• Prime Minister Netanyahu’s government still hopes to restore ties with Turkey, but not at the expense of apologizing for the treatment of the flotilla, after a U.N. panel stopped short of suggesting one. [Haaretz]

• Not that Israel is holding its breath. “This is part of the Islamization spreading there,” said one official. “Therefore, unfortunately, we won’t be returning to the golden era of our relations with the Turks in the near future.” [Ynet]

• The first rule of doing drugs during a Birthright trip is: don’t. But there are other rules should you choose to ignore that one. [Jewlicious]

• Judith Butler on Hannah Arendt on Adolf Eichmann. Surely this is of interest to some of you. [Guardian]

• One-time NBA baller Kenny Anderson will coach the team at a Jewish day school in Florida. [JTA/Jewish Journal]

Oh my God you can be Maccabi Tel Aviv in a video game!

So far tests on the unfinished product—which the developers say will be a small, inexpensive device resembling a stirrer that lights up discretely or sends a message to a cell phone if the drugs are present—have been 100 percent accurate.

According to reports, the device simply needs to be placed into a drink:

“The sensor works by picking up a bit of alcohol and mixing it with a patent chemical formula, which was also developed by Patolsky and Ioffe.

So far, the sensor can detect gamma-hydroxybutyric acid (GHB) and ketamine. The scientists want to develop the sensor to detect Rohypnol, commonly known as ‘roofies.’

The sensor never failed to detect the presence of the two drugs. It can be used several times until it detects a drug.”

However, some predict the device won’t find mainstream success—its sudden use might seem accusatory, say, on a date—while acknowledging the unpleasant reality that date rape can occur without the presence of drugs.

Has Your Drink Been Spiked? This Sensor Could Let You Know [International Business Times]
Date-rape drug detector tests for ketamine and GHB; Scientists call test ’100% accurate’ [NY Daily News]
A sensor that can detect date-rape drugs? [The Week]

He’s also 27. And he lives with his parents, Orthodox Jews, in Staten Island.

Braun’s squad allegedly shuffled in 110 tons of marijuana from Canada since 2007, channeling the drugs through the Akwesasne Native American reservations upstate. According to the Staten Island Advance, authorities seized $30,000 in cash and “drug ledgers for ‘hundreds’ of marijuana shipments” from Braun’s home. They also nabbed 16 cell phones from the young entrepreneur, who once owned a cell phone store in the borough.

Nearly 60 members of Braun’s operation have been arrested by the U.S. Drug Enforcement Agency. But he was the big get. After an earlier raid of a stash house in Staten Island, Braun apparently fled to Israel. Even there, he still ran the show. And his dealing operation was reinforced by partnerships with crime syndicates in Canada and California, including the Hells Angels.

Yesterday, Braun was denied bail. If tried and convicted, he could be sentenced to 30 years to life in prison.

Either way, the tale of the local drug kingpin should, no doubt, hit a theater near you soon.

Marijuana Kingpin Jonathan Braun Ran Major Drug Ring from Staten Island Home: Feds [NY Daily News]
Earlier: ‘Holy Rollers’ Sacrifices Intrigue and Precision

All of these elements do appear in Holy Rollers, but their colors are muted and their interactions are half-hearted. Director Kevin Asch chose to go the gentle-coming-of-age story route, focusing on the journey of Jesse Eisenberg’s Sam Gold, a (fictional) 20-year-old straight outta Brooklyn who journeys from restless yeshiva bocher to naïve-but-eager smuggler to minor-league gangsta, until his own soul brings him down (well, and then the cops do). Eisenberg is totally cute in payes, but he basically plays the role as though Sam were any sweet, angsty white kid instead of one from a very specific cultural location.

I’m not objecting to Asch’s decision (which he acknowledged in a Q-and-A after a recent screening of the film in New York) to invent his own hybrid ultra-Orthodox sect, although others have. That seems within the realm of poetic license to me. The problem is that the sect he made up is not particularly convincing. Sam and his friends speak a stereotyped New-York-Jewish-ese with a few extra Yiddish words ostentatiously thrown in, not the complex varieties of Yinglish that are actually spoken in Brooklyn’s Hasidic enclaves. And interactions in his community, from a meeting with a reproachful rabbi to an awkward parentally-supervised date, similarly feel like they were lifted out of the secular world and airbrushed with Hasid dust.

Things feel a little sharper once Sam enters the underworld: Justin Bartha as Yosef, the neighborhood’s bad apple, and Danny Abeckaser as the operation’s mastermind do a good job at capturing the film’s most interesting insight: That staffing a crime ring with extraordinarily sheltered kids is a brilliant tactic that contains the seeds of its own destruction, because once those kids get good at their jobs, they’ll lose the artless innocence that made them such good patsies to begin with.

“Relax, and act Jewish,” Yosef tells Sam the first time he prepares to get on a plane with thousands of “medicine” pills under his hat. But when is Sam acting Jewish? When he bumbles past airport security in black hat and black coat, as unaware of just what he is carrying as the federal agents were? Or is it later, when he emerges as a brilliant young businessman who knows exactly what he is doing?

Liav and Ofra, an Israeli couple in their late 30s, run Woodstock Village, in Arambol, north Goa. They seek to marry the spirit of a kibbutz with the rock ‘n’ roll spirit of the 1960s. It’s a peculiarly tight-knit place. Guests eat together, clean up after each other, smoke charas—Goan hash—together, and play music together. Everyone keeps their doors open, so when babies cry or women moan or dogs bark or someone farts, the sounds vibrate through the night. Couples swap partners, and younger singles regularly get together. Most of the guests are Israeli, and many bring young children. Liav and Ofra’s young children have been raised as much by the guests as by their parents.

Time disappears in Woodstock, because people smoke massive amounts of charas in more forms than I could have ever contemplated. Guests who initially intend to stay only a few days find a month has passed, and then they realize that their plans have changed. For some, Woodstock incubates a fear of the outside world, which everyone calls Babylon. I meet two young Israelis in Woodstock who served in combat capacities for the Israeli Defense Forces. My impression is that they were both damaged by the experience in a very real way. Naor fought in Lebanon; Ilya piloted unmanned aircrafts, or drones, in the Robot Wars.

