When I was in elementary school, more decades ago than I care to admit, my family lived for two years in Tel Aviv. We were new immigrants from the former Soviet Union, part of the mass exodus that managed to make it out right before that shaky behemoth’s collapse. Eager to explore our new home, every Saturday morning the four of us went for a long family walk from our rented apartment in the part of town immediately adjacent to Suk Carmel (eerily quiet and empty on the Sabbath) to the much older and historic part of the city—Jaffa.
Finding simple human kindness across cultures amid the chaos of history makes for more than a great story. It generates hope.
By Bret Lott
(Slant Books, 2024)
It was there that, millennia earlier, the rogue prophet Jonah boarded a boat to run away from God. But modern Jaffa for me is associated, first and foremost, with the best fresh-baked pita bread I’ve ever tasted in my life, courtesy of the legendary Abouelafia Bakery—a locally (and beyond) renowned institution that for nearly a century and a half (it opened in 1879!) has been bringing together Arabs, Jews, and Christians over such delicious goodness as baked pitas with toppings of all kinds, baklava, countless types of cookies appropriate for every weekday and season and holiday, and those massive soft bagels that one eats dipped in olive oil and loads of za’atar. Adjusting well to modernity’s demands, Abouelafia is now on Instagram and Facebook—offering snapshots of people stuffing their faces with cheesy goodness (oh, how I wish I were them!), and promising in Hebrew to deliver “the taste of the garden of Eden.” This may sound a bit over the top, but I promise you, they’re not lying.
Abouelafia, in retrospect, had another thing going for it, beyond its delicious goods. Put simply, we stopped by there every Saturday not just because it was delicious and reasonably priced but because it was open. In a country where, at least during my childhood, grocery stores and most eateries were closed from sundown on Friday to sundown on Saturday, an Arab-run bakery had the Sabbath market cornered. But its accepted—and much-loved—existence right next door to trendy, modern Tel Aviv also reminds of the presence of Arab Israelis in the country, living and working peacefully and joyfully side by side with their Jewish neighbors. Pretty boring stuff—nothing that would ever make the news.
Abouelafia never comes up in Bret Lott’s beautiful new memoir of experiencing Israel, Gather the Olives: On Food and Hope and the Holy Land. But stories of many places and businesses that reminded me of Abouelafia populate this book, which one should not read on an empty stomach. Lott’s experiences around different food and drink serve as the gateway into exploring Israel, a country so dear to the author because of his Christian faith. Israel seems familiar to him, as its many place names conjure recognizable biblical connections to his mind—and yet so strange and foreign at the same time, as he realizes once actually on the ground.
Jonah’s Jaffa is long gone; only the name remains. And an American-style baseball diamond now stands in Beit Shemesh, not far from where the ark of God came back to Israel in 1 Samuel 6. Nazareth, Jesus’s hometown, is a modern city crowded with apartment buildings. The new in Israel seems to squeeze out the old on the visible surface, but never fully. As a result, Lott repeatedly finds himself dwelling simultaneously in multiple worlds and places, a reality perhaps unavoidable in Israel, with its remarkably lengthy history. Cars in Jerusalem drive over streets better acquainted with horse-drawn carts. Places with a history harking back to the days of Jesus—streets on which Jesus walked—have modern kiosks selling sparkling water, newspapers, and tourist souvenirs.
But the food is a link—so many of the staples are still just the same as in the time of Jesus. The ubiquitous different sorts of fresh-baked breads, the wondrous cheeses, chickpeas in all forms, and then, of course, the olives. They are grown on trees in the countryside or in the middle of the city, then brined for eating whole or crushed to make oil for cooking or for seasoning salads or dipping bread. Olives are the taste of the Mediterranean par excellence. More than a basic food staple, they are a symbol of the one good that has been elusive for Israel in all its history—peace.
Gather the Olives is a collection of vignettes, each essay using a particular food as a jumping-off point for telling a larger story that goes in unexpected directions; Lott’s reflections are never facile. Three interludes interspersed throughout consider “What to Drink.” While the narrative ranges all over Israel, tracing Lott’s travels over various trips over the years, there is a special preference for Jerusalem, the city where Lott has lived for months at a time while teaching and writing—and, on one occasion, looking to satisfy a craving for bacon, even while living in the land of kashrut. No worries; he found a supplier. It’s quite a story.
But then, perhaps none of this should surprise us. Every food, no matter how ordinary, has a story, Lott is convinced. You just must know how to tell it. And the key to telling each of these food stories lies in people—the ones who lovingly grow the food, prepare it, serve it, and teach unfamiliar visitors how to take delight in it, if they have never experienced it before. To live in community with other people, to see them fully, to get to know them as they really are—the sharing of food is integral for all this today, just as it was for Jesus’ ministry and throughout the history of Christianity.
Feasts are made for sharing, not for enjoying all alone, although in the opening essay of the book, “First Morning,” Lott tells about his breakfast at a hotel buffet alone. His overnight flight landed in the middle of the night, so here he is, awake and ready for breakfast before anyone else, except a kind quiet waiter. The spread of food for this breakfast overwhelms Lott—so much goodness and beauty, and all for him? A welcome unlike any other.
