Israel: Where the Elite Meet to Skeet

Dear God,

I hope you are well. I'm doing ok, as I'm sure you know. Well, how has life been looking from up there? Because from down here life and this world isn't going so well ... My friend's father died. Please remember her and her family sometime. He was so nice. Why are they always nice? ... Sorry, Hopefully I'll get to Israel some day very soon. Take care of your children. All of them. Please.

Have a nice day and thank you for your time.
-Tess

It was pretty strong throughout, but the meteoric rise of Dan's and my birthright nihilism really began the night I convinced him to leave the group in the Bedouin tent and sleep naked with me in the desert. Later I pressured Dan into shitting among the rocks and wiping with a sock.


Adding to the rush of breaking Birthright norms was the conversation we had with our insane friend Dave who stumbled on us while he was walking around smoking cigarettes.

We met Dave on the first night when he offered us some extra-long menthol Pall Malls (unquestionably the longest-burning cigarette, he assured us) of which he had purchased a carton at the duty free shop in JFK. The conversation went something like this:

Dave: Oh nice -- I'm a writer too. What kind of stuff are you working on?
Dan: Well, right now I'm working on a period piece about lobbyists in Washington DC in the 1790s.
Dave: A period piece -- cool. I'm working on the lost Seinfeld script: the one where Jerry kills a whore: "You killed a whore? What do you mean you killed a whore!?" / "I killed a whore!". And then Kramer comes in...

Later that first night though, Dave revealed his core decency when, in response to my attempt to make friends slash run game by offering a menthol to a flaxen-haired 12 y.o. native Kibbutzer he emphatically called me a monster (pronounced "Mahnstah") for the first of several times.

But on this particular night, Dave, whose teeth are the after picture in a Meth lecture, was coming off the rush of making out with one of the Israeli soldiers (who he then lost to a rotund UCF junior like the very next day -- we found this out for the second time when we provoked a reaction by asking "So, whatever happened with Liron; you fucked her, right?"). He revealed his recent success when Dan asked him "How'd it go with those Uruguayan chicks" (decent looking girls) and he responded "Those rancid whores? I wouldn't let em neah my cawk".

As the night drew on, he solemnly gave Dan advice on how to cheat on Susanna.

Dave: Okay rule number 1, and this is the most important rule. No cash. You gotta use pills or drugs. You gotta BAHWTER. And definitely no fucking credit cards.
Dan / Tom: (Unsure of the exact mistress/prostitute arrangement that Dave assumes is standard and trying to mask our laughter) Well no credit cards makes sense, but why no cash?
Dave: Are you fucking kidding? You can't pay her rent with cash! Yah bitch knows yah money!
Dave: Okay. Rule number 2, and this is very sad. You gotta use a condom...

Our nihilism reached its zenith at the Western Wall ("Wait, this wall is made of molecules, right? Okay good.") when everyone was getting all solemn and anti-photography and shit. When one of the hassids asked me if I wanted to wrap teffelin, I said "I'll answer that question with another question: suppose a meteor were headed for a school and you had the opportunity to divert it onto the western wall -- would you do it?" to his credit, he said "yes" and even admitted that he would destroy the wall to save even one human life. I wanted to keep pressing him ("Would you destroy the wall to save someone from having to accept a 50% chance of death? What about a 1/1000 chance?"), but Dan and I needed to touch our dicks to the wall.

Concealing our laughter, Dan and I solemnly approached the wall ("Which was actually searing hot -- it really burned my hand" -- one of my many western wall jokes that fell flat), but he casually slipped in one of Jason Congdon's business cards and I stole two notes (one excerpted above, the other was in Spanish). Telling Dave about this was a rush until he again called me a monster and threatened to tell the group.

The trip had its earnest moments. One night a tall, incredibly poised, ex-marine and fellow Birthrighter named Gabe (with whom my only previous interaction was when he told me to "watch my language" after I had just loudly announced in front of several probable Holocaust survivors "wow -- this dead sea water really hurts my dick and asshole") gave a truly heartfelt talk about his experience in Iraq, the positive cases for the war, etc. (It was actually pretty good, but I couldn't help asking "would you still support the war if it were 10 times as expensive? 100 times? You don't know? Okay, you're an idiot.")

The Holocaust museum was just too much. "Zahava" (below) was our guide. Her name is one of the toughest prompts in the the classic "getting to know you" first-day-of-Birthright game "Birthright tour guide or seasoning".

Zahava: ...and when he was 10, his father gave him a harmonica for his birthday, and he would only play one song -- "My Shtetl Bells" ... And when he was at Treblinka, the only way he could stay sane was to play one song over and over: "My Shtetl Bells" ... Finally, when he died, they played just one song at his funeral. And of course, that song was "Mambo No. 5". It would always cheer him up when he heard it! He loved listening to it in the gym...

Anyway, the other campers were pretty much all reptiles. I was on fire the entire time, but my game kept falling flat:

It's 5am and we're all assembled in front of the bus with our bags. Today we're driving to meet our new Israeli soldier friends (who, as many people would go on to point out at length throughout the trip, are not so different from us (in many respects!).

Tom: Boy, I'm pretty tired...
Tom: ...of the way Hezbollah has been acting in Northern Israel!!!
Mephitic Fellow Birthrighter: (Surprisingly not writing anything down) ...
MFB2: Wait -- HOLY SHIT -- you only brought ONE bag? That's fucking incredible! OMG -- how many pairs of shorts / shirts / shoes did you bring? (A variant of this conversation happened several times.)

To their credit, I did bring a very small suitcase (and did so to impress):


The Bergers actually packed really light too, but got zero props. Here's another joke no one understood:

We're at the Tel Aviv airport waiting to fly home.

Tom: Hey guys? Guys -- could you come take a look at this?
Tom: (Throws away the framed group photo they gave to us at the banquet hours earlier).

The point, as I explained to Rich and Dan, being "hey, we're never going to see these people again; why not?" Though of course right after explaining this, I couldn't help but engage one of the attractive, dull girls about the neck pillow she just bought ("Wow, cool design -- is that a Jewish star? Hey -- we decided not to exchange all our Shekels so that we could buy snacks in the airport. Are you familiar with that strategy?").

So I guess in the end, Birthright taught me that you really have no choice but to, ugh, affirm life after all. Really I just want to be liked: