In Between: A View From The Halfway Point

Sundays on Kivunim are often filled with additional “experiential” educational programming, taking us on fieldtrips around new areas of Jerusalem, or outside the city altogether.  Over the course of the Sunday programs we have met a lot of interesting people and seen a lot of new places, or at least learned to look at familiar places in new ways.

The Sunday right after I returned to Israel from New York, Kivunim was visited by Daniel Rossing.  Mr. Rossing has worked in Israel’s Ministry of Religious Affairs, and today he directs the Jerusalem Center for Jewish-Christian Relations.  His program consisted of a short lecture on the history of Jerusalem, specifically regarding Jewish-Christian relations, which was followed by a walking tour of the Christian Quarter of the Old City of Jerusalem. 

Mr. Rossing’s lecture began with an introduction to Jerusalem as “City of the Between.”  He discussed this label from many points of view, but he began with the religious dimensions, talking about how Jerusalem is in many religious teachings the site of the final judgment between ascent to Heaven and descent into Hell.  Jerusalem is also a city caught in between sacred and secular, being a holy city for many, while having just elected a secular Mayor.  He talked about Jerusalem being a border between the past and the future, as different communities in his eyes seem to live in different centuries.  It is a city split between democracy and theocracy, between tradition and modernity, between dream and reality.  Perhaps most poignantly he talked about the “in betweeness” of Jerusalem’s citizens, explaining how Jews are a local majority but a regional minority, while Muslims are a local minority but a regional majority, and Christians are a double minority—perhaps exposing why he finds the Christian community so interesting in this context. 

His discussion of the many dualities existing in Jerusalem was very compelling to me.  Over the past few years I have become more and more interested in and conscious of the importance of appreciating the coexistence and synergy of diverse, and even seemingly opposing, elements in the world.  Indeed, as my roommate Jason and I have discussed, Rossing’s label for Jerusalem seems to apply to much more than just this city.  Especially that Sunday, as I reflected on the excitement of the past several weeks on the road, and began to settle back into life in Jerusalem, I found Rossing’s use of the term “in between” to describe quite aptly how I had felt over the course of all that time living out of a suitcase. 

By the time I returned to Jerusalem, almost two weeks ago, it had been nearly five weeks since I had lived in Beit Shmuel.  The last time I had packed up and rolled my suitcase out of our hostel had been on December 28^th, the day that winter vacation started.  Since then I had traveled all around Israel for two weeks, and then flown from Tel Aviv to Casablanca via Istanbul.  I had spent a week breathing in Morocco, before making the continental shift from Africa to Europe on a ferry over the Strait of Gibraltar.  Then, just four days later, I had crossed the Atlantic Ocean and spent a week back in the warmth and winter of my hometown, before making my way back down to New York, and eventually flying back to Israel to take a bus back to Jerusalem.  It’s a lot to fit into so few sentences.  In fact, it’s the most I’ve ever fit into so few weeks.  Last year I spent almost five months looking forward to Kivunim, and now it seems that I fly to Israel with nary a few hours to spend in anticipation.

Those five weeks opened my eyes to more of the world than I’ve ever experienced, and I always seemed to have been experiencing the “in between.”  During those five weeks America finished its latest transfer of power between presidents.  In Morocco the in between was ever present: we were at the crossroads of Africa, Europe, Islam, and Arab civilization, with all the languages that go with them too; between democracy and monarchy; and between the desert and the sea.  When we crossed the Strait of Gibraltar, we felt in between worlds, just floating in transit.  In Spain we found ourselves in between many major religions and cultures, as we visited places that had seen the heights of Jewish, Muslim and Catholic cultures, in conflict and coexistence, at one point or another. 

There’s nothing like travel to make one feel in between, but especially on a plane.  The sense of transferring gravity, from one life to another, between the earth and outer space, makes us groggy as we try to adjust our biological clocks to the time at our destination.  When I landed in the United States, the familiarity overtook me.  I was home, but I felt more in between than ever as I felt the shortness and sweetness of my visit all at once; I asked myself, do I live here or have I moved out?  Something in between, no doubt.  My time living out of the suitcase, then in its fourth week, endured.  Arriving in New York City, feeling the familiar, almost overwhelming energy of millions of lives all playing out together in a dense and cosmopolitan city, and perhaps especially upon entry to the United Nations building, I felt more definitions of “in between” materializing.  When I boarded the plane back to Israel, just hours after speaking at the UN, days after leaving Spain, and weeks after I had flown out of Tel Aviv, I felt what seemed like an entire era of my life come to a close.  When I landed in the evening in Israel, after taking off in the evening of the previous day just hours before, I wondered where the day in between had gone.  As I looked out the window of the bus on my way from the airport to Jerusalem, I felt myself begin to slow down and finally find the calm to reflect on my travels.  With the fresh ink of the fifteenth stamp of the year drying in my passport, I felt a new sense of life in between being a seasoned tourist and a resident-at-ease sink in.

