Doing time

A friend pointed out to me that living in Israel is like living in prison. It's a minimum security prison. You dwell in these little concrete encased rooms. Since you can't afford a car, you rely on buses which  put you in a kind of curfew. You must leave wherever you are by 12 PM or you'll be stuck. 

It's unpleasant outside the apartment. It's even unpleasant walking down the stairs with the crumbling paint and dirty walls. You enter the parking lot, which is ridden with cracks and loose tiles and garbage. You don't see trees, not many. You see more dreary apartments and garbage. There are no benches. You walk around for half an hour like you would in your hour a day in the prison yard. 

Half the New Jersey sized country is desert. Half of the remainder is Arab, which means either unsafe or prohibited to Jews by law. The quarter that remains is mostly a dump, with prison like housing. There's not much to see but you can't even get there anyway without a car. 

Bus service is sparse in Israel. You can catch a bus or two a day to dreary places like Rishon L'Tzion. Even within Beit Shemesh, you'll find buses only in the most populated areas. If you try to go from the industrial district Har Tuv to the main Beit Shemesh, good luck. I once tried to leave the Biblical "Museum" there (which consists of a few rooms of snakes in glass boxes and a few bones of dead birds), and had to walk all the way because the next bus wasn't coming for 6 hours! I walked two miles in the blazing heat.

Even if bus service were frequent, if you are Haredi you aren't welcome in most of the tiny country. The eyes of Hilonim go wide when they see Haredim, but it's not a happy to see you widening of the eyes, it's hostility, as if they saw a cockroach in their kitchen. The hatred is palpable. 'Oh there go those horrible bums who live off the state and refuse to serve in the army.' That's what they are thinking, and might even say out loud. It's like meeting members of a rival prison gang. You don't know if there will be a confrontation.

So what happens is that you wind up roaming the same streets all the time: the one you live on, the one with the tiny grocery store which is like a minimum security prison commissary, and maybe 2 or 3 streets in the Haredi parts of Jerusalem, Kiryat Belz, Meah Shearim St. It too is like pacing a prison yard. Same streets, same dumpy housing, same lousy tiny stores. 

Then you have the military coming after the children, like prison guards. The wardens, the guys who run the country, hate you and tell you so every day. 

Maryla (nee Husyt) Finkelstein, Norman's mother, likened the place to a garrison, a military base. That's also an apt description because a military base is a minimum security prison too, and since they have a universal draft here, the people all around you have done time.

Welcome home.