Locating the Center

Found, or Still Looking: Israel

Today, for the last time, I took the 25 to Melech George Street. Today, for the thousandth time, I referred to my destination as “the city center.” Today, for the first time, I realized that each time I used this phrase I’d gone to a different location.

If you visited the city that has been my home for the past two months, I could tell you where to find the Yemenite soup stand that only permits American tourists to order chicken soup, the bench in Hayarkon Park that provides the shadiest spot in the afternoon, and the old vendor who preys most mercilessly on those too shy to demand reasonable prices at the Shuk. But I could not tell you where, exactly, the center of the city lies.

This is due, in part, to what I consider a major error in Tel Aviv’s urban planning. The geographic center of the city—and its exact location is debatable, give or take Jaffa—probably lies somewhere around Dizzengoff Street. It seems that at some point, an attempt was made to mark this spot officially, with the creation of Dizengoff Square.

Dizengoff Square, in typical Israeli fashion, is, more like a lopsided hexagon. It could be a beautiful outdoor meeting spot—a raised platform surrounded by coffee shops and juice stands, decorated with a well-designed, if somewhat tacky, multicolored fountain. Benches surround said fountain, and paths lead off to the city’s major streets.

But the Square will never be a central meeting spot, for the simple reason that it has no shade. With its concrete base and short surrounding walls, Dizengoff Square looks like a giant Shakshuka pan, multi-colored egg and all, in the middle of the city. (Following this food metaphor, humans are tomatoes, growing red in the sun).

So Dizengoff is out. Rabin Square is too far North; the Shuk too far South. You and I are left aimless, asteroids fallen out of orbit in space.

Perhaps this has not bothered me until now because only now have I begun to worry about finding centers, locating the heart of things amidst winding streets and wandering thoughts.

I could not tell you what the heart of my experience here has been, no more than I could locate the center of Tel Aviv.

I have been thinking of something I learned in high school chemistry class, about the discovery of the atom. It turns out the atom had been written about since the time of the ancient Greeks, but only in 1911—after Einstein had already discovered smaller particles—did scientists figure out just what comprised it. A chemist named Rutherford, believing that the atom had both positive and negative particles, bombarded one with double-positive alpha particles, so that, by observing where the alpha particles violently bounced back or collided but then pushed through, one could determine the location of the atom’s oppositely charged particles.

But Rutherford did not foresee the results—most of the alpha particles simply passed through. From this, he theorized, and this theory, though expanded upon, largely holds, that the atom consists almost entirely of empty space. It holds a small, dense, positively charged nucleus in the center, around which tiny electrons orbit. But mostly—empty space.

I think that memories work like atoms; in a few months or years, this trip will carry a small, deep concentration of memory, but the majority of my activities will be forgotten, empty spaces in time. Yet I can’t say now what will be the nucleus, and what will be the empty space.

It seems wrong or lazy to identify anything as the nucleus but the war, the casualties, the sirens; the travails of tourism must be merely superficial asides. But if the way to counter death is by living, then my personal experiences should be my nucleus/ city center, the hatred and prejudice of the conflict dangerous distractions.

And so, I wander, aimless.

Lately I have received several Facebook messages from friends and family members asking, “How is Israel?” I’m not always sure how this question is intended—as a friendly inquiry about my travels, or an instigation to political debate, or a mere expression of confusion that I can physically exist in a place that seems so abstract. The “Israel” in this question might be a geographic nation or a symbolic entity; neither of us is quite sure which.

So I answer this question with a detailed, memorized response, one I have saved in a Word document for future use:

“Thanks for checking in!! (two exclamation points) Israel is great, I’m having so much fun here. Of course, it’s a little stressful right now, with everything that’s been going on, but I’m in a safe location so I know I’m not in any danger. My internship is fun, the people here are really nice, and the food is AMAZING (all caps). I go to the beach a lot. I even have a tan!”

What appeals to me about this response, besides the reassurance I can provide through exclamation points, is its list-like nature. Items, rattled off one by one, don’t have to be ordered or prioritized; the center can remain hidden. Word-count wise, the war gets hardly any more attention than the beach.

It is easy, indeed, to understand things as lists, as lines. I can see the timeline of my trip so clearly. I can see myself boarding El Al for Birthright, arriving suitcase-heavy a week and a half later at the home of relatives I had never before met, stepping on to the 13 to ride to work, stepping on to a thousand 13s, a thousand 25s and 24s. I can see these events forming a narrative, beginning to end.

I can see myself, too, walking outside after hearing the first sirens, confused as to why what I mistook for a routine ambulance had everyone huddled in a circle and our evening trip to the theater cancelled. I can see myself, about to go to October Bar, reading the news alert announcing the ground invasion of Gaza. I can see myself reading a thousand news alerts, walking into a dozen shelters, wishing an infinite number of times that it would end.