Neither Naor or Ilya likes to talk about his army experience much. One night, when we both get high together, Naor tells me his feelings toward Palestinians. His attitude is one of pure and honest hatred. He draws an analogy that I can understand. Imagine, he says, seeking to describe his work in the army, if you could “vibrate your hand to kill Osama bin Laden.” They smoke charas every day and take LSD, MDMA, and Ketamine regularly.

Ilya is obsessed with a wooden trellis supporting the canopy of dried palm leaves that covered the courtyard, which looks like a sukkah. Beneath the leaves are five low tables with mattresses where residents sit and eat and get high and pass out. When I first came to Woodstock, Ilya was one of the guys who passed out on the mattresses. When I returned after a two-week trip he was climbing the trellis, which indicated that life was flooding back into his limbs. While the degree of his chemical addiction is unclear, the major damage appeared to have been inflicted on his soul by a life spent playing video games that had turned deadly.

Several days after I met them, Ilya and Naor were coming out of long acid trips and were distant and uncommunicative. Liav and others tried to engage them in conversation, but they were too far gone. Ilya half-yawned; it was as if he thought that he needed to yawn and then urgently realized that he shouldn’t. Naor wore a scowl. His Swedish girlfriend (they met at Woodstock) touched his arm, but he flinched at the slightest contact.

Liav, the proprietor, was a fighter during the First Intifida, and he hints to me that he also experienced a certain amount of trauma. His face reminds me of Bob Dylan circa Rolling Thunder, or the Joker in a deck of cards. He has a small blue tattoo on his left triceps that reminds me of the end of an Internet cable. He watches over Naor and Ilya like he would his own sons. This doesn’t mean he prohibits their drug use—quite the opposite. He himself has used drugs regularly since the army. But he is also a responsible father and businessman. He downloads studies on the effects of drugs so that he can join and coach the young Israelis. He points them to informative lectures and books on topics such as “synthetic happiness,” by which he means transforming your unhappy memories into happy ones through the process of synthesizing the two parts of your soul—anger and forgiveness. He believes that anger needs to be balanced with pain in order to create an emotional levelness that makes it possible to absorb happiness while resisting the large amounts of shit that the world will always throw at you. It’s a very Israeli version of strength, a homemade emotional putty that can repair the large gashes that run through the lives of the young men who make their way here.

The day Naor and Ilya find themselves deep in acid holes, Liav finds clever ways to keep them from digging any deeper. He asks Ilya to set up the laptop and find some music for everyone to listen to. He starts a conversation with Naor about synthetic happiness. After an hour Naor is making eye contact again, and by the end of the night he’s speaking coherently and even laughing and playing with his girlfriend. Ilya stays in a dark place for a couple more days.

On the plot next to Woodstock’s is a hotel called the Phoenix Homes, whose residents quote Hunter S. Thompson, drive loud motorcycles, hang from the hotel restaurant’s rafters, dream that they all speak the same language (they don’t) through transference of chemical energy by way of neural signals, and shout “Medicine!” when they “boom” a chillum hash pipe, which compared to shooting heroin is a form of recovery.

***

Liav is opposed to organized religion, especially Judaism. He shows inquiring guests online lectures to demonstrate how the major religions of the world derive from sun and moon worship. People here believe strongly that the Age of Aquarius has arrived, is arriving, or will soon arrive. The Internet, they say, will somehow deconstruct organized religion. The guests are not particularly messianic. They just enjoy weird conversations.

When guests arrive, Liav invites them to play chess, which is just a con so that he can discourse on religion to a new set of ears. “There are over 10,000 religions in the world,” Liav says to me during our chess game. “Their followers all have one thing in common: 99 percent only believe because of the other 1 percent, who know next to nothing about other religions,” he says. “So, how can they possibly say they know what is true?” Liav beats me easily in chess. He’s a crafty player. He’s even invented a new way of playing wherein he moves the pieces according to the movement of sound and light.

Liav is insistently argumentative, but not in a rude way. He enjoys playing word games. When he’s stoned, he talks in an odd code that involves oblique references to string theory, Radiohead, chess, Zen Buddhism, cartography, love, and principles of logic. He’s also very funny. His favorite saying is “For sure, maybe.”

He and Tomer, the leader of the Jewish House in Arambol, are good friends. Their children also play together. The two men love trying to prove each other wrong. Liav sometimes goes to the Jewish House and persuades Tomer to let him deliver his anti-religion beliefs to Jewish backpackers who come for Shabbat. Religion is basically absent from Woodstock, though occasionally Ofra puts together a Shabbat dinner and invites guests, guests’ friends, and staff and their friends. It’s a lovely affair, and Ofra asks one of the young men to bless the bread and another to say something. Liav loves throwing parties, so he enjoys these occasions in spite of himself.

Only later did I realize that Tomer and Liav had both served in the same division a generation apart. At first, each man perceived the other as a threat to his self-appointed mission of putting damaged souls back together in India, the first through faith and the second through reason. They steered clear of each other, but their wives met and slowly became friends. Ofra brought their daughter, Stavi, who was 3 years old, to Tomer’s house. After that, Tomer began to invite Liav to give his secularist sermons. In return, Tomer began appearing around Woodstock, dropping off books. The young veterans began bouncing back and forth between the two families and getting clean in the process.

***

In their time in Arambol, Nati, the wildest of the three Israelis, makes a point of separating himself from Liav and Woodstock. Nati refuses to sit on the floor, and the restaurant there has only knee-high tables and mattresses. His new haircut, which he tops with a funny hat, makes him look like an old man. He also refuses to speak English, something Liav requests so that everyone can join in a single conversation. “We’re not a part of this,” Nati says to me. “We speak our own language. If you want to speak it, learn Hebrew.” He picks a fight with an Austrian girl named Leia who mocks him for holding forth on the merits of Israeli hummus versus Indian hummus. “You laugh at our culture,” he says. She admits it. “Austrian food is terrible so you shouldn’t talk,” he shoots back.

