Esh in Israel: My Life Now, My Life Next Year

After months of telling myself that THIS was the night I'd sit down and write my blog, I decided that tonight was the night. I'm going to start off free-form and see where it goes, since I've given up all hope of this blog having any semblance of continuity.

Maybe that's for the best, though. I don't spend a lot of time reading blogs, but the best of what I have read, though, develop a character not through overly thoughtful meditations (to which I clearly aspire and to which I generally fall short), but rather through small, regularly updated moments, simply reflected upon so as to slowly paint all corners of a character, not just a few brazen brush strokes.

Starting with the second night of Pesach (Passover), Jews go into a period called the Omer - a period counting the 49 days between the Pesach sacrifice and the holiday of Shavuot, but a period which, due to rabbinic interpretation, has been tied to a sense of loss and mourning (often attached to stories related to Rabbi Shimon bar Yochai and Rabbi Akiva and his 24,000 students). In the midst of this period, a number of days are marked. We've recently recounted three of them - Yom HaShoah (Holocaust Memorial Day), Yom HaZikaron (Memorial Day) and Yom Ha'Atsma'ut (Israeli Independence Day).

Of those three, Yom HaZikaron and Yom Ha'atsma'ut fall directly next to each other on the calendar. In the Jewish calendar, the day starts the night before - this means that you start the day mourning the loss of Israel's fallen soldiers and end the day celebrating it's independence. Memorial Day was felt here in a way I never felt in the US - where Americans take the day off work, visit relatives, and enjoy extremely good sales at the mall, this country mourns deeply, communally. The military graveyards are packed, from the most secular to the most religious in the state, hardly a person doesn't have some connection to a soldier that has died, and those that are lucky enough help to mourn others' losses. In a sense, to see a graveyard more full of the living than the dead gives a sense of hope - that Jews have reached a place where we are still growing rather than shrinking, coming together rather than drifting apart, even for a day.

Within hours of such sadness, downtown city centers throughout the state became a celebratory zoo. Downtown Jerusalem, in particular, was a crowded mess - cars are blocked out and the streets run packed with families, teenagers, and couples alike.

A favorite moment revolved around a group of otherwise secular Israeli teenagers huddling down the street, chanting Israeli Zionist songs, and raising an oversized Israeli flag. Too often and too recently, the flag here is constantly tied to a sense of inevitability and militaristic misstep, that every right the country might think it's making turns into a somehow unplanned greater wrong. The flag has become so rife with corruption that it's lost it's innocence - after 59 years, the flag has gone from a badge of honor to a sign of something more sinister. When these kids ran through the street lifting the flag, though, it was born anew - the blue star on the white shield buckled magnificently in the streetlight sheen, and the breezy night caused the flag to even give itself applause. Israel was everything we want Israel to be, a pure state of peace, and community, and shared vision and shared purpose, a flag over a union of brotherhood locked in purpose of well-meaning and selflessness. It was beautiful.

I haven't made this knowledge widely-known, for some reason, but I'm staying in Israel next year. I'll be a Pardes Fellow, which essentially means I'll once again be a full-time student in the Pardes Beit Midrash (our study hall, where I spend 3/4 of my day), with the added responsibility of creating and implementing a leadership project, as well as being a general role model in the Pardes community, both in and out of the Beit Midrash. How I came to this thinking went kind of like this:

1. Come to Pardes for year, apply to Pardes Educator's Program
2. Get into Pardes Educator's Program
3. Realize that you really should study more before going into Educator's Program, or else your knowledge of Torah will totally suck
4. Apply for Pardes Fellows Program
5. Get into Pardes Fellows Program
6. Decide between Fellows Program and Mechina (preperatory) year for Educator's Program
7. Agree to Fellows Program
8. Realize that the Pardes Educators Program was never for you in the first place
9. Be really happy with your decision but equally confused about the future

And after all that, I'm still ecstatic with my decision to stay. I'm not so totally clueless about the year after next - I forsee myself either in graduate school (in either a Jewish Ed. MA program or a Jewish Studies program) or working (most likely in a community-based programming position). Either way, I went through a lot of stress about my future this year - a lot of right-or-wrong-decision worry, a lot of totally useless and unnecessary stress. When all was said and done, though, I'm left where I was when I first came back to Judaism, when I first realized that I needed to make Judaism a central part of my life. I know that this life will still have many paths yet to travel, that a "career decision" is barely that, that a professional choice is but a step on the overall bigger goal - ensuring a life focused on bringing goodness and peace into the world, on making the global world better through my local steps.

Back to Yom Ha'atsma'ut. An Israeli tradition on Independence Day is the barbecue - they freakin' love it. You can even get little $2.50, pre-packaged, disposable grills at the corner stores (makolets), charcoals and all. Back at Willard Residential Hall, in the I-live-in-dorms college days, I became grillmaster for our dorm cookouts. It was really great fun; there are only rare joys greater than cooking ten feet of meat at a time for waiting, hungry freshmen. Tuesday, I stepped back into my role, and it was terrific. Granted, it was 20-something Jews instead of freshmen, but the joy was the same. They all laughed at me for being the meat-cooking vegetarian, but I loved it. I really can't explain the sheer visceral joy in running a grill - the heat off the grill, the smell of the marinated meat dripping fat onto the coals, the occasional flame-up - these all leave a real sense of meaningful quietude, a purposefulness that few other tasks ever allow.

Yeah, I know. That's weird.

I'll finish with a thought. As I become more entrenched in this country, whether I like it or not, I constantly reflect on my relationship not only with Israel, but with the surrounding countries, the US, and the world. At the alumni panel hosted at Pardes for Yom HaZikaron, a former-student-turned-reporter remarked on the fact that she lives here permanently, but that she has never, in fact, ever made aliyah to gain Israeli citizenship, because doing so would prohibit her from entering the territories of Gaza and the West Bank. As such, she's essentially stateless - she has US citizenship, but doesn't live there, vote there, or pay but the slightest of taxes, and she doesn't have Israeli citizenship, yet she does everything but vote here, including raising her children in the school system. Even still, to be, at the root, stateless - does this appreciate our ability to report on a place, to reflect on a culture? If we're not invested anywhere, do we then become appropriate voices of the objective? I'm not sure, but it left me puzzled, nonetheless.

In lieu of the Omer, I hope we can all take pause in the next few weeks, at least once, to admire the awe that constantly surrounds us.

Oh, and let's not forget picture time. (Click for bigger)