Dear Family and Friends,

Welcome to the first official entry of my e-mail log! Most of you know what I have been up to the last couple of years, know where I'm headed now and are expecting these periodic entries. For those of you who don't and I who have been out of touch with for a while, I am moving to Israel for a duration of somewhere between six months and two years. My plans are to backpack for the first month before I begin a language program in Netanya in modern Hebrew. This program will last two months afterwhich I will consider several options of employment, study, etc.

Right now, it is about 2:00pm on Sunday and I am making myself ready to leave in a few hours for the airport. I have been in NYC since early Thursday and my time in the city has been wonderful. Highlights have been observing Michael Haskell teach english to his kids at Southshore High in Canarsie, Brooklyn and celebrating the reunion of poets from Tom Lux's firstyear studies group at SLC. On Friday, L.B. Thompson, Michael, Alex and I spent a great night in the east village,finally ending up on top of a roof in Greenpoint, Brooklyn looking across the East River to the entire global island's skyline (now minus and plus a few revelrers). We sang mournful blues that didn't rhyme and cat-called from our landscape of broken antennae and tar. Our celebration was made sweeter by the fact that Michael has just won a very major grant-award for his poetry, given each year to ten writers at the beginning of their career.

Yesterday, I spent a beautiful time with Jenny Campbell in the west village tucked away in a garden sanctuary right on the avenue of the Americas. The garden was situated by a beautiful, old church and we sat on a bench with a plum and cheese sandwhich between us, draped on all sides by a jungle of flowering trees, plants and vines. Kind old women who were very proud of their fresh compost tended to each bed of flowers like the soft surf of an ocean caressing the beach. All this while horns honked and people yelled...cars and people in their way of course...only in NY.

Well, I have to do some laundry and take care of some last minute visits and tasks before my ride comes to fetch me. I send my love to all and hope health and happiness are attending you.

Yours, Philip Solomon It

Subject: Arriving in Israel

Dear Family and Friends,

I made it in to Ben Gurion air port late Monday night, after surprisingly running into a friend from Oxford L'Chaim Society on the plane from Athens. Although I intended to go to Tel Aviv, the current worked against me. Every smile I met was like a kind stone directing my flow to the gates of the old city in Jerusalem. I arrived at Jaffa gate at about 10:30 worn out and almost oblivious to my surroundings...I found a bed and crashed. Upon rising in the morning, still a little jet-lagged, I began searching out less expensive lodging and found a place called Heritage House in the Jewish Quarter. Its a frum place where the orthodox groom future Ba'al Teshuvas (masters of return to orthopraxis). I've heard the shtick before but its neat to see and meet people from similar backgrounds to me struggle with questions I have struggled with...it's also nice to know that I no longer struggle with those questions! Anyway, yesterday I met some guys who were going to a concert of a bunch of Israeli grateful deadish bands, a frum woodstock if you would believe it, and I tagged along. It was wonderful and strange, espescially as I ran into an intern from Elat Chayyim from '96 at the real Woodstock, NY! Small world stuff. I plan to stay in Jerusalem through the end of Sukkot (we are sleeping beneath lulov covered booths on top of a roof) and then go north. I've decided to check out the mountain before it gets too cold and then return to the desert when it gets closer to winter. Other than a small cold, I am happy and healthy and I will be sure to touch base with all later. I cannot tell you how eager my tongue is wrap itself around the modern incarnate of this language, I feel it so deeply. Love, love, love and Shalom, PSA.

(Jerusalem)

Hi Everybody,

I'm still in Jerusalem and planning a trip to the north to do some backpacking shortly. I should be leaving Sunday, visiting my Ulpan on the way up. After a week in the Golan, I will come back down through Jerusalem on my way to Eilat where I hope to join a SPNI (Society for the Protection of Nature in Israel) tour to Mt. Sinai. I don't know how easily it will be to get e-mail outside of the cities...so we shall see. In other news, Jerusalem is perhaps the most intense place I have ever been...but not necessarily in a positve way. The sky feels heavy and all the people in the Old City (Jews, Christians, Muslims) seem absolutely zealous to bear its infinite burden. The colors are all muted: grey, tan, yellow, pale pink, white...and the archticture is so solid, so incontestible, almost no admittance for the new.

I heard a man lecture today from a yeshiva called Aish Ha'Torah. His talk was on the concept of the messiah, Gog and Magog. It was frightening and exhilerating: on one hand, these teachings seem almost beyond my willingness even to listen but on the other beyond my ability to refute with an argument of coincidence. It is a grand and insightful authority with which "Torah-true Judaism" addresses the present global situation; however, its attempt to articulate our times is surely brutal and punishing in its claim to exclusivity. It scares me that I am being wooed to be included in a "we" that is so narrow, how easy it would be to smile my brain away into that security. Although I look forward to leaving, the time has been thought-provoking and beautiful.

The next time I address everyone I will be either on my way out of the Old City or about to set camp from the mountains in the north. I wish everyone well. Say hello to the changing leaves for me. Love, PSA.

P.S. A poem:

The desert sun
glints of a machine-gun.
Who is apostate now?

The nations parade
through a crowded arcade.
The pious still learn to bow.

Subject: Letter from Tzfat

Shalom to All,

I am typing this from a basement library in a mountain top college in the city of TZVAT (Safed, Tsfat, Zfat). I have been here since Monday, staying at a hostel within the old city where I have made some very fine friends and enjoyed the lectures on Jewish mysticism. (The cost per night is 50 shekels but for each class on Jewish mysticism attended, one receives a ten shek rebate--not a bad way to spread the word I suppose?)

Tzfat is one of the four holy (according to Judaism) cities including Jerusalem in Israel. The other two are Hebron and Tiberias. Each represents one of the four elements: Yerushalayim=fire; Hebron=earth; Tiberias=water; and Tzfat=air. I don't know how much credence I lend this symbolism but for sure during the week I was in Jerusalem, the city of fire was burning me out.

Tzfat is at the highest elevation of any city in Israel, surrounded by the mountains of the Upper Galillee which house the tombs of several famous rabbis. Yesterday, I woke up at five in the morning for a day hike to Mt. Meiron where R' Shimon bar Yochai is buried. Roni (my hiking partner)and I never made it to the tomb but explored the summits of several other mountains and Nahals (hebrew), Wadis (arabic) or Arroyos (spanish-english). We hiked all day accross beautiful rock formations, through waterfalls and stone ruins. On the final climb up from the valley into town we turned a corner and the entire valley exploded with these small running creatures. I have yet to find out what they were but they looked like a cross between a house-cat, a gopher and one of those big-eyed marsupials that hang from trees by their tails in Australia. There were literally about fifty of them scampering all over the red-rock and scrub pine of the canyon.

Tzfat is a backwater in a way, a very rural town populated by students of Jewsish mysticism and secular Israelis who have fled from the congestion of Tel Aviv and Haifa. I like it very much, the balance between the two perspectives does not seem so tense as in Jerusalem. I will be here through Shabbos so I may have the chance to write more about it, however...

