It’s the third day of the New Year and my “Resolution” checklist looks as follows (green = completed; red = failed) : 1) Make a New Years Resolution checklist
2) Stop eating hummus x
3) Do nightly push ups x
4) Accept Israeli culture as circumstance; embracing it without anger x
5) Uphold my New Years Resolution checklist x
#2 and #3 were easy ones to break. In fact, I broke them both less than a few hours into the New Year. Quite simply, after our New Years celebration I ate a falafel sandwich with hummus and then fell asleep for the night.
But these weren’t the important resolutions. The important resolution – the one that I really wanted to uphold – was #4: Accept Israeli culture as circumstance; embracing it without anger.
The following post is dedicated to my reason for breaking it…
I love culture, and I usually embrace it with open arms. But the culture I’ve experienced in the past has only been temporary. For instance, when I traveled to Europe, I only experienced different cultures for a few days at a time. Because I had no personal ties to them, I submerged myself in the good, and easily disregarded the bad. It's much easier this way.
Israel, however, is much different. I'm tied to the land both physically and spiritually. Living here, it’s hard to ignore the cultural differences that shape the way your day plays out. And it's often angersome. As a result, I made a resolution to view such differences as elements of circumstance only. I will accept both the good and the bad of Israeli culture as a byproduct of the actions its residents have grown to know. In other words, the Israeli way of life will not anger me because I'm going to accept it for just being the way it is. I will, in turn, embrace it as a learning mechanism to improve my own life.
At least, that was the idea...
To anybody who has ever been to Israel, it should not come to a surprise when I say that my hopes and dreams I planned on executing through Resolution #4 were completely shattered by the means of… Israeli drivers.
In an article from Drivers.com, the author writes: “By all accounts, driving in Israel is getting worse: more honking, rudeness, cutting in.” This quote was written in 2001. If the author were to describe driving in Israel today, I think his quote would simply say, “Fuck.”
It’s chaos. Drivers swerve in and out of lanes without signal. Bikers ride the shoulders and (wait for it…) the sidewalks to get ahead. Bus drivers have been known to hit cars and then just drive off. There is constant beeping, yelling and gesturing. It's like a highway chase scene from a Bruce Willis film.
As a result, road rage occurs, and when it does, this tends to happen:
A highway accident just outside Tel Aviv.The driving situation got so bad that the government had to implement a new stoplight. Before the light switches from red to green, it flashes yellow. The reason for this is because Israeli drivers got so anxious and impatient at stoplights that they began inching up during the red, falsely anticipating when exactly it would turn green. Drivers wound up blocking crosswalks and creating confusion with their prematurity. So the government gave drivers a yellow light to let them know when they could start inching up. But now this yellow light has essentially become their green light, making the situation just as problematic.
All in all, I don’t know what everyone is so impatient about. Israelis are perpetually tardy. So I guess there's something intriguing about rushing to be inevitably late.
Anyway, I thankfully don’t drive. But I do take the buses. And the same people who drive these buses, at one point, grew up driving cars.
So my friend and I were coming home from the basketball courts. There is pretty much only one bus that takes us to and from the basketball courts: Bus 48. Bus 48 NEVER seems to come. It’s the ghost bus. When I don’t need it, I see Bus 48 every 10-15 minutes. But when I do, I find myself waiting 45+ minutes.
So on the way back from the courts, we see Bus 48 stopped in the distance. It’s at the bus stop, and we just might be able to make it. We start running toward it. It finishes loading the passengers, and begins to take off. It makes it less than 5 feet from the bus stop when it hits a red light. We caught a break. If the light was green, Bus 48 would have driven away, and we would sit waiting for an unpredictable amount of time. But G-d must have changed it to red. My friend had a study session to attend, and I had some hummus to eat.
We arrive at the doors of Bus 48. The bus driver looks at us, and then turns his head to the road. “Let us in,” we yell while knocking on the doors. The bus driver shakes his head “no.” Wait, what? What the hell is this? The bus stop is 5 feet back, and he’s stopped at a red light. In the amount of time he took to shake his head “no,” we could have hopped on and paid him. But instead, we stood screaming at him to let us on while he waited at the traffic light for another minute and a half. He drove away the second it turned green, leaving two helpless Americans behind.
Both of us returned to the bus stop, quite angry. I was trying desperately to keep my cool. “Why the hell couldn’t he just let us on?” we pondered. “In America, they would have,” my friend said. But this act alone wasn’t the thing that shattered Resolution #4. The nail in the coffin came with what happened next.
A very old woman was waiting for another numbered bus. Perhaps the 18? Maybe the 82? I don't remember, but I do remember that it wasn't the 48. She was waiting several feet away from the bus stop. She signaled to the bus driver that she needed to get on. The bus driver pulled over as quickly as he could, completely blocking the two lanes of traffic. It was very difficult for this woman to get on. She tried getting on, but couldn’t. She felt bad about holding up the bus, so signaled to him to go without her. But the bus driver didn’t leave. Instead, he inched closer to the curb, and waited patiently as myself, my friend and a random passerby now helped to lift this woman onto the bus. The light was green, and people were beeping ferociously at this man to move his bus. But instead of succumbing to all the external pressures, this driver did what was right.
With this kind deed my resolution was shattered. At this moment I became absolutely irate with the driver of Bus 48. I realized that him not letting us on the bus wasn’t because of a bus company policy. I quickly remembered that there were no rules when it comes to traffic. The rules were dictated by the drivers themselves. And if one man can do the right thing, then so can another.
I absolutely refused to embrace this impatient, “every man for himself” Israeli mentality when it comes to certain elements of their culture, most notably driving. I couldn’t embrace this cultural occurrence without growing angry because I realized that it could have been prevented. This goes for any culture and any situation. Sometimes we feel as if we’re restricted by cultural circumstance and therefore accept cultural wrongs as rights. But this is not the case. We need to learn how to embrace culture in order to change circumstance. We can directly affect the actions that occur around us by utilizing the power from our differences. And I realized all this from a bus driver without a face.
As I mentioned, when the bus driver blocked the road people began to beep ferociously. However, when they realized that this man was blocking the road to help an old lady, the beeping stopped. Sometimes you can’t always see the good that’s being masked by the seemingly bad. And change is very much possible, even in a place as stubborn as Israel. Patience is what’s needed to gain that enlightenment.
The kind-hearted bus driver of bus 18? 82? assisted in the breaking of an old Resolution #4, and the formation of a new. So let me introduce to you my New New Year’s Resolution checklist:
1) Wish bROke eNgLisH readers a very happy and healthy 2010
2) Eat more hummus
3) Think about doing nightly push ups
4) Ignite change by becoming the kind-hearted bus driver deserved by Bus 48 (In good time…)
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