Many thoughts about identity, Judaism, teaching, meditation, travel, parenting and more

Monday, March 11, 2024

We Want It All

This post was written on March 10th, posted on March 11th.

I wish blogger would let me post the video I have on my phone... it was filmed just a few miles away from our home during a local protest.   (Message me privately. I'll send it to you.) In any case, below is what you can hear in the video.

"Say it loud, say it clear.

We don't want no zionists here.

Settlers settlers go back home.

Palestine is not your home.

We don't want no two-state.

We want '48.

We don't want no two-state.

We want all of it. "

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Wednesday, March 06, 2024

Friend from the past

Aine and I met during a semester in Ireland. We became close friends, traveled together, and stayed in touch on and off over the years. Our connection was rekindled especially deeply during the scary days of COVID. We began connecting somewhat regularly (although not frequently) over zoom. Once the COVID threat began to diminish, I drove four hours to visit her in New Hampshire. She later reciprocated for a weekend visit to us with one of her daughters. 

Aine is an ordained minister. She does not have a congregation now, preferring instead to connect with people through InterPlay, a program which I think I understand to use body awareness to connect with the soul and with each other. She’s worked with communities, using InterPlay to help them dialogue. 


In the shock-ridden days of mid-October, she reached out to me, checking in and telling me that she held me in her heart. As our texted conversation progressed, she expressed her hopes for peace and safety, her empathy for Israelis as well as her empathy for the Palestinian people. It was here that I began to feel uncertain of our conversation but I couldn’t verbalize why. 

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Sunday, February 25, 2024

What I'm Learning About Myself and Confrontation

In the past few weeks I've been in several unexpected confrontations. I'm not going to go into the details of them now although I hope to share about one in a future post.

I'm proud of how I handled these. I used time as a tool to wait to respond and to do so as clearly, simply, respectfully and calmly as possible.

Nevertheless, this process has led me to understand the following things about myself:

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Sunday, February 11, 2024

Israel Part 13: The Final 24 Hours

One of the deciding factors in my doing this trip was the revelation that it would coincide with sheva brachot for Bat-Ami and Mike's son, Gavi and their new daughter-in-law, Daphna.  Sadly, covid cancelled that plan and the only visit I had had with Bat-Ami and Mike was the chat on their mirpeset (porch). 

That's not enough time to spend with the friend I've known longer than I've known anyone else in the entire country. So on my way back from Jerusalem, Bat-Ami picked me up at the train station in Modi'in and we got a few more hours in before my last night. We didn't talk much about war by now. We talked about food, about family and about education. Bat-Ami teaches English as a second language and we talked through some ideas together of how she can relay enough vocabulary to her students and have it be meaningful. I geeked out on the tiny bookstore she made (seen behind my ear in the photo) and then she took me back to the Altmans. They were out for the night but had left me a key and I went in and went straight to bed. 

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Monday, February 05, 2024

Israel Part 12: Jerusalem, the shuk, food in general and the comfort of familiarity

(Revised lightly on March 15, 2024)

By the time I got off the train in Jerusalem it was getting late and a heavy rain had set in. I had lost track of time, partly from jet jag and partly from a technical error. In planning my train trip I had taken screen shots of my route and while checking them again and again I somehow hadn’t registered that the time remained 11:22 on the images while actually it was past 3:00 in the afternoon when I got off the train. 

Now I didn’t really have time for Jerusalem. It’s huge. I needed to get back to Modi’in and a settle in for my last night before flying back to the U.S.

On the other hand, I couldn’t NOT go to Jerusalem. I struggled to rent a locker for my suitcase. (Misread what coins I needed and then needed to go to four different stores before I could get that change.)
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Sunday, February 04, 2024

Israel Part 11: Train Ride South

On my Wednesday morning in Israel, Joel dropped me off at the Karmiel train station. I now felt much more equipped to buy my train ticket, locate the platform and order a croissant, at least partially using Hebrew to ask for what I needed. I had ridden to Karmiel in the dark. Now it was daylight. I spent much of that time writing the blogposts you've seen here, but also a lot of time looking out the window at the coastline. 

