Rabbi Crazy and the Prince Philosopher

So I had a good chat with my previously mentioned Tel Aviv hostel crazy, and it turns out he's ALSO from Florida, like the Granada hostel crazy. Is it something in the water? He calls himself Rabbi something, I can never catch exactly what he's saying. We'll just call him Rabbi Crazy. He usually goes out in an old Israeli army uniform and pink sunglasses. He told me he spends his days out on the beach, picking up trash and holding it up to God to show him how the people are misusing his Holy Land. This particular day he also decided to do a little ballet, and a passing man told his son "that right there's a freak." He told the man he shouldn't go around calling people freaks, because you never know what they're capable of. Our conversation:

Me: That sounds like a threat.
RC: It was. I could do terrible things to him with prayer.
Me: Is prayer the way you exact your vengeace? (this man inspires dramatic language)
RC: It's one of two.
Me: What's the other?
RC: I'll tell you tomorrow.
Me: What if I don't see you tomorrow?
RC: You won't, that's why I said that.

Thankfully the crazy gleam in his eye wasn't particularly murderous, or I might have been up all night. Consequently, I did see him in the morning, but I didn't follow up.

Last night I ditched the hostel for a CouchSurfing.com host, a great guy named Ahava. The name means "love" in Hebrew, it's not his given name. He is something of an amateur philosopher. Over a drink he talked at length about the soul, the mind, the body, how the three interact and interact. In his view we're all splinters of God. God was a perfect being who wasn't actually perfect because he was all there was (alpha and omega and all that) and therefore there was nothing to compare him to to confirm he was perfect. As Ahava says "A race with only one car on the track has no winner." So he split himself up into all of our little souls, and we all live out a part of the complete picture, through many lifetimes and bodies and minds. One lifetime we may learn generosity, another we may learn what it is to be needy and depend on the generosity of others. Eventually our souls learn all of these earthly lessons and then transcend to something else.

When we got back to his apartment, he put on Purple Rain for me to watch and everything became clear.

This Is the End

Finding placement on a kibbutz/moshav/farm/whateverwantsme is taking longer than I thought it would. I am waiting on many different people for many different things. I feel like Willard at the beginning of Apocalypse Now, watching the ceiling fan turn, smoking a cigarette shirtless in bed, sweating, waiting for an assignment. Literally, I have done this. It was certainly a forced situation to cement the parallel in my mind, but there I was.

Ben and I had a great time zipping around Israel at a rapid pace. Two nights in Tel Aviv seeing friends, one night in Jerusalem running between holy sights (Ben was getting a bit overwhelmed watching a Greek Orthodox monk chant evening prayers to a shrine built in the very spot Jesus was crucified... reportedly), zipped to the Dead Sea for some great hiking, swimming floating, back through Tel Aviv to get a car to drive up North to the Sea of Galilee (sitting deep in the water on plastic chairs sipping on beers and a bottle of vodka, a gift from Daniel, who owned the beach), hiking around the Banyas, Nimrod's Fortress, some beautiful things, then back to Tel Aviv to send Ben home.

My pace has downshifted significantly. Last night was my fourth night in Tel Aviv since Ben left. I spent the first couple staying with friends, then these last couple in a hostel. I have an insane man of about 45 in my room who sometimes wakes in the night to yell down at pedestrians from the balcony. He thinks it's hilarious to tell people they're going the wrong way, repeating himself like a psychotic broken record (or a Books song): "You're going the wrong way. You're going the wrong way. You're going the wrong way. You. You. That's not the right way. You. You're going the wrong way. That's not the right way." He'll keep this up for minutes and follow it up with some maniacal laughter. Last night he exclaimed to the world below "I don't give a shit about anything! I get that from my mother. She died. She's why I'm like this!" He'll then come back inside and have a quieter conversation with himself, during which I fall back asleep. This is the second insane older gentleman I've had the pleasure of sleeping next to since leaving the US. The first was of a calmer variety, but also an incessant talker. He lives in a van in Gainesville, FL and travels the world on a trust fund his mother left him that can't be spent on regular living expenses. These guys and their moms. He kept me up late one night while I wasn't feeling good (a reaction to my typhoid vaccine, I eventually decided), going on and on about his problems: "They tell me I have a personality disorder or schizophrenia or some shit. I just think I'm lazy." How laziness could be confused for schizophrenia I'm not sure, but he seemed pretty convinced the docs had it all wrong. That night I was up all night with horrible fever delusions, mainly about our rental car not being arranged properly (you know, one of these horrible dreams that has you going over and over through some nonsense bureaucracy and every time you close your eyes it's the same problem again, unsolvable...) but also about this rotund man from Gainseville deciding he's interested in what my insides look like.

I have a bunch of pics that I'm organizing, should be posting about them soon.