Tiyulim In Eretz Yisrael: Snorkeling For the Murex Trunculus, the Source Of Techelet

Yesterday morning I went on an adventure. I took the morning off to join my friends Victor Ofstein and Rabbi Natan Slifkin, the Zoo Rabbi and author of Rationalist Judaism, for a trip to Chof Dor to search for the murex trunculus snail, recognized by some (many?) as being the source for the techelet.

I have not gone over the material of, both for and against, the murex in a number of years, so I would not say I remember all the arguments, but when I did research it, and spoke to a number of rabbis, I was convinced that there is at least a very good chance of this being the correct species, and more likely it is. So, I chose to wear techelet in my tzitzis.

I have been to the techelet factory and taken the tour, seen how they produce it, a number of years ago. Ptil Tekhelet, the manufacturers of the techelet (or as they spell it "tekhelet"), also run a snorkeling tour at Chof Dor, the beach where the murex trunculus can be found. I never got around to going snorkeling for the murex. So, when they invited me to join them for the morning trip, I decided to go for it. Though this trip was not going to be snorkeling with Ptil Tekhelet, but we were going to go snorkeling by the beach on our own.

Chof Dor is a beach in the vicinity of the town Zichron Yaakov. The beach is beautiful, with soft sand and rocky reefs.

I have never been snorkeling before, so it took a few minutes to get used to it, and a few tries to get it right. I now kind of get the idea what waterboarding is like. It was not pleasant getting either a noseful of sea water, or a mouthful of sea water. The initial snorkeling experience was tough, as i found ti difficult to force myself to breathe only through my mouth. When I caught myself trying to breathe through my nose, and getting no air, I would force myself to breathe out through the snorkel, and then I would be able to breathe in. I got used to it after a few minutes and settled in to the snorkeling experience.

The Murex Trunculus

The rocks of the reef (I am not sure of it was coral) were very sharp, and I got a few cuts from them. It was time to snorkel! I found a murex snail fairly quickly, only to discover that it was just the shell, and a hermit crab had moved in and taken up residence within. There was no snail. We continued snorkeling, moving around to different sections of the beach, along different sides of the reef, and found a few more murex shells, and a lot of other snails, both shells and actual snails. Along the way we saw fish, and underwater flora. It was really a cool experience.

We decided to go back to the other side of the reef, as we had found a few murex shells there but nothing significant where we had moved to. This time we struck gold, as along with a few more shells, this time Rabbi Slifkin had the fortune of finding a couple live murex trunculus snails as well. Sure enough, just then the waves started bringing in small jellyfish, and one of us got stung. It was time to go anyway, so we called it a day.

We got our stuff and headed into the kibbutz of Nachsholim which is adjacent to the beach, and found some people who were nice enough to bring us some vinegar to apply to the sting.

Some additional highlights were finding the rotting carcass of a large sea turtle. This was interesting until the top was moved, exposing the rot and creating a horrible stench of rotten carcass. Another highlight was chatting with the elderly lady from the kibbutz who brought us the vinegar. She moved to Israel 49 years ago (I don't remember from where), straight to this kibbutz, and seemed to be a special character.