A visit to Jerusalem and Yavne

For the final weekend of my vacation from Berlitz, we arranged to visit our friends, Shaul, Omri, Yasmin, and Shirli in Jerusalem. I met Shaul through Facebook, and his 12-year-old son, Omri, is interested in snakes. We had visited them once before, and they have visited us a time or two.

One purpose of this trip was to take one of our male snakes (Gur) to Omri to breed a couple of his females in the Spring. Of course, Omri was very excited about this, and we also answered his many questions about breeding snakes, since this will be his first experience.

Another reason for the visit was so that they could take us to בית חיות Beit Chayot ("Animal House"), a place just north of Yavne, where they raise and sell many kinds of animals, including, of course, snakes. It was a very interesting visit, and the proprietor, Shimon, was very friendly. He has quite a diverse variety of snakes, including a number of morphs of corn snakes.

In order to get to there, we drove through the city of Yavne, which we had never visited before. Shaul assured us that there would normally have been a lot of traffic there on a Friday, but there was hardly any this time, since several Hamas rockets had fallen in the vicinity. We saw none nor any evidence of them during the short time that we were there, however. By the way, Yavne was once the center of the Jewish world, after the Jews were exiled from Jerusalem following its destruction and the destruction of the 2nd temple. For quite a few years, Yavne was the seat of the Sanhedrin.

On Friday night, we went to prayers at כל הנשמה Kol HaNeshamah ("The Whole Soul" or "All Souls"), a large Reform synagogue in Jerusalem that I had visited once before, when I came to Israel in the summer of 2005, but which David had never attended before. The prayers were led by a woman rather than the rabbi because he had recently been diagnosed with some kind of cancer and had had surgery. She did a great job, and the prayers had a restful feel to them, filled with רוח ruach ("spirit").

On Shabbat, we returned home. Normally, the shortest (and perhaps quickest) way to Jerusalem from here is through the Jordan Valley and past Jericho. On both directions of this trip, however, we avoided the Territories (areas under Israel's control but not formally considered part of Israel pending negotiations with the Palestinians), meaning that we traveled on Highway 6 instead. We even took highway 70 instead of highway 65 because the latter passes through an area (Um al-Fakhem) where many Arab-Israelis live. We knew that there had previously been some protests in some Arab-Israeli communities, and that these had at least once led to highway closures. We didn't want to get stuck somewhere for hours in case anything like that happened again!