Routes To Roots

Same Path. New Directions. Deeper Intention.

2009-08-25T02:29:00.000+03:00

In the closing moments of our flight back to Israel from Mumbai—the year’s final flight back to Israel—as we descended over Tel Aviv, taking in the simple familiarity of the city’s skyscrapers and beachfront hotels, it finally began to sink in that we were all but at the end of Kivunim. When we landed, the plane was filled with sleepy applause and cheer, as people who had been steeped in a foreign culture felt the relief and comfort of returning home. After thanking our flight attendants and bidding them shalom, we stepped onto the jet-way and began our final walk through the arrivals section of David Ben-Gurion International Airport. From the moving walkways to customs to baggage claim and the bus waiting outside, we felt the epitome of appreciation for routine, as we took in every moment of a tradition that had started nearly eight months before.

We drove back to Jerusalem as dawn blanketed the country. With most of the group sound asleep, there was a beautiful silence on the bus. As we drove past the fields, and up into the hills outside of Jerusalem, the sun began to rise on the last short chapter of our time together. The route to the hostel was achingly familiar. Those who were awake gazed out at the buildings that had become our neighborhood, looking on the surroundings of our daily life with equal parts calm and frantic endearment. Finally, we turned onto Eliyahu Shama Street with the sun blaring over the Old City, across from Beit Shmuel. We checked back into our rooms, and fell asleep for a few hours, putting India behind us, and preparing to conclude the program.

The next two days were a blur of final visits to favorite places in the city, from restaurants and bars to the shuk and the Kotel, combined with hours of simply enjoying each other. We would wake up early, and go to sleep late—even more so than we had through the entire year. We had an emotional final banquet together at Beit Shmuel, before a final night out in Jerusalem, and a final night to sleep in our beds.

As our last day came to a close, we had a wonderful barbecue gathering at my Hebrew teacher Atara’s house outside of Jerusalem. On the way there our bus driver Yisrael Peretz, whom we had all met on our first day in Israel when he joined us on our orientation in the Negev, brought us to the Haas Promenade (better known as the tayelet), where we looked out on the vista of Jerusalem for the last time.

Taking in the beautiful skyline, complete with the Dome of the Rock, we weren’t the tayelet’s customary tourist crowd (though there was plenty of picture-taking as usual). We were family. This city had been our home. We said farewell to it, in denial for the most part that it was really goodbye, whether because of determination to come back, or simple disbelief after having left so many times throughout the year only to return. With heavy hearts we boarded the bus, and savored the time.

After the barbecue, which coincided with our last Israeli sunset, and included a final ceremony featuring a skype appearance by Peter, we began our final ride to the airport. We blasted our favorite songs from the year over the sound system, and sang along together through tears and laughter. We said final goodbyes to most of our staff at the airport, and enjoyed a lengthy delay including some hours of sleep in an airport that had come to feel strangely cozy. Our first flight from JFK on October 12^th had also been delayed. I remembered back to those final hours of anticipation, when Peter had predicted that our comfort with air travel, delays and all, would be one of the major ways in which we would be able to observe our growth throughout the year. Exactly eight months later, his words rang true.

Just before we boarded our plane back to New York, we watched the sunrise of June 12^th, 2009 through the windows of the terminal—a sunrise we never expected to see in Israel, having been scheduled to leave in the middle of the night. I couldn’t help but feel sentimental, as I went back through the sunrises of the year, from the Negev to the Sahara to the Ganges to Jerusalem. In a moment of sheer unknowns, as the routine of a lifetime was coming to an end, the sun shined especially brightly as a symbol of continuity.

On the plane we were hit full force with our shifting identities. Sporting our commemorative Kivunim t-shirts, we were surrounded by a sea of other American teenagers, flying back to the US after their respective programs—ranging from a year in yeshiva (religious school) to a weeklong college trip. To our dismay, after a year of bus rides that often exceeded ten hours in length, the eleven-hour flight seemed like nothing. We laughed, cried, and cuddled the whole way—with naps expertly placed in order to maximize the quality of our inescapably short time and little energy left. As soon as the plane touched down, our last landing of the year, we alarmed every other passenger on board by launching into a soulful rendition of the old Greek melody that had become our anthem over the course of the year. Some of us, who were held captive by our seatbelts in seats assigned apart from the bulk of the group, choked back our tears as we listened to our best friends chanting away—the first experience of distance on what would be our first day apart.

After reclaiming our bags, already missing several people to connecting flights and other complications, we huddled together next to our luggage carousel, and began to sing. Soon we were ushered out of baggage claim by a characteristically unsympathetic security guard, and then, rushing to say hello to our families, we lost ourselves in a mess of hugs, kisses and goodbyes.

In just minutes we would be on our way, going in different new directions…

Today, over two months since returning to the United States, and over ten months since embarking on the life-changing voyage that was Kivunim, I am still reluctant to look back on it as if it is truly over. As advertised, Kivunim presented all kinds of new directions, perspectives, people, places, and experiences—new ideas to think about, and new ways of thinking about classic ideas. The year was endlessly enriching, introducing me to new life-long friends, exposing me and my friends to more of the world than most people ever have the chance to experience, and challenging us never to settle for simplification or cease to search for further complexity in the narratives that we encounter. It is difficult to say goodbye to an experience like that.

While it is hard to believe that my friends and I are no longer making Kivunim memories, the nostalgia is fully intact. I no longer live with my best friends. We don’t go to class together everyday, or roam the streets of Jerusalem in the morning, afternoon and night. We don’t plan adventures all over Israel every weekend, or travel to different parts of the world every few weeks. I no longer look outside the window of my bedroom and see the walls of the Old City of Jerusalem. I can no longer touch the smoothly dimpled ancient stone of the Kotel, or smell the fresh and fragrant fumes of the buzzing and teeming Machane Yehudah shuk, on a whim. At home I don’t speak to people on the street in Hebrew, or haggle with them when I’m buying groceries.

Yet, while I miss the daily life of Kivunim, and we’ve already been home too long for this to be just any other Kivunim international trip, my reluctance to acknowledge the end comes from more than difficulty with saying goodbye. While the program may be over, the process is certainly not; from friendships to worldviews, there are basic core elements of the Kivunim experience that are alive and well—works in progress. While I felt that Kivunim was already an integral part of my life from the moment that I read the mission statement on the website, now, on the other side of the experience, I carry the program’s central questions and vision with me all the more.

I went on Kivunim to gain a broader perspective on the world and my personal roots through the lens of my Jewish identity, to take my relationship with Israel to the next level, to explore the possibilities of peace, to grow personally, and to meet some new and wonderful people. Kivunim allowed and encouraged me to pursue these personal goals, and they feel dearer to me than ever, as real people, places, and experiences. Yet, I could never have imagined what they would truly mean in reality. Indeed, at the core of my interest in Kivunim was what I perceived to be a unique opportunity to test my mostly intellectual understanding of Israel and the world with real, first-hand experience. I wanted to gain some integrity in talking about issues that I had only read or thought about.

Struggling with the complexities of the world, while also finding commonality with people in the most and least expected places had been a primary aim of mine since before Kivunim, but it had never been so much a part of my daily life as it became during the past year. When it came to Israel I found myself relating to the country more and more as home, finding deeper bonds with its people, and developing a more nuanced and multi-dimensional perspective on its political and social issues. Today I find myself struggling more than ever before, on a deeper and more meaningful level, with my relationship to Israel and my role in the world as an American Jew.

This also played out in a broader sense on our international trips. While I had a theoretical definition of “world consciousness” before going on Kivunim, developing emotional connections to the peoples, histories, places, and cultures of ten other countries around the world throughout the year has very literally expanded my consciousness. It’s certainly not that I feel I know these countries inside and out. (Indeed, my pre-Kivunim definition of world consciousness as a commitment to an ongoing process of embracing the challenge of balancing appreciation for complexities and commonalities still stands. The ongoing process is still quite nascent.) We only got a relative taste of these countries. Still, I can’t help but look at world maps differently today, or feel more personally invested in the news coming out of different regions of the world. Today I feel connected inextricably to people and places all over the world that I wouldn’t have even recognized in a photograph before this year.

Exploring Judaism in an international perspective meant being awestruck by the simultaneously striking diversity and cohesiveness of the worldwide Jewish experience, while at the same time, especially in India, being humbled by how small a slice Jewish life really is in the global context—even as it has existed in and contributed to a disproportionately broad collection of the world’s major civilizations at pivotal points in history. In enriching my sense of Jewish identity, as a vehicle for learning more about myself and the world, Kivunim suggested that perhaps the Jewish story could be a model for the story of humanity, that within the history and geography of the Jewish people could be the seeds of the diverse yet common international identity that we all ultimately share. Exploring the synergy between my Jewish identity and my concern for the world is a process that has only just begun.

Of course what I most expected to get out of Kivunim were those things that I could never have anticipated. Especially as I look forward to college, I realize that through spending a year in which the educational program took place in classrooms, in daily life, and around the world, learning about subjects that were at once my academic passions and deeply personal questions and concerns, Kivunim helped me reconcile my identity as a life long learner with my commitment to be a diligent student. Indeed, on a fundamental level Kivunim taught me how to ask questions—how to get the most out of one week in a country or one hour with a special guest speaker. I also found that as Kivunim exposed me to new dimensions of my areas of interest, I achieved new focus in exploring those passions. My interest in politics, international relations, conflict resolution, and psychology led me to fascination with public policy and neuroscience. One of the least expected and most profound levels of the Kivunim experience, in Israel and abroad, was its ever-unfolding relationship to language. Indeed, to express my new appreciation simply, I realized that the term “world consciousness” is in English.

When it came to my Jewish identity, I found myself struggling with my religious identity in ways I couldn’t have predicted. For the first time in my life I started to ask questions about observance. I started trying to understand the core meaning of Jewish traditions and prayers, what inspired them in the first place, and what their function is in the modern world and my life—casting off what had become a simple disregard for rituals and practice that I had barely tried to unravel due to discomfort rooted mostly in unfamiliarity. I began to explore what I want my Judaism to look like in my adult life, and what I eventually want to pass on to my children. Even regarding Israel, I can no longer rely on the prospect of a summer program or a gap-year program to bring me there (apart from staffing opportunities of course), and to make the country a part of my life. It’s strange not to know the next time I will be in Israel. These new, un-programmed responsibilities to my identity development, and to communities of which I am a part, speak to deeper underlying growth processes that Kivunim facilitated in exceptional ways.

More than ten months after writing that starting Kivunim “may not be best described as a crossroads, where one must choose a new path, but as a rotary, where one stays on the road he has been on as it opens up an array of different potential directions,” I stand by the metaphor. The very word kivunim, meaning “directions,” connotes unbridled search for identity, broad and deep sampling, and escape from the pressure to simplify or specialize. It calls to mind an image of a post in the road, with countless street signs pointing at all different angles. At the same time some might argue that Kivunim is very specialized, or even that it provides directions as instructions more than suggestions. Indeed, on the other side of options are choices to be made—rotary exits to take, leaving other options behind.

In an April 26 Boston Globe article called “Inside the Baby Mind,” Jonah Lehrer quoted psychologist Alison Gopnik, saying that “for a baby, every day is like going to Paris for the first time.” While I often related my process of sustained excitement, learning and growth on Kivunim to this wide-eyed state of constant discovery, Kivunim also made me reflect freshly on the path I was following, helping me to confront for perhaps the first time that we can’t do everything in our lives. Indeed, as Lehrer explains in the article, even on a neurobiological level, being able to take in everything around us as babies is directly related to our inability to tie our shoes; it is only the focus, and accordingly flawed perception and slowed neurological growth, that we develop as we grow that makes us productive.

The article echoed questions and concerns that followed us everywhere throughout the year. As I was forced to recognize and question the fact that I simply wasn’t seeking preparation to be an engineer, Kivunim put into sharp focus questions that are central to growing up: Does growing up mean closing doors? Does solid identity development have to come at the cost of open-mindedness and curiosity? Do finding definition, becoming an adult, and finishing brain development ultimately mean settling for rigidity? From the Greek aphorism, “know thyself,” that is inscribed on the Temple of Apollo in Delphi to the inward-looking eyes of the Buddha sculptures we saw in India, issues of personal identity were central to the entire year’s experience.

As a gap-year program, Kivunim didn’t close any doors; it allowed me the luxury of a year of less conventional education as a means to get more out of college. It was as much about following the most appropriate next step on my path of development as it was about delaying inevitable choices of specialization on that path. While I did start thinking about how I would choose classes at college in the fall, I felt a renewed commitment never to “let my schooling get in the way of my education”—a Mark Twain quote that I interpret as a plug for life long learning.

In this way the rotary metaphor feels as appropriate as ever, not just retrospectively in terms of Kivunim, but as it applies to my life today. As I approach the next series of choices on my path—the next rotary, if you will—the questions remain. While I hope to have integrity and a strong sense of self in my decision-making, I also hope never to lose broader curiosity and a will to learn. Especially after Kivunim, I have hope and belief in the power of education. Indeed, who knew that a program focused on language, culture and politics would lead me to neuroscience? Maybe there is a biological window that eventually closes on further growth, but as our Civilizations teacher Shalmi would say, history shows us that identity is always in the making, and never made. Maybe the seeming fork in the road between solid identity and life long learning simply represents a false choice. Perhaps, I hope, the will to grow and learn continuously can be one of the most central and consistent parts of a sound identity.

These challenges of identity development are deeply rooted in perhaps the single most important piece of what I am taking away from the Kivunim experience. At some point in the first week of the program, I realized that Kivunim was giving me a new appreciation for life. As we were immersed in a world where every moment was teachable, and a life-changing experience was never far on the horizon, I became consciously determined to get the most out of every moment. A conviction to take as little for granted as possible soon became central to the way I spent my time.

Before Kivunim, especially when it came to my organizational responsibilities to Young Judaea, and in listening to Barack Obama speak about America’s need to reengage with its core ideals and institutions, and cast away bad habits, I had some theoretical understanding of the idea that meaningful progress was a product of conscientious analysis of the meaning behind any present tradition or routine. Still, with the routine including an exceptional community, a consistently engaging educational program, independent life in Israel, and trips all around the world, Kivunim brought the need for such a commitment to conscientiousness to the next level.

With exploration of life and the world at the center of this uncommonly powerful and meaningful experience, I found that I was trying to get the most out of something that transcended Kivunim. As I lived in this ideal world, while also encountering more and more of the real world, I began to appreciate everything from my health, my family and friends to technology, government and religion. In studying and visiting the most distant elements of human civilization, both in time and space, I became more appreciative not just for my own privileged circumstances, but also for the precarious and miraculous nature of life and human progress itself.

Perhaps alongside my expanding appreciation for the fact that our ability to form an identity and develop a contribution to the world would be limited to choices that we made—in tandem with other factors of the world beyond our control of course—I began to connect to the idea of intention in life, the idea that our experiences, traditions and existence as a whole are ultimately only as valuable as our will to take stock of them and translate them into improving ourselves, each other and the world. That ultimately is the meaning of this blog, and it presents another uncanny example of the often profound and intuitive ways, about which I have written at length, in which common letter roots connect Hebrew words. The word kivunim has the same root as the word kavanah, meaning intention. Usually kavanah is used in religious contexts, suggesting that in order to be moved by prayer and tradition we must appreciate it for more than simply going through the motions. Fittingly, the Kivunim experience did introduce me to new endearment to Jewish traditions and spiritual exploration in many ways. Still, that is just one dimension of how trying to appreciate the once-in-a-lifetime quality of this year, and to reaffirm that appreciation every day, brought me to new levels of zest for life in general.

While I don’t feel I took this year for granted, there is always more to take into account, more meaning to glean as experiences grow with distance. The commitment to search for underlying meaning and appreciation in the smallest and biggest parts of life is something for which I will always be thankful to Kivunim. Besides, in the end, it seems that the ultimate goal is balance—another central theme of human civilization, exhibited by the other Greek adage inscribed in Delphi’s Temple of Apollo, “everything in moderation,” and integral tenets of Buddhist philosophy. Of course achieving balance, of all lofty goals, is easier said than done. Still, just as I hope that growing up will not hinder further growth, I hope that a certain level of deliberateness and intention in life won’t impede creativity or flexibility. As I stand here, as in between childhood and adulthood as possible, I suppose it’s only fitting that I envision a balance between the constant curiosity of an infant and the focus of an adult.

Now, less than a week away from starting college, I am more connected to my roots than ever before. I have a broader sense of who I am, and the people and world of which I am a part. For a year I called Jerusalem home, and now I have returned to a home that I am soon to leave again. In the end, I am far from homeless, and the routes to uncovering and understanding my roots are far from fully traced. At the same time, however, in these next legs of the journey it seems that I am to extend these roots to new places, on new horizons. While I may be turning onto a new rotary, with new choices, opportunities, questions, and directions—true to life—I am still on the same path. Going forward with a new level of intention, and a renewed commitment to balancing it with sustained open-mindedness, I will always remember Kivunim as a unique learning experience, an opportunity that helped me better appreciate all opportunity. For now it is time to take the next step, and if there is one thing that hasn’t changed since I wrote that first entry almost a year ago, it’s that I still have a passion for embracing the process.

India: A Part of the World, Worlds Apart

2009-08-12T22:46:00.000+03:00

I feel compelled, more so than I have in writing any previous entry, to emphasize that the following experiences are simply too rich and complex to sufficiently describe. In just nine days Kivunim’s trip to India expanded my view of the world in a more profound way than I have ever experienced. In nine days we visited eight dramatically different towns and cities, all in a country that is at once at the hub of the story unfolding in our world during our time, and seemingly as far as possible from the framework of our daily lives. The trip was a personal and group exercise in jumping clear of comfort zones and familiar frames of reference for the here and now. We were in a profound and sustained state of awe as each day brought us in contact with unique and unfamiliar people, places, and ways of life. Each moment of being in India challenged my assumptions about the world, facing life itself anew on every level, from spirituality to poverty. All the while, this trip was part of the powerful and emotional culmination of the entire year, a time when best friends were savoring an uncommon lifestyle, a series of exceptional experiences, and each other. The following is an attempt to put a first encounter with a new world into words.

As much as I have thought about and discussed over the course of the year the passage of time and the special human ability to look forward and backward in time, anticipation was something that we hardly had any time for over the course of Kivunim. After nearly half a year of looking forward to Kivunim, culminating in the grueling final month of nearly full-time anticipation before the program began, the year itself, as a unique and constant series of groundbreaking opportunities and eye-opening experiences, afforded abnormally little time for expectation in between each adventure. Of course, this might prove to be the best problem any of us will ever have in our lives; there was hardly ever any shortage of excitement about, or appreciation for, what we were doing in the present—even without the typical salivation over it in advance. Still, whenever we did any special program, whether it was a fieldtrip or a concert, an international trip abroad or a return flight to Israel, I tried to spend at least a few moments recognizing that in any other time of my life I would have looked forward to any one of these experiences for weeks or months beforehand.

That being said, the level of anticipation surrounding Kivunim’s trip to India was unprecedented. The idea of going to India held a certain climactic significance simply by virtue of the fact that as our final international trip it would be the last time during the year that we would all live out of our suitcases together, tour a new place, and see our education come alive. Over the course of the year, we had come to appreciate the international trips as unique opportunities for the group to grow together. Apart from the sheer privilege of the trips themselves, as we spent more time together on buses and airplanes, ate exotic food together, and lay awake in hotel rooms all over the world, discussing our experiences in active and energetic digestion of these often overwhelming experiences, travel had become an increasingly meaningful part of our lives together. It was at once familiar (packing up our rooms in Jerusalem and driving to Ben-Gurion airport together, often in the middle of the night) and confounding (finding ourselves in completely foreign places together), but always endearing, as our friendships—not to mention fresh connections to new places—were forged time and time again in the furnace of collective discovery.

We were also able to look forward to India for reasons that transcended our general excitement about traveling together. Our trip to India had been postponed indefinitely due to the terror attacks in Mumbai earlier in the year. We had switched Turkey and India on our itinerary, landing India at the very end of our calendar. Because it would be central to the culmination of the year, and we could never be sure if the unfolding security situation would allow us to go at all (this inspired many of us to pay more attention to India in the news, which supplemented our educational preparation for the trip in a special way), India had grown on the horizon of our minds.

Of course on top of all this, it was understood that India would take our encounters with foreign cultures to the next level. After traveling to unique and wonderful places all over Europe, the Mediterranean, and the Middle East, India represented an entirely new civilization, where we would find a society of untold diversity springing from antiquity outside our more familiar Middle Eastern or European frame of our roots. In our studies and sessions of preparation for the trip, there was a deep sense (even deeper than in our preparation for the previous trips) that there was no priming, from academics to packing lists, that could possibly ready us for how different and challenging the reality of India would be—from the scorching pre-monsoon-season heat and the overwhelming seas of people to the unique smells and the basic cultural phenomena that would blow the roof off of all previous experience with the human condition.