By now, Maor, the homesick Israeli, has gotten his own room at a different guest house and taken up with a new group of friends. Nati and Elad, who have been best friends for 18 years, don’t see much of him anymore. Instead, they spend most of their time on the beach, where Nati wears his funny hat and Elad wears his kerchief. They also meet several more times with the fixer Hilik Magnus, who has succeeded in getting the three Israelis permission to leave the state of Goa, though they still can’t leave India. Nati and Elad immediately make plans to return to the “Hummus Trail.”

Before they leave, Nati argues with Liav about the meaning of truth. He interrupts a conversation between Liav and Ilya, the stoner I’d met at Woodstock, both of whom are speaking in stoner riddles. Nati, Elad, and Maor haven’t smoked since the arrest, and now they don’t like being around high people.

“We understand what we think is true,” Ilya says to Liav, “until we encounter something new, which we then try to fit into this old definition we lived by, until that doesn’t work anymore and we need to start all over again. It’s all very”—Ilya bobs out for a bit, then perks back up—“dizzying.” Liav agrees. Nati overhears and jumps in. He pulls quotations from the Talmud and Maimonides to explain his belief that there is a single truth, and it’s called Judaism.

“How do you know that’s true?” Liav asks.

“Because I know,” Nati answers.

“But I have my own truth that’s different than yours, which is that everyone has their own truth,” Liav says. “So, if our truths aren’t the same, how can yours be true?”

Nati doesn’t have a good answer, so he deflects with an aphorism I’ve heard him say many times. “First you do. Then you know.” This is a big part of the reason why he came to Goa: to taste other cultures in order to confirm the supremacy of his own.

“And this is stupid,” Liav answers.

“It’s only because you’re lazy,” Nati says. Liav rolls his eyes and walks away.

The conversation upsets Nati. “It’s very easy for you to sit here and laugh,” he says. The next day he leaves for Hampi. He’s angry that I’ve decided to stay at Woodstock.

I approach Liav about the conversation after Nati leaves with Elad. I ask him to describe what he was thinking when he decided to leave in the middle of the conversation.

“Leaving is a choice, and so is staying,” Liav says. “But staying is the lazier choice.” His message to Nati is the same lesson that he gives to the junkies: Don’t keep running from the reason that you are running; turn around and run toward your fear.

***

Liav enjoys clamming on the beach. He calls it “catching mussels,” with a wink. He likes to take people with him whom he feels have achieved something significant at Woodstock. On this occasion, the mussels are for Naor and Ilya, both of whom have released their torpor and weaned off heavy drugs (“medicine”) after their recent binge. They’re both leaving Woodstock in the next couple days. Naor and his girlfriend will go to Karnataka. Ilya will travel in the opposite direction on his Bullet motorcycle.

Together, we drive to a remote spot Liav calls Paradise Bay, which is still a ways from Paradise Beach, he says. Liav’s bizarre—the word I want to use is “zig-zaggy”—mantras are intended to lodge in your brain so that you play them over and over again to figure out what exactly he meant. In this case, he wants to give Naor and Ilya the idea that greater happiness awaits them further along their journey.

Ilya has carried Woodstock’s hatchet and rope on his Bullet, and Ofra asks him to build a fire. He straps together a bundle from heavy pieces of a broken log and carries it back to the group. The rest of the evening, he quietly tends the fire, tracing the flow of heat with his eyes.

We leave the beach after nightfall. On the way back, Naor’s bike runs out of gas. He’s riding with his girlfriend, apart from the other bikes in the convoy. As it happens, my bike also runs out of gas. I’m confounded—I just filled the tank that day. Liav and Ofra (with their 4-year-old daughter) see me and stop. Liav helps me find gas.

Naor and I discuss our odd predicaments later that night. He also thought he had a full tank. Liav overhears us and smiles. His face folds upwards into his temples.

Naor spots his meaning immediately. “Baba,” Naor starts, calling his mentor by their affectionate nickname for each other. “Are you telling me you took the gas out of my tank? Why would you do such a thing?”

Liav looks at Naor, then me. “Today we caught mussels.”

For a couple weeks I don’t see or hear from Elad, Nati, or Maor. Then one evening Maor returns to Arjuna, and the next day Elad and Nati arrive. All three seem happy. Maor loved every minute of traveling by himself. He bought new jewelry and clothing, which he shows me proudly. Nati and Elad head straight to Woodstock, where Nati chats amiably with Liav. Any past disagreements and bad feelings are water under the bridge. Elad tells me that Hilik Magnus succeeded in convincing the judge to release their passports and that they’ve returned to Goa to pick them up from their lawyer. Then they’ll all travel together to the north.

Nati is tired of India but he wants to learn more about Hinduism. He isn’t sure what he feels about going into Hindu temples yet. In Tamil Nadu, he and Elad went to a zoo and then to a water park, where he purchased a souvenir of his time in India—a T-shirt with a lizard stitched on the front. “Welcome to Goa,” it says.

After Shabbat dinner in Goa, the three Israelis, Elad, Nati, and Maor would normally smoke hash on the beach. But their arrest on drug possession charges has turned them to God. They have started praying three times a day, using the tefillin that Nati, the most devout, brought from home. They read prayers from a copy of a book of the psalms of David. They listen to Israeli pop music with religious messages and to the psychedelic trance group Infected Mushroom. For the first time since they landed in India, they have decided to keep Shabbat.

One Friday, Elad, Nati, and Maor go by motorbike, a half-hour before sundown, to the Jewish House in Arambol run by a Breslov Hasid named Tomer. Tomer is unlike any person of intense faith I’ve ever met. He’s young and full of life, and he wags his long sidelocks like a heavy metal drummer. Like many Breslover Hasids, he’s deeply in touch with nature. He meditates—he doesn’t say “pray”—in the fields.

