And I Wonder If There Was Some Better Way To Say Goodbye

Sitting in Gan Ha'Paamon (Liberty Bell Park) - one of two gorgeous parks literally steps outside of my front door - last Shabbat, I started thinking about space and time.

Less than twenty four hours earlier, I said an almost tearless goodbye to the city I called home for six years, and then I boarded a plane to a place an ocean away, to a place I had been told would be my home for a year. Sitting in my cramped seat on my packed flight - summer is the high season; every single seat on the 600-ish seat plane was full - I started a bit of conversation with the man next to me.

"Are you going for a visit or do you live in Israel?" I asked.

He told me he was going for a visit, asked me where I was from, and then turned back to his cup of tea. As the hours wore on, and as I showed him how to use the movie screen above his seat, helping him adjust the volume and change the channel, our conversation expanded. I made the decision to tell him what I would actually be doing in Israel (deciding whether to have a conversation about becoming a Reform rabbi - especially as a woman - is often a delicate one, as you never know how receptive your audience will be or how tiresome the conversation - and the explanations - will become). He seemed interested, hopeful. I dispelled a handful of misconceptions about Reform Judaism - "That’s the not religious one, right?" He wished me luck repeatedly. He asked where I would be living.

"Jabotinsky. Near Keren Ha'yesod," I said.

"My wife lived on Jabotinsky."

That sense of a universal Jewish family, a seamless connection to those who share our faith - a birthright I struggle to believe in - lingered in the back of my brain.

I arrived and retrieved my luggage. When my cart rolled away from me as I tried to heave an 85 pound suitcase on top of it, a woman wearing a wig, covered from head to toe in modest dress, came over to hold the cart stable for me.

My aunt drove me the 45 minutes from Tel-Aviv, where the airport is, to Jerusalem. We unloaded, went to the grocery store for Shabbat food and to the Home Center for fans, as the sharav (heat wave) was just coming to an end.

And, now, I sat in a park, looking out at the buildings around me - the Jerusalem stone beige in the intense light of midday. I watched Arab children running around, playing, sing-song yelling to each other. I watched as they came to eye my iPod and book with curious interest. I watched as they tried, in Arabic, to ask Molly, an English and Hebrew speaker, to share her basketball with them. Coexistence, I thought. Somehow this scene felt like home. The buildings, the children, the trees, the activities, the serenity did not feel so far away from Central Park on Shabbat afternoon. Could this foreign place, this place where I only half speak the language (and that is a generous estimate) already feel like home?

Later I joked that Jerusalem looked like to New York to me - just with windier streets, less traffic, and a few more trees. Then I went to Tel Aviv, where home dripped from every building, where the city really did look like New York. I arrived back in suburban Jerusalem reminding myself of how important this year would be - how I needed to relearn how to interact with people. to shed some of my New York-bred tendencies, to move a little more slowly, more calculated, more thoughtfully - to really interact with the people around me, talk to them, make a little more eye-contact, listen to them.

11 hours. An ocean. And somehow it all still felt like home. And then it didn't. And then it did. And then it didn't. And then it did.

I did not know what to say to you. My thoughts these days hover mostly around what it means to make a home and what it means to live in the world.

Over fresh grapefruit juice, one of the summer interns asked me what I was most excited about and most scared about this year.

"At the risk of sounding naïve, or perhaps brattish, I have to be honest: I have no expectations for this year. High standards? Sure. But I am really trying to have few to no expectations. After I got into Columbia, which was, perhaps, one of the most thrilling moments in my life up to that point, as I gushed about how excited I was to leave, to start my new life, to learn, a friend told me that high expectations lead to disappointment. While probably the most earth-shattering, crushing thing anybody has ever said to me, it proved to be the most useful. I guess, now, the challenge for me is to figure out how to live with passion, with excitement, without ambivalence, but with no expectations," I responded.

The intern nodded.

I went on, "I do not talk about this often, but I really struggle with living here. I have never felt the rah-rah-we're-all-one-family passion that my peers expressed about Eretz Yisrael. I am an American; I want to be a rabbi in America. Sometimes I struggle to understand how living here for a year - how being away from everything I know and love - will inform my rabbinate."

