I enter her in sackcloth and ashes. Literally ashes. I disembark with my hand covered in ashes. I searched the garbage can for my boarding pass, without which they won’t let me off the ferry boat. As the boat swung into the harbor, my own hand betrayed me. I cleaned stale bread and warm cheese off the table, sweeping up the boarding pass along with apple cores and cigarette stubs, tossing everything nonchalantly into the garbage can. My eyes misted over as the engines steered us towards land: Holy Land, the Promised Land. My inner state of jubilation was tinged with anxiety. I was not paying attention to anything else.

I am not Jewish but I caught a yearning to be in the Holy Land from books.The Diary of Anne Frank andNight by Elie Wiesel opened my mind to the horrors of the Holocaust. Later, the works of Chaim Potok, Sholom Aleichem, and I.L. Peretz gave me a window into Jewish culture. I had studied some Hebrew and a bit of Torah. I wasn’t fluent but I could cross-reference words and I could imagine the painstaking scholarship that comprised the backbone of spiritual life in the shetl. My best friend in high school was Jewish and I loved the atmosphere of sophisticated intellectual discourse in her home. And then I discovered Golda Meir and Menachen Begin’s autobiographies. I tried to imagine the mountains of Judea, the Sea of Galilee, the gates of Jerusalem, and the self-sacrificing work of the pioneers to coax the land back to life. Something about the fight for freedom, the struggle to return to the Jewish homeland started a blaze in me. Maybe because I felt rootless. Drifting from one place to the next, without a destination or a sense of my own heritage. So I adopted the Jewish one and set sail for the Holy Land.

Outwardly poised as someone who has crossed many borders must learn to be, my hand betrayed my inner trembling. I have little money and I know the requirements for entering the country are strict. The Israelis deal daily with Christian fanatics and Moslem terrorists and are alert to liars, crazies and trouble-makers. The lies I tell must be based on the truth. This imaginary conversation goes on in my head: “Purpose of your visit?”

“The Holy Land is calling me in my journey to know God…”

No, no, no. The harbor officials are secular flesh-and-blood authorities in uniform. Even though they are apologetic about sending me back to retrieve my boarding pass, it does nothing to ease the tightness in the back of my throat. I have heard that Israelis are tough, the hardest to pull the wool over their eyes.

For the last two years, I have been traveling with my best friend, her daughter and my son, hitch-hiking in Mexico and across Europe dependent on the kindness of strangers, proclaiming that God loves us all. We even connected to a Messianic spiritual group in the States for a time, before cutting those ties as well, too many rules and restrictions. Before that, a stint in a half-way house and another in a homeless shelter, taking care of household chores. We are flower children, peace-niks with a map to the center of the world, the center we have defined, where we are all children of God. I hide my cross inside a small box of nibs for my calligraphy pen. Maybe the Israelis won’t tear my bagapart.

The boarding had commenced with a wad ofdeu