The house he runs is near the center of town. A bright banner hangs between stalls over the hard dirt path from the main road. Down the path there’s a bamboo awning, outside of which sit two Indian security guards, occasionally armed. Shabbat prayers and dinner take place under a sukkah built by Tomer. Israeli children play on a small, homemade swing set. During peak season, as many as 40 young Israelis attend services. Tomer has hung sheets from the roof to block the view from outside the sukkah, but an Indian family still peeks in. Sheets also separate the sexes. Prayer books have a stenographed picture of captive IDF soldier Gilad Shalit on the cover.

“I’m starting to feel the Shabbat,” Maor says, dramatically sweeping his arms over his head, a pose he also uses when people take pictures of him. Elad invites me to join. “It’s a mitzvah for me,” he jokes. They are eager to increase my faith.

Hasidic groups—mostly Lubavitchers, but also Breslov and other sects—have a strong presence in Israeli travel destinations around the world. There are Jewish homes or Chabad houses in Palolem, Arambol, Hampi, Kodaikanal, Pushkar, and all the major cities of India, Southeast Asia, and the Americas. They offer Jews a chance to spend time with other Jews, most of whom are Israelis, with a small leavening of Americans.

Late in the Shabbat service, a young Israeli woman arrives and tells a tragic story. She’s just learned that an Italian friend in India is a pedophile. She herself was sexually abused by her father and brother, she tells the group, starting when she was 4 years old. The Italian has joined the circle of Sai Baba, a controversial guru with a large and devoted following. According to this woman, Sai Baba promised to “cure” the Italian’s pedophilia, but she’s convinced the cult is actually procuring Indian beggar children for men. “I have a problem,” she pleads. “You are my country. Any support you can give.”

Nati, Elad, and Maor listen carefully to the woman. They don’t know what to say. Afterward, they start to see their own situation in a new light. Elad says, “Now Goa is my jail. But she is a beautiful jail.”

The three Israelis don’t know or care much about Indian history or culture. They came more for the raves and freedom of travel than for India itself. In one conversation, Nati confuses Gandhi with Nelson Mandela. Elad confesses that his strongest impression of India before the trip was the avatar Dhalsim from the video game “Street Fighter.” Maor’s interest in India is even hazier and more indifferent. At one point I show them a newspaper article about a meeting between Israeli Defense Minister Ehud Barak and Turkey’s deputy foreign minister, but find they’re not interested in Israeli politics either. They came to India to avoid such information.

Still, they are patriotic and their political views are hawkish. They don’t believe Palestinians should have their own country, but they also don’t want to fight with the Palestinians. Elad talks about how Tel Aviv hasn’t experienced a suicide attack in over two years and how this helps him sleep easier. Before leaving Libya after World War II, Elad’s grandfather served in Muammar Qaddafi’s army unit. “Now if I go to Libya, I would be shot at the airport,” he says. Nati believes the Obama Administration’s position on clearing Israeli settlements in the West Bank is dangerously naïve and will expose Israelis to greater violence. “In Israel we know how to tell dream from reality,” he says.

The trial looms. They could be stuck in India for up to two years before they see a judge. The lawyer the three Israelis are using speaks English with a heavy Indian accent, so they have a hard time understanding much of what he says. He has advised them to plead guilty. The Israeli consulate offers little help. “It’s India,” a consular officer told them. “Anything is possible.”

***

Prasad’s guesthouse, where Elad, Nati, and Maor first stayed, has lately become a magnet for misfortune. Prasad’s cousin was stabbed in the kitchen by a 13-year-old kid who came from Northern India for the tourist season. To ward off further evil, Prasad and his mother hung cloth effigies around the perimeter of the guesthouse. But it still takes the three Israelis a while to find the will to leave.

Meanwhile, Oleg, the Russian staying at the guesthouse, feeds their paranoia about the outside world by reminding them about Brendan and about a Kurdish Turk named Kasim, who visits prostitutes and sports apocalyptic tattoos, like one that reads “The Future is Now.” Every afternoon, Oleg does his own voodoo: rounds of the perimeter, spraying the foliage with a noxious chemical to keep the bugs away from his room.

So, the Israelis head to Palolem, 50 miles down the coast. On the way, they meet Hilel, a soldier from the Givati Brigade who is finishing a six-month tour of India. Most of his time in the army was spent in Gaza, securing homes of suspected terrorists. He says Indians remind him of Palestinians, except that the Indians smile at him if he smiles at them. More than anything, it’s the smell of India—not the turmeric, jasmine, and burning sandalwood smell of India, but its open sewers—that reminds Hilel of Gaza. Everywhere he went in India, he says, the smell of Gaza followed.

Joining Elad, Nati, and Maor on the trip to Palolem is Nathan Sokoloff, a Dutch-Canadian Jew who was arrested the same night as the Israelis and met them in the Mapusa jail. Nathan traveled through villages along the west coast of India from Mumbai to Anjuna, often by himself. He had been in Goa only a couple days before he was arrested for smoking charas on the beach. He said the police encircled him and tried to plant drugs in his bag.

Amused that I know nothing about drugs, Nathan tells me how travelers smoke cannabis in India, where the hash comes in a little waxy ball. The most popular method, he says, is to use a chillum, a clay or stone tube with a cylindrical piston and gauze mouthpiece for a filter. Smoking a chillum is a ritual of significance. It forms unions between people.

On the trip, Nathan and Nati, whose sister is a Lubavitcher Hasid, talk about religion. Nati believes there was once a time when mankind all spoke one language. Sometime before the Book of Exodus, he tells me, the language that all mankind spoke was definitely Hebrew. Nati loves The Lord of the Rings, and it clearly colors his view of the fundamental narrative of human history. Neither Nathan nor I are practicing Jews, but we both believe the universe has an energy that moves people and things around, occasionally in a harmonious way.

Nati believes in cultural diversity, but his real passion lies in Jewish exceptionalism. “If you’re Jewish, you’re chosen,” he says. “It’s like the army. You can’t run away.” He travels with a book, published in Hebrew, that puts essays by Israel’s founders—Herzl, Ben-Gurion, Golda Meir, Menachim Begin—next to texts from the Bible and Koran, and writings by Gandhi and Mandela. Nati tells me that he doesn’t read religious writing by non-Jews.

