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Friday
The passport checkpoint on arrival was routine. The person behind the desk didn't even say anything to me. And customs was non-existant, which I didn't expect.
We have a fun, friendly guide named Nir. (The bus driver is a different person, so Nir can focus on talking to us.) It turns out he was the guide on my rabbi's last tour; that's a good sign.
Friday morning after getting people set up with money, cell phones, and other random stuff, we drove through Tel Aviv and Yaffa. Yaffa is an old city based around a port; when immigrants started flooding it in the early 20th century, a group of families bought nearby land from an Arab who was (we're told) astonished to get money for sand dunes. They then leveled it, divided it into equal lots, and assigned them to those families by chance, and they then cultivated it. In the 20s and 30s it transitioned from an agricultural town to a merchant-class town. Now, it's a modern city (second-biggest in Israel) and a center of business in several areas. Yaffa merged into Tel Aviv in the 60s.
We stopped for lunch in Yaffa, at a sidewalk stand that our guide recommended highly. It was a combination bakery and sandwich place. Very tasty, and very crowded. I had a simple conversation in Hebrew while buying sufganiyot (jelly doughnuts -- it was still Channukah, after all).
From there we went to Rechovot and specifically the Ayalon Institute. There's a fascinating story there (and this is why we went). In the 30s, lots of young people were coming out of camps and youth movements (as teenagers) and they wanted to go live on kibbutzim (collective, socialist farms). Making that work isn't intuitively obvious, so someone set up a "training kibbutz" on a hill outside of Rechovot. The idea was that people would live on that kibbutz (with mentoring) for a couple years and then go out into the wilds themselves.
Then, in the 40s, it became obvious to people including David ben Gurion and the Hagganah, that winning Israel's independence from Britain was going to require some fighting. Britain had tight controls on the import of weapons and forbade training people to shoot. Some leaders in the Haggahan went to this kibbutz, enlisted their aid, and built a bullet factory 25 feet underground. The story of how they did this, practically under the noses of the British, was interesting to hear. (Bullets, it turned out, were more significant than guns after a point.) We saw the factory, including a few of the machines that still worked.
What's the biggest problem with something like that? Noise. So they put it under the laundry. Why was the washing machine so important? It made noise to mask the factory noise. But the kibbutz didn't generate enough laundry to run it all day, so they opened a laundry shop in Rechovot. Didn't they draw a noticable amount of power for the factory? Well, it would have been noticable if they hadn't bypassed the meter. There was a sarcastic certificate on the wall thanking the British power company for their contributions to the independence effort. :-)
From Rechovot we went on to Jerusalem, where traffic was bad but that's what you expect on Friday afternoon. Our hotel is set up for Shabbat in ways I've never seen in the US: in order to get access to (most) lights, the thermostat, or electrical outlets, you need to put your key card in a special reader (and leave it there). I didn't ask what provisions are possible if you don't want to use the key card in the lock on Shabbat. (While I'd rather have a physical key, I'm not going to put property at risk by preventing the door fron locking.)
We went to the wall for kabbalat Shabbat. We went to the southern end, at the Robinson arch, instead of joining the presumably-huge crowd at the Kotel plaza. (We're going back on Sunday.) I didn't expect huge crowds, but I was surprised that we were the only group there for a while. We attempted to light channukiyot (which Ayelet, the tour company, provided), but it was too windy to keep them lit. Then we did the evening service. Partway through another group arrived, and we expedited since they were being polite and we didn't want to block them.
Praying at the wall was evocative but not quite as powerful as I had expected. This might have been because everyone was tired and some people in this group aren't necessarily into prayer as a core activity. There will be other opportunities to visit the wall, so I expect to have a better experience later. (And I didn't have a bad experience; it just wasn't the "ooh wow" I anticipated.)
Shabbat dinner was at the hotel, and it was a very good spread. We are not going to be hurting for good food here. :-)
Shabbat: to be continued. Time for breakfast.
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