When I open my eyes, a flight attendant with perfectly swept-back hair, wearing a navy suit is leaning over me, placing a plastic-wrapped tray on my lap. My contacts are stuck to my eyeballs, but I blink a few times and stare down at the little label stuck to the top. “Kosher Meal B,” it says. This is the extent of the description offered.

Image provided by the author

My Excedrin PM is still in full swing and I make slow, groggy progress through the packaging. Inside, I find more packaging, until at last I uncover a little plastic dish containing a suspicious-looking brick of turkey (?) meatloaf resting quietly on a bed of oil-soaked noodles and drooping green beans.

In my real life on the ground, I don’t keep Kosher. I’m what I call a “Holiday Jew”—Jewish on holidays and not discernibly on the days in between. But today I’m en route to Tel Aviv, courtesy of Taglit-Birthright Israel, an organization that provides free first-time, educational trips to that holiest of lands for young Jewish people from all over the world. The idea is that these trips will strengthen participants’ personal Jewish identity and connection to the Jewish people and to the land of Israel itself. I’m interested in this idea of connection to a place I’ve never been. And so, with an open mind, I unwrap my plastic fork, and plunge right in.

A few days later, I find myself watching as two steaming candles—one yellow, one blue—emerge from a couple of tubs of hot dye.

A woman in a white head wrap twists them together, forming one braided “Havdalla” candle, to be used only at the conclusion of Shabbat, to welcome a new week. We are in Tzfat, the birthplace of Jewish mysticism, or Kabbalah, but not “Madonna’s kind,” we are repeatedly told. I am straining to feel this mysticism, and, more generally, to feel some sort of personal tie to this place I am culturally linked to. Like others on my trip, I take in the exotic beauty of the country, with its fields of fig and olive and pomegranate trees. I am impressed by the energy of the jostling crowds in the outdoor market of Jerusalem on a Friday afternoon before sunset and the start of Shabbat, and I am similarly struck by that same marketplace—shuttered, empty, filled to the brim with stillness—on the following morning. At Yad Vashem, Israel’s Holocaust memorial and museum, I wander through the Children’s Memorial, a darkened hall dotted with glowing candles that seem to hover in the air overhead. A recorded voice reads out names of the young dead and their ages. I listen, and try to remember a few.

But my reaction to all of the sights and sounds of Israel feels like an intellectual one, and I can’t force it to be anything more.

Perhaps it is the pace, I think. The week rolls steadily along, and we, conveyed by charter bus, roll along, too. The days go something like this: charter bus, rest stop, canyon hike on the Golan, charter bus, rest stop, charter bus. Sleep. Rafting on the Jordan River, charter bus. Observation point and former Syrian bunkers (also a rest stop), charter bus. Israeli folk dancing. Sleep (lovely, lovely sleep.) Charter bus, boat ride on the Sea of Galilee, charter bus, rest stop, Old City Walking Tour of Jerusalem’s Jewish Quarter. Charter bus, colorful Jerusalem marketplace, charter bus, festive Shabbat dinner. Sleep.

Also: camel riding, overnight stay in a Bedouin tent, nature walk in the Carmel Mountains, relaxation time on the beaches of Haifa, shopping on Ben Yehuda Street, tree planting, climb up Masada (an ancient mountain and fortress, with, oddly, a functional restroom), nature walk to desert waterfalls and floating in the Dead Sea. We go caving in Hirbet Midras, and partake in a little bit of much-anticipated nightlife in Tel Aviv, where I try my first Goldstar, the Israeli beer of choice.
In Jerusalem, we visit the Western Wall. The holiest of Jewish sites, it is a remnant of the retaining wall that once enclosed and supported the Second Temple, which was captured and destroyed by the Romans in 70 A.D. It has also been called the “Wailing Wall” because for centuries Jews have gathered here to lament the loss of their temple. At the prayer section of the Wall, grass grows out of the higher cracks, and bits of paper scrawled with visitors’ wishes have been stuffed into the ones below. I make my way up to stuff my own paper wish in to the ancient monument.
In Tzfat, as I walk along the city’s glittering galleries and ancient synagogues, I notice the smoothness of the stones that form its narrow pathways, worn sleek by the incessant footsteps of generations past. Perhaps this is the way one is meant to experience something ancient. You feel it underfoot.

Many years ago, in a newspaper opinion piece called “The Meaning of Home,” my mother (a psychologist and writer) presents the idea that as we launch ourselves on our summer sojourns, “it is midway through the trip before we are seized with it—the realization that adventure is really the challenge of leaving home, of seeing just how long we can stay away without losing ourselves in the strangeness of it all.”
I am “seized with it” upon reaching the top of a set of uneven stone steps at the edge of town in the mystical city of Tzfat. Someone is cooking soup, and the scent—salty, dill-heavy—is the smell of my grandmother’s soup. I picture her at home in New Jersey. Possibly, she is cooking her soup at this very moment, to freeze in advance of Rosh Hashanah, still a few weeks away. She’s peeling carrots, and maybe my dad is there fixing her checkbook, scowling as he takes a sip of flat Diet Coke, scolding her for never throwing anything away.

Tomorrow we venture on to Tel Aviv, to visit the memorial to Yitzhak Rabin and lay about on Mediterranean beaches for an hour of quick relaxation. I look forward to these stops. Israel tosses me its little gifts and I catch them eagerly, one by one, as I traverse its roads, hike its hills, breathe its scents, and take in the many other wonders it has to offer. But I also look forward to the moment when I will slip the key into the broken door lock of my apartment, and (after some jiggling) hurl my backpack onto the kitchen floor at last.

By then, I will have had enough magic for one summer. Madonna’s kind or otherwise.