“God is like this car,” Nati tells me in a taxi on the way to Palolem. “There is no car, there is no us. But the car is also time. Without this car, we’re not here. This ‘now’ doesn’t exist.”

“What if the car crashes?” I ask. “Should we then fear God? Or are we dead?”

“God is not fear,” Nati says. “God only brings happiness. Man creates fear.”

At the market in Palolem, in the early afternoon, a fat Russian brandishing a bottle of Old Monk rum signals he wants us to drink with him. We meet one of Prasad’s Indian friends, who owns a guesthouse, and he implores us to stay, but the Israelis find the price too high. Prasad’s friend pouts, then sulks away. The Israelis decide this is a negotiating tactic. “They love to play with your emotions,” Nati says.

We end up sleeping at a place called “Cocktails and Dreams,” which sits along the string of beachfront guesthouses almost directly next to the entrance to the market. But the guesthouse turns out not to be friendly to Israelis, who are known to linger, make lots of requests, and even cheat waiters. One waiter there tells me that when his manager is out, he posts a “No Israelis” sign in Hebrew. He much prefers Russian and British travelers, who tend to make shorter stays and drink more heavily.

Oddly, the waiter, who has a chipped front tooth, gives different names to different people. He tells the Israelis to call him Ariel and that he’s from Jerusalem. He tells me to call him Jefferson, and that he’s from Arkansas. I learn later he’s Nepali, and a former Ghurka. He’s stocky and wearing a tight red shirt with the “Cocktails and Dreams” logo, which resembles the one used in the Tom Cruise movie Cocktail.

Nati, who wears his shoulder-length hair in a loose bun, decides to pick a fight.

“You need to shave,” Nati tells the waiter. “You don’t have a good appearance.”

“You need a haircut,” the waiter replies.

“How much is a haircut?”

“One billion shekels,” the waiter says, with a weird laugh.

“I don’t like his humor,” Nati says, but only after the waiter has left. The waiter is the first Indian or Nepali we’ve met who physically outmatches Nati.

“You need two days,” Elad says. “Then you get their respect.”

Nati calls his aggression toward Indian waiters “Israeli rude,” and it makes him proud. Maor displays visible chauvinism toward female travelers. Elad lets it all slide. His friends amuse him, and he realizes that rudeness is something Nati and Maor can agree on. The trip is revealing that Nati and Maor can’t stand each other. They were never friends—Elad was their only link. Maor’s seeming inability to grasp the severity of their situation infuriates Nati, and Nati’s judgment infuriates Maor.

Elad and Nati are grasping the idea that if they’re going to live in Goa until the trial, they will need to adjust their lifestyles. Maor daydreams that he’ll get his passport and return to Israel soon. He has been spending a lot of money on new clothes. He meets an Israeli woman and spends most of his time with her. Nati avoids him by reading and playing soccer on the beach.

After the arrest, Elad got a cell phone to call home and stay in touch with the lawyer. The lawyer has been working on their case, but the Israelis are having a difficult time understanding exactly what’s expected of them. Can they leave the state without their passports? Their case hasn’t been assigned to the right judge yet, but the lawyer tells them they still hope to work out a deal to plead guilty without jail time. The trial could be in 2012, or it could be sooner.

Most of the calls to the cell phone come from Israel. This means that when they’re at the guesthouse, Elad is constantly looking for Nati and Maor to tell them that their parents called. When we go hiking one day without Nati and Maor, Elad feels free for the first time in a while. The trail leads to a waterfall to the east, near a state border. Near a place called “Treetop,” his phone buzzes to let him know he has a text message.

“Welcome to Karnataka,” it says. It’s an announcement from AirTel, the phone’s wireless provider, that we have strayed outside of Goa. Elad laughs. But later he starts to worry. What if the police get their hands on his mobile? Is he in violation of a court order? As we return to Palolem, he deletes the incriminating message from his phone.

***

Not long after, Elad’s mother intervenes from Israel to hire a fixer with decades of experience in India. His name is Hilik Magnus, and he’s a retired Mossad agent who runs a search and recovery operation for Israeli travelers. Most of his cases involve drug cases and “flip outs.” It wasn’t hard for Elad’s mother to find him. Problems can be fixed because of Hilik Magnus. Some say he has conducted as many as four secret missions to release Israeli prisoners held in Thailand, even though he looks like a garden gnome in the Macy’s Thanksgiving Day Parade.

In Anjuna, Magnus meets with Nati, Maor, and Elad and tells them the truth: Goa is your jail today, tomorrow, and for the foreseeable future. But it’s also paradise, so it’s time to start loving it. He shows them around Panaji, 10 miles south, where he suggests they settle, and promises to help them look for an apartment.

On Magnus’s advice, Elad and Nati decide they want to take a cooking class and a course in English. Nati’s animosity toward India mellows. He buys a T-shirt with a picture of Gandhi, which he wears to Shabbat dinner at Tomer’s house. But Nati worries that even if the judge promises no jail time, anything could happen. Elad starts to wear a kerchief on his head and thinks about his 10-year-old brother, who will be alone at home now that Elad’s other brothers have started their military service.

Maor, meanwhile, thinks about the future in his own way. Every day his longing for home grows. He chases women and talks about Israel a lot. Maor still infuriates Nati, but he brings out a more “shanti” approach from Elad, who seems concerned. Magnus knows the lawyer well and pressures him to work harder to secure the right judge, which is key to the Israelis getting their passports back. With a little luck, their stay in Goa will be over soon.

***

Back at Tomer’s Shabbat service, a former Nahal agent—the only person who speaks English there that evening—pulls me aside and says, “You need to see this.” He leads me down the beach, through a blanket of palm trees that whistle, to a small Israeli-owned spot called Woodstock Village.

Woodstock looks like a normal guesthouse: a restaurant surrounded by 13 bamboo huts. The people who live in the huts are in hiding. They went to the places that Maor, Elad, and Nati successfully avoided, and here, a world away from Gaza and the West Bank, they are free to compare scars and total up what they can still believe in. I see guys praying and guys doing heroin, which is something I have only read about in books. Woodstock is a community of people who have been badly hurt. I stay for two weeks, which becomes two months, until it starts to feel like home.

