Following my aptly named ancestors, a wandering Jew I’ve been. My family left Israel in 1976. I was ten, full of trepidation, excitement and a belief that God was on our side. I’m 45, and the rest is pretty much, still the same, except that I now believe God is on everyone’s side and the trip is in reverse. I am returning to the sands of the Mediterranean, which still try to encroach the entrance to the hospital where I had my first peek.
It has been 17 years since I set foot on that arid, irrigated, sacred, bloodied terrain. I have been very busy crisscrossing the US, creating a tapestry of homes, seeking community, a place for my heart to belong. And it did, at times. But there was always a place, unfettered, untouched, inaccessible to assimilation, to America, to this early, foreign invasion. That spot is where I have gone at times of terror, of deep yearning, for familiarity, for belonging.
In two weeks, I am returning to my home, my people, my place of complicated relations, the one that shaped me, the one that has held me no matter how far I distanced my self from it.
I imagine that everything is different, for the both of us. I cannot fathom how Israel has grown, spread without apology, invented and rose and civilized and uncivilized. I know the roads on which I had travelled and I know them not at all in the more recent landscape. I know there are new roads splitting Arab communities like red, raw, weeping watermelons spitting families, like seeds, aside, without care. We will drive on those roads so that we all can witness how cruelty festers in mistrust, and how it is our responsibility to find a solution. Now.
And I know the tremendous changes that have occurred in me since my last trip. This time my family constellation consists of my female partner and our two man-cub thirteen year olds. They actually expect me to know how to navigate in a land where I never drove, where I now stammer in the language, rusty from a profound lack of use for nearly 35 years. Although I am no longer accustomed to guns and shoving and yelling and smoking, I know that those are integral to Israeli culture and will greet me, assaulting. I know my family has no idea what they will encounter. I dare to consider that my fears will be met with joy, beauty and unexpected connections. People, who look like me, will mirror al our beauty, harshness, kindness, passion, racism. I know that I may taste grief and heartache and that I will no longer avoid my guts by burying them in cold bags of chocolate milk, in pyramid-high falafel, in iced coffee brimming with ice cream, in succulent corn from the large steaming kettle on street corners. I don’t use food like that anymore, but that is how I survived all that I had to in Israel. And I wonder what it will be like to be surrounded with comforting delicacies and uncomfortable memories and over-stimulation of everything life in my primary core has to offer, but have it served up exponentially.
Shall I take them to my old apartment complex, the slums of my township, to watch the big, frightening and frightened cockroaches scatter like the a Passover plague, when one lifts the communal trash bin lids? What will they say when they see the scrawny, scraggly, feral felines copulating everywhere, nary a neutered one in sight? Will they cherish a fudgesicle like I did, in exchanging for sexual favors at the age of 8? It’s hard even to write that sentence in relation to my children who are five years older than I was when that happened.
But it is a vacation, after all. And I really do want all of us to be able to relax, and soak up some sun on the Tel Aviv beach and snorkel in Eilat, and touch our lips to the Wailing Wall and know that we are very much alive, very much here, together, right now and thank for another day of feeling full and pray for another day of being present.
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