1:11 PM


This is the first posting of a series that will document the journey I have travelled down since making aliyah six months ago.

I stepped off the plane in Ben Gurion Tel Aviv airport with not so much luggage. I had packed relatively lightly for this trip. I simply did not want to be weighed down so heavily by things. I wanted to be able to be relatively mobile. I wanted to feel free. So I under packed wherever I could. One of my oldest friends who also made aliyah a couple months before me greeted me at the reception area after baggage claim with a huge sign exclaiming "Welcome Home Gidding!!" What a wonderful way to come off of that flight.

After waiting a bit and catching up with Emmanuel, a taxi driver drove me all the way to my mother's apartment in Tsfat. He was quite a disillusioned fellow as it turns out; he seemed to be very discontent with life as a taxi driver. But he was a nice fellow, and we shared small talk and he showed me his taste in music the whole way up to Tsfat.

It was an emotionally heavy time to be in my mother's apartment. My step father was living there and he was hanging around the house day and night reading. He is suffering from Parkinson's and he can't really talk anymore. This was a difficult energy to be around in my first months after I had made aliyah. To add to that, my mother was in the process of wanting a divorce from him. So I was helping her cope with that emotionally and then eventually logistically; I cleaned his new apartment and helped choose the furniture for it. I moved all of his stuff in there with the help of Joseph our chef and Gary's caretaker. With all of that happening and the chaggim coming up, I was quite busy.

During a trip to a furniture warehouse for couches for Gary's new apartment,  I became intrigued by the owner of the place and asked him for a job. He told me to stop by after the chaggim and I could get started. I was quite excited to have something to do in this foreign place. So after the chaggim I began working.

What a job. I worked with a fellow named Motti. He had just retired after 30+ years in the IDF. He was a real hard ass but he was using army discipline in a warehouse that was falling apart. He wanted to turn the place around. We both worked for this guy Shimshon. He was the boss. He had this inventory warehouse that was just piles and piles of couches and chairs with no organization at all. I mean he literally had a warehouse that was piled high with random furniture which was covered in dust. He would bring people back there and sell them stuff. I learned later that his business was failing and that he was something of a crook. Either way, he was paying me minimum wage to do labor in that dusty warehouse. We built industrial shelving for the inventory and began to set up a showroom in there. Shimshon never showed an ounce of appreciation even though we were literally saving his inventory. He was a real dumb idiot thinking back on it. I was just happy to have something to do and somewhere to go.

One day, after a couple weeks of much labor, we were putting up this shelving. I was up on the second level, about 10 feet up in the air, laying down wood as a floor. I stepped on one of the pieces and it broke through. Miraculously, my arm caught the iron and broke my fall dangling me in mid air and then landing me safely on ground. I could've broke my head open it was incredibly dangerous. It was really a miracle. But I was off the books and this wasn't smart. I quit working for these guys that Monday. This was just ridiculous.

That was my first stint here in Tsfat.