Still, beyond the fact that India was so different on so many levels from the other countries we had visited, many of us experienced heightened anticipation for the trip because India was endeared to us on a personal level too. In one of the most powerful personal examples of India’s importance to the Kivunim experience, I remember on the first night that we were all together in October, we were sitting in a circle at the Ein Gedi youth hostel on the Dead Sea, talking about why we came on the program, and my friend Anna talked about her grandfather, who had worked as a rabbi in Mumbai, and her desire to explore his legacy and continue his journey in India.

For me exploring the Jewish life in India represented a crossroads of culture in my own life. My parents raised me with a solid commitment to Judaism, especially in terms of its culture and history. Yet, especially in the spiritual and intellectual realms, I always felt heavily influenced by Eastern ideas as well. Both of my parents began learning about Eastern thought and philosophy in college when they were about my age. As undergraduates at Brandeis University, my father had his introduction to transcendental meditation, while my mother all but invented the comparative religion major there. Later he was one of Deepak Chopra’s first patients of Ayurvedic medicine, and also spent some time in a Yoga ashram; she went on to earn a Master’s degree of theology focusing on Eastern traditions, especially the intersection of religion and psychology. Whether it was my mother’s avid practice of yoga, my father’s chanting Hari Krishna (a Hindu mantra) in the hopes that a parking space would open up in Harvard Square, the Dalai Lama’s celebrity status in our household, or our almost divine inspiration to get a Tibetan Terrier, Eastern—specifically Hindu and Buddhist—thought featured prominently in our household throughout my childhood. In some ways going to India felt like a sort of personal pilgrimage, some thirty years after my mother backpacked through the country. I might not go so far as to call myself a Jew-Bu or Hind-Jew, but suffice it to say that before the trip I was very curious to see how much of India—foreign in a way that I could never imagine—might on some level remind me of home.

PART ONE

Finally, after an eight-hour plane ride from Tel Aviv, we began circling Mumbai. Even before we touched down, we could see the streets buzzing below with incomprehensible traffic. As we flew over the city, it seemed endless in enormity—physically ten times the size of Manhattan. We saw slums that in some cases crept right up to the edge of tarmac of the runway. This would be just our first taste of the overwhelming poverty and population that characterizes India, with over three times the population of the entire state of Israel living in Mumbai alone.

Once we landed and left the airport, we were hit with a heat that can only be described as brutal. (There was a reason why the trip was originally scheduled for February instead of June!) The heat was a perfect physical manifestation of the intensity of the cultural transition that India would present. After I un-fogged my glasses, I remember all of us just standing outside the airport, waiting for our tour guides to come pick us up, sweating, laughing, and living in complete shock. It was at that moment that we realized that, while much of what we had been told—regarding the heat and the population density at least—would prove to be true, no amount of anticipation could truly have prepared us for how real and different India would be.

Ironically enough, one of the most apparent differences was that people drive on the other side of the road, an import from England. Indeed, while India was in some ways the most distant and foreign country we visited, it was also a former British colony, so we found English more useful there than in perhaps any of the other countries. Still, the fact that many drivers don’t quite commit to either side of the road in India didn’t make the adjustment any easier—sometimes I wouldn’t realize that we were on the wrong (right) side of the road. When it comes to the roads, which we always get to know quite well on these trips, another image of India that I’ll never forget is the sound of the horns. They have much more variety of tones and even melodies, and are used much more liberally there than in any other country I’ve visited—not because of road rage or stubbornness, but simply as the easiest way to communicate on the sometimes overwhelmingly busy, confusing, unmarked, and unmediated streets.

After having a counterintuitive breakfast at a McDonalds of Mumbai (Maybe they were trying to ease us into the new culture…), we took a lengthy bus ride down the western coast of India, getting our first taste of the Indian countryside, and spotting more monkeys than chipmunks in the trees by the side of the road. Soon we arrived in a village called Al-Baug, where an old synagogue is kept in strikingly good condition. In this area rural Jewish communities—called the Bene Israel—are thousands of years old, claiming that they shipwrecked on the coast of India after sailing from Israel to escape the Greek king Antiochus’ persecutions during the time of the Maccabees. These communities were lost to the Jewish world for centuries, and many don’t celebrate Chanukah because, having left the Middle East due to Antiochus’ persecution of Jews, they actually missed the events that Chanukah celebrates! Meeting these communities epitomized the exercise in expanding our conception of the Jewish world that Kivunim presents at every step of our journey. In no other country was it so apparent, and yet difficult to imagine, our common Jewish roots; seeing Jews seemingly so far from our image of their natural context challenged us to rethink the framework itself.

After a lunch of traditional Indian cuisine in Al-Baug, on our bus ride back up the coast to Mumbai, we visited the site of the original shipwreck of the Bene Israel Jews, where there is now a memorial and cemetery. That evening in Mumbai we went out to dinner; already developing a taste for the classic paneer and dal on rice with the delectable naan flatbread, it was the first time in my life that I had eaten the same foreign cuisine twice in one day. As we walked the streets, the heat and humidity belying the set sun, we began to see Mumbai in all its diversity and contradiction. We saw a vibrant nightlife in a cosmopolitan city, with children begging in the streets, and slums literally piled up next to skyscrapers. We would return to Mumbai at the end of our time in India, but the next day we woke up early to head to the airport for the first of six flights within India over the next nine days. We were off to Varanasi, the holy Hindu city on the Ganges River, and one of the oldest continually inhabited cities in the world—a place that stands today as true as it stood during the time of the original agricultural civilization at Sumer in ancient Mesopotamia nearly eight thousand years ago.

PART TWO

For me Varanasi has held a special place in my image of India throughout my childhood. As a city that captivated my mother in her graduate studies of religion, it was always a cornerstone in her stories about her trip to India. As we drove through the crowded streets, lined with caravans of rickshaws and often blocked by groups of cows (we even saw signs for a Chabad House—in Varanasi, India!), amidst the novelty of the place, I thought of my mother and felt a sense that in some way I was adding on to a previous journey. On some level this would be a return trip to Varanasi.

Soon after arriving in the city, we had a meeting with Tarun Bashu—known more affectionately by friends and locals as Dada Ji—a wise and wonderful man, a friend of the program, and our host in Varanasi. Notably, as soon as we sat down we were served Coca Cola, in one of the most spiritually transcendent cities on earth—about as far away as possible from Coke’s headquarters in Atlanta, Georgia—reminding us truly how inexorably connected the world is, for better or for worse, no matter how disparate and distant the pieces may be.

Dada gave us a quick tutorial on the city, and Hindu life in general. As a seasoned tour guide, no doubt used to tourists coming with removed and idealized lenses through which to view his city, he began with a simple and down-to-earth request, encouraging us not to take Varanasi too seriously, to take it as life. This encapsulates in so few words the deepest characteristic of Varanasi, a place where heaven and nature seem to meet, where life is as mundane as anywhere else, yet consistently recognized as the miracle that it is. He extended the statement beyond Varanasi to Hinduism itself, as a way of life that cannot, he posited, be put into a rigid framework. One of the various major distinctions that he drew between Hinduism and other religions was that it is individualized as opposed to institutionalized, meaning that there is something for everyone, from the academic and philosophical love of knowledge and observation to the more common religious practices for bringing people together. He explained Hinduism’s “trinity,” if you will, of Brahma, Vishnu, and Shiva—the Creator, Transformer, and Destroyer, respectively—representing the unity of birth, life and death with separate but combined roles, which embody the spirit of pluralism that is at the heart of polytheism. Finally, he introduced the central physical elements of nature in Hindu philosophy, which all of us appreciated; learning that fire is a purifying element seemed to suggest that the extreme heat of the Indian summer had redemptive philosophical value to its people—and to us.

By pure serendipity, our program directors insisted, we had arrived in Varanasi on Ganga Dashami, one of the most auspicious days of the whole year, when Hindus celebrate the descent from heaven of the goddess Ganga in the form of the river. It doesn’t take long in Varanasi to begin to appreciate the depth and weight of such a celebration. The Ganges is a river that is worshipped. It is appreciated for what it is. It is a life force, a resource (though increasingly diminished, damaged, and polluted), an ancient religious holy place, a goddess, a bathtub, a washing machine, and a mass grave. It represents the circle of life.

Never was the feeling of returning to the heart of my mother’s journey in India so strong as when we arrived at the ghat—the Indian term for a flight of steps leading down to a river—on the western bank of the Ganges. As we boarded a small boat on our way to another ghat where the celebration was in full force, I couldn’t help but take a quiet moment to myself and wonder, as I surveyed the scene on the riverbank, not only how I had gotten there, but how different it must have been for my mother, traveling alone without friends or a structured program, to find herself here and make a tour of her own. It was out on the calm Ganges, where the watershed and cultural center of a billion people converge in a cloud of humidity and color, further than I had ever been from home, that I found a connection to my most immediate roots in my mother. For the first time since arriving in a place more foreign and relatively distant from the framework in which I exist than anything else I had experienced, I felt India floating into context. The distance was breathtaking, but I also felt a calm familiarity and affinity for the place. I felt my family’s relationship to Varanasi take a new step forward, connecting the dots from one generation to the next.

In the context of Kivunim, this evening on the Ganges was groundbreaking. In two days we had traveled from Jerusalem to Varanasi, visiting two of the world’s major “final destinations”. Jerusalem is a place that people all over the world have dreamt about and yearned to see for millennia; it is a focal point of the heaviest of historical moments, and the site of monotheism’s most dramatic projections for cosmic events in the future. Varanasi is a place where gods settle, where millions of people hope to end up at the end of their time on earth in this life. It sat heavily with me that it had been barely a month since Kivunim had floated down the Danube, a river of a different kind of mass burial, in the heart of Europe.

That night we finally arrived at the ghat of the main celebration, where an entire stretch of the river was dedicated to a show of rhythmic dancing, elaborate costumes, fire, and lights of all kinds. We joined hundreds of other boats, all crammed up against the riverbank. It reminded me of a mosh-pit at a rock concert, with rows and rows of boats mixing together by natural pushing and floating, and ultimately just squashed together into a lawless blob of people held captive by the festivities. After the ceremony we edged our way out of the crowd, and cruised back to the first ghat.

The next day we returned to the river early in the morning to watch the sunrise, and also to see the daily life of the river in action. We saw hundreds of people along the river, swimming, bathing, praying, washing their clothes, and even delivering their dead back to nature. It truly was, as Dada suggested, simply normal life at its richest, an intersection of existence with the natural environment. Still, I cannot overstate how shocking it was to see a place accepted as a sort of all-purpose hub for a community. Especially when it came to the burial customs, and the delivery of the ashes of the dead to the river, just feet from boys swimming in the water and men tirelessly washing clothes in the river, while it was beautiful to see the sacred and the mundane together as inexorably connected parts of life, it was difficult for us to understand how the transition from death to recreation to business could be so seamless.

In fact, while we all walked away from the Ganges reeling from the power of the depth of the culture on the river, many of us also felt another underlying sense of shock in seeing the river as an environmental issue. Besides our almost instinctive western reactions to the sanitation issues surrounding the blend of bathing and burial in a river that is revered by over a billion people for its perceived purity, many of us also wondered if, like many other major rivers in the world, the Ganges is suffering from pollution and increased erosion caused by the rapid industrialization of the country. However vibrant and seemingly unadulterated the Hindu life on the Ganges remains after millennia, having a culture so conscious of its relationship to the natural environment seems at odds in some fundamental ways with the grueling growth process that is propelling India to the front and center of the world stage in the 21^st century. Maybe innovation will prove that India’s growth and development is not necessarily mutually exclusive with the health and richness of its ancient cultures. Still, seeing this sacred and beautiful place made us more conscious of the difficulties associated with the largest democracy on earth rapidly developing under a basically western industrial growth model—one that without conscientious reform poses great risks to the health of our planet and its people. This was just part of a larger process of trying to digest a country with an incredible scale of complexity, and a uniquely challenging—if not promising—role in the modern world. As Dada said, it was nothing more than real life.

As we prepared to bid Varanasi farewell, Dada reminded us that one day was simply too short a time to even get a taste of the city. Many of us buzzed about plans to return, exhibiting the ultimate goal of Kivunim: to whet appetites. After visiting a silk shop and the Banaras (the British name for Varanasi) Hindu University, we made our way to the nearby town of Sarnath, where Buddha preached his first sermon after attaining enlightenment. A grandchild of the original tree under which Buddha allegedly attained Enlightenment stands there, reminding us of legends of people from Isaac Newton to Buddha, who have changed the course of history simply by sitting under a tree.

The shrine and museum there gave us plenty to think about as we began to process the religious diversity of India outside the pluralism of Hinduism itself. One of my favorite images from the museum was an old statue of lions with their tongues out. Built by Emperor Ashoka, who ruled India in the third century BCE, and converted to Buddhism, the statue was designed to show that Buddhism is so gentle that even lions will submit to it. Ashoka is revered today as a pioneer in advocating for universal human values and the idea that war is a tragedy for everyone. The statue has since become a national symbol of India, along with Ashoka’s Wheel of Law, which is on the Indian flag—interesting points of comparison to the Jewish symbols of the lion of Judah and the Star of David. We also saw some of the oldest statues of Buddha in existence. Dada explicated one statue, showing us the meaning behind Buddha’s posture and facial expressions.

Soon we arrived with all our belongings at the Varanasi train station, where we would board a sleeper train to Agra—the home of the majestic Taj Mahal. Kivunim had taken a sleeper train before in Turkey, but nothing could compare to the experience we were about to have. Not knowing what to expect, we moved through the outdoor train station. I can’t imagine what it must have looked like to the local Indian travelers to see a group of fifty North Americans lugging their suitcases through the crowd, trying to stick together, struggling in the heat, and feeling sorely out of place.

We finally found our platform, set down our things, and began to wait for the train. At this point it was clear that no train like one we had ever been on would be coming through this station. Some of us held out hope that there was one luxury car a day, but as we saw train after train pass, full to the brim with people peering out of the open-air barred windows, we slowly began to harden around the idea that this experience was about to take India’s other-worldly effect on us to another level.

PART THREE

After hours of anticipation, tired and ready to get out of the heat at the end of a day that had started with the sunrise—though not necessarily very hopeful that we’d find much relief—we boarded our train and found our compartments. We were placed in a sleeper car (with glass windows!), but the next challenge would be trying to negotiate with our Indian compartment-mates about whose bed was whose. In this particular province of India, English was less common, so while our tour guides had the transaction well organized, once everyone got settled it was up to us to figure out the terms of sharing the compartments with all kinds of interesting people. Some of us fell asleep immediately. Some of us slept with a family bringing their terminally ill father to a hospital. Some of us slept very little, stuck in a staring contest with our fellow passengers.

Personally, I met a talkative civil engineer from New Delhi, who was very interested our group’s presence on the train. We mainly spoke about politics; he was really the first local with whom I had had a serious conversation about India—especially regarding its extremely rapid rate of current growth and its extreme poverty. He spoke about education, the economy, infrastructure, and sanitation as the first priorities. The most interesting point he made was a critique of President Obama. He suggested that if Obama actually wanted to fight poverty and be a leader in the global community then he should stop talking about ending American outsourcing. (By the way, this was the day before Obama was set to deliver his speech to the Muslim world in Cairo, so Hindus were especially suspicious about how this would affect Indian relations with the US—as if Obama might be siding with [Muslim] Pakistan when it came to their region.) For all the talk in the United States about the global community, it had never occurred to me that Indians—who, like people in many of the countries we visited throughout the year, feel personally invested in Obama’s presidency—might feel threatened or even betrayed by Obama’s promises to the American electorate to stop supporting companies that “ship jobs overseas.” Yet, in India it felt entirely understandable to hear this commentary on the ultimately national accountability that elected leaders have, even in a “global” society.

Toward the end of the ride, a few of us huddled around the open door of the train, and let the new day seep in with our next destination coming to life outside as we cruised by. The feeling of waking up en route, beginning the day’s travel before you even get on your feet, is something I will always associate with Kivunim. Clutching our suitcases, we watched the day begin as we rolled into Agra. We had just completed a night that we would remember for the rest of our lives. In just a few hours we would be standing in front of the Taj Mahal.

After reuniting on the platform and sharing stories from the past night, we stopped at a hotel for breakfast, and began to make our way to the Taj Mahal. After months of training ourselves to appreciate the moment at hand within the context of a year of consistent excitement—with just minutes to anticipate some of the most exceptional experiences in our lives—we soaked up every second of build-up available to us in preparation for seeing one of the most magnificent structures on earth. Our tour guide insisted that we would have to multiply our highest expectations by a million in order to imagine what we were about to see.

It was true. As we entered the courtyard of the Taj Mahal, any sense that the sight might be lost on us weary and over-stimulated travelers melted away in an instant. Armed with hats, multiple water bottles, clothes that held the sweat of days, and cameras of course (if we hadn’t shed the self-consciousness of being tourists by this time in the year, it was never going to happen), we savored the almost cinematic image of the Taj creeping up into view as we walked through the entrance.

The Taj Mahal is emblematic of so much of the Kivunim experience and philosophy. It exhibits nearly perfect balance of complexity, with its intricate carvings and inlay work that can be seen up close, and simplicity, with its elegant design. It is versatile and demonstrative of short-term and long-term change, as it shifts in color throughout the day, and has transformed from Muslim mausoleum to Hindu national symbol over the course of centuries. (This was especially significant to us after seeing the churches in Spain that had originally been mosques.) Still, perhaps more than in any other way it resonated with all of us as evidence of a love story; the Mughal Emperor Shah Jahan built it as a mausoleum for his wife Mumtaz Mahal. True to its raison d’etre as a testament to her inner and outer beauty, the Taj Mahal gives genuine and basic meaning to the word breathtaking.

Beyond the visceral emotional reaction that seeing the Taj Mahal inspires, as a Wonder of the World it inspires wonder on an intellectual level too. Our program director Peter Geffen joined us at this point in the trip, directing our focus to the fact that, like so many other structures we had seen throughout our travels, from the Parthenon in Athens to the Blue Mosque in Istanbul, the Taj Mahal strains our capacity to imagine how such feats of engineering and architecture could be accomplished without computers. Besides the fact that its construction is all the more breathtaking under these considerations, perhaps no other building in the world shows us how much we can take computers for granted—even as they surround us constantly in the modern world (and make Kivunim possible). Indeed, if we cannot imagine how it was built without computers, it is just because we don’t understand computers, or, really, ourselves. After all, the Taj Mahal and computers were ultimately made possible by, and even designed based on, the power of the human brain.

Reflecting on how the beauty of the Taj Mahal was brought into the world—especially as it stands amidst overwhelming poverty in the surrounding region—also raised some questions about the functional priorities of modern society. Standing in front of it, I tried to imagine anything like it being built today in the United States. I thought about the Lincoln Memorial and Ataturk’s mausoleum in Ankara as examples that people of modern democratic countries do invest in expressing their appreciation for beloved leaders. Still, I thought, even if the people really loved Mumtaz Mahal, Shah Jahan didn’t need their permission to construct the Taj. Today’s architectural wonders include the Empire State Building, the Golden Gate Bridge, along with a tunnel, a dam, and even a canal—structures for pragmatic uses in business, industry and transportation. Seeing the Taj Mahal as more than just a picture in a book makes one think about the priorities of a society in any time and place—not to mention what effects term limits and resource accountability have had on our ability to construct beauty on such a scale.

After we bid farewell to the Taj Mahal, we made our way to the Agra Fort, a red-stoned palatial city about a mile-and-a-half northwest of the Taj. Besides being a beautiful relic of India’s history, where many rulers and foreign dignitaries met during the Golden Age of the Mughals, it is also where Shah Jahan spent his last days, confined by his son. From Shah Jahan’s former quarters in the fort, we saw the Taj Mahal from afar. Trying to put ourselves in his shoes, and imagine what it must have been like to be kept at a teasing distance with a clear view of his life’s work, we squinted to piece together a glimpse of the mausoleum’s beauty.

After another long day, we began another bus ride to New Delhi, where we would spend the night. Arriving late at night, we checked into a hotel that put the whole trip up to that point into perspective. After sleeping on a train in the heart of one of India’s poorest provinces the night before, opening the door to what must have been our 100^th hotel room of the year and getting ready to sleep in a real bed inspired a whole range of emotions. On one hand I was full of a warmness that I cannot explain. Feeling the fabricated familiarity and comfort of a hotel after four of the most culturally challenging days of my life made me appreciate why hotels exist. Being a tourist in India wasn’t like being a tourist had been in any of the other places we had visited throughout the year. We had barely seen any other tourists in India. After sleeping on the train with relatively local passengers, we didn’t feel entirely removed from the society—we weren’t merely observing. This hotel was in fact one of the nicest ones I had ever stayed in, but, beyond that, compared to where I had been for the last few days, it felt like home.

On the other hand, when I came out of the pristine bathroom feeling clean from a hot shower, and slipped under the cool, soft sheets, while my room mate watched TV in the background, I felt a deep sense of regret in my relief. Although I had been in culture shock, the discomfort of the train was the closest I had come to being immersed into Indian society. As the polished Indian news anchor, speaking perfect English, facilitated a debate between Indian versions of CNN’s political consultants about President Obama’s speech to the Muslim world, I wondered where I was. What country did these people live in? Was it the same one I had been touring for the past four days? How could this TV, this hotel room, be so strikingly cozy and familiar, when just miles down the road it felt like Tel Aviv to Mumbai could have been an interplanetary flight?