I have a story I must tell: Last Friday when I was still in Jerusalem, a couple hours before Shabbos came in, I finally decided to start calling family in to see if I could spend time with them for all or part of the weekend. I was able to reach our cousins Yitzchak and Sarah Engel who live in the Ezrat Torah neighborhood near Mea She'Arim.

For all the family who are reading this, though Jan may well correct me: Yitzchak is the grandson of Shloime Engel who was the brother of Mojshe Engel my great-grandfather. Shloime lived in Germany during the 2nd World War...I don't know how he made it to Israel but when he did he became very observant. s of Shloime and his wife in Germany portray them as a very secular couple (however, this was just my impression).

Cousins Yitzchak and Sarah are in their seventies and devout followers of a Hasidic rabbi named Nachman of Breslov, who lived at the end of the great wave of Hasidism--mid 19th century--and who was the great-grandson of R' Israel ben Eliezer the Baal Shem Tov who legend has it founded Hasidism in the late 1700's.

Yitzchak and Sarah speak hardly any English (Sarah none) but made me welcome in true Engel/Angel fashion--even with a little sip of schapps on Erev Shabbat! They fed me and kept me for three days in their modest home--three days because as one who is not yet a citizen of Israel I am obligated to celebrate a second day of Simchas Torah, and therefore could not take a bus, turn on a light, create, destroy, etc.

The experience of davening (praying) with the Breslov was beyond words. The Breslov Hasidim are radical and out on a limb even in Hasidic circles. One of their branches all wear long, blue and tan pin-striped, silk robes with white yarmulkes on their heads. All have long, long paius (earlocks) down to their shoulders and beards almost to their belly-buttons. The other of the groups mostly wear the fur-circle hats and black silk caftans with silk braided ropes wrapped about their middles with which you may already be familiar.

We davened in a small basement shul, a stone room lined with books situated on the sandy mountain halfway between Yitzchak and Sarah's apartment and the top of the hill. As Nachman's teaching was all about pouring out the heart, there was a lot of yelling and crying out, random wailing, clapping and even whistling during the regular prayer session.

(I did a paper on Nachman and his life while at Oxford and so am somewhat familiar with his philosophy. His stories, in fact fabulously elaborate parables, were read extensively by Kafka and in many ways anticipate that modern roach's work).

As you may know, the main part of the Simchat Torah ceremony involves dancing seven times around the Torah/s as they are carried about. This was done on the eve of the holiday and on the day itself, taking about seven hours each time...and I was there every minute, the only Hasid wearing khakis and a sports shirt. The dancing was incredibly intense.

Most minyanim (quorums of ten), tend to dance with a lot of fervor and ecstacy around the Torah, singing and chanting like a foot-ball fraternity whose team just won the division title. The Breslov were different: each man held his left hand behind his back with the back of his palm on the base of his spine. The man behind would loosely fold his right hand into the man in front's left. In this manner a circle was made around the marching Torah.

As other minyans would just dance like mad, feet going every which way, spontaneously moving in and out of the circle, the Breslov performed a ballet. Our left feet struck the ground at the same time with a large bang, our right feet shuffled forward, and again and again. A song was started by one of the elders and all joined in...slowly, with more patience then zeal. The zeal was developed and so much so, men were rocking their heads, crying, lifting their voices up in huge halloos of joy but all within the structure of the dance. It was amazing! And I was included in every step.

Many of you may know or have supposed that our family are Kohanim (descended from the priest Aaron, the brother of Moses), well I don't know about carrying the blood of Aaron, but Yitzchak confirmed that we were both Kohens. Besides being given an Alliyah (an opportunity to bless the Torah before its reading) I was asked to take off my shoes with cousin Yitzchak, stand before the Ark, don a tallis (prayer shawl)--wearing it completely over my head so that I couldn't see anything and lift up my arms in the traditional manner of blessing (Leonard Nimoy's vulcan greeting: the fingers of both hands splayed in the middle).

Afterwords, the entire group came up to me and thanked me in Hebrew and Yiddish for my blessing. It was a wild ride that I have not yet overcome. The Breslov community is fascinating...they seem to be poor as dirt...every last one of them, but happy, magically and genuinely happy. I suppose cocain or a lobotomy can also make you happy too...?

Although, I am not about to become Breslov or even strictly Torah-observant for that matter...the experience was so beautiful and has remained with me in such a huge way. I crossed a kind of line in which the absolute ecstatic Hasidic expressions of communal love, fear, joy, sadness, etc. feel no longer foreign to me or a backwards part of Judaism stuck in the 18th century. I love it that something so culturally pure still exists in our community and I am eager to learn whatever lessons it has to offer. Well...

There is much more that I could write about but I must return to the people here and the mystical mountains of Tzfat. I love you all and wish you the best. Keeping in touch, B'Ahava, B'Shalom, PSA.

Subject: Khodesh Tov, Leaving Tzfat

Dear Family and Friends,

A short update today. I am on my way from Tzfat to the Lake Kinerret (The Sea of Galilee) to do some exploring and hiking from there up through the Golan. It has rained the last two days which is much needed and the temperature has cooled considerably. The last few days I have spent in this mystical city have been quite amazing...I don't know how much I wrote in the last letter but Tzfat besides being breath-taking is historically very significant.

The last great school of Jewish mysticism (before Hasidism in Eastern Europe) began here in the 16th century. Following the 1492 expulsion of the Jews from Spain, thousands of disappointed souls migrated to this mountainous region and began a process of revitalizing Jewish ceremony and practice. The intensity of their conviction and ritual stemmed partly from having suddenly lost a priveleged position in Spanish society. Jews in Spain had enjoyed for a couple hundred years civic involvement, religious tolerance, and a remarkable inter-religious discourse (Christians, Muslims and Jews were together responsible for a huge expansion of knowledge in the West because of their translation of thier respective religious, poetic and scientific traditions into each others languages.)

At any rate, the Friday night service, Kabbalat Shabbat, exists as we know it today from a ceremony started in this city of walking out at sundown on the Sabbath Eve to greet "the Sabbath Bride." I enjoyed the Shabbat experience here very much: at every synogogue and house I visited to pray and eat (this is all you do on Sabbath because its about all you're allowed to do) I was made so welcome. Its beginning to feel however, that if I keep any more mitzvot I may explode from too much holiness at once.

Overall, the most moving experience in Tzfat has not been visiting the graves of famous rabbis, ancient synogogues or taking a dip in the freezing waters of R' Isaac Luria's mikvah (a natural spring-fed ritual bath many men use to "purify the soul" before the Sabbath) although these have been beautiful experiences. The most moving experience by far has been the beauty of sharing a struggle of accepting or at least trying to understand the Halakhic (or Orthodox) mindset.

