Being Jewish

I’m suffering from a post holiday hangover, typically whenever there’s a holiday around here we all do it’s a fairly common thing. This time for me it’s a little different, for this first time since I left New York at the end of October I have a direction and that is something like this. I’m coming home by the end of August, its just feels like time. I’ve been gone for seven and a half months and by the time I get home it will be something like ten plenty of time in Israel for now. And now that I’m faced with this I’m starting to freak out just a little tiny bit, for one thing it seems totally impossible that I’ve been gone for that long, I mean really?? Israel in that time has begun to feel like home. I feel comfortable with the rhythms and cycles of both secular and religious Israeli life and I like it. Whenever Americans talk to Israelis about Israel being such an amazing place they all look at us like we’re insane, they just don’t get it. And I don’t expect them to, living in a Jewish state warps their perception about what the world is really like. Many of them have no no-Jewish friends; they don’t think anything about stores being closed on Jewish holidays and open on Christian ones. To them its just business as usual and they don’t get what a little beautiful bubble Israel really is. They never grew up defending their Jewishness to their close friends, because all their close friends are Jewish, they don’t have the experience of being one of a small few Jewish kinds in their school. They grew up singing Jewish songs, dreaming Jewish dreams. Okay so maybe I’m romanticizing the point a little bit. But that’s just my point, for an American like me this is all very romantic, I grew up without a Jewish identity and I felt the pain of that, recapturing or really for that matter discovering my Jewish identity has been the most beautiful and at times painful experience of my life and its precisely because I never had it that Israel and a Jewish state is so romantic to me and many other foreign, diaspora Jews. We believe in a dream that for us always seemed like just that a dream. While many of our Israeli brothers and sisters sleepwalk through the experience.

There’s a great story told about the American – Israeli experience. It goes something like this when many religious American Jews come to Israel and few years later you’ll find them much less religious. When Israelis come to America a few years later you’ll find them much more religious. And I think it makes a lot of sense in an environment surrounded by Jews what’s the need to be so religious, even living in a secular-ish environment in Israel still places you firmly in a Jewish rhythm, life here just is Jewish all of the time, so to some extent what’s the need to be so super religious in an environment where its so easy to identify yourself as a Jew. Meanwhile for the Israeli’s suddenly they find themselves in a completely non-Jewish environment and they need to cling on to something that makes them feel more Jewish and so they turn to the one thing that makes us all Jewish, the Torah and its laws. On an unrelated note its starting to get really hot in this country I don’t know if I’ll make it though the summer, I may just shrivel away and turn to dust, now I’m starting to understand the whole living in a desert thing. But that’s just life here in Eretz Israel.