There was no other place to go for that first real vacation [in June 1982], not to my old haunts in Texas nor to Club Med’s Caribbean frolics. After hearing about Israel from friends, a trip seemed the natural extension of my growing interest in Judaism and my own Jewishness. What did I expect from the nine-day Kopel tour arranged through B’nai B’rith? Like I told the steel-eyed guard, it was part of being Jewish, a part I lacked. My wealth of second-hand information was unsatisfying since the physical reality of Israel – a place and a people – remained elusive. To give substance to that abstract mental map was the chief goal.

And that happened, totally. Despite the “situation,” as our tour guide Benny called the Lebanon invasion, the tour proceeded with the precision of a Netanya diamond cutting. From the moment the El Al jet touched down at Ben-Gurion airport – amid claps and cheers – I felt strong relief just knowing that Israel indeed existed in three dimensions. The mundane sights of cars, buildings, people and fields lent the place a solidity that was invigorating, an instant antidote to second-hand impressions.

That realization and sightseeing did not make me an expert. Because of the pace of the trip and newness of the experience, I missed contacts with average Israelis; hence, their inner lives remain mysterious.

My experiences with the dreaded Israeli bureaucracy, for example, were blessedly limited to getting my passport stamped and lamely explaining to a Jerusalem traffic cop why I sauntered across a street against a red light (“Gosh, officer, I didn’t see anybody coming, so . . . “)

Still, I returned to New York with more than T-shirts, a “Yiddishe Mamme” bag [for my mother] and sunburned shoulders. I carried a better understanding.

A better understanding of what? As the jet whisked me westward after the trip I wondered about this. Since the tour emphasized geography over sociology, I felt the deeper impact occurred internally rather than through specific insights into being able to explain Israel. Beyond toting up sites and miles, I examined what startled and moved me.

I must thank Israel television for the first surprise. Flopped on a couch in the lobby of a Tel Aviv hotel soon after arrival, I found myself watching a well-known face and voice talking with animation. So why couldn’t I understand him? The jet lag had not me me that catatonic. After a few seconds the truth struck home: I was trying to understand Menachem Begin’s Hebrew. After years of hearing the Prime Minister speaking on American television, I just assumed he always spoke English, albeit with a heavy accent. No such need in Israel, and hence the culture shock of hearing brand-new sounds from a familiar mouth.

Soon I changed some dollars and headed into the Tel Aviv evening to explore. Seeing the holy letters of Hebrew on dress shops and hot dog stands – compared to the Hebrew on the hardy religious stores of the Lower East Side – prompted a soliloquy about the nature of being Jewish but secular in Israel.

“My, my, all the signs are in Hebrew. Doesn’t that make them religious, like on Essex Street?” I asked myself.

“Not necessarily,” I mentally replied. “What’s so religious about an appliance store?”

“But isn’t this the Jewish state?”

“So is Jewishness always directly tied to Judaism?”

So it proceeded, like the remembrance of a dream in an Isaac Bashevis Singer novel, all these new thoughts so complicated yet so simple. The give-and-take of my thought was like the old joke; ask a jew a question and he’ll answer with another question, even if he’s just talking to himself.

The 1982 Lebanon war was just starting, amidst hopes that it would end quickly. In the first day’s early minutes on the bus, Benny the tour guide voiced his concern for his son on duty in Lebanon. The war caused professional headaches also, as he had had to replace two drivers on the last tour due to the call-up. (Benny himself entered the reserves after the tour ended, what he called the “Coca-Cola Soldiers.”)

War news followed us on the roads. The hardware of bloodshed eventually engulfed our bus as it mixed with military traffic in the Golan Heights. Once we passed a line of tired soldiers outside a country store, waiting for their moment to call home. What motivated the spirit of sacrifice symbolized by that line? It was the concept of survival, an idea carrying an immediacy in Israel rather lacking in the United States.

Benny talked passionately about the motivations of sacrifice as we stood atop sunlit Masada. The people had simple aspirations, he said: Pace, a decent living, to live as Jews. Embodying all these hopes was Jerusalem. However ancient, the city, its students and buses reminded me of a university town. The construction cranes stark against the horizon spoke of change, which appealed to my western sensibilities.

Still, the most telling episode happened at a distinctly unmodern place – the Western Wall.

[Our group arrived at the Wall Friday afternoon, the beginning of Shabbat. We noticed a swirl of activity.] It was a phalanx of young men, clad in white shirts, coming to welcome the Sabbath. While I did not have the foggiest idea of the literal meaning of their song, its emotion was evident. The solidarity and presence of the group deeply moved me. In that twilight Jerusalem moment, I grasped an essential element of Jewishness in Israel. There was a sense of communal holiness among people bound together in their own land, freed from interpreting their lives in relation to a dominant, assimilating culture.