A group of us: a middle-aged /artist couple from LA, a massage-therapist from New Jersey, a completely secular cruise-ship employee globe-trotting around the world, an older woman from Holland who only discovered ten years ago that she was Jewish--rescued from an internment camp in Germany when she was six and adopted by a Dutch couple! (I became very close with her), and a few new yeshiva-bochers (orthodox students of Talmud). All of us stayed the week in this hostel and have been drawn in different extents to rediscovering and becoming intimate with the tapestry of Jewish thought and practice. The energy and intensity of emotion we achieved sharing L'Chaims (vodka toasts) with a staff of devout, devout Lubavitch Hasidim who welcomed all our doubts, our criticism, our dismissals, etc. was MAMISH quite beautiful. This connection that exists between Jews who wrestle with their identity whether wearing a yarmulke, a big black hat or eating a cheeseburger is powerful and heart-warming.

Anyway...I think that's it for this "short" installment; however, I will write more the next chance I can find a friendly public library. My love to all and I wish you all good tidings and health for the beginning of this fall season. May we all have the feeling of being embraced by a community that cares for all its members, that listens to each person's needs as he/she tends to a part of his/her body in need of healing and exercise. Sending love, PSA.

Subject: Tiberias

Shalom Mishpachi v'Chevrim! (my family and friends)

I am writing from a strange, hole-in-the-wall computer store in Tiberias. The door is open and it smells strongly from the bins of the famous St. Peter's fish hauled-out fresh from Sea of Galilee/Lake Kinneret. I spent yesterday cycling around the lake, 55 kilometers!, with two nice girls from Denmark who were travelling before they begin university. I visited several of the sites holy to the Christian symbology, Taghba where Jesus was to have multiplied fish and loaves of bread and also the mountain from where the Beatitudes (Matthew 5, "Blessed are the poor...etc." my favorite section of the Gospels) were delivered. It was a strange experience walking around with my kipah which I have worn ever since arriving in Jerusalem...and strange to encounter the intensity of faith and hope that a Western culture, which is not my own but dearly familiar, approaches the same ground.

When I left Tsfat, my wish was to get myself somewhere multicultural and secular. I wanted a break from the 24/7 religiosity of Jerusalem and Tsfat. Now that I have had that experience...drinking beer with fellow travellers from Australia, California and London on the hostel deck and listening to imported American rock music, I long again for the communities of learning and contemplation I left behind, especially in Tsfat.

For that reason and that Tiberias is a rather seedy, built-up and polluted city, I am moving on later today. This morning I visited the Rambam's (Maimonides') tomb and after getting off the internet I will visit the tomb of R' Akiva. Cousin Jan has put me in touch with our cousins Yoav and Dalia Efrron who live in Qatzrin which is visible from Tiberias so depending on their willingness to play host, I may travel there. I had planned to do some hiking in Nahal Yehudiyya but I believe it will take another day to recover from the bike trip: I feel like the triangle shape of the saddle is going to be permanently impressed into my hind-end!

I will write again soon. Thanks to all for your notes of reply, the next time I have more leisure time with a computer I will reply to them individually. Love, love, love to all. B'Shalom, Philip.

Subject: Rahmat HaGolan (The Golan Heights)

Shalom Family and Friends,

I am back in Jerusalem for a day and night before I head to the Dead Sea and Massada and on to Tel Aviv. My language program begins in Netanya on October 25 and I am anxious to sink my teeth in. I thank you all for your messages returning mine...I have been challenged, amused and encouraged by all of them. It truly is wonderful feeling so connected throughout the world to such wonderful people.

One of you (no names) wrote to me of feeling a little put out on not understanding "the Jewish stuff" and asked me to make for certain that this histori-spiritual adventure of mine does not end up creating barriers between me and non-Jews. I certainly hope it doesn't!

I guess my response is that I hope my exploration should bring me closer to all people in general...but definitely with a deeper knowledge of who I am, where I come from and of how I plan to help the human family using the spiritual vocabulary I have inheireted. Definitely, heritage is a difficult thing and can be divisive. However, when we reach beyond the simulacrum of American humanistic pluralism (the ideal of which I entirely agree with and hope nevertheless to embody), we suddenly see that if an American "unity" exists, it depends on the extent to which as ravenous consumers we can consume. If a person can break through the designer blow-dryer and rich meats at every meal mentality, what kind of unifying mythology is he/she left with? Good will and peace toward men? Unfortunately, I doubt it.

I see in this exploration of my heritage, a quest whose goal is not enlightenment, redemption or another similar sounding religio-spiritual aspiration. Rather, my goal is to unite within my own mind my pluralistic American values with a deeper knowledge and appreciation of my family's history--the hopeful product being a poetic language forged out of this wide spectrum of personal/communal relationships.

That said (and said poorly I'm afraid), someone else asked about my greetings and farewells, Shaloms vs. B'Shaloms. Shalom means peace and is the standard greeting and parting expression in Israeli society. At the end of my letter, I add the B' which is the Hebrew pronoun for "with" or "in". I hope I have satisfied the question, but if not...ask again as you can see I love playing at being an authority.

Well, I think that this communique promises to be a long one. The last time I wrote to all of you I was crouched in a stinking computer store in Tiberias. Since that day and the next (I was pulled into another drinking session with my hostel friends, alas!) I have been many places...physically and otherwise. From Tiberias I decided to hitchhike rather than try a bus to Yehudiyya Nature Preserve. I entertained myself during the slow periods with a Paul Auster novel I allowed myself the incredible indulgence of and all in all, for starting out on the road after noon on Wednesday, I fared well and made it to the Preserve in the lower Golan Heights a couple hours before the sunset. I had enough time for a gorgeous hike to the Zavital Falls.

(The trick to hitch-hiking in Israel I discovered is finding a soldier who is going the same way you are and tag along as it is customery is Israeli society to give rides to any soldier who needs one.)

The Yehudiyya Preserve is one of many in the Golan (perhaps the most magnificent) in which deep canyons with year-round running springs criss-cross the volcanic plateaus of the region. The rock in the area is almost entirely basalt and is layered in rich reds, tans, and dark grey/purple through which one can distinguish different primeval volcanic explosions. There is no volcanic activity in the area now, unless one considers the term as a political metaphor in which case...almost every time somebody opens their mouth...you get my meaning.

Wednesday night I camped at the forest making good friends with an Israeli couple who were university seniors. We made coffee and talked about politics and world religion until long after the sun had set. My impression from Tal and Anat and from the other young Israelis visiting the region whom I met hiking the next day...was that the move to give back the Golan Heights to Syria was an inevitable and good move on the part of the new Barak government. I heard from them the comment over and over again that the deaths of soldiers along the Syrian-occupied Lebanese border was too, too much. Giving away Rahmat HaGolan (the Golan Heights) was worth the peace.

I mention this observation only because later in the week my initial agreement with this observation would be challenged again and again. Besides this subtle political background conversation and its accompanying bittersweet sensation n realizing how potentially fleeting could be my pleasure of these gorgeous canyons, sparkling pools and applauding waterfalls, Wednesday was spent entirely transfixed by the natural world. I negotiated boulders, scrambled along the side of cliffs and used metal ladders and guide ropes installed for that very purpose. It was one of the most challenging hikes I have ever been on and it was wonderful.