I can see where these two threads intersect, time-wise, but I can’t see which orbits the other.

When I think about history, I never think about the ordinary events that must have been occurring at the same time—some of which must have felt as significant as war and international politics for the individuals experiencing them. That is the way history books are written (or most non-revisionist history books, anyway), just the nucleus and no empty space.

Is it selfish to focus on the events of the periphery? Is it elitist or neglectful not to?

The issue, as always, becomes doubly complicated when Israel enters the picture. It seems naïve at best, insensitive, at worst, to enjoy food and art and nightlife when the world is falling apart at its seams. Does it substantiate the claims of disproportionality in this conflict to say that I still enjoyed Israel while Gazans my age were dying?

Then there’s the issue of Zionism. Which love for Israel—the love that engenders a desire for nationhood, or the simple love of a culture and place—constitutes the nucleus of my feelings about the country? More importantly, is it even possible to have one without the other? Yes, Zionism is a political ideology rooted in religion and history, but like all political ideologies, it’s deeply tied with emotion. Part of the national pride that has sustained Zionism is the pride in Israel’s culture, its beautiful people, its vibrant cities. And conversely, because it is impossible to live in or visit Israel without some encounter with the conflict (even during peacetime; debates always abound), an appreciation of its culture necessarily encompasses the political culture.

There was another theory about the atom, before Rutherford’s. It was my favorite in chemistry class because it sounds so silly—it’s called the “pudding model.” An earlier chemist, J.J. Thomson, hypothesized that the atom looked like a sticky lump, with negative particles stuck to a positive sphere; not necessarily a center—how can such an inextricable mess even have a center?

Thomson was wrong about the atom, of course, but maybe that’s a better model for Israel, the pudding model. Every particle bound together so tightly that nothing can be separated; there can’t be a center because no aspect of life here remains totally distinct.

I ran into bomb shelters in the middle of phenomenal meals at Tel Aviv restaurants; I checked news alerts on my phone between scenes at Cameri theater; I discussed (if not argued about) the conflict with almost every Israeli I met. The pudding, you could say, has been stirred too thoroughly.

And I don’t think I was so wrong when I called every one of my destinations “the city center.” For Allenby runs parallel to Dizengoff, which crosses Melech George, leading to Ibn Gbriol. If you wander aimlessly for a while, you’ll end up walking down each one, and maybe that’s not so aimless after all.

I’ll be home in less than 24 hours. I’m not completely sure, after all of this, how to answer the question: “How was Israel?”

But I’ll tell anyone who asks that should she ever find herself in Tel Aviv, she should take the 25 to the city center.

Living, Loving, Leaving

Found: A Frozen Cucumber and the Reason I’m not Making Alliyah

The refrigerator in my apartment is empty. Or rather, it’s empty except for half a tub of hummus, the packaging from a six-pack of Yoplait yogurt, and a tiny cucumber that has frozen to the wall.

I could go to the supermarket, but with only seven days left here, I thought I could eat out just as cost-effectively, that being the length of a typical vacation. This has turned out not to be true. Moreover, while eating out is a much more attractive option when exotic restaurants provide breaks between beaches and sites, less so when I need a quick breakfast before work or find myself hungry while sitting in my apartment, half an hour away from the city center.

If I’m not on vacation, I’m not quite living here, either. I don’t speak the language. I have a job but I’m not being paid. I spend most of my time with Americans. There is no food in my refrigerator. The towels, sheets, and utensils in my apartment are on loan; I am on loan, so to speak.

Eating out is not the only way I have tried to force the remainder of my time here into something resembling a vacation. Yesterday, after a long day of work and only a few hours of sleep the night before, I marched myself through the Diaspora Museum, because I felt that I couldn’t leave Tel Aviv without seeing it. I got through the Dreyfus exhibit, what I most wanted to see, but found myself at the end of the first floor of the path of Jews after the Diaspora, still only in Rome, my eyes closing. I gave up, and left the Jews to wander through the ages while I wandered back to my dorm to take a nap.

After an hour-long rest, I pulled myself together, and attended a lecture about Israeli-Arab co-existence. Afterward, I tried to organize a group to try a Vietnamese restaurant on Rothschild; this time, my friends were too tired. We ordered pizza.

Today I’m sitting street-side in the historic Neve Tzedek neighborhood, and I can’t even summon the energy to get up and walk across the cobblestones. I have been utterly defeated by tourism.

Thus I find myself in an awkward limbo, too tired for tourism but not prepared for permanence, desperate to see everything and too tired to do more than glance at it.

Why aren’t I prepared for permanence? Yes, seven days isn’t much time, but it would be easy enough to go grocery shopping for a week.

I guess I’m in denial. I can’t go through the motions of permanent because I’ve never really felt permanent here; as much as I love Tel Aviv, it does not, in the end, feel like a home.