Today, February 12^th, splits Kivunim in half.  Our first flight to Israel was October 12^th, and we will be on our way back home on June 12^th.  Indeed, my perspective on what it feels like to be in between seems to have been inspired by the natural rhythm and calendar of this year.  With four months of Kivunim behind me and four months ahead, I sit on the balcony of my new room at Beit Shmuel, looking out on the walls of Rossing’s Christian Quarter of the Old City of Jerusalem, with the tops of churches and mosques peaking over the ramparts.  Living yards from the Green Line, between Israel and the West Bank, as an individual I feel about as in between as any of the countries that we’ve visited.  I hope and imagine that it’s clear how deeply this year has impacted me so far.  I feel I have experienced growth in almost every area of my being, from my writing and my relationships to my dreams for the future and my knowledge of myself and the world.  Recently I have found myself torn between somewhat painful yet endearing nostalgia for the freshness of the fall and renewed motivation to explore through the spring.  Throughout the year I have joked about how time zones mean nothing to me anymore, but Rossing’s lecture could not have felt more pertinent than it did that Sunday.  The time since I returned to Israel has been full of reflections on how my peers and I will approach this second half of Kivunim, as a group and as individuals.  We have gone back to school, and are now watching the seasons change. 

We continue to struggle with our identities, between high school and college, as American Jews living very much on the inside and the outside of Israeli society.  In the past months this identity has been reflected in the election schedules of America and Israel, and our ability to really participate in them.  And of course, we are still somewhere in between war and peace here.  Soon we will see where we are going in that regard; with the Israeli election results released, we now begin another in between period as the next Israeli government and 18^th Knesset takes shape.  We find ourselves with two prime minister candidates, who both gave victory speeches when the results were released.  While Tsipi Livni’s Kadima party received more votes than any other, the bloc of parties that would align in a coalition behind Bibi Netanyahu’s Likud party seems to beat out Livni for a presumptive majority in parliament.  If today has marked the point between the two halves of Kivunim, it has also brought us to a new place of convergence between two interpretations of victory in Israeli politics.

In a few weeks we will be traveling to Turkey, one of the most in between countries on earth.  While I have tried not to take for granted the in between nature of my life and the places I’ve seen, I’ve certainly become accustomed to expect it to a certain extent.  I am learning to recognize that so many places on earth find themselves at the crossroads of civilizations, and also to look for such “in betweeness” if it’s not initially apparent.  Indeed, Jerusalem may be a phenomenal example of such a localized fault line between cultures and ideas, but such intersections exist all over the place, and throughout history.  Entire peoples, like the Jews wandering in the desert, have found themselves in between, while Obama’s stimulus package finds itself moving slowing between status as a bill and a law. Yet, being in between is not just about transition; it is also about moderation and complexity.  It is about trying to achieve balance between seemingly opposite extremes, and recognizing that while places, people and ideas don’t simply fit into the categories that they may appear to represent at first, they do also fit together.

Living in between is exhausting.  It compels us to put aside time to reflect, so that we do not lose track of where we are in the process of such intense experiences, or allow ourselves to desensitize because of sheer inertia.  I know that the Kivunim experience and lifestyle will not last forever, but impermanence seems to be a fact of life.  Perhaps the way this “gap-year” (bridge- perhaps?) has taught me to appreciate life shines light on the most basic value of spending some time to take notice of the in between—for high school graduates and others too.  We’re all in between.  When we zoom in we may find ourselves between classes, careers, relationships, or stages of life.  Yet, when we zoom out we find ourselves between birth and death, and between past and future generations.  It is in that context, seeking a healthy balance between these two viewpoints, that I begin the next half of this gift of a year.

International Commemoration at the United Nations

On Friday, January 23^rd I boarded an intercontinental flight.  This year on Kivunim is full of such dramatic itineraries, but this one was particularly meaningful.  I woke up Friday in an empty hotel room in Madrid; all my roommates had left for an early flight back to Israel.  I met Kivunim’s director Peter Geffen in the lobby, and before I knew it we were on our way to the airport.  We would be flying from Madrid to the United States.

The idea of coming home during the year had always been up in the air.  My parents and I had flip-flopped several times between not wanting to ruin the momentum of the year and feeling that it was only logical that my international experience would have to include North America.  Yet, on December 31^st, as I stood on the beach of Eilat, the southern tip of Israel, killing time before a New Years celebration, the decision of whether or not to go home was taken out of our hands. My phone rang.  When I heard Peter’s voice on the line, I thought for sure he was calling with an urgent security update as the situation in Gaza continued to unfold.  But his voice carried a different tone altogether.  He was calling with an invitation for me to speak at the United Nations.  After months of hopping from country to country, I would be going home and visiting international territory—perhaps the best expression of my goals for the year.

