The story of our peoplehood begins with these words that God spoke to Abraham in the book of Genesis:

Go forth from your land,
your birthplace,
your father’s house
to the land that I will show you.

My parents both grew up in Brooklyn. Went to school there. Married and moved to faraway Queens and then to Long Island. Eventually they divorced and both of them found their way separately to Southern California.

My father’s only jaunt was to Europe as a soldier during the Second World War. After that, the only places he wanted to go to were his favorite restaurants. “What’s a tree?” he used to say. But toward the end of his life Dad discovered the desert and fell in love with its stark simplicity. As he wished, his ashes were scattered in the desert east of Los Angeles.

My mother always wanted to travel but could never afford to. The furthest she and my father got to was the Adirondacks, and Mom begged her second husband to take her to Hawaii, but he’d already been there and refused to go back. Mom’s one great dream was to explore the cultural richness of Florence, maybe even live there. She never made it and is buried in a Jewish cemetery in the San Fernando Valley.

Me, I went off to college in Santa Barbara for two years, then did my junior year at Hebrew University in Jerusalem. With year-long classes instead of semesters, it was easy to take off for long weekends, and friends were constantly hopping over to Cyprus, Turkey, Greece, or making longer trips to Italy, France, Spain, even Ethiopia. But I decided that I’d rather know one place well than many poorly and stayed close to home. After two long camping trips in the Sinai, I went to Tel Aviv twice, Haifa twice, Safed twice, lived on one kibbutz for two weeks and another for a month. Other than that, the furthest I traveled was to Bethlehem to visit a friend who taught there. A life-long walker, I was out every day exploring, every church, every mosque, every museum in Jerusalem. In fact I got a job in the Israel Museum, working as an apprentice to an archaeologist helping him mend potsherds and catalog a dig in the Negev that I never visited. No, I was content traveling though time, those dusty shards in my hands souvenirs from the shattered past. 

Having traveled more than either of my parents ever would, I came back to the US deeply changed, with neither my father's yearning to visit new restaurants nor my mother’s yearning to see the world. Instead I am a man who doesn’t want to go anywhere that I can’t walk to. The only other journey I’ve taken was three weeks in – of all places – Germany. But that’s another story. And this is a story about the kind of trips that I do make, on a regular basis.

'I am a man who doesn’t want to go anywhere that I can’t walk to...'

I wake in the morning and stretch. The undulating fields of my quilt spread out around me, dark green and scattered blues, rising and falling, climbing up onto the elevated hills of my pillows. I roll over. To my right, through the tent opening of a black frame, I gaze out onto the landscape of red jagged black-edged mountain peaks, a scrap of Bedouin embroidery. Below them, a lower range of hills, some taller and some shorter – red, dark purple, amber glowing in the morning light – my glass paperweight collection on top of a small wooden chest. Sighing, I turn and the heavens are spread out before me – an illuminated sphere of all the constellations on the night table to my left. I lean over and turn it on. It is morning; the night stars are shining. Time stops. Fuses. Journeys me inward. And across from me, a deer and an elephant – paused and poised in contemplation, one wooden and one silver, on top of my dresser.

Yes, this is my travel, a journey around my room, and I haven’t even gotten out of bed yet. And then my legs engage, my feet yearn for contact with the earth, the substitute earth. I swing them down, touch the polished oak, forest sliced and slick, lying flat. Called, I travel hundreds of miles down the hall, and settle myself on the wooly white rug on my study floor. Wind in the trees – my breath. The sea in the distance – my breath. The power that moves me – my breath. Time slows, space merges, inner and outer becoming one. And in the shape of my body, within its outline, the entire universe unfolds itself and shines. No spoken prayers. Just silence. Not clock time but no-time. The “Rise and shine” my mother called out to us each morning. The cosmos within my body a luminous invocation. The sacred words that inspire me not Torah but Lao Tzu’s Tao Te Ching :  

Without going out the door,
one can know the whole world.
Without peeping out the window,
one can see the  Tao of heaven.
The further one travels, 
the less one knows.

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