Lev and Jeremy unplugged

Ariela and Benjy are off in Egypt with Menachem, so Lev and I are holding down the fort here. Lev is a person of strange proclivities and I am not entirely sure it was wise to leave me under his supervision. Sometimes I question his judgement. His speech can be disjointed (I was relived when some friends showed us their son's hearing test -- perfectly normal -- which they had undertaken because he, too, is constantly saying "What?" What?"). "Do birds really know everything?" he asked me the other day, as if in reference to some previous conversation. Sometimes, his speech is whatever the opposite of disjointed is -- but weirdly so.
Two days ago he said, "Maybe you'll never die." I said I would die but I hoped it would be a long way off. Yesterday he told me he did not think I would die before Ariela and Benjy got back from Egypt. A child's loyalty is a little mercenary. He hopes I won't die, and if I have to would I at least stave it off until his mother, who knows how to buy things he likes to eat at the grocery store, comes back.
He mutters a lot.
Lev has clothing rules. Shirts cannot cover his pockets or his bum. Pants must be "softie" pants ie. sweats or fleece, preferably with pockets for putting all the weird treasures he finds with friends at school. I scored a huge parenting victory the other day by cutting the legs off an old pair of sweat pants which had too many holes in them to be acceptable anymore and presenting them as a new pair of shorts. "Softie pants with pockets!" he said with reverence and delight. You can see them in the picture. I don't think Benjy ever had such a strong tastes in clothes but maybe I have blocked it out. After all it makes the mornings more challenging.
I have been trying to find adventurous things for us to do so Lev won't be too sad about missing out on Egypt. We went to Hezekiah's Tunnel two days ago. Lev started complaining about getting car sick after thirty seconds (which explains why he was not invited on the twelve hour bus ride to Cairo.) "Ir David," is the name of the metastysizing archeological park where Hezekiah's tunnel is located. It is in Arab East Jerusalem, in Silwan three or four blocks from the walls of the Old City. It is run putatively by the Israeli National Parks Authority, but the work of digging in the site and managing it is subcontracted to a right-wing, religious private foundation (see one organization that is trying to draw attention to this). In some cases the excavations have been carried out under the homes of Palestinians, literally undermining their houses and often without permits. It has excited some controversy and in addition to seeing Hezekiah's Tunnel I wanted to see what the fuss was about. We went in and I bought tickets for Hezekiah's Tunnel and they had a 3D movie, so I figured we'd check that out too. In the meantime, Lev had a slushie. He asked me what flavor it was and I told him "red". Then we got our 3D glasses and watched the video which is called "Where it All Began" but should be called "Arabs? What Arabs?" since it is at some pains to ignore the fact that David's City is underneath a busy Arab neighbourhood. One sequence seemed particularly odd from an ideological perspective. At the end of the film, the narrator talks about how there are so many buildings from so many different historic periods in Jerusalem today and a fancy computer generated video shows a bunch of architectural landmarks. Given the bent of the movie, I didn't expect to see the Dome of the Rock or the American Colony hotel or anything like that but I was suprised by two things they did show. One was the King David Hotel. The King David is definitely a Jerusalem landmark. It is a beautiful building from the late twenties located right across from Lev's daycare. But what's weird is that the King David is perhaps most famous for is getting partially blown up by Jewish terrorists in 1946 when it was the headquarters of the British administration and military in Palestine, an attack which killed 91 people (the Irgun always claimed that they called to warn that an attack was imminent and that the building should be evacuated and that the call was ignored) not exactly an association you would want to make, I'd think. The other thing that jumped out was the way the Western Wall was presented. The Western Wall is the big kahuna of Jewish religious and nationalist iconography. Of course, it was notably shorn of its Golden Yarmulke, the Dome of the Rock, which is creepy, for sure, but no surpirse. But it was also presented as sort of second fiddle to Ir David, WHERE IT ALL BEGAN. It is pretty cheeky to put your Jewish monument standing higher (of course, it is actually quite a bit lower geographically) and glowing (?!) brighter that the Western Wall. I am curious if this reflects some subtle ideological rivalry that I am missing. Anyway, with both our slushy and our indoctrination finished we went down to Hezekiah's tunnel.
It is a hand-carved 500 something meter tunnel which brought water from the Gihon spring inside the city walls of Jerusalem during the time of the first temple built by King Hezekiah to ensure water supply in case of seige particualrly by the Assyrians. Water still runs along it from the spring and it is pitch black; a perfect place to take a four year-old. When we first went in the water was belly high on Lev and I had to pick him up and I thought there is no way I can shlepp him for forty minutes. But soon enough the water levelled off at about ankle depths. We trudged through the low narrow passage in the dim light of our flashlights and sang "Dark as the Dungeon" with great accoustics. It was fun although about ten minutes in Lev said "I want to go home." I pointed forward and said "Home is that way." He did great in the tunnel though he did tend to loose focus (amazing since all there is to do is walk and that only in one direction, but such is the power of a four year old).
When we got out of the tunnel we hiked up the steps back to the entrance which was longer than I had bargained for in the full heat of the day (the tunnel was great for a hot day, the walk back up the hill, not so much). The one good thing (or not depending on your take) is that as you walk back up the hill (shlepping a screaming 4 year-old) you get to see the amount of Jewish-Israeli settlement that has gone on as part of "Ir David," often on land/houses expropriated by the government from Palestinians. The film had boasted in a weirdly National-Geographic-sort-of-way about how Jews were now living once again where they had so long ago. Aside from the political piece of this settlement activity, which is meant to "Judaize" the eastern part of Jerusalem both as a nationalistic and religious enterprise and, practically, to ensure that the city will never be home to a Palestinian capital, it sounded from the video almost as if the settlers were caracals or ibex which had been reintroduced to their natural habitat. It seems to me indicitive of the way in which, when you view people strategically, as ideological assets rather than as individuals, you end up de-humanizing even "your own."
Finally, ruffled feathers smoothed, mine and Lev's, we got in a cab and headed home. Not quite Egypt, but plenty to think about.