In the past four days I had seen levels of poverty and inequality beyond imagination, from the slums creeping up to the tarmac even before we landed in Mumbai, to the strangely spiritual poor of Varanasi, to the emaciated children begging in the train station, to the rough-shod communities we passed by on the train (I remembered how my mother always spoke about how seeing the poverty of India from her own train ride to Agra had impacted her life.), to the people outside the Taj who would wait at the entrance to the bus, begging for business, and then hold onto the windows as it began to drive away. Seeing such poverty, not in an academic or internet context where it can be isolated from the rest of Indian life, but amidst its equally overwhelming cultural context, made it powerfully real in a way that I had never experienced before.

I was forced to think about it in a more holistic way, challenging my immediate reactions as a westerner, and tempering my critique of a society that could sustain such unconscionable levels of poverty with questions about how and why. I began to challenge the word “poverty” itself, acknowledging that our terminology simplifies the situation to its economic reality, excluding the dimensions of social and cultural richness of the people. I imagined the discomfort that they might experience in Acton, Massachusetts, after their hunger was alleviated. Wondering what it was like for the British imperialists who found themselves in India centuries ago, my mind raced with heightened awareness and consideration of western values and basic assumptions about life and the universe. From reincarnation to definitions of success and happiness, I realized that this was an incredibly important experience, but that I had (and still do, of course) a long way to go before I could have any integrity in speaking about poverty in India in more general and theoretical terms. It’s hard to think about changing a society when one doesn’t understand its fundamentals (or maybe too easy if we’re not careful). Especially with over a billion people to think about, one must have a robust sense of humility alongside any sense of empowerment when it comes to suggesting what is best for India. Indeed, few if any would argue that India should not be thinking about how to improve itself—and many Indian entrepreneurs and policymakers are making valiant strides in greeting the challenges—but how and who says it are key details in the conversation.

It is very easy to judge a country, culture or people from afar, based on percentages and one’s own disparate cultural framework. It’s only a little more difficult to operate from those insensitive assumptions in a foreign culture as a teacher, missionary or other type of social worker. Yet, having been on Kivunim, living in Israel as something between a citizen and a tourist, and especially having been in India, I have never had more appreciation than I do now for the value of action coming from personal immersion and investment in a community as a thoughtful participant—rather than as just an outsider with big ideas. Sometimes, if not often, having an outside perspective can be very useful and helpful; it can give one the clarity and emotional distance to challenge harmful traditions and envision a better future. Still, being face to face with some of the people behind the alarming numbers we hear so much about bolstered my belief that without the appropriate sensitivity for the insider perspective such utility and helpfulness will inevitably be handicapped by a lack of integrity in defining what is in fact harmful or better.

As I lay in that hotel room in New Delhi, reflecting on the disparities in the country, and my privilege to be able to escape to luxury, I was also preparing for the next day, when we would be traveling north to Buddhist India to spend Shabbat with the Tibetan monks in Dharamsala, the home of the Dalai Lama and the Tibetan government in exile. Further highlighting our visit would be a special meeting with the Prime Minister of Tibet. We would go from the architectural wonder of the Taj Mahal to the natural wonders of the Himalayan foothills. Indeed, if the difference between the train and the hotel could have been two different countries within India, then Dharamsala would prove to be a third.

PART FOUR

The following morning, after a scrumptious buffet breakfast, we headed to the New Delhi airport for our flight to Dharamsala. Because there is only one flight to Dharamsala every day, Kivunim chartered a flight for most of us, while some of us went on the regularly scheduled one. Those of us on the chartered flight had quite a time being on the first flight ever made up exclusively of Kivunim students.

Then the unthinkable happened. The normally scheduled flight, with eleven of our friends and most of our staff, was grounded due to inclement weather. After arriving in Dharamsala it would take a while before we heard whether or not the rest of the group would be joining us, but ultimately they stayed in New Delhi. We would be spending our last Shabbat—the beginning of our last week together on Kivunim—in two groups. Given the logistical and programmatic ambitions of Kivunim, the fact that we were basically able to get through the whole year until that moment without a hitch was actually incredible. We took the change of plans in stride, and looked forward to being reunited with our friends.

From the moment the plane touched down in Dharamsala, we could tell that it was a special place. Geographically, it was completely different from the India we had seen up until then. With its stony and green rolling hills, it reminded me more of my image of China than India. The air was cool, fresh and crisp in a way that we hadn’t experienced since before we arrived in India; perhaps needless to say, Dharamsala would provide a refreshing respite from the oppressive heat of the lower altitude. It began to rain almost as soon as we arrived, but as the misty clouds drifted over the already mountainous city, the tremendous, snowy mountains that frame the city’s backdrop slipped in and out of view, inviting us to imagine just how far up they went off in the distance. Like the pristine natural energy that we had felt six months before in the majestic Greek mountains of Delphi and Meteora, here too at the end of our journey was a place where it felt perfectly natural for a spiritual community to have settled.

Nestled in the foothills of the Himalayan mountains, Dharamsala has been the home of the Tibetan government in exile for fifty years. After the Chinese occupation of Tibet in 1959, India allowed the Tibetan refugees to settle here. While it is said that Dharamsala is the closest one can get to Tibet while still in India, its refugee residents never forget that they are in exile. No matter whom you ask, whether it’s a Tibetan monk or a Kashmiri shopkeeper, everyone insists that their real home (Tibet or Kashmir) is the most beautiful place on earth, and that they always yearn to return.

The first stop on our journey would be the Norbulingka Institute, a center for Tibetan cultural preservation that was founded by the present 14^th Dalai Lama. It had natural charm, with a lush courtyard and gardens, leading up to a beautiful Buddhist temple overlooking the picturesque vista of the surrounding mountains. All through the gardens were studios and shops of Tibetan art. With just the sound of the rain, we wandered through the center, watching the artists work in tranquil silence on Tibetan Buddhist mandalas and statues. On all the walls were Tibetan flags and pictures of the Dalai Lama. Walking among these workshops, we slowly began to realize the importance of the place we had stumbled upon. This was a nation’s oasis, a place dedicated entirely to the maintenance of a culture trying to survive outside its historic home—an idea that endeared the place to Kivunim’s exploration of Jewish communities spread all over the world. This was just the first way in which we would discover Kivunim’s core bonds to Tibetan narrative and philosophy.

After our tour of the Norbulingka Institute, we got back into our cars (the city would not be ideal for bus travel) and began the climb up to McLeodGanj, the town of Upper Dharamsala where we would spend most of our time, and where the Tibetan government is situated. As the car bounced up the steep and narrow streets, I began to feel the power of the experience personally. If Varanasi had felt like a return journey in my family’s story, then being in Dharamsala made me feel like a pioneer. As part of my family’s affinity for Eastern culture and Tibet in particular, one of the most memorable and informing experiences of my childhood was going to hear the Dalai Lama speak in Boston when I was fourteen. I was inspired by his ability to frame the most confounding and complicated issues of our time in profoundly simple terms of encouragement to strive for personal and collective improvement. He was authentically wise, with an unmatched appreciation for and understanding of the complexity of universal human concepts like happiness, compassion and humility that allowed him to speak of them in their deepest and simplest terms. Although he was out of town at the time, as we ascended through the narrow and crowded streets to McLeodGanj, I felt myself filling up with excitement to be there.

After checking in to our hotel, we spent a few hours exploring the town. Being in upper Dharamsala, at the top of a small mountain, McLeodGanj was a pretty small collection of narrow streets. Our hotel was about a block away from the main temple, the home of the Dalai Lama, and the seat of the Tibetan government. In between were streets full of restaurants and shops. We spent a lot of time going from shop to shop, trying out our haggling skills after learning the ropes in Middle Eastern markets all year. It was especially interesting to hear the stories of the shopkeepers, most of whom were Kashmiri. I will admit that it seemed a little ironic—if ultimately unsurprising—to have such a thriving tourist business, full of material items, in the heart of simple and modest Buddhist India.

One of the most exciting features that this tourist culture brought to Dharamsala was an Israel-friendly atmosphere. We had always heard that India was a favorite destination for post-army Israeli travelers, but we would never have anticipated that Dharamsala would be full of signs in Hebrew, and restaurants advertising Israeli food. Being a mostly vegetarian country in general made India one of the easier places in our travels to keep kosher by Kivunim’s standards, but Dharamsala brought it to a whole new level. However, most of us used being in India as an opportunity to eat non-Israeli food.

Eventually we made it back to the hotel to prepare for our final Kivunim Shabbat. We would be joined by a group of Tibetan monks. Praying in the presence of Buddhist monks proved to be a unique window into reflecting on our own traditions. From prayer to prayer, my friends and I spent more time than usual dwelling on the translation of the Hebrew words, and getting into the spirit of the singing and dancing involved in the Friday night service that welcomes the Sabbath. As we led these prayers, we began to appreciate where we were. India is the heart of polytheism—very far from our home base, the spiritual center of monotheistic tradition in Jerusalem. It was a wonderful way to bring in the final Shabbat of Kivunim, creating a powerful perspective of how far we had come over the course of the year, both in miles and in months, as individuals and as a group.

After a particularly uplifting prayer service we ate dinner at the hotel with the monks, exchanging questions, mostly about life and religion. The monk at my table seemed most interested in what Jews envisioned during prayer, being that there were no physical images to pray to. This cut to the core of our religious differences. He had a pretty impressive knowledge of the Bible, and asked us all kinds of questions about why certain people appeared in our prayers as opposed to others. It was very interesting to reflect on these questions, and to hear the different answers that we each offered in return.

The next day was momentous for Kivunim. After the Shabbat morning service we made our way to the center of the Tibetan government in exile for a special meeting with the Tibetan Prime Minister Samdhong Rinpoche. Perhaps needless to say, of all the moments of the year that we knew would only blossom in significance with time, we found ourselves challenged especially in this moment to soak in the experience to our fullest capability. In preparation for the Prime Minister’s arrival, we lined up and got ready to receive a customary blessing from him one at a time. We each received a ceremonial scarf called a kata, which he would use to bless us. As he entered the room with a group of monks, we saw an unassuming man with a big smile. He went to each of us individually, making eye contact and pressing together our hands, which were draped with the kata. We all bowed and showed our appreciation with a word or a smile.

Then we all sat down facing the front of the room, where some chairs and microphones were set up for the Prime Minister, Kivunim’s director Peter, and a few other high-ranking monks. Peter gave a short introduction, a powerful analysis of the significance of this meeting between Jews and Tibetans, united by unique yet related historical narratives, and common pursuit of ideals of freedom, compassion, and peace in the world.

As the Prime Minister began to speak, we all took a lesson in Buddhist thought and practice, and in Tibetan history and culture. He spoke humbly about his election to be Prime Minister—joking almost irreverently that he had hoped the people would elect a young, secular visionary, but instead they picked an “old monk.” He spoke about the political oppression of the Tibetan people at the hands of the Chinese government, but at the same time about the importance of hating an enemy’s actions, while still loving the enemy. Hearing what he was doing to work for Tibet’s political autonomy showed us how politics and Buddhist philosophy can mix.

During his talk and the following question-and-answer period, we all began to recognize certain parallels between the Tibetan story and the Jewish story. We began to see how our study of Jewish life around the world, in so many different broader cultural contexts, resembled the Tibetan experience of living in India. While modern Israel makes the conditions of Jewish “exile” today very different than the Tibetan presence in Dharamsala, our study of the Jewish Diaspora—the common yet fragmented dispersion of the Jewish people that defined us for almost two thousand years before Israel was established—certainly endeared us to the Tibetan story on some level. Hearing the Prime Minister’s Buddhist interpretation of what it means to be subjected to injustice offered a progressive perspective on conflict resolution in general. Especially when it comes to the Middle East, Jews and Palestinians alike might have related to his words. His vision for mutual respect, recognition and regard between Tibetans and Chinese resonated very deeply with many of us in our own views of conflict in Israel and throughout the world. We all walked out of this session with the Prime Minister deeply grateful for the opportunity to have had such a private audience. We felt humbled by his humanity, refreshed by his simple yet radical vision for his people and the world, and both intellectually and spiritually stimulated.

After thanking him for spending time with us, we were given a tour through the Tibetan museum and main Buddhist temple near the Dalai Lama’s residence. The museum was a shocking and painful look at the Chinese occupation of Tibet, and the past fifty years of exile and oppression. We got a great tutorial on Buddhism from the monk who guided us through the temple. I had never realized that Buddhism was in many ways a reform movement of Hinduism. It was designed to focus on compassion, and to put less emphasis on worshipping idols (though they eventually were introduced for meditative visualization). The most interesting thing he taught us was that Hinduism claimed Buddha as a reincarnation of Vishnu, essentially absorbing Buddhism. This struck me as I tried to imagine the equivalent in monotheism—if Judaism claimed the prophets of Christianity and Islam, as opposed to the other way around. This detail was particularly emblematic of how different the basic frameworks of these religious traditions are. We had stumbled upon our own organic experience of longstanding western fascination with eastern religion and philosophy. On a different note, we were surprised and intrigued to see all kinds of cookies piled up inside the shrines. Standing next to boxes of Oreos in a Buddhist temple in Dharamsala, some of us joked that this was the best form of globalization that we had seen yet.

After an evening out on the town, we gathered together to say goodbye to our last Shabbat on Kivunim. With an emotional reflection session on as many memorable moments as we could muster with a chunk of us missing, we made one of our last deliberate attempts as a group to gain some perspective from each other on the past year and prepare for the future. It was an uplifting and heartwarming session that culminated in a spirited havdalah service and the customary weekly rounds of personally wishing each other a shavua tov, or a “good week,” bearing heavily in mind that by a week from then we would be strewn all around North America, reminiscing about moments like the one at hand.

Still, it wouldn’t be over until the very end. Again, based on pure chance, just as we had stumbled upon the most auspicious day of the Hindu calendar in Varanasi, we found ourselves in Dharamsala on Saga Dawa Duchen, the day when Tibetan Buddhists would commemorate Buddha’s birth, attainment of Enlightenment, and ascent to Nirvana in death. Accordingly, many of us would wake up at 4am to walk to the temple for the start of the festivities.

The group of us who went found little more than a handful of monks and tourists walking to the temple in the middle of the night. It was a calm night, and once we got there, we watched as the observers walked clockwise around the temple. For the majority of us, the most eventful piece of the outing was meeting a couple of Israelis at the temple. I don’t mean to downplay such an occurrence of course; Israel is a country of about 7.5 million people, and yet Israelis can be found in the most remote places of the world. After watching a beautiful sunrise over the mountains, we were disappointed to hear from one of our friends when we woke up again a few hours later that he had followed the people walking around the temple as they left and filed into the woods, where there was a giant shrine to Buddha surrounded by hundreds of people. Still, having missed the core of the ceremony, we were glad to have shown up and tried to squeeze every last moment in Dharamsala out of our short time there.

A bit later in the morning we began our descent from Dharamsala. We took a bus all the way to a small city called Chandigarh. On our way out of the mountains, we slowly found the familiar heat, terrain and smell of India return to our senses. Dharamsala had been an incredible addition to our experience, bringing us into contact with an entirely separate nation of people in a whole different environment, and giving us the distance necessary to fully appreciate the rest of our experience in India, as our grueling pace through the country continued.

From Chandigarh’s small domestic airport we took a flight to New Delhi, where we reunited with the rest of the group. There were tears and general warmth as we caught up with some of our closest friends, whom we very seldom ever got the chance to miss. Soon we were on another flight to Jaipur, one of the primary cities of the ancient spice route in its heyday, sometimes called the Pink City. It had been a long day of travel, and the pace would continue.

PART FIVE

The next morning we went straight to the Amber Fort, which is actually just outside of Jaipur. The ancient citadel served as the capital of the region until Jai Singh II moved down the road to found Jaipur in the 18^th century and build a new capital city from scratch. Combining Hindu and Muslim architecture, the fort is a unique piece of history that we had the pleasure of viewing atop elephants. After a tour of the incredibly elaborate and labyrinthine palace, we took a bus back to Jaipur. There we visited the city’s outdoor observatory, with the world’s largest sundial. When Jai Singh II moved the Rajasthan capital to Jaipur, he built the city with impeccable attention to detail even by today’s urban planning standards. On top of all this he built Yantra Mandir, or Jantar Mantar, which remains one of the most groundbreaking astronomy sites in the world. Adding to our list of India’s time-honored scientific and architectural feats, we were beginning to appreciate the roots of this distant civilization in some of its foundational contributions to human development in general.

After lunch we had a few hours to explore Jaipur’s busy marketplace. Again, we were overwhelmed by the level of poverty in the area, and the desperation of the shopkeepers to secure our business. Some of them lured us with declarations that Obama had shopped at their store. Others even tried using a little Hebrew on us—unbelievable! It was quite a way to conclude our year of perusing many of the world’s most popular and historic marketplaces. By the end of the day, we had been solicited nearly to our breaking points. If the pace of our trip was catching up with us, we would have to rally for another day. And even before this day was over, we would have a pool party on the roof of our hotel—a sort of celebration of our final night on a Kivunim international trip.

The next morning we woke up early to catch our flight back to Mumbai, our last stop before heading back to Israel. Having visited several other places around the country since our first day in Mumbai, we were able to take in a much more nuanced perspective of the city, seeing what makes it distinct amidst the country’s myriad of unique places. It felt particularly meaningful to be in Mumbai in the year that saw the city propelled into mainstream global consciousness. With the urban population officially accounting for more than half of humanity for the first time in history as of 2008, along with the tragic Mumbai terrorist attacks and the success of the film Slumdog Millionaire in the past year, Mumbai represents some of the most exciting progress and most overwhelming challenges facing the modern world. To be in Mumbai is to see the cutting edge of human civilization.

We were immediately reminded of its size. With a skyline that dominates the entire horizon, and slums literally packed into the spaces between skyscrapers, the city is simply enormous. We also began to appreciate Mumbai’s special identity as the former capital of India, when it was a British colony. From the architecture to the transportation to the distinctly British design of the city’s university, lots of old European influence contributes to the contrast between Mumbai and the rest of India.

One of the most exciting stops on our quick tour of the city was Mahatma Gandhi’s old residence in Mumbai, which has been converted into the Gandhi Museum. It was inspiring to be in the former house of this legendary change-maker. After seeing starving children on the street, one gains a deeper appreciation for Gandhi’s commitment to the pursuit of justice—even to the point of starving himself in protest. To have this be one of our last stops in a year that saw the election of an African-American president of the United States was extremely powerful. Our director Peter, who worked with Dr. Martin Luther King in the Civil Rights Movement of the 1960s, delivered an inspiring reflection on Gandhi’s profound impact on the history of the world. As the primary leader of the Indian Independence Movement, and a pioneer of satyagraha, the non-violent resistance philosophy that inspired Dr. King and many others in struggles for freedom all over the world, Gandhi was fundamentally responsible for sowing the seeds of possibility at the roots of Barack Obama’s story—a story that many of us tie deeply to our own, especially as we imagine the future that we are beginning to contribute to building. The dots of our generation’s bond to this place and its history were beginning to connect on a fundamental level.

After spending some time at the museum, we made our way to the Keneseth Eliyahoo Synagogue for lunch. With its beautiful aquamarine blue exterior, it is a loud and proud expression of Jewish identity in the heart of Mumbai, celebrating its 125^th anniversary, in fact. We were quickly ushered into a room in the synagogue where we ate lunch. As we sat around these tables, laughing and munching on our last proper Indian meal of the trip, there was an underlying sentimental vibe, a beautifully implicit—and sometimes perfectly explicit—acknowledgement that in our joy we were building some of the final memories of the year. The mood became even more heartfelt as we moved into the sanctuary of the synagogue—the last one that we would visit together all year. Over the course of the year we had stood in dozens of synagogues of all shapes, sizes and styles all around the world. We had brought each of them to life with song, paying respect to history by revisiting it in our own time. Now, in the sanctuary of the Keneseth Eliyahoo Synagogue of Mumbai, we all stood in a circle holding hands and sung the moving and uplifting hymns that had become central to one of our strongest and most consistently practiced Kivunim traditions. I closed my eyes and listened to that unique collection of voices, picturing our growth as a group through the lens of each of the song sessions in our travels to synagogues around the world over the course of the year. We savored each beat as the last notes rang out—and finished on a good one.

We left the synagogue in small groups, free to roam the nearby sites of the city. We visited a few shops, tired but still shocked by the modern vibe of Mumbai amidst all we had seen in our time in India. We visited the Gateway to India, an impressive arch on Mumbai’s western waterfront that was built by David Sassoon, the Baghdadi leader of the Jewish community of Mumbai in the mid-19^th century. Across the square we could see the Taj Mahal hotel, landing us right in the epicenter of the terror attack that ravaged the city while we were in Greece just six months earlier. When we all regrouped, we made our way to the Mumbai Chabad House, where the rabbis and community members continue to work on rebuilding since the attack.

