At The Crossroads Of Galilee -- Faith, Tradition And History On A Religious Kibbutz

LAVI, Israel - The backup at Golani Junction stretched a quarter-mile in four directions - a petulant gridlock of Bible-toting tourists, locals in farm-to-market pickups and military transports hauling weary soldiers home from Israeli-occupied south Lebanon.

Every now and then, the light would change and the whole caravan would erupt into overwrought honking, roll forward a few yards and settle back down to wait some more.

Traffic in this part of the world hasn't changed much in 2,000 years.

It used to be braying donkeys, irritable camels and bleating sheep that mixed it up at the crossroads of the Spice Trail from Samaria and the Sea Trail from the Galilee. People of the scripture ambled through on their way south to Nazareth or east to the fishing villages of the Sea of Galilee. Rabbis came through from the Sanhedrin, the Jewish high court in Sepphoris.

And knights of the Crusade bivouaced their armies in the fields that butted up against the roadways.

Many of those people of antiquity - like the two of us - would have been heading for a place near the crossroads called Pundak Lavi, the Lion's Inn.

The inn is mentioned by name in the Talmud, the ancient Jewish code of law. The story is a bare-bones cautionary account of how some people found a block of cheese at the pundak and the rabbis allowed them to eat it because the Jews there were pious and would never have cheese that wasn't kosher.

We were feeling pretty much like those people - if we didn't get to Kibbutz Lavi, the modern-day version of the pundak, soon, we'd be late for the dinner buffet and have to find our own cheese.

We had come to Israel to see how Israelis, on the 50th anniversary of the nation's founding, have been affected by decades of political and religious struggle. And we hoped to experience the mystique that has drawn pilgrims here since antiquity in search of God and peace on earth.

What better place to meet Israelis than a kibbutz, one of the agricultural communes that are a hallmark of the culture and home still to many of the nation's founders? What better place to trace religious tradition than the Galilee, where Bible patriarchs sought inspiration, the Sanhedrin scholars interpreted God's laws and Jesus fed the multitudes?

What better place than Lavi, an Orthodox religious kibbutz here at the crossroads of the Galilee?

"A religious kibbutz?" a Jewish friend from Seattle gasped when we told him. "You aren't Jewish. You'll be bored to tears. They'll expect you to dress like they do and pray all the time. You'll have to eat kosher food. Why don't you look for a nice resort with a pool near Jerusalem?"

"Sounds deadly," a co-worker said, shaking her head.

We looked into the resorts. Most offer swimming and tennis. Some have a camel safari or afternoon tea and pita in "a real Bedouin encampment."

But at Lavi we could watch a cow being milked according to Jewish law, learn a few Hebrew phrases and talk to a pioneer. And just down the road are places of the Bible, where the grass might still seem bent with holy footprints.

We e-mailed Lavi for reservations.

Farms and businesses

The kibbutz sits on a hill just off the highway between Tiberias on the Sea of Galilee and Nazareth in the hill country above the Jezreel Valley - an afternoon's drive from Tel Aviv. It is one of about 250 such communes, including 17 that are operated by observant Jews.

The kibbutzim were begun as farms, subsidized by the Israeli government in an effort to help tame the countryside and provide food for Zionists who came in waves over the past century, mostly from Europe and mostly on the eve of and right after World War II.

The kibbutzim began to branch out into business a few years ago to keep solvent when Israel's economy went limp from inflation. Some opened hotels, guesthouses or bed-and-breakfasts. Others began manufacturing products for export, including shoes, computer chips and lawn sprinklers. Lavi makes synagogue furniture and is the only religious kibbutz in the Galilee with a hotel.

We could smell the kibbutz almost as soon as we turned off the main highway past Golani Junction. A rich but not unpleasant whiff of country - chicken houses, cowsheds, plowed earth and pear orchards.

Resorts don't smell like this, we told each other as we drove up the hill to the hotel.

Lavi's hillside perch overlooks Israel's most verdant terrain. In the blue-haze distance to the north are some of Israel's highest mountain peaks. The Horns of Hittin, a long low hill with a peak on either end, dominates the middle distance. There, on July 4, 1187, Muslim forces routed an army of Crusaders.

Below the kibbutz are the rolling farmlands of the Galilee, of which Josephus, a 1st-century historian, wrote, "There is not a plant which its fertile soil refused to produce." He marveled at walnut trees, which love the cold, growing alongside mild-weather fig and olive trees and heat-loving palm trees.

The farmlands sprawl eastward toward the shores of the Sea of Galilee. The shallow lake is also known as Kinnereth, from the Hebrew word kinnor, which means harp. Some say the lake is shaped like an ancient harp; others that the wind on the waves makes harp-like music.

The kibbutz settlement at the top of the hill is shaped like a side-view of a football helmet, with the 124-room hotel at about the face-mask position. At the forehead, along a jogging path that forms the kibbutz boundary, are the tennis courts and a swimming pool. In the center are the synagogue, the residents' cottages, dining hall and cultural center - all connected by a maze of paved pathways, shaded by gnarled olive trees and hibiscus. Not far away is the mikve, the ritual bath where residents cleanse their souls as well as their bodies.