He had presented an excerpt of my writings about our trip to Greece and Bulgaria (from Routes to Roots entry “The Routes Less Traveled By”) at a Kivunim Board meeting.  One of the Board members, who directs the UN’s Global Teaching and Learning Project, thought it would be appropriate for me to speak at this year’s annual observance of the International Day of Commemoration of the Victims of the Holocaust at the UN.  By coincidence, this year’s week of commemoration programs would include a briefing on Sephardic, and specifically Greek, Jewry during the Holocaust.  Sitting on the panel would be the Greek Representative to the United Nations; an Oxford professor of modern Greek linguistics and son of a Greek Holocaust survivor; and a Holocaust survivor from Salonika, one of the most significant places in our travels to Greece.  At a briefing on such an unlikely subject—as far as mainstream Holocaust commemoration is concerned—I would be playing the unlikely role of youth representative.

From the moment I hung up the phone with Peter, I began to grapple with how best to approach such an assignment.  I realized that the only way to have integrity as a young speaker in such a forum would be to try as hard as possible to connect to the enormity of the topic.  I knew I wasn’t even close to being an expert, but at the same time I realized that I was part of a small handful of people my age who had been exposed to the stories of the Greek Jews.  I had to put my voice in context. 

As Thursday, January 29^th, the day of the briefing, approached, I became more and more humbled by the subject matter.  I tried to reflect as honestly as possible on the Holocaust in general and on the specific stories of the Greek Jews.  I read other commemorative pieces about the Holocaust, seeing how people had broached the topic in the past. I tried to combine my own personal philosophy and family stories, the goals of Kivunim, and my experiences into a presentation that would express a representative perspective on the Holocaust, from a Jew, an American, and a member of Kivunim and my generation.  I would explore how the importance of constantly striving to enrich our perspective and collective memory of the Holocaust represents the broader importance of keeping these lesser-known stories alive in general—and how that relates to the many challenges that face my generation, in the Jewish community and beyond.

By the time my parents and I arrived in New York, the fact that I was speaking had become real enough that the final touches on my speech fell into place—though I’ll admit they often had to be dropped several times before they fell the right way.  It had been quite a powerful and eye-opening experience to immerse myself in the Holocaust commemoration mindset, and this process led me to places of equal parts sadness and hopefulness, intimidation and resolution.

It was the second time I had ever been to the United Nations building.  The first time was last summer as a counselor for a global activism program at my summer camp Tel Yehudah.  My parents and I met family and friends who had come in for the briefing, and then we made our way to the room where it would take place.  The room resembled a miniature version of the General Assembly.  There were between 300 and 400 seats, each of which had a desk and a microphone.  The seats wrapped around the stage at the front, where a series of microphones were set up with the names of the panelists and our moderator.  I felt the buzz that I had felt before public appearances in the past—the nerves giving way to shear excitement.  

I was the fourth and final speaker of the day, so I sat and listened to the other panelists for about an hour.  I was glad to have this opportunity to take in the mood of the event and continue to put my perspective in context.  Between viewpoints ranging from the political to the academic to the powerfully personal, the vibe in the room was somber and meditative—the feeling of a room full of people engaging in an experience of collective learning and introspection.  Once I began to speak I felt right at home.  I felt at peace with the voice I had found on the subject, and I felt even further endeared to my experiences in Greece.  After the hour-and-a-half of question-and-answer time following my speech, during which the audience and panelists got to know each other and their perspectives better, I talked briefly with a few representatives of different NGOs who had come to the event.  Then it was off to lunch with the family before heading back to the airport and Israel.

Today words cannot do justice to how grateful I feel to have had the opportunity, and the responsibility, to reflect on the questions that the briefing presented.  If this blog has been a meaningful way to process and get more out of my experiences in retrospect, then preparing for the briefing was the epitome of such a learning experience—forcing me to reexamine not only past experiences, but also a deeper past that I feel I have a responsibility to face.  I feel truly lucky to have seen how my philosophy and Kivunim’s vision fit into a professional context.  As much as I have felt so fortunate to be able to explore both my Jewish identity and my curiosity in the world in tandem on Kivunim, to be able to address Jewish questions that I believe transcend the Jewish world at the United Nations, of all places, was a symbolically fitting and humbling format for what has been one of my greatest privileges. 

My experience at the UN was not a climax but a jumping-off point to continuing to explore the challenges that face my generation and the concrete lessons we can learn from our past—perhaps especially when it comes to the Holocaust.  Whether we like it or not, these past events come to define entire cultures and public discourses.  However, the quality of that definition can only be determined by how we embrace our history and evaluate it as a means to get the most out of our present and future.  This, I think, represents the meaning of commemoration—as a deliberate effort to reflect and set goals, striving not to take history for granted and live conscientiously for the future.  Today I have renewed conviction to continue the journey and find further meaning in the stories that we tell ourselves.