Seeing all of this up close put in perspective how lucky we have been. Of course we postponed the trip to India after the attacks, and were given security restrictions during the war in Gaza earlier in the year. We had been shocked to read about the riots in Athens and Salonika, and the Ukrainian gas crisis that plagued the region just the week after we were in Greece and Bulgaria. There were tornados in southern Spain after our trip there, and we arrived in Berlin just the day before the May Day protests there would turn violent. Still, we had never come across danger during the year. In any case, it was very sobering to see how close all of these events came to intersecting with our lives. We were lucky to be able to simply read about these incidents—the trade-offs of living in an interconnected world where a program like Kivunim is possible—and adjust our schedule when necessary.

Over the course of the year, I have made it my business to try to take as little for granted as possible. In India, where hundreds of millions of people can’t even expect to have food and clean water everyday, one does not need to look very hard to appreciate even the most basic levels of privilege in life. Yet, beyond privilege, I found that just being in a place that was so different from anything I had yet experienced brought appreciation for life into finer focus. The trip to India was incredibly enriching not only in showing me images, ideas, and culture as I had never seen before, but also in providing a unique contrast with my own ideas and culture, forcing me to look at myself and my background in new ways. This speaks to the essence of the past year’s focus on routes to roots. Every moment held meaning and opportunities to learn and reflect on previous knowledge and assumptions. (Perhaps that can be blamed for the length of this entry!) Indeed, for much of the world we are the strange ones, and India is home.

Being in India showed us how little we had ever really known about a place we had always known about. India is a cradle of civilization where language and religion developed from scratch. It is a place where national identity can almost be confused with human identity, as diversity and unity are kept in a delicate balance on a scale not known anywhere else. Whether it is religiously absorbing Buddhism or politically accepting Tibetans, India is a country of integration without necessarily assimilation. India is dealing with many of the same issues facing the communities I have known, but in very different ways than what I have been used to. While it seems worlds away from the United States, or even Israel, its 1947 partition (corresponding with the 1947 partition of Palestine) reminds us how the world was once connected by English rule in the Americas, the Middle East, and Asia alike. Perhaps most poignantly, it is a place where neither the Star of David, nor the swastika, carry the same meaning as they do in the West. In India the Star of David, which actually pre-dates Judaism and recorded history altogether, is a symbol for the union of male and female elements, often associated with the “cosmic dance” of the gods Shiva and Shakti, while the swastika is merely a symbol of auspiciousness; fittingly enough, a significant position of Hindu nationalism has been the notion that the original Aryan race was indigenous to the Indian subcontinent.

Our trip to India embodied Kivunim’s goal of building “world consciousness” in a way that transcended the theory of any mission statement. I could feel my frame of reference expanding day to day. It was the best example of any experience all year of feeling that the more I saw the less I knew; indeed, often in India I felt less world-conscious than self-conscious. The trip was the epitome of a springboard, of a gateway to the rest of the world after Kivunim. While the trip was only a taste, we flew back to Israel with whetted appetites and more than enough to chew on at the same time. Amidst it all, we were preparing to go our separate ways. After a dinner from McDonalds (it was only appropriate as a bookend to complement our first breakfast in India) in the airport and the eight-hour flight back to Israel, we would have less than three days before finishing our journey around the globe together in New York.

Just The Tip of the Tongue

2009-08-12T22:32:00.000+03:00

The following was written on Friday, May 24^th, 2009

Now in my final week in Israel, I wanted to take the opportunity to share a particularly salient part of the Kivunim experience that has given a level of cohesiveness to the year as a consistent part of our lives and thoughts, while also serving as a concrete basis for distinction as we grapple with the different people, places and ideas that we have encountered. This entry is a note on languages.

Language was a foundational part of Kivunim even before the year began. Because the program didn’t officially start until the middle of October, I had about six weeks at the end of the summer to spend in preparation. Much of the time was spent enjoying my family, visiting my friends at college, following and participating in the presidential campaign, reading some required books for Kivunim, and doing some last minute shopping for life abroad. Apart from all that, because language study would account for half of the academic program in Israel, learning Hebrew became a central focus of my preparation during those weeks.

A little over a month after I decided to go on Kivunim, my father had bought me the Rosetta Stone program, Hebrew edition, for my birthday. For those who are not familiar with it, Rosetta Stone is a wonderful computer program for learning languages. Named for the multilingual Ancient Egyptian artifact that was discovered by Napoleon, and greatly advanced the modern understanding of hieroglyphics, the program takes the user through an intensive series of immersion exercises that develops skills for reading, writing, speaking, and listening to the language of choice. The idea was for me to learn as much Hebrew as possible in order to get the most out of the year in Israel. Every day I would wake up and do about four hours of Rosetta Stone. By the time I received the Hebrew placement exam from Kivunim, it was clear that the work had paid off. Serendipitously enough, the last Rosetta Stone lesson that I completed before I got on the plane to Tel Aviv was about asking for and giving directions—the English meaning of the word Kivunim.

From the time I ordered my drink on the plane to the time I got off and started reading the signs at the airport in Israel, language provided the most basic indication that I had transitioned into a new place and stage of life. When we began studying in Jerusalem we were thrust into a world of intensive language study. We would forge a special connection with the Arab staff of our hostel by practicing our rudimentary Arabic with them. I still remember the first time I read the Arabic on a street sign in Israel.

As my relationship with Israel has developed over the course of the year, nothing has been so indicative of my place and level of comfort in the country as my ability to speak the language. First I was a tourist, ordering food and saying thank you. When I became a regular at certain restaurants, my orders became more complicated. The first time I really felt like a resident of Jerusalem was the day I asked a taxi driver in Hebrew about the new mayor. Perhaps needless to say, nothing made me feel quite as at home in Jerusalem as when I gave directions in Hebrew to Israeli tourists from another part of the country.

Language’s role in my informal Israel experience even transcended Hebrew and Arabic sometimes. I was able to attend a Shabbaton (an organized weekend program) for long-term Israel program participants, and join in the Spanish-speaking group’s discussions. When Kivunim visited the Deaf Museum in Bat Yam, we were introduced to a whole new language community; indeed, every country has its own distinct sign language, which varies and relates to other sign languages, underscoring an interplay between common origin and separate development similar to that which characterizes verbal languages.

It is fitting that half of the academics on Kivunim are dedicated to language study. Learning Hebrew and Arabic together allow us to comprehend the cultural context in which we exist on a whole new level, using the natives’ terminology, which often doesn’t translate so perfectly—a model for the cultural differences that can be difficult to understand but are so fundamental to what makes diversity enriching. When it comes to Israel, language is a striking tool in perpetuating the conflict between Israelis and Palestinians, but the more Hebrew and Arabic one learns, the more clear it is that language could just as easily be employed for reconciliation. Hebrew and Arabic are both Semitic languages, and share hundreds of cognates and much grammatical structure. Early in the year we had a session at Givat Haviva, a center for coexistence education in Israel, with a sociolinguist who discussed how language perpetuated the conflict sometimes in ways that the people didn’t even realize, by bolstering stereotypes and communicating values almost implicitly.

Several months ago I moved into a room that faced the Old City of Jerusalem, which sits on the Green Line right next to a structure that has many different names, including security fence and separation barrier. Sometimes between Israelis and Palestinians, when the two peoples live in such proximity nearly on top of one another, it seems that the conditions of the relationship, whether conflict or understanding, rely heavily on the semantics of the borders and events, which are all experienced from many different perspectives. One of the most powerful examples is that in Palestinian communities Israeli Independence Day is known as the Nakba, or “catastrophe.”

When it comes to the Jewish world, it is sometimes said that Hebrew is our DNA. Indeed, if there was ever a route to roots in Jewish identity, it would have to include Hebrew, as the grammar and history of the roots, or shorashim, that govern the language tell a story and reveal many basic ideas about the world. There are many examples of words that are connected in Hebrew in ways that forces us to ask questions and confront ourselves. (The following are a few of my favorite examples, brought to my attention by David Leishman, an old friend of my dad’s with whom I spent a good amount of time over the course of the year.) The word for “leadership,” manhigut, shares a root with the word “to drive,” linhog, and also “custom,” minhag. The idea that a good leader is able to keep the rear-view mirror in mind, to relate vision with a sense of history, has theoretical and practical applications, and certainly shows how Jewish values ooze out of Hebrew. Even the word Zionism, or tzionut in Hebrew, shares a root with the word mitzuyan, or “excellent.” The idea that the two-thousand-year-old dream of having a state in Israel (centered on Mount Zion in Jerusalem) does not end with the establishment of the state, but continues in the pursuit of excellence, paves the foundation of much of modern Jewish and Israeli belief in progress—even as so many different, and even conflicting, visions of an “excellent” future exist.

Language is at the heart of Zionist history itself. It is hard to imagine a successful national movement that didn’t have a unified language; before Israel was established, Jews around the world spoke all kinds of languages including Yiddish (Judeo-German), Ladino (Judeo-Spanish), Judeo-Arabic, and hundreds of other dialectic derivatives of Hebrew. Today perhaps the most famous street in Jerusalem is named after Eliezer Ben Yehudah, the man who resurrected Hebrew for modern Israeli society. The bottom line is that in Jewish identity Hebrew is not just a translation from one’s first language. To those for whom Hebrew is a first language, these ideas are central to their most basic way of communicating and putting the world into words.

In all our travels this year, just as when we arrived in Israel, our efforts to connect with the local culture during our short stints abroad were fueled by picking up a few phrases in the local language of each place. In fact, our familiarity with the languages usually paralleled our overall understanding of each place. I remember when we were in Greece, I read Long Walk to Freedom by Nelson Mandela. When he spoke of the injustices of South Africa during Apartheid, it was clear that language was at the core of the inequality. While Mandela spoke the several languages of his country, the white European community only spoke one; they only needed to speak one. I quickly became very self-conscious of the fact that I only spoke English (however much semi-fluentness I might have in Spanish and Hebrew). In a world where the United States has so much influence, although it follows historical patterns that the less powerful are often more knowledgeable because they have their own culture and the dominant culture to access for success, it seemed to me that English-speakers’ comfort, our luxury to expect subtitles—not just when we watch foreign films, but when we order food in a foreign restaurant or interact with people abroad—is unfair, to say the least. In many of the countries that we visited, English was a required part of the school curriculum, while world language study in my experience was always more of an effort to learn about different cultures than a necessity for success in future work. As we have traveled we have tried to use more and more of the local languages, bringing small vocabulary cards with us on our trips.

Ultimately, outside of Israel we were usually simply humbled when the alphabet changed, but that didn’t change the fact that this year has made many of us more determined than ever to learn more languages, and put language study at the center of our interest in concerning ourselves with the world at large. Even if it would seem that English-speakers don’t have to learn other languages to communicate with people or even work in most parts of the world, in all our travels knowing the local language has felt like more and more of a necessity to entering a culture and getting the most out of one’s time in new places. After all, what gets lost in translation, or what people don’t tell you if they can’t say it in your language, is often the most important part of their story.

The small moments of understanding between us and our hosts in all these countries have been priceless. In perhaps the most storied example of language’s constant role in our travels, Kivunim boarded our train from Greece to Bulgaria with ticket receipts but no tickets. What ensued was a flustered Bulgarian conductor talking to a Bulgarian passenger who spoke a little bit of German talking to a couple of us who spoke a bit of German translating into English for our staff. The crisis was averted, and—on a train to the most foreign place many of us had ever seen—none of us would ever take language for granted again. We have seen Coca-Cola written in many different alphabets. We have even been to the desert in Morocco where they filmed Babel, the 2006 movie about multiple narratives of characters who find themselves plagued by lack of common language—hearkening back to the Biblical story of the Tower of Babel, when God scattered the people all over the earth and confounded their speech so they couldn’t understand each other. Whether it was speaking with my taxi driver in Spain about Obama, or exchanging small talk with a taxi driver in Turkey until I had absolutely exhausted all salutary questions and answers, including “how much for the ride,” these interactions paved the way for the basis of endearment that I have to the places we have visited this year.

We have found that language, like art, architecture, music, food, clothing, and even nationalism and identity, grows organically with laws that aren’t invented, but create themselves through our hands. Language can certainly be picked apart and studied analytically, but like any other creation of humanity, it has an inspired origin that cannot be altogether explained. In synagogues all over the world we would find prayer books with prayers written in different languages. We would struggle with the difference between Ladino (Spanish written in the Hebrew alphabet) and the English transliteration of Hebrew in our own siddurim; does it show more solid identity to read the spiritual language in your own alphabet or to read your own language in the spiritual alphabet?

In Morocco the fragmented and complicated national identity is modeled by the fact that most people know two or three languages, but only half of the country is literate. In fact, before we went to Morocco, we met a non-Jewish Moroccan living in Israel, who told us how he would write in his journal from left to right as much as from right to left, changing from French to Arabic to English to Hebrew on a dime, often depending on the emotional tenor or content of his thoughts. In Germany hearing the German language was at the heart of much of the struggle that we had with modern Germany; while for some of us the mere sound of it made us think of Jewish persecution, it was also a useful way to get the best beer in town.

When we were in Morocco, I read a book called The Stuff of Thought, by Steven Pinker. The whole book, subtitled Language As A Window Into Human Nature, is a treatise on “the ideas, feelings, and attachments that are visible through our language and that make up our nature.” Pinker’s assessment is that words “are rooted in our development as individuals, but also in the history of our language community, and in the evolution of our species.” It is a wonderful book that also speaks to language’s key role not just in classifying and expressing ideas, but also allowing us to create news ones and teach ourselves to think differently and innovate through metaphors.

This has been at the core of this year, and I hope will serve as an area of consistent curiosity and improved understanding. As hard and rare as it is to travel as Kivunim did this year, it is even more difficult to learn all the languages necessary to really access all the places we saw. The lofty ideals of Kivunim operate with humility towards the complexity of the world that is always presented by language as the most basic and nuanced tool for communication and understanding. Indeed, how can we expect to understand each other without (at least!) a common language, when even people who speak the same language have misunderstandings?

In preparation for the trip to India, we have already learned that Sanskrit has more in common with English than Hebrew. India represents the insight that language offers in ways I can only begin to imagine. Through our education of language as much as culture this year, we have become more conscious of our western perspective; this has been especially highlighted so far by our study of India. The Indian civilization has existed throughout the ten thousand years of spoken language’s history, but in the West we usually deem a civilization viable based on its ability to write, because those are the cultures that left records for us to study. In Arab society too, the written Arabic that was standardized in the Koran is what unites all the spoken dialects of the Arab world. In an embarrassing example of how language can reflect the history and culture of a society, we still often associate the “Indian” label with Native Americans, representing a 500-year-old assumption that the continent most immediately west of Europe was Asia…

As someone who had only traveled to three countries outside the United States before Kivunim, two of which were English-speaking, I hold appreciation for language as one of the most foundational lessons I have learned this year. I have learned to see language as a constant and basic model for so many of the social and scientific processes that we can observe in the world. Therefore, it is fitting that my experience of language this year is symbolic of a larger trend in my education; perhaps no other part of my learning this year speaks as clearly to the trend of my experiences bolstering and further developing my previous intellectual understanding. If you had asked me before Kivunim about the importance of language, I would have spoken to the importance of communication between people. I would have talked about coexistence and intercultural understanding, about how language was at the heart of conflict, and held the keys to its resolution. Yet, in retrospect, after a year of learning and encountering different languages, of course it seems that before this year I barely had a concept of just how essential language is to understanding each other, the world, and ourselves.

For all the times I have written about the importance of things that we tend to take for granted, from food to loved ones to memory and imagination, again language stands as a clear model for learning such a lesson. When it comes to identity—the things with which we struggle that make us appreciate who we are when we enter a room and feel different—there is nothing like language to ignite the flames, and that is something I have experienced over and over again as a traveler this year.

Central Europe: Old News

2009-06-15T14:03:00.000+03:00

The following was written on Friday, May 15^th, 2009.

As I have discussed at length in the past, one of Kivunim’s central educational goals is to introduce its students to threads of our story that we never knew existed. When I described this element of Kivunim’s mission statement to people before this year had begun, I would often talk about expanding the mainstream Jewish narrative to include places beyond Europe, the United States and Israel. Our first three trips accomplished this goal by exposing us to Jewish life and culture in places that we might never have thought to connect to personally—let alone on a Jewish level. Admittedly, in trying to explore unknown frontiers of the Jewish world, Central Europe might seem an unlikely choice. Indeed, few regions of the world appeal so clearly and fundamentally to modern Jewish identity. Most Kivunim students, including myself, trace their roots back to Europe.

Yet, an integral piece of Kivunim’s aim to present lesser-known corners of the world and dimensions of Jewish identity is the conviction to reconnect to pieces of the story with which one already feels well acquainted. In fact, places like Central Europe and the issues they represent offer some of the greatest challenges in our education, because they compel us to confront our assumptions and appreciate what we tend to take for granted. Whether my friends and I expected it or not, for many of us the trip to Central Europe, which consisted of one week in Germany followed by another week in the Czech Republic, Slovakia and Hungary, was the most intellectually and emotionally enriching trip of the year.

Before the trip Kivunim buzzed in anticipation—especially when it came to Germany. Many of us were simply excited to visit Berlin, as a major European city, while many of us also expressed extreme discomfort at the idea of going to the heartland of the Holocaust. Most of us were probably somewhere in the middle. Personally, as a European history student I salivated over the prospect of seeing a place of such rich cultural and historical content, while as a descendent of victims of the Holocaust I anticipated a difficult emotional experience in unprecedented proximity to that part of my own history. I was also very curious about how Germans process that dark period in their history. I imagined that the generation of Germans my age would have inner conflicts to which today’s young Jews might be able to relate. In a similar way to the balance that we as Jews try to find between learning from and maintaining an emotional connection to the memory of the Holocaust, and not wanting to think and act as victims forever, I expected young Germans to be struggling with how to learn from their history without feeling like oppressors. If I expected the trip to be the most thought-provoking and emotionally challenging one of the year, then I was right. Yet no expectations could compare to the difficult and compelling realities that we found when we got there—in the same week, fittingly enough, as the Pope, who has his own modern German identity struggle, visited Jerusalem.

When it comes to American Jewry, I can’t think of a place that is as easy to simplify as Germany. Both as Americans and as Jews we connect most directly to the Germany that existed during World War II, and from both perspectives the pressure to see the country simply as a paradigm of evil is great. We may intuitively recognize that Germany is a very complicated place, and we may even have dealt with it on a more nuanced level in a book or a European history class. However, many of us haven’t had the encouragement, institutional opportunity or even wherewithal to really grapple with modern Germany. As one of the most balanced weeks of the year in terms of combining both academic and experiential learning, the time we spent in Germany was a consistent chain of teachable moments that I think left us all with an unthinkable amount of new questions, and a new sense of just how complicated Germany is.

Our time in Germany was spent under the auspices of an organization called Germany Close Up (GCU). GCU is a new government-sponsored, but privately planned and administered, organization that runs programs for American Jews, introducing them to modern Germany. While it was an honor to be hosted by the government, I can’t say that no one was afraid that we were walking into a propaganda machine. Yet we found the facilitators to be sincerely open and honest people, who encouraged us to ask difficult questions and collect as many experiences and personal stories as possible in our short time there. True to the name of the organization, GCU invited us to zoom in and grapple with Germany as a real and complex modern place that in many respects is as baffled by its history as anyone else. After nineteen years of viewing Germany from a distance through historical documents and narratives—a difficult process in itself—the week with GCU was an unbelievable opportunity to reexamine central questions about Germany, discover wholly new ones, and ask them all personally in the place where they are most relevant.

I’ll admit that our first day in Berlin was not particularly emotional for me. When we got off the plane, we didn’t see the Holocaust. I don’t suppose I was really expecting to see it. As I mentioned above, I was one of the students that had more education about Germany outside the world of anti-Semitism. The weather was beautiful, and it was quite easy to be occupied by all the magnificent architecture and wholly modern vibe of the city. Even standing outside the Reichstag, the original but revamped parliament building, I can’t say I was really connected to the difficulties of being where the Nuremburg Laws, which degraded and disenfranchised German Jewry, had been passed. At the national Holocaust memorial, if anything I was impressed by its scale and central location. I tried to come to grips with what had taken place in the city, tried to imagine it ravaged by war. But something wasn’t adding up.

Of course I appreciated modern Germany for what it was—how liberal and modern it seemed. Still, this comfort, this sense of familiarity and simple excitement at being in a new and historically significant place, became a source instead of extreme discomfort. There really wasn’t a sense that Germany was struggling with the memory of the Holocaust, but at the same time there were memorials everywhere. I felt torn at the seams by the distinction of modern Germany and a sense of duty to feel more than simple acknowledgement for the racism that had roamed these streets. Luckily, I was in good company, as I felt my intellectual curiosity boiling over into emotional struggle. The same old conflicts were becoming very fresh and very real very rapidly: I didn’t want to conjure up a sense of victimization and delude myself into paranoia about the normalcy of Berlin just as a means to feel the pain that was on some level expected of me as a Jew, but at the same time I couldn’t walk around the city without feeling a latent sense of discomfort when I thought about how unsafe it had been at one time for a Jew to have a good time in Berlin.

