When they arrive at the squat school building, Yoni can’t even make it to the gate without being greeted several times. He jokes around with the guard, and they enter. The yard is full of children, happy and wild. One of them, maybe six years old, climbs up a short wall to be at the same height as a grown-up. “Yoni!” he yells, and raises his hand. Yoni high-five hims, and he and Aaron keep walking.
“I don’t know who that kid is,” he tells Aaron quietly. “But it doesn’t matter. Though this one,” he continues, pointing at someone ahead of them, “is really something. You’ll love him.”
Aaron sees a blue-eyed guy, maybe twenty years old, with curly brown hair and a piercing that goes through his ear in two places, dressed in a loose white shirt like westerners wear in india. He walks over to them and greets Yoni with a broad smile.
“This is my nephew,” Yoni proudly introduces Aaron. “He’s also a philosopher; you’ll have a lot to talk about.”
“A philosopher, eh?” the guy says with a sneer. “Who’s your favorite?”
“Lao Tze,” Aaron answers effortlessly.
“One of those, eh? Mine’s Wittgenstein.”
“Never dove deep into Wittgenstein, but there’s one sentence I remember: ‘I do not know why it is that we are, but I’m pretty sure it is not in order to have a good time.’”
Uncle Yoni smiles, as if he were watching two dogs sniff each other’s rears.
The philosopher runs his fingers through his hair. “Well, yeah, but that’s not the majority of the work. I enjoy his work the most, but everything I read goes back to Kant, to the basic perception of reality, namely, which conceptions we learn from the world and which come prepared.”
“I only read, um, Prolegomena-”
“Prolegomena to Any Future Metaphysics That Will Be Able to Be Called a Science,” the philosopher says sharply, apparently delighting in his own excellent memory. It’s not the correct title.
Aaron laughs. “That’s so Kant, using the most try-hard name he could find.”
“Try-hard or not, he mapped reality like no one before or after.”
“Yeah, that part was really cool. Did you read the rest of his work, the stuff about morality?”
“Nah.” The philosopher shakes his head. His blue eyes glisten in the light of the sun that just came out of the clouds. “I’m not really interested in morality.”
“Stand-up guy, no?” Yoni says after they bid him farewell and descend a flight of stairs towards another part of the school. “He missed a whole year of school, I think tenth, and when he got back they told him: you missed a year, do three points1. By pure chance he had me for three private lessons. Right from the first one I told him no way you’re doing three points. You’re going to do five points2, and don’t let anyone mess with your head. Here’s the workbook, sit down and study and in two weeks you’ll be in the class doing five points. Guess what degree he just signed up for?”
“Math?”
“Math and something else, philosophy, hell if I know. And it was all luck. If I hadn’t been here he’d have a useless diploma because somebody thought they knew everything.”
Yoni can say these things without a hint of pride in his voice. He just expresses the rational acknowledgement that a lot of idiots make mistakes in their work, and he’ll prevent them from doing damage however he can, as much as he can.
They wander the school, looking for the new math teacher. Aaron is impressed by the warmth and admiration with which every teacher greets Yoni.
At last they find the optometrist. He’s bald, dressed in gym clothes, moving at something between a walk and a jog, and he gives off the impression that he’s been moving at that pace for a while. Yoni calls his name. “Finally, we found you!”
“Oh, you’re Yoni. Sorry, I don’t know if we can sit down: there’s a staff meeting at one and I still don’t understand where it’s supposed to be.” It’s now twelve-twenty.
“Then let’s sit down for as long as you’re free.”
The optometrist argues, and Yoni understands that the optometrist thinks there’s an authority higher than Yoni. He cuts that Gordian Knot by approaching said authority, an overweight woman with thick glasses moving with the same urgency as the optometrist, who answers to the title principal, as she’s speeding down the hall. She stops her seemingly perpetual motion, and Yoni asks her, slowly and precisely, to borrow the new teacher until the staff meeting.
“Sure, Yoni: you shouldn’t even ask.”
The three of them look for a place to sit. When Aaron presents himself as a former student of Yoni’s, Yoni nods approvingly. It’s not a lie, and it will make Yoni more credible if he recommends Aaron as a teacher. They find a room with a table and two towers of plastic and metal chairs. Yoni’s gaze lingers on the sink, the electric kettle, and jars with coffee and tea. “Well, all sorts of people are going to come and bother us, but it doesn’t matter. Let’s see what we can do.” He sits at the table and draws his laptop from his bag, opens it up, looks for the relevant material. The optometrist takes the remaining chair, and sits shoulder to shoulder with Yoni, while Aaron picks up a chair from one of the towers and sits behind them, observing, as Yoni presents his program.