Last night, I had a dream that central Tel Aviv was bombed, and this time the rockets penetrated the Iron Dome. Netanyahu ordered all of the city’s residents to put on their personal jet-packs (they came with our dorm-rooms; just like our plates and towels) and fly to Hong Kong. Then the jet-packs started to blow up, like suicide vests. I got to Hong Kong and had to write an article about the whole experience in Time Out: China. It sounds ridiculous now, but I woke up terrified.

So to answer the obvious question, part of the reason I couldn’t live here permanently is the conflict; I don’t feel scared, now, in the daylight– but it’s there, in the corner of my mind, waiting to come out in a moment of darkness.

Yet, that doesn’t completely explain why Tel Aviv could not be my home. After all, I had nightmares about school shootings after Newton; I still have nightmares about New York terrorism and it’s been over ten years since 9/11. No, it’s not really because of fear.

Here’s the best way I can explain it. Joan Didion (to whom I always look for wisdom) left New York because she realized that it was a city for the very young. I’m leaving Tel Aviv—and won’t move here permanently after graduation, like many of the participants on my trip– not only because it’s the end of my vacation, but because for me, Tel Aviv is a city for tourists.

Of course, plenty of people (400,000) live here year-round, just as plenty of middle-aged and elderly people live in New York. Yet, tourists– not literal tourists, but those in a state of transition, impermanence– dominate the city.

Recent immigrants and refuges. Expats. Young Israelis who have finished their army service but haven’t yet enrolled in university. Thousands whose situations I’m unaware of, but for whom time seems to go by in great loops that swing between the beaches and the bars and the cafes, never quite settling anywhere, as assuredly as the rhythm of the waves.

An American-born Israeli I know went on Taglit-Birthright and simply didn’t buy a ticket back. After travelling with a friend for a few months, she looked for an apartment in Tel Aviv, her only requirement being that it was near the beach. She found one in ad, a cheap, cockroach-ridden one-room, two miles from the shore. When she visited, she found the dismal apartment inadequate, but the realtor also showed her another tiny room—essentially a broom closet—that connected to a rooftop garden. It didn’t fit any furniture, but that didn’t matter; she spent the days at the beach and the evenings in her garden under the stars.

That’s the kind of thing you can do here. And maybe it would suit me, for now more than ever do I imagine my mind and my heart as amorphous liquids swishing around inside their cavities, still unsolidified by experience.

Yet, there is something solid forming; I am conscious of that too. And as that process (crystallization? Solidification? I didn’t pay enough attention in chemistry class to know) continues, I’d like to be with my family and friends, in my place of permanence.

The American-born Israeli is my boss. She has a job here now, a husband, a child. This place is permanent for her, as it must be, eventually, for at least some of the men and women in transition. But it’s not my place of permanence.

So I remove the remainder of the contents in my fridge. I open my empty suitcase.

On Thursday, a little after midnight, I’m flying back to New York. I am, after all, still young.

People vs. People

Found: capitilization issues

Most people, if asked to describe an attractive celebrity like, say, Scarlet Johansson, would mention, in no particular order: lustrous blond hair, perfectly sculpted limbs, plump red limps. Though they have achieved no particular triumph over superficiality or insight into contemporary Hollywood, my relatives would comment on something entirely different—and not her considerable acting talent. The first thing my relatives would tell you about Scarlet Johansson is that she is exactly one-half Jewish.

(I have always thought it was a strange phrase: “half Jewish.” It would seem to imply that you could have a Jewish arm and a non-Jewish arm, the way most people have a left arm and a right arm, or else that your body could be like a pitcher filled up halfway with Jewish juice).

My relatives would note, similarly, the percentage of Judaism claimed by Mila Kunis, Joseph Gordon-Levitt, Jake Gyllenhaal, Daniel Radcliffe, and Natalie Portman. A newly encountered celebrity, if possessing a slightly curved nose or name ending in “stein,” undergoes extensive analysis.

It’s not just my relatives who do this, of course. It’s a game I’ve seen played by almost all of the Jews I know. In fact, it’s so popular that there’s a website called jewishornot.com, whose function requires no explanation.

If I had to name this game, I would call it People vs. People: People Magazine vs. The People, The Chosen People.

Another favorite game is commonly referred to as “Jewish Geography.” It’s usually played upon introduction, when a Jew meets another Jew, and tries to establish a connection through a shared acquaintance, also a Jew. If you are from the tri-state area, it seems, and at some point in your life attended Hebrew School, synagogue, or Jewish sleep-away camp, you attended said Hebrew School, synagogue, or Jewish sleep-away camp with the sister, cousin, and best friend of every other Jew you will ever meet.

Of course, Jews also share Gentile acquaintances. Yet, the potential Judaism of the common friend is always at least considered. Here, the game becomes People vs. people: The People, or, just… people.