Tomorrow: At Woodstock Village, a certain kind of healing.

Maor Hagay is homesick in India. He’s a handsome young Moroccan Jew from where Jaffa used to be who avoided his Israeli military service through a series of weird injuries that he would rather not explain. The real reason he ran away, his friends told me, was that he would have had to serve behind enemy lines in Gaza.

Maor loves Israeli music, food, the whole bit. He is so homesick that he can barely leave his room. The weather is perfect: Sunny, cloudless, and 90 degrees with very little humidity, as it is almost every day in Goa, a small state on India’s western coast. He is at a beach resort, but he doesn’t swim because of his new tattoos, which include lines of barbed wire across both biceps and a word in Indian script that he believes is his name inscribed along the length of his spine. Instead of going swimming, Maor sits alone in his room at his computer, looking at photos and listening to music by Israeli pop artists. The photos on his computer screen are from his first month in India, before he was arrested.

There is no shortage of Israeli head cases in Goa. There are said to be 30,000 Israelis traveling in India between October and March of each year, during which time the IDF could easily muster a unit of Israeli backpackers for a Goan field operation. The Israelis who are most screwed up after leaving the army—those who served in special brigades like Nahal, which combines military service with social welfare programs—often enclose themselves in undemanding protected spaces within Israel proper, working on a kibbutz or delivering pizzas in their hometowns. Everyone else goes to chill out somewhere beautiful, warm, and far away from Israel. The ones who are into climbing mountains go to South America. Those who seek to disappear with no redemption look to Thailand. India is for young stoners in search of some mystical experience by way of pot, acid, and Breslov Hasidism. India is a decompression chamber that keeps these young Israelis from imploding and revivifies them so that they can rebuild themselves and function in the civilian world. They tend to travel a circuit called the “Hummus Trail,” which stretches up India’s spine from Kodaikanal, Tamil Nadu, in the south, to Manali, Himachal Pradesh, in the north, through Hampi, in Karnataka, and Pushkar, in Rajasthan.

Back when he was in the military world, Maor went into the office of the Israeli army psychologist and begged not to wind up like his older brother, who served in Gaza and didn’t come back. Maor believes his actions were brave. But in the context of a society where all young men of his social class are expected to serve in the army, he is a coward.

Maor is of medium height with short hair and a long stitched-in braid down his back that makes him look like a Jedi Knight. People call him the Black Boy of Tel Mond. He has dark skin, and his family is poor. He’s here in Goa with his two friends, Nathanel “Nati” Ezra and Elad Koren.

Nati is a wild man. He’s tough, sharp, and funny, even though he looks like a caveman. (“My grandfather lived in a cage,” Nati jokes.) Nati has a broad chest and large head, with ears the size of saucers. His hands are big enough to snap open a coconut. He wears cartoon shirts, like a “Chef Goofy” T-shirt with Goofy energetically stirring a mixing bowl with the accompanying messages “It’s only silly 9-cents” and “Wholesome meal in a box.” He’s also a sharer. I met him because he offered me a smoke from his hookah. I proceeded to knock over the hookah, which is a tendency of mine, but Nati only laughed.

Elad has gentle features, blue-gray eyes, and a straight nose perched over an even smile. Before the army, Elad’s weight of 265 pounds was the butt of Nati’s jokes, but now he’s down to 155. Elad is 22, Nati is 24, and they’ve been best friends for 18 years. They, and Maor, are from Tel Mond, a village of around 15,000 people near Tel Aviv, built on top of what was once the Biblical city of Jaffa. They’ve been in India one month.

For now, Elad and Nati are sitting with Prasad, the manager of their guesthouse in Anjuna. The Sai Prasad guesthouse is owned by Prasad’s father, who never once shows up during the course of my two-week stay. There are 13 rooms situated around a closed courtyard of red stone. The walls are off-white with red, yellow, and blue trim. It’s a pleasant spot.

The three Israelis say they owe Prasad everything. They love him like a fourth brother. Prasad is in his late thirties and has very large and prominent ears. He bailed Maor, Elad, and Nati out after three days in a Mapusa jail. Prasad also found them their lawyer, the best in Goa, he says. Before the arrest they would all sit in the courtyard, looking at the ocean, smoking the hash derivative called charas with Brendan, a California cannabis farmer who came to India to smoke dope.

Maor, Elad, and Nati were arrested in this courtyard six days ago. A Delhi woman in her early twenties had died of a drug overdose near a place called Shiva’s Valley, just down the beach. She was from a wealthy family, and her father, who is connected to a local member of parliament, spurred an investigation into how foreign tourists were influencing the drug trade in Goa. The result was a spate of arrests across Goa, over a one-month period, which rounded up the three Israelis. Brendan was with them at the time of their arrest, but he got away.

The Israelis spent three days in a private jail cell, where they slept on concrete slabs three meters long by one meter wide. On one end of the cell was a filthy squat-style toilet, something they had never seen before. On the other end, some bars in the wall separated them from the outdoors. For three days, they hardly ate for fear the jail food would make them sick. (They all keep kosher.) By the end, they were covered in mosquito bites and deeply affected; jail in a strange third-world country was an unfamiliar trip for them. They had no idea why they were there. And now they won’t talk freely about their experiences.

Nati became obsessed with the details of the police report. He studied it like a puzzle. He became convinced the police fabricated the arrest report to inflate the quantity of drugs. In order to protect Prasad, whose father is a member of the local Panchayat, or caste government, the police had also changed the location of the arrest to a nearby city. The report said Nati carried 20 grams of hash in his pants pocket when he was arrested. At the time, though, he was wearing pocket-less exercise shorts issued during his army service.

Together, Maor, Nati, and Elad fantasize about winning their trial. They want to beat India. Alone, Nati obsesses over the pocket-less shorts, Maor dreams about leaving India and what he’ll think of it when he gets home, and Elad is focused on recovering their passports and money, which the police confiscated. Their bail conditions prohibit them from leaving Goa.

