Pros of taking a very short trip to Israel for your cousin’s bar mitzvah:
1. You will be very proud of your cousin.
2. You will be able to make up with a branch of your family that you recently offended.
3. You will learn that the prison in Akko where your grandfather was imprisoned for plotting to overthrow the British Mandate in Palestine has, in the 22 years since you last saw it, been much further excavated and that what you remember as kind of a boring building is now part of an astonishing archaeological record of a city from the middle of the 12th century, when the Crusaders took it from the Muslims as second prize when they realized they weren’t man enough to take Jerusalem, through the late 13th century, when the Mameluks took it from the Crusaders, filled it with rubble, and built another city on top of it that lasted until it was destroyed by the Ottomans in the early 16th century, through the 1950s, at which point people started to realized what they were living on top of, and seeing your family in the context of a millennium of oppression and empire will blow your fucking mind.
Actually, I think I’ll leave the cons for tomorrow.
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