of self-reflection I wasn’t hopelessly lost or broken.  I hadn’t been shut out and there wasn’t any shame in hardening my heart at hate, hypocrisy and heartbreak.  When I had the courage to step out of the spiritual chaos of those ten days, I uncovered something much more sacred, pure and lasting.  I hadn’t walked away from this journey without encountering good, grace and God.  I met wonderful people with inspiring stories and big open hearts.  And perhaps because I was disenchanted, I dropped all the labels and stopped caring who was what religion.  I instead opted to listen and to be present – taking in and playing witness to their light and their darkness. I honestly can’t help but wonder now if that’s not the answer to so much of what the world struggles with these days.  The labels we plaster on each other hide the beauty of the souls that dwell beneath.

For nostalgia’s sake and to pay homage to the method of travel that has blessed me so abundantly – taste-led travel with intent – I can’t resist the urge to share one final round of unforgettable encounters in taste and the truly magnificent, talented and giving people of Israel behind them. There were so many moments when flavor collided with hospitality, cultural immersion and kindness - from Israelis, Palestinians, Christians, Muslims, Jews – Humans.  Humans who just like me are not their government, their baddest apples or their religious extremists.  

It might be “sinful” to not start with Knafeh, a spectacularly delicious dessert my generous and tenderhearted tour guide shared with me in the Muslim quarter in the Old City of Jerusalem.  The textures! Crunchy, chewy and gooey…  There was also the most unlikely of lunch companions at Port Sa’id. Not even the tastiest of beet carpaccios could hold my attention when Bobo Fett in a Yankees jersey no less sat down next to me.  The man under the mask was utterly hilarious, witty and self-effacing.  A true joy to dine next to.  There were solo dinners full of energy and life with easy-going bartenders who shared their favorites and a shot here or there, making two meals at the Montefiore Hotel in Tel Aviv and at Jerusalem’s ruckus Machneyuda memorable if not a bit hazy. These evenings played out in perfect contrast to quiet sips of white wine on the American Colony Hotel patio surrounded by pilgrims starting or ending their own journeys – hopefully more placid and predictable than my own.   The mental montage comes to an end to my delight on a modest but mighty bowl of hummus and falafel. Maybe… the best I’ve had in my entire life from somewhere unassuming inside the walls of the Old City – the exact quarter – Muslim, Christian, Jewish or Armenian – fittingly not noted or remembered.  

 I stop typing as the memories fade and my tastebuds recover from all that delicious reverie.  It all suddenly seems less grueling and less ambiguous now.  It suddenly seems impossible not to see how travel and the good it inspires, inside the inevitable and beautiful exchanges between strangers, is exactly why I felt compelled to share my personal account of Israel.  If some kind of God and holy, isn’t in the middle of all that, I don’t know what is.

Old Town Jaffa Sunset

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