The obvious way to grapple with this tension was to try to figure out whether real, healthy progress had been made. Had Germany recovered from the Holocaust through thoughtful and measured collective reflection that established an emotional conviction never to allow anything like it to happen again, or was it simply an overly-intellectualized part of their past that they could easily put in the “never again” category without dealing with it on a personal level? It was nice to feel safe on the streets, but was it worth it if all it meant was that people had forgotten about the Holocaust? I had spoken about this kind of conscientious processing of the Holocaust at the UN, but hanging out in Berlin gave the questions much more punch. The emotional and intellectual processes of the trip were never really to be isolated from one another. Indeed, they would inform and intensify each other.

A defining moment was in the German History Museum, where we learned about how prominent and assimilated German Jews had been before WWII. I had always been taught that Nazism built fear and hate of the Jews on the idea that they were responsible for the Great Depression, but for the first time it became very clear—as I thought about my orthodox Jewish ancestors on the shtetl in Poland, in contrast to the deeply assimilated and proud German Jews—that anti-Semitism in Germany had rejected Jews if they were visibly different, while hating and suspecting them if they were invisible/integrated/influential in the mainstream.

Our World Jewish Civilizations lecturer Shalmi, who joined us on the trip, would often talk about the “one-sided love affair” of German Jews with their country. When we went to Berlin’s Jewish cemetery later in the week, we would see the section for Jews who had died fighting for Germany in World War One, buried around a monument that read in Hebrew “strong as death is love.” For the first time I began to connect to why German Jews didn’t leave Nazi Germany. As Shalmi explained it, they were sophisticated people, who saw the Nazis as a temporary power. Why would anyone leave their homeland just because some fanatics took over? Besides, Jews hadn’t been a priority for Hitler when he was elected in 1933. In fact, German Jews were generally invisible for the most part; they felt more German than Jewish. Furthermore, they had never heard of the Holocaust. Let the fact that it’s so hard for us to imagine the atrocities even now that they have happened be an indication of how difficult it would have been for German Jews to have truly perceived the threat. For the first time I thought of myself. Part of what made Germany so comfortable for me was its resemblance to Scarsdale, New York in the suburbs, and Cambridge, Massachusetts in the city. I asked myself, could America ever do this to me? The fact that I was so sure it never could was on some level unsettling in itself. Comfort inspiring discomfort had reached a new level.

While I don’t believe that Jews are in danger in America, I am committed to making sure that we never are, which sometimes means asking very difficult questions. As I’ve explored in previous entries, history shows us that the impossible often transitions into the inevitable whether we are conscious of it or not. When we imagine the Holocaust as the epitome of evil, we run the risk of distancing ourselves from it so much that it loses its horrendous place in reality. Again, if we are to rise conscientiously from the ashes of the Holocaust then we must not forget it, but part of that means not simplifying it either, not keeping alive an image that shields us from the very real work of truly ensuring that it never happens again. The difficult reality is that such preventative work seems wholly unnecessary as long as we are doing it right, so the pain of confronting the questions may seem prematurely dramatic, but I don’t believe such thoughts are dangerous as long as they do not become answers, excuses to be preemptively defensive (which can often appear offensive). As Shalmi would say, the Holocaust is the epitome of something that we’ll hopefully never understand, even as it is our responsibility to try.

In our travels to Greece and Bulgaria, we saw some examples of moral courage amidst the atrocities, exploring a more nuanced understanding of the Holocaust as reality. When Kivunim visited Wannssee, the villa where top Nazi officials planned the implementation of the Final Solution, our conceptions even of the most active and apparently evil people involved were challenged by new ideas. Wannssee, in its picturesque countryside location, is the very essence of removal. It is where politicians and bureaucrats got together, away from society, to do their clearest and coldest policymaking. It is not a place where evil ideologues tortured and killed Jews. While there must have been plenty of ideologically steeped Nazi officers, who learned to hate Jews and carry out their duty, Wannssee represents an entirely different echelon of the Nazi machinery. I certainly wouldn’t go so far as to posit that there weren’t zealously anti-Semitic Nazis among the fifteen bureaucrats—nine with PhDs—who were convened to plan the extermination of European Jewry. Still, what chills bones at Wannssee is the realization that the Holocaust was planned in a conference room in the middle of the German countryside. At Wannssee eleven million lives were reduced to a stack of paper—a pragmatic public policy that would protect the political viability of the regime.

These fifteen men didn’t even come up with the idea; they just figured out how to implement it. By 1942 the Nazis had gone from trying to get the Jews out of Germany for political stability through immigration incentives, anti-Semitic laws, and ghettos. The death camps were the last step in a long process of policymaking. German-Jewish thinker Hannah Arendt would explain the Nazi crimes with something she called “the banality of evil,” the idea that the Nazis weren’t monsters, but instead were normal motivated people who wanted to get ahead, and would follow orders rather than lose control and abandon their duty.

Apart from how jarring this nonchalance felt personally to me as a Jew, it also shook the core of my interest in public policy. Does the fact that government policy did so much evil represent the potential for it to effect powerful amounts of good too? Or, on the other hand, does the extreme public policy that came to be known as the Holocaust merely serve as the worst epitome for how impersonal policymaking inherently is? One of the hallmarks of President Obama’s governing style seems to be to uphold a sense of empathy, a pragmatic desire to appreciate how policies affect people on a daily basis. Yet, at the same time we cannot ignore how the cheapness of life that characterized WWII has only increased in many ways. Wars are waged from offices. Technology has allowed for a single decision to wipe out thousands of people in a moment. I can think of no greater tragedy than the reduction of real people to the simple status of war cost. Kivunim’s day at the Wannssee villa was a gripping encounter with such tragic detachment, and a very personal reminder of what can happen when power causes normal people, who have the most responsibility to their society, to lose site of the basic human value of others.

Still, as we zoomed in to see Germany with its nuance, the Holocaust was certainly not a mere political issue. Indeed, at the end of the day, the tragedy of the most powerful people, the ones with the most responsibility, having the least contact with the implementation of their decisions is further highlighted by the experience of those who played no part in the decision-making, and yet are still expected to bear the brunt of the blame: modern Germans. As seemingly absent as the Holocaust is from the façade of modern Germany, one does not have to dig very deep to find its remnants festering in the identities of the people. As we spoke with people we met, two points were repeatedly expressed: 1) that people are extremely ambivalent about any expression of national pride, and 2) that young Germans are on the whole resentful of being blamed for the Holocaust.

Over the course of the year, as we have learned about different historical narratives and the ways that societies use history to build their present and future, we have often dealt with the tendency of nations to focus on the distant past and ignore the most recent. From Greece to America to Israel it is clear that much of national identity often stands on a romantic image of the “good old days.” As we have been trained to identify this trend, we have also become pretty efficient at sniffing out what I like to call the illusion of a clean break. This is to say, when societies write their history around idealized events of antiquity, and all but ignore the most recent period, they run the risk of pretending, even unconsciously, that they can escape the world of which they are most directly a product. While the ultra-nationalism of Nazi Germany was one of history’s primary examples of a society adopting a glorified sense of self based in ancient roots, modern German national identity often epitomizes the clean break piece of the model—an all but passive repression of the memories of WWII.

Today German identity seems to be defined by a lack of pride. Besides some recent enthusiasm about the national football (soccer) team, which still made many people uncomfortable, expressions of nationalism are completely taboo in German society. While this might seem like a natural and appropriate place for a country with such a spurned past to be in, it is also extremely unsettling. Beyond the fact that the world accepts this muted sense of national identity—and would probably be uncomfortable if Germans were too proud—what does it really mean that no one is dealing with the past in Germany? What does it really mean for the health of the society? What will happen when someday someone comes along and makes Germans feel proud to be German for the first time in a long time? Is the modern age just a polarized swing of the pendulum, from ultranationalism to anti-nationalism, that could swing back in time? Can there be a middle ground? What did communism do to the Germans’ ability to deal with WWII, when half of Germany was taught a simplified anti-fascist curriculum, stifling any inclination to pursue redemption through collective introspection and critique?

As these questions still swirl around my head, I hardly have any answers. Still, I really wonder what German society is doing to address these questions. When I asked young people about how hard it would be for them to be expressly proud about their country—as opposed to being mellow and content in living there—they seemed stretched to consider what future of national identity they were working towards. When one realizes that German people were really just a collection of hundreds of principalities for hundreds of years, that things went horribly wrong the only time they ever really united, and then outside parties immediately split them into east and west for fifty years, it is easy to understand the fragmentation and ambivalence that they have about any national identity. Still, especially when it comes to the Holocaust, while the things that Germans share are the things that no one wants to think about and everyone hates even more to feel, complaisance is very dangerous. It seems to me that there are few nations on earth that have as much of a duty to think critically about their past and connect to it emotionally. Of course, it’s very hard to look inward when the entire world is so critical.

This brings me to the modern dynamic between Germans and Jews. These questions cut to the core of GCU’s primary mission, and Kivunim’s too on some level. While just a few days in Berlin was enough to show Kivunim how little we really know or even think about modern Germany, many people with whom we spoke also made it clear that German consciousness of Jews is mostly defined by WWII. (Indeed, today most Jews in Germany are immigrants from the Soviet Union—Jews who suffered their own separate atrocities at the hands of Stalin, Jews who grew up in a society where assimilation was the name of the game. Jews from the Soviet Union have Judaism that is all but invisible, while modern Germany let them immigrate in the hopes that they would be visible, to show that there is a place in the country for all kinds of people, especially Jews.) This broadly identifiable trend of lack of understanding underscores how little these estranged peoples have dealt with each other in the last sixty years.

GCU is doing some of the most important work that I can imagine. After all, when it comes to how Jews deal with the Holocaust—one of the most centrally defining pieces of modern Jews identity—it seems obvious that they would blame the Germans. Yet, while it’s less explicit, it may be just as obvious that modern Germans should not be blamed. But who else? Must we find some present people to blame? (Of course we may feel justified in attributing blame if we have problems with modern German attitudes towards the Holocaust, but we may also find a role in influencing those in a positive way instead of simply criticizing them.) Even as we have explored how the Nazis themselves were perhaps not as simply evil as we might like to imagine, they will never be forgiven. The natural inheritors of that legacy would be their children and grandchildren, but as a Jew I can testify to the fact that I want to be able to preserve the memory of the Holocaust without raising my children to feel like perpetual victims; only being in Germany could help me begin to appreciate how hard it would be for a country to raise its children with an honest and emotional connection to the Holocaust without in some way teaching them to blame themselves.

These are issues that Jews, Germans, and in some way all peoples, face. My time in Germany suggested to me that Jews must recognize that the choice to isolate ourselves from Germany—not to buy products or meet people from the country—breeds resentment. Indeed, as easy as it is to blame “Germany,” the country has changed and almost entirely replaced its population since WWII. At the same time Germans must realize that, while they don’t have to blame themselves personally, they cannot stop at simply feeling resentment towards Jews for blaming them. We must all ask ourselves what we are doing to effectively engage with each other and be reminded in a less hardened, principled and unsympathetic way that, while we all may have changed, we are also products of WWII in very fundamental and painful ways. Indeed, soon the Holocaust survivors and WWII generation of Germans will be gone forever, and it will be up to us to determine the discourse that keeps anything like the Holocaust from creeping up again. It will be easier for us all to greet our responsibilities to memory and the future if we don’t allow distance, generalization and unchecked emotional resentment to let our questions narrow and fade. We must not shy away from the complex nature of moving forward and remembering in tandem. We all have a right to dignity and to painful memories of the time when our peoples came in contact in the worst way, but we must also ask, what are we doing to combat disconnect and help each other reflect and progress healthfully? As we look forward, in my mind the only thing more destructive than disconnect from our history would be ongoing and unaddressed resentment of each other for not appropriately dealing with it.

My experience with Germany Close Up was a big surprise; Kivunim’s relationship with the organization didn’t even exist when I signed up. Yet it was one of the most important pieces of the year. For all the effort that Kivunim puts into coexistence education between Jews and Arabs, it is wholly necessary—and maybe even more difficult—to address our relationship with Germany. I look forward to continuing the work that began when Kivunim visited Germany, because I believe that we were introduced to levels of the modern world and ourselves that we cannot possibly ignore, confronting even more questions that are shaping the world that we will inherit. Perhaps no other adventure outside of our bubble this year appealed as fundamentally to our basic assumptions of the world as American Jews. These are the kinds of challenging and uncomfortable realities that we encourage each other to embrace.

* * *

Beyond the more obvious reasons for American Jews to see Germany, I also found myself confronting questions about the Cold War—questions that appealed more to my identity as an American, a westerner. After experiencing the “in-between” nature of places from Jerusalem to Istanbul, my brain lit up with excitement when I recognized the very real local divide between East and West that existed in Berlin until recently. Here was a city that experienced the division of the Cold War within walking distance. As I stood under the Brandenburg Gate, where President Reagan gave his famous “Tear Down This Wall” speech, I could see the double-brick line running through the street that signified where the Berlin Wall used to stand. This was the first time that I had ever really confronted how little I think about a war that defined the society in which I was raised until the year before I was born. In fact, I am about as old as an American can be without remembering the Cold War, or being raised with consciousness of the threats associated with it. What is more, for most Americans the Cold War reached across oceans, while here in Berlin it was waged across streets. This realization was only the beginning of a consciousness that would always be in the background during our time in Germany—that the East-West divide that defined Germany for fifty years is in some ways still the most central element of modern German identity. As much as our responsibilities regarding our conceptions of WWII and Germany would challenge us for the bulk of the trip, I also walked away with a new sense of just how potentially problematic it is that the generation of Americans who are the most immediate products of the post-Cold War world know the least about it—speaking of modern neglect of the recent in favor of the distant past…

We had spent a week in Germany. We had been to seemingly countless museums and memorials. We had tasted ice cream, bratwurst, baked goods, and beer. We had spent nights wandering around the artists’ colony in Berlin and marveling at the graffiti on the vestiges of the Berlin Wall. We had met with students, teachers, and representatives from the German Foreign Ministry and Parliament. After a day in Dresden, the baroque wonder and site of one of the most merciless carpet-bombing campaigns of WWII, we boarded a train to Prague.

Prague is a special place. Right in the heart of Bohemia, it was a refuge for strange and interesting people from all over Europe. For centuries religious and political dissidents who were exiled from their own countries found a home in Prague, creating one of Europe’s most diverse cities, a place where culture bloomed and billowed. It was the birthplace of the revival of many modern Jewish symbols like the Magen David (Jewish star), the Israeli national anthem Hatikvah, and the illustrated Haggadah that is read on Passover. Prague was a center of the Jewish reformation in the 19^th century, and the home of Franz Kafka, one of the great thinkers of the modern world, and a German-speaking Jew.

Prague was emblematic of the old/new nature of the trip like no other place. The city’s nearly 750-year-old Old-New Synagogue stands as one of Prague’s earliest gothic structures, and serves as the home of the Gollum—the mythical clay monster created by Rabbi Judah Leow ben Bezalel, or the Maharal, to protect the city’s Jews from pogroms. The entire city, when viewed from the old castle of the Holy Roman Emperor literally seems to spread into modernity, from the 14th century Charles Bridge to the modern skyscrapers in the distance. The city was the epitome of a quaint European city, with breathtaking architecture and culture so rich you could see, smell, hear, taste, and simply feel it everywhere. In Prague an inescapable air of fantasy and history consumed us.

We spent one of our three days in the Czech Republic at Thereisenstadt. It was the first concentration camp I had ever visited. In Germany we had visited Rail 17, where thousands of German Jews were deported to Thereisenstadt. Now being at the camp was one of the most difficult days of the entire trip. In keeping with Kivunim’s penchant for the complex, Thereisenstadt was a powerful example of the confusion and disorientation that Kafka had coined in his writings even before the Holocaust ever occurred.

The Holy Roman Emperor Joseph II originally built Thereisenstadt in honor of his mother Maria Theresa, as a garrison town to protect against Prussia. Its fortress was a famous European prison that at one time held Gavrilo Princip, the Serb who assassinated Archduke Franz Ferdinand of Austria and all but started World War One. Unlike the other Nazi concentration camps of WWII, Thereisenstadt was seen as an exemplary camp. It was a hallmark of Nazi propaganda, a place where the Nazis brought the Red Cross to show that their detention of Jews wasn’t so bad. It was a place where annihilation was postponed, where “special” Jews were kept indefinitely. It was a transient place where people stayed “for the time being.” As a camp devoted to Nazi indecision about certain Jews, it was the quintessential “in between”—being in the country side, it was not a ghetto, nor a death camp, but many died, and when the transports did occur due to limiting factors like space, the Nazis still left it up to a council of prominent Jews to make the decisions. People didn’t know that the Holocaust was happening; they knew that a war was happening, and many were thankful for the opportunity to wait it out. Still, there was vague fear of the transports that took people east never to return. It was as Kakfaesque as it was Samuel Beckett’s waiting.

Even as 35,000 people died there due to causes ranging from malnutrition to disease to fatigue—along with about 90,000 who were sent to other death camps—people didn’t run away. Not only did the 17,000 or so survivors of Thereisenstadt have to live through the horrid conditions and treatment at the camp, they also had to deal with being considered survivor-lite in the aftermath because it was a unique camp that was considered less overtly evil than places like Auschwitz.

Being at Thereisenstadt challenged and confirmed every image of the Holocaust at the same time. It epitomized the challenge that characterizes Holocaust study in general: trying to make sense of something completely senseless. It was a place where culture flourished as these Jews of the intellectual elite expressed their anxiety and confusion through theater, painting and music. While suffering seemed to bring people closer to their faith, as there were four synagogues and a surge of Zionist fervor, the prisoners produced the culture they loved—German culture, the culture that had rejected them. All this productivity occurred as people were being weeded out and sent to death camps. While there was a post office and schools in the ghetto where the Jews lived and worked, Thereisenstadt was also the only camp that was run almost entirely by Jews. This meant that amidst autonomy Jews were expected to be responsible for the selection and deportation of their own. After six months of visiting synagogues all over the world, we crammed ourselves into one that seemed carved out of the wall of the ghetto, and prayed, sang and cried. One personal account in the museum summed up the incomprehensibility of the place, as a man spoke in one paragraph of the cold, the lice, the transports, the best rendering of a Czech play he had ever seen, and his new girlfriend.

To top it all off, the camp is in one of the most beautiful places in Europe. It is not cold and barren, but fertile and picturesque. As we stood on the bank of the river just outside the camp, where the Nazis had disposed of the ashes of the deceased, I thought about the contrast between Thereisenstadt and Germany. While in Germany the presence of the Holocaust was less apparent, and even eerily cold and political, Thereisenstadt saw it on the ground. While the Holocaust was policy in Germany, it was life and death at Thereisenstadt. Yet in some ways the tension between comfort and discomfort was still potent. It rained while we were in the camp, and was sunny and beautiful when we held a short memorial service on the river. It was a mass grave, and a tranquil spot to sit and think at the same time.

As we boarded the bus back to Prague, we were baffled. We were shocked and uplifted, depressed and reflective. Thereisenstadt was truly one of the most confusing places we visited—indicative of the whole year’s struggle not to simplify, and truly pushing the envelope in our confrontation with our roots.

We spent the following day in transit, bidding Prague farewell, and stopping for lunch in Bratislava, Slovakia on our way to Budapest, Hungary. I think three countries in one day was a new record for Kivunim, bringing us more to the brink than ever before of being able to appreciate the power and value of our experience this year. The distance between all these countries makes them seem like the northeastern United States, but the borders here aren’t just remnants of colonial settlements—they are dividing lines between languages and cultures. That day of travel put in perspective how cursory our exploration of these places really is—even when we spend more than a day in each place.

In Hungary we learned about the political polarization and social difficulties that have plagued the country since the fall of communism. We learned about the latent extreme nationalism that exists around the territories that were lost in World War One. We learned about notable Hungarian Jews, and met Jews in a country where the word “Jew” can be taboo. Hungary is also a place where the most progressive education happens in Jewish schools; we visited one where only a very small percentage of the students are actually Jewish because the quality of the education draws people from many backgrounds. On our last evening in Europe, we took a boat out on the Danube for a party with some local Jewish students. After visiting the Holocaust memorial on the bank of the river—a simple group of empty cast-iron shoes lying on the dock—I thought back to the river at Thereisenstadt. These rivers were the lifeblood of Europe, and more than any other place, they saw the depth of destruction of WWII. Rivers reflect the way the world is filtered and distorted by perception, as its flow makes the reflection of the nature around it flawed. All we can do, as we watch it pass by in constant movement and flux, is try to take in as many pieces and perspectives as possible. I opted for a reflective conversation with one of my close friends as the music blared. I could not imagine a more fitting scene for the end of the trip.

