Holidays are tricky. Whatever vague relationship I had with holidays in the United States¹ has utterly disintegrated overseas. The Fourth of July is basically meaningless, Labor Day is on the wrong date. I’m left with Christmas and New Year’s.

And holidays applicable to the local population are even worse. I don’t know what’s relevant to locals, and it’s not like it happens so frequently that I double check before making plans. So sometimes I end up in a situation like now, where I schedule a three-day stopover in Jerusalem over Yom Kippur.

Okay, so it’s not strictly my fault. I’m traveling with friends at the moment and none of us caught it before the tickets were booked. But your travel choices are remarkably constrained over the holiday;² virtually everything shut down mid-afternoon on the Tuesday only to reopen about an hour after sundown on Wednesday. Mercifully, there were a few restaurants still open,³ but we lost a day on our already compressed travel plans.

I got in early Monday, and had arranged a day trip to Masada and the Dead Sea,⁴ so we rather sleepily trundled off for that. That turned out fine; we napped here and there on the bus, got to float in the Dead Sea and wander through the archeological ruins of Masada.⁵

The next day we hit all the major religious sites, the Temple Mount, the Western Wall⁶ and the Church of the Holy Sepulcher.⁷ By then the heat and the walking had done kind of a number on me, and I was more than interested in just heading home and crashing for the afternoon. We had dinner reservations — I’m eternally grateful for the help we had finding someplace open — and then returned to the apartment.

I’d have loved to have visited some of the museums, or maybe done another tour, but it just wasn’t an option. My friends went out; I stayed in and got some stuff done. We all met back up for dinner, and after a bit of a false start (I suppose if your fast ends at sundown, you still have to give people at least an hour to reopen all the restaurants) found a place for dinner. And then it was time to head back, so we could be ready for our morning flight.

I’ll admit to being a little uncomfortable traveling to Israel. Part of it is the whole weird hassle with passports⁸ and security.⁹ Part of it is the government, which at the moment at least holds the potential of a marginally less right-wing coalition. Most of it is Palestine. I had the bright idea of visiting the West Bank on Wednesday, only to discover the holiday meant all the security checkpoints would be closed.

I go back and forth on this. I can understand the people who want to protest by at a minimum refusing to visit. I think I’d outright refuse to do something blatantly touristy, like spend a week in a resort in Haifa. And I can see the argument that I’m just splitting hairs here. I think about it a lot.

I don’t think I really agree with it, though. I’m really trying to understand things, here, to try and get a sense of what life might be like here. I can’t, obviously, but even just spending a few days, seeing the Dome of the Rock and seeing all the petitioners lined up along the Western Wall, or hearing someone talk about the siege that broke the defenders of Masala, I’ve learned something. I’ve got a piece of the puzzle that was missing. I still can’t claim to understand things, but I have a decidedly better idea of how it all fits together than when I arrived. We’re not going to be able to figure out how to fix anything without at least that, as a starting point.

I don’t think I need to come back to Jerusalem. I’d see those museums I mentioned, the Yad Vashem¹⁰ and the Israel Museum. But I don’t really need to see the city again. If I come back, I’ll want to see the West Bank.

I will say this: we had headed out for food too early on Wednesday, and ended up walking around kind of randomly for about an hour. And relatively soon after we started, we heard the horns for sundown, so there was this magic moment where the streets were still empty of cars and motorcycles and pedestrians.¹¹ And the kids did what kids do everywhere, which is rush outside with their bikes and scooters and plastic sleds and coast down the middle of all these empty, wide, abandoned streets.

We watched them a bit. They were having a blast. And all I could think was, man, lots of the adults around here might be really screwed up, in lots of different ways. But not the kids. Not yet, anyway. Kids are just kids, no matter where you go.

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Footnotes

¹ I’d not infrequently discover I had a Monday off the Friday before the weekend when coworkers would wish me a happy long weekend.

² “Holiday” feels like the wrong word here, but it does literally come from “holy day.”

³ The usual travel tip: if everything’s closed for a holiday and you need a place for dinner, look for a fancy hotel that caters to tourists. Guests gotta eat.

⁴ There was some discussion between my friends and I whether to do the day tour on Monday or Tuesday, with my fear that the start of Yom Kippur on Tuesday might cause problems with the tour winning out narrowly on their fear that our flights might be delayed and we’d miss start of the tour on Monday.

⁵ As usual, take what the guide says with a bit of salt. The story is that 960 rebels killed themselves rather than be captured, but they’ve only found the remains of 28 people, which seems a rather wide discrepancy.

⁶ I’d always heard the term “Wailing Wall” but apparently it’s never been in common use among Jews and is regarded as somewhat offensive these days.

⁷ One of the real delights of Jerusalem, for me anyway, is to actually get to see all the fabled sites of the Crucifixion. The Church of the Holy Sepulcher is literally where Jesus was nailed to the cross and crucified. According to some traditions, anyway — the archeological evidence is decidedly scant. But it’s still kind of a thrill. I’ve been hearing these stories for the entirety of my life; realizing you can actually visit the site is kind of like discovering you could just visit Tatooine.

⁸ The passport thing appears largely resolved at this point. Tensions in the Middle East being what they are, many Arab countries won’t let you in if you’ve got a stamp from Israel in your passport. Israel has responded by simply not stamping passports, instead issuing small entry and exit visas you need to carry with you.

⁹ Getting on the plane in London I got pulled aside for a 15 minute talk with one of the security personnel, who ran through the standard low-rent interrogation technique of repeated questions (“Where are you traveling? What for? With whom? How do you know them? And where were you going? What did you say their names were? What flights are they on? Where were you planning to visit?”) which I hope is effective at catching criminals because all it does is make me super annoyed and super anxious in a situation where it feels like a bad idea to admit to being either.

¹⁰ As if to remind everyone of the stakes, a German man shot up a synagogue killing two people on the holiest day of the year for Jews.

¹¹ Excepting us, the idiot foreigners who should have just left their apartment later