The figs are ripening and the peahens bob and murmur down the paths of Kibbutz Ein Hanatziv. Once the terrible heat of the day passes I go running and drop naked into the clear pool of freshwater in the woods by the gate. Every day passes, slow and similar as those in a sanatorium, but I know I'm leaving soon. Ever since I came back from Passover in America I've been fascinated with Israel in an entirely new way. I look out the bus window hungrily at the vast expanses of rock and shrub on either side and at the great striations on the mountains. With a certain degree of passion I wait for the seat beside me to be filled by dark and compact soldiers handling their weapons half-cavalierly and listening to music that is too loud in their earphones. Memorial Day and Independence Day were intense here - they are back-to-back in Israel because the military and the country's existence have such close and undeniable relations. People on the kibbutz, in the two ceremonies here, gave testimony about relatives who died in their twenties and thirties; at the local high school, strapping sixteen-year-olds sang songs about dead alumni-- brothers, fathers, etc. Twice on Israel's Memorial Day a great siren sounds and everyone is still. We stood in the kibbutz graveyard, by the neat, uniform socialistic headstones, heads tilted down. The birds yattered wildly and launched out over the fields. Everyone but me was wearing mirrored sunglasses. On Independence Day fighter jets in formation flew over Jerusalem.

The questions of life here are less distant, less vague and florid. In the heat, everything hazes together and becomes small. The tranquil and severely ordered rows of palms stand at attention with absolutely nothing around them for kilometers. Flocks of sheep run head-to-head over the rocks. Here, I feel old, and tribal, and protective of everything around me. On the weekends I freely go to the houses of strangers and am graciously treated. I climb into the cars of people I have never met. The bales of hay in the yellow fields seem to me eager to speak. The Arabs kneel and ease unknown buds from patches of leaves in their ragged fields as I pass them on the bus ... and everyone is a little afraid... but they put out their humus, their tehina, their tiny pieces of cucumber and tomato cut with deliberation into shrapnel. They slide it out with brown arms over their counters. They sing a thousand songs and write difficult poems. The question "What does it mean to be in Israel?" is like the question "What does it mean to be a Jew?" I can't answer. Only my blood answers.

Sometimes I get the eerie feeling that I haven't gained much from this year other than twenty pounds. So much for the benefits of autonomy, or my intellectual integrity. Nonetheless I'm sure I'll look back on this year and the experiences in it with a certain measure of fondness, and feel, with the soft light of nostalgic recollection, that I have grown; recall things like my adventures in Palestinian territory and nearly getting stabbed while hitchhiking and hiking by waterfalls with beautiful young men with pride and good will. So these months of relative stagnation really don't make much of a difference in the end, and the twenty pounds will be shed.

Two weeks ago I was in Poland, for a "Heritage Trip" through the Holocaust; every day featured at least one mass grave, death camp, abandoned synagogue and beaten-up Jewish graveyard, and sometimes two or more of the above, with long stretches on buses through the flat and dreary Polish countryside, littered with crosses. Holocaust movies blaring on the bus television. "My goodness," I told myself, "if I have to see one more person getting shot in the head for no reason, I will go out of my mind. If I have to see one more death camp, I will go insane." Some things about the nature of the trip made it ridiculous: singing "It is good to praise God [tov l'hodot lahashem]" in the crematorium at Majdanek was a little heavy for me, in light of the many relatives I have who died in this particular human obscenity. I don't know if I was enriched for standing in a gas chamber looking at the scratch marks running down the walls; or seeing mounds of human hair collected at Auschwitz; or seeing, at Majdanek, a great mound of human ashes; or looking intently through the skinny Polish trees as if I could see my grandparents running through them with the partisans sixty years earlier. As if I could see my dead infant aunt. Coming from Poland, I spent a day in Israel in the arms of my current paramour, and then was off to exile again, at home in America. All I know is now, seeing Jews in full regalia on the streets of New York, I want to clutch them to my chest and cry, "Watch out! You are more fragile than you know!", like a frizzy-haired Cassandra. This would probably not be a wise move. However, I have never been an expert in the wise move. All is confusing. For the past eight days I have eaten the bread of affliction; somehow, no country is safe.