Kivunim’s trip to Central Europe was a uniquely enriching experience. After basically concluding our unit on Mediterranean and North African Jewry after Turkey, Central Europe represented a whole new region of study in our exploration of Jewish civilization around the world. It was neither east nor west—somewhere in between, per usual. It showed us the modern amidst the old, in art, architecture, thought, and identity. With so many different peoples living in such close proximity, it was a humbling jumble of new languages and worldviews. It was a crossroads that turned us inside out and made many of us confront our most immediate roots in the Jewish world. Grappling with modern Germany and the ongoing discourse on German unity, while soaking in the vibrancy of Prague, the din of Thereisenstadt, and the persistent anti-Semitism in Hungary, we felt the deep scars and rich cultural struggles and triumphs that make up Europe’s modern actualization as a continent. As history is alive and well there, along with some of the past neuroses, we discovered a new level of appreciation for emotional processes without closure and intellectual curiosities without conclusions. This was how the heart of Europe found a place in our hearts.

* * *

Flying over Tel Aviv as we prepared to land in Israel for the fifth time of the year, with the old-new themes in mind, I thought back to a Chasidic story that a Chabad community leader in Prague had told us. I don’t remember it perfectly, but the basic story tells of a man from a rural town in Eastern Europe who has a dream about a chest of gold buried in Prague. He travels miles and miles to the exact place from the dream, and finds policemen there monitoring a construction project. The police ask him where he is from, and what he is looking for, so he sheepishly explains the dream and his long journey. One of the officers lights up, as if recognizing the man from somewhere, and exclaims that he just had a dream about a chest of gold buried under the man’s house in his town. When the man returns home, he does in fact dig up the chest of gold.

As we descended over Tel Aviv, the moral of the story—that we may search for miles and miles only to find that what we have been looking for was under our nose the whole time—seemed to ring true. The name of the city Tel Aviv, combining tel, an archaeological term in Hebrew for a hill or mound made up of accumulated layers of past human civilizations, and aviv, the Hebrew word for spring, the season of new life, is in itself an expression of appreciation for “old-news.” Indeed, even Israel, as a modern version of a nearly two thousand year old idea is about as “old-news” as it gets. On some level the moral of the story has been a subtle truth of Kivunim from the start. If it is the essence of any journey, it seems especially relevant to one involving routes to roots.

The Relationship: Rewards Of A Rocky Road

2009-05-14T12:22:00.000+03:00

The following was written on April 29^th, 2009

We are all part of many communities, bound by common religion, language, history, home, ideas, and many other elements of association that contribute to identity development. My time volunteering as a peer leader in Young Judaea during high school introduced me to the idea that a group’s process and the development of each of its constituent individuals inform and even depend on each other. This idea, that mutualism exists between any whole and its individual pieces, that individuals are shaped and defined by being a part of groups as much as they define and shape those groups, is not always an explicit part of how we describe the links and bonds that make up much of the foundation of our identities. Indeed, it sounds more like the way we might describe an interpersonal relationship.

Yet when it comes to shaping an identity, it seems that there are many parallels between the most personal and individual relationships and those of broad and collective caliber. Just like any interpersonal relationship, an individual’s dynamic with the group can be a process of mutual sharing and growth, or of neglect and destruction. All too often, when we don’t actively participate, or when the community does not provide ample enough opportunities for such initiative, we may feel isolated or cut off. Sometimes, especially in the 21^st century, we belong to such large and diverse groups that it can be difficult to truly see and appreciate our connection to them. Yet these sentiments of disempowerment and alienation are most evident when the system itself has lost consistency—when there is a lack of communication, education or leadership for instance. Usually it isn’t entirely the fault of the group or the individual, but a combination of the two. When people are engaged, their involvement can be as personally rewarding to them as it is beneficial to the group. The bottom line is that the health of our identities and that of the communities with which we identify are often deeply dependent on the level of interaction between the two. Whether the net impact on everyone involved is positive or negative is complicated and subject to change, but the relationship is there whether we feel and accept our stake in it or not.

I have come to put my connection to Israel—no doubt one of the central ingredients in my Jewish identity—in these terms. I admit that I don’t feel the same kind of citizenship-based responsibility that I feel for the United States, or that I felt for Young Judaea for example, but my peers and I often think and talk about our “relationship with Israel.” This relationship is always in flux and feels like a big question mark most of the time, but that’s what this year is all about. Being on a Jewish peoplehood-oriented program that is based in Israel puts questions about where we fit as American Jews in Israeli society at the core of our experience.

When I think about my own relationship with Israel, I remember when I had barely heard of it. As a child I knew that my dad worked for different organizations that had the word “Israel” in their titles. I grew up listening to political discussions about the possibilities of peace, and I even had some consciousness of the controversy around Israel in the news. Of course my consciousness of group identity is really very new, so when I started going to Young Judaea summer camp at age ten, Israel was a piece of the world that I largely took for granted. At that time the depth of my reflections on identity largely concerned how I felt more like a Red Sox fan at camp when I was surrounded by New Yorkers, and a Yankees fan at home, when I was the only one in town whose dad’s most prized piece of baseball memorabilia was a ball signed by the legendary 1963 Yankees roster. We all know what it’s like to feel a piece of ourselves come into finer focus when it makes us stand out in a given situation. The image of a person having to wear different hats at different times, as a metaphor for the complexity of identity, was quite literally how I was introduced to the sliding scale and relativity inherent in a rich sense of self.

When I was sixteen I remember being introduced to the idea of “loving” Israel, again through Young Judaea. Of course the term had been thrown around a lot before, but I had grown up with Israel and now things were getting complicated. Love was a strong word. Was it a romance? Just infatuation? Was it unconditional? I would slowly untangle the idea that it meant knowing Israel well enough to know that it wasn’t perfect, yet nonetheless sticking around to advocate for its strengths and give support and constructive criticism in the interest of constant pursuit of improvement. Loving Israel brought a lot of pride and a lot of pain at the same time. Learning how to balance appreciation for both would be just one of the major challenges in the process—which continues today—of developing a place and role in the relationship. I would visit a couple of times, and spend a lot of time learning about it and analyzing it from afar. I would confront—not merely acknowledge—the fact that Israel was a real place with real people, and not simply an intellectual challenge for carving out a cultural identity. Then would come the issue of whether or not I, as a non-Israeli Jew, actually had the right to use the word “love” in relation to Israel; could I truly appreciate it, let alone have any integrity in critiquing it? I would find that being genuine, especially in acknowledging the limits of my perspective, goes a long way when it comes to having integrity in talking about Israel. Yet ultimately how I related to Israel depended largely on where I was and with whom. In other words, it was a classic Red Sox/Yankees situation.

All of this, of course, continues today. All of these questions and challenges are magnified like never before. That search for integrity was a primary motivation for me when I decided to spend this year in Israel; I saw it as an opportunity to supplement my intellectual knowledge about Israel’s politics and culture with some first-hand experience. After the first couple of months of Kivunim, which already represented the longest period of time I had spent in Israel, the Gaza War epitomized such a manifestation of that first-hand confrontation with real, complicated life in Israel—especially because the conflict was the subject about which my academic knowledge ran the deepest.

I remember leaving Israel for Morocco in January with a bitter taste in my mouth as the conflict ravaged on. I was glad to leave on some level (in a way that perhaps only someone who planned on returning shortly could be), taking stock of the luxury I had to go to Morocco, Spain and home, and also to get a breather from Jerusalem’s tense atmosphere in the wake of death relatively so close and yet so far away. Mostly, I was tired of feeling completely lost in the process of figuring out where I fit into the mix, and how I could contribute to its progress.

After I returned from the United States, the next weeks until our trip to Turkey was the longest period of consecutive days in Israel that Kivunim would have all year. Distance had cooled me off and helped me refocus my frustration into something more constructive. I couldn’t help feeling the warmth and familiarity of returning to Jerusalem. Now, the intellectual process of past years, of feeling my relationship with Israel strengthen when refusing to walk away in frustration, was being rehashed in a much deeper and even more physical way.

Since then I have had countless endearing and straining experiences here. I joined my Israeli counselor Gabi when he went to vote in the national election, reminding me of all the times I went to the precinct with my mom as a child. I have attended political protests. I have been to soccer games, concerts, and even an amusement park. I have performed music in an open-mic café. I have had a number of incredible Shabbat dinners, being invited into people’s homes in a way that is really only possible in Israel—and I’ll even narrow that down to Jerusalem! I have been to an army base and Arab villages. I made my way to Sderot to see the ubiquitous bomb shelters and accumulated rockets for myself. I have eaten at Obama Pizza on Hebron Road, and followed it all the way to Hebron, to visit the cave where the Jewish Patriarchs are allegedly buried—perhaps the ultimate route to roots! I have heard radically different visions for a better Israel from the right and the left. I have ventured across divides into East Jerusalem and even Jordan. From drafting public policy proposals in my Middle East class and visiting African refugees and controversial (to euphemize a bit…) Jewish settlers, to volunteering in the Mayor of Jerusalem’s office and meeting him in a bar, I find my relationship with Israel becoming more multidimensional every day.

The longer I am here, the more I find myself in between the inside and outside of Israeli society. I am no longer a tourist, but I plan to go back to America. I’ve been here during a war, but I haven’t served in the army. The issues are largely the same, but the relativity slides on a bigger scale now than ever before. Today I know more about Israel and feel more emotional connection to every detail, so while my fundamental values have remained more or less the same, the foundation of my beliefs has become much more complicated. I have become less certain and more curious. At the end of the day, perhaps my most emboldened belief is that, when confronted with the countless issues of Israeli life, one must try as hard as possible to maintain respect for just how complex this place is. At every turn there is incredible pressure to choose a side and simplify one’s self and others.

Perhaps no experience yet has so thoroughly embodied this complexity as the past two days. Just a week after Holocaust Commemoration Day in Israel, the country observes Memorial Day and Independence Day back to back. To many American ears this might not sound so dramatic, but in Israel these two days represent much of the most fundamental meaning behind national identity. The mood of Memorial Day is set by the sound of a cacophony of sirens blaring throughout the entire country. For two minutes at sundown the night before and then again on the morning of Memorial Day, Israelis simultaneously stop what they are doing, close their eyes, conjure up faces of lost loved ones, and are enveloped together in collective reflection amid the din. The day is full of heavy ceremonies about fallen soldiers and victims of terror. Kivunim spent the morning at Mount Hertzl, Israel’s military cemetery, where the reality that this is a country of soldiers really sinks in. The place was literally packed with people crying, draped over the graves of their lost friends and family. Then, at sundown the mood shifts to a seemingly completely opposite extreme as Independence Day begins. The cities begin to pulse with uncontrollable energy. Streets are closed for Israeli dancing and all the trappings of the wildest party of the year appear on a dime.

Needless to say, the transition is a bit jarring. Yet that, I think, is exactly the intention. Israeli Memorial Day and Independence Day go together for a reason; in Israel neither day means as much without the other. In mainstream national consciousness, without sacrifice there would be no state, and without appreciating the state’s existence Israelis would have little context for giving meaning to loss.

Israel is certainly a country of extremes on many levels, but the fact that life and death are both so commonly experienced and appreciated evokes the heart of Israel’s extreme nature. It is fitting that the transition between Memorial Day and Independence Day is abrupt, because Israeli culture has been forged in a reality of uncomfortable transitions between triumph and tragedy. Yet, usually the “ready or not” situations mean suddenly being called up to fight in a war or losing a loved one. These two days reverse that trajectory, staying true to the complex emotional roller coaster on which Israel is based, while switching instead from solemn memorial to unbridled celebration.

There is no reason to simplify, or pretend that Memorial Day and Independence Day are entirely separate, but the connection between the two is incredibly challenging. Like so many pieces of Israeli life, the connection and transition between Memorial Day and Independence Day is easy enough to grasp intellectually, but once one confronts it in a personal way (another relative term) it becomes very emotionally difficult. In the end, true love of Israel means taking memorial and celebration together. Again, neither is as meaningful without the other, so while simplicity may be comfortable, it puts the most meaningful and enriching elements at risk.

Still, of course part of embracing the complexity represented by Memorial Day and Independence Day means, beyond appreciating the relationship between the two days themselves, recognizing that the collective mood is not always as uniform as we might think. National divisions and various experiences on these days do not melt away altogether. There are those who see Israel’s security and existence as contingent on much more than the military. Indeed, it must be noted that for many the connection between the death of their loved ones and pride in their country is less direct. Many Jews are disconnected by much more than politics; the ultra-orthodox, for instance, largely don’t serve in the army, and many don’t even recognize the state of Israel for religious reasons. Additionally, let us not forget that for many of Israel’s Arab citizens, who do not serve in the army, and whose national identities are complicated immensely by living in the Jewish state, their experiences of Memorial Day and Independence Day are often at odds with much of the rest of the country—to say the least.

If learning to resist the temptation to simplify seems always to be central to learning itself, then in many ways Israel epitomizes that struggle, especially for those of us who are still trying to figure out where we fit in. This year has been an intensive around-the-clock exercise in constantly being stretched and challenged by Israel as everything from a home base for international travel and a halfway house between high school and college to a site of the peaks and valleys of life and a historic homeland. Even the word Israel, the name that was given to Jacob in the bible after he wrestled with an angel, shows how struggle has on some level always been central to Jewish identity. Anyone would agree that love isn’t easy, but many would also say that it’s one of the few things we really need. I remember learning in high school that the origin of the word “engagement,” as a term for agreement to marry, comes from the term for being challenged to a duel. With so much talk about the need for “civic engagement” in society these days, the connection between forging relationships and finding ways to participate seems to apply on the most local and broadest levels. Indeed, let us not forget that trying to figure out where one “fits in” is (or should be…) as much about personal identity development as it is about a desire to make a meaningful contribution to the community. I feel that spending this year in Israel has been an appropriate step in my choice to enter the ring, and wrestle with the questions that true love of Israel presents. I’m far from sure about what my relationship with Israel will be down the road, and I suspect and hope that it will always be dynamic and changing, but for now I’ll stick with complex, challenging, rich and rewarding.

A Masterpiece Of A Work In Progress

2009-03-21T18:22:00.000+02:00

From the moment that we landed in Istanbul, it was clear that Kivunim’s time in Turkey would be equal parts eye-opening and full of familiar, or at least fitting, steps in our journey. Embodying the “third time’s a charm” ethic as our third international trip this year, our time in Turkey brought me to a new level of endearment to the international story of the Jewish people that we are trying to reclaim this year, and represented in many ways the core and climax of everything we have done thus far. Even from a linguistic perspective I challenged myself more during this trip than on any other before to learn local phrases. Above all, our visit to Turkey this past week was evidence of progress—not just in terms of our year and our development as students of the world, but also in visiting a place, like many others where we have been and have yet to go, where the process of the development of human civilization, and many of its different stages, are especially evident.

As I mentioned briefly in my last entry, Turkey is about as “in between” as a place gets. I maintain that every place we have visited, perhaps especially Jerusalem, holds the seeds of converging cultures and civilizations. However, I must admit that few other places in the world are as much of a crossroads as Turkey. Turkey borders Greece and Bulgaria on one side, and Georgia, Armenia, Iran, and Syria on the other. It is at once Asian, European, Middle Eastern, and not quite any of these. Over the course of the week, moving from Istanbul to Ankara and eventually to Izmir, we physically traveled inter-continentally, while staying inside one country. The cross-cultural nature of Turkey centers on Istanbul. A city physically split between Europe and Asia by the Bosphorous Strait, it has served as the seat of government for both Eastern and Western powers. Many parts of Istanbul could easily be London or Madrid (or Athens or Haifa for that matter), but the minarets of its plethora of mosques dominate the skyline.

As soon as we got off the plane from Tel Aviv, we made our way to the ancient Roman Hippodrome and the Blue Mosque of Ottoman Sultan Ahmet I, and then saw the two cultures combined just across the square in the Hagia Sophia—one of the world’s most majestic Byzantine churches (in fact, it was the largest cathedral in the world for a thousand years), which was turned into a mosque shortly after the Ottomans captured Istanbul (then Constantinople) in 1453, and then into a museum in 1935 when the Republic of Turkey was established. I find it pretty profound that one building can hold the remnants of so many chapters of Turkish history. The Blue Mosque and the Hagia Sophia are awe-inspiring in their sheer size and style. They are truly tremendous feats of architecture, especially given the tools that the builders had when they were constructed. At first glance they appear to be sister buildings; they stand opposite one another, with their massive domes complementing each other. Yet their constructions were separated by over a thousand years. It is quite striking to consider how the style of Istanbul’s mosques, which most clearly demonstrate the city’s Muslim character, must have been inspired by Christian innovations in religious architecture. The roots of this interaction between cultures, especially on a religious and architectural level, made me feel right at home. Indeed, the relationship between the Hagia Sophia and the Blue Mosque is all too reminiscent of Jerusalem’s Church of the Holy Sepulcher and the Dome of the Rock, which also share almost eerily identical measurements in their domes—not to mention the less physical historical parallels in Istanbul and Jerusalem of the relationship between Islam and Christianity, and Romans and Ottomans, that such buildings represent.

After visiting the Blue Mosque and Hagia Sophia, we went to Istanbul’s Grand Covered Bazaar, which was yet another interesting variation—after Morocco in particular—of the marketplace culture that is so integral to life in the Middle East and the development of international trade that connects and affects the world today. What was most thrilling about the bazaar in Istanbul, again, was the multicultural and multilingual atmosphere. While I was there I spoke English, Arabic, Spanish, Hebrew, and even a few words of Turkish, employing basically all of my linguistic tools in one market. The vibe of cross-cultural interaction took on an almost playful air as the shopkeepers tried to guess their customers’ origins (at two separate shops I was asked if either of my parents were from Syria or Iraq!).

Over the course of the next couple of days in Istanbul, we experienced the city through several different lenses. We met with the Chief Rabbi of Turkey, a charming and wise man, who entreated us to greet our future with a smile on our faces. We visited Istanbul’s Jewish school, which was an impressive institution, with high ideals and expectations and state-of-the-art facilities. Turkey doesn’t allow religion to be taught in schools, so the school had integrated its Jewish curriculum into an ethics class based on Jewish values. We had a dance party with some of Istanbul’s Jewish youth, and learned more about the Ladino (Judeo-Spanish) music culture of Istanbul’s Sephardic (expelled-from-Spain) Jewish community.

We spent Shabbat in Istanbul, mostly dividing our time between an Ashkenazi synagogue and an old-age home where we ate our meals, while overlooking an absolutely breathtaking view of the city. Praying in an Ashkenazi synagogue, in a country that we associate much more heavily with the Sephardic Jews, who were taken in by the Ottoman Empire in 1492, was an interesting reminder of Turkey’s complexity. We visited a number of old synagogues and museums, where we saw chanukiot (Chanukah lamps) with the Turkish/Muslim crescent-and-star symbol and even one that resembled a model of a mosque’s minaret. We visited a synagogue that had a bima/teva (podium for leading a prayer service) that was in the shape of a boat—Noah’s Ark, or a tribute to the Ottoman ships that brought these Jews to refuge from Spain? After visiting Spain in January, it was fitting that Turkey would show us the pinnacle of the comfortable relationship that Sephardic Jews shared with Ottoman society, and also serve as a transition into the Ashkenazi culture that we will be studying in the coming weeks before our trip to Central Europe at the end of April.

On our last day in Istanbul, we visited Topkapi Palace, which was the home of the Sultan when Istanbul was the Ottoman Empire’s capital. We saw the Sultan’s ceremonial clothing and jewels. We visited the old Harem, where women from all over the world were kept for the Sultan. We even saw relics of the Prophet Mohammed. At the end, the palace compound opened up to the best view of the Bosphorous Strait that the city has to offer. I felt overwhelmed as I stood literally on the boundary between Europe and Asia. The culturally and historically diverse and fluid identity of this place was suddenly manifest in a shockingly physical way. Seeing both continents was as simple as looking over a relatively narrow body of water, even as I could only imagine what truly lay over the horizon in front of me and behind me. I looked downstream towards the Marmara Sea, which feeds into the Aegean Sea through the Dardanelles, and then into the Mediterranean towards Israel, Greece, Spain and Morocco. I looked upstream towards the Black Sea and Bulgaria. I felt the entire curriculum of Kivunim thus far converging on this point. I closed my eyes and heard people speaking English, Arabic, Spanish, Chinese, German, Turkish, and many other languages that I couldn’t understand. Maybe it is just a tourist hot spot that brings people together, but there’s nothing like tourism in Istanbul. Later that night we would cross the bridge over the Bosphorous, and board an overnight sleeper train to Turkey’s capital of Ankara.