The natural beauty there is so hard to describe, and when I try to I almost find my tongue shaping images that are obscene in the extent of their sensuality. First, the volcanc plateau is itself possessed of a desolate beauty: scrub pine and oak in addition to cactus and fields of thistle roll across the rocky landscape. These hills are scattered with ruins of stone-huts, all roofless and falling over, of a dark, dark basalt that is stacked almost at random without mortar (I learned later these were Syrian dwellings built in the twenty years Syria occupied the Golan prior to the twenty years Israel has now occupied it).

However, as one approaches the wadi (Arabic for canyon or arroyo) the ground suddenly disappears and drops at an almost ninety degree angle from one's excited feet. The colored layers of rock descend down to the bottom, a couple hundred meters at least to where the roar of water can be heard...heard but not seen. Suddenly all before you is green and pendulous.

Beginnining thinly and growing in intensity down the wadi walls are all kinds of vines, palms, long reedy plants and dense, ripe, verdant shrubbery. The contrast is extraorinary and as I said before almost sexual, one feels as if some hidden errogenous zone of the earth is being climbed down into. I felt naughty the pleasure was so intense.

The air is cooler but close with humidity and where the sun makes it past the mountains and leaves, it is almost smothering. I spent the day rock-hopping in wild ecstacy. At some point I hope to do something more concrete with the journal entries from this day...but that is a different matter.

After spending a day climbing from waterfall to waterfall, swimming in chilling pools and stretching out like a pleased and portly lizard on the hot rocks to dry...I finally make it back to base camp. Still jazzed from the day, from the neat people I met on the way and enjoying a cold, cold grapefruit juice which proved to be almost as exhilerating as my hike...I called our Engel cousins Yoav and Dalia Effron who live in Katzrin and were expecting me for dinner.

I must back up a little and explain what I knew before hand (or rather what I did not know) about the Golan Heights and the relationship of Katzrin to this region. Of the thirty-odd settlements in the Golan, mostly Kibbutzim (collective farms and/or manufacturing communities) and their privatized version, Moshavim--Katzrin is the only city. Its population is about 6,000 (though it is planned for about double that), it is about twenty years old and functions as the regional and economic capitol of the Golan.

Cousin Yoav, a lawyer, and Dalia, an English teacher, have been in Katzrin since it was little more than five-hundred people and a state-backed idea. They are secular and ardent Zionists; Yoav was a paratrooper and fought in every war Israel has been in barring the initial war for independence in 1948. They have three children: two sons, Roee and Shai and an absolutely beautiful daughter, Ya'ara, who is finishing her last year in the army.

I spent the entire weekend with them and have just come from their house in Katzrin to Jerusalem. My journal is filled with detailed accounts of our conversations and interactions, descriptions of each of them, their appearance and personality, alive as I can make it. Here is one passage I am fond of:

Yoav is talking ceaselessly about Moby Dick. The book has cleared up a theological dilemma for him. Evidently, he has always assumed that the Bible--the Torah, Prophets and Writings--were human products, only metaphorically written by the fiery hand of G-d. He says this with emphatic hands, raised slightly higher than his head, "..but...but.." his fingers flickering madly like tiny, ardent flames, "..but nothing!" His hands land on the table: "The truth is that in my heart-of-hearts I always thought it too beautiful, too comprehensive and extraordinary to be mortal work. How could David alone write Tehillim (psalms)? Or Solomon alone, Shir Ha'Shirim (song of songs)? But Melville! Melville showed me...he showed me what could be the influence of G-d on the writing of man!"

Isn't that crazily cool?! This passage is a page of many and I feel really confronted by Buber's "altar of the form" to turn the whole group into something of public value. The Effron's family life, their existence on an international edge where UN trucks roll by constatntly patrolling a demilitarized zone, their fervency and the grains of salt with which I take that fervency--I find it all intellectually and emotionally intoxicating. I have been overwhelmed by both their ebullient hospitality and the blind (or perhaps not-so-blind) conviction that the Golan Heights should forever belong to Israel.

Along these lines, a lot of thought is gestating in my mind right now about Zionism vs. Arab claims to this land...and this conflict's relationship to the shadow of the Holocaust (in Jerusalem today, I finally went to Yad VaShem, the Holocaust Museum). I don't expect to come up with answers, certainly nothing pleasing, but to paraphrase Andre Gide in his beginning of his novel the Immoraliste: "I often find it of equal or more value to state a problem completely and well, rather than offer a passionate solution."

Well....I love you all. I am on my way tomorrow to float in the Dead Sea and climb Masada. I promise that I am eternally your devoted "moraliste" and still a ways off from joining the army. I send love, love, love to all, B'SHALOM, Philip Solomon. P.S. Thanks for being out there.

Subject: Thursday PM in Eilat

Shalom Family and Friends,

It is about 4:00pm Israel-time on Thursday afternoon. I am sitting in a used/new book store in the tourist strip of Eilat. Eilat is the southern-most tip of Israel on the Gulf of Aqaba, Jordan to the East and Egypt to the West. My original plan was to use the city as a base and explore Sinai, especially the mountain of reknown...but my fuel reserves ran out. I have relegated this pilgrimage to another time and have been spending my time instead reading on the beach and rowdily lounging before the world-cup rugby matches with other guests at my hostel. I left Jerusalem on Monday morning for Ein Gedi, a fresh water spring, kibbutz and spa on the Dead Sea. I camped out on the beach that night and left the next morning for Mezada. After climbing up and down Mezada I caught another bus to Eilat...and here I am. I wonder exactly how to document these stages of the trip because, truthfully I went through the motions of the exhausted tourist who feels it imperative to "see, see, see" and "do, do, do". The sights and sounds swim in my memory with residues of the Golan and are clouded further by a persistent cold I have picked up along the way.

However, I will try my tongue and do my best: The Dead Sea was in a word, slimy. I don't mean this in a moral sense--no overt displays of flesh, machismo, feminie wiles, gambling or the like (although it was certainly there to be found). On the contrary, the water was simply slimy. Despite the blue beauty of it, the wrinkled brown mountains and plateaus rising up from 400 meters below sea-level on all sides, the cork-buoy feeling the body experiences, bobbing up and down in the awesom immensity of a perfectly still and clear waters--I got the distinct impression that this immersion was not healthy. After about ten minutes, every bit of skin that has been dipped in the Dead Sea's water becomes slick and gritty with a chemical sheen and dried salt and after a few minutes more, I began to feel like a curing piece of meat, a hide being tanned. A few minutes following this, every exposed orifice begins to sting and burn like hot-pepper juice had been liberally applied

Don't take my complaints too seriously though. I had great fun and the views of the desert were overwhelming. I made a good friend from Finland named Rolf and we drank a bottle of wine and smoked cheap Israeli cigarettes beneath the starry desert sky talking--you guessed it--about religion (no way to escape this conversation in this country). With other camping vagabonds, long after the sun had set, we organized a midnight swim and skinny-dip which--all appendages being buoyant--remains one of the strangest sensation of recent memory.

