Aliyah Diary 28: Yarkon River Tel Aviv Judaism

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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
34. Feb 17, 2025: Finding Obscure Things

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

Government and Bureaucracy
10. Oct 8, 2024: Driver’s License
11. Oct 13, 2024: Packages. (חבילות.)
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

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

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Introduction

As a college student, at the interview with an Orthodox Rabbi with the big black yarmulke, I asked if we’d visit Tel Aviv. He said, nah, it’s just like an American city … if you’re going to Israel, you want to visit Jerusalem. Truth, but … myth 1.

As a newly religious Jew you’re told that Tel Aviv is the city founded where synagogues were forbidden. Truth, but … myth 2.

As a Hebrew school kid you’re told that Israel is a desert. Jews made it bloom and ran a pipeline from Kinneret to the South. Truth, but … myth 3.

… the map literally shows a ling river in the middle of Tel Aviv to the sea. What kind of desert are you?

Israel is complex. It’s all true and it’s all half true. Both those things can’t be true – that’s true too! (I stole that from Fiddler on the Roof.)

Before moving to Israel, I’d barely ever been to Tel Aviv. As a guy who likes history, I just read Jewish historian Sam Aranow’s book, “An Armada of Cats” – after a Birthright Israel trip he decided to move to Israel. We share similarities having an atheist grandparent and while I became religious, he remains anti-religious, and I agree with exactly one opinion in his book: food comes quickly at restaurants in Israel. Then when you want to pay, the waiter is nowhere to be found.

His book does mention the Yarkon river park and sure, one day. Having to pick up a child in Tel Aviv and being perennially early, and school activities running perennially late, I had some time to look around. Hmm … river … look at Google Maps … by golly it’s the Yarkon River. So … I went for a walk to the sea and back. Here are my observations.

Truth, but … myth 1: Tel Aviv is an American City

United States: Let’s flatten the earth as much as we can do with nature what we want it to be. Back in New Jersey our river was first covered with streets for miles until someone decided to allow it out in a small portion thereof, and even then, dam it up to create a lake that regularly needed dredging and change the course so it regularly flooded the walls. In Central Park in New York, they flattened the land as much as possible.

Yarkon River Park: Fits in with the environment.

The architecture is also interesting. Not so much “here’s a rectangular prism” in Tel Aviv as … “here’s an new interesting shape to compliment the other 200 interesting shapes”:

Truth, but … myth 2: Tel Aviv is without religion

They seem to be doing a terrible job of that because today there are plenty of synagogues and there’s an eruv through the park:

Also, there’s free parking on Shabbos – though in religious areas you sometimes find apartment buildings which are narrower and strangely shaped at the top so more people can have balconies for their sukkas. In Tel Aviv, there’s this building which is so anti-religious it creates anti-balconies:

You guys aren’t doing anti-religious like you used to.

Truth, but … myth 3: Israel is a desert

Apparently, that’s 58% true. Not so much for the other 42%.

This is where the river through Tel Aviv meets up with the Mediterranean – I found it:

Truth, but … myth 4: Israel history began with the Balfour Declaration

Henry Clay, who should have been president of the United States about four times, kept the country out of Civil War for decades. From the border state of Kentucky, known as “the Great Compromiser” his enemies joked that “his face was a compromise by comittee” to describe how ugly it looked.

1917 – Lord Balfour, after his text went through too many committees, said that the largest empire on earth at the time “viewed with favor” the establishment of a Jewish homeland that would not prejudice the rights of others. It’s not so clear what he did or didn’t mean, though it set off a wave of Jewish immigration into Israel at the same time that the United States closed it’s borders to almost all new Jewish immigrants in 1921.

Type I: In Israeli culture, it seems that history usually goes like this:
– first Temple
– second Temple
– exile … skip a thousand years or two … oppression and backwardsness or something …
– 1880s to now – we’re a nation again with aliyah!

Type II: In secular American culture, Jewish history usually goes like this:
– Europe before the holocaust
– Holocaust
– America and Israel after the holocaust

Type III: Religious Jewish history usually goes like this:
– G_d made man, man made mistakes for a few thousand years except for this person and that person who saved the world
– serve G_d here, there, and everywhere
– enter Israel, leave Israel, repeat 3x or so
– exile, prosper, exile some more … study Torah …
– oh smack, we’re going to Israel – how the … ? Okay, well, here we go. Ask questions later.

That is borne out by the monuments. What’s the Jewish museum in New York about? See “secular American culture”. In London … very similar. At a ‘random’ park in Cherry Hill and ran across a memorial for Jews and what’s it about … the holocaust. What are the memorials in synagogues about in the US? The holocaust. Yet to see one holocaust memorial in Israel that isn’t the Holocaust Museum. There used to be one at the Western Wall – no more. Now it’s about the destruction from 2000+ years ago.

The monuments in Tel Aviv are exactly as expected type I – I found two: one to the 6 Day War (1967) and another to the Munich massacre in 1972:

One truth in both monuments of type I and type III are that both need those spiky things to stop birds from pooping on them – compare Tel Aviv to Jerusalem:

Another similarity is that you can hear plenty of English in both places and the thermostats feel incredibly inaccurate. I thought maybe just where I am the weather online is off … in Jerusalem it feels colder than the temperature and in Tel Aviv, hotter. Plus, a weather report in the United States is something like, “tomorrow, high in the xxx and low in the xxx dropping down to xxx at night with a xxx chance of precipitation Monday …). Here, despite the vast temperature differences, I heard on the radio in both cities, “mezeg avaair mahar, domeh” … tomorrow it will be similar. That’s always the weather tomorrow which is truth, but …

Truth, but … other myths

Israel doesn’t have enough parking spaces: this one is true except around this park. There are parking spots along both sides and near the sea are shopping centers with a lot of parking. That’s where they’ve been hiding all the parking spots.

City planning is amazing here … usually. The park … amazing. In true Israel style, the Yarkon River park has continuous, uninterrupted flow for your eyes. It’s relaxing. Imagine Central Park not being interrupted by roads … inconceivable, yet Yarkon Park is actually designed that way. Walkways are continuous under roads. There are also various spaced apart activities, marked walkways and bikeways (probably just a suggestion), playgrounds, dog park … while distractions and interruptions to your peace are few.