Our tour guides would compare Ankara’s relationship with Istanbul to that Washington D.C. with New York City. If Istanbul is the country’s cultural crown jewel, then Ankara is the heart of the national identity. The capital of Turkey was moved to Ankara when the modern Republic was founded, largely because the War of Independence had been waged from its more central location. The most obvious manifestation of Ankara’s importance to national identity, besides the government buildings, is the Mausoleum of Mustafa Kemal Ataturk. From a Turkish standpoint, this might be the most important stop in our entire trip. Ataturk literally means “father of the Turks.” He was a military genius, who became the Republic’s first head of state, with seemingly endless political capital. He is all but personally credited with saving the country by winning back key territories that were apportioned to other nations when the Ottoman Empire dissolved, and enacting major cultural reforms that secularized and modernized the country (try changing the alphabet from Arabic to Latin overnight).

Today, Turkey’s increasingly Muslim government is a bit at odds with the secular elites, who have their own sort of religion in Ataturk. Everywhere one goes in Turkey, Ataturk’s portrait is posted—in restaurants, hotel lobbies, schools, city-centers, and taxis. For a group of American Jews, his ubiquity was intriguing, if not a bit startling. A large part of our study this year has concerned the role of heroes and myth in a nation’s identity, but if there are parallels between Washington and Ankara then imagine what the National Mall would be if the entire area was dedicated to one person. Structurally, the Mausoleum may resemble the Lincoln Memorial (visa vis the Parthenon), and Americans certainly tell their own story through grand structures in the capital, but Ataturk’s Mausoleum is a unique place, and, as any Turk will tell you, Ataturk was a pretty unique guy.

We also visited the old city of Ankara, the latest in a series of citadels and acropolises that we will visit this year, beyond the one we live next to in Jerusalem. We toured the Anatolian Civilizations Museum, which is ranked among the best museums in Turkey, showcasing the ancient culture of the region, dating back tens of thousands of years to the Hittite tribes and beyond. Rarely do the routes to our roots take us all the way back to our origins as human beings, but that is the essence of the civilizations that we study—in their differences and common origins.

Another feature of our stay in Ankara was the city’s synagogue. This was one of the most sobering experiences of the trip. Besides the fact that the police had specially opened the synagogue for our visit, and were stationed all along the route to the entrance (precautions after the recent conflict in Gaza caused local unrest in Ankara), we also found a community that was in dire straits. We met the 21-year-old daughter of the president of the Jewish community of Ankara. She was confused as to why a Jewish group would choose to come so far to visit the synagogue, or even the city itself. She said she plans to move out of the country, and expressed pretty definitively that she expects her community to cease to exist in the future. Kivunim has made it a sort of tradition, since our first trip to Greece, to sing in all the synagogues that we visit. We have filled many all but empty synagogues, but this one was especially powerful to see. Here was a synagogue where we didn’t just find older caretakers; the representative of the community’s future had also given up hope in the long-term continuity of her community.

For us, this encounter was simply very sad. However, it also represented concretely how important this year is, and, frankly, as we spent the rest of the day with our new Turkish friend, I began to wonder if our visit might lead to a change of heart. As our director Peter has reminded us, we are not simply students or even representatives of North American Jewry on these trips. As powerful as these travels are for us, we are also engaged in a reciprocal process with the people that we meet, as evidence of the value of international interaction, and—when it comes to the Jews—of reacquainting each other and ourselves with the global story and identity of the Jewish people, on behalf of our shared future.

After leaving Ankara we made our way to Afyon. On the way we stopped in Gordium, which is where Alexander the Great cut the legendary Gordion Knot. It is also the site of many tumuli, or hills constructed as tombs, where notables of the city were buried. There were also ruins from the Hittite period, and then Greek, and then Roman, and so on. Afyon is a beautiful small city with Turkish baths and Turkish coffee—neither of which, our tour guide told us, happen to be Turkish. Turkish baths are Roman and Turkish coffee is Arab. Early in the morning we climbed a rock formation in the middle of the city to a citadel, from which we viewed the entire city in all directions, with the majestic Taurus Mountains in the distance.

En route from Afyon to Izmir, we stopped to visit Sardis, home of an ancient synagogue. We have visited many ancient ruins during this year, but to see evidence of Jewry in such antiquity was very powerful. Of course Jerusalem brings us about as close as possible to ancient Jewry, but seeing a synagogue with its columns and internal structures surviving its roof, painted an image like so many Greek and Roman ruins, and hit a different chord of Jewish historical resonance altogether. Being at ancient ruins usually leads to more general societal projections—about the Parthenon as a model for the Empire State Building in the 45^th century for example—but Sardis gave this idea a Jewish twist. I found myself thinking back to the future of emptiness anticipated soon for the synagogue in Ankara, and wondering what our modern synagogues will look like and hold in thousands of years—and, of course, whether we will have new ones that make our contemporary structures look ancient in their own way… The synagogue in Sardis also happened to be gigantic, at one time housing a thousand people. Of all the synagogues we have visited this year that have no community or a diminishing one, few ever held a thousand people, so Sardis represented a peak in the trend, in age, size, and emptiness.

In Izmir we visited another Jewish youth group, and danced to Israeli music (so far from the summer camp where I learned them!) over dinner. During our last day in Turkey we visited a number of old synagogues in Izmir and one last bazaar. Our visit to these synagogues was personally very special, because of one completely unexpected encounter. We met an older woman named Esther Benmayor, who has become a volunteer caretaker for the city’s synagogues, making sure that the buildings are maintained as part of the city’s Jewish culture, right in the heart of the bazaar. Besides the meaning of Esther’s work in the interest of keeping up the Jewish community’s heritage spots in Izmir, her acquaintance was particularly exciting for me because there had been a Professor Isaac Benmayor from Salonika on the speakers panel that I was a part of at the UN in January. When I asked Esther if she had any family in Salonika, she got very excited by the idea that maybe I was a Benmayor. Her father was from Salonika, but she said he never talked about it, so she wasn’t in contact with any family that she might have there.

Only time will tell if the two are in fact family, but, regardless, this experience was a powerful example of the bridges that this program builds between Jews all around the world. I have never felt so viscerally connected to anyone we have met in our travels as I did when I talked to Esther. We were both on the brink of tears as we talked about and experienced in real time the importance of seeking out and “remembering” our own story as Jews, a story that has been lost, or perhaps never truly fleshed out before, of a people that has lived in over fifty countries and, in Peter’s words, worn every costume, listened to and danced to every music, eaten every food, and spoken more languages than any other single people. I was exhilarated by the idea that such foundational recent experiences in my life might actually bring someone else’s family together across borders. For Esther the idea of finding lost relatives was overwhelming, and the fact that I was invested in her story and her family was touching. For both of us the reality that our stories are shared was what brought tears to our eyes.

After lunch in the bazaar we boarded a bus to Ephesus—an ancient city in the heart of Anatolia that serves as one of the most comprehensive ruins of Hellenistic society. The difficulty of trying to imagine that a quarter of a million people lived in this city at one point (put in perspective by the fact that only 160,000 live in Afyon, which we had seen in expanse from a mountaintop) lessened dramatically when we set eyes on the huge amphitheater that is still all but intact. Then we got back on the bus to return to Izmir’s airport, to lay eyes on our last unique vantage point of the Mediterranean Sea in our travels this year (rounded out by Israel, Greece, Morocco and Spain), to fly back to Istanbul (my first domestic flight in a country other than the United States) for a connection flight to Tel Aviv, to see once more the Bosphorous and its physical separation of Europe and Asia and the beautiful bridge that connects them, before flying back to Israel for the fourth time this year.

Looking back on our time in Turkey, I keep thinking about the mosaics that we saw at Gordium (not to forget those in the Hagia Sophia of course!). Recently, in light of my thoughts about the importance of balancing appreciation for commonality and diversity, for specifics and the big picture, I have come to find the mosaic to be a poignant and powerful expression of these ideas. The pattern recognition ability of human beings to find unity in disparate elements, and to maintain curiosity for individual parts of a whole, is embodied by the work of a mosaic artist. He or she must meticulously pick and place each tiny piece of stone, all the while keeping the finished, zoomed out product in mind. This is equally pertinent to the scientist, who learns about the world through a microscope or a telescope, or the politician who must balance short-term and long-term goals for societal development.

From Jerusalem to Istanbul, Kivunim has seen some of the world’s most beautiful mosaics this year, and I am always struck by how they develop in complexity and intricacy as we move through history. A few monumental steps in that process are still evident today in Gordium. When we looked at the Greek and Roman mosaics in Gordium, Peter took us through a quick study of art in the Torah. He talked about how the Torah passively describes how the Golden Calf emerged in an almost supernatural way from the flames at the base of Mount Sinai, and how just a few chapters later we are introduced to the first Biblical artist Betzalel. Besides Betzalel—the artist—Peter posited, no one else in the Torah is described as being full of the spirit of God. This speaks to the same energy that I felt in Delphi, of our uniquely human power to create while feeling humbled by our idea of a Creator—or at least by the wonders of Creation.

Places of ancient traces like Gordium and Delphi make one wonder what evidence of progress and capacity we will leave behind for generations to come in hundreds and thousands of years—not to mention whether those ancient artists and scientists were thinking far ahead enough to consider us. Our ability to keep on making more and more beautiful and complicated mosaics is clearly evident; just look closely at the pixelated universe that we live in through television and computer screens. We can see how such development is important today for artists, scientists and policymakers alike. For me the challenge seems to be to recognize what such a balance for the particular and universal, the ability to zoom in and zoom out, could mean for us, and the questions that such a dynamic presents, in terms of how we interact and approach our public and private life, our academic and experiential learning, and our amateur and professional work—no matter what field we choose to enter.

I think art probably imitates life as much as life can imitate art. Our unique ability as human beings to imagine and create mosaics is also part of a process of discovering the wonder of what already is. Indeed, in so many ways the world and each of us is a breathtaking mosaic, including Turkey and any other place; looking up at the Milky Way, out over the Bosphorous, or into a friend’s eyes, we can see that the big picture is beautiful, but every level zooming in, even to an individual cell, is a universe of its own. That being said, neither we nor our world are perfect. The dynamic between our ability and our reality presents constant opportunity for growth. Seeing different mosaics all over the world shows me that we must keep challenging ourselves to improve, and offer that positive change to the world. A finished piece of artwork is wonderful, but in the scheme of human civilization and development each masterpiece is also a piece of a much greater work in progress.

In Between: A View From The Halfway Point

2009-02-12T14:11:00.000+02:00

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

2009-02-07T14:45:00.000+02:00

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.

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

2009-02-07T11:20:00.000+02:00

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.

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.

Reading Between the Headlines, Living Among Them

2009-01-10T17:31:00.000+02:00

Reading about home in the news is difficult. I have wanted to write that sentence in an entry for months. It was the election that initially spurred this sentiment as I lived through the excitement of being an American from a distance. This was an experience in itself, but I craved to feel the mood in America firsthand. I continued to check the news compulsively as Obama’s cabinet began to take shape. I read as economic instability increased and winter weather wreaked havoc on the northeast. I don’t think I have ever read The Boston Globe as carefully and as thoroughly as I have in the last two months.

And it is quite unsatisfying. Of course I have my favorite columnists and sections, but I am now more aware than ever of the fact that trying to connect to the atmosphere, character and quality of a place through reading about current events in the news, is really an exercise in imagination. Just the fact that I haven’t seen a hardcopy of the Globe in nearly three months is a symbol of the limited perspective that one can gather just from reading the news. Of course imagining home is easier for me because of all the memories, but ultimately the knowledge that a newspaper provides is only as helpful and enriching as the collection of sources with which one supplements it. The voices and anecdotes of friends and family are the meat of my sense of home.

This, I think, cuts to the core of this entry’s purpose. Connected to my frustration with trying to connect to America through the news these days, I know as well as anyone what it can be like to have one’s understanding of Israel rely on the news. Indeed, the homepage on my internet browser only changed to The Boston Globe when I got here in October, after long being set to the website of the Israeli newspaper Ha’aretz. The experiences I have had in Israel since my first visit in the summer of 2007 have advanced a long process of adding to my intellectual and cultural knowledge of the place, and trying to develop a real relationship with it. Today I have my daily life in Israel to supplement the news, but that relationship is being tested. Although it’s not always healthy to confront the issues in a relationship in the heated moments when they rise to the surface, as I’ve discussed before, history shows us that challenging times like the present offer the best opportunities for growth.

On December 27^th, 2008, the difficulties of reading about home in the news took on a whole new meaning. That is, if I may use the term “home” to refer to the place where I live right now. The news about the Israeli airstrike in Gaza was shocking. I felt very uncomfortable. The sheer numbers of the dead and wounded startled me and sent my heart sinking like a stone. I was torn between the anxiety of knowing how nearby the events were taking place and the relative calm of the Jerusalem streets. I felt at once closer than ever to the heart of this conflict, and more alienated than ever from Israel. For news of a defensive operation, the headline “Israeli airstrikes kill hundreds in Gaza” made me feel unsafe in a way I had never experienced in this country.

Ironically enough, December 28^th was to be the first day of Kivunim’s vacation—a time for me to break out of my home base in Jerusalem and get to know Israel a little better. I had planned to basically wander around the country, exploring places where I hadn’t spent as much time, roughing it in general, hoping to live day to day and have some experiences that would enhance my independence and further develop my relationship to the land and the people here. Of course security restrictions and personal safety considerations have affected the plan, barring visits to mixed cities in the north and various cities in proximity to Gaza. Yet over the past ten days I have been able to travel cross-country in a way that I never have in my life—in any country. I have ridden a bus literally from one end of Israel to the other. I have smelled the desert, the mountains and the sea (actually two seas!) all in one day. I have walked a lot, learning the layouts of cities that I had only toured through briefly in the past. I have explored many of Jerusalem’s neighborhoods beyond the bubble of my daily life in the center of the city. Yes, today I feel a new level of familiarity with Israel, from a number of new favorite ice cream joints and new knowledge of the public transportation system, to new confidence with the Hebrew language and closer personal investment in the current political climate of Jerusalem and the national government.

Meanwhile, the burgeoning conflict in Gaza looms in the background. It’s hard to describe what can only be described as really complicated. I don’t want to be an alarmist, but at the same time I don’t want to sound out of touch. It’s not as if everything feels completely normal and I wouldn’t know what was happening without the news, but I haven’t seen any of the fighting with my own eyes. I won’t say that I feel like I’m living in a war zone even though I feel more aware than ever of the immediacy of conflict. It feels like walking a tightrope. Of course the situation in Gaza commands many of my thoughts. Of course there’s the anxiety of wondering what the next stage could be; no one wants to get caught up in the next headline. However, after reading the news I can step outside, look out on the living and breathing city of Jerusalem, and remember that this place is neither its government nor its military. Of course I have some experience with living under and being represented by a government with which I disagree, and I have felt more strongly than ever in the past two weeks that my life is being deeply impacted by the actions of such a government. Yet the past two weeks have also reminded me that Israel, like any other country, stands for much more than the policy of its leaders and its appearances in the news.

That being said, I don’t remember any time in my life when I have been as attentive to Israeli news as I have been in the past two weeks. For days I have had a lot of difficulty writing and reflecting about the situation here. I have felt paralyzed, tied to a pendulum that swings between fear, frustration, hope, shock, and awe. Searching for solace, understanding, explanation, and above all context, I have surrounded myself with the endless editorials, policy propositions, blogs, and other news analysis that the last two weeks in Gaza have generated. Yet at the end of the day, this is the least intellectualized that the Israeli-Palestinian conflict has ever been for me.

Throughout my life this conflict has been a constant fixture in my cultural and intellectual development, an often-painful passion of mine that has provided the deepest and most rewarding challenges in my search for identity. It has taught me foundational lessons of patriotism and appreciation for multiple narratives, framing many of the ideas that inform my life, relationships and worldview. Today it is challenging me like never before, presenting new levels of complexity and affording me firsthand (up to a point, of course) experiences of the historical, political, social and just plain emotional struggles that mire the lives of those involved. I’ve only been living with the immediacy of this conflict for two weeks, and even I feel the vortex of fear and anxiety welling up inside of me when I hear an ambulance outside or I decide not to ride a bus. I realize that in these moments of feeling healthy and rational perspective slip away, I am finding new appreciation for the difficulties of Israelis and Palestinians to resolve this conflict themselves. In high school my friends and I used to lament the stress that we associated with our early-morning alarm clocks; I can only imagine what it must be like to live in Sderot, Israel, where the sound of a siren gives a thirty-second warning before rocket impact, reminding you multiple times a day of your inability to live in safety and protect your family, or to live in Gaza without clean water and electricity as nearly constant bombing shakes the foundations of your home for weeks on end. New sensitivity to the reasons why the conflict endures does not make it any easier to stomach, but that is another entry entirely!

For all the times that I have expressed the importance of not settling for simplification, the past weeks have re-taught me that ethic over and over again. Seeing geographic diversity equivalent to that of the entire continental United States, feeling the coexistence of peace and war, and hearing at least five languages being spoken on a bus, all in a place smaller than the state of New Jersey are really inspiring testaments to its potential. This potential is not a euphemism for failure; it is pragmatic hope, the promise that we can commit to remain faithful to the pursuit of our highest ideals, and to react constructively to the unpredictable processes of our lives and the world. Indeed, insofar as connecting to a place through its appearances in the news requires imagination, so too does the necessity to envision a better situation fall heavily on those on the inside. Reading about home in the news is certainly very difficult, but—although I still wouldn’t necessarily go so far as to call Israel my “home” per se—living here, among and between the headlines, is a whole different ball game.

The Routes Less Traveled By

2008-12-16T23:17:00.000+02:00

The following was written on Friday, December 5^th, 2008.

Movement and migration have been important parts of human life since the first communities made their way out of Africa hundreds of thousands of years ago. Though today there are still several nomadic cultures around the world, nomadic movement as a human institution became all but entirely obsolete thousands of years ago as the agricultural revolution made way for settled civilizations and the establishment of nations and states. Still, especially in developing countries, every year millions of people in search of opportunity migrate from rural areas to the closest cities. Of course immigration policy is a constant issue for governments trying to balance economic stability, social order, and population growth sensitivity. The entire growth model of humanity’s movement, physically from place to place and developmentally from nomadic wandering to settled civilizations—not to mention the movement of culture and ideas—is evident today across the world. It continues to progress and increase in complexity with new dimensions emerging every day as technology allows for increased communication and cultural diffusion.

Still, the truth is that while mass movement has been a common thread in human history, international travel experiences have always been rare. I have never felt so lucky in my life. This is saying a lot, considering that I’ve already been on this program for almost two months. As if it wasn’t already clear to us that Kivunim is a unique program that provides unique opportunities, as we traveled from Athens up to Sophia we met people who have never left their country of origin, and visited places that have never seen a tour bus. Just the sheer beauty of the natural world was enough to make us feel closer than ever to who we are and where we live. Yet, that was just the beginning. We experienced some of the oldest and most well known pieces of history in the world as well as some of the most obscure ones. We read street signs and learned some rudimentary vocabulary in new languages. We met with Jews who remember Jewish life before the Holocaust and those who are trying to resurrect Judaism after half a century of communist rule. We prayed in synagogues that haven’t held 51 Jews in decades and have probably never housed a service of 51 Jewish youth alone. We tried new food and new currency, and were able to explore and navigate new cities. In so many ways, I have never been further from home in my life, and yet I have never felt closer to my roots, nor to how far they extend.

When we landed in Athens, the first thing that occurred to me was that it was more foreign than anywhere I had ever been. Before this trip my international travels had amounted to Israel, England and Canada. Greece was the first place I had ever been where I couldn’t speak or read the language. Even Hebrew, with its own alphabet, is familiar enough to me, though I will admit that I didn’t read the French on the signs in Canada. One of the ulterior goals behind Kivunim’s international travels is not just to open us up to some of the lesser known threads of Jewish history but also to take us to places where we would not necessarily go if we are fortunate enough to travel later in life. Case in point: although we did go to Greece, the islands were not a stop on our tour. To have distinct mental images, smells, sounds and feelings tied to Bulgaria, a country that would be very easy to simply lump into the “Eastern Bloc,” is very powerful. The feeling of replacing a generalization or a fixed image in one’s mind with a fluid and enticing taste of reality is something that simply cannot be replaced, but must be built upon.

If as one of the cradles of civilization Greece was an appropriate first trip in our series of international travels this year, then it was all the more fitting that the first thing we did in Athens was climb up to the Acropolis. Being in the presence of such old and significant structures, I found myself shocked by how real they were. Besides being reminiscent of meeting a movie star, it reminded me of visiting the Western Wall in Jerusalem. There are parallels simply in how the “Old City” of Athens has been preserved at the center of a modern city. Of course I didn’t connect to the Parthenon on a Jewish level directly, but a large part of Kivunim’s goals, especially on the international trips, is trying to balance our Jewish and broader human identities in order to learn more about where they intersect.

After visiting the Acropolis we went to the Jewish museum and main synagogues of Athens, and had an audience with the chief rabbi of Greece. One particularly incredible part of a visit we made to one of the synagogues was hearing Torah be chanted there; the reader chanted the Torah with different voices, speeds and intonations—as if to portray a dramatization of some kind. This was shocking on the one hand, because most American Jews, besides being unable to understand the biblical Hebrew of the Torah, are used to hearing it chanted with one particular set of tonal inflections that masks the dramatic quality of its verses. How appropriate, we all thought, for Greek Jews to chant the Torah like an ancient Greek epic poem...