In the past week since my return I've started, both cautiously and confidently, to open up conversation with a very dear friend of mine. She has been concerned about my saying that that my worldview has changed and she wanted to see if I was still the person she knew. In our snippets of conversation (somehow fit in between laundry, school, parenting etc.) I've begun to find the words that have evaded me for these past 121 days.

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Sunday, January 28, 2024

Eshchar continued

I realize now that I left out some critical information from the last post! I wrote a great deal about the fact that Joel and I talked so much, but I didn’t say a lot about what we said. That actually is somewhat by design. First of all, it’s really hard to remember the details of something that we immersed in all day long. Second, a lot of it somewhat personal. 

That said, I do want to make something clear. One of the reasons it was really important for me to see Joel was to see somebody who is in love with Israel but who does not fit the mold for most people I know. Joel and I talked about what it means to be in Israel because they want to be on a kibbutz and what that means practically, politically and ideologically.  We talked about what it means to be in Israel because it means belonging to the community in a unique way as a Jew. We talked about how hard it is to learn Hebrew but how doing so makes the difference between transplanting American communities into Israel in a way that, frankly, looks kind of colonialist, versus actually working hard to use the language to become Israeli. We talked about how Joel found Israel to be an answer to a lot of questions DESPITE a lot of pro-Israel rhetoric that Joel was averse to. 

If you've read through my other posts through this trip, you'll know that I've really wanted to have a relationship with Israel, but that a lot of things have stood in my way: language, mis-guided PR, and more. I haven't even addressed directly the work I've been doing so long trying to lean into learning Palestinian narratives and history. But meeting with a friend who now lives in Israel and who thinks so radically out of the box has helped me start to open a path. 

Israel Part 10: Eshchar

(Apologies that this text is the wrong color. I'll take any advice on how to fix it.)

Sometimes I wonder if Joel Rothschild and I are cosmic cousins. Even before we ever met, we were breathing the same Pacific Northwest air. When I was a pre-teen getting my summer camp Jewish education at Camp Solomon Schechter, they were apparently living on the other side of those Olympia Washington woods. This wouldn’t matter a lot if not for the fact that I don’t know a single other person from Olympia.

Joel and I actually met at Oberlin and certainly were friends in the Kosher co-op, but I never expected it to be a continuing friendship. Nevertheless, our paths have crossed again and again, in Portland, for a full year on Vancouver, BC, in Englewood and in Washington DC. The last time I saw them was, I believe, an entire decade ago and then except as distant Facebook friends, we fell out of touch.

When my Facebook account was hacked and I started a second account, many people I re-friended reached out to me privately to see whether or not I was the real me. Joel was one of these people, on October 11, as a side communication we somehow mastered while the world was crashing down around each of us in our own ways.

It was in this exchange that I learned Joel had made Aliyah. What?!

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Saturday, January 27, 2024

Israel Part 9: Rehovot

It says Rehovot. Trust me. 


(Apologies that the text in this post is black instead of white. I wrote it from my phone in transit and something got lost in translation. I'll accept advice on how to fix it.)

Rehovot was the centerpiece of my trip. It was also the starting place of my planning. A few months ago when I tentatively reached out to my friend there and asked what she thought about me coming, her response was that she was crying.

I knew the trip was blessed somehow because I looked at the nose of my plane when boarding at JFK. I didn’t know they named planes, but apparently they do. And as Ofra said later, it would make sense for them to name the planes after well known cities: Jerusalem, Tel Aviv, Haifa. But no, my plane was named Rehovot.

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Thursday, January 25, 2024

Now I’m a Tourist Attraction

Checking in at ElAl the guy behind the counter asked me if my name comes from Lord of the Rings. When I confirmed he geeked out for a few minutes, giving me his take on Tolkien’s genius and taking a picture of my boarding pass to show his brother.

It was weird. I wonder if this is how Israelis feel sometimes around Americans.

Wednesday, January 24, 2024

Israel Part 8: Mazkeret Batya

For a few years when N was little, the Lewis family, who are Israeli, lived in Englewood. Their son was a year younger than Naomi and the two of them were adorable together.

The last time we saw them was on our trip to Israel in 2015. We spent Shabbat together in Jerusalem with family of theirs and they housed us in their tiny and temporary apartment the night before our early flight back.

I wasn’t 100% sure I should tell them I was coming on this trip. With only a week there were so few people I had time to see. 
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