What interested me about Paran Moshav was the chance to meet Rotem, above, and his lovely family.  You see him in the entry to a building he and his wife designed and built, picking herbs for my tea.  A great welcome!

Beautiful work, instant empathy, immediate plans to try to get together in Israel or Maryland.  Lovely tea with equally lovely family.  Immediate sense of pleasure and abundance as you entered the community.  Instead of leaving me to get lost, spontaneous offer to come out and get me.  The gate, instead of being locked and requiring phone calls to security, was open.  A small thing, but my heart lifted as I saw it.

Moshavs, in case you didn’t know -- are community based and many aspects of life are shared, but each household is also a separate entity, and each has its own financial resources and responsibilities.  There’s more of a business flavor, and that’s probably why it worked so well for me.  Others might find the living community at Lotan so warm and welcoming that nothing else would matter.

Here are a couple more photos from Rotem’s project:

The fact is that the desert sands were warmed up for me by my visit with my new friend and his family, and it was a good thing because otherwise the drive back to Jerusalem would have been a little bleak and dark.  As it was, I could enjoy the drive up under a half moon.  I drank in the ghostly mountains to my left, and the surreal and luminous Dead Sea to my right.  I thought again about how I take an almost guilty pleasure in being alone with beauty. 

Across the Dead Sea, the hills of Jordan slept in the night.  Those wonderful distant and hazy red and purple mountain slopes from the daytime now revealed a scattering of settlements, lights flickering.  It was beautiful, though I was tired and anticipating a long flight leaving later that night.  But it was lovely and my “welcome CD” which came with the car and had been skipping all day suddenly roared into life and serenaded me with sweet and confident songs in Hebrew.

I don’t have photos from the night, but I do have some from the drive down which should give the feeling.  Just imagine that it’s late, you’re alone, and there’s moonlight and music.