I woke early the next morning to flabby Russians paddling their feet down to the rocky beach covered with mud from the spa and making no attempt to respect the sleeping. Rolf went for a morning swim but by this time I had totally lost interest in the Dead Sea and bid him goodbye to catch a bus to Mezada.

Mezada is a desert plateau further down the Dead Sea and as many of you may know was the scene of a mass suicide that has become tantamount to the modern Israeli patriotic ideal. According to Josephus, during the war with Rome, 73 C.E., 1,000 men women and children took their lives rather than surrender to the Romans. This small band of "Zealots" of which only a third were fighting men, held out against a Roman force of several thousands for over six months before finally casting lots to run each other through with swords and set fire to their compound. Today, all Israeli men and women who fight in the army are sworn into service on top of Mezada. This resolute courage has been suggested by some historians to offer to Israel an alternative national myth to the community of peace-loving scholars who went meekly to the gas chambers in the Holocaust.

The view from all around is stunning, the blue, blue of the Dead Sea, the orange ripples of the eroded plateas whose stone sings up to the sky, whose ridges are like hundreds of fingers spread out with their tips to the ground, the small desert rooks wheeling about and cawing from crevice to nook and other smaller birds for which I have no name, shrieking from unexpected shadows in the rock--all this was overwhelming. Atop the plateau are ruins from the Zealot village in addition to Herod the Great's Dead Sea Palace (initially taken by a small garrison of Roman soldiers before being taken in turn by the Zealots) in which are preserved frescoes that date to almost 2,000 years.

Strangely, I was not moved so much as I thought I would be...but truthfully I feel as if "my cup already runneth over" with novel emotions and insights. Incoming information simply streams off my forehead, its spears and armour, holy alphabets and sack cloth and ashes like sweat seeping from my face.

When I made it down off the mountain, I met two Asian travellers from Chicago at the bus-stop, Dave and Stephanie. Dave was adopted by Jewish parents from Korea when he was about four and he and his girlfriend who grew up in the states but was from China and was raised a-religious were on a pilgrimage of sorts to Mt. Sinai. I found it interesting that he was telling me things I didn't know about Judaism while I spoke of Buddhism and mentioned some books he might enjoy! I tell you what a world we have before us.

I arrived finally off the bus from Mezada early Tuesday night and was immediately besieged by all kinds of dark, suspicious characters asking me if I was interested in their hostel--scary toothless old women with scarves wrapped around their heads, and wheedly, rat-like men offering to take my luggage. I noticed a white-bearded Hasid standing quietly by the side of the bus but my eyes passed on just as quickly. I had researched the hostels in Eilat and I reopened my book to find the name. Doing so I called out at a level voice "Max & Merran's" and the Hasid I mentioned eyes brightened up.

His manner on the walk over was mischevious and clever, jokes about girlfriends and ex-wives. I initially mistook him for a spritely sage but have in the days since learned he is "all-too-human." I had never thought of meeting a Hasid who sneaks bacon behind the back of his observant mistress before...but one never knows when a surprise will next surface.

Well, I'm about written out today. I thank everyone for their responses. Please, keep them coming--they do my heart such good. If G-d's willing and the creeks don't rise I hope to write next from my Ulpan in Netanya.

Love to all, B'shalom v'ahava, (in peace and love), Philip Solomon.

P.S. I'm sending some attachments (pics from Tsfat 1 & 2). The only way I was able to do this was to send through the address of the e-mail service in Eilat. Please, to not "reply" to this e-mail as it is not my address and the owner of BJ Books. My address is still philipsolomon@yahoo.com

Subject: Ulpan Akiva

Shalom Family and Friends,

I am in Netanya at Ulpan Akiva studying modern Hebrew, "EVRIT". The work load is enormous and I am exhausted so this letter will be short. I sent a long letter from BJs Books (another address more capable than Yahoo of sending attachments) in Eilat with pictures from Tsfat attached to it...did any of you receive this e-mail? The only response I have gotten is from someone in Israel...I can send it again if it was not received.

I am fine and hope to have a chance to write more when I have a breather. Love to all. B'shalom, PSA

Subject: L'ILMOD EVRIT

Shalom Mishpachti v' Chevrim:

Another long day in the Ulpan. I have a tad more leisure time tonight to reach out and say hello. I have been placed in "Kita Aleph+", the equivalent of the second semester of first grade. I am one of three Americans in my class--the rest being mostly from Russia or the Ukraine. I am afraid the Hebrew I will eventually speak will be with a "pronouncedly" Russian accent.

Today I took a long walk along the beach, wading in the water and enjoying a few English words with some of my fellow internal students. My room-mate is a reporter from Norway who is studying Hebrew in order to have a better "in" with the locals when it comes to fast-breaking international stories. His newness to the language and commitment to learning it is inspiring.

I am slowly--l'at l'at--learning to think in Hebrew. It is exciting...never have I been recquired to be so single-minded about anything. Funny thing--a Reform rabbi who once had a congregation in Huntington, WV--Fred something--and his wife are here brushing up on their conversational skills--small world! (Rabbi Koller, he says hello to you!)

I hope to soon describe this beautiful area--the beaches, fig trees, date trees, the odd birds and silken sands. For the time being, I wish everyone well. B'shalom, PSA

Subject: Hello from Netanya

Shalom to all...

I have not much time to write as I am borrowing the Ulpan Akiva's computer. The student computer is on the fritz for the second week in a row.

There was a bomb that went off in Netanya this morning which you may or may have not heard about--14 injured but no deaths. This is the first time a terrorist attack has ever happened in Netanya. I am fine but certainly saddened and concerned for the people involved.

I love you all and hope to soon get more regular e-mail access so that I can return to my longer letters. Love, love and prayers for shalom in Eretz Yisrael. PSA

Subject: Hof Yarok

Shalom aleichem,

I have grabbed a few moments from the evening, moments I have long wished for, to wish everyone well and catch you up on my life in Israel. I have been storing up so many memories, images of the ocean, encounters with captivating persons and occasional reflections on what it means to be here. I don't know where to begin.

Let me first describe the grounds of the ulpan itself. Ulpan Akiva sits overlooking the Mediterranean somewhat south of Netanya. The campus shares its facilities with a small hotel and a military intelligence training program. I have made several friends among these young men and women...but on the whole they are a tight-lipped bunch as is naturally warranted.

The fall landscape here is painted with soft browns, yellows and greens. Fig and date trees rise from their telescoping trunks and offer subtle shade from the autumn sun. Birds like I have never know--large crows with smoky bellies, bright woodbeckers with white-striped wings, myriad types of water-birds with long legs and windy screeches--populate the air and scavenge the ground for big, black-armored beetles. A wet, salty air blows in from the sea and even in this climate bids one to pull the jacket a little tighter on cloudless evenings.

