Israel: Savoring the Taste

My friend Baruch and I wended our way up into the northern Galilee in Israel, up into the mountains. Just a few kilometers from the Blue Line – the UN determined border between Israel—we drove past an Israeli Army outpost and its patrols dressed in their heavy uniforms in all that heat. The day hovered at 45 degrees Centigrade.

But as we drove higher, a brisk wind began to blow—hot but at least the air was moving. We had come to visit Baruch’s brother-in-law, Chananiya, who lived on the goat farm he built, structure by structure—a place surrounded by blooming olive trees and verbena, wild flowers and goats whose bleeting punctuated all the deep silence that surrounded us. Two Israeli flags that once flew over the clay structures painted in Moroccan blues and yellows were ripped to shreds.

The weather up there, like everything else about the place, was different, more intense than the rest of the country, saturated with heat and wind. The silence was so thick it felt like a blanket draped over the noise of the world. Way down below the few cars I could see wending their way through the verdant green of the north looked smaller than toys. Now and then I heard a goat bell tinkling, then more silence, then trickling water traveling through the single pipe that ran across the dusty earth from a nearby Moshav.

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