***

Goa has become a global tourist destination. Many Israelis and Israeli-run restaurants and guesthouses remain all over Goa, but Russians now outnumber Israelis, as do Scandinavians, Canadians, Australians, and Germans. Goa is easy to navigate, its beaches are pristine, things are cheap, and during the non-monsoon peak season, from October to March, the weather is ideal. It’s crowded with tourists, but not crowded in the Indian sense of the term, and many foreigners come to India only for Goa.

Some restaurants in Goa post menus in Hebrew, but most of the keyboards in Internet cafes are now in Russian, and I met only one shop owner who speaks Hebrew: Shimon at Shimon’s Falafel in Arambol. Outside his restaurant, Shimon hangs a signed picture of Mosh Ben Ari, an Israeli pop musician who pioneered a style known as “shanti” (for the musician’s long hair) in the mid-1990s. The meaning of “shanti” as used by Israelis is hard to peg but might best translate to “chilling out” or “taking it easy.” Shanti people often like to smoke marijuana and listen to Bob Marley. They wear baggy clothes with complex stitching and slacken their concern for material and grooming matters. Israelis use “shanti” to describe the carefree life people seek in India.

Some Israelis wind up here by accident or word-of-mouth, looking for the cool places where their older brothers went and where the members of Infected Mushroom, a popular trance band that blends elements of Radiohead, the Grateful Dead, and electronic music, might be found. Maor, Nati, and Elad fall into this category. Others Israelis, the ones who are badly screwed up from the 2006 Lebanon War, or from serving in special units, are sent here through networks of older veterans, who fought the first Intifada, or served up through Operation Defensive Shield in 2002. The Israeli Defense Forces don’t maintain networks to send kids suffering from Post-Traumatic Stress Disorder to India in order to chill out and get high. The army has ways of keeping tabs on the kids, through a semi-formal network of insurance companies, hostel owners, and rabbis who minister to lost souls. They do drugs and share their experiences until it feels safe enough for them to fall apart. In Israeli circles, this exorcism is known as “flipping out.” A person who has already flipped is called a “Falupe.”

Nati and Elad planned to travel in India for six months; Maor for only two, because he is poor. Maor sold his car and everything else he owned to come here. They settled in Anjuna precisely because there were fewer Israelis here. They wanted to meet people from all over the world. Nati loves Judaism. Maor loves everything about Israeli culture. When he’s relaxed in a restaurant, smoking a cigarette, he often says, “Now, this feels like home.”

Israelis tend to carry their country with them. Maor has packets of Israeli coffee that he prepares every morning. Elad carries cans of tuna fish. Nati brought his tefillin and prayer books. He also promised his mom he wouldn’t “lay with Goys” in India. Maor promised himself he’d try everything. Elad promised Maor’s mom he would take care of her son.

But after the arrest, their priorities changed. Wounded, they became more adamant about their Israeliness and sought other Israelis for support. They began to distrust Indians and came to hate everything about India except Prasad and his guesthouse. Their friendship suffered, too. Maor pulled away and became more and more self-absorbed. Nati’s humor turned to anger. With their legal fate in doubt, each day brought more reason to worry. Brendan, the American, was their closest friend during the month before the arrest. He was in their room when the police came, and 10 grams of the hash on the bed was his, but he left the room before the arrest. Only Elad ever spoke to him after that, and only to say, “You have to leave, now.”

Brendan has since been replaced by Oleg, a taut Vladimir Putin lookalike from Ufsa, Russia. At the beach Oleg wears 1950s-style bathing trunks and oils up his hairless torso so it gleams. He is winsome in every way. He talks incessantly, but he doesn’t know any English, so he rambles in Russian, punctuating his thoughts with an inimitable laugh. The Israelis understand a little of Oleg’s Russian from what they learned from friends who emigrated from the former Soviet Union to Israel in the early 1990s.

Oleg’s only English sentence is “I go fishing,” and Oleg loves fishing. Every morning he casts from the rocks using frozen prawns as bait. Prasad, the guests, and all the Indian women and children selling jewelry (and men and boys selling DVDs) on the beach watch him in perplexity. He brings a spear so he can kill his catch with due mercy and expediency. Oleg used 70,000 rubles, some $2,400, in casino winnings to pay for his holiday and paid Prasad up front for an entire year. In the afternoons, Oleg walks the perimeter of the guesthouse’s courtyard, spraying bug repellent in the bushes. At night all five of us get drunk together. Oleg shows softcore porn stills to Elad and Maor while trying to sell them on the idea that there is no difference between Jews and Russians. It is unclear if he’s trying to buy their souls.

The three Israelis don’t believe nationality had anything to do with their arrest. But I wonder. Sex and drugs in Goa foster resentment. Before arriving in Goa, I read a pamphlet called “Claiming the Right to Say No: A study on Israeli tourist behaviour & patterns in Goa.” It’s an anti-Israeli tourist screed issued by a local group called The Students of Rachol Seminary. The pamphlet is difficult to get through. It accuses Israelis of implausible things, like importing drugs into Goa from Afghanistan and Pakistan, and for being responsible for the local sex trade, which is allegedly organized by Israeli backpackers who are said to travel by land to Goa from Israel through Mumbai and Pune.

The sex traffic in Goa is just as visible as the drug trade. I was offered sex with a child on the very first day I arrived in Goa, even before I was offered drugs. The Israelis I met showed no interest in the sex trade. They wanted to understand what had just happened to them in the wars they fought in, or avoided. Their method was to get high and listen to Radiohead’s “Standing on the Edge of Time” and to learn from older veterans—some of whom were married and had children of their own.

***

For a long time, traveling to India was a dream of mine, too. I don’t exactly know what I was looking for, but as with many travelers, I found something that put my life on a different path. I went to places of religious and historical significance and tried to learn everything I could. I came to love the people, their food, and their culture.