I’ve always been terrible at Jewish Geography. As much as my relatives enjoy the celebrity game, most of us have relatively few connections with actual Jewish communities. I went to Hebrew School, reluctantly, and attended a Girl Scout sleep-away camp where we said grace before dinner. My parents are erstwhile (Rosh Hashanah and Yom Kippur) synagogue attendees, but aren’t very involved socially with the congregation.

I have a lot of Jewish friends, but no more than your average person who lives in New York and goes to school in Boston. For the most part, Judaism remains pretty incidental to our friendship, to the extent that I’ve had some friends whose Judaism remained unknown to me for months after we met.

So they were always people, and not The People, to me.

Now, I’m in a Jewish state, as part a group with membership contingent on belonging to The People. Most of my friends here did grow up in Jewish communities, attended Jewish schools and sleep-away camps, and can play Jewish Geography with finesse. With my blond hair, secularism, and failure to have had my first kiss in Cabin 5 with a curly-haired boy named Josh, I am practically the token Gentile.

But I really, really like everyone I’ve met here, and I’ve become closer with them, in a shorter span of time, than I have with almost anyone else. Yesterday, I woke up groggy and slightly moody and planned to spend the day alone. I ended up having lunch with one friend, sitting on a balcony for the rest of the afternoon with several others, walking through the park with a third bunch, and finishing the day at the campus bar with a fourth. This probably sounds entirely normal, but for me, it’s not. I’m an only child and determined introvert who normally goes insane after more than five or six hours spent in the company of other humans.

But yesterday, I didn’t go insane. For the simple reason that spending time with them feels no less foreign than spending time by myself.

There are a few logical explanations for the tight-knit nature of our group. For one, programs like this tend to have such an effect—hence my friends’ cherished memories of Jewish camp and my own of poetry camp. Then, the stress of living in a foreign country in the midst of a military operation has no doubt brought everyone closer. Friendships are built in bomb shelters.

But there’s another possible explanation for our closeness—an explanation for why so many Americans fee inexplicably at-home in Israel. That we are all Jewish; we are not just people in a group but the original group, The People.

And if that is the reason, I’m not sure how I feel about that. First, the Jewish community was not the community I felt connected to growing up, and it’s not the only community I want to be connected to in my future. If I consider myself part of the Jewish world I also consider myself part of the New York world, the Harvard world, and I hope some day, the literary world.

Many young people I have met here would only marry another Jew. I think it would be nice to marry another Jew, but in the same way it would be nice to marry another New Yorker or Harvard alum. And on the list of marriage deal-breakers, dislike of books ranks about 3,000,000 levels above lack of Judaism (which probably does not rank at all).

And on a larger level, there is something deeply worrisome about the People vs. people game. There is something deeply worrisome about dividing the world into those who are like you and those who are not, those who attended the same Hebrew School or synagogue or sleep-away camp as your brother, and those whom you have no reason to know. That capital “P” looms dangerously large.

That is not to say that the Jews I know identify with other Jews out of any feelings of prejudice or superiority. There is something deeply, naturally comforting about identifying with the members of your tribe, whether it’s a tribe based on religion or a love of books. On this trip, I’ve felt that deep and natural comfort—to the extent that it will be difficult to come home.

But other things can emerge naturally from excessive group identification. The things that are breeding the current conflict in Israel, which has everyone convinced that he belongs to a side, to a tribe. Which has everyone convinced that his people are The People, the only ones to listen to, to follow, and to trust. And when others become just people—well, it’s clear who comes first, practically and morally.

So I have to hope that I can feel so strongly connected to the other Jews here as people, not as My People or The People. And I have to hope that I can see all people as The People, because in the end, we’re all, well, people.

Innocent Abroad

Found: The way things are

Six was an age of disillusionment, the year I noticed the similarly curved l’s and dashed-off i’s on my mother’s grocery list and the note left under my pillow by the tooth fairy. Had I been raised Christian, it would’ve been the uncovering of Santa’s beard that did me in; as it was, Snow White tested my innocence.

Snow White was, practically, a religious figure to me. I had seen the Disney movie several times, bought every plush and plastic poison-apple-eating doll at the toy store, and dressed up as her for Halloween, twice. The culmination of this obsession should have been a February-break trip to Disneyworld, where I would meet the princess herself. A week or so before the trip, though, I told my parents that I simply no longer believed.

My mother was heartbroken. She begged me to fall under the spell of Disney just a little longer, at least until the plane ride home. And because I was at least still innocent enough not to question adult authority (I was six, after all), I agreed.

So we went to Disneyland. We rode the roller coasters (not the scary ones) and stayed at the Magic Kingdom Hotel. I tried to resolve my cognitive dissonance by deciding that characters represented with unconvincing fully-body costumes– Mickey Mouse, Dumbo– could not be real, but the natural, pretty princesses had a chance.