Every food, no matter how ordinary, has a story.
The concept of firsts is, of course, significant theologically. We think of creation: the first morning that God made, and the successive mornings of creation, day by day. After creating day and night, God made plants, then fish and fowl, then animals, and finally, the culmination of all creation—people, God’s own image bearers.
But seeing people, especially people one doesn’t know and from a different culture—and in a country where one doesn’t speak the language—is not easy. This is the point that Lott gets to in a chapter about his favorite coffee that he discovered in Israel: café hafuch, the upside-down cappuccino (the steamed milk goes in first and the espresso added later, instead of the other way around). He tells a story of being in a coffee shop, a nice café hafuch next to him at the table, working on a novel (a year overdue), and finding himself increasingly more annoyed with a loud-talking couple at the next table. How inconsiderate of them to choose the table right next to his own!
The mise-en-scène readily recalls Paul Ehrlich’s The Population Bomb, the angry 1968 manifesto against reproduction and all loud and inconvenient people. Visiting India, Ehrlich was appalled by seeing so many people everywhere, he felt crowded by their presence, bothered by their noise. His response was to write a book against the very idea of people, offering his very modern longing for the undoing of God’s creation.
Of course, this is not where Lott ends up because of his own experience with loud neighbors in a coffee shop. Instead, an unexpected event leads Lott to see the people around him that morning in a new light. While he is seething inside over his inability to work, he is humbled when the loud woman from the table next to his own sees something he missed: a little girl whose stuffie got trapped in the coffee shop’s door without her mother noticing. Jumping up from her table, the woman helps the child. This deviation from the expected routine shakes Lott out of his annoyance and forces him to focus on people. It is easy to love one’s friends. And Jesus teaches us to love our enemies. But what about just these ordinary multitudes, neither friends nor enemies, but just people whose paths cross ours every day?
And so, in this story, the delicious coffee—and the coffee shop—quickly takes a backseat to the story of people, flesh and blood, going about their day, annoying each other, but also learning to see Christ in others in small ways. There is so much sorrow in the world, we say. But, story after story, Lott shows that there is so much kindness, too.
Indeed, the kindness that Lott, an American and a Christian, got to experience may be of a sort that Israelis do not see in full. When I lived in Israel, my family never went to Ramallah or Bethlehem—we had no reason to, and it wasn’t considered safe. Nor did we ever make it to the legendary site of Petra, “ha-sela ha-adom” (the red rock), in modern-day Jordan, once the stunning capital of the ancient Nabataean kingdom. Of this ancient city, my middle school history teacher spoke in a longing whisper when she told us of the escapades by Israelis over the years, who crossed the desert border by night, evading border security and risking life and limb, all to see this stunning site. It was, to these adventurers, worth it, as a wistful popular song insists.
The kindness that Lott, an American and a Christian, got to experience may be of a sort Israelis do not see in full.
But to all these places Lott was able to go without any serious complications. While he reports feelings of stress and occasional concerns over his safety, they proved vain in the end. Instead, in every place, kind people—Israelis and Arabs—make his safety a top priority and feed him delicious food time and time again. On both sides, ordinary people crave relationships, friendships, peace.
That is why in an essay about a road trip that included a brief stop picking cherries at the Golan Heights, best known in Israel for the regular shelling they receive from Lebanon and Syria—these mountains are just close enough for anyone to hit from across the border—an unexpected story comes up, instead, about a hospital in Tzfat, which found itself faced with a different mission. When in 2013, during a civil war in Syria, an Israeli border patrol came across seven critically wounded Syrian soldiers just across the wire border fence, they brought them in, first to an army triage station and then to this ordinary Israeli hospital. “From then on Syrian soldiers began trickling in to the hospital, left at the border—at that wire—one, and another, and more. Then Syrian citizens began to appear in the night, injured—a girl and her mother with shrapnel wounds, a boy nearly dead for a bomb explosion—and seeking to be taken care of by Israelis. So far, on this day we are visiting, 470 Syrians have been treated. All but five survived and have been returned to their country.” Why do we hear stories of hatred, Lott wonders as he listens to a doctor tell of his work with these patients, while stories of love and care remain hidden?
Through stories like these, Lott repeatedly finds human kindness dominate on the ground among ordinary people living next to each other, whether separated by a border or a language or both. Yet they know they live under a heavy cloud. A longing for peace haunts this book.
It was an olive branch that the dove brought to Noah at the conclusion of the Flood, a symbol of God’s peace with mankind restored. Yet that peace didn’t last. But this book is haunted by a peace most recently disrupted, the shadow of October 7, 2023, falling thickly on these stories that Lott completed months before that date.
The reader cannot avoid this haunting. Yet perhaps this is also what makes the book so needed, not just in some abstract moment, but right now. To read it now—to have published it after October 7—feels unavoidably political, both Slant Books and Lott himself have remarked, as they briefly discussed the possibility, initially, of simply canceling the book’s publication. I’m glad they didn’t.
