We live in the town of Tiberias, which is below sea level (but not underwater, fortunately) and is a paradise nine months of the year, but can be a taste of hell in the two to three months of summer.
In Israel it is considered a city, but by international standards of population, with about 40,000 people, it is still a town. However, it has the energy of a much larger place—the energy of an active tourist city.
Stores are open, for example, on the main street, until ten at night and many stores don’t close for the "siesta" hours between one and four in the afternoon. There are places to get a cup of tea or coffee, or a pizza, falafel or shwarma (roasted lamb or turkey in pita), until twelve at night, and some places are open all night. There are take out and cafeteria style restaurants for a working man’s budget (our level), middle class restaurants with table clothes and attentive waiters, and tourist extravaganzas on the lakeshore of the Kinneret (Sea of Galilee).
As for entertainment, there are water parks and beaches and hot-springs spas, which mostly close early in the evening. Then there are various races, and other sporting events throughout the year. However, I’ve been wishing for someone to open a miniature golf center with a view of the lake, or someplace with shuffle-board or even ping pong. For the children there is only one merry-go-round, a computer game store, and in the summer lots of day camps.
Teenagers have some clubrooms but they seem to mostly hang around. In our neighborhood they hang around on the hood and the roof of our ancient Volvo. Our neighbors enjoy telling us that they tried to chase the kids off our car, and try to make us fell guilty about not bothering ourselves to get involved in this adult ‘sport’. My husband always explains that he doesn’t care if they sit all over the car, it is one car that is made to take a lot of abuse and that the kids need someplace to hang out anyway.
We are very, very slowly gathering material for a book on Tiberias, and I mean slowly for that is not in the cards for another few years. Not that much information is readily available on the history of the modern city. Recently a neighbor told us that in 1933 half the city washed into the lake in a flood and many people were drowned and many houses destroyed. This was the first that I had ever heard of the incident.
In Biblical times there was a city called Rakat more or less in this area. In the times of the Second Temple a city was founded called Tiberias, after the Roman Emperor Tiberius, by Herod Antipas. The remains of this ancient city are about half a kilometer south of the current city.
Two attempts were made to rebuild Tiberias, one by Dona Gracia and her nephew Yosef HaNasi, (or Prince Joseph) in 1564, but that attempt was not successful. The second re-founding was in the 18th century by Rabbi Chaim Abulafia, who promised that the city would not fall again, and built it to the north of the former city. Last summer, when the Hezbollah rockets were aimed at us, miraculously, most of them fell into the lake. While there were a few hits, they fell into unoccupied houses or apartments. The city did not fall.
Our city has the resting place of Rabbi Moses Ben Maimon, better known as Maimonides, and of Rabbi Akiva, one of the ten martyrs in the period following the destruction of the second Temple, and the graves of many other well known rabbis.
South of the city is the tomb of Rabbi Meir Baal HaNess (or the Miracle Worker Rabbi Meir). (He is an interesting figure, the descendent of the Roman royal house of his time and his unique story would make a very good movie, and we’ll hopefully get around to telling it someday.) Therefore, this city has quite a bit of spiritual "protection" or influence upstairs, which certainly came in handy last summer when our government was trusting in diplomacy and we had about two minutes warning of rocket attacks.
The cities of Tzfat and Kiryat Shmonah did not fare as well as we did, but most of the causalities there were buildings, not people. (Kiryat Shmonah had no real warning time, since the Hezbollah sat on the hills above it and lobbed shells right down on them in seconds.)
Tzfat, like Tiberias is one of the four Holy Cities of Israel (Jerusalem, Hebron, Tzfat and Tiberias) and also has its own spiritual "protection". It was the city of the Kabala awakening, and sits in view of the tomb of the Great Rabbi Shimon Bar Yochai (on an opposite hill top) the author the Holy Zohar (that was only published over a thousand five hundred years later—all that time it was passed on by a teacher to a disciple, on a one on one secret basis).
While there is much talk about kabala today, the knowledge of various super stars on this subject is similar to my knowledge of nuclear physics or higher mathematics like string theory. In short, what they think they know is a very, very superficial popularization of knowledge that stays hidden except for those few who are dedicated to learning it and ready spiritually to integrate what they learn.
We actually do know such a person, whose knowledge is put to good use in healing, healing on a level of the miraculous, and we’ll get around eventually to telling some of his story also. However, the next posting will probably be about the weird weather that seems to be our lot everywhere in the world.
