How quickly it all came upon us.
Not that we couldn’t have seen it coming–we knew what COVID-19 was doing to Italy, which is a whole lot closer to us than China. Yet we continued to deny. Even last week, I still imagined it likely that the bookstore launch of Intimate Alien: The Hidden Story of the UFO would go ahead as planned on Tuesday, March 24.
On the morning of Friday the 13th–how appropriate!–the events coordinator at Flyleaf Books in Chapel Hill, NC, emailed me to ask: might I perhaps want to postpone the launch? I answered that I thought that would be wise. That afternoon she emailed again: all events at Flyleaf were cancelled for the remainder of the month. And on Monday I stopped by the bookstore and found it closed to the public for the duration.
Which we all know is going to be a lot longer than the rest of this month.
Have any of us boomer-age and younger, which means pretty much everyone in this country, ever lived through anything like this before?
I think I have–but not here in the US. I was in Israel in 1973, on that awful Sixth of October when the world turned suddenly dark and cold all around us. My experience there wasn’t quite unique. But it was unusual. Even in my dreams I have deja vu to it, now that like the rest of us I’m in a situation that’s not quite the same, but in some ways comparable.
I sit at my computer, where I’m trying to get the hang of using Zoom, in my home which I expect to leave only at infrequent intervals for the next several weeks. (I’m 72, which puts me in the prime risk category for coronavirus even though I’m pretty healthy.) And I remember.
I arrived in Ben Gurion Airport in Israel on August 8, 1973, on a night flight from Paris. I’d spent the previous few weeks touring in Europe, which I’d never seen before, with a college buddy who was then in the American army. I was 25 years old, had just passed my Ph.D. exams. I’d won a fellowship to spend the 1973-74 academic year at the Albright Institute of Archaeological Research in East Jerusalem, in an Arab neighborhood–we hadn’t yet begun to think of them as “Palestinians”; they were Arabs like any others–just north of the Old City walls. Living there, commuting to the Hebrew University in the Jewish part of the city, I would write my dissertation.
One of my professors in the US asked me, when I told him my plan for the year: will you feel comfortable living in an Arab neighborhood?
“Why?” I asked. “Is there any danger?”
No, he said, no danger. But will you feel comfortable?
In the summer of 1973 all this was in the future, which I foresaw to be a radiant adventure. My pal Steve and I met in Amsterdam, took the train to Munich and then to Paris. In Munich I remember a sun-drenched plaza, watching sparsely clad girls saunter amid the easygoing crowds. Steve and I sat and drank beer with an old man who spoke fondly of Hitler. “Hitler gab dem Volk zu essen. Zu essen!” the old man said, prompted by a question from Steve. He pantomimed bringing food to his mouth just in case we Americans didn’t understand: the people were hungry, Hitler gave them what to eat. But now, in the Munich of 1973, no one seemed to be going hungry. I saw only the careless prosperity of a world that soon would vanish.
Jerusalem, too, was a city of sunshine that summer, a good deal hotter than Munich but the heat was dry, not unpleasant. We were, after all, in the Judean hills; of which the Bible says, “The Lord was with Judah and he drove out the inhabitants of the hill-country, but he could not drive out the inhabitants of the valley, for they had chariots of iron” (Judges 1:19).
Israel had captured the eastern part of the city, along with the whole chunk of territory to the west of the Jordan River that had once been part of the Kingdom of Jordan, in the Six-Day War of 1967. No one had been driven out. Instead, the city of Jerusalem had been unified, the border that once ran through it from north to south vanished without a trace. Only in the early mornings, when you saw the Arab laborers gathered along the once-upon-a-time border waiting to be hired for the day by Israeli contractors from the other side, did you have a sense of where it had been.
I was a good walker, and for me it was an easy walk from the Albright Institute to the Ulpan (Hebrew language school) in the western part of the city, which had once been as distant from the eastern as the moon from the earth. From there it would be a fast bus ride to the campus of the Hebrew University, where I would enroll as a talmid mechkar oreyach (“visiting research student”) when classes began after the High Holy Days.
I enjoyed that Ulpan. The teacher was a woman of about 40 with a permanent vertical worry-line between her eyebrows. One day she used the word p’tzatzah. I knew Hebrew pretty well from the Bible and the ancient rabbinic writings but my conversational skills were close to zero. I’d never come across the word p’tzatzah. I asked what it meant.
The teacher’s eyes opened wide. “You know what bomba is?” she asked.
Yes. I knew what bomba was.
“You stay in Israel for a while,” she promised me. “You’ll know the word p’tzatzah.”
September passed, and with it the Jewish New Year. Yom Kippur, the “Day of Atonement,” came on Saturday, October 6. I spent it in the Jewish Quarter of the Old City of Jerusalem, now being renovated under Israeli rule, shuttling among the venerable synagogues there and the Western Wall where crowds of Jews, some Orthodox and some not, had gathered to pray or to simply to be present at a sacred spot that had been off limits to Jews from Israel’s founding down to its victory in the Six-Day War. It was still something of a novelty, that they could be there at all.
Somewhere above us, on the ancient platform for which the Western Wall had been a retaining wall, the Jewish Temple once had stood. There Yom Kippur had been celebrated with gorgeous ceremony and the stench of slaughtered animals, splattered blood, burned meat and fat. The high priest, according to the ancient rabbinic law code called the Mishnah, “would take the blood [in a bowl] from the man who had been stirring it … and he would sprinkle from it, once above and seven times below. … And thus he would count: ‘One and one, one and two, one and three, one and four …'” (Mishnah Yoma 5:3).
I remember those last words, the numbers of the priest’s counting, being chanted in one of the synagogues I visited. It was early or perhaps mid-afternoon. I went out into the street. Perhaps then or perhaps somewhat later, a siren went off. Traditionally a ram’s horn is blown to mark the end of the Yom Kippur fast–which I was observing that year, for the first time in several years and the last time in many years more–but this was way too early. No one seemed to know what the siren meant.
If I recall correctly, twenty minutes later there was another siren.
I continued to walk around the Jewish Quarter but the atmosphere was growing tense, almost hectic. At the same time there were fewer and fewer people. At dusk, I found myself again at the Western Wall where a group of yeshiva students, in white shirts and dark trousers and with earlocks, were dancing and singing–
“Ootzu eytzah v’tufar
Dabru davar v’lo yakoom
Kee imanu el.”
“Take counsel together and it shall be brought to nought,
Speak the word and it shall not stand,
For God is with us” (Isaiah 8:10)
–and I knew: this was bad.
Through dark, empty streets I hurried back to the Albright Institute. The director met me. I asked: “Is this war?”
He nodded. “But we’ll be safe here,” he said.
(To be continued in my next post.)
by David Halperin
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Now ready for ordering from Stanford University Press–my book Intimate Alien: The Hidden Story of the UFO.
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