I found the most amazing travel agent, Shiri. She helped me get a United flight to Paris tonight, a connecting flight on El Al later tomorrow, with ETA in Tel Aviv 12:10am on May 6 (Israel time).
I am glad to be in transit as I sit at my gate in Newark. I am grateful for all the help, flexibility, generosity, and creativity that went into making sure I could begin this journey. It's been strange to keep my head in it for the last 36 hours, as it was touch and go until we departed for the airport.
I am feeling the weight of the fact that no airlines will fly into TLV except El Al. It makes this moment feel like all that much more of an in-the-family crisis. As I was expecting to be grounded, I felt a kind of yearning for my people and our land . . . like I was going to fail to make it to the seder.
I am glad I can be present there. I am grateful I can see people's faces, touch the ground, feel the air, and begin to further understand this fraught moment in so many spiritual, cultural, emotional, and practical ways.
Before Landing
Thinking of being in Eretz Yisrael gives me pause. I lived in Jerusalem for my first year of rabbinical school -- as was the policy for all first-year, American rabbinical students at Hebrew Union College-Jewish Institute of Religion. A profound learning -- one that now seems obvious -- became clear in this year abroad: Israelis and Americans are different. Even Jews. There is a cadence, zeitgeist, and energy to American Judaism and American Jews which makes our lives something separate and apart from the project and the challenges of being Jewish in Israel. I began to see with greater clarity all the ways in which my Jewish education had prepared me for Israel to be a kind of spiritual Disneyland. . . A destination for my American trip to the land of my spirituality.
Around this time, I became enamored with a poem by the late Israeli poet-laureate, Yehudah Amichai. It illustrates the flaw in this model so deftly. I will copy it here for you in English:
Tourists by Yehuda Amichai
Visits of condolence is all we get from them.
They squat at the Holocaust Memorial,
They put on grave faces at the Wailing Wall
And they laugh behind heavy curtains
In their hotels.
They have their pictures taken
Together with our famous dead
At Rachel's Tomb and Herzl's Tomb
And on Ammunition Hill.
They weep over our sweet boys
And lust after our tough girls
And hang up their underwear
To dry quickly
In cool, blue bathrooms.
Once I sat on the steps by agate at David's Tower,
I placed my two heavy baskets at my side. A group of tourists
was standing around their guide and I became their target marker. "You see
that man with the baskets? Just right of his head there's an arch
from the Roman period. Just right of his head." "But he's moving, he's moving!"
I said to myself: redemption will come only if their guide tells them,
"You see that arch from the Roman period? It's not important: but next to it,
left and down a bit, there sits a man who's bought fruit and vegetables for his family."
Meeting the Family
The ocean between us can seem wide indeed. (Flying there is taking me more than a day!) Travelling to Eretz Yisrael is both a homecoming and a visit to a distant, foreign place. It means I feel strongly and proudly assertive of my Jewish identity and its connection to Israel. At the same time, when I look at life there -- on the news, through folks I know, or on the ground, in the land itself, it feels far away from a lot of what I know and love about being Jewish.
So, I am trepidatious. I am nervous. What will it mean to encounter this land and its people again? What will it mean to wrestle with the conflicting values I will encounter within myself, within others, and within what the current situation (the "matzav") reveals?
One travels to feel connected. I am afraid I will encounter only fissure and brokenness. I am afraid that the family will feel like strangers, the gulf of what it means to be Jewish widening into an ocean.
