Case in point: I’m not just eating a hot dog, I’m eating a hot dog, made of pork, on Shabbat, in Israel. Case in point two: Walking down the street, you look up and realize you have been trekking along the Via Dolorosa for some time, oblivious to my station. Yeah, I don’t believe the Son of God walked down this way, but still. You can’t help but get caught up in the whole business.

The significance of life in Israel makes me more enlivened but also more distraught. On the plane from Washington to Tel Aviv, I read Israeli author David Grossman’s fine work The Yellow Wind. In it, the author describes one major qualm he would have with the Israeli occupation of Palestine: the loss of one’s time.

“Sometimes I feel as if time flows in my veins. And I am not willing to tolerate the thought that even one moment of my life might pass empty of meaning, of interest, of enjoyment. I feel great responsibility to the time given us with such meanness, and it seems to me that, were I living under foreign rule, what would torture me would be – besides the tangible things that are taken as given – the fact that I do not control my time.”

Fast-forward from Grossman’s 1988 writing to me, bored but unbowed (at first), milling around in Tel Aviv’s David Ben-Gurion airport because my past trips to Lebanon and Syria apparently had marked me as a security risk. (I have spent 11 days, total, in both countries as a student traveler last fall. The ruins at Baalbek are highly recommended.) I waited. And I waited. I met more than two dozen Arab travelers – and a handful of others besides – who had been pulled to have their security credentials checked and re-checked. So we all waited, hearing nothing of our status, wondering when we might be released.

I flew all this way to play basketball with Israeli and Palestinian kids for the summer. And now l've watched an entire soccer match plus half of a rerun of the Spurs and Hornets NBA playoffs game on closed-circuit TV in the airport.

The Palestinian family that came to Israel on the same flight as I did thought they were going to be released, only to see the contents of their suitcases dumped out in front of them for security screening. A dentist coming to aid in cleft palette surgeries, a teenager going to see his family for the third consecutive year, and a student traveler, all found themselves dumped into the security tank.

As the hours crawled by, many were cleared. Three hours after landing, I was not. I sat and thought about Grossman’s book and talked to the dentist about it. He said we should make the best use of our time by becoming “bigger than yourself” and being at peace with yourself through doing well for other people.

The strictures of religion not withstanding, here I was in a land I find so enchanting with my enthusiasm withering on arrival. As my passport was finally released a full four hours after my arrival, I spent the rest of a dreary first night abroad thinking about time, about having a little more of my life, joy and opportunity drained away.