 

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The video webcast of the briefing can be found here: http://www.un.org/webcast/SE2009.html

Just look under January 29, 2009: NGO Briefing on "The Sephardic Jews in Greece: The Untold Story" in Observance of the International Day of Commemoration in Memory of the Victims of the Holocaust.

Below is the full text of my prepared remarks from the event:

Good morning.  Firstly, I would like to extend my most sincere thanks to Maria-Luisa Chávez, Bill Yotive, and everyone at the United Nations Department of Public Information, who have afforded me the opportunity to speak here today. Also, efharisto to Ambassador Alexandrakis, Professor Benmayor and Mr. Mullah.  I am honored and humbled to be here with you today.  I would especially like to thank Peter Geffen, the Director of Kivunim: New Directions.  Peter, today I speak on behalf of my peers when I say thank you for being our leader, our educator-in-chief, and an inspiration to us all. 

It is truly an honor to have been asked to participate in this discussion.  As an 18-year-old Jew from Boston with Eastern European ancestry, I feel I would be remiss not to acknowledge that I must seem like an unusual candidate to be speaking at an event focused on commemorating Sephardic and specifically Greek Jewry during the Holocaust.  Of course I don’t pretend to be any kind of expert on the topic, but the recent contact I have had with the powerful stories of the Greek Jews has revealed to me what I consider to be some of the most pressing questions facing my generation of Jews, as well as issues that transcend the Jewish world altogether—challenges we all face now as we move into the next chapter of history and Holocaust commemoration.

As a student on the Israel-based gap-year program Kivunim: New Directions, over the course of the past four months I have had the privilege of being exposed to a broad view of the Jewish people, an exploration of our history and culture that includes study of various Jewish communities that all too often lie outside the consciousness of North American Jews and the general mainstream Jewish narrative.  These studies are part of a rich academic curriculum that includes Hebrew and Arabic language studies, along with a Middle East Studies course that explores the history, politics and culture of the region through Jewish and Arab lenses.  The more my peers and I learn the more conscious we are that any year-long study of history and culture can really only touch the tip of the iceberg.  Nevertheless, this exposure feels increasingly significant, as we, many of whom have had over a decade of formal Jewish education, find these lesser-known threads of the Jewish narrative providing poignant addenda to our concept of what it means to be Jewish, developing parts of our Jewish identity that we never knew existed.

Such a sense of awe in deliverance from ignorance is perhaps most potent when our studies touch on the Holocaust.  Having left hardly any Jewish families on earth unaffected, and having led to watershed changes in the life and geography of those families, the Holocaust is an endlessly challenging subject that makes up much of the bedrock upon which modern Jewish identity develops.  As an only child, I grew up with the story of how my great-grandfather and namesake, Benjamin Perlstein, the youngest of twenty-two siblings and the only one to emigrate from Poland prior to the Holocaust, ended up also being the only one to escape the family’s fate at Auschwitz.  Yet today, observing Tuesday’s anniversary of the European liberation of Auschwitz, I feel the roots of my Jewish identity reaching into that bedrock that is the Holocaust, and wrapping around it in entirely new ways.

In the last week of this past November, Kivunim took its first international trip of the year, visiting Greece after a month of studying the roots of Jewish life there and its intersection with the broader history and culture of the country, as part of our World Jewish Civilizations course.  As we walked the streets of Salonika, which before Kivunim most of us had never even heard of let alone linked to our Jewish heritage, we tried to imagine the city teeming with Jewish life—a place where for centuries one out of every two people we met on the street could have been a Jew.  For the first eighteen years of my life, any international consciousness of my Jewish identity had been largely focused on the relationship between the United States and Israel, so standing in a synagogue with Jews chanting familiar prayers in the middle of Greece was a dramatic revelation in itself.  Yet it was really only when the congregation at one point began to pray in Spanish, or more accurately, Ladino, that I began to feel how deep this new avenue toward the heart of Jewish history could go.

As we met with the small remaining Jewish community in Salonika, perhaps the only thing as powerful as what we saw was what was missing.  Indeed, as remarkable as it was to experience Jewish life in Greece, the fact that it felt we were saying goodbye to the Jews of Salonika no sooner than having met them was not just a function of the briefness of our visit.  As we stood in Liberty Square, where the deportation of Salonika’s Jews was preceded by unconscionable public humiliation, we imagined how uprooted, terrified and betrayed these people must have felt.  Just behind us was the port, which used to close early on Fridays because even the stevedores in this city were Jewish, and they too observed the Sabbath.  To have to celebrate our discovery of this past center of Jewish culture, where Jews exiled from Spain in 1492 had found a new home under the Ottoman Turks, and at the same time mourn the loss of ninety percent of its nearly 50,000 Jews, who were taken to Auschwitz in 1943, was positively wrenching.  Realizing that so many hundreds of Greek Jewish families were at one point together with my own in that particular concentration camp, personalized their stories, challenging and enriching my own.

