Eventually we came out of the narrow streets of Old Jaffa
and stepped out onto the edge of the harbor. There was a small quay with a few
boats tied up, and then the sweeping scope of the blue Mediterranean. And there
were no gulls. It seems like an odd thing to notice, but it was one of the
first things apparent to me. In my part of the world, you couldn’t venture
within a mile of the ocean without seeing fifty gulls; I had only seen one over
the town, and here, at the water’s edge, there were none. But that little
discrepancy set me thinking about the writers of the Bible and about the world
they saw: and for all the birds I could think of in the Bible—eagles and owls
and doves and sparrows and even hoopoes—I couldn’t recall anyone mentioning a
gull. I imagined that it must have made the great sea seem all that more
forbidding to the ancient Israelites—this vast, unknown expanse of dangerous
waves, where not even the familiar and friendly birds they knew dared to
venture forth. My fellow pilgrims were no doubt thinking about much worthier
and more interesting things at that particular moment, but birds are interwoven
into the fabric of my perception, so the kind reader will have to bear with me.
After a short walk along the broad harbor road, we
reunited with Najji and his silver bus. We were tired and jet lagged, but there
was one more site in the area that Norah wanted to show us. Many of us probably
would have declined if we were given the option, but she made the decision for
us, and in the end we were glad she did. After a short drive down toward Tel
Aviv, we pulled up in a residential neighborhood next to a house that looked
nothing like the conventional brick-and-cement Middle Eastern homes all around.
It was a wooden house with brown clapboard siding and a peaked roof, an exotic
splash of New England in the middle of Israel.
We got out and looked around while Norah gave us the
background on the place. It was called the Maine Friendship House, and it was
the last remnant of an attempted settlement by a group of Mainers a century and
a half before. In the late 1860s a shipload of people from Jonesport—a little
seaside town in my own county of Maine—embarked on an adventure to settle in
the Holy Land and to help encourage Jewish emigration there. The history of the
settlement was a sad one; they were unprepared for what faced them due to
inadequate foresight and leadership issues, and most were reduced to poverty
before being forced to leave. But the attempt itself, and what it represented,
had remained a treasured part of the story of the modern Israeli resettlement.
Norah was excited to have a tour group from Maine so that she could share with
them this connection that our state—unbeknownst to us—had had on the
development of the nation of Israel. We paused for a few moments to take
pictures of the house in its restored setting, with a lovely steepled church
standing alongside. It was really one of the last things we had expected to
find: a little chunk of Maine here in the Holy Land. But its presence there,
much as the warm familiarity of churches on every side, reminded us that this
strange and distant land was, in a very real sense, our own native home. It was
a physical repository of the hopes we had stored up as “treasures in heaven”
for years upon years upon years, and now we got to walk amidst them.
