Saturdays in September always meant that the swimming beach (the “laguna” as the Israelis call it) would be crowded, the ice cream shop on the corner would have customers spilling outside and filling the tables and chairs at the beginning of the boardwalk, families would be picnicking on every available grassy spot, children running in and out of the waves all along the coastline and shrieking with delight. That was not the scene last Saturday. So on this one –- 2 weeks to the day from October 7, 20223 –- I wasn’t sure what to expect.
As I finished my breakfast while watching the water crash on the rocks outside my window, my pre-coffee space-out was interrupted by loud Israeli pop music blaring from the direction of the laguna for the first time in over 2 weeks. It was a strange intrusion in my living room. Was this a normal Saturday? Were people just going on with their lives? How was that even possible? In confusion and resentment I listened to the lyrics, as best as I could –- spoken Hebrew is hard enough for me to decipher, let alone with a booming rhythmic bass -– and as I made out words and phrases here and there, I started to understand that the songs that they were playing were all in their own ways expressions of mourning for loved ones lost, of solidarity and community and friendship. I had heard some of these songs before, but the context seemed to have changed for understanding what they were singing about. People on the beach had not forgotten, had not resumed their normal lives. They were celebrating that they were still alive while also mourning those who were lost. As G. told me yesterday [I am writing this on Monday, so “yesterday” is Sunday even though this post meanders through my thoughts on Saturday… thoughts and time are all rather jumbled, but hopefully you can follow along] when we were driving to the volunteer house, “We are continuing in our jobs and in our routines, we are trying to do what we can to help those who are fighting, those who have lost families, homes; we are coming together and moving forward. Our resolve is strong. We will win. But make no mistake. We are broken. Our souls and our hearts are broken.”
From my window I could see the playground and I watched a guy in his twenties with long curly hair flying in all directions while he did trick stunts in his wheelchair in the center of the basketball court. Teenagers who had stopped their game were clapping and egging him on. I looked back toward the sea and focused on the lyrics of the song that was playing. At times it seems like there’s no hope, And everything looks completely cloudy and unknown, The flowers in the garden and in fields have not yet bloomed, And only wind is blowing at night. So come, we will together light a candle, a candle. [If you’re interested, those are the opening lines to Sarit Hadad’s Nadlik Beyakhad Ner, “Let’s light a candle together.”]
Eventually I decided that I wanted to be outside and to see people, even though, truth be told, I still feel fairly alien here. I know that I've written about the indescribable feeling of belonging when I'm in Israel that is different from my feeling at home in Canada, but I guess there are different kinds of familiarity, and we take different kinds of comfort in them.
Out on the boardwalk there are more people than I’ve seen in one place in the past two weeks even though there are far fewer than I remember from previous sabbaths. And for the first time out here by the beach, I see what I can only guess is a homeless man panhandling quietly on a park bench. He has a sign written in Hebrew on a large piece of cardboard but it takes me so long to read modern Hebrew that I didn't want to have to stop and stare for that long in order to understand what it said. But as I walked on I wondered if he was a refugee from the south, one of thousands who have lost their homes, their families, and their communities. And it struck me that this is the first homeless person that I've seen here, out of maybe a handful in the whole country over the past 6 weeks, including all of the walking we had done around Haifa, in Jerusalem, and in Beersheba.
One of the things that my daughter and I did not enjoy about Paris, where we spent 4 days on our way here at the beginning of September, was the unbelievable number of homeless people sleeping in the streets, sprawled out on sidewalks amidst dead rats and garbage, and around them the crowds of well-dressed perfectly groomed Parisians going about their business. It was actually quite shocking, even coming from having spent a week in New York before that. We had expected to really enjoy Paris -- isn't it the city of romance, the city of love, the one place everyone wants to go least once in their lives? I have been there before. When I left Israel with the outbreak of the Gulf war, in early 1991, I spent a few days in Paris before running out of money -- which happens very quickly there -- and having to go home. I had thought then that my impression of Paris, my feeling that I was unwanted there, was because of my general state of mind, which was angry and frustrated and sad, and of course because I was basically broke and knew that I wasn't going to be able to stay in Europe and would have to go home in the middle of winter, when I was supposed to still be passing my days among the flowers and sunlit community of the Kibbutz. My French is better than my Hebrew, but still draws sneers and derision from most people when I tried to use it. In September we spent a lot of time walking around Paris, and quickly noticed that our casual walking gear was itself the subject of derisive stares. You could tell the tourists from the Parisians because the latter seemed impeccably dressed and groomed. It seemed that it wasn't just our fanny packs that made us stand out, but I don't usually bother doing hair and makeup when I'm touring in 35 degree weather.
