When I finally overcame  jet lag, my husband and I went to see the movie “Philomena”.  A journalist, Martin, and the main character, Philomena, are traveling together seeking her son, who was taken from her and adopted out by nuns a few years after the baby’s birth. As Martin and Philomena are driving along, she asks Martin if he believes in God.  He answers that it’s a complex question and would require a complicated response that would take a long time to answer.  He turns and asks her if she believes in God.  “Yes,” she replies without hesistating.

Besides being a land of technology and innovation, Israel is a land of many faiths.  It is a Jewish State in which, by law, there is freedom of religion.  Officially, the State recognizes five religions:  Judaism, Christianity (10 separate sects), Islam, Druzeism, and Bahai, and unrecognized religions are also free to practice.  Percentage wise this breaks down to 75.4 percent of the over 7 million people in Israel are Jewish, 20.3 percent are Muslim, and the other 4.3 percent are the other groups.

The Ministry of Religious Affairs assists all the affiliations and contributes to the repair and preservation of holy shrines.  All holy shrines are protected by the government and all are accessible to pilgrims,and religious institutions get State support and funding.

Most of the people of faith with whom I come into contact are Jewish.  When I think of people of faith I know, three stories stand out.. The first is about a man with whom I work.  He is an energetic, jovial man in his 50s, who loves people, laughter, and conversation. He and I were talking and complaining about taxes one day when an announcement came over the radio about someone winning a million shekels.  I asked him what he would do if he won.  With no hesistation, he answered, “I would buy a Torah for my synagogue.”

It seems simple, but in the days after that short conversation, I realized what I had heard.  With a windfall of a million shekels (about $289,000), the first thing this man thought of was to buy a holy book for his community.  He would be fulfilling a traditional, but hard to fulfill commandment.  Buying a Torah scroll is not a modest purchase:  the scroll, the first five books of the Jewish bible, is written by hand on parchment.  It takes a year to write and costs around 103,926 shekels ($30,000).  That would be nearly half the winnings.

Another story came not directly to me, but through a friend.  A woman he knew on a kibbutz near the Jordan River had come with her husband from Europe to live in Israel.  In Europe they had tried for years and years to have children, to no avail.  A friend told them to move to Israel and they would have children.  They took the advice, moved to Israel, leaving a whole life behind, and before long were parents of two sons.

In the third story, a Jewish visitor to Israel needs to go to the police station on some business.  When she finishes, the police captain tells her that every time she comes to Israel it is a fullfillment of a commandment, so she should not only come, but she should move to Israel.  She tells him she can’t because of her son’s serious illness.  The policeman says “Bring him to Israel and he will be healed.”

These anecdotes deal with three of our most serious concerns:  money, birth, death.  It would be possible to collect similar anecdotes from any of the religions in Israel; Israel is a holy land to all of them.  Sometimes the stories would amount to simple statements of faith, sometimes they would point to action resulting in what appeared to be miracles, and sometimes perhaps they would raise questions of belief and how to carry out those beliefs.

Besides the scientific and technological innovations in Israel, and all the media coverage of politics and problems, there exists this other vital side:  mosques scattered throughout the country, Jerusalem’s many churches, the international center of the Bahai faith in Haifa . . . People of dozens of languages, faiths and beliefs, all stirring the universe for answers.

I have seven things to tell about Israel this time, and I can personally recommend them all.  (I’ve been very busy when I’ve been off the base. )  I’ll begin with En Gedi, a nature reserve at the eastern edge of the Judean Desert, on the shore of the Dead Sea.  The reserve covers about 3500 acres and there are two valleys running through it fed by sweet water springs.  Imagine it like one of the adventure films you saw when you were little:  you’re trekking across the dry desert, parched and, turning up into the hills, suddenly you hear water and you look up to see jujube trees and acacias, balsam, and cordia. Down below you, at the edge of the stream are ibex and if you walk slowly the rock hyrax will sit still and watch you ascend toward the falls.  Tristam’s grackles fly overhead. You think maybe you are in paradise. You’re not, but you are in En Gedi.  If you could be there at night, you might see the rare leopard, or an Afghan fox, or a wolf.  More likely you’ll be there in the day, hiking upward toward one of the falls where you can jump in and cool down.  Go ahead.  People have been doing it for 5000 years.

From En Gedi, we drove north and stopped at Qumran National Park, another, like En Gedi, of the 65 national parks in Israel.  Like En Gedi, Qumran has long had a Jewish population.  It was settled around the 8th century BCE, but that’s not what made it famous.  Around the 2nd century BCE, the Essenes, a break-away sect, made a community there and except for a 25 year hiatus after an earthquake, stayed until 68 CE when the Romans drove them out.  While they lived at Qumran, the Essenes made scrolls in their scriptorium, including books of the Old Testament, the Apocrypha, and some of the sect’s own works. When the sect was threatened, as it was ultimately by the Romans, the members tucked their scrolls, what we know as the Dead Sea Scrolls, in clay jars and hid them in the caves that dot the surrounding hills.  The jars sat there for 2000 years, well preserved because of the dry desert air, waiting to be discovered by Bedouins shepherds in 1947.

Last night I had dinner with a family of Iraqi Jews. The grandparents came to Israel in the 1950s, soon after Independence.  There were about 20 people at the dinner, but they told me this was a small group because usually the whole family came.  Being with them reminded me of my year and a half  in Afghanistan.  We talked and ate and laughed and ate more and then talked more and then ate more.  In this tiny but cosmopolitan country, it is exciting to think that from the northern border to the southern border there are Iraqi, Afghan, American, Canadian, German, South American, Nepalese, African, Italian, French, Czech, Austrian, Dutch ….orthodox, conservative, reform, and secular Jews all sitting down to Shabbat dinner every Friday night.

Before that fine dinner last night, I spent the day at Zikron Yakov with a group of students from the IDC in Herzlyia, a private international university with top scholars on faculty.  The first thing we did when we arrived in Zikron was plant trees.  Why?  Because next week is Tu b’Shevat, the New Year of the Trees, and hundreds of people plants trees for the holiday, making the desert bloom even more than it already is.  Once we’d rinsed our hands and put the shovels away, we went down to the winery, one of 200 in Israel.  This particular one was developed in the late 19th century by the Rothchilds.  The town is situated on high hills back from the sea, and originally, the settlers had hoped to raise vegetables and fruits there, but the soil was not right.  It was right though, Rothchild knew, for grapes, and thus the winery and it’s now gold-medal studded welcome room.

I have a little necklace I wear. It’s ceramic, a turquoise circle with a red center.  I wear it on a green cord, and it’s one of my favorite things.  I bought it from a young woman in Jerusalem several years ago.  She was making money for her schooling and had learned jewelry through one of the program of  Yad Sarah, the largest charity organization in Israel.  Yad Sarah has 16 sorts of support services, but they are most known for lending medical equipment, and on no small scale.  They save the Israeli economy about $400 million every year in medical costs, and at the same time help Arabs, Christians and Jews in need of medical equipment but without the means to pay for it.  My necklace reminds of what big things can come from a simple idea.

Back to volunteer work tomorrow.  I’m ready to sleep now and I’m going to put on my favorite song of the Yemenite Moroccan singer, Eyal Golan.  His rich golden voice will carry me into yet another aspect of Israeli culture.