Tapering off down the hillside are the furniture factory, a school for children of the kibbutz and neighboring communities, barns and out-buildings and fields of fruits, vegetables, grains and cotton.

Evening talks and Shabbat rules

We knew we were on the right track for spiritual adventure as soon as we registered at the inn and met Yitzchak Snitkoff, Lavi's education director.

Snitkoff, a rabbi and tour guide, gives lectures to religious groups who come to Lavi to learn about Judaism, kibbutzim, issues facing Israel and the connections between Jews and Christians. Tonight's lecture would be for a group of Mennonites and we were invited.

Like all the men of the kibbutz, Snitkoff also takes his turn on overnight guard duty at the main gate and setting the milking machines on automatic on Shabbat, the Jewish sabbath. Lavi's 650 residents wouldn't think of even flipping a switch on Shabbat, because God has forbidden work on His day of rest.

Every three months Snitkoff pulls on his oldest clothes and helps slaughter some of the 30,000 chickens Lavi produces each year for Israeli kitchens. It's the only job on the kibbutz he truly hates.

Snitkoff immigrated to Israel from Harrisburg, Penn., six years ago with his wife and four children. He took his Hebrew name, Yitzchak, when he arrived. Back home and to many of the Americans who stop by Lavi, he's still Ed.

We were welcome to attend morning services in the synagogue, Snitkoff said. We should be there at 5:45, dressed modestly - no shorts, no low-cut tops - and wearing something over our hair.

We could sleep in past dawn and skip the weekday services, but we couldn't ignore Shabbat.

From sundown Friday until an hour past sunset Saturday, the electricity in the hotel would be turned off, to keep us all from violating the injunction against work on the sabbath.

Shabbat meant no TV, no reading in bed, no hair dryer, Snitkoff said. It meant using the "Shabbat elevator," which stopped at every floor so no one had to press a button to summon it. It meant simple meals, served cold. It meant instant coffee, made from a pot of water that had been plugged in before the sun set Friday.

If we wanted to leave the kibbutz during Shabbat we'd have to park the car outside the main gate Friday afternoon and slip out discreetly.

"It's really no big deal," Snitkoff said. "You'll handle it."

"It's no big deal," we told each other at dinner. We could have gone to a resort on the Dead Sea and had tea with a "real" Bedouin. But we were going for something more meaningful. We would be at the synagogue in time for the first prayers. We would ride the Shabbat elevator and go without brewed coffee.

But we would also leave the car outside the gate in case we felt the need to escape.

Honoring the Torah

That evening, we and the Mennonites shuffled into a basement room that was bare except for a few rows of folding chairs and a Torah, a scroll of scriptures, resting upright in the corner on a table.

"When a Christian looks at the Bible, you understand it through the New Testament," Snitkoff said. "When a Jew looks at this Torah, he looks at it through the Talmud. We all start at the same place, that God created the world and has a covenant with his people. After that, we disagree."

He had to be careful, he warned as he lifted the Torah for us to see. "If the Torah is dropped, everyone present has to fast for 40 days."

That would be awful, we told each other. The food at Lavi may be kosher - prepared according to religious law - but the kibbutz is known as one of the best restaurants around the Galilee.

We all breathed more easily when Snitkoff leaned the Torah safely back against the wall and began telling us about life on the kibbutz.

Learning from pioneers

Communal living in America may have withered with the flower children, but it is alive and well in Israel's kibbutzim, many of whose founders were socialists. The credo of the kibbutzim was and is Karl Marx's "from everyone according to his ability, to everyone according to his needs."

"We have a moneyless society," Snitkoff said. "We get everything we need, from socks for the kids to a college education."

We learned about Lavi firsthand over tea with some of its pioneers.

They are sturdy people in their 70s and 80s, still working because retirement isn't an option or a desire in a socialist society.

Many of them had arrived in Israel as teenage war orphans. Their parents, European Jews, had sent them to English foster homes to save them from the Nazis in World War II. The rescue effort was called Kindertransport. When the war was over, the Kindertransport kids were among the hundreds of thousands of homeless Jews who flooded into Israel to start over.

Lavi was settled in 1949, while wounds were still fresh from Israel's war of independence between Jews and Arabs. The new government chose the site, gave the kibbutzniks guns and told them they were responsible for controlling movement on the main road from Tiberias to Nazareth and Haifa.

When the founders arrived at Lavi, the site was barren and rocky, Lily Stern told us over chips and dips and homemade cakes in the living room she shares with her husband Henry. "We'd dig out one stone and another one would take its place."

They lived in tents the first few years. In the winter the mud was up to their knees; in the summer they were plagued by heat and insects.

When conflicts with the Arabs struck too close to Lavi for comfort, the people "dug in, closed our doors and minded our own business," Edith Gold told us another evening as we shared globes of "ugly fruit," a local delicacy that tastes fine but looks like flaky white fish studded with raisin-like seeds.

Neighbors

The conflicts have softened over the years, and today the kibbutz hires Arab farmworkers who live nearby to help with the crops.

