Missing Tel Aviv

On a night like tonight, when I sit envious of a friend who's off in Jerusalem, I find that I miss Tel Aviv. This is somewhat out of context because you have to understand it in relation to the whole thing, but it touches on part of what goes through my head when I think of it. An excerpt to a larger piece:

          Even though I’ve only ever spent a night in Tel Aviv before (not long enough to see much of anything) I want him to be wrong. He’s close-minded, I tell myself, incapable of giving a fair trial to anything in the secular world.

But Tel Aviv just can’t seem to keep it’s mouth shut. The 70s-style hotels that line the coast, the smell of sunscreen that sits like a thick fog rolled in from the water, make the city seem like nothing more than a sad Middle Eastern version of Miami Beach. A few generations of pasty Ashkenazic immigrants have given way to firm, tanned bodies. Bronze Gods, new idols of worship.

I stare up at the sleek new skyscrapers, those symbols of Israeli progress and modernity, but have a hard time reconciling them with the squat, abandoned Bauhaus structures that still litter most of the landscape, chipped paint and weeds and trash spilling out from boarded-up windows and doors that have long been propped open. I’m embarrassed when I see Independence Hall with its dilapidated exterior, a makeshift flagstaff at the top, leaning off to one side at a slight five degree tilt, a tattered flag sputtering alongside it. This is where a state was formed? I missed Washington’s white-washed Roman architecture, forgetting for a moment that I’d never actually spent enough time in Philadelphia to see where America was born.

             The southern part of the city, away from the water and tourists, is crammed with very non-Jewish-looking people of African, South Asian, and Indian origins. Most are workers, living in purgatory, ready to be tossed back home if their jobs suddenly come to an end - if Shlomi, who runs the laundry service, sees a drop-off in demand for talis dry cleaning, or Mrs. Gittleman decides she doesn’t want her house cleaned twice a week anymore. Lights flicker along the edges of the streets, tacky bright bulbs announcing whorehouses with graffiti painted accents of exaggerated bodies draped in Flashdance-style underwear tearing at the seams. Peddlers spread dusty sheets, once white, across sidewalks to exhibit their worthless wares – rusted tools, used (“vintage”) clothing, manicure sets slipping out of their open containers, unlabelled VHS tapes with cracked plastic screens. It’s all a caricature of the forgotten, a corner of this country that God must not have noticed.

I try to ignore my disappointment because it’s easier not to deal with it. Instead, with the coaxing of more party-minded individuals than myself, I indulge in the familiar comforts that Tel Aviv has to offer. Life becomes one sleepless night of drinks and hookah on the beach, eyeing bikinis and searching for knowing smiles, the resonating slap of matkot paddles off in the distance as the Friday night sun dips behind the Mediterranean and the prayer book grows sweaty in my hands. Most other things recede into the dark corner, just a shapeless mass casting a long shadow at the passing of a light.

The night before our exodus East, I sit out by the sea with a few other people. Our feet buried in the cold sand, each of us contemplates in silence. I allow myself to realize that I’m ready to leave, happy even. I don’t think I will miss having Tel Aviv behind us.

Someone lets out a deep breath. “This place, it’s amazing isn’t it?”

“Why?” I ask, annoyed at the mere suggestion that there can be anything amazing about it. “It’s so rundown, so seedy. I expected something a little more, I don’t know, developed, advanced.”

“You have to realize,” he says, “it’s still such a young place. All of this was built from nothing, in the middle of a desert, by people who came out of Europe after the Holocaust. And they did it in only sixty years.”

I don’t know that I understand what any of it means. The context, the realities, they seem too far removed from my own life. I don’t have anything to say in response, and so I let his words trail off into the salty air as our conversation devolves back into just the sound of our rising and settling chests, the sleepy lapping of the Mediterranean against the shore.