Israeli Reminisces: My Travels Around Israel in '78 - '79

There's a truism that states that the only place a Jew can really be Jewish is in Israel. And I heartily concur having lived in Israel for almost five years total out of my almost 48 years on this earth.

I was born in Brooklyn, NY and grew up on LI, NY but at the tender age of 19 I took a plane to go to Israel to sip the deep wisdom that is the heritage and legacy of every Jew.

I wanted to know the ancient secrets that are the property of the Jewish people. Yes, Israel is important but the intellectual property as well as the physical land of Israel is important to the well being and spiritual health of every Jew.

So, sometime in mid 1978 I had a meeting with my Uncle Isser, and Shlomo Carlebach and Shlomo invited me to come to his Moshav. He said, "You can stay with my Chasidim. You'll meet your soul brothers and sisters and you can use the Moshav as a base to do anything else you want to do." So I was off.

I studied the Torah with a number of prominent teachers on the Baalei Teshuva circuit including Rabbi Noah Weinberg, Rabbi Baruch Horovitz, Rabbi Shlomo Carlebach, Zt'l, and Rebbetzin Ester Jungreis. Each of these teachers not only added their own personal knowledge of Yiddishkeit but also inspired me to continue to add to my fervor to come back to Israel several times over the years.

Additional teachers included Rabbi Meir Fund, Gershon Winkler, and Rabbi Yoseph Krupnick Sometimes I only spent some fleeting time with these people but I always managed to soak up a lot of material during the time I was under their tutelage.

But what I want to focus on now is the energy I gave back to Israel. Let's look at my time in Israel in May of '78 to October of '79. I came to Israel and went to YeshivatD'var Yerushalayim for a three-month summer course. I landed at the yeshiva with nothing more than $100 in my pocket, my steel six string Goya acoustic guitar and my faith in G-d.

My uncle, Isser Green, was dismayed. "What are you going to do for money?" he said. "I don't need any," I replied,"I'm going to yeshiva!"

Luckily, my father had some money to give me so I could have a pretty easy time. He also used to send "CARE" packages to me, usually consisting of hard Hebrew National salamis that were dried out on my lat machine (a weightlifting device) and I had a blast.

I had a friend who had a restaurant in the Shalom Tower in Tel Aviv, so when I was living at Moshav Me'or Modi'in (after my 3 month tour at D'var was over) I got free meals from him. Nice chap.

After I finally got to Modi'in, I stayed for about four and a half months. I played many gigs with Rabbi Shlomo Carlebach, Zt'l and we went running and driving all around Israel jumping up and down, dancing to his soul lit melodies and energizing the Israelis everywhere we went. And my uncle was complaining, "You're having the time of your life running around Israel with Shlomo..." It was high times, let me tell you do to all these concerts, to live in Israel and to be Jewish. .

Shlomo, his band and I were in all the big concert halls in Israel: Beit Ha'am, the Jerusalem Amphitheatre, Binyanei Ha'uma, the Dan Carmel in Haifa, the Dan Caesarea, etc. It was high times to be Jewish, to play all these intensely spiritual songs and to learn at the feet of all the great teachers of the generation.

I also managed to attract a number of female groupies but I was trying to keep it holy and I had to be a good 'lil Jewish boy. After all, these were religious songs I was singing, not Jimi Hendrix songs. Not that I can't appreciate Jimi's guitar playing, I can, but his sexual antics were not to be imitated.

After that time, I went to Kibbutz Shluchot in Israel's Beit Shean valley to learn Hebrew in a crash course called an ulpan. I got a chance to rub elbows with people who were native born Israelis called sabras, who were working on the kibbutz as part of their substitute for regular army service based on a religious exemption. These people belonged to a program called Nachal that enabled them to serve as workers in a kibbutz rather than serve in Tzahal, which is the regular army.

As a side note the term sabra refers to the fruit of a cactus that has thorns on it and is tough on the outside with a leathery skin and a soft fruit on the inside. That's what they say Israelis are like, tough on the outside and soft on the inside.

In Israel, they have something called the kumzitz that is a campfire type of gathering where people congregate together and sing songs and tell stories and jokes and bond together. You don't actually need a campfire but it helps. My guitar and I were frequently enlisted to entertain the troops and I can honestly tell you that nothing turns me on like a female sephardisher (Sephardim are Jews from the Arabic and Spanish countries and they're dark skinned unlike Ashkenazim like myself whose ancestors are from Eastern Europe) sabra in an army outfit. I love Israeli women in uniform. And they loved me too. They also loved my guitar playing and singing.

So, I was in Shluchot for almost six months and the ulpan disbanded and I went back to Moshav Me'or Modi'in. Besides the frequent concerts with Shlomo, I also worked in the granola factory that was part of the health food industry concern that was on the Moshav.

By the way, Modi'in is an historical area because the kedomet ("area") is where the Macabees or Chashmenoyim (Hasmoneans or Hammer) lived during the time the Jews managed to overcome our enslavement by the Greeks. The Kohen Gadol or High Priest lived right around the Moshav and the burial places of the Chashmonaiyim are around the little Carlebach settlement.

Now, Israel isn't the easiest place to live in. It's intensely hot in the summer and Modi'in is off the new highway that goes between Tel Aviv and Jerusalem. It must have been 120 degrees during the summer in my house. And I didn't have air conditioning either. And in the winter, it's not as cold as America gets in my native east coast but it is cold and we used kerosene heaters. Still difficult to stay comfortable I'd say. But I managed.

This wasn't my last stay in Israel. I had two more extended stays. And I did more singing and dancing during the last two stays but those stays will be the subject of future articles.