Hey gang,

Jeez I read my friendslist so regularly that I almost feel I update at the same pace, you know, since I know all your lives so well. But unfortunately I haven't been, mostly out of laziness but partly due to the sense that nothing really happens in my life here; or rather everything happens at the strangest intervals and everything between the adventures is sort of dull. I mean here I am sitting around on kibbutz, right, biding my time and doing some learning on occasion, and then every once in awhile I venture into Palestinian territory (well, okay, only twice) and get kicked off roofs by the IDF (funny story! - and part of one of aforementioned ventures into the PA), and have hitchhiking snafus (that story on request), or there's a terror attack in Jerusalem that kills ten people when I am out dancing in Jerusalem. Oh, and it's peacock mating season on the kibbutz, which is sort of swarming with peacocks, so there are all these cries, which sound something like the offspring of a mad cat and a duck would in my head.

But mostly I am biding my time. Learning some lessons about life's essential loneliness. Coming around to the fact that the zenith of my life so far seems to have been the nights spent making out with my senior-year boyfriend in his car. I can't think of anything that's made me happier in my life. I mean, is that sad? Or is that how life is supposed to work? I can't think what I'd do to get that happiness back, but I know my life is far poorer without it, and I can't help but think that that kind of happiness has its own strength and value that far surpasses the actual moment of kissing in the car. It's the memory of that happiness that sustains me sometimes, and the hope I will come to it again, wiser and better able to retain and replicate it. It's like, in situations like that, you just don't feel alone anymore. You feel blessed, like you possess every inch of your capabilities. I mean, theoretically I am someone with a lot of capabilities. But it's so hard to feel them sometimes, and harder to act on them (how rarely I do that here!).

Anyway, so here I am, biding my time without love, waiting for the next explosion to come on all possible levels that that can be interpreted. As of tomorrow, I've been here seven months. Which is pretty nuts.

To The Soldiers on the Bus

I won't give you my love, Asaf. Not even if you ask for it.
Not even if you take out your map to show me your village.
Nor you, blue-eyes, arranging your spindly frame
somehow in the seat beside me, spilling a little;
I won't give you my love. Not even my number.

I swear, Yaron with the braces, it's no personal offense.
I like your big limbs and black fuzz of hair.
But a guy in green? Too much for me, achi. There's a kind of rose
in your cheeks, maybe from being in the sun too much,
and a squint to match it. And, of course, the gun.
When you laugh, it falls against the window, a small sound.
A busful of small sounds. Like the rain's small hands.
Here's your side against my arm, warm, and the big Jordan mountains
stretching their heads up to peck at the mist
as it lessens slowly, and the motor going and going;
my hand lifts up to pluck the button from your sleeve
but it falls again empty, and I drop into sleep.

It seems to me that no matter the occasion I find some cause to complain. High school, midrasha, it makes no difference, and I have a fatalistic idea that come freshman year of college this blog will feel the keen edge of my whining once again. O, why! I am reading "Henderson the Rain King," by Saul Bellow, which offers a potent yet dangerous excuse for any whiner; the protagonist, Henderson, indulges in gross self-destructive activities that hurt those around him and eventually leaves all that is known to him for the sake of following an inner voice that won't stop clamoring I want, I want, I want! Nonetheless, it's unclear to me that I would find my answer even in Africa among the lions, like the ponderous Henderson. The book calls Henderson's intractable voice "grun tu molani" --man's desire to live--man's refusal to succumb to routine, to death. Could my whining be grun-tu-molani in its eternal disguise? Or is it merely a fitful, fickle girl's laziness and incapability to fulfill her potential? I mean, I suppose I was seeking a similar break with my past when I came to Israel among the Torahs. Oh, it is all so perplexing! Oh, I am so far from any constructive change! I want, I want, I want -- but it won't tell me, oh, it won't tell me what it wants!

Hello my fine friends.

Apologies for the lack of updates. Every time I think about it, the notion of getting the weirdness of this year down on paper or cyberpaper or whatever it is is really daunting. I'm bored and overwhelmed at the same time basically, and there are peacocks and parrots and horses and hedgehogs and cows all in this equation. There are members of the opposite gender. There are international politics and ancient rabbinates. There are stones and girls knitting silly hats. As you can tell it's complicated. So in lieu of any substantial update about my life, it's time for something extremely different but no less crucial or riveting. My friends, I present you with the Jewish calendar... through pickup lines. That's right, themed pickup lines for every holiday.