As incredibly unique and unexpected the richness of Jewish life in Salonika was, it would appear to contribute to an easy assumption that Greece was just one more European country that willingly gave up its Jews to the Nazis.  Yet, while the horrors are certainly real and unimaginable, we would learn that the reality is truly not so simple.  In contrast to the apologetic air in Salonika’s Liberty Square, we were shocked to find that the Holocaust memorial in Chalkida, a struggling community that claims to be the oldest community of Jews in Europe, pays tribute to the Greek Orthodox Bishop Grigorios, who hid many sacred objects from their synagogue in his church and facilitated the protection of ninety percent of Chalkida’s Jews.  This moving example of courage in the non-Jewish Greek community, in the face of Nazi threats against their Jewish neighbors and anyone found assisting the Jews, was not unique.  We learned of Greek Archbishop Damaskinos, who was responsible for saving thousands of Jews through initiatives to produce false baptismal certificates from the Greek Orthodox Church and appeal directly to the Germans, namely in the form of a letter written by the famous Greek poet Angelos Sikelianos that was signed by many prominent Greek citizens.  “In our national consciousness,” he wrote, “all the children of Mother Greece are an inseparable unity: they are equal members of the national body irrespective of religion or dogmatic differences.”  (He is speaking about Greece.  Perhaps today we could expand this statement to represent not only our ideals for minorities in all nations, but for the equality of all peoples around the world.)  These uplifting stories of heroism amidst such excruciatingly painful and threatening circumstances continue to remind us of humanity’s potential for redemption even in the darkest of times.  It is truly difficult to recognize now how little is known not just of these places, but these stories in particular—and not just among Jews, but Greeks and other students of the Holocaust as well.

Of course, when it comes to the Holocaust, in the end the pressure to settle for simplification is great.  It is certainly easy to despair.  While there are examples of courage and resolute moral principle in the face of senseless persecution, it is sometimes difficult to keep them in mind amidst the obvious and overwhelming devastation.  The sheer numbers of dead and the inconceivable actions of human beings against others challenge our capacity to accept the reality of this tragic chapter of human history.  Indeed, when we allow ourselves to lose track of the strands of courage, the instinct to preserve the Holocaust as merely a symbol of evil in our memory can be an excuse to neglect the exploration of its inevitable nuance.  We may begin to shy away not just from the examples of hope, but also from the depth and darkness of the individual stories, the diversity of the people, and the ultimate acknowledgement that even though those involved may have been dehumanized—both as perpetrators and as victims—we must not distance ourselves from them to the extent that we do not learn from the Holocaust as a human tragedy that relates to us all—perhaps especially now in our interconnected and technologically advanced 21^st century world.

This cuts to the core of why it has been such an important experience for me and my peers to be exposed to the stories of Greek Jewry.  Kivunim’s mission to educate us about the Jews who live and have lived in countries and cultures of the world beyond our limited experience is not only an effort to broaden our sense of what it means to be Jewish, but also to foster the development of what our mentor Peter calls “world consciousness,” a term that I have come to define as a commitment to the challenges of embracing both the complexities and commonalities among us.  If anything, Kivunim has taught me that the story of the Jewish people can be a model for the story of humanity, of a group with seemingly endless diversity and fragmentation combined with an ultimately common core identity.  Perhaps, these experiences suggest, despite the many challenges that we currently face, the roots of the Jewish people’s transnational history and present day life may in fact embody the ideals for which the United Nations itself ultimately stands.

During our study-tour to Greece, we visited a synagogue in the town of Veria, which has been essentially entirely empty of Jews since World War II.  As the 51 of us held a short prayer service, we quite literally brought the synagogue back to life.  Perhaps never in its entire history had it housed a congregation made up entirely of so many young Jews—let alone Americans.  Being in Veria gave us a special sense of humbled empowerment, reminding us that the processes of history and society that seem to transcend us all as individuals really cannot happen without us.  However, foreshadowing the slow disappearance of many other Jewish communities around the world like Salonika and Chalkida, whose stories lie outside the mainstream Jewish consciousness, Veria is an example to us all of how important it is not to take anything for granted.  For if we are not careful to move forward conscientiously, our history can easily slip out of memory. 

When the day comes that my children are old enough to learn about the Holocaust, any remaining Holocaust survivors will likely not have been old enough during the War to remember much from its darkest days.  So today members of my generation and I ask ourselves: when that day comes—and it is on its way—will we remember the Holocaust?  Will we remember the Jews in places like Salonika, whose communities have all but fallen off the map because of their decimation?  Of course memory can never be truly perfect, but will we have risen to the challenge of forging a collective memory that is rich in detail and perspective?  Will we have succeeded in broadening our sense of who we are and where we stand in the process of history?  Will we have learned to balance appreciation for both complexity and commonality, difference and similarity, tragedy and redemption, specifics and the big picture?  For me these questions are at the core of the many seemingly pivotal tasks that appear to hinge on the aptness and agency of my generation—not just of Jews, not just of Americans or of Greeks, but of all peoples.  Thank you.

