There's a frood who really knows where his towel is

The first rule of intergalactic travel, according to Douglas Adams, is "don't panic." This is undoubtedly good, but hopelessly impossible advice for life abroad, so we're just going to move right along to the second rule: always know where your towel is. A towel is the interstellar hitchhiker's universal passport. A good metaphor comes to mind for international travelers, which is your actual, um, passport. But for most countries I've been to, the towel is infinitely more useful. According to the Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy, not only is the towel your ticket to space rides in spacecraft in SPACE--already pulling a lot more weight than my passport--I can use it for warmth as I " bound across the cold moons of Jaglan Beta"; I can "sleep under it beneath the stars which shine so redly on the desert world of Kakrafoon"; or if I am especially enterprising, "use it to sail a mini raft down the slow heavy river Moth or wet it for use in hand‐to‐hand‐combat." These are just a few of the myriad possibilities of life with a towel.

My passport, in contrast, allows me to cross some imaginary lines without being shot by some very non-imaginary guns--but not always! (Hello to our North Korean friends.) To be fair, it also occasionally gets me preferential treatment at currency exchanges--but not always! (Hello to our British nemeses.) In Russia, the requirement that you carry your passport around at all times is a critical driver of economic growth, because it allows the police to extort bribes when they catch you without it. Woo. Compared to the towel, my passport is looking mighty underachieving.

That was, until I came to Israel.

Some things you need your passport to do in Israel:

-Enter the country
-Exit the country
-Get a visa to work for no money
-Pick up a package from the post office
-Join the gym
-Acquire a discount card from the grocery store
-Purchase a public transportation card

Your towel will help you do none of these things. Moreover, your towel isn't even that useful for normal, towel-like functions. This is currently my favorite part of the Internet:

Drying off is not a goal with which Israelis regularly encounter difficulties.

But do you know where they do encounter difficulties? Getting anything else in life the fuck done because you have to have your passport on you for everything. Why does my grocery store need it to give me discounts? Why does the gym care if I've been to Cuba? Of what possible use can my visa be to my bus driver? This isn't just a rant, I actually know the answers to these questions.

You see, when these places take your passport, they never just glance at it and give it back to you. They give you forms to fill out with all of your personal information, then they take your passport and forms to a mysterious back room for several minutes before returning it to you, with no explanation of what they have done with it in the meantime. Possibly because I don't have the language skills to ask. The point is, as Princess Leia once astutely observed, they're tracking us.

No doubt the Israeli government would dispute the notion that they're following my bus transfers in the hopes that I'll lead them to the rebel base. I've had some experience with how the Israeli government justifies the tabs they keep on the population, because I had to go through a rigorous background check to get my security clearance to work at the Supreme Court. Yes, the court officer asked me a series of very rigorous questions, all of which could be basically paraphrased as, "Have you ever talked to an Arab person ever?" and the penetrating follow up, "Good God, why?" Then she checked the box for alcohol use without bothering to ask me about it, made me waive my medical confidentiality, and sent me on my way.

Let's back up to the part where she made me waive my medical confidentiality. I made a bit of a stink about this, which surprised the security officer almost as much as encountering a Jewish person with no family or friends in Israel, not to mention one who had talked to Arabs ever. After failing to soothe my ruffled feathers with the ol' classic "If you don't have anything to hide, you shouldn't mind if we comb through the results of your last pap smear" line (note: if I had anything to hide, I certainly wouldn't be hiding it there), she assured me, in a pretty legit display of quick thinking, that they would never look at these records unless I had a medical emergency at the Court and they needed to know how to treat it. I suppose because having the security guards access my medical records themselves in this situation would somehow, in an amazing feat of efficiency and competency by the intelligence bureaucracy, be more useful than calling an ambulance?

Uh-huh. And the bus service is tracking my movements in case I'm on a bus that gets blown up and they need to identify the victims. No, I'm pretty sure the buses are recording my whereabouts in case I am, in fact, the terrorist, and the security officers who want a peek at my medical history are about equally concerned with my personal well-being. But with the crack team of grocery store cashiers, bus drivers, and postmen on the case, they know I'd be a fool to try anything. Next time someone in Israel asks me for my passport, I'm handing them a towel.