We spent Shabbat with the local Jewish youth, and were given ample time to roam the city. Moving on to Chalkida, we had the sobering experience of visiting a Jewish community that will in all likelihood cease to exist within the next hundred years. Our director Peter Geffen led us in a prayer for the leaders of the community that felt truly appropriate. I really appreciated Peter’s use of prayer in these circumstances, to bless the leaders of the Jewish community in Chalkida, and then to show appreciation for the wonders of the natural world when we got to Delphi and Meteora. Although I’ve never been particularly religious, being able to pray out of feeling a connection to the spontaneous meaning of what a prayer stands for in the first place—beyond the age of the tradition itself—is a very moving experience.

At Delphi we visited the old site of the Oracle, which is where many Greek rulers went to seek advice from the god Apollo through his Medium. Part of what made Delphi so meaningful was that, unlike Athens, which is a modern European capital, Delphi is all but unadulterated. You can easily look out on the mountains and imagine that you are living in any time period. Even the town itself has a sort of quaint antique vibe. In Meteora we took our bus to the heights of the mountains that rise out of the plains of central Greece, to visit a different time period. The monasteries there were built into the mountains during the early years of Orthodox Christianity.

Delphi and Meteora were two of the most beautiful places I have ever been. Needless to say, our hotel in Delphi won the award for best room with a view. Even (or, dare I say, especially) the bus rides were absolutely breathtaking. The earth in these places is so vibrant and far from mundane. There is something about the natural world in Greece, whether it’s the Acropolis in Athens, the Oracle at Delphi, or the monasteries of the Meteora mountains, that makes it easy to connect to the organic energy that inspired the societies in these places to develop. My roommate Jason said it best when we got off the bus at a lookout point just outside of Delphi during sunset. As the sun was bursting through from behind the clouds, while other clouds rolled down the mountains behind us, Jason exclaimed, “If someone told you that Apollo was behind that cloud, you’d have to believe them!” Truly, it didn’t require very much imagination to understand why the monks chose to live and pray in those mountains.

Accordingly, I found myself connecting to these places on an almost religious level. I found myself inspired to write and invent. I find it very interesting that these places, which inspired creativity and innovation two weeks ago, are also the places where people felt closest to their creators thousands of years ago. My peers and I could have read a lot more and studied for years about Greece to enhance our experience before visiting, but ultimately the natural energy and meaning of these places required very little preparation to perceive. In short, I would posit that if someone didn’t tell you that Apollo lived behind those clouds, you would say it yourself. At a time when I feel my childhood slipping away each day, these places made me appreciate that the heart of human imagination truly is our oldest tradition and it can never die. I don’t just mean Ancient Greek mythology; I’m talking about something as basic as the ability to plan a hunt before one is too hungry to think straight. The frontal lobe is most literally what sets us apart as human beings, and as far as memory is also included in that biological phenomenon, it is only appropriate that these places of such profound historical significance made me feel closer than ever to that fact.

On our way to Salonika—really the curricular highlight of the trip as far as Jewish history is concerned—we stopped in the town of Veria to celebrate Thanksgiving. I’ll just say that it was very heartwarming, but somehow the decorations alone couldn’t disguise the fact that we were still eating spanicoppota (spinach pie) and pasta. Veria was one of the most powerful places that we visited, as much because of what is there as what is missing. The town of Veria used to be home to hundreds of Jewish families. Today there are only about ten individuals. I found myself really wrestling with what it must be like to identify as a Jew in a place where the community is so limited and the access to the major centers of modern Jewry are so distant. As far as the northeast United States is concerned, I come from a pretty small Jewish community, but even compared to some Jewish communities in the Deep South, Veria is a whole different ball game. However, combined with the eerie silence of the Jews of Veria is a really hopeful and positive story of a municipality that is doing wonderful things to preserve the old synagogue in town and not let it fade away like the people who used to use it. As Kivunim held a short mincha (afternoon) prayer service in the synagogue, Peter emphasized the historical significance not only of the synagogue itself but of our presence inside it. Never in its history, he proclaimed, had this synagogue housed a prayer service exclusively made up of so many young Jews—let alone Americans. We had received a similar reception from the people of Chalkida, but again Veria was all the more powerful because no one was there; we literally brought the synagogue back to life as we chanted the prayers. As solemn as they are, it is places like Veria that empower us, reminding us that the processes of history and society that transcend us all as individuals really would not happen if we weren’t here.

The next and final stop on our tour of Greece was Salonika, or Thessaloniki, the capital of the north. Before World War II Salonika was home to 90% of Greek Jews. The city was actually 60% Jewish, making it one of the most vibrant communities of the Jewish Diaspora. Unfortunately it is exactly this vibrance that made it a prime target for Nazi destruction during WWII, when 90% of its Jews (approximately 70,000 people) were killed in Auschwitz. Most of the survivors moved to Athens after the War because it was too expensive to rebuild their homes in Salonika. Being in this city and realizing how little Jewish influence is left in everyday life was really heavy. Again, almost as powerful as what we did see was what we didn’t see, according to the history that we learned about what had once existed there. We spent Shabbat at the local Jewish Community Center and prayed in their synagogue. Although it is small, Salonika’s Jewish community is certainly not in as dire straits as those of Chalkida or Veria, but it was striking how underdeveloped it seemed. Salonika was the perfect transition from Greece to Bulgaria, because we began to connect to the spirit of revitalization that exists in some of the more promising Jewish communities.

As we boarded the train for a six-hour ride to Bulgaria, we came to terms with how little we actually knew about this place. We had learned the basic story, which happens to be very inspiring, but our brains were fraught with post-communist Eastern European imagery and little else. Bulgaria didn’t have anything very distinct associated with it for most of us. But as with Salonika, we were soon asking out of equal parts wonder and outrage why we had never learned about it before Kivunim. One can imagine how those students with twelve years of formal Jewish education felt when they found out that there was a city called Salonika, which they had never heard of despite the fact that it had been one of the major centers of the Jewish world at one point. This sentiment became all the more potent in Bulgaria.

When we got off the train, I immediately felt I had reached an even higher threshold of feeling foreign. Aside from the cold and the faint smell of smoke, I remember looking at my first Bulgarian sign and wondering where some of the non-Greek characters had come from. Such is the sliding scale of familiarity! The capital city of Sophia was beautiful. It had all the trappings of a European city, with its squares, churches and Roman architecture. Perhaps the most striking piece of the skyline was the synagogue, which, resembling a castle, is the second largest Sephardic synagogue in Europe. We also visited the second largest Bulgarian city of Plovdiv, which showed the vestiges of communism a little bit more. In Plovdiv we were able to meet with some elderly Bulgarian Jews, who told us their stories. This was a great opportunity for those of us who know a little Spanish, because the first language of Jewish communities in Greece and Bulgaria before the War was Ladino (a hybrid of Hebrew and Spanish), dating back to the culture of the Jews who were expelled from Spain and moved into these Mediterranean countries in the 16^th century, ultimately taking dominance over the culture of the native Romaniote Jews.

The story of the Bulgarian Jewish community is as uplifting as it is intriguing. Essentially, before WWII the Jews were much more assimilated into society in Bulgaria, and were less conspicuous and centralized than the majority of Jewish communities across Europe. Aside from the public good will concerning the Jews, because Bulgaria was allied with Germany, its government had more leeway than that of France for example, especially in dealing with Jews. In the end the Jews of Bulgaria were saved from the death camps, though many were sent to work. Although they were not killed, the anxiety of being Jewish in Europe at that time, sure that it was always only a matter of time before they too were taken to Auschwitz, incited about 90% of Bulgarian Jews to move to Israel after World War II, so the community’s numbers still decreased just as much as other more tragic ones across Europe. Then communism pushed an already inconspicuous Jewish community further into dilution as religion was forbidden.

Today Bulgaria has one of the most progressive and vibrant Jewish communities in the world, yet it is almost entirely unknown to the majority of the Jewish world. Since anyone younger than sixty was raised without any concept of what it means to be Jewish, Bulgaria has a Jewish community run by the youngest generation of professionals, a group of twenty-somethings who came of age during the fall of communism and are intrigued by this lost piece of their identities. They are determined to resurrect and reconstruct what it means to be Jewish in Bulgaria, and they are doing a really fantastic job. They have a well-attended summer camp and even a school. Leagues beyond Salonika’s Jewish community in terms of cultivating leadership among the youth, Bulgarian Jews are a community that is struggling but thriving. Indeed, in terms of numbers they are millions behind the United States, but in terms of percentages they are disproportionately more successful in developing Jewish identity and increasing numbers. When this point was made in a presentation made by the thirty-year-old president of their community, Kivunim reached its peak of shock that this place is left out of the mainstream Jewish narrative—and frankly, I think some of us were ashamed that America takes so much of the spotlight! Granted, their small size probably doesn’t hurt their ability to organize each other, and my first reaction was that they didn’t have the freedom and comfort (et cetera) of the American Jewish community that can lead people to drop out and interpret out. Yet, being at the crossroads of Mediterranean, European and Asian culture, Bulgaria prides itself on being very diverse (which is all the more impressive in the Balkan region where diversity is so often the root of violence), so even with such a small Jewish community, nurturing pluralism is a high priority.

This was a fitting note to end the trip on. Broadening our conception of the world and what it means to be Jewish is at the core of Kivunim’s mission—especially when it comes to the international program. Like many American Jews, I am all too aware of how my sense of Jewish life has been constructed around an image of a people with just two foci, in America and Israel. This brings us to the rhetorical question of our time: why settle for simplification? After two weeks in Greece and Bulgaria, I feel I have taken another small yet nonetheless significant step towards uncovering truly how much more is behind that question than merely rhetoric. Being on Kivunim, it becomes increasingly clear to my peers and I that as the world is globalizing and calling on a new generation of people who can realize their connections to others on an international level, the Jewish people have the seeds in the geography of our history and our present day to take on this global identity that we talk so much about. The story of the Jewish people can be a model for the story of humanity, of a group with an endless of amount of diversity and fragmentation combined with an ultimately common story and core identity. For the first time since we arrived in Israel, I feel that I am actually seeing the reconciliation of my Jewish identity and my concern for the world. I always knew that these two pieces of me could coexist and even play off of one another, but truly wrapping my mind around how inextricably intersected they are is a process that has only begun to unfold.

Sooooo Far, Sooooo Good

2008-11-20T11:18:00.000+02:00

The one-month anniversary of Kivunim’s arrival in Israel came and went. A week-and-a-half in the desert followed by three-and-a-half weeks in Jerusalem has come to pass. Every day we continue to solidify our relationship with Jerusalem—seeing new places, frequenting some familiar ones, and traveling beyond the city limits only to return “home.” Since arriving here from the south, I have made my way around the country on the weekends. There is still much to see, but I feel I have made good use of the accessibility of the country and the opportunities that I have had to get out of the Beit Shmuel bubble where I sleep, eat and work. Here are some recent thoughts and events:

The scents and sights of Jerusalem have begun to feel increasingly familiar, so it is appropriate that at this point in the year (less than a week before our first international trip to Greece and Bulgaria) we have taken strides to see the city in new light. Right now Kivunim is hosting Tobi Kahn, a photographer from New York City, who has been connected with the program for each of Kivunim’s past two years as a facilitator of artistic literacy and expression. One day this week we awoke at 4:30am to journey across the street to Jerusalem’s Old City in time to see the sunrise shine the day’s first light on the Western Wall and the majestic Dome of the Rock.

Toting our cameras, we made our way through the Old City’s maze-like streets, watching and documenting as the world changed before our eyes. New and natural light was a powerful tool as we all tried to get at least one good photograph of this time of shifting perspective. From a curricular standpoint, Tobi’s presence makes a lot of sense—and not just for the photographers in the group. He ran a really special workshop on “visual lying,” which basically amounted to a lesson on bias and the ability to shape narrative through art. His words mirrored the teachings of our Civilizations lecturers, emphasizing the power that we have over shaping perception and selecting from reality to fabricate a coherent and meaningful work of art or history. Tobi’s early-morning lesson allowed us to look on symbols of Jerusalem, trying to appreciate what the images mean to us, what they look like when we try to check our associations at the door, and how those two dimensions play into photography or reporting of any kind (personal, journalistic, historical, etc.). This will become an increasingly important theme to keep in mind as we travel around the world and try our best to take in as much as possible about the raw reality and the mythic stories of the people and places we visit.

Daily life has been a treat lately. I do feel a level of routine, but there are always opportunities to wander and explore. A few nights ago there were fireworks set off in the parking lot below the Kivunim rooms. New restaurants are constantly revealed—from schnitzel to waffles, there is always a new hole in the wall to try out (or a McDonalds with four ice creams for ten shekels to exploit). Many of the major cities in Israel are also holding their mayoral elections around this time. The victor of Jerusalem’s highest office was Nir Barkat, a secular Likudnik who represents a major shift (or mahapach) from a series of recent religious mayors. Socially I can feel that the religious/secular dynamic in the city represents a lot of tension, but I will admit that I have yet to connect personally to the concrete politics of the city—though I recognize all the major candidates’ faces, due to ubiquitous campaign signs on buses and buildings.

On my way back to Jerusalem from Haifa last weekend, I stopped in Tel Aviv to attend the annual peace rally held in Rabin Square. The rally, and the square itself, doubles as a memorial for the late Prime Minister Yitzchak Rabin. Rabin was assassinated by a right-wing Jew on November 4, 1995 (a conflicting anniversary for Americans these days) immediately following a speech he made at a peace rally there. The rally this year was moving, and included speeches by all the country’s major left and center politicians. Rabin’s legacy as a war-hero-turned-visionary-of-peace is inspiring, and one could even argue that it is fortunate that the popular movement for peace in Israel is tied to such a figure, who also led the state during its major self-affirming wars. He represents the choice that Israeli society will have to make as a whole if peace is ever to be achieved; he was someone whom everyone could trust to appreciate the pain that Israelis have suffered (indeed, better than most), while also committing to hearing the stories of the other side and working for the idea that peace is ultimately in Israel’s best interest. Since Rabin’s death, Israel has seen some of the darkest days of the conflict, and today stands on an equally promising and precarious state in the peace process.

I expect that I’ll dedicate an entire blog entry to the theme of peace in the future. For me one of the most enriching elements of personal experience in Israel is being able to supplement my intellectual understanding of the conflict and the people here with living and breathing perspectives. This is a piece of my experience here that is blossoming, through possibly doing some interviewing for Seeds of Peace, playing with the Arab delegation from East Jerusalem that comes to the Variety Center (my social responsibility project site) on Thursdays, and speaking more Hebrew and Arabic everyday.

A couple of days after the rally, I had the good fortune to wander out of the hostel with my friend Elie, and stumble upon a free David Broza concert at the YMCA a block away. David Broza is one of the most famous songwriters in Israel, and has become something of an icon since his heyday in the ‘70s, here and in America—especially at Jewish summer camps where his lulling tunes are the soundtrack of summer nights. He was playing the show with an Arab band, as part of an event sponsored by the organization Searching For Common Ground, which facilitates media ventures for peace. We had the luck to arrive in time for the last few songs, which happened to include a couple of the only ones of his that we actually knew from camp. It was a very random and powerful experience to see those songs sung live in such an intimate setting; I am constantly impressed by how accessible this country is, and constantly reminded of how remarkably close I am to the center of the action here in Jerusalem. Prime Minister Ehud Olmert had a press conference at Beit Shmuel (the building where I live), Condoleeza Rice stayed at the hotel across the street when she visited Israel last week, and, as I mentioned before, the Rabin peace rally included appearances by Israeli President Shimon Peres, Foreign Minister Tzipi Livni, and Defense Secretary Ehud Barak—the latter two of which are currently vying for the office of Prime Minister.

The academics of Kivunim have been very interesting lately—a feeling that is accentuated every day as our trip to Greece and Bulgaria grows closer. Hebrew and Arabic are really exciting, as the line between the classroom and the street blur in my learning. We have been focusing heavily on learning the Arabic alphabet lately, which gives street signs here a whole new significance—not to mention the artful precision that the written language requires. As we learn about Islam in the Middle East Studies course, the historical value of Arabic becomes more and more intriguing. Arabic is a language that sounds entirely different in almost every Arab country, but the written Arabic is the same everywhere—a classic version that is rooted in the style of the Koran’s verses.

I’ve had several units on Islam in my schooling. The Kivunim introductory curriculum of Islam has centered on the life of Muhammad. For the first time I have been able to connect to Islam as a social movement. In 7^th century Mecca, where pagan religion, politics and economics were all part of the same corrupt system, Islam was the religion of the common man that taught equality of all people. It was a social reform agenda that represented a level of identity that transcended the tribal affiliations of Arabia, and grew from the grassroots. It’s really sad that American culture has lost (or never fully pursued) an appreciation for the meaning of Islam at its foundation.

In learning about the Age of Jahiliyya (Ignorance), a term used in the Koran to describe the time period before Islam was founded, I am reminded of the first readings we did for the Middle East Studies class. Francis Fukyama talked about “the End of History” as the traction of liberalism in societies. When he wrote in the final years before the fall of the Soviet Union, his argument centered around the idea that the major conflicts in the world would be between those post-history people who lived in liberal societies and those who were still in the process of coming to the end of history (i.e. adopting liberalism as the basis for policy in social, political, and economic sectors). Jahiliyya seems like a similar concept, a state of being that specifically refers to pre-Islam Arabia, but could potentially be attributed to the entire non-Muslim world, and so could extend into today in many parts of the world. Just as Fukuyama posited that history, a concept that seems to develop at all times in all places, ends upon the adoption of liberalism, it occurred to me that an interpretation of Islam could argue that the Age of Ignorance ends when a society adopts Islam. (Of course, I feel the need to emphasize that this interpretation of Jahiliyya is as individual an interpretation of the Koran as Fukyama is of modern international relations.) Just as history comes to a grinding halt in Fukuyama’s western world, as it plods along in the rest of the world, the Koran says that Jahiliyya has become part of Arabian history, as it is still happening around the world today. This comparison brings me to the next point, which is the civilization-centric view of the world proposed by Samuel Huntington in “The Clash of Civilizations.”

Whether one calls the age of pre-perfection “history” or “ignorance,” whether one refers to liberalism or Islam as the end of necessary progress, both civilizations seem to have theorists who prescribe their major ideological institution as the be-all and end-all philosophy that marks the end of human development; it is only a matter of time, in their eyes, before the entire world wakes up to the value of their system as the ultimate version of human functionality. It is well known that one of the major differences between Islam and the two older monotheistic religions is the fact that, while it acknowledges Moses and Jesus as prophets, the Koran asserts that Mohammad is the final prophet—God’s final attempt to reveal His word after Judaism and Christianity corrupted it. With the advent of Adam Smith’s 18^th century theories of liberalism, and the ascendance of the West as the unchallenged “First World”—especially coming out of the Cold War, when Fukyama wrote—it would seem that liberalism is the paramount modus operandi of global society. These are very clear and modern examples of the parallelism between civilizations that Huntington identified as the fault line along which the largest and deepest modern conflicts will be focused.

However, I don’t have to elaborate too much on the impurities of Islam and the failings of traditional anti-interference liberalism that exist in the world today. This is not to say that Islam and liberalism are definitely not the greatest ideas that we’ve come up with yet, but we have seen that it is still an unachieved ideal that we are all able to interpret liberalism and Islam in their most constructive and healthy forms—and, indeed, who knows what new frameworks and new interpretations of the existing ones will emerge as history continues to unfold. In any case it appears that we still have some growing up to do, and that no one institution or idea has yet captured the hearts and minds of the entire world. History is definitely not over, and even Fukyama admits that “the end of history will be a very sad time.” As Huntington notes at the end of his paper, “for the relevant future, there will be no universal civilization, but instead a world of different civilizations, each of which will have to learn to coexist with the others.” We must be able to appreciate our differences as the means for debate and progress (How interesting that these two major international relations theorists focus their entire articles on centers of conflict instead of opportunities for cooperation…), without compromising a commitment to revel in what unites us—and vice versa. Indeed, even if not everyone can agree that liberalism and Islam are the “right” systems, neither of them were designed as instruments of conflict that one society could use against the others; they were conceived of as systems that could potentially unite us all in each other’s best interests. If we can connect to that as the most fundamental of intentions, and continue to develop and refine our ideas and institutions, then we can truly make some progress.

* * *

When we started our Civilizations class Bulgaria was a complete mystery and Greece was a little bit less of a mystery. It has been so exciting to learn over the past weeks about Greek and Bulgarian history both in breadth and in depth, how the Jews in those areas affected the history, and how the modern countries are affected by their histories. We leave in just two days to supplement our academic understanding of these places, and our personal connections to the stories, with some first-hand experiences of some pieces of the reality—an opportunity that only exists in our highest educational ideals. The only thing missing is a time machine, but as we’ve learned repeatedly—and as I am sure I will emphasize when we return—when one is a student of history, there’s no time machine like the present.

Happy Thanksgiving!