Dread and Delirium in Ramot

A Celsius-and-alcohol-fueled trip to a West Bank Ultra Orthodox settlement.

The editorial team kindly asks all future employers and girlfriends of our contributors to remember that the essays presented herein are artistic works and not to be taken as fact.

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We were driving through a checkpoint across the Green Line into the territories of Judea and Samaria, also known as the West Bank to the international community, when the sleep deprivation and four cans of Celsius hit me. Unfortunately, considering the timing. I had just had the realization that I was being driven to not just Jerusalem, not just East Jerusalem, but the deep settlement of Ramot. Ramot is closer to Ramallah than to Jerusalem. Ramot is twenty miles from the Dead Sea. Ramot is a long way from my apartment in the North.

As we handed over ID cards to the guards, I looked out the window of my host’s Skoda. The walls of the canyon crossing seemed to increase in size as I stared, rising towards the demiurgical heavens. Crows and vultures flew overhead in familiar patterns, patterns I knew from to a 1980s academic paper I had read in French concerning the bird-watching fortune-telling practices of Berber Jews in the Moroccan Atlas mountains, my demon-sickness-filled ancestors. The portents are ominous. Maybe. I don’t remember whether the vulture swooping left and up was bad or not. 

Before reaching the house I was to stay at in Ramot, I visited a holy site, the tomb of Samuel. In the parking lot, one of the giant concrete barrier walls towered over me, and I felt nauseated at the sight as though it was going to somehow topple and crush me. On a hill up from the lot is a mosque with the ruins of a crusader fortress. Below the hill is a spring, supposedly Hana’s spring, at which the future mother of Samuel had prayed for a son and had her prayers answered. The spring is filled with trash and refuse. As you look in the other direction, you see signs purporting the Jordanian custodianship of the site. Past that you see valleys and hills. The exact distances in the Levant are not known to most of the world. You can see the other side of the Galilee from every point on its shore. Tel Aviv is about an hour from Gaza. Some type of border is maybe twenty minutes away from you at most at any time. Drinking with friends on a Haifa rooftop, you can see fire in the night sky rain down on Lebanon. There is none of the sprawling vastness of America here.

So, standing on this hill with the ghosts of crusaders and saracens, you can see all the various settlements and villages. The enclaves and exclaves that make up Areas A, B, and C. There are basically no distances separating them. You think there are, because you’ve looked at the map. There’s no distance at all. Only despair.

Many people ask me why a rootless cosmopolitan such as myself would choose to reside in The Entity during the most fraught point of its existence. It makes more sense once you know I used to be a Baal Teshuva. Baal Teshuva means, in Hebrew, “Master of Repentance.” The BT movement is a movement of Jews who grew up secular and become religious later in life.

As a Baal Teshuva, I was always the same person as when I was secular before. I simply liked being observant and learning. I always felt an attachment to the culture. My brain is the subject of a three-thousand-year breeding program designed to make me really good at reading Talmud, and is why I’m here vomiting on a page for you people. At my most religious, I was essentially modern orthodox, but I woke up one day and I found myself working at a hasidic company, going to a hasidic yeshiva, engaged to a hasidic girl. Everyone I knew was hasidic. This isn’t what I wanted.

Soon, all I was thinking about was how I wanted my old life back, my secular life. And so I left it all to try and live that life without religion  again.

I was completely miserable by the time I reached rock bottom. Hooking up with your aspiring stand-up comic goth coworker in her filthy pet-snake-and-skull-infested apartment, in a jittery haze. And this was after I had given my package to the front desk woman in my apartment complex who gave me my Amazon packages. In the aftermath, she had started obsessively watching the security tapes to track who else I was bringing home. I had to take the fire escape to get to my flat. It wasn’t fun. I was a different person after becoming religious. I needed to be able to live a normal life while still being somewhat observant. Too much was ruining my life and only The Entity could save me. Israel, my home before, now and always, offered a hope for a way forward. The hope that I could find a way to be myself. Not secular. Not religious. Just Jewish.

