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Twelve Lesser-Known Tribes Of Israel

I

t’s a new day in Israel — a remark-
able, daily occurrence. It’s 3:30 in the
morning back here in Michigan and
I’m up, feeling the gravitational pull with a
twist of Daylight Savings Time. My heart,
mind and feet are still swollen from the
trip, my first since the 1998 Teen Mission
2 Israel.
I know just enough
about Israel to be
dangerous, so I’ll lean
on something I heard
repeatedly over the last
two weeks: This is a
tribal place. Beyond the
ancient 12, the present
ones — ultra-Orthodox,
Ben Falik
Bedouin, Yemenite —
bore at least passing
resemblance to how my tour guide Leon
Uris described them in his sprawling,
sparing novel Exodus. But I identified
far more tribes, fluid as their member-
ship may be, than I could have possibly
imagined. Among those that accepted me
as one of their own — even though I had
little to offer other than a healthy appetite
and a suitcase full of Repair the World
shirts — were these 12:
1. Loddites. Like Detroit, the city of
Lod has suffered from population loss,
blight and segregation for years. And like
Detroit, Lod refuses to go gentle into the
night. To stem the tide of young leaders
leaving for nearby Tel Aviv and beyond,
Project Re:Lod is building a tribe of col-
lege students to be the change they wish to
see in Lod. I walked through the city with
some of them, and we discussed the chal-
lenges and opportunities of respectfully
entering a community and focusing on its
assets rather than its deficits.
2. The West Bank. Through Encounter,
a group “dedicated to strengthening
the capacity of the Jewish people to be
constructive agents of change in trans-
forming the Israeli-Palestinian conflict,” I
experienced the warmth and hospitality
of Christians and Muslims living around

Bethlehem. I heard the same sense of
hope, frustration, purpose and fatigue as I
did in communities throughout Israel.
3. Hapoel Jerusalem B.C.
Distinguished by their elaborate red and
black regalia, fans of professional bas-
ketball in Jerusalem pledge fierce loyalty
to their tribe, especially as they look to
defend their first national championship
against perennial favorite Maccabi Tel
Aviv. I rooted extra hard for Eli Holman,
the University of Detroit-Mercy alum
playing his first game for the Lions.
4. Ore to Excellence. Young tribes of
high school mentors and middle school
mentees (just like PeerCorps!) gather in
Ashdod and other marginalized commu-
nities around Israel’s periphery through
Ore to Excellence. They invited me into
their safe space and found my answers
about Lacoste and Leatherman sufficient
to indulge me in a Rock Paper Scissors
tournament in which I fared poorly.
5. American-Israelis. Whether they
made aliyah 30 years ago or last month,
this tribe has possibly the hardest kind of
dual citizenship: explaining, if not defend-
ing, American politics to Israelis and
Israeli politics to Americans.
6. In Transit and Traffic. Roving tribes
form and disband throughout congested
commutes across Israel, bound together by
a deep devotion to Waze, a GPS app creat-
ed in Israel that aggregates user tips about
accidents, traffic jams and speed traps. I
am told the way I drive would make me a
natural member of their tribe.
7. Kfar Tikva. This “Village of Hope”
serves more than 200 Israeli adults with
special needs. The tribe is proud of the
crafts they make to sell, their animal care
facility and Tulip Winery. Interviewed for
their TV station, I talked about how proud
the Jewish Federation of Metropolitan
Detroit is to support them and about
JARC. Then I day drank.
8. ArtSpace. Nomadic by nature or
necessity, this tribe — artists from a vari-
ety of backgrounds working in as many

media, including street art — has turned
an old industrial area in Tel Aviv into a
rich district of studios and galleries that
they are well on their way of pricing them-
selves out of.
9. Interns. I joined this humble tribe for
a day in the mayor’s office in Jerusalem.
The last mayor I interned for had some-
thing in common with the last two in
Jerusalem: bribery. Mayor Nir Barkat,
though, runs a clean shop. He and his staff
focus on service delivery and economic
development across Israel’s largest city,
toiling under a global microscope.
10. Strangers. As captured in the Oscar-
winning documentary Strangers No More,
South Tel Aviv’s Bialik-Rogozin School
has students from 48 different countries.
I spoke the universal language with their
students: bad dancing. Large popula-
tions that escaped to Israel from Sudan
and Eritrea, as well as guest workers who
overstay their visas — neighbors for some,
infiltrators according to others — live in a
state of uncertainty in Israel.
11. IDF. Of all the places soldiers are
present in Israel — many places — I got to
see the uniformed tribe in their element:
gardening, dancing and playing dominos
as part of a volunteer program at a senior
center. Not present: Yisrael Kristal, the
112-year-old Holocaust survivor and
former confectioner recently named the
world’s oldest man.
12. Saftas and Sabras. These tribal
elders from across the global diaspora
came together in their ancestral home over
decades. Yisrael Kristal, the 112-year-old
Holocaust survivor and former confection-
er was recently named the world’s oldest
man. At the center, an air force pilot and
I joined them in singing songs from their
youth, mostly in Hebrew and Russian, in
preparation for their Passover concert.
We sang only one line that I recognized
— though I never recognized it as a lived
experience, plucked from the pages of
Exodus and Exodus, of Israel as a lifeline
in a hostile world: Let my people go.

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March 24 • 2016

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