Aliyah Blog 42: Nachal HaTavor, Har HaTavor

Read all the aliyah blog entries by clicking here

Aliyah Diary

Arrival
01. Aug 19, 2024: Preparation In America
02. Aug 25, 2024: First Few Days
03. Aug 29, 2024: Moving In

Cultural Adjustment
04. Sept 4, 2024: First Day of School
05. Sept 8, 2024: Two Weeks In . . .
06. Sept 16, 2024: Getting Comfortable
07. Sept 22, 2024: Ready for Yom Tov
09. Sept 30, 2024: Nasrallahed on the Floor
15. Nov 10, 2024: Safety Fourth
18. Nov 24, 2024: Language – l’at, ‘lat
29. Jan 31, 2025: My Son Still in America
31. Feb 3, 2025: Internet Filtering for Kids
37. Mar 3, 2025: Technical Difficulties
39. Mar 12, 2025: Prove Yourself
40. Mar 17, 2025: Holiday Loneliness

Shopping
11. Oct 13, 2024: Packages. (חבילות.)
34. Feb 17, 2025: Finding Obscure Things
41. Mar 23, 2025: New Shopping Habits
44. Apr 6, 2025: Pesach Shopping & Osher Ad

Government and Bureaucracy
10. Oct 8, 2024: Driver’s License
13. Oct 30, 2024: Bureaucracies and Stories
19. Nov 28, 2024: Taxation for Americans
22. Dec 23, 2024: Doctors & “Choleh Chadash”
27. Jan 23, 2025: Healthcare in Israel
32. Feb 5, 2025: How To Hire the Wrong Person
33. Feb 10, 2025: Quest to Pay My Taxes

Politics & Thought
12. Oct 25, 2024: October Sun and the Jew
16. Nov 17, 2024: Where People Look Like Me
17. Nov 19, 2024: Jewish Identity and Outlook
21. Dec 11, 2024: Let Freedom Ring
38. Mar 6, 2025: Talking in Quiet Peace

Travel and Trips
08. Sept 25, 2024: Jerusalem Concert
14. Nov 2, 2024: The Kindness of Strangers
20. Dec 5, 2024: Tel Aviv Art Museum
23. Dec 29, 2024: The West Bank. (Shomron)
26. Jan 18, 2025: Dead Sea Beer and Ice Cream
28. Jan 26, 2025: Yarkon River Judaism, Tel Aviv
30. Jan 31, 2025: My Son Visits and we Travel
35. Feb 20, 2025: Mitzpe Ramon Stars, Ein Avdat
42. Mar 28, 2025: Hike Nahal Tavor, Mt. Tabor
45. Apr 20, 2025: Desert Llamas and Camels

The Roads
24. Jan 5, 2025: Supermarkets & Highways
25. Jan 12, 2025: Not Cutting Me Off
36. Feb 25, 2025: Road Rules of Israel

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Printing a Replacement Driver’s License

The trip almost didn’t happen – I lost my wallet. My wife is big into saying a small prayer and giving a donation to Rabbi Meir Baal HaNeis Tzedekah when something is lost. It works for her every time, so I said go for it and also gave some tzedekah to a woman sitting outside the synagogue. My wife sat down in a deep chair in the living room, did the thing, and … after that … no wallet.

So to make the trip I went onto www.gov.il (called “guv”) to start with getting a replacement driver’s license. After a few attempts, for 22 shekels ($6 or so) you can print a temporary license and they mail you a new one. Printer wasn’t working, etc, etc … took me about 20 minutes then it was on to putting credit cards in Google Wallet … which you can’t do outside of the United States.

Then … my daughter yells, “I found Daddy’s wallet!”

She sat down in the same deep chair … where I had sat the day before! We rarely even use the chair. It’s this half-moon thing I bought for my wife’s birthday a bunch of years ago.

After a happy dance, we were off to the trip.

