Travel Log #17

September 22, 2009

It has been a long time since I have written. Lack of internet has played a large factor in this. Hopefully, I will soon be back in the technological realm of existence. Meanwhile, I have been sharing one computer kiosk with over one-hundred people.

Two-and-a-half weeks ago, I moved to Ashkelon, a city on the sea, seven miles north of the Gaza border, along with thirty-seven other OTZMAnikim. We live in an immigrant absorption center: Mercaz Klita Kalanit. Kalanit= a kind of flower. In the front yard, there are etrog trees. The fruit will be ripe in time for sukkot, a week-and-a-half from now. Baby etrogim fall from the trees. We sit in circles and throw them at each other. I scratch the skin and smell like citrus. The oil does not bother me, so perhaps it is only oranges and grapefruits that dislike me.

Kalanit is empty, other than us, a few dozen college students, and three families. During its golden age, it had hundreds, so many you couldn't find a seat on the lawn or benches. Now, it is nearly empty. We have been placed here with high hopes. We are expected to save it from extinction. Money dries up here, very much like everywhere else. Money dries up here like water but our time is still spent.

In the mornings, we got to Ulpan. I am placed in the "advanced" class, meaning intermediate. There are only two levels: those who spend their time learning the aleph-bet, starting from absolutely nothing, and those of us who speak just a little. Today, I went out and bought a dictionary. My problem is not a lack of understanding. It is a fear of speaking, a lack of confidence.

We are here to volunteer. I have found what I was looking for: a dance floor. Ballroom dancers in this country number merely seven hundred. Ninety percent of these dancers are Russian. The method of teaching is as foreign to me as the Russian language. The instructors do not promote teams, only couples. Couples do interact with one another. They are enemies. "We would all benefit it we dance together," I say, knowing this from experience. "No. We are Russian. It's not going to happen," is all I am told. And that is supposedly the end of that. I will see what three months of American influence can do. Social dancing does not exist here. The dance floor is full of animosity and competition. I begin dancing three days a week: Sunday, Monday, Wednesday. On Thursdays, I tutor Russians in English. I help beginners dance and I am allowed to take the overly-priced classes for free. It is good to be an OTZMAnik. Ashkelon has been made a volunteer city and we are volunteers. We are highly revered. Last Wednesday, the mayor came to us. Kalanit threw him a party for us.

On Thursday night, we were taken to Jerusalem for slichot, a spiritual all-nighter before Rosh Hashana. We got a walking tour of Jerusalem and were then let free on our own with maps that could hardly be made sense of, so that we could go and observe the crack-of-down services. Tallit and tefilin on men dressed in white are nothing new to me. I got lost, ran into others of the group and followed them to our destination, where we were given breakfast. Then, I got on a bus to Tel Aviv and got a train up to Binyamina and Zichron. I have gone there every weekend to be with my adoptive family. It is a always a relief to get away after the long (and hot) weeks in Ashkelon.

This weekend was the New Year. I went to shul on Shabbat, which was nice, and refrained from Quaker Meetings on the second day. Not that there are Quaker Meetings to be had in Zichron. On Sunday, I took a walk in the nature reserve and the botanical gardens with with my friend. The views are gorgeous and the walking is good. I ignore my flat feet.

The wind is good at the those heights, and the view is far and wide. As usual, I am not alone and my celestial companions stand guard everywhere. They remind me constantly:

"You are close to the place where we were born, Little Girl," and all Orders populate the landscape . There are the Orders without names. They are voices only, arrows in suggestive directions. They remind me of my purposes for being here.

I look around at faces, physically young and actually old. Where I come from, young faces accompnay people into adulthood. The world does not press down on us so heavily, so noticeably. There is no need to escape from reality. For most. Here, I look into young faces and see the kind of expression I have always worn looking back. They understand--the world is not easy, it must be carried. Happiness is not free. Here, we know the price.

In high school we were always preached at for being privileged. They showed us pictures of starving children in India or Africa. "Oh, yes," we'd nod our head. "We are privileged," and then go home to our nintendos 64s, reach into our pockets and dole our our money and not our time. We tuck the notion of disadvantage and despair away in a file labeled with a number and not faces. Here, each individual face counts, each individual face counts, each individual life. This is why we come upon dilemmas where we debate trading one soldier for hundreds of prisoners with the pressing knowledge that those released prisoners will mean more lives later, and usually, lives out of uniform. Maybe even our own lives. But this is the way the game is played. We continue. There is nowhere for us to go. It comes down to (once again) the notion of Heimat: "I don't necessarily enjoy living here," someone said, "but I couldn't live anywhere else".

The people here are warm and kind. It is like one big family and for the first time in my life, I feel truly welcomed everywhere. At least outside the typical drama of the living situation. I don't feel unwelcome here, but it's just the typical story with me and my age group. I stay out of the loop. I am through with trivialities. So I branch out to the locals. I get phone numbers and Shabbat dinner invitations. I accept. As usual, I am most popular and most impressed with those a generation older than I am. Still, I have not caught up with myself. It is like waiting for rain in a drought.

But, as the weather proves, be careful what you wish for. The opposite of drought is a flood. Casualties result from both. It has rained non-stop at home. The city is drowning. It has begun to rain here, too, a little bit early. The climate is changing. Nature is angry and in the face of it, our work on the ground is inconsequential. I work anyway. All things in moderation. For an individual, a little can mean a lot. And to save one life is to save an entire world.

The world around me is full of music, fresh fruit, the screams of military airplanes flying low at night, Amharek, Russian, Hebrew, birdsong, laughter, arguments. It is full of the sounds of life. It is Israel. This may be a little hard to paint in words, especially for those who have never been here, and particularly because o the media's portrayal of it.

Israel is just as multicultural as New York City, London, or Berlin. The difference lies in the fact that in all those cities, we're Jewish, and in Israel we are American, British, or German, Ethiopian, Russian, Iranian, French, Argentinian...You get the picture. Like I spoke about in Germany, Jews have the uncanny capability of assimilation/acculturation almost too perfectly into any culture world wide. Except for the fact that we are viewed as Jews in those countries by the host population, we are more French than the French, more German than the Germans, more American than the Americans, and on and on. In Israel, we are all Jews, so that label disappears and we are left with the host cultures we have become and carried with us; we are left with what we are: the embodiment of cultures with a Jewish twist that we held in such great esteem but which slighted us more often than not.

But pooled together, we are only Iraqi and French and German and Moroccan and American, and all the rest. Left to our own devices, we become like all the others. We have our feuds and prejudices, our racism, our alliances, our assumptions, and our own ardent display of Octavia Butler's "Human Contradiction" of intelligence and hierarchy. More on that later. I will be working with a lot of Ethiopian children in the coming weeks, teaching them English, improving their skills in whatever they need improving in. It's a class struggle like in every other country. This is why I refuse to grant any group of people greater respect than another--we are all quite Human in the end. I just feel the right to hold my own to a higher standard. I live my life attempting to embody it. Let us see how it goes.