Anyway this wasn't supposed to be a post about what I didn't like about Paris or how we felt like we didn't quite belong there. (Note: the food was amazing (so many fantastic vegan restaurants and options), and the Louvre was spectacular (we ended up spending a day and a half there because we couldn’t see everything we wanted to in only 1 full day), as were the historic sites and the sunsets on the Seine; for the most part, I think we were just eager to get to our final destination, after too much time in hotels in New York and then in Paris). I'm trying to dig deeper into my feelings about belonging and the liminality of being an outsider here in Israel in terms of language and culture but an insider in terms of my own feelings of affinity and security. Paris is an interesting point of comparison and contrast, because I do speak the language and I know a lot of the history. But there is no deeper connection to the people or the sites. And where I've lived in Canada and in the US, though the language and way of life is what is most familiar for me and much more like home than Paris could ever feel, there is also a certain connection with the culture and feeling like an insider that has always been lacking for me.
In Canada, I grew up in both the Jewish community and in the public school system, a strange combination that made me feel more like an observer of each than an insider to either. My parents were always involved in Jewish volunteer work, synagogue work, and community building work. We ate challah and at bagels and lox, lit candles, learned the horah and how to curse in Yiddish. Those were never conscious immersions in Jewish culture; they were just normal familiar family life. Outside of that, I had to go to Hebrew School after regular school for 2 hours on Tuesdays and Thursdays and 3 hours on Sunday mornings. I actively and vehemently resisted Hebrew School but had no say in the matter. Navigating the politics of public school during the day was hard enough; Hebrew School presented a whole new set of peers, different politics, and ultimately more loneliness. And Jewish summer camp, overnight for 7 weeks at a time, at first a fun escape, became something I dreaded as I got older and began to realize that the other girls thought it was weird that I preferred to spend our down-time reading the stacks of novels I brought with me rather than trying on each others’ clothes and braiding each others’ hair. I always had a stomachache during dance class; they all got stomachaches when we set up pylons for a soccer match. I tried hard to blend in as best as I could, but it seemed like everyone knew that I really didn’t belong in the group.
Public school meant starting each day with the Lord’s Prayer – if I didn’t want to stand at my desk and join the chorus, I had to go stand out in the hall with the two Jehovah’s Witnesses whose parents wouldn’t allow them to pray with the class this way. Unlike them, I had a choice, and at first when I didn’t know what it was all about I just went along with it. Then when I thought about it, I decided that mouthing the words would be ok, as long as I didn’t say them out loud. But eventually I decided that I’d rather remove myself from the group in silent protest and stand out in the hall. I also opted to remain outside until “God save the Queen” was finished. So thinking about it now, I would say that at first I was the only one who knew that I didn’t belong in the general culture that was “public” school, but once that had fully sunk in and I had processed it, it was easier to just own it and make it clear to everyone that I was opting out.
So in public school I was the Jew, and I felt it in all kinds of ways, both self-imposed and definitely from others. Minorities today have come up with a word for what I felt from my peers and teachers most days: micro-aggressions. I can definitely relate to that word and all of the behaviors that it covers. There were of course also macro-aggressions (“my parents said I can’t come to your house after school anymore because you’re Jewish”) or just incredulous misunderstanding and even horror from non-Jewish friends (“you don’t have a Christmas tree? What do you DO on Christmas morning?!”). And in Hebrew school, though I didn’t have too many friends, at least there was some correlation between family culture and school life, and by 7th grade history started to get much more interesting than the history we were learning in public school. Although I didn’t realize it at the time, my connection to the stories of the original Abraham and his descendants were just far more compelling in my young mind’s formation of who I was, than the stories of the battle on the Plains of Abraham between the English and the French that seemed to constitute the entirety of the public 7th and 8th grade history curriculum.
By 7th grade, and despite still feeling an outsider at summer camp and preferring to ski on Saturdays than go to synagogue, I had fully embraced my own sense of a Jewish identity. It was not based on faith -– I had tried and given up on praying many times, and learning about the Holocaust really clinched my conviction that there could not be a God. It wasn't really based on community either, at least not in a real sense -- I had few Jewish friends -- but more on the sense of the community that my family belonged to, a kind of idealized sense. But the history, the sense of identity, the ideal of community; the ethical pillars of charity, acts of loving-kindness, compassion for the oppressed, social justice, the emphasis on education and intellectual diversity; the way in which Joseph and His Amazing Technicolor Dreamcoat spoke to me, the imagined past that Fiddler on the Roof evoked in my mind; all of that became, or maybe had always been, the core of my identity. So while I stood alone on the school playground, I knew that I had thousands of years’ worth of ancestors standing with me, and their imagined presence took away the desperate need to belong to something else, to be Canadian. (My teenage years were full of a real penchant for the lyrical and romantic, in case that’s not obvious.)