Yes, this is what I do when I am bored and I've got Torah knowledge. I am a bas yisroel. Eatin' pas yisroel. This will probably mean less to those of you who are not of the Abrahamic faith but feel free to ask questions about any of the pickup lines you don't understand. Also feel free to use them on people. As my cousin said, they should come in handy at the fountain in your village. And tell me about it if you get laid based on these. I would be pretty shocked, but pleasantly so. Yes, I would be pleased to share a small part in the furthering of nookie in the world.


( The Jewish calendar, baby. In chronological order. )

Hello friends.
Were I you I don't know that I would even have this journal friended anymore, it is so dead. This is unfortunate. However, in the specious hope that I still have some readers, here's an update...

I'm doing NaNoWriMo this year (current wc: 35,000) & so that has essentially eaten November and made my Hebrew deteriorate and my sleep schedule disintegrate. My project for next month: get eight hours of sleep every night, go to as many classes as possible, and run every day. Pretty epic. I kind of fail at living a double life.

Life in midrasha is actually pretty independent -- no one's really making sure that I go to class. And that's good, I guess. Being an expatriate, even a temporary one, is kind of lonely and overwhelming, and I can't imagine electing a life of it. I miss America a lot--tradition, home, family (I guess, warts and all), country. I've pretty much decided I wouldn't want to raise kids here in Israel, not necessarily even because of the violence but because the education here pretty much sucks. Most of the teachers in Israel are on strike now because they are paid atrociously. Like minimum wage. Like making American teachers look like Rothschilds by comparison. Depressing.

There's a seediness in certain places, a lack of ambition in the youth here that's kind of -- I don't know, disillusioning I guess, ( mostly because... )

So here I am in Israel!

I don't know how to summarize my first week and a half here pithily without loading your flists down with detail, but suffice it to say I am slowly getting used to it. It's been kind of difficult to be comfortable with learning all day (8am to 10:30pm or later, with a 2-hour lunch break) in Hebrew... but I'm trying really hard, and my language skills are improving already.

I'm on a kibbutz 2 hours north of Jerusalem in the middle of nowhere called Ein Hanatziv, and it's a great setting--there are date trees and fig trees and peacocks, and it's surrounded by this marvelous barbed-wire fence with all kinds of interesting wire loops. Every day (except today, 'cause I'm a bit sick and hence skipping class) I run around the perimeter of the kibbutz, skirting the fence and looking out at the bone-dry dirt fields beyond it. There's the shell of a tank by our dorms buried in dirt with white bougainvillea growing out of it. A family of stray cats lives inside it, and a little brown dog whose name is Calev Hakelev [Caleb the Dog] follows us around everywhere we go. I haven't really spoken to any boys since I got here, but there's a famous freshwater spring on our kibbutz that you can swim in [called a ma'ayan] and when I go there at lunch break, I get a nice eyeful of half-naked boys from the whole neighboring region. Not that I've gathered up the guts to speak to them in Hebrew yet. Whatever...

This weekend I am going to Jerusalem to get a taste of the big American-teenager-here-for-the-year party scene for the first time. I'm gonna try and count how many people I know on Ben Yehuda--I bet there'll be a lot.

So that's about it.

How's life, flist?

This is the list of books I am bringing to Israel.

( PH33r. )

Did I mention that HOLY SHIT I'M LEAVING TOMORROW?

I meant to write for IBARW and do an expose about Modern Orthodox racism, but I found myself pitifully short of anecdotal evidence and would have been forced to write something like "...sometimes Modern Orthodox Jews are racist, and it's bad." Nonetheless, be assured, dear readers, sometimes Modern Orthodox Jews are racist. And it's bad. And I believe it has more than a little to do with the fact that the Jewish community is extremely sheltered and homogenous--for purposeful, faith reasons--and that children in Modern Orthodox schools, by and large, do not have a multiethnic peer group until college [unless they attend a religious college such as Yeshiva University, in which case their peer group is largely homogenous, white, Jewish and affluent even then].