Growing Pains Before Spain

One of the most central goals in Kivunim’s mission statement, as I have discussed at length, is to espouse “world consciousness.” This conceptually ambitious and oftentimes nebulous term, along with its many variants and derivatives, has become increasingly popular in the lexicon of our world. On a more personal level it has been a focus of my own intellectual and educational pursuits, presenting many of the questions and challenges that led me to Kivunim. Stemming from the centuries-old trend of increasing economic and political interdependence, in the last years and decades the more cultural definitions of “globalization” have become more complicated and widely examined in education, public policy and the media.

Certainly terms like “global citizenship” and “world consciousness” have gained traction and buzzword status in western society, and part of my own struggle to define these terms has been to explore whether “globalization” really is just “westernization”—an updated version of imperialism for the era of political correctness. Yet, while this self-consciousness certainly has some credence, it would be unduly self-centered to assume that Western culture is the only one with an emerging sensitivity to the transnational processes in which we are all increasingly playing a role, and to the collective issues that we face on a global level.

Last year I developed and ran an educational initiative called Global Citizenship Seminar (GCS) in my high school, based on the idea that in order to facilitate the development of healthy active citizenship for our time we must embrace the complexity and diversity within ourselves and each other as individuals—and within and between the groups to which we belong—while also appreciating and striving to deepen our understanding of the uniting, common factors. Many of the ideas surrounding GCS operate on the personal, local, national and international levels, so they have developed in my mind as personal challenges as much as challenges I see facing the world. When I first launched the project at the high school, I was curious about whether the curriculum could be adapted for different communities outside the upper-middle class ilk. Yet, while I was confident in the idea that a program such as GCS was appropriate for my community, I would also learn to think about “my community” differently—that Acton was much more complicated than just an upper-middle class suburb.

I bring all of this up because in the same way that the initial experience with GCS opened me up to new meaning behind the philosophy that I was promoting, I am finding that Kivunim is also expanding and challenging these ideas in new ways. Indeed, while I gravitated towards Kivunim in the first place largely because the website advertised a mission statement very much in line with my own, at the core of those common ideas is not a comfortable sense that my beliefs and worldviews are intact and static. I stress that the GCS philosophy is a set of ideals and challenges; at its core is curiosity and a will to find new meaning and deeper understanding of these ideas. In short, to me “global citizenship” does not represent an assumption of understanding, but a commitment to the challenge of exploring the infinite complexity of our world and how we all play a part in it and are connected through it. Ultimately, to say these things is to admit that we do not entirely understand them. They offer guidance and encouragement in the endless journey of realizing how much more than rhetoric and philosophy they truly are.

And so, as much as I find myself feeling a deeper and deeper dedication to the principles of embracing complexity and commonality, as much as I find my experiences reaffirming these broad conceptions about the world, I have never been so challenged in my life.

I will admit that during my time in Morocco it was more difficult than ever to keep complexity and commonality in balance. In Greece it was easier to see how significant and eye opening the experiences were. To look at the Parthenon is to see the foundation of an entire culture that is very much at the roots of the context in which I have lived. When I looked at the columns, I saw the White House. Morocco is full of sights, smells and sounds that simply don’t fit into that context as easily. On the one hand, thanks to Kivunim I could read the Arabic in Morocco better than I ever could read a sign in Greece or Bulgaria, and the markets in Morocco showed me a new side to the shuk (market) atmosphere that has come to feel familiar to me during my time in the Middle East. I also saw another side of the Atlantic Ocean and it snowed while we were in the mountains, which made me feel right at home. However, on the other hand, many of the experiences felt like they were just bouncing around in my mind without any hope of finding traction. I realize that these experiences are exactly what one needs to have in order to grow and gain new perspective, but they also made me more aware of what it really means to travel beyond the United States, Israel and Europe.

Morocco has a history that overlaps with the United States less than any country I have been to yet. Still, it does overlap—in completely unexpected ways! Morocco was actually the first country to recognize the United States as a country. It is a country that is in the thick of one of the most intriguing modernization stories I have ever heard. Its motto is “God, King, Country.” Its constitution calls for a democracy, but all power (including the ability to appoint the prime minister and the cabinet, and to dissolve Parliament) is concentrated in the king, who serves as the religious and political authority. And here’s the kicker: the current king is a vigorous reformer. He’s all about human rights and basic freedoms. Of course the reforms are imperfect because, among other things, they aren’t democratically enacted, and to the extent that they do liberalize they are on some level in direct contradiction to the integrity of the monarchy as an institution. One wonders how long the Moroccan people can rely on the king to lead (or shall I say, order?) such a revolution, but somehow it seems altogether logical—and remarkable—that Morocco has found a way to achieve systemic change that is true to its roots.