Our guide’s live-and-let-live attitude impressed me. Speaking about Israelis’ relaxed approach to religious practice, Benny pointed at the Wall and declared, “This is our spirituality.”

So much for observation; what about the expression of my urge for solidarity? It surfaced frequently, at Masada, Yad Vashem, and at Machpelah. Benny briefed us about the Tombs of the Patriarchs’ history as our bus rolled through the West Bank hills to Hebron. Massacres dominated the telling.

He said, “One thousand percent the people here hate the Jews. They teach it in the schools.” The tombs held great symbolic power, much like the graves of my grandparents in a little Jewish cemetery in Gonzales, Texas. The presence of the past was comforting and the kinship strong at both places. Spirits moved there.

The other men returned their construction-paper skullcaps at tahe door, but I had my own and decided to keep in on. Somebody mentioned this when we reached the bus. I replied, as much to myself as to him, “It feels natural to leave it on. At a place like this I need to make a statement, to let people know what side I’m on.”

We ended where we began, Tel Aviv. Alone on my last day, I scooped up shekels and a city guide for solo explorations. Finally, I experienced Israel from street level, from eating falafel to visiting the Jabotinsky Museum to watching World Cup soccer in a bagel shop near City Hall.

Even the bus ride to the Diaspora Museum was special. The noon crowd radiated conviviality as we listened to the driver’s radio. (For the first time I saw another historical symbol, when an elderly woman across the aisle reached down for a package. On her arm were tattooed numbers.)

The Diaspora Museum endlessly fascinated me. Here unfolded the scope of Jewish life outside Israel, something I could certainly identify with. For the first time in my life I saw myself as part of history, enveloped within an unfolding story. For me it now plays in a great center called New York. Considered in a building that gave equal time to Vilna and Alexandria, I felt New York has no claim on immortality, and that it is subject to the same forces of decline and destruction.

One particular exhibit put me squarely in the midst of Jewish movement through time. The section contained a half-dozen displays showing alternate Jewish responses to modern challenges, such as the French and Russian revolutions, assimilation and the Holocaust. The convulsions were poignant but lacked much personal relevance. The final display, “Towards the Year 2000,” shook the complacency. It depicted a post-Holocaust Jew choosing whether to remain in the West or to move to Israel. I kept pushing the buttons that revealed the paths of this generation.

More than anything else, these moments summoned vanished generations. With each flicker of the display in Tel Aviv, I sensed the wheel of Jewish history turning. Two thousand years ago it spun and destroyed Israel; 35 years ago it moved again to recreate the state and now it had brought me to Israel to discover unknown bonds between myself and my past, including the past as it exists in Israel.

The trip greatly increased my interest in and concern with the continuing turmoil regarding the Lebanese war. Like many Jews, I’ve found my assumptions about Israel’s leadership challenged. That has changed my feelings about the country or what it represents, however. I feel a close bond to Israel, both the people there and the community of Jews around the world that support the state.

The journey strengthened these feelings. It also enriched my life in the Diaspora. Having received so much from Israel while there, I started returning the favor sooner than I expected upon my return to New York (El Al passengers clap and cheer on arrival at JFK, also).

While waiting to pass through customs, a distraught elderly woman pushed ahead of me. I let her pass as she offered an incomprehensible explanation in various Eastern European languages. I whizzed through and saw her standing with her bags, utterly confused. Tapping her on the shoulder to offer help, I determined quickly we could speak no common language, although I did understand she was from Tel Aviv and needed to make a quick connecting flight.

I grabbed a baggage handler and explained the situation. We coaxed the tickets from the traveler. She was looking for a flight to Seattle3. The handler told me what bus to put her on. With an authoritative nod I said my Workman’s Circle 101 Yiddish vocabulary, “Kumen!” [The Workmen’s Circle is an organization founded to provide services to the Yiddish-speaking population of New York. I studied Yiddish there starting in 1981 with Sheva Zucker, who went on to write a popular language textbook.]

We walked quickly through the terminal, chatting as best we could. She was born in Poland and had “mishpokhe” [family in Yiddish, derived from Hebrew] in Seattle.

We found the right bus loading area. While waiting I scribbled a note with the flight and time information that she could show people if she somehow got turned in the wrong direction. Too soon the bus arrived and we parted, but not before she thanked me vigorously. Flustered, I said, “Have a freilicke time in de Fareinigke shtatn.” [mangled mix of English and Yiddish meaning, “Have a happy time in the United States.”]

It was the perfect ending.