This isolation allows Modern Orthodox teens to feel safe expressing racist sentiment to their peers, and while they are often challenged this is not always the case. While I understand the faith need of Modern Orthodox schools to isolate their children in order to give them a proper Jewish education, I do find it somewhat deplorable that, by and large, the only contact Modern Orthodox schoolchildren have with other races is in the form of small talk with the janitorial staff. Despite the (for the most part) liberal values disseminated in Modern Orthodox institutions, they nonetheless become something of a breeding ground for racism--a racism that often mirrors sentiments expressed by adults in the community, a community that is fairly rife with xenophobia.I surmise that a good measure of this xenophobia is a survival tactic, disseminated in order to prevent intermarriage (the scourge of the Jewish community--dilution of the blood!); however, I do believe that intermarriage can be prevented in other, more moral ways--and if it cannot be, then perhaps the community ought to seriously reexamine itself [of course, I am a self-professed atheist whose chances of staying in the community are slim to nil--so perhaps I'm not the best authority to consult. Still, a community that can only remain coherent with the aid of xenophobic sentiment seems to be lacking something in my eyes.]

In other news...I can't believe I'm leaving to Israel on Sunday, but the roomful of clothing I labeled yesterday seems to provide some hard evidence...( more on the topic )

Every time I hear the word "Israel" on the news I do an involuntary judder. Frankly, trying to tease a coherent political opinion out of the overemotional, reactionary mush in my brain on that topic is difficult. In addition, "Israel" and "Orthodox Judaism" are irrevocably entwined in my head, 'cause of all those zealous-Zionist Orthodox institutions spoonfeeding me pro-Israel propaganda all my life. (No lie.) So... my recent crushing apathy and immense distance from Orthodox Judaism sort of spreads to the country, as well.

At some indefinite point in me, I'd "like" to care, just as I suppose I'd "like" to be a good (or even a decent) Jew; I think I'd be a "better person" if I believed in or cared about God in any real way, but I don't, and as such I--it's hard for me to really lift my hackles in defense of the "chosen land" of the "Chosen People." I know that makes me an ungrateful fucking child. I can feel it allaway down to my marrow, trust me. Nonetheless. Difficult to change a downward trend; this one's dropping like a stone. On the other hand... people I love are there. I'm scared for them. And believe it or not, I'm going to spend a year there, studying. But, but, but.

(All I really want to do is lie down on the tiles, smoosh my nose into a crack, and scream "I HATE MATH!" into the mortar. This is what I have become. I was a province full of promise once, I recall. Now if you watched me through the keyhole you could see me doing stupid things all. day. long.)

From here:

The attack marked the second suicide bombing since the Israelis and Palestinians declared a truce in February. Overall violence has been down sharply since then, but there are still shootings and clashes almost daily.

The bomber struck shortly before 7 p.m., detonating his explosives at a crosswalk just outside HaSharon mall. A suicide bombing at the mall's entrance, just a few steps away from the site of today's blast, killed five Israelis in May 2001.

The explosion shattered the mall's windows, and scorched body parts were scattered up and down the street. Israeli ambulances and police officers converged on the scene, rushing to assist the wounded. A woman who was killed was sprawled on the crosswalk, still clutching her handbag.

Islamic Jihad, which has carried out many of the suicide bombings against Israel, claimed responsibility in a phone call to the Reuters news agency.

Islamic Jihad agreed to the truce in February, but has been behind numerous attacks, including a suicide bombing that killed five Israelis at a Tel Aviv nightclub on Feb. 25, just two weeks after the truce was announced.

And you know, it's--funny, I guess, and I mean peculiar, in that horrible way we use peculiar, that I look at this news and there's neither the same anger nor the same grief I used to feel, just a sort of numbness, just a sort of urge to lean forward and examine the pixels on the screen making up the words. Just a sort of distance from something I don't and will never and can't really understand, like in London, and a fierce desire to live in Israel that I can't unpack either; it's all unfolding like a surrealist piece whose artist I haven't studied, except it's people dying. But it might as well be performance art for all the grief I can muster, which is none, which is the sad product of the information age I live in.

( Read more... )