A few evenings ago, I could not sleep. I had crammed my head too full with root and tense. My head ached and I realized I had not made time for the more spontaneous machinations of the heart and head. Crawling from my sheets, I left to walk along the beach and let the more subtle aspects of this setting articulate themselves with the waves and dunes.

Each incoming wave seemed a wing of a wide angel, without name but with never-ending purpose. Each insisted: Listen, I have something new to say. And in the dark sky, the dunes on my left were both presence and void--drawing to them all dreams and imagined birds. I hurled my own: a stranger who has come home to a house at war, wanting tea, a rest and a meal.

I thought to the morning class on the Israel Wars. The eager yet restrained face of my friend Muhammad from Beth-Lechem (Bethlehem--House of Bread) in the Palestinian Territories. I found myself saying in Hebrew outloud: b-yachad (together) without any premeditation...and reflecting that the root word of war: mil-chema...is bread.

The walk was like one described by Elizabeth Bishop in her poem, The End of March...except her lion-sun had set, the night was hardly winter and there was no house, no rainbow dream to surrender with returning steps. I found oultined in the uniform but layered sand, a plastic trash-bag, its wrinkles filled and flattenend, barely hinting from its bed. The pattern seemed to suggest the skeleton of an angel, frozen in her gift, but licked again by the frothy wings of ever new interpretations.

Dwelling in language, my class of basics returns me to a beginner's mind: not Adam in Eden, but similar: a thrill of discovery, owning the image by controlled explosions of the tongue, a melody at once guttural and rare.

My teacher told us a story today: her return to the Ukraine after five years as a citizen of Israel...how she felt a stranger and that Israel was her home. I think a lot of my loyalties, my loves--but pretty conceits of waves have not as yet whispered me an answer.

I love you all and wish I had time to return your letters individually. I receive each one and paint its senders picture in the air around me. Just now, as I write, all of the young soldiers come in and flood the bar. Your colors vie (sp?) with their laughter and swagger and I must quit. I am healthy, happy and meeting the embrace of my destiny each day. I wish all health and peace and look forward until the next letter. I am yours with love, Philip Solomon.

The better part

Subject:Kibbutz Lotan

Shalom,

It has been a long time (or it seems so) since I have touched my pen--key-fingers--to you all. I have been since early Thursday morning staying at a Reform Kibbutz in the Negev called Lotan. The Kibbutz is one of two that are Reform in Israel and is an interesting place. I am staying with a friend from the Ulpan who runs the organic garden here and had taken time off to study in Netanya.

On the studying score, progress went really well this month. I speak a very simple Hebrew, but with confidence and enthusiasm and am always learning more. Being more than halfway through the plans I made in the states, most of my spare time is being spent organizing what comes next. More than likely I will find a Kibbutz Ulpan where I can spend five more months working with the land and language.

Tomorrow, I have an interview with Hebrew Union College in Jerusalem and perhaps another with the National Council of Jewish Women.

There is so much to tell of the relatively short time I have spent here but I am afraid it must wait. I send love to all and hope all are happy and healthy. Love, Philip.

P.S. The poet hasn't left, he's just waiting until he gets back to Netanya.

Subject: Jerusalem with Memories of Donkies

Shalom to All,

I must apologize first for the short message I sent last night from Kibbutz Lotan: I wanted to reach out and give something to you all from my journies but was low on energy and time. I woke up early this morning, said goodbye to Leah, the friend with whom I was staying, and quickly boarded a bus to Jerusalem where I am now. In an hour, I have a preliminary interview at Hebrew Union College. I look forward to clarifying some possibilities of my next steps.

The past month at Ulpan Akiva has been incredible. As I have written before, I have never been given such an opportunity for single-minded attentivess: LEARN HEBREW! This is the trajectory of purpose, the light by which everything else is lit. My housing and meals are taken care of, a community of friendly fellow-students is always at hand for a sense of solidarity and the pursuit itself is incredibly stimulating. It is really a privelege and a luxury.

During the break between sessions (my second beginning tomorrow morning) I travelled with a new and special friend, Leah to the Kibbutz in Lotan where she works. The passing mention of this place and her that I made last night fails to do either justice.

Lotan is one of two Reform Kibbutzim in Israel. Its main income is large-scale commercial agriculture (mostly dates) and an enormous dairy farm. The kibbutz is situated in the southern part of the Negev about fifty kilometers from Eilat--the southern-most tip of Israel. The Kibbutz also takes in a lot of revenue from tourism, especially birders. There are few places in the world where the spring and autumn migration of European and African birds can be seen as dramatically as from Lotan. The most common is a strange fellow called (I think) the Green African Bee-Eater. He is masked black with brilliant, green/turquoise feathers, a long slightly hooked black beak and wings whose under-feathers are bright orange. He dances in the sky to show off before possible mates, spreading his wings for long moments of free-fall and glide.

Even in Autumn, the desert sun in merciless. On Shabbat, Leah, a friend of hers and I went hiking in the mountains around the Kibbutz. I have hiked quite a bit in the north but this was the first occasion I have had to explore the Negev. The experience has really changed my perspective of the terrain. Until now whenever I came to the south, the dramatic desoltaion of its mountains, its unforgiving and mortal aura, the scraggled and hardly existent vegetation--these awoke in my memory only comparison to the lush forests and mountains of Eastern North America that I know and love so deeply. The desert mountains seemed to me only pictures and the hot haze which covers them an insurmountable barrier between myself and them.

Having hiked into a remote valley, seen the wild ibex at play (small deer with small and spirally-scooped-up horns) and learned some of the plant and wild-life ecology, the mountains now--with their steep wrinkles, eroded bluffs and boulders, painted in pale yellows and browns beneath a pastel blue sky--and dotted with knotty leafless trees whose green twig-tips carry out photosynthesis so as not to waste energy with leaves--the mountains now are more alive to me. In fact, such life holds a subtle beckoning light when seen in ist stark contrast with arid absence which surrounds it.

I can only imagine that it is this reverence for struggle seen enacted all about them, that leads people such as the Kibbutzniks in Lotan to call the Negev's barren expanse of rock and sun, Home. However, we do like our lawns...and the Kibbutz is not without them. The main compound is in so many ways a collective paradise, bright gardens, rainbow-painted playgrounds, tarpaulined geo-desic domes, welded sculptures of birds and musical intstruments playing themselves. Lotan impressed me as a university campus for families, intently studying the local mysteries of community living by doing exactly that, sharing both festive meals and misfortune--tied together irrevocably.

Certainly, we can assert the same about our lives in the cities and states which are no less "intentional communities" as this one, but the respect and warmth each of us must know is fundamental to humanity is buried by our privacy, our instinctual self-protection from that which is foreign and therefore feared. As I walked around Lotan, my reaction was at once enthusiastic and skeptical: what does one give away to bathe in such pure human, waters? will it always be necessary to describe the circle with such limitation?