Morocco is an Arab Islamic country that is geographically closer to New York than to Mecca. Thirty percent of the population is of the native Saharan Amazigh ethnic group of North Africa, and the short period of French colonialism, from 1912 to 1956, (and really short distance from Spain) has left in indelible mark on society. Most Moroccans speak at least Arabic and French, but still around half of them are completely illiterate. Almost half the time we were in the country was spent on 8-12 hour bus rides. (In fact, so far on Kivunim we have traveled by bus, plane, taxi, train, horse-drawn carriage, camel, ferry, Jeep 4x4, and foot.) We were in the Atlas Mountains (the second highest peaks in Africa) and watched the sun rise in the Sahara Desert. We saw the ocean, the sea, the plains, and the cities. We visited the biggest mosque I will ever see (because the only one in the world that is bigger is in Mecca, which non-Muslims aren’t allowed to visit). We saw snake charmers in the famous Djamaa El Fna square in Marrakech. We visited Quarzazat, the desert location where Lawrence of Arabia, The Mummy, and Gladiator, among others, were all filmed. Of course the most powerful parts of our week in Morocco were spent with local people. We stayed in the mountains, in a town called Talouet, where we became spontaneous participants in a rhythmic Moroccan song-and-dance tradition in the middle of dinner. One of our tour guides also invited us into his (big) house one night, where his wife taught us how to make the Moroccan delicacy pastiya, and introduced us to the wonderful Moroccan tradition of greeting guests with tea and cookies before the meal. In all seriousness, being invited to do havdallah (the service that ends Shabbat) in a Muslim home was a very powerful experience for the group.

The Jewish content in Morocco was no less profound than in Greece and Bulgaria, but sometimes it was so deeply entrenched in the broader culture that we didn’t initially recognize it. Jews came to Morocco after the destruction of the First and then the Second Temples in Jerusalem. That means that they arrived about 2000 years ago, predating Islam by 600, and in some cases 800, years. Today the Jewish community has just a few thousand members, because about a quarter of a million moved to Israel between its establishment in 1948 and the 1960s. While our trip to Greece and Bulgaria opened us up to new clusters of Jewish roots, showing us centers of Jewish culture that had thrived for five hundred years until very recently, Morocco challenged us to connect to an entirely different avenue to the roots of Jewish antiquity. In Greece the Jews were split into Romaniotes, whose history was considered to begin there during the Roman Empire, and Sepharadim, who came to dominate the Romaniote Jewish culture after being expelled from Spain and spreading all over the Mediterranean in 1492. In Morocco the Jewish community was split between Magorashim and Toshavim: essentially, Jews who had stayed in Morocco since the destruction of the Temples, and those who had gone to Spain and then were forced to return to Morocco in 1492. The idealism that was afforded to Spanish Jewry in Greece was muted in Morocco, as historians see the culture of the golden age of Spanish Jewry all but sprouting from the same group in Morocco. It is so interesting to see where the lines are drawn…

Our first contact with the Jewish story in Morocco, after a month of studying it in Jerusalem, came on Day 1 of the trip, in Casablanca. First we visited a remarkable museum of artifacts that have been recovered from restored synagogues all over the country in the past fifteen years (an initiative mostly led by our guide Raphy). Then we saw one of the four Jewish schools in Casablanca in action. We visited an old synagogue in the city of Errashadiya. Its state of horrible disrepair, we learned, is mostly due to a roof collapse in 2006, which, needless to say, made us wonder how long it had been intact before then. The countless kasbas (old desert hospitality palaces) that we saw by the side of the road on our hours of driving all had Jewish quarters. This presented another side of the ancient Jewish contribution to international trade, which was so pronounced in the Mediterranean communities of Greece; in Morocco the evidence lies not in the sea, but in trade routes of the desert. Case in point: while the port in Salonika, Greece used to close early on Friday and stay closed through Saturday for the Jewish stevedores to observe Shabbat, in Morocco the traveling souks still have no business on Saturday, even though no Jews live in the desert regions of the country anymore. We spent the first two weeks of Kivunim exploring Israel’s desert as the birthplace of the Jewish people. Now, in the Sahara Desert of Morocco, we recognized why this place could feel so at home to Jews. We visited a positively expansive Jewish cemetery, and spent Shabbat in Marrakech, which was shocking in how similar the prayer service was to that in Greece—except that here the prayer books were in French instead of Spanish.