I could write a whole chapter about this program, but this isn’t what this text is about. The driving principle, the schtick, is that the students can progress on their own. It’s divided into workbooks, each one with very little text. Text, any text, confuses young students, so Yoni focuses on the exercises themselves. Each one is a tiny step up from the last one. A student who solved the last exercise can understand on their own how to solve the current one without any written instructions. More than that, students don’t even need to work on the same workbook at the same time—when different students advance in different workbooks, it makes it harder to measure who’s advancing faster. According to Yoni, this is very helpful to the weaker students.
“So I explain every exercise to them?” asks the optometrist.
“No,” Yoni says. “That’s exactly what I’m saying. You can’t explain everything to them, and you don’t need to.”
A woman Aaron assumes is a teacher opens the door, apologizes to Yoni, says she needs the new teacher for the staff meeting. The new teacher apologizes, and asks Yoni to meet later.
“We’ll see,” Yoni says, and Aaron sees his fuse is on the verge of blowing. The teachers evacuate the room at their fast-forward pace. Yoni takes a deep breath, releases it, turns to Aaron. “Yalla, should we get some food from the kitchen?”
They leave the school and Yoni takes them on a short drive to a squat building where refugees, all with black yarmulkas and traditional garb, are waiting in line to get food. Yoni and Aaron enter through the back door into the kitchen. The cook, a man with a heavy Yemenite accent, opens his mouth to shout why are you here, and stops. “Oh, how’s it going, Yoni?”
“Perfectly fine; I’m just coming to have lunch, if that’s OK?”
“Sure, sure, I’ll make you a tray.”
He goes from the kitchen to the cafeteria-like space, where packaged meals are set on a long counter. He returns a moment later with a disposable aluminum tray with a glossy cardboard lid, containing one schnitzel and two meatballs.
Yoni’s expression is one of true discomfort as he asks, “Could I have another portion?”
He doesn’t make excuses. He doesn’t say that he’s here with his nephew, that he’s having guests over, that he doesn’t have the money to buy meat for himself. He just asks.
“Sure, Yoni,” the cook says, takes the tray, and returns it so full the lid won’t close.
They go to the adjacent building and say hi to two men at a table. One is wearing a button-down and the other is in uniform, an assault rifle thrown over his shoulder. They’re both in knit yarmulkas.
Yoni greets the soldier and shakes the hand of the civilian, greeting him by name. He greets Yoni too, but less enthusiastically than the teachers and children they met along the way.
They continue to the next station. “This guy,” Yoni tells Aaron, “is running for mayor. He’s alright, but there’re all sorts of extremists behind him. Well, alright.”
Aaron isn’t sure it’s alright.
“So,” Yoni asks. “What do you think about this teacher we saw? Should we take him? He used to be an optometrist, he should have the necessary math background.”
Aaron tilts his hand from side to side, as if to say, ‘not so much’. “He’s unfocused. Says the same thing too many times. You don’t need to be an optometrist to teach long division: you need to understand what problem is stopping the student from learning and solve it. I don’t think he’s going to be good.”
“Well, we’ll see if there’s anyone else. If not, it’s not really relevant what we think. You wanna see The Camel?”
“What camel?”
Yoni drives him to the edge of the settlement, to a hill that from a certain angle looks like a sitting camel. They climb the old stone stairs, holding onto the new and painted iron railing, and Aaron almost doesn’t have to wait for the old man. At the top, they look down at the great hole in the ground called Makhtesh Ramon, and talk about the unique geological phenomenon this place is, in a land where for some reason everything has to be unique. About the fact that even English speaking geologists use the Hebrew word for crater (makhtesh) to describe this scar upon the earth that was caused not by impact but by water that was there and is no more. Yoni recalls how he took his grandson, the same nephew who told Aaron that he bled terrorists, to the very same hill, when he was a child. “He said he wanted to pee, so I told him no problem, take out your peepee and pee, right through the fence, so he pissed on the camel’s head.” He laughs that unique, careless laughter only grandparents seem to be capable of.
They dismount the camel and go to the edge of the Makhtesh itself, so close Aaron can feel that shiver in his legs, hear the call. Jutting out over the edge is an observation balcony, a sort of wooden raft held in place with metal cables and beams. Yoni and Aaron stand on its edge, feel the wind rushing vertically, as if trying to pick them up and raise them to the sky.
