Saints and Sinners: Learning from your neighbors
Today’s news is flooded with images of war overseas. But if, for a moment, you can look past that, to the many images of a land, a people and their culture, you may begin to think about the many cultural and customary differences that set one country apart from another.
Living in a country where bombings are an everyday occurrence can be an unsettling experience. I have never been caught in a bombing raid, but I came close once.
It was during a visit to Israel in the 1970s. I was spending the evening at the apartment of one of the kibbutz families on the Israel-Lebanon-Syrian border in northern Galilee. A kibbutz is a communal or collectivist village.
About 10 p.m. I heard what I thought was thunder. “I’d better hurry along before it rains,” I said to my hostess. The guesthouse where I was staying was a three-minute walk away.
“It’s not going to rain,” she replied. “Look at the sky.” Sure enough, it was star-bright.
“Then what was that noise?” I asked.
“Oh, that’s the bombing in Lebanon,” she shrugged. Earlier that day two Israelis had been killed by Arab terrorists as they were driving on a road that could be clearly seen from the kibbutz. The bombing I was hearing was Israel’s retaliation.
Such border incidents were a regular occurrence. The kibbutz residents took them in stride even though only weeks before Arabs from Lebanon had lobbed a small bomb over our kibbutz. It left a hole behind the apartment where I was now staying.
Still, in many respects Israel is a tranquil country — or was during my two visits there in the 70s and 80s. Muggings are rare and crime is rather uncommon. In his book “Twelve Cities,” author John Gunther remarks, “murder in Israel is virtually unknown and there is very little juvenile delinquency.”
Gunther, a distinguished journalist and foreign correspondent, quotes Teddy Kolleck, then the mayor of Jerusalem, as saying, “Jerusalem is a working city. People don’t have time to be corrupt. There were half a million citizens in the streets last week celebrating our anniversary and we did not have a single case of drunkenness.”
Prisoners in the Jerusalem jails are allowed in certain circumstances to spend weekends at home with their families.
Much as I enjoyed my stays in Israel, I noted that the Israelis are not “overly friendly to visitors which is strange in a country where tourists are wooed as a source of income,” as had been described.
I mentioned this to a faculty member at Hebrew University in Israel who was from the United States. She said she had noticed the same thing.
“I don’t know why Israelis don’t smile more,” she said. “I don’t think it is because life is harder here, although that might have something to do with it.”
She said that Israelis, for their part, sometimes wonder why Americans smile as much as they do.
Israeli driving is something else again. Horn-honking is usually the mark of a bad driver and Israel is a country of horn-honkers. I made some inquiries and was told the country has the world’s highest auto accident rate.
Gunther called Israel’s auto traffic “lively” and said accidents are “frequent.” He went on to say, however, that the accident rate “does not come near that of the U.S. in proportion to the population.”
The Jerusalem Post carried two letters to the editor about the driving problem while I was there.
One correspondent wrote, “Young boys might like to make a note that aggressive driving is known to be a sex substitute and I’m sure most of them wouldn’t like to advertise their shortcomings in that direction.”
Learning about these cultural differences helps to enlighten us about life abroad and may also offer solutions to some of our country’s own problems. For instance, could publicizing this sex/driving correlation cut down on the teen mayhem on the highways in this country?
(George Plagenz is a syndicated columnist.)