Day 1 The Human Language

I have been on a couple long distance flights, but never one this friendly.

I had company when boarding the plane. She was a well-travelled, retired, recently widowed business woman, flying to her second home for the first time since the pandemic, to attend a wedding. “Come by my seat to visit if you are bored!” She said as I moved further back to my own seat.

My first reaction was horror when I saw who I was seated next to: a young boy spewing Hebrew as his baby sister screamed in his mother’s lap. This is going to be a long 10 hours, I thought to myself. My expression must have betrayed me as a received an apologetic smile from the mother, just as I spotted another young family of three kids to my right…and yet another screaming baby further back. I sat down in resignation, not knowing that by the time I left the flight, it has became my favourite.

The flight reminded me of my coach ride home to vote in 2018 - there was a single mindedness and a camaraderie among everybody on the trip. As different as I look, I was enfolded into that camaraderie. I picked up bottles and played with baby Evie. I watched in admiration as young couples took turns to sleep or feed or comfort their restless children. The older kids entertained each other or was sent to dispose diapers or fetch hot water. I smiled as a mother joined her daughter in colouring, looking like an older kid herself. By the end of the flight she and her two-year-old were passing a piece of jelly candy back and forth. I laughed as the mother explained that she was trying to bribe her baby but this works too. I slept. I saw Dune and an Israeli movie called Harmonia. I ate in peace, all whilst surrounded by the largest and most well-behaved brood of kids I have seen on a flight.

The border agent was amused that the Malaysian passport-holder lives in Canada and has a Hebrew name. The lady at the washroom asked me in Hebrew and hand gestures where the soap is. We proceeded to have a conversation over the overly sleek interior design and laughed, all the while not understanding a single word the other had said. The bus driver gave me free ride cos I couldn’t find the Rav-Kav dispenser. The gatekeeper Jamal gave me a car ride up the hill because he thinks my luggages look heavier than me. I was immediately fed upon arrival. And I learned that I would be saying “shukran” more than “toda” because almost all the people here at Tantur are Arabs.

My brains spontaneously shut down right after I unpacked, so I missed afternoon prayer and dinner just as my hostess warned that I might. I rebooted before dawn.

As I began writing this, the sound of the first azan call rose from across the visible West Bank Wall. It started with a single voice drawing a slow, long drawn melody done entirely in minor, which was answered with canine barks in the distance. That single voice was soon joined by others and they rose into a medley of choruses and echoes in jumbled words. They swelled and waned. Then suddenly, everyone randomly landed altogether on a last chord of melancholic dissonance. The azan call from back home, while also always a minor key, had feeling of resolution at the end. Here, the azan chorus from a little distance sounded to me like the chorus of an ongoing lament.

Shortly after, the singing of birds took over the soundscape. I climbed back into bed thinking, I wonder what it sounded like when Jesus was here?