“A good friend of mine died here,” Yoni says. “He loved paragliding. He must have lost control and crashed onto those rocks. The first time he lost control, I had to drive the car under the cliff to get him to the hospital. He had a concussion; he was confused, talked nonsense. He really loved it. Dying doing something you love—maybe that’s also alright.”
Aaron looks down at the cliff below them, sees a swallow hunting for bugs hiding in the shade, and quietly agrees. Safe from the edge of the cliff, somebody is jogging in running clothes. He’s got long, curly hair, the kind you only let grow wild when you’re young. Aaron thinks he could be someone here, that he could teach, become part of this community. People would know him, greet him. He’d feel how every bit of effort he put into his work went to building the foundations of a better life for a certain person, even if that person was now a child. Especially if.
“Shall we go get some vegetables?”
When Yoni drives the car into the supermarket parking lot, a car on its way out stops and blocks them. Yoni opens the window. “Will you get out of the way?”
The window on the driver’s side opens. “For you? I’m not moving a millimeter.”
“Ah, it’s you! I didn’t recognize the car!” Yoni yells at the driver, and Aaron recognizes the cook from before. “How come you drive such a fine car, and I’m in this old wreck?” The cook’s car does look luxurious.
“Because you save all of your money,” the cook answers.
They laugh, and Yoni parks the car. “Say,” he says. “Did you see that show—what was it called… Northern Exposure?”
“Yeah,” Aaron says, remembering it fondly.
“That could be you.”
They buy fifteen shekels’3 worth of vegetables, enough for one lunch, and return to Yoni’s house, where they eat and plan their next move. There’s a concert planned, by some Israeli singer, on the lawn behind the public library, right by the bus station. They agree to go there for the concert, afterwhich Aaron will take the bus to meet Ya’akov.
Yoni drives him there, his car loaded down with piles of books that Aaron’s father loaned him the last time they met. They arrive at the lawn a little after the show’s over, which works fine for Aaron. They wander through the people, Yoni collecting more handshakes and pats on the back. The people here are hippies, with loose clothes and hair long in some places and shaved in others. A circle of barefoot jugglers throw balls and hoops and plastic clubs into the air. When the hippie women hug they put their heads on each other’s shoulders, nestle into one another. Aaron estimates that about half of the couples are polyamorous at any given moment.
“Do you see that?” Yoni says. “We usually don’t have that kind of stuff here but because of the war, because of the refugees here, all sorts of artists have come to show support. It’s like a party.”
Indeed it is, Aaron thinks. They understand that there’s a long wait until the next concert, so in the meantime they take the books from the car. Yoni insists on carrying half. They cross the road, the piles leaning against their chests, and enter the squat building. The library is pleasant, designed with great care. The children’s corner has a little igloo made of old books, with a reading lamp inside and even windows. Behind the counter sits a man with a knit yarmulka and long payot. “Ah, Yoni,” the librarian says, neither cooly nor warmly. “How’s it going?”
“Perfectly fine, Shmuel. We’ve brought a pile of books for you, if you’re willing to take them.”
“I can take what I’ve read for myself,” he says. “I can’t let the children read something I haven’t vetted.”
“So can you go through them and tell which ones you know, and I’ll take the rest to Illana?”
Illana, Aaron remembers vaguely, is the owner of the other, secular library.
“No need,” says the religious librarian in a show of solidarity. “Leave them with me; I’ll make sure the ones I don’t want get to her.”
Yoni thanks him and bids him farewell, while Aaron takes a picture of the igloo to send to his book-loving friends.
“Do you see how it is here?” Yoni says. “Everybody wants to help.”
Aaron nods, but he’s not sure about that. If a man saves his own flock from poison, but helps deliver it to kids who aren’t his responsibility, there has to a more complicated thought there than a simple desire to help.
“When’s your bus?”
Aaron peeks at his phone and sees that the answer is soon.
As they wait at the station together, Yoni points at a single crow as it lands on top of a palm tree. “What do you think he’s thinking about, Aaron? Perhaps where to find food, perhaps where everybody went. We think they’re stupid, but maybe they’re capable of much more complicated thought than we give them credit for.”
Science has already proven that yes, crows indeed live in a complex cognitive world. It isn’t the accuracy of the claim that’s important, though, but the fact that Yoni looks around and tries to understand what forms of thought exist. That he tries to see intelligence where others would see stupidity, and tries to figure out how to approach and harness it. That is the secret of art.
Lao Dze claimed to only have three treasures: Simplicity, patience, and compassion. Aaron wonders if he and Yoni would have gotten along.
NEXT: Lovers
Aaron Benelli 
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