My sense of Israel was similarly naïve, a simple story of triumph out of tragedy, of the victory of the underdog, the little engine that could having a baby with the ugly duckling, that struck deep chords of recognition and empathy, a feeling of solidarity with a state that was constantly under attack, physically and in the media; misunderstood, maligned, but standing proud nonetheless. While it is much more complicated for me now, the basic foundation laid back then remains.
So when I come here and am immersed in alien waves of languages and people that I have to strain to understand, the elbowing and the yelling and the loud in-your-face reality of Israelis makes me feel both at home and also far away from home. When someone speaks to me in English I’m disappointed that I stand out as a tourist; when they address me in rapid-fire Hebrew, delight turns to dejection as my response in broken Hebrew (usually a request that they repeat whatever they just said more slowly) yields an impatient glare (or at best a polite smile) and a switch to English.
Yesterday [Sunday] when we met G. at the appointed place, she greeted us politely enough but in the usual gruff Israeli manner. She was impatient as we waited for two other volunteers to join us before heading to G.’s car. One of them, a young woman from Cameroon who has been here off and on for the last 7 years while pursuing her Ph.D. in nursing, finally arrived full of apologies for misunderstanding where we were supposed to meet (G. greeted her with "So you know for next time, the cashier's till is this spot, where the cashier is standing and people are paying for their coffee."). The other volunteer, we learned, had taken the wrong bus and was an hour away. G. called and told her we couldn’t wait, but that she would be in touch if there were other opportunities to volunteer in the future. The car ride was awkward at first, G. and I asking each other polite questions in the front seat, until I mentioned how I have been spending my time here writing this blog and trying to counter the narratives in the press at home. Immediately, G. let loose with a tirade against the foreign media (she works in PR) and suddenly we found common ground. We traded stories and gripes, and spent much of the rest of the afternoon talking and sharing. By the time she dropped my daughter and I off at the end of the day, the cold politeness was barely a memory.
A sabra is a prickly pear cactus fruit. It is also an epithet: to proudly proclaim that one is a Jewish native of Israel, one refers to oneself as a Sabra. Unattractive and hostile on the outside, you have to open them up in order to discover just how sweet they are. When G. described all of the volunteer efforts around the country -- showing us pictures and videos of people packing up food and camping grills and driving to army bases to flip burgers for the soldiers on the front lines – she talked about how divided the country had been before the war. There had been weekly, sometimes daily, protests by rival groups for and against the proposed judicial reforms, for 39 straight weeks. G. said that the minute the war broke out, the groups that had organized opposing strikes throughout the country for ten full months immediately pivoted and began to mobilize volunteer efforts to help the refugees, to support the families of those who were dead and missing, to arrange funerals, to resettle the newly homeless in dormitories and hotels across the country, and to raise donations of money and clothing and food for them and for the soldiers being deployed north and south.
To describe this, G. resorted to a phrase that I have heard many times growing up, but had never spent a lot of time thinking about: kol Yisrael arevim zeh bazeh. It means “all Israel is responsible for each other.” It comes from the Talmud more than 1500 years ago, and originally highlighted the collective responsibility of the people of Israel for the sins of its individual members, an idea that itself goes back to the Sinai covenant and the Ten Commandments. The underlying and foundational expression of torah as “instruction” is as a series of precepts and guidelines for the people of Israel to enforce within their communities so as to live according to the ways that the biblical authors understood God wanted them to. Individuals who strayed endangered the community as a whole with the threat of God's wrath, and so everyone was responsible for enforcing the rules on everyone else. A unique system in the otherwise hierarchical and classist structures of the larger ancient Near East, the basic ideal was a classless society in which God’s law would serve as the ultimate authority, and everyone in the community would live in accordance with it and be responsible for each other on a communal level. While elsewhere in the ancient world crimes were defined and adjudicated by the authority of a king, and punishments were mitigated depending on how high up on the social ladder the offender stood (from a slap on the wrist for a nobleman to the death penalty for peasants and slaves), the Torah’s idealized society was egalitarian, and this meant that rewards and punishments were the same for all, and were ultimately collective: kol Yisrael arevim zeh bazeh.