You meet very fascinating people working behind the bar, and I always say yes when a guest asks to meet outside of work. There is something profound about the pseudo-psychiatric relationship between bartender and customer. When that sweet transference hits, you know you’re going to have a fun time. Many have asked me how in my years of bartending and serving I averaged a 30% tip. It’s quite simple really. You just vibe out your tables and run with it. This is where my savant-like knowledge of sectarian conflicts comes in handy. There’s no easier way to bond with a table than to encourage reptilian instincts, making pointed jokes about Albanians. Listen and observe.

I was bartending and serving in the ashtray of a city known as Pittsburgh, post-pandemic and prior to my travel to The Entity. That night, I was sat a table of yuppie finance people. I looked from behind the bar, sipping my oh-no-i-made-too-much-of-the-cocktail leftovers, and sized up the group. As the top shelf mezcal runs through my veins, I can already feel I’m going to crush.

I greet them, they ask how I am. “I am vibrating at a high frequency.” We’re off, they’re asking me questions about my life. They’re laughing, all my bits are landing. One of them opens up that he’s Ethiopian. Yes, I’m ready. “Oh so are you Amhara, Tigrinya, Oromo..?”

“Oromo.”

“Oh, so you’re like the black people of Ethiopia.” This man gives me one of the biggest smiles of my career. He loves me. I start asking his coworker about herself and she mentions how she just bought an apartment with her sugar daddy’s help. Through my line of questioning, she proceeds to talk about her experience starting part-time sex work after having a lobotomy. She only needs to fuck the guy once every few months apparently, a good deal! The Oromo man and the half-brained sugar baby ask me to go out with them, and I am so down. We go to the diviest bar I’ve been to in all my travels. Smoke lazes in the air as a 4’10” Vietnamese girl downs bottle after bottle, screaming, destroying man after man in pool. From there they take me to the most “ghetto strip club” in Pennsylvania. “We will pay for everything.” They did. 

So, take this as a prior. I may have been born and bred to memorize long religious texts, but I have been trained by years of tips and chemistry to chase the high of ‘yes.’ Yes is in my bones. It’s all I know. I love yes, and yes loves me.

When I landed on my feet in The Entity, I got a job working in the wine store and tasting room of a vineyard in Northern Israel. I had only been there a short while when a lanky German man in short-shorts said in a soft Bavarian voice, “You should come over for Shabbos some time.” My reply was as you would expect, a firm, “Jawohl!”

The vibe was interesting. He was not wearing a kippah or anything identifying as religious, but his wife had a hair covering and an appropriately long skirt for a religious woman. They said my Transnistrian then-girlfriend was welcome to come along, a petite, pale post-Soviet with big eyes and a heart that's shaped by living in an unrecognized breakaway republic. Her family actually personally knows the prominent Israeli politician Avigdor Lieberman. He runs the secularist center-right party supported by the Russian community. He was also implicated in a Russian mob corruption scandal of which he was acquitted due to witnesses dying under mysterious circumstances. She said her family hates him because her grandmother shared a bathroom with him in Moldova. I will still most likely be voting for him in the next election.

The night before the trip was already off to a rocky start. After a passionate evening, I was in a deep slumber, the kind of sleep that only results from a woman briefly subduing your dreams of empire. Then I awaken in the middle of the night to a haunting echo outside. It takes me a few minutes to realize it’s a siren.

Rockets. Before I can get up, our neighbors are banging on our door and screaming at us in Arabic to get out to the shelter. I hear the interceptors outside, you can feel the vibrations in the air from the explosions. We hurriedly put on clothes and wait bed-headed and sweatied in the blank concrete room with a steel door. And nowhere to sit. Hence the Celsius six pack  pre-dawn morning. It’s a vibe killer when Shia militias can ruin your evening. 

 I get a text from my new German friend in morning light. He asks if we wouldn’t mind going to Jerusalem, instead of his place, because he and his wife got invited to a party. His friends would be able to put us up with a room as well. I’m very amenable to this. Jerusalem, the city of the world’s desire. Always happy to visit.  He picks us up with his wife and baby and down Kvish 4 we go.