"I struggle with being told I have some G-d-given right to this land - a right that can be defended at the expense of the human rights of others. I cannot take a side in this conflict. We have all been aggressors. We have all been victims. There is anger, heartbreak, loss, mourning, fear, and insecurity from every perspective. But, still, I ask myself how I can be here? I struggle to reconcile a deep-seated commitment to social justice, to equality with my desire to connect to this place I am told is my home."

"I have come to realize that I can love this place without loving everything that she does. I have come to realize I can believe in my right to be here, just as fervently as I believe in the rights of Palestinians, of Muslims, of Christians, of Druze to live on this land.:

"But I still struggle with being here. What does my presence say? Some assume my living here correlates to unquestioning support of the Israeli government and their decisions, to an unending hatred of The Other. I do not feel those things. I do not see The Other - I see the similarities, the commitment to family, the same olive skin, the dark hair, the laughter and the chatter, the guttural language. Somewhere in my mind I believe we can all put down our weapons, can use our words, can find our similarities, can respect our differences, can coexist. That does not seem so impossible to me."

The tears came - from both of us. I do not think either of us expected them. But, then, neither of us expected to hear the other express the innermost thoughts we all have but do not say - to commit verbal treason, to commit the crime of questioning, to break the silence and the tacit agreement.

"I guess I just hope I will make my corner of the earth a little better while I am here. I do not think I will solve world peace - though it would be totally great if I did. I just want to get to know this place. I want my neighborhood to feel like home. I want to pursue my passions here - educational equity, meditation. I want to buy vegetables from my neighborhood vegetable guy and from the shuk. I want to be uncomfortable, to be forced to make a new home away from everything familiar. I want to be lonely sometimes. Maybe, in the end, others will see my corner of earth and want to make theirs similar, maybe they will embrace similar values, joining me in my efforts. Or maybe they won't, and that will be fine too," I ended.

The questions continued to pour from my jetlagged brain. I hushed myself for a long enough moment to continue with a conversation about radical Jewish community, about empowering people to take ownership of their Judaism and the ways they express their commitment to it, about being the anti-Rabbi rabbi.

We paid the check, and I walked home, hoping to write to you, to give you insight into my ever-developing new (is it really new?) life here, to give you insight into the 83,000 questions that flood my brain at every turn. But the words were slow to come. I am still making sense out of the questions - I am far from having the answers.

So I remind myself that being here is not a commitment to the rest of my life - it is a commitment to the next hour, possibly to tomorrow. As I get lost on the winding streets, trip on the slick Jerusalem stone, look at pictures of weddings I have missed, the lump rises in my throat. As quickly as it rises, though, it falls, as I read the Hebrew street signs; as I find my way around; as I make friends with cab drivers, with store owners, with the woman at the coffee shop on the corner. Over three hundred days in this foreign place - it feels as foreign as it does homey - overwhelm me, though. And, so, I think only about today and, vaguely, tomorrow. I think about singing with Kol Zimrah in the park; I think about which of the vegetables in my fridge I will cook for lunch tomorrow; I think about mopping my floors, cleaning away the layer of desert dust that has settled in the three weeks I have called this place home.

Tears well. Tears well because I am so happy here; I feel like I am truly in the right place. Tears well because I feel like I am taking more steps towards being the person I hope to be. Tears well because I miss American washing machines. Tears well because I miss gentle hands rubbing my head and listening to how my day went. Tears well because everyday I try to write to you I read about Toby's struggle with neuroblastoma and my words, my fears, my challenges seem insignificant. Tears go away, though - they never stay for long, and they rarely even fall.

Please do not confuse these words as expressing unhappiness - they just express reality. I feel something different at every moment of every day because every moment is new. I do something I have not done before more times a day than I can count, and that is as emotionally taxing as it is wonder-inducing, intoxicating, and exhilarating. So I sit with my feelings. I try to give them words. I try to paint them. I try to talk to you. Please be patient with me, be gentle. The words will come in their own time. I just hope you will be here to listen.




***NOTE: I hope to update my blog on Tuesdays and Fridays, so check back often. The initial lull was not (hopefully!?) indicative of things to come, more of a need to get settled in a new place and focus on being in the moment.