But as the Israelite and then Jewish community developed and became diasporic, as the collective was dispersed, minoritized, othered, and subjugated in host countries that regularly persecuted and expelled Jews through the course of history, this expression took on a deeper ethical dimension. It meant that even if one community spoke Yiddish and wore long black coats and furry hats, and another community spoke Ladino and dressed in colorful cloaks, when the one was expelled from one place, the other had to take them in and look after them. This is a moral obligation, one that also goes back to the Torah as the law of Leviticus 25 spells out the absolute necessity –- as something that Jews owe to God –- of taking in and helping out your fellow Israelite in their time of need. Loving your neighbor as yourself is what we owe to all others; acting on that love is an absolute and unquestionable requirement for Jews who need help. Or as G. put it, “We know that when we are in trouble, we are the only ones we can count on to help each other. We are all in trouble now, together, and we are all helping each other now, together.” I wondered silently if I was part of the "we" in her mind, or only in my own.
My Saturday walk is longer than it has been for a while, and I pass an area with a dozen picnic tables looking out over the water, filled with families and groups of young people. The man at the concession stand exchanges a glance with me and I notice the big gold cross hanging from his neck. It occurs to me that I haven’t really seen too many of those while I’ve been here; but then maybe I have, and they just hadn’t registered in my mind? I wondered if he was wearing it as a kind of protection – not in the amuletic sense, but to let everyone know that while he was an Arab, he was not a Muslim.
But there were plenty of Muslims around today. The population balance seems to have righted itself, I thought as I politely looked away from a young couple arguing quietly in Arabic, and then passed a further park bench with a man in a kippah holding a prayer book silently reciting his own private Shabbat service for himself as he looked out at the waves. I heard a lot of Russian along with Hebrew, and Arabic had definitely made a comeback. A few words in English from a passing older couple were so jarring that I almost stopped to turn around and engage them in conversation, perhaps just to be able to speak and be heard in the crowds.
Belonging to something, feeling like part of something greater than oneself, is a universal human need. I reflect on my own experience in Canada and in the US, and I understand the need for people to identify and affiliate and belong. My mind returns again to the thousands of people gathering in city centers and on university campuses all over the world, marching to express their solidarity with Palestine in the midst of the worst massacre of the Jews since the Holocaust. Even as I am appalled by it, I can understand the error of thinking that they are standing up for what has become the underdog in their minds. I can empathize with the desire to blend into a human wave breaking across a city square, chanting rhythmically in unison. But my brain balks at the blind acceptance of the idea that terrorizing and massacring over a thousand Jews in their homes and at a peace concert in the desert is a legitimate expression of resistance. And calling for a genocide of the Jewish people in response to the opening act of that very genocide, with such loud voices, ardent force, and vehemence defies any empathy that I can muster. Again and again, I wonder how many of them know that they're calling for the death of Jews when they cry “from the river to the sea?” And how many of them would care if they did?
I do have empathy, painful and heartfelt pathos for the generations of Palestinians who have developed their own sense of identity and belonging around a core hope –- kept alive by corrupt leaders of their own population and the surrounding Arab nations, as well as human rights groups, NGOs, and the UN itself –- based on impossible promises for a right of return and the twists and lies that have passed for history. The stories they have been told are tragedies, both in content and in consequence.
The stories we tell ourselves and our children about our pasts are stories about who we are in the present. They are assertions and expressions of identities, real and imagined. Historians are identity-makers, even as their histories are forged by their own identities. Growing up, I felt belonging in my physical family but also in the community of ancestry that was made up in my mind out of stories that I read. Coming to Israel the first time when I was 13 and again at 18, the surge of familiarity, the pull of historical identity, was so much greater than anything else that it blinded me to the real foreignness of the culture and language that surrounded me, to the complicated politics, to the deep cracks in social solidarity even among Jews, and to the stories of belonging from Palestinians that I never heard. I felt that I belonged here, and still feel that every time I step off the airplane in Tel Aviv, even though there is so much here that is still so alien. The country is almost like the individual people themselves – so hard and even unfriendly, uninterested, and rude at first; but then we talk and we listen and we connect in the deep, core feeling of shared values and identity that goes beyond language and culture, an affinity that defies my ability to express it in words here or even really in my mind.
I think of my friend who moved here from San Diego last year, and of how when she announced her intention I had wondered at the move and at how difficult it would be to start a new life here in this strange mix of the familiar and the unfamiliar. But when I saw her a few weeks ago and saw how happy, how comfortable, how at home she was, I realized that she absolutely belonged here. She felt it, even as she railed against the unpredictable and disorganized chaos that accompanied every bureaucratic hoop and endless piece of paperwork that she fought through to settle here. She belongs here because this is where she believes that she belongs.
When I came back from my walk I wrote down some thoughts and impressions, and I wrote down a new question to think about. Maybe no one ever truly belongs anywhere. Maybe belonging is just something we feel in our hearts and justify in our minds to stave off the inherent loneliness of being human.
I hugged my (startled) daughter and told her I was so grateful for her company here, now. Come, we will together light a candle, a candle.