I met Snow White after waiting on a line up a hill, one that appears in my memory as tall and winding as the cliff from which the evil queen falls to her death. I stood behind excited girls one or two years younger than myself, and envied their pure, unblemished expectation.

Yet the moment I met the princess, all of my disillusionment disappeared. I told the poor part-time employee about all of my dolls and costume dresses, and hugged her tightly, ignoring the awkward Prince Charming by her side. I think it was the most sincerely I have ever told someone I loved them.

Innocence, I think, is not always merely lost or taken away. Nor is experience merely gained. It comes and go, like a liquid poured between two cups, one filed away in the back of the mind.

No educated person– or uneducated person, for that matter– in the 21st-century can grow up without being aware of the Israeli-Palestinian conflict. If you generally follow the news then you might check the status of the conflict the way you’d check the temperature in Boston or the score of last night’s game. If you are a political person the role it plays in your life is much greater.

But I never wanted to be a political person. I never could stand the red, sweaty shouting faces on TV talk-shows or the want-to-be-senators at Harvard who always sat in the second row at lecture and asked exactly two long, rhetorical questions every class period. I never could stand talking about conflict and war.

I thought, somehow, that I could make my stay here apolitical. I thought I could gaze down from the Golan Heights and out at the Mediterranean Sea and into the walls of the Old City, and never see anything but the sites in front of me. I thought I could pack my days so thoroughly with trying new foods and seeing historical monuments and meeting Israelis that politics would simply slip away.

I was warned, before my arrival, that on Birthright politically-tinged presentations would find their way between camel rides and visits to the shuk; but I told myself, as my mother had years ago, to believe for just a little bit longer.

Then I arrived here. And yes, there were politics, but I poured them into the back of my mind, and filled my days with trips to Tel Aviv Port and Gordon Beach and Old Jaffa. It worked. I fell as in love with Israel, with Tel Aviv specifically, as I once had been with Snow White.

I felt, in the center of the city, that external conflicts could not penetrate winding streets; the Nachalat Binyamin artists’ market on a Friday morning, for instance, could simply not be marred by ugliness.

And even when the rockets started falling, there was a beauty to the resilience and the courage of the people here that made the situation seem to transcend politics.

And I still believe in that courage and resilience, but I have seen something else infect the streets of Tel Aviv—penetrate the city in a way that the rockets cannot. Not necessarily in the city or the people itself, but in the atmosphere that surrounds Israel and discussion if it.

Over the past few weeks, I have heard the words “apartheid” and “genocide” used to describe Israel’s actions; I have also heard the words “morally superior” and “exceptional” used to describe the same actions. I have heard pro-Israel activists suggest that Palestinians have no right to a nation and that Palestinians are “naturally” prone to aggression. I have heard anti-Israel activists suggest that Israel has no right to a nation and that Israelis are prone (if not naturally) to aggression.

While some of these comments came from Israelis (there was a riot last week in Tel Aviv during which protestors shouted “death to the Arabs an the leftists”), many more came from Americans. I found myself uncomfortably reading the Facebook posts of both my left-wing Harvard peers calling to “free Palestine” and my right-wing Jewish peers declaring any criticism of Israel anti-Semitic.

Now, every time I interact with someone, it is as though a sign declaring their political affiliation hovers over their head, a reverse halo of sorts.

And the streets I once thought could not be touched by politics are built on land carrying thousands of years of historical baggage. Even the people who declare themselves apolitical engage in passionate debate.

That includes me. If I restrain from posting angry comments on Facebook I cannot restrain my feelings about this conflict. I am not, I realize, apolitical. I am not pure; I am not Snow White.

Yet in this moment, when I sit at a cute café with French film posters on its walls, sipping a cold glass of lemonade, getting ready to meet my friends at Dizengoff Center for a movie and falafel, all of my disillusionment disappears. I tell everyone at home about the beaches and the restaurants and the city streets, and I tell them that I love it here. It is the most sincerely I have ever said I loved a city.

All in the Timing

Found: An absolutely unneeded taxi

Hayarkon Park, when exited by Adventure Garden, opens on to Ayalon Highway, a wide expanse of road with cars that whiz past as if in sheer defiance of the serene atmosphere of a Shabbat morning spent in nature. Like any paved location in Tel Aviv, the road is capable of melting the iciest Vaniglia gelato cone, overcooking Dr. Shakshuka’s lunch special, and doing something simply unimaginable to hummus. The speeding cars carry passengers on their way to resorts in Caesarea or Netanya, bypassing the busy city center. Not a single cab is in sight, and a cab is exactly what we need.

It’s Shabbat, so the buses aren’t running, there’s not a Sherut in sight, and our stretch of highway is far away from anywhere we need to go, even if we could walk safely along its edge.