Israelis come to India under different circumstances than I did. The screwed-up ones come here to empty themselves out. They come here because they have to. Chances are high that they will end up at a campsite run by an older Israeli who understands their trauma and tries to structure their experience before summoning their family to take them back home. This passage offers a bridge from the army—as well as a childhood shadowed by anticipation of service—to a nascent adulthood of university applications or job hunting.

But Maor, Elad, and Nati carried a great shame with them to India. Maor avoided service altogether. Elad decided he didn’t want to serve in a combat capacity, so he switched to a military police unit and finished his three years of service as a guard at a training base. Nati, who for his whole life had wanted to be a fighter, completed eight months of combat training only to find that strict discipline turned him off. Then, faced with a drug test he knew he’d fail, Nati made a plan. He complained about a sore tooth at the base infirmary, where he managed to persuade a dentist to extract a molar, so that he would be sent home. When he returned from his leave, he transferred to a noncombat army job. He says that he’s too jolly to carry a gun.

Tomorrow: The three Israelis leave Prasad’s guesthouse behind and meet a man who might help them.

Matthew Schwarzfeld is a New York-based writer.

Was Max an observant Jew like his writer cousin? “We do not have good information on ‘how Jewish’ Max was,” Lipner told me. “But his welcoming hundreds of thousands of people onto the farm strikes me as a rather extraordinary example of the Jewish value of hachnassat orchim—welcoming guests.” Max Said Yes! isn’t an explicitly Jewish book, and it doesn’t draw an overt parallel between Max’s behavior and that of our tent-opening forefather Abraham, but the authors believe the analogy’s there. Still, is it weird to have a book about Woodstock that doesn’t mention sex or drugs at all? Lipner and Yasgur told me they’d joked around with some couplets that were left on the cutting-room floor:

In land filled with alfalfa seed
They relished LSD and weed.
They lay down in the fields and went to bed
With people to whom they were not wed

Mm, not so much. Ultimately, the authors decided that parents could use the book as a jumping-off point to talk about sex and drugs with their kids—or not. So for those of us—Woodstock Generation, Gen X, and Millennials—who did inhale, the question remains: how do we talk about drugs with our kids?

Kiki Schaffer, a social worker and director of parenting, family and early childhood at the 14th Street Y in Manhattan, laughs: “This subject is to parents of teens what sleep is to parents of newborns.” In other words: it’s the biggie, the giant bong in the room. Schaffer’s strategy is to plant the seed (as it were) early. “I tell younger kids, ‘Think about what we put in our body,’” she says. “Would you put worms in there?’” Schaffer believes that early education about drugs and alcohol is about encouraging kids to think about choices and self-regulation, so that when they grow older, they’ll continue to question what they ingest. As they reach preteen and teen years, she says, “Parents can start saying, ‘There are a lot of things we once didn’t think were harmful but studies have since shown they were: cigarettes, medications women were given in pregnancy.” Like many experts, Schaffer is not a fan of “Just Say No” education. “I hate it,” she says. “It doesn’t engage the hearts and minds of children or empower them to make good decisions—real life is about learning to be a decision-maker.” Indeed, those of us who grew up with Reefer Madness-style education learned only to laugh at parental paranoia.

Julie Holland, an assistant professor of psychiatry at NYU School of Medicine and author of the forthcoming Weekends at Bellevue: Nine Years on the Night Shift at the Psych ER (Bantam, October 2009), agrees that the “Just Say No” approach is misguided. For one thing, she says, recent studies indicate that marijuana isn’t a gateway drug—hysterically insisting to your kids that one toke is a fast track to Cobainville makes you look like an untrustworthy doofus. In 2008, 43 percent of 12th graders reported trying marijuana once or more—clearly they haven’t all become raving, heroin-shooting, paint-huffing street addicts. A better strategy, Holland says, is to stress the potential consequences of doing something illegal. “Many schools have random drug tests,” she says, “and if you test positive, you can’t do sports. If you’re a senior, you could lose your student loans.” Explaining how drugs affect developing brains is also vital, she continues. “Because the adolescent brain is still in a formulation stage—pathways are getting laid down, connections are being made—in a perfect world kids wouldn’t use any substances, including alcohol. But in the real world, statistics show that’s unlikely.”

Holland stresses that parents should be as concerned about legal drugs (cigarettes, alcohol, and prescription drugs) as about street drugs. Unlike the kids at Woodstock, kids today rarely experiment with acid. Today, the big drug of choice is “pharmies.”

“Excuse me?” I say, like the old fart I am.

“‘Pharmies’ are what kids today call prescription drugs,” Holland explains. “So keep track of what’s in your medicine cabinet—especially all you neurotic Jews taking benzodiazepines [Xanax, Valium] so you can sleep.” Other modern-kid faves include narcotic pain killers (Vicodin, Percocet, Oxycontin), ADHD drugs (some kids resell them as weight-loss aids), steroids, and the cough suppressant dextromethorphan (which the kids call “Robo”). Not to harsh your mellow or anything.

So, my fellow post-Woodstockians, what should we do? There are terrific online models of nuanced, non-scare-tactic-y speeches to give to teenagers. With my own kids (now seven and four), my inclination is to wait until they start asking questions. But I also don’t want to end up in the same situation as my mom, when she tried to give me the sex-ed talk long after that particular train had left the station. So in a couple of years, I think I’ll sit Josie down and say, “You may start having kids offering you drugs to feel good—pills, things to drink, things to sniff, and things to smoke. My hope is that you’ll talk to me about it. Just because something is legal doesn’t mean it’s safe. You don’t know who got what where. And if you ever get in a situation where you feel unsafe or out of control, know that you can call me or text me and I will help you or get you, no questions asked and no punishment given.”

And what if Josie or Maxie ask about Mommy’s drug history? Well, I’ll tell the truth. (And no, I’m not telling you.) And we’ll continue to share a regular sip of Shabbat wine. One recent study found that kids who drank with their parents were less prone to binge drinking. Thus in the spirit of Woodstock, I offer my own conclusion:

Your kids’ addiction you will head off
If you think of Max, and share a quaff.
Treat your kids like sensate beings.
And they’ll grow into responsible teens.

Or so I hope.