Thoughts

Good morning, everyone, and thank you, to those who sent me their well wishes on my safe return. As anyone who knows me can tell you, I’m not the best flier. I’m not saying I need to take medicine just to get me into the plane, I’m just saying that I get a bit nervous that SOMETHING will go wrong, or worse, I will have forgotten something uber-important, like a passport, my ticket or my accessory kit, even when I’ve checked everything about a thousand times. Whatever.

On this trip, however, I think I was suffering from something a little different. On my trips both to and from Israel, I reached the highest of highs and the lowest of lows. Never was I so happy to stand in a customs line (of all places) to enter a country, and never was I so upset to see the “Welcome to Massachusetts” sign (especially when I saw the one below it said “Home of the World Series Champion Boston Red Sox”). No, this return trip was bittersweet. I was happy to be back, yet it was with a very heavy heart. I hadn’t been to Israel in 8.5 years, and while so much had changed, I felt completely at home. Never nervous. Never worried. Always excited. Happy. Comfortable. No, that’s not right. I don’t have the words to do justice to what I was feeling. One of the presenters referred to it as “returning home from your first semester away at college.” Cute, but a poor analogy. No, my friends, it wasn’t quite like that. Still, I could hardly believe nearly 9 years had gone by since I lived here.

This was from my hotel room porch. I arrived on Sunday afternoon (yes, I missed the Jets implode, as my defeatest self thought they would – two kicks in one minute.) After taking a shower, I spent about 25 or 30 minutes just sitting in a chair on the porch watching the water roll in on the shore.

Next door to the hotel, there was a gorgeous beach, where children were playing, old women were laughing, and everyone’s mind was far away from all of the troubles that were plainly evident to anyone who picked up a newspaper, watched the news or lived within the 20 miles to the south or the 35 to the east. In fact, I asked the taxi driver, security guard at the hotel, and a few shopkeepers and waitresses what they thought (and after laughing at my pathetic excuse for the Hebrew language – let this be a lesson, kids, practice your language BEFORE you get there. It will save you much laughter). For every person I asked, they all said the same thing, its not good, but its better than it was, and more importantly, it will get better. There was a genuine belief that the peace process had finally taken hold (of course, one of them said “peach process” but who am I to mock after I asked her to pass the screwdriver instead of cucumber?). In an interesting article, the International Herald-Tribune reported staggering numbers of Israelis and Palestinians not just want peace, but believe it will happen in their lifetimes. Something, as recently as 2 months ago, I was saying was never going to happen. My, how far we’ve come…

For as much as I refer to places in Israel as very traditional or industrial, with only a passing interest in popular culture from the rest of the world, there’s no getting around it. Sometimes, there are phenomena too strong to pass up on (that’s Hilary Duff from her POS movie and Harry Potter made out of Legos – I also have pictures of other movie posters, McDonalds, Boston Red Sox paraphernalia and a Britney Spears concert DVD too)

Now, the original reason that I was there was for a conference on informal education, and while the conference was incredible, I think my 24 hours in Jerusalem hit me the hardest. I had the chance to visit with some of the participants of the program I myself participated in 10 years ago, Nativ. While where they lived was completely different, and the level of freedom they were given was curbed a bit by the violence of the last 10 years, the students didn’t seem at all daunted. They were happy to be there. In love with the land, with the program, with their lives there, and it brought back a flood of memories. Memories of my life on kibbutz, walking the streets of Jerusalem, shopping in this huge open air market, looking out from a useless windmill at the Mount of Olives (created by a Quixotic poet originally from Austria) and standing on the Tayelet (a lookout point on the outskirts of town).

Very rarely in this world have I found that words escape me (just ask anyone who knows me) and even more rarely, do pictures not properly convey what was seen. Someone once said, “History is just the retelling of someone else’s memories.” Ten years ago, I was a witness to history, when Yitzhak Rabin was assassinated right in front of my eyes, and Shimon Peres signed the second Oslo Accord on television. While nothing quite so grand happened this time, I truly feel as if I witnessed history again. This time, though, I can only describe it as “history in the present” and leave it at that.

I leave you with this image, and I’m sorry if I rambled too much.