Har HaTavor (Mt. Tabor)

Where I grew up was a neighborhood called “Mt. Tabor”. No idea what it meant as a child … it’s the place where Devorah and Barak beat Sisera’s army and why we blow the shofar only 100 times on Rosh Hashana because the evil Sisera’s mother cried 101 times over his death and we don’t want to drown out all her cries … even the mother of an enemy.

At the top of the mountain is a church, and says Wikipedia (I’m reading it now after the fact), this is where their deity transfigured. I just found out what that means and why there’s a church there. You see, the church has no plaques and no explanations other than … don’t eat and drink here and no head coverings. How are you supposed to proselytize to me when I won’t take off my yarmulke … to enter a church that I wouldn’t enter anyway.

There’s a small shop there with various Christian things and across the path is a bathroom … that charges 4 shekels to enter. Nah, bro. I found a place on the mountain for free … to the outside of some cemetery. There are lot of ancient-ish ruins around there … again, no labels and no idea what I was looking at.

Then there’s a winding path down the mountain … back and forth, back and forth … with a nice view of the farms in the valley below. The road up is similar … back and forth, back and forth … except on the other side of the mountain.

It’s worth saying, “hey, I’ve been to Mount Tabor” and it’s a nice round shaped mountain extending up from a flat valley. I can’t recall every seeing something like it before – how would a round hill form amidst a flat valley?

Nachal HaTavor

Nearby is a “seasonal” hike – in the late winter and early spring the hills are full of the color green and surround a water-filled canyon. Apparently if you wait until mid-April or so, the hills are already brown kind of like the Windows XP background at different times of year.

At the entrance there’s a guy to tell you which trails to take – fancy that – there’s a trail map. Take a picture of it! There’s also a lady screaming that we don’t have enough water. We had about three liters for three people … I bought another liter. She was right.

She also screamed that we needed hats (I had one) … my neck still got sunburned … in March. It was a sunny day. Today I bought sunscreen at the pharmacy for future use.

The regular hike is about 8 km long – about 5 miles. Plan to spend your day. The first/last part of the hike is on a compacted dirt road with green rolling mountains all around … and then there’s this shortcut:

I always love this about hikes in Israel. A mediocre hike in Israel is better than the best of hikes in New Jersey … and Florida. (Florida is so flat.) Then in Israel there’s no coddling you on hikes … shortcut leading to steep hill where the only thing to grab onto is a barbed wire fence? That’s a lawsuit waiting to happen … in the United States. It’s kind of like how playground in the U.S. have all lost their character, look the same, and are sanitized from risk. Israel be like … nah, bro. You figure it out. Israel coddles in other ways, mostly in relationships with people.

Once you reach the river, there’s much shade to be had and a path that requires crossing over the river … and back … and over the river again … probably around 10 times. You can walk across slippery rocks that someone in the past probably placed in various places … or just walk through the river and cool off. At one location is a waterfall and the getting there requires walking along a narrow path against a wall (don’t look down and don’t tell OSHA) and then up the metal steps chiseled into the wall. This was the biggest bottleneck of the hike, though not bad … some kids would then jump in from the top of the waterfall.

Returning back to the center of the country, our drive was through rush-hour traffic on Route 6 … the “NJ Turnpike” of Israel. A car with good adaptive cruise control makes such a difference. Despite being tired, just put the car in the automatic mode and it will even stop and start itself through traffic. You just have to steer. This makes long traffic drives so much better … combined with silly music. There’s Tae Kwon Leap, Last Will and Testament of Tae Kwon Leap, Funny Farm, Fish heads, Dead Puppies Aren’t Much Fun, Roman’s learning the decimal system, Tom Lehrer’s new math, periodic table song (followed by the Daniel Radcliffe version), and others. (The funniest part about Tom Lehrer’s new math song is he’s mocking the new math of 1965, which is the math that I learned and the version that makes sense to me whereas the version before that, which he thinks is normal seems irrational to me. Get it? Irrational?)