The Relationship: Rewards Of A Rocky Road

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

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.

 

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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

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.