Mossad, this one's for you:

Note: I sat on this post for a several days, until I found out that I did, in fact, pass my security check. I may be indignant, and as my friend Miguel has helpfully noted, functionally illiterate, but I'm not stupid.

Better than Birthright

A conversation at the grocery store:

Clerk: Blachdy blach blach blachdy blach.*
Me: I'm sorry, I don't speak Hebrew.
Clerk: Ah, English...Please consider making purchase of excellent store credit card, receive 5% discount off all store brand items! Card is free, excellent discounts!
Me: Do you need an Israeli passport to get the credit card?
Clerk: Ah, yes.
Me: Sorry, I'm an American citizen.
Clerk: Oh...Well, please make Aliyah, and then receive store credit card for all discounts!

This is by far the most convincing argument for making Aliyah that I've ever heard.

*("Blach" is Hebrew for "blah.")

My kitchen is Hogwarts

My roommates are studying to be Jewish school teachers, so the apartment is kosher and the common areas are Shomer Shabbat (i.e., no electricity on Saturdays). I knew this going in, but there's a difference between intellectually acknowledging a radical lifestyle change and actually arriving in a country after 18 hours of physical travel and 7 hours of time travel and realizing that you can't make some toast right now because God says "no." (I unintentionally scheduled my arrival for a Jewish holiday, many of which are celebrated without the benefits of electricity. Or carrying. Or stringed instruments. If you're a time traveler for whom these things are important, plan accordingly.)

Like I said, I did have advance warning, and like any true member of the Scooby-Doo generation, I had a plan. My plan was to basically go vegetarian for the summer. This would allow me to handle with ease the main rule of the kosher kitchen, which is not to mix meat and dairy. Actually, since my arrival, I've incidentally eaten entirely vegan, so all I've cooked is pareve (food that is neither meat, dairy, nor tref), which is universally kosher.

I arrived on Sunday. By Tuesday, I had managed to de-kosher the dishes. How did this happen? Let me explain.

The Jewish kitchen is governed by the laws of kashrut, or, as I have come to think of it, magic. This magic is a magic of transfiguration. Not only must meat and dairy foods be kept separate, but so must meat and dairy cookware, because vegetables that are prepared in a dairy pot become dairy, and vegetables prepared in a meat pot become meat. Hence, one can, as I have done, prepare pareve stir-fry that de-koshers, or as the Jews say, confuses, or as I say, magics my dishes. How? Prepare part of the stir-fry in a dairy frying pan and the other part in a meat wok, and then combine in the same pot. Boom, baby! Your pot is no longer a simple kosher pot, but something altogether more sinister and alarming, in no small part because it's also apparently developed the ability to feel. If mixing green beans from a meat pot and peppers from a dairy pot can confuse a dish, if you put shrimp in it, does the pot level up to outright hostility? The sages don't say. This is how one performs kosher magic.

This magic is way more powerful than that boasted by other religions. To give you some perspective, Jesus turned water into wine. Child's play. I can turn water into hot dogs, just by boiling it in the wrong pot. I can turn quinoa into alfredo sauce and chickpeas into cheese balls, all with the power of my bewitched cutlery. It's like a superpower that I can only use for evil, since the only apparent use of this magic is to de-sanctify my dishes, the re-kashering of which requires an entirely new magic ritual of its very own.

There are some people so afraid of this awesome responsibility, that they keep THREE SEPARATE KITCHENS (meat, dairy, Passover) in order to accidentally avoid triggering their wizardry. My roommate vouches for having been in one of these houses. This cannot possibly be necessary, or else my roommate's acquaintances would be the only actually kosher people. Bear in mind that most of the ultra-Orthodox Jews in Israel are on welfare and probably keep it to a modest number of kitchens, unless the Orthodox Jews live in apartments that are actually only kitchen. I have not heard that this is the case.

I'm pretty sure I've managed to control my powers since the Miracle of the Stir-Fry, but there's just no telling when they'll next escape my grasp. I'll never understand why magic in the Potter-verse is so hard. The kids have to bring every ounce of concentration to bear just to transfigure a simple potato into steak, and most of them suck at it. I have to concentrate that hard just not to engage in spectacular displays of sorcery every time I turn on the stove. Where's my acceptance to Hogwarts?