Later that same Shabbat, Leah and I went for another walk with an old Kibbutznik from Vancouver, who had been at Lotan almost from the beginning. We visited the date plantation and as we were eating the leavings from this year's harvest beneath a tree, a stampede of donkies kept inside the palm "orchard" to eat the cuttings, charged us wanting our love and affection. About 25 donkies of all coats and colors, braying and running behind us, nuzzling and nibbling on our neck. I thought I saw the Mashiach riding on each one.

I must leave you with this image. I have a meeting to make. B'ahava, Philip.

Subject: Quick Greetings<\H.>

Dear all,

I am far behind in my e-mails but thinking of you fondly. I am working on a real nice one...but you won't see it quite yet...sorry.

I am going to Kibbutz Sde Eliyahu this weekend to visit and see if I want to live there for the next few months and continue studies.

There is also a chance I will continue to be at Ulpan Akiva for the next month. I have been drafted into helping prepare a worldwide "Young Leadership Parliament" sponsored by the Ulpan and Jubellenium 2000 and scheduled for March.

I am very excited. Soon you will be able to see some of my writing on the website: www.jubillenium.com.

If any of you are interested in attending, please look up the website and see. Registration is due by Jan. 15 but there remains time to get sponsors for the conference cost.

My best to all. Ahavah v'shalom. Philip.

Subject: no longer in exile

Wednesday, 1 December

Shalom v'Kol Tuv, Mishpachti v'Heverim:

I am sitting in the lobby of the beach-side hotel in Netanya where my ulpan is based. The computer is situated in a small cafe separated from the reception area by a modest wall of wooden lattice and hanging plants. Empty wicker chairs painted white crouch around small cafe tables. I watch young soldiers go in and out, linger by the telephones or by a counter drinking coca-cola. Crowds of teenagers, as well I watch: the boys with slicked-back gelled hair and baggy pants, the girls with slim skirts and baggy sweaters, passing by on their way downstairs to a Hannukah disco.

The one occupied table in the cafe is kept company by three of my fellow students. Two are my room-mates--Haim and Mordecai, both my age--and the third is Masayuki, a gentleman from Japan to whom English and Hebrew are equally difficult. Haim and Mordecai are trying to teach Masayuki the meaning and proper pronunciation of "Lo yisa goy el goy cherev, lo yilmedu od milchema!" (Nation shall not lift up sword against nation; they shall not practice war anymore.)

A group of soldiers begins to gather by the lattice wall, tenatively leaning with their drinks and listening. Soon, however, they situate their rifles to rest more comfortably on their shoulders and walk away. Indeed as I have written these last lines, the lobby has emptied.

I have just returned from a field-trip to Tel Aviv, from a visit to the Museum of the Diaspora. I am filled with images of exile kept alive in my people's communal memory for two thousand years. "We" wept by the waters of Babylon. "We" painted frescoes of ourselves as prey: small rabbits and chickens--bloody-taloned eagles, bloody-toothed foxes carrying brothers away while a castrated community watched. I inspected the trap-doors and secret passages built into models of twenty centuries worth of synagogues: hidden sanctuaries, last chances of escape. The words "O G-d, have we not been chaste and chased enough!" trembled from the lips, from the curtains of beards, from the studied eyes of those whose hearts "we" have held, glimpsed the hills of a world-to-come.

I am moved but uncomfortable. In my mind, the world never stops coming.

The finale of the museum was a movie: Our group wanders tired, excited and uncertain into a circular theatre. "The seats are better in back!", someone calls out and the thirteen highschool students from Australia scramble back over the upholstered rows, laughing and wrestling for spots. (The adults are no less anxious but restrain themselves and move casually.) The Australian kids' teacher becomes cross. Other adults shake their heads and adust jackets and hand-baggage. The slides and voice-over begin:

Avraham, Yitzchak and Yaakov--Israel. Your seeds like the stars in the sky. Halleluyah. Color-filled maps with arrows: the armed and unarmed roads of flight. From Ur to Canaan. Milk, honey and more Halleluyah. ...And famine. From Canaan to Egypt: Joseph, dreams, princely privelege, a new Pharaoh and entrance to the house of slavery. Moses, Our Teacher. Plagues, parted waters, a golden calf and the Law. Halleluyah. Back to Canaan. Saul, David and Solomon. The Temple is built. The twelves tribes dwindling down to two. Babylon and the burning of the Temple. The first exile. The first return and the Temple rebuilt. Halleluyah. The curiousity of Alexander...but then the different curiousity of the Romans. The second Temple is destroyed. Exile. Exile. Exile.

I fell asleep somewhere here, not in a real sleep, but a dream whose images flash in and out where time and space confound one another. I woke up occasionally to hear about Maimonedes, Spinoza and Mendelsohn...or about Constantine and the Czars, Napoleon and George Washington. I slept but not because I already know the story...though I know it. Not because I did not want to hear it again...though I have heard it. Neither because I found it painful...though it hurts me.

I slept because perhaps sleep is the only way to understand. "Have we not been chaste and chased enough?!"

I was fully awake for Auschwitz. Perhaps I could understand it better if I were asleep. I was fully awake for the Balfour Declaration, awake for the founding of the State of Israel. And painfully awake, when NO MENTION WAS MADE OF THE PALESTINIANS LIVING HERE ALREADY! I was awake then. "Remember: you once were strangers, servants in the land of Egypt."

Earlier this term, the students at the Ulpan were called into a meeting with the program's director. A point was made that the ulpan's policy of emphasizing similarities between Hebrew and Arabic in the classroom: a good policy but a little superficial. (This month, there are four students here from the Palestinian Authorities.)

After the meeting, I asked one of the students, Makhmoud--a doctor from Ramala--if he thought we might do something more formal, a forum of some kind to talk about the difficult issues within which are identities proceed. He kindly refused. However, he did invite me to play tennis with him. The whole time we played I was afraid to become competitive...he sensed this and laughed.

I thought, holding the racket loosely, how history is never objective. There is always a narrator. Each narrator has suffered and been exalted by experiences exclusive to himself and/or his community. We have two versions of history, they are both right. We can attempt to be as open as possible, listen, share, try to transcend nationalist emotion--but this too is another version. I gripped the racket tightly and smacked one past him. He said, "Nechmad!" f --------------

Motzei Shabbat, 11 December Shavua Tov!

I wrote the above several days ago...meaning to complete some of the toughts (which I now forget) and mail them out quickly. Oh well. To continue.

Shavua Tov. A good week. A happpy week. A week of peace. I am sitting in the same cafe described above having just returned from Shabbat spent at Kibbutz Sde Eliyahu. Sde Eliyahu is a religious (dati) kibbutz near Beth She'an in the Galilee. Founded over fifty years ago, it is one of the most stable kibbutzim in Israel...it is also one of few that have made almost no concession to the trend toward privatization.