But every weekday morning, I walk 100 meters from my bus stop to my office, and at least twenty empty cabs are parked on the curb, drivers aggressively trying to persuade me to pay for a ride I don’t need, in both English and Hebrew. It gets so bad that sometimes I pretend to speak only French.

There are always cabs in Tel Aviv, I have learned, except when you need one.

Bad timing, matching desire with availability, seems to be a perennial problem lately. All summer I have been craving eggs Benedict from– of course–Benedict. I have fantasized about the precise mix of the cream of Hollandaise sauce to the just slightly different cream of egg yolk. I have deliberated about whether to have the dish served with smoked salmon or spinach or merely the traditional bacon. I have exalted in the possibility of an unlimited bread basket, and tried to imagine the spreads that would accompany it.

On the same day we struggle to hail a cab, we eat at Benedict. There is a mushroom (a la fungi) version that day, eliminating the need to choose between salmon and spinach. The sauce and yolk are perfectly creamy, the breads unlimited, and the spreads turn out to include butter, apple compote, and Nutella. The dish is fantastically prepared, but I am simply not that hungry. So it’s just… fine.

Of course, these are such silly things to care about. But lately, when Israelis see that I’m visiting the country right now, they say things like “I’m sorry you had to be here now,” or “And you decided to come anyway (thinking I only just arrived)?” or “I guess this is really bad timing.”

And it is bad timing. If I could have gone to a fortuneteller of world events and received a calendar of the conflict in the Middle East for the next five years, I would have chosen a different time to visit Israel.

But if it had been possible to scientifically determine the exact height of my hunger and craving for Eggs Benedict, I wouldn’t necessarily wait for it. And if it had been possible to determine the exact year in which this region of the world would be totally peaceful, I would not wait for that, either.

I am here. I am inconvenienced by daily sirens, I am dismayed by the media campaigns on both sides of the conflict, and I am devastated by the rising death toll. But I am here, now, and that is simply it.

The more meals I cannot fully appreciate, the more much-needed taxis I wait for and the unneeded taxis I wave by, I realize that optimal timing does not necessarily exist. You can wait for the Messiah all you want, but if he comes while you’re busy or tired or quite content with the unsaved world?

In other words, I guess that happiness is not produced by a mathematical formula matching desires with availability.

So it is not the best time to be in Israel– there haven’t been any sirens in over 24 hours, but the next round could go off before I finish this sentence– but right now, I am sitting in my favorite cafe in Dizengoff Square, and I have just finished an herbal tea that had an especially pleasant note of cinnamon today. And that, maybe is happiness.

There are five cars parked nearby, and I can easily walk to my next destination. It will be a lovely walk, down King George in the slightly mellowed late afternoon sun.

Storytelling

Found: Beginnings, endings, and the moments in between

It is easy, I think, to travel somewhere and feel that you have ventured outside of reality. Maybe it was different when more people reached vacation destinations by car, children’s sweaty elbows pressed together in the back of the Volkswagen, the whole vehicle smelling like potato chips, road signs out the window the objects of games of “I Spy.” Cities becoming countryside, countryside becoming cities, at so many miles per hour.

Or maybe we still felt it then, that displacement from actual life into imagined territory. Maybe it was only back when we travelled by horseback, stopping overnight at beer-filled inns, the bouncing of the saddle indicating the texture of the ground, that the journey was salient enough to bound us to our place of origin.

Airplanes provide transportation relatively lacking in sensory experience. If you’re cramped into the middle, you only see the gray of the seat in front of you and the white of the ceiling above. Even beside the window, the indiscriminate view of sky could show clouds hovering over New York or Paris or anywhere in between. There does not seem to be a smell at all; or rather, it is a smell without a scent. You land and lack a sense of time; the vast maze of baggage check-ins provides few clues to your destination, though it waits just outside.

And once abroad, you are surrounded by voices speaking a language you can’t understand. The signs may as well be written in hieroglyphics. You must then, infer everything. You must guess. You must imagine. You are trapped inside your head.

You have, though, something to grab on to. An arrival and a departure, a beginning and an end. You do what people do best in the face of confusion and unreality: you tell yourself a story.

This, of course, is my story. I have literally and figuratively turned it into one. It has a climax that fits almost too neatly into the middle: the exploding of bombs above my head, coinciding with the most exciting parts of my personal experiences.

But lately I have become weary of stories. They are being told, on both sides of this conflict, far too often. Words like “victim” and “aggressor” reduce combatting armies composed of individuals with complex motives to the black-and-white heroes and villains of fairytales. The beginning of the story is accordingly adjusted– the murder of three Israelis or the ground operation in the West Bank. Really, it goes further than that, each side beginning a larger narrative with its own origins here. And each side insisting that the story end with the satisfaction of its own demands.

