From Mystic Tsefat to the Lebanese Front Line

Shalom from the Galilee! Today was an amazing day!

We began with AJR-style prayers in a circle. There are ten of us, including our guide, so we had our own minyan in one of our hotel's smaller conference rooms. After breakfast we traveled to the Gallilean city of Tsefat (Safed), the home of the renaissance masters of Kabbalah. This was an auspicious day to visit, the yahrtzeit of Rabbi Isaac Luria, possibly the greatest teacher of Kabbalah--Jewish mysticism. We saw the site where he began the tradition of welcoming the "Shabbat bride" on Friday evenings, with the service that we now call Kabbalat Shabbat. We visited the synagogue, named in his honor, that now stands adjacent to the site, pictured below.

After visiting a Kabbalistic artist and doing a bit of Judaica shopping, we drove northeast to the Golan Heights. We crossed the Jordan River, which separates the Galilee from the Golan and came within two miles of the Syrian border. At the museum in Katzrin, a town of 8,000, we saw archeological evidence of a long Jewish history in the area. For example, the stone pictured below has a carved Hebrew inscription saying that this was the entrace to the academy of Rabbi Elazar Kaftor, a sage quoted in Pirke Avot, in the Mishnah, which was published around 200 CE.

Below is another one of many ancient Jewish artifacts found in the same area. Our guide, Dr. Peter Abelow, wanted us to see this evidence because of the current debate over the status of the Golan Heights. While political concerns may determine the eventual outcome, I think that the existence of an ancient Jewish history in the Golan Heights makes this situation very different from Israel's 2005 disengagement from the Gaza Strip, which had no such history.

From Katzrin we crossed back into the Galilee and drove north into the "finger of Galilee", a narrow strip of land sandwiched between Lebanon and the Golan Heights. We passed Kiryat Shmona, a norther border town, and followed the Lebanese border to Malkiya, an agricultural kibbutz located where Israel's border with Lebanon turns from east-west to north-south.

At Malkiya, we left our bus and were guided by Eitan, the kibbutz security chief and a fruit tree expert. He took us in a rickety old van into the kibbutz orchards where he invited us to pick and eat apples and nectarines right from the trees. We were literally just across a narrow security road from Lebanon. The Israeli army "sweeps" the road at regular intervals, so that any attempts by Hezbollah to cross it will be revealed by tracks in the sand from the road's shoulders.

Eitan took us into an Israeli defenive position overlooking the border. He showed us a Russian-made Katyusha rocket, pictured below, which hit the kibbutz during Israel's recent war with Lebanon, not far from where he and another kibbutz member were picking fruit to keep it from spoiling on the trees. Fortunately, the rocket didn't explode. Eitan believes that the rocket was intended to hit some of Israel's top military officers, who were visiting the kibbutz that day.

Eitan showed us the contrast between Malkiya's thriving orchards and the brown fields on much of the Lebanese side of the border. As he pointed out, this gave new meaning to the term "green line", which has been used to indicate the border between Israel and Lebanon. Eitan told us that the only crops thriving on the Lebanese side of the border are opium poppies and hashish, which Hezbollah is making the farmers grow for export, instead of producing food. Eitan said that he used to work with the Lebanese, who had an agricultural institution in old French buildings near the border, to help them grow fruit trees. When Hezbollah "took over" in southern Lebanon, they put an end to such contacts and destroyed the buildings, whose remains are still visible.

The highlight of our day was a visit with Eitan to an Israeli Army forward outpost overlooking the Lebanese border. A mostly Jewish unit had just left and turned over the base to a mostly Druze unit. The Druze are Arabs who are neither Moslem nor Christian, and have been a loyal minority within Israel since at least the early 1970's. A young Druze officer-candidate took us to a strategic vantage point and spoke with us at length about the border situation. He spoke as loyally and as proudly about his country, Israel, as any Jewish soldier could have. He said that he was there, on the border, to defend his family and all Israeli families and all of us visitors.

(For security reasons, Eitan asked us not to post photos of the soldiers or the base.)

Eitan and the officer-candidate told us that the Hezbollah forces continue trying to dig tunnels under the border road, through which to enter Israel. They said that the UN peacekeepers are doing nothing about this, but don't like it when Israel blows up the tunnels from the Israeli end. They showed us passenger cars in and near the opium fields, which suggest, along with other signs, that Hezbollah is planning a new attack. Knowing that we're rabbinical and cantorial students, they asked us to go back and tell our congregations what is happening on the border.

We were all deeply moved by this experience. We thanked the soldiers for their efforts and the risk that they're taking and gave Eitan cash to buy pizza in town and bring it back for them. We recited the Hebrew prayer for the Israeli Defense Forces just before leaving the base.

We ended our day with dinner in the town of Ilyona, near the ancient city of Tiberias, on the Sea of Galilee. We are in a restaurant which once served as the original secret headquarters, in the 1930's, of Ha Shomer, the defensive forces which became the Haganah, the Israeli army. We saw photos of David Ben Gurion and some of the other famous people whom he used to meet in the security bunker underneath this larger former farm house. Here's how it looks today:



Tomorrow morning, we'll tour Lavi, the religious Zionist kibbutz where we've been staying, and then go to Tzippori, where the Mishnah was completed. From Tzippori, we'll head to Jerusalem. Assuming no traffic problems, we should be able to make our first visit to the Western Wall.