I visited in order to their Ulpan (a five-month program beginning in February) and to discover if their community was one within which I could envision myself living. It was fascinating. The town of Beth She'an is similar I assume to many North African cities. There is a hot, sandy and tasteful amount of pollution, violence and crime. There is an archeological dig whose subject dates from the Roman Empire. The population is a mixture of Sephardic Jews, Arabs and Ethiopian--vying for seats on the bus and dumb Americans with nice smiles willing to swindled for a bouquet of Shabbat flowers.

Five minutes away on the Kibbutz, one walks onto a superbly groomed campus reminiscent of a private college in the Southwest USA. One walks into a fragment of Europe in the desert. Children laugh on playgrounds. The elderly shuffle in for an early lunch in the dining hall. They are themselves well-groomed, neat and reserved. They are the founding remnant of Sde Eliyahu (established nearly sixty years ago), Modern Orthodox Jews from Germany, students of Mendelsohn and Hirsch.

I return excited to be moving to this place...but I have reservations. What the Ulpan has to offers fits my needs in the short term: I want to work for my food and shelter, I want to study modern Hebrew at an advanced pace, I want to study the Sifrei Kodesh (holy books) and to experience the orthodox lifestyle in a relaxed environment, I want to learn how to pray, "Old and in the Way". This is definitely the place...but it certainly isn't easy.

Part of the difficulty is coming face to face with the gaping holes of my Jewish education. No matter how much Enlish literature I can swim within, no matter with what degree of fluency and familiarity I know this language and the many traditions I have read in its translation...I have no authority within my own tradition--indeed within myself--until I can read Torah with the same ease.

For the last few days, I have been rising very early and praying in a tradional minyan in Netanya, and certainly while at Sde Eliyahu, I attended every service. It still takes me three to four times longer than any of the other men standing around me to say the Amidah, the "Eighteen Benedictions", a series of prayers over 2000 years old. I wrap my old, un-kosher Tefillin discarded into my possession (through Elat Chayyim) by an obscure Jewish Community Center in Nebraska. I feel like a foreigner in my own home.

There are moments when to pray in such a manner feels completely natural, moments when reciting the collective poetry and moral insights of my ancestors leads me to deeper feelings of connection with living, with my family, with history...and with G-d. There other times, however, when these connections are prevented by insecurity and contempt for the isolationism and existential fear that have kept these traditions alive for the last 2000 years. How much of Jewish idenity is built on a pride taken knowing what to say, or how fast one can read a blessing, how fluent one is in the laws of prayer pertaining to the new moon, or to whether father and son should or should not be called to the Torah consecutively.

In this sense, every bit of Jewish practice has been an affirmation of an identity that could be easily or not so easily brushed under the rug and forgotten. The deeds served/serve as touchstones for an individual Jew to preserve a heritage that will ever be his/her spiritual well-spring. I know this is important...but unfortunately if it is all that prayer serves, a defiance to assimilation...then we shirk our duties to ourselves immeasurably.

Enough rabbi-rambling for now. I love you all. Thank-you for listening. Please write and let me know how your lives are. Blessings of health and happiness. B'shalom, PHILIP SOLOMON.

Subject: Shabbbat in Netanya

Dear Family and Friends:

It is about twenty minutes after nine, Friday morning. Ulpan Akiva has finished and I am staying in Netanya through Shabbat with Antony Felix and family, a dear friend I have made at the ulpan. From his apartment balcony, one looks out over the Mediterranean and the clusters of white and tan apartment buildings of Netanya.

I watch the waves begin to white-cap about a hundred meters from shore, churning up sand to cloud the navy, blue waters. Little men and women walk along the surf all hours of the day, swinging their arms and legs, stretching this way and that, running with dogs or doing sit-ups listening to music I only imagine with their headphones. Each person has a unique gait that seems to say something of their personality: speed-walkers--out to arrive at "having excercised", amblers--soaking it in, some who start and stop, start and stop--seeming to search for something as they look out to the strict haze of the blue horizon.

I am at my ease and thoroughly enjoying the Felix' company and hospitality. It is wonderful to be encompassed within a real family, living a real life in Israel, a more established energy than the comings and going of the touring ulpan-students. The Felix family has treated me so generously and with such rare warmth. They are a religious family from London, having made alliyah within the last five or six years. Antony and wife, Daphna are my folks' age...and for those of you, who will know the comparison, Antony reminds me of an English Uncle Henry (may peace be upon him): witty, ebullient, with a booming voice for song and laughter...infectiously joyful and considerate.

"L'eat, l'eat" (slowly, slowly) I am making a network of friends in Israel, some religious, some secular, some kibbutzniks, some city-dwellers, new citizens and Israelis born in the land. Also, l'eat, l'eat, I am becoming more and more observant. I hesitate to place any label upon this practice: orthodox, reform, what have you. I feel only that I am responding with my entire heart, fully hearkening to the traditions of wisdom and moral/spiritual commitment I have inheireted. The more I soak myself within this heritage, the more I challenge it to develop a contemporary and globally communal voice, the more I value it and love it: as both child and parent, as both brother and neighbor, as both friend and lover.

From as long as I can remeber a certain paradox about Jewish identity, like a grain of sand that becomes the kernel of a pearl, has irritated my head and heart. That is to be Jewish one simultaneously belongs to a nationality and a religion. (In Israel, especially, we see how these often opposing poles can be at odds.) Outside of Israel, as I wrote in my last e-mail, the two become tied to each other more expressly as their existences are mutually dependent.

I always wondered if once in Israel, my commitment to an antique religion would fade as I became more secure in a cultural identity. To be honest, I suspected it might be so. On the contrary, for the first time ever, when I place the "kipah" or "yarmulke" on my head, any nationalistic pride or wish to publicly identify myself as a cultural Jew takes second seat.

Funny, I remember so often saying to friends and family when I wore my kipah during high-school: I wear this to demonstrate my heritage, I certainly don't believe a little piece of cloth shows reverence to G-d; we do this by word and by deed. In some ways I have come full-circle. It is still not my concern whether the heavens are honored by a knit-job of colors on my head. I am more concerned about people than gorgeous clouds.

Wearing a kipah is humbling. This is its root: forced on to the heads of Jews by Romans over two-thousand years ago, it is a remnant of an antique version of the yellow-star. "Yarmulke" comes from the Aramaic, which come from the Hebrew, "yire melech": Fear of the King. It reminds its wearer that no matter what high station he arrives to in life: money, power, prestige, leadership--he must remain a servant, he must stay true to the moral realizations inevitably made at the mercy of another man's opinions and desires.

During the next month, I will continue travelling in the country before I begin the next big chapter of my time in Israel: six months at Kibbutz Sde Eliyahu. I look forward to this opportunity very much. Anyway, I will be in touch. I hope all have a beautiful holiday season and that through the nearness of your families, you may grow near to another Presence, winking out from the lights and tinsel. Love to all, b'shalom, Philip.

We have had the first real rains of the year two days