I write this sitting and intermittently checking how Carolina (our basketball team) is getting on against Duke… And I guess I have a lot to reflect on. Today we were in Dalit El-Carmel, a Druze village about half an hour away. The Druze are a fascinating lot – secret religion, strict rules for marriage, and fierce patriotism are just a few of the things which jump to mind when describing them. Still, to go into detail regarding them would take far more time than I am will to devote to this, so I’ll content myself with saying simply that it’s both refreshing and frustrating to have a guide who openly admits that his description and explanations (of the Druze religion) vary depending on his audience.
So Carolina won the game… whoop whoop… but it’s a little more melodramatic than I might have expected, from afar at least. It has been a somber week or so, from news of the death of a school friend, coming to the year’s mind of the murder of a role model at UNC, and driving through a junction in Jerusalem past a bulldozer with shot-out windows, thirty minutes after a Palestinian builder decided to plow it into a police car and a coach. I was in Jerusalem yet again, on the first of a trio of “leadership-development” (I know, I know, I winced as well when I wrote it) weekends – which actually exceeded my expectations by some margin, both in terms of the speakers, including the previous IDF (Israeli armed forces) Chief of Staff, and the discussions that arose, though the preconcert ‘motivational’ speech Thursday night, to a hall packed primarily with groups from Jewish youth movements, was an unpleasant reminder of the sweeping collective fervor I’ve seen associated with strongly evangelical Christianity…
I may be heading away from the kibbutz to spend some of the next few weeks living in the Arab community, and returning solely for classes… but we’ll have to see how that one goes.