The last entry was just a sliver, but I suppose this one will be too. We arrived at Kibbutz Ketura and had a couple of hours of really slow internet access. I decided not to revise/revisit the last post before publishing it to the internet, because the innocence about what I now know followed it is bottled forever in those paragraphs.
Kibbutz Ketura was much more than the short history I provided in the last post. We had the privilege of being there for Simchat Torah, the festival which celebrates the final verses of the Torah before launching into B’reishit (Creation) the following week. It’s basically a lot of dancing and singing—typical, one might say, of many Jewish festivals. However, the intrigue of dancing with the Torah makes for an entirely different mood. The rabbis clutch the scroll like a baby, not merely strolling through the congregation as on High Holidays and Shabbat, but literally dancing through the aisles with it.
There are so many ways that the Jews have programmed times of reflection into their culture—daily prayer, the weekly day of rest, the yearly day of atonement, etc.)—and Simchat Torah is the epitome of such reflection. The Torah is a document that contains history. Hearing the Torah read on Simchat Torah is to be unable to take it for granted. The words and melodies are familiar, but the atmosphere is wholly different. It is a very concrete way of experiencing the passage of time, to recognize that the entire Torah has been finished. Needless to say, this experience—especially being on a Kibbutz—added amply to the already ubiquitous themes of appreciating history, looking towards the future, and experiencing tradition and life itself in new ways on Kivunim.
Following the festival and dinner, Kivunim retreated to its housing complex. Before I launch into describing what was one of the most powerful experiences on the trip so far, allow me to set the stage… Samara, a new close friend of mine, loooves asking questions. To meet Samara is to be challenged by revealing yourself in ways you’ve never imagined. “If you could host any gameshow, what would it be?” “What’s your ideal breakfast?” “What intimidates you?” Et cetera, et cetera. She once gave me flack for opening with “What music do you listen to?” In any event, on the way to the Bedouin village, she zoomed out from the specifics, and simply asked me to recite the story of my life. This request perplexed me, but the bus ride was over and we agreed to delve into that later. (This reminded me of a man in a nursing home that I volunteered at in sixth grade who used to ask our chaperones, “Got a second? Tell me the story of your life.” We would laugh.)
On the bus ride back to Sde Boker, from the Bedouin Village, I sat with another new friend of mine, Elie. With or without knowing its current relevance, she too asked me to tell the story of my life. The bus ride would only be fifteen minutes long. I went for it. I went through parents, places, deaths, influential teachers, music, karate, Young Judaea, and then the bus ride was over. I immediately promised to hear her life story next time. But the seed of what my “life story” had become in that short iteration began to sprout. I wondered to myself why I had chosen the narrative that I had followed. Why had I mentioned X and not Y? Did I really portray myself? The stream of consciousness-style telling had had a natural flow to it, but it was also impromptu, so the outline and thesis were shaky, and left me ultimately with a hunger to expose more.
I sat with Elie at dinner that night. “That conversation we had earlier really got me thinking,” I said. She concurred. She was thinking too. We both had the same instincts and interests in the selective nature of telling one’s “life story”. The idea that telling one’s “life story” was an exercise in appreciating it as just a sliver of greater reality resonated very deeply with me, tapping into much of the core of the story that I tell myself. Elie and I, along with others at our table were excited by the idea that a life story would be different every time. Like in journalism, historical narratives of entire cultures, or simply the imperfections of human perception and memory, the bias is inevitable, but not necessarily bad. Bias doesn’t have to be propaganda; the selectivity of our individual iterations can rather be viewed as the natural product of human perspective and a contribution to the aggregate report of reality, if we compile many different perspectives and tell our stories many times. I felt the philosophy and themes of my life story converging on the idea of making this a group activity. I made plans to hear other people’s life stories after dinner…
Which brings us back to Ketura. After the Simchat Torah service, a few days after the initial conversation at Sde Boker, Adin, one of my closest friends on the trip, said he was ready to tell life stories. We found a nice piece of ground in Ketura’s Arava Valley dust, and began to reflect. He went first. His life story focused less on events than on particular people and philosophies that he holds dear—or at least profoundly influential. Others joined us and listened in, curious to find out what we were doing. What was this monologue? Why were we listening? Throughout the night people would be encouraged to come and go as they pleased, in the hopes that we could maintain an authentic atmosphere, a sense that people were there because it made sense for them.
Soon it was my turn. By now there was a critical mass. I launched into it. I introduced myself. I came to call what transpired the rest of the evening “like dropping an iceberg into a Jacuzzi.” After I told my story, the group moved to a circle of chairs to hear more. A few more people revealed their first version, and Adin, Elie and I explained the philosophy behind the activity several more times, refining it each time. The idea felt like it was literally hatched that night, in a spontaneous and meaningful way, by several emotionally rich and trusting people. There were lots of laughs, tears shed and shared, and ultimately a feeling of release and resolve to greet more of life.
It is the ultimate icebreaker to be sure, but telling life stories is an exercise in personal reflection. In a safe environment of intently listening peers, one is able to simply draw out his or her life without rules—glossing over certain things, explaining certain ideas nearly completely, and leaving other things out altogether—thinking out loud, completely uncensored. The process continues after one speaks, as the speaker mulls over why s/he mentioned the things s/he did and what patterns emerged from this organic purge. It is just as much about the speaker as the listeners though. It is an exercise in listening, learning to reflect individually on what things in the speaker’s story triggers thoughts, without actually interjecting. Above all, it is an exercise for the health of the group. It is an opportunity to go to very deep places together. That night there was a therapeutic energy in the air, an excitement that we were actually entering a time in life when developing a life story was beginning to be feasible, and a rich sense of balancing the specificity and uniqueness of each person’s words with the ways in which everyone found commonality in the stories.
I hope it becomes a regular exercise with this group (we’ve already done it once again since arriving in Jerusalem). The challenge will be—as it often is with activities that become traditions—maintaining the inspired and spontaneous energy that kicked off the idea in that first session at Ketura. As long as we can be sure that people are ripe for sharing, listening, and only doing so if it feels right, I won’t worry.
To me it feels entirely necessary, during an experience such as Kivunim, when life often progresses faster than our ability to process it, that we give ourselves time to get to know each other and ourselves as best we can. Like a blog on steroids, it is an opportunity to stay up to date. Telling life stories brings the individual to new self-clarity, endears one to his or her peers, and builds a healthy group identity—something that I think will be increasing important as we begin to grapple with the world. In order to get the most out of our experiences in the following year and years to follow, we must be able to equally apply ourselves to understanding the worlds that exist within ourselves…
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