Growing Pains Before Spain

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Reading Between the Headlines, Living Among Them

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

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.