There is a man at the first intersection who carries a certain demonic energy. I have seen him on my daily commute many times since, but this was my introduction to him. He wears a clown suit with a terrible smile, coming out onto the street to throw his diabolo ball-stick-thing in front of traffic in between lights. I am convinced he is a djinn who appeared to me first due to this trip to the borderlands.

Jerusalem will be my savior. They say Jerusalem is where Zionism goes to die, but I am convinced my hoe-scaring levels of ideological purity are up to the task. More than that, I had been looking for inspiration to write for this esteemed publication of Futurist Letters, and here it was. I was in a period of writer’s block then. I had nothing to post, and no spark for the script I was writing. This trip could be the new flame.

As I sit in the back seat of this car, in a complete shambolic state, I am dressed like a cartoonish volunteer for the eighties invasion of Lebanon. I’m wearing Risky Business sunglasses, my synthwave themed Rhodesian camo-patterned shorts, an olive t-shirt, and a vintage Australia Cricket cap. I’m ready for my first trip to a settlement. 

Coming upon Ramot, the first thing that strikes me is how it is the most Haredi (Ultra-Orthodox) environment in which I have traveled—and I, dear reader, have been in many of these environments. I know the tunnel builders under New York. I have accidentally spilled coffee on the floor of 770 Parkway Avenue, where the Rebbe is under the Bimah, only to clean it up on my knees as if I was washing the Temple in Jerusalem itself. But Ramot is a true penguin city. As we approach, different types of black-suited and white-shirted men congregate in numbers like a flock on the barren South Atlantic Island of Zavodovski. There are black hats everywhere. I feel the fear creeping on me as I wear my brat summer drip. They know! They know I’m not one of them! Thank g-d I brought my uniform to go to shul this evening. My nondescript black suit and white shirt. What lets me blend in seamlessly with the penguins. No tie—that automatically outs you as a goy. 

I arrive at the house with my friends and girlfriend, and the hosts are unimaginably kind. As everyone files in for the party, I notice very subtle things. Each couple is from a different religious group, for one. You can tell by the hair curl and beard style, the shirt, the hat, the socks, how much hair is that woman showing, what type of hair covering, et cetera. One is Chabad with a droopy fedora, and he hands me a Russian religious newspaper about the history of one of the lesser known Rebbes. Another is Breslov, with long side curls and a small boy who only spoke Yiddish, not a word of Hebrew. There are some Haredi Sephardim, some Hardal. I won’t continue listing taxonomies at length, but suffice to say this is not normal or common. There’s no mingling, since marriage isn’t in the cards for opposite sides of an ideological beef from a shtetl in the 1700s in Poland. Sitting at the table, I have a deep underlying anxiety. This is the first time I’ve been back into a religious environment since I left the community, and it’s in the most intense version imaginable. Yet, somehow, I’m fitting in? I’m easing into it? I’m doing fine. This is fine. Just say yes.

I need to go with a couple of the guys to fetch some medicine for one of the children from a nearby apartment building. It’s already shabbat, so we can’t just buy it. We’re knocking on doors in these dark stairwells asking families if they have what we need. You might expect a settlement like this to be delineated or separated in some way but walking around and looking at everything, you’re really just in a suburb of Jerusalem. Which is what it is legally and is also the reality. Eventually we find it, but running around I realize I’m blending in perfectly. I’m at ease and unnerved. Who am I? I thought we’d settled this and know what we want after breaking twenty shiksa hearts and getting our own broken a few times, too. 

 I also notice that, while the men all seem to be familiar, it’s really the women who know each other quite well. And they’re talking? And not about religious things? Women are driving the political conversation? This place is completely out of control. Anyone who’s been to any of these dinners would know that religion is the only available topic of discussion and it’s bizarre to see women in charge of it like this.