We tell ourselves stories in order to live, said Joan Didion. And they do allow us to live… inside our heads. But maybe the only way to live in a world of shared space and competing points of views is to abandon the narrative. To forget beginnings and endings and see only the moment in time in which people (not characters) are suffering, a moment that must be responded to in a way that probably won’t fit anyone’s narrative neatly.

As for me, I cannot make an experience that has some of my friends afraid to leave their bedrooms and over 200 humans dead into the climax of my story. And on a larger level, I cannot turn all of the events of my life into a narrative, or I really will exist in a world outside of reality.

I have been telling stories as long as I can remember, and I’ve missed everything I’ve edited out.

What Tel Avivians Say During a Rocket Attack

Found: Iron Dome, Iron Will

As a steadily increasing number of rockets explode mid-air over Tel Aviv, as sirens blare as regularly as alarm clocks each morning, as phrases like “possible Lebanese involvement” and “attempted suicide bombing” fill the home page of Ha’aretz, a video circulates YouTube.

It’s a short sketch, made by amateurs, called “Sh*t Tel Avivians Say During a Rocket Attack.” The SNL-style parody shows blasé urban dwellers responding to siren alarms by checking Twitter and going back to sleep, preparing to enter apartment bomb shelters by putting on make-up, trying to remember their never-before seen neighbors’ names, and generally treating rocket attacks with the sort of bored annoyance I treat the loud construction work on Tel Aviv University’s campus.

The video ends with a Tel Aviv resident lying facedown on the concrete—he’s not protecting himself from a bomb, just trying to reserve a notoriously elusive city parking space.

It’s the first thing that makes me smile after the sirens go off on Tuesday evening. Before that, the evening passes in a blurred series of realizations. The realization that these noises are not simple warnings to yield the right of way to an ambulance. The realization that the Americans huddled in a group aren’t wondering whether they should leave for the play we’re supposed to see that night, but whether they should leave the country. The realization that this is happening, that I am here.

We watch the video huddled in the dorm-room designated as the bomb shelter for the third floor—there’s one on each. Someone has made pad Thai and we scoop it from the pan hastily, not really tasting it. Everyone has at least one text message or voice-call from home asking “Are you okay?,” and no one is quite sure how to truthfully answer it.

But the video makes us laugh. And outside, unbeknownst to us at the time, blasé Tel Avivians are not sitting huddled around Pad Thai. They are having absurdly late dinners in outdoor restaurants. They are watching FIFA games at sports bars. They are dressing for a night at the club. Some, of course, still linger on the beach. They are doing all of the things Tel Avivians always do, though they are also ready to stop doing those things and head to the nearest bomb shelter in less than two minutes, should another round of sirens go off. They are prepared but not panicked.

Here’s some other sh*t Israelis say during a rocket attack:

“Was that a bomb?”—A Jaffa shopkeeper, in the flat, unconcerned tone one might use to ask “Was that my bus?” when she really wants an excuse to be late to work, anyway.

“The number one rule is, no matter how bad it seems, don’t fart in the bomb shelter”—an Israeli security guard, making a group of hyperventilating Americans laugh.

“We’re going to go over the exact security protocol again. And if there’s anything you need to talk about, if you ever feel unsafe at any time, you can come to us.”— with varied phrasing, every Israeli with us this week, no matter how irrational we are and how busy they are.

Nothing—a young Tel Avivian woman, only recently released from her army service, called back to the reserves.

The Iron Dome is the most effective missile shield in the world. It’s effective against aircraft up to an altitude of 32,800 ft. and can intercept rockets fired from 70 kilometers away. When it stops a missile in mid-air, you don’t usually see anything. Sometimes, though, you hear a boom in the distance, feel a vibration on the way to the shelter. And you know that once again, you have been protected. With it above you, you feel safe.

But there is another protective shield here, preventing the rockets from penetrating. It seems that Tel Avivians have internalized the Iron Dome in a way, so that rockets fired from a distance cannot keep them from the beaches and the bars. So that they can say stupid sh*t and worry about parking spaces but not terrorism. So that they can stay strong enough to react logically and responsibly, so that they can stay strong enough to comfort those of us born without inner shields.

And you know that a strategy based on causing terror could never really succeed here. With them around you, you feel safe.

Here But Not There

Found: An American barbecue in Israel

I can identify three smells. Sunscreen, for one. Slightly stronger than that, seawater, lingering on t-shirts and curling just-dried hair. Strongest of all, nearly overpowering the other smells, grilled hamburgers, smoky and so evocative that even the vegetarians can feel the meat stuck between their teeth.

Besides the hamburgers, there’s corn-on-the-cob, blackened just so and piled in a pyramid shape on a plastic plate. Watermelon, juicy and dripping down on everyone’s clothes. Country music plays in the background. A gust of wind blows down an empty beer can. It is the most quintessentially American Fourth of July I have every celebrated, and I’m on the ninth floor balcony of a university apartment in Tel Aviv, Israel.

