In Jerusalem I aborted an attempt to get to someone’s house. The city was too packed. The buses and roads were at a standstill. There were detours and diversions. It was pointless to compete against the mass of superheroes, princesses and clowns that had arrived to party on the final day of Purim. The place was beautiful, but having spent enough time walking the closed off streets and parties, I decided to head back to Tel Aviv.

The train was also packed with princesses and superheroes. I asked someone to move their bag and sat next to a religious guy who was in the middle of an argument with a big guy from Haifa. They were shouting about politics and religion. After five minutes of them haranguing each other, other passengers admonished them to stop discussing politics. It was a festival, they remonstrated. The two bickerers begrudgingly sheathed their words back into the scabbards of their throats and shot silent daggers from their eyes. Their gefrunzled glances then roamed the carriage, searching for a sympathetic look of approval from a stranger who might adjudicate one of them the winner. Their eyes both settled on me. I didn’t even understand the Hebrew they’d been arguing. The train remained stationary on the platform and a French lady with her children began speaking in English to the strangers around her. She said her girl was learning Hebrew in an ulpan. They didn’t want to live in France anymore because of the situation. An old man with one arm said words of welcome to them. His prosthetic limb was harnessed at his shoulder and he had a hook for a hand. A small child dressed as a pirate looked up at him through the nook of his mother’s elbow. The French lady continued. She said she felt like they had to hide their Jewishness in France and she didn’t want her children to grow up like that. She said she wanted to live in Tel Aviv. Cliched jokes about the cost of living in Tel Aviv ensued. This small, banal ceasefire had been enough for the bickerers to tolerate and they started up again. They felt relief at not having to contain their words anymore and continued their dispute where they’d left off. No more talk of a chag from the other passengers, things had been loosened up enough in the carriage for others to join in. The man with one arm spoke angrily against the religious exemption from military service, waving his hook in the air as the child dressed as a pirate observed it gliding like a seagull. The one armed man spoke his words directly to the religious guy in Hebrew, but would then translate his speech in English to the French lady, trying to win her over and be her trusted guide in the chaos of Israeli society. The religious guy thumped his book with sun baked face and wild eyes that indignantly refused to yield any ground, his voice feeling entitled to fill the whole carriage with no inhibition. The train engine finally started and we were off. As the train left the station we emerged out into the hills of Jerusalem. The man with one arm pivoted from the argument to wax lyrical to the French lady about the trees and the greenery. “You don’t have this in Tel Aviv” he said. The French lady said it’s good to be able to argue but not to fight. The religious guy was now back at his book reading and singing to himself. The guy from Haifa was on his phone. I looked out the window at the rocks and brush on the terraced hills. There was the smell of someone eating chips on the train and I thought of the English seaside. The chips in Israel were good but occasionally I missed the fat proper chip shop chips and salt and vinegar. As we clicked along the religious guy turned to me and said “Why did we leave Mitzrayim? Why did we leave Mitzrayim?” He repeated it over and over to me. It was unclear if he was asking a question or expressing regret that we’d left Egypt. I mumbled some answer, knowing it was going to be a trick question. But my mumbled answer got lost as the three way argument started up again between the religious guy, the man from Haifa, and the dude with one arm. The religious guy got super animated and spoke across my face to the man with one arm sat across the aisle. Everyone was arguing in front of the French lady who seemed to be enjoying it and smiling at her children. Noise and spittle crossed back and forth across my face like cannonballs. “Oy v’voy” said the religious guy. “Oy v’voy” into my sore ear. I started to grow annoyed, trapped between this conflict. I felt myself wanting to remain aloof and focus on my journey, but gravity was dragging me into the chasm between the two sides. The child dressed as a pirate watched the one armed man quoting statistics about birth rates and demographics in Hebrew and then in English. The religious guy prodded his finger against letters in his open book. And then no word of a lie, something happened that I’ve never experienced before on the train. The carriage started jerking violently. It felt like a plane experiencing turbulence up in the sky. As they argued the train jerked left and right. It genuinely felt like it could derail. It actually made me anxious - half expecting a crash. I’d never experienced such precarious wobbling on a train before. As they argued and the train jerked, the guy from Haifa typed something into his phone and showed it to me. It was google translate. “My friend lost his hand fighting in 1973 and this is how he speaks to him.” The religious guy looked at the phone and then defiantly raised his own hand to show a severed thumb. I don’t know if an explanation was given for the absence of his thumb, but they continued to bicker as the carriage wobbled left and right. The train somehow managed to keep hurtling forward and I got to Haganah in the end - but it unnerved me the whole journey. I’m not scared of any Haman. I’m scared of what we can do to ourselves. I know there’s an answer for why we left Mitzrayim. But it can’t be to split like the Red Sea.