I soon learn that I am at a party of Haredi feminists. Now, this might seem like an oxymoron to you. Ultra-Orthodox feminists? You must realize, growing up and being Haredi is not just a religious thing. It’s a lifestyle, a society, a way of life. So when some of them get ideas like feminism, why would they leave? It’s their home. They would be strangers in the rest of Israeli society.

This is first wave feminism, to be clear. These women all run for different political parties across the spectrum, except ironically for the two Haredi parties. There’s Shas, for Sephardim, which also gets lots of Arab voters. Then there’s United Torah Judaism for the Ashkenazim. The Haredi parties both have no representation for women and will refuse to run them. I’m sure many of the women at the table would actually happily be in Shas or UTJ, but they have banded together in feeling cast out, and the rest of the political parties in Israel are more than happy to take them in. Every party has a Haredi woman, an Ethiopian guy, an Arab guy, etc.

The vibe with the Haredi feminists is honestly great, very relaxed. Then the alcohol is brought out. In all my travels nobody drinks like religious Jews. The last time I stayed over at my kinda hasidic friend’s house, we, over the course of 25 hours, killed four bottles of vodka, eight bottles of wine, and two cases of beer. We then did snuff in a great hasidic court (you can’t smoke on shabbat but you can still speak to Dr. Nic) as we were not the only righteous men there completely hammered. So, at this house in Ramot, for about fifteen people altogether, you can only imagine the alcohol brought out. Beer, wine, vodka, brandy, schnapps, whiskey, and arak. All the stars are here. It’s getting litty and as two women start screaming at each other over the then-proposed, now newly-enacted Haredi military draft. I’m more than tipsy, and feel the aggression from what were only blurry wigs and snoods in front of me. I saw the ten thousand dollar women’s sheitels (wigs) sway back and forth in agreement and exultation against a furrowed and defiant tichel (headscarf). It was getting real.

Many people think the number one political issue in Israel is the war. They’re wrong. There’s very little disagreement about the war itself, and I think most American observers would be confused to know that Netanyahu is the most dovish in any room. 

You may scoff, but it’s true. All the parties to his left have frequently criticized him for not being aggressive enough, especially concerning Lebanon. Long before we finally went in, Yair Golan, leader of the new broad left Labour-Meretz merger called The Democrats, was calling for a ground invasion.

The war is certain. The point of contention is finding the men to fight it. The manpower debate, as it stands, revolves around the religious exemption for the draft.

When the State was created, a carveout was granted to a few scholars while the religious community was quite small. Originally, not all Haredim could get it. I know a man who ate himself to obesity to avoid serving in The Entity’s endemic immune system known as the Israeli Defense Forces. Nowadays, Haredim overwhelmingly do not serve in the IDF, despite increasing in share of the population to about 10% today. This is the cause of much resentment from everyone else for obvious reasons. Haredim also don’t work, and mostly live off the State and charity, with their large family sizes (average of about nine) and religious lifestyles keeping them in poverty. Their schools teach no skills, and they often have no ways of pulling themselves out of the community. This is by design, to keep everyone in. It’s very difficult to leave and to even describe the level of insularity unless it’s something you’ve seen firsthand. American Haredim can’t spell for their lives in English despite living in the US all their lives. Many don’t even speak English or Hebrew in Israel. They speak Yiddish. They think the Sun goes around the Earth. These people don’t watch movies or listen to music. They don’t know who Taylor Swift and have never seen Harry Potter, much less read it. They are most akin to the Amish. A subsistence fisherman on Lake Victoria in Uganda understands modern culture better and would be able to integrate more easily than Haredim.

Many outsiders also don’t realize how the draft for the IDF works. There is a major mismatch, due to their being a huge surplus of people for non-combat roles and a huge shortage for combat roles. Many are called “jobnikim” for having useless make-work non-combat jobs where they show up to base for a few hours and literally get paid below minimum wage to do absolutely nothing. The Haredi male numbers would exactly fit the shortage for combat roles.

The Haredim and their rabbis are so intransigent on this issue because they worry it will lead to the end of their society and their way of life. And they’re right. Serving would necessitate integration in greater Israeli society, secular society.