In all honesty, I am still having trouble digesting the week I spent in Morocco. It was an adventure that truly does lie outside the framework of my limited experience. Now I can say that Morocco is part of my experience, but I expect that as I continue to grow, the connections between all the dots of my life experiences will continue to mature. As my sense of what it means to be Jewish and to be human continues to broaden this year, I know that although the week in Morocco has come and passed, it will continue to change my life. I hope that it will continue to serve as an example, a springboard, for the challenges and rewards of establishing familiarity with places in the world that our radar really must stretch to see. It is indeed an endless journey in our short time on earth, but as long as these dots keep appearing on my radar screen, and the screen itself continues to expand, I will not fear the dots that don’t so easily connect. After all, as much as I came to Kivunim for some pretty specific reasons, what I looked forward to most, and what continues to embolden me, is the relevance and enrichment of the experiences I did not expect.

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As we crossed the Straits of Gibraltar, from Tangier, Morocco to Tarifa, Spain, we felt in between worlds. The mood was slowly shifting, from Arabic and French to Spanish, from Africa to Europe, from Islam to Catholicism. The ferry ride was only about 45 minutes, but Spain is an hour ahead of Morocco. After the 8-hour bus ride from Marrakech to Tangier, followed by the ferry ride, Spain felt like some kind of dream world.

Hearing Spanish was sweet to my ears, after six years of studying the language in school—and after months of experiencing all kinds of brand new languages—I was finally in a country where I felt I could begin to communicate on a higher level with the natives. While Morocco is definitely the most foreign place I have ever been, despite the fact that I could read the language, Spain felt more familiar than any of the countries we’ve explored, because of the language.

We began our short visit in Granada, exploring the Alhambra, the old Moorish fortress that served as a city hundreds of years ago. The similarities to the palaces we had visited in Morocco were striking. Before we knew it we were back on the bus to Cordoba. On the way we took a trip through time, seeing the old windmills of Don Quijote, and then the modern windmills of Spain’s alternative energy industry. As I watched the sun set over the seemingly endless hills of olive trees we passed, I closed my eyes and transported myself thousands of miles west, where the same sun was lighting up the National Mall in Washington, D.C. Barack Obama’s inauguration as the 44th President of the United States of America would be in just under two hours.

When we arrived in Cordoba, we ran through the streets with our backpacks bouncing up and down and the wheels of our suitcases buzzing on the ground. We were a hoard of eager patriots flocking to witness history from afar. We piled into the bar in our hotel, which conveniently enough had a big-screen TV set to BBC. We gasped with joy and anticipation as we shared in the energy radiating from the millions of people on camera in Washington. We waited with the rest of the world, feeling the distance and the proximity at the same time. We watched each of the former presidents slowly emerge from the Capitol building, and then Barack appeared. His faint smile and resolute gaze felt perfectly appropriate as we all shared the moment. Then came the opening prayers and remarks before he took the podium. Watching that speech made us feel powerful. The words were beautiful, and while he outlined anything but business as usual, Barack was all business. Later that evening, after enjoying an authentic Spanish meal, we watched as CNN’s Wolf Blitzer talked over footage of the Inaugural Parade. He mentioned the hard work the CNN staff was doing to bring the coverage to people all over the country and the world. I have never been more aware of the fact that I was watching TV.

The next day before leaving Cordoba we toured around the city, visiting the home of Maimonides, the foremost scholar and Jewish thinker in perhaps all of history, and the Cathedral of Saint Mary, which is also known as the Great Mosque. Having changed hands a number of times, this religious center, just across the street from our Maimonides hotel, is a keystone of art history that also stands as testament to the rich religious history of Spain—including the peaks of coexistence and the depths of intolerance.

In Toledo I was able to survey enough natives to find the best restaurant in town for the best price. Then my friends and I caught a cab back to the hotel, and I reveled in the opportunity to chat with the driver. The next day we headed to Madrid, where half of us would catch a plane back to Israel and the rest would stay a day, exploring the city. In Madrid we visited the Prado art museum, which holds one of the most historic art collections in the world. From El Greco, to Velazquez, to Goya, the Prado is as much about appreciating that these paintings so seldom seen outside of textbooks are real, as it is about recognizing that the images they portray are not; the canvases are so grand that sometimes you feel like you could just walk into the paintings.

Earlier in that last day, we visited with the Israeli ambassador to Spain, who talked to us about the gifts and perils of representing Israel—especially in light of the recent escalation of violence—in a country that before 1992 hadn’t held a single Jew in 500 years. Sitting in that room, we felt how appropriate it was to finish the first half of Kivunim there. While Morocco provided a unique perspective on the golden age of Spanish Jewry, without the expulsion of the Jews from Spain in 1492 we would perhaps never have visited Greece or Bulgaria. The Sephardic Jews hold their origin in their name (Sepharad=Spain), but Spain is a distant root, like many other places we will visit this year, that simply does not play the central role that it used to, but somehow reaches to the core of us. Being there didn’t just add to our sense of the international nature of the Jewish people; representing a chapter in Jewish life that shaped the other communities of our studies so far this year, Spain put in perspective how much what we have learned this year has already become a part of us.