"Our neighbors are Israelis, too, you know," Gold said. "An Israeli doesn't have to be a Jew. An Israeli can be a Christian or an Arab. It's not at all like you read in the papers. I know Christian Arabs and Muslim Arabs who are as willing to live next to me as I am to live next to them. It's the troublemakers you read about."

In the early mornings, before Lavi's roosters even thought of crowing, we picked our way in the dark from the three-story hotel to the synagogue.

We were the only women there - services aren't mandatory for Orthodox women or hotel guests. The men entered sleepily, staring vacantly or smiling faintly at us through the iron bars that separate the main worship center for men from the side spaces for women.

They reached into compartments built into the backs of the pews for prayer books; tallit, white prayer shawls with dark stripes; and tefillin, little black boxes containing scripture to be fastened to their foreheads and left arms with leather straps.

It was a better way to start a day than room service in a resort, we told each other.

With the children

After services we wandered over to the children's houses to watch the toddlers arrive for preschool on tricycles, wagons, go-carts and all manner of homemade kid vehicles.

Only the youngest children, those who couldn't negotiate a pedal or a handlebar, had a parental escort. In Lavi, home is never more than a few hundred yards away and there are no cars to dodge - unless you count the old hulks, sans motors, wheels and windshields, that serve as playground toys on the kibbutz.

Lavi people don't take anything to the dump. The play yard is strewn with old clothes and purses, abandoned kitchen cabinets, well-used skillets and pans. There are old tires to jump on and swing from and rusty bathroom scales to figure out some use for.

The kids posed for our cameras and taught us to say "yes" and "no" in Hebrew ("ken" and "lo"). Those may look like simple words, but they howled at our accents.

Like all kibbutz children in Israel's early days, Lavi's youngsters used to live in the one-story, non-descript children's houses, visiting their hard-working settler parents for a few hours in the evening and on Shabbat. But a few years ago Israelis realized that was no way to raise a child and the practice has been abandoned on all the kibbutzim.

"It really wasn't right," Henry Stern said. "If our children woke up sick in the middle of the night, it meant someone else, not their mother or father, comforted them. We never really liked that system, but we had to work, the parents did, to build the country."

Synagogue furniture

At the dairy, workers tried to explain to us the automatic milking machines that give the dairy cows relief on Shabbat morning. It's a strange and complicated system that relies on this lever touching that thing-a-ma-jig which pushes this dealy-bobber into that doo-hickey which starts the udders pumping and the milk flowing. And no one has violated God's ordinances against work.

We wandered about the pear orchard and into the factory.

Lavi is the largest maker of synagogue furniture in the world,

Ellis Kaplan told us. Kaplan is in charge of the boxes on the backs of the pews that people use to store their prayer books and shawls.

Fewer than half the factory workers are Lavi residents - many are Russian immigrants who commute from Tiberias or nearby villages.

Kaplan grew up in Baltimore, but he grew tongue-tied when he had to carry on a conversation with us in English - Hebrew is the language of the kibbutz.

"I've been here 30 years, but I sound like I just overcame on the boat," he joked.

Ancient landscape

Friday was our day for a tour of the Galilee with the rabbi - we promised Snitkoff we'd have him back to the kibbutz before the candles were lit for Shabbat.

We wanted to see more than old churches and musty shrines, we told him. We wanted to see what it is about the Galilee that has captivated mystics for millennia.

We packed rolls from the breakfast buffet into napkins and set off before most of the hotel guests were awake. We had hardly driven out Lavi's main gate before Snitkoff was saying, "Stop the car."

He pointed toward a mesa in the distance, dark in the early morning shadow. One end dropped abruptly to the farmlands stretching out in front of us. "That's Mt. Arbel. The town of Migdal is on the other side of the mountain. That's where Mary Magdalene lived. Jesus had to walk through this valley to get to her house. He walked this way."

There was no shrine to memorialize the ancient moment. Only olive and citrus groves, a haze-draped mountain and God's blue sky studded with clouds tinged pink in the morning light.

It was the same view Jesus would have seen. And it was mystical.

Snitkoff pulled us over again a few miles down the road. This time we climbed out of the car, and Snitkoff held a narrow wire gate so we could squeeze through and into a pasture. There, in the midst of a languorous herd of black-and-white cows was a tall pillar and scattered blocks of stone - the remains of a synagogue destroyed by an earthquake more than a millennium ago.

As Sabbat begins

We turned up the hill to Lavi as the sun went into its downhill slide toward Shabbat.

The parking lot was full of buses that had brought devout Jews from Tel Aviv to the inn for the weekend.

In moments, the automatic "Shabbat clock" would switch off the lights in all the rooms. The elevator would begin to stop at all the floors, so no one would have to push a button. Carafes of water would be set out on hot plates for tea or instant coffee the next morning.

And we'd give each other another high-five because we'd had a glimpse of God in a kibbutz synagogue, in the shadow of Mt. Arbel and in a cow pasture not far from the unchanging traffic jam at Golani Junction.

Sally Macdonald's phone message number is 206-464-2248. E-mail address: smac-new@seatimes.com