All the women at my dinner table that night are in support of the draft, because they recognise the situation isn’t sustainable, especially as they grow through sheer birth rate mogging of the secular cosmopolitans. The only opponent is the Breslov mother of the Yiddish speaking kid. The one who doesn’t know Hebrew.

I start speaking to my German friend in English, which we can do quite safely without worry of eavesdropping. I’ll call the German Tobias.

To back up a bit, right before the dinner Tobias and I needed to walk to shul (synagogue) for afternoon and evening prayers. We’re walking up this steep hill to these menacing brutalist synagogues, darkened by sunset, surrounded by packs of feral Haredi children as he comments, “It smells like mikveh.” I smell it too. Chlorine. Sweat. Stagnant water. Mikveh is the term for the ritual pool that women purify themselves in after periods, but is also used to mark conversions, and many men go to mikveh before Friday evening shul to purify themselves. Also gay sex apparently, but that’s a story for a different time. When Tobias mentions this, I have an uncontrollable flashback, the kind the doctors had once warned me about. I have only been to mikveh once.

I was staying by a religious friend for shabbat and he had asked if I wanted to come, some time ago. You already know my response to an invitation. As I arrive there’s a turnstile you need to pay to get in. A hasidic youth unashamedly skips the line, violating my personal space to squeeze through with me. I then strip down and go out to the communal shower area, where you clean yourself before going into the pool.

I’m overwhelmed. There’s just lines and lines of naked, hairy, fat Jewish men with huge asses covered in soap in this dark and absolutely silent dingy communal shower. It’s claustrophobic in a holocausty way. I clean myself as a man my age pushes me firmly to the side—with our eyes meeting in mutual fear—to get his body wash he left at my station.

At the pool, I dip myself in the required minimum. The water is the most disgusting water in which I’ve waded. You can feel the thousands of men and their balls rubbing up against you as you submerge and lift yourself out of the water. I get out and get dressed, slightly shellshocked.

That’s what flashes in my mind as Tobias says mikveh. We’re walking up the hill, and we need to decide between the Ashkenazi and the Sephardi shul. We look into the Ashkenazi one and everything is so serious. Everyone is dressed identically. We stick out despite fitting in outside.

We look at each other. “Sephardi.” As I’m sitting getting through my reading, my friend is just reading a fiction book pretending to pray. Nobody notices or cares. Everyone here is just here out of obligation. I notice I’m the only one actually praying and reading. What is going on? The young men and old alike aren’t even pretending to read or mutter, they’re just standing up when they need to and sitting down. Waiting for it to end. Like me. My friend mentions that he’ll tell me his story over a couple beers. I feel a kinship. He, like me, is not of them.

Back at the dinner table, beer in hand, I ask for the story. Tobias apparently was not born Jewish, and flew to Israel at eighteen to live in a Yeshiva in Jerusalem for the purposes of conversion. He then was very religious for a number of years, but felt some contradictions. When his child was born, he felt commanded to leave the community. He was serving in the IDF at that time, as he no longer had a religious exemption. It’s a lot to unpack, and I won’t go into all the details, but he was telling me about this Yeshiva run by the Rabbinate that people flew from all over the world to convert.

I was fascinated by the story of one of his fellow students, an Englishman named Thomas. Now, Thomas used to be a neo-Nazi. From a family of Neo-Nazis. His fixation on Judaism changed forms one day, and he flew to this Yeshiva to convert.

Tobias was his roommate. Thomas did not do well in the Yeshiva. He apparently belonged to a mostly American borderline-heretical group that followed only the Rambam’s vision of Jewish law. The rabbis would be trying to teach him about Judaism, and he would reply that they’re doing it wrong. They were genuinely concerned for him, and by him, and felt he was trading one extreme for another.

