By Noam Spira
I’ve never really felt any connection to Tel Aviv. With the exception of the small area of Jaffa, I thought it has little, if any Jewish significance. Sure, it is a city of success in the economic and cultural sectors, but I never felt any deeper connection to the city the way I have felt many times before in many other Israeli cities. This is what I have felt for a long time, but I am not sure I still feel this way.
On our fourth day of the opening conference, the Nachshon Fellows headed for Tel Aviv with our tour guide, Jamie. The theme of the trip was Tel Aviv as the first Hebrew city. Throughout the tour, Jamie made the distinction between a Hebrew city and a Jewish city, being that many of the founders of Tel Aviv wanted little to do with religion, but felt that the Hebrew language was the ultimate unifier of the Jewish people. However, Jamie explained, the religious Jews believed that the ingathering of the Jewish exiles would only occur when God decided so, as in the coming of the messiah, and rejected the secular Jews’ migration to Israel.
Our first stop was a lookout of the city skyline from the outskirts of Jaffa. It was unbelievable to imagine that when the founders of Tel Aviv looked out from this vantage point all they saw was sand, the vision of a modern Hebrew city just a fantasy, while we were standing looking at a vibrant cosmopolitan powerhouse. If up until this point of the tour I was still skeptical about anything truly great happening in Tel Aviv, I finally reached a turning point.
One of our next stops was Founder’s Square, located on Rothschild Boulevard. It contains a rectangular monument bearing a plaque depicting workers in a field with a backdrop of a semi modern Tel-Aviv. Underneath the plaque is a quotation from Jerimiah 31:3, saying, “Again will I build thee, and thou shalt be built, O virgin of Israel”. Jamie explained that this placement of the quote seems out of place, being that the founders of Tel Aviv were very much secular, believing that Judaism did not originate from a divine covenant but a man-made invention. Surely this quote was put in to mock the religious who believed that the land of Israel would not be built up until the coming of the Messiah, explained Jamie.
However, this was not my impression at all; in fact I saw something entirely different in the monument. Unlike Jamie, the first thing that caught my eye when I saw the monument was the prophetic verse, not the plaque. I then looked up and saw the depiction on the plaque, almost as if I was watching events in chronological order. When I saw the plaque, I saw a confirmation of an achievement of a biblical prophecy. I told Jamie this, and he replied that yes, that is a way to look at it, but it was certainly not the intention of whomever made the monument. It was supposed to be a rejection of religious beliefs. I told Jamie that I agreed with him, but that to me, that did not matter. Whether they liked it or not or whether they believed in it or not, the first settlers of Tel Aviv ended up fulfilling a major biblical prophecy, the first rebuilding of Eretz Yisrael. This came to mind abstractly when I saw the Tel Aviv skyline near the beach of Jaffa but it all came together in my head after seeing the monument at Founder’s Square.
My perspective of Tel Aviv has changed. I used to see it as a regular standard metropolis that happened to be within Israel’s borders. When I look at it now, I see it as an attempt by the early Zionists to reboot Jewish history by establishing a modern city in the land of Israel. This attempt was a huge success and that is why Tel Aviv is special to me.
There are two things that I learned from this experience. The first is that as much as I believe that I know Israel well, I will continue to be inspired and enlightened by new things. The second is the difference between looking and seeing. Two people or groups of people can look at the same thing but see totally different things. I am not just talking about Founders Square, but even something like the city of Tel Aviv as a whole. During conversations with many of the other Nachshon fellows I learned about what Tel Aviv meant to them. They had a lot of great things to say. All were different than me, but we were all looking at the same city all day. The semester has only just begun and I am looking forward to hearing all about different thoughts and perspectives to similar experiences I will encounter with my peers at the Nachshon Project.