He was kicked out of the Yeshiva and started going to a modern orthodox yeshiva in Tel Aviv. There he started dating a Portuguese woman in the program who was half-Jewish and was kicked out for getting her pregnant. Thomas then returned to Jerusalem and refused to go back to England. He was homeless on the streets near the Old City, rough sleeping, taking food from various synagogues and yeshivas. Every once in a while, he would visit Tobias to remind him that he still was around. And then nobody heard from him. Tobias told me he was talking to one of his friends recently and they asked what happened to that guy. His friend asked if he saw the news article. What article? “Alleged UK neo-Nazi who named kid Adolf had studied in Israel, tried to convert.” He posed with his half-Jewish now wife and mischling child in front of a Nazi flag below the headline. They were dressed up in KKK uniforms.   

Oh, where was my girlfriend through all this, you might be asking? She’s freaking out. She’s never been in this religious of an environment and doesn’t understand Hebrew. She gets physically ill, and is frightened by how well I’m doing socially, how I’m fitting in with everyone. The only guy there who speaks Russian is far away. She retired early to the bedroom. When we had previous discussions, she kept telling me she wanted to be more religious. That she wanted to become a, “Zionist Baby Factory.” This was something that I was open to, feeling like I could perhaps express myself more freely in Israel while still living a public professional and social life. That night she cried to me as we shared a sofa bed that she could never be religious, she knew now. I had warned her it would be an intense environment. I told her now in reassurance that I didn’t want to be as religious as them anyway. She seemed to say that I was too much for her to begin with, but this might have been lost in translation—not because she was speaking to me in Russian but because I was very drunk. I then fell asleep.

In the morning, I wake up late with my head in a vise grip. I need to go to shul for the morning service and the only place that has one that late is Chabad. One Yom Kippur I was sat next to an Israeli man who introduced himself as a professor. I asked what for and he replied “a professor of strategy.” We were at a Chabad and he remarked, “Don’t you think this is a franchise model?” He was right. Chabad is the McDonald’s of Judaism. A hasdic group whose raison d’etre is outreach to secular Jews. Also they worship their dead leader as the messiah and did the tunnels for reasons I will not expand in this article. There’s a chabad in rural Australia, Angola, Nepal, Hong Kong. They’re everywhere, like the golden arches, and have a consistent product. You know what to expect. They’re also very good at what they do, bringing people in. You always skip the hillel at your uni and go to the Chabad instead, at least they have alcohol.

There was no seating, as everyone else there had also slept in and come in late. I stood next to a clearly secular Russian guy and just waited for it to be over like everyone else who was hungover. At a certain point, I realized there’s no enthusiasm here. I feel just the same as everyone else. Maybe I’m truly one of them now that I feel this level of mundanity. It’s no longer mystifying to me, just banal. That’s how you know you’re really one of the group. How you’re normal in that world. Banality.

The synagogue was in a shopping mall and I didn’t want to interact with people so I walked by a parrot store and blinked at the parrots. Bird body language is all about the eyes, blinking slowly communicates you’re not a threat and fast indicates excitement. I look at two colorful green Amazons who are starved for interaction and close my eyes in front of them for a second. Then I speed up and quick blinks successively, they start communicating back and give me a positive single tilting their heads, exposing their necks. I do the same. They start doing little dances and they smile through their eyes and legs. I feel more at home with parrots than with penguins. Joy sparks in my eyes and they give me calls to reciprocate.  I look down and realize I look like a penguin, not a parrot. Am I one of those flightless, colorless huddlers? Maybe I’m not, but a part of me will always be of them. I’m just a different person than I was when I was secular. I’m a regular member in a synagogue and as I participate as a Levi washing the hands for the priestly blessing, I do feel the spiritual connection to my ancestors preparing the Kohanim. They say the priestly blessing is the oldest tune for any prayer we have, it’s the same one that was said at the temple. Maybe that’s why I like it here so much, maybe I wouldn’t have stood it when I was younger. At the end of the day, The Entity ended my block. I got my material and feel the most creative here.

I remember listening to a lecture by an Israeli Rabbi about the state of Jews in the world a couple years ago. He said, “Whatever happens, it’s going to happen here. The future isn’t in Europe. It’s not in America. It’s here.” And I have to say, living in the future, it’s happening.

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