I’ve celebrated the Fourth of July at home, of course. But I never liked the taste of beer, there. I never liked the rhythm of country music, there. Parking at the fireworks display was so impossible that I often just stayed at home, there. Sometimes I watched it on TV. I can’t even remember what I did last year. I think I napped.

The Church of the Holy Sepulchre. The Western Wall. The Arab Quarter. Mahane Yehuda. Shuk Carmelite. The Israel Museum. The Yemenite Quarter. Banana Beach. Charles Clove Park. Park Hayarkon. Idan Raichel in concert. Tel Aviv Port. Port Said. The Golan Heights. The Sea of Galilee. Haifa. A Bedouin village. A Druze village. Khachapuri. The Dead Sea. Gordon Beach. Yad Vashem. The Armenian Quarter. The Jordan River. Tzfat. Dizengoff Center. Rabin Square. The Hebrew Book Fair. The Tower of David. The City of David. Mahane Yehuda. The Jewish Quarter. Benedict. Meir Garden. The B’Hai Gardens. Mamilla Mall. London Beach. Masada. A goat farm. A vegetable farm. Allenby. Ben Yehuda. Ben Gurion. Florentin. Rothschild. Mount Scopus.

I have been to so, so many places since arriving here in Israel– that’s surely not even a full list, but I’d be here all night if I tried to name every place. I have done so many things and tasted so many foods and met so many people. I have spent countless hours walking and riding buses and getting lost and giving up and taking cabs.

And I’ve done all of these things because I know that I’m in one of the most exciting cities in the world and I only have a couple months here. Because it feels like any minute I’m not going somewhere new or doing something exciting I’m wasting an incredible opportunity. And really, it’s not so hard to get on the bus from my dorms or walk somewhere after work, even if I get lost a lot. I have neither the time nor the inclination to nap.

But I also live across the river from one of the most exciting cities in the world and I only have a few years there. And every minute I decide against going somewhere new or doing something exciting because it’s too hard to get on the bus from my dorm or walk somewhere after class. I’ve taken more naps than I can count, and I’ve never been lost in Boston (and if you know how often I get lost, you can guess just how many times I’ve been to Boston).

The MFA. The Fogg. Chinatown. Little Italy. The Boston Philharmonic. Newbury Street. Fenway Park. Boston Common. The Freedom Trail. The New England Aquarium. Boston Harbor Islands. Trinity Church. Isabella Steward Gardener Museum.

There are so, so many places I haven’t been in Boston– that’s not a full list because I’m not even aware of the interesting places to go. I haven’t done much of anything or tasted much food besides dining hall staples and cafe sandwiches, or met many people besides the other students at my school.

At first, I thought that I was celebrating the Fourth of July so much more enthusiastically here than at home because I missed America, because I felt more American surrounded by Israelis. But then I realized that I do everything more enthusiastically here, or rather I do things here, period.

So when I come home, I’ve decided that I’m going to do things. I’m going to go out to exotic restaurants and see historical sites and wander down famous streets. I’ll walk around with GoogleMaps in my own city and get mistaken or a tourist, and be totally proud of that.

Around Israel

Found: Tragedy

Yesterday, I sat down at my laptop to write. With the magazine off to press early in the morning, I had the day off work. Outside my window, a palm tree swayed softly, its branches occasionally mingling with those of its neighbor, a more sturdy pomegranate. Inside, my apartment was perfectly air-conditioned. I had no where to go, and nothing to do. But I could not write.

Sometimes you can’t write because you don’t know what to write about. Sometimes you can’t write because you know what you must write about. Because there is only one thing to write about. Because if you write about anything else it still lurks in the background; it still emerges in the white spaces of the page.

Three kidnapped teenagers, found dead in Hebron, bodies partially buried in a field. Eyal Yifrah, Gilad Shaer, Naftali Frenkel.

One Palestinian boy abducted and shot in East Jerusalem. Muhammed Hussein Abu Khdeir, possibly as revenge.

Jews shouting “Death to Arabs.” Arabs shouting “Death to Jews.”

Me, blank, white screen, tea in hand, these words swirling around in my head but refusing to exit my body through the tips of my fingers. How could I write about a country in the midst of tragedy and dangers, when I was here as a mere tourist, a shallow consumer of its ethnic foods and tacky souvenirs? How could I write about a complex and nuanced political reality when I hadn’t even graduated from college, when mostly I skip the international news in the paper and go straight for the book reviews or style section?

How could I even trust my emotions, when emotions– those sticky, irrational things– lead to actions like murder and revenge and war?

So I left. I took a bus into the city and ate Yemenite soup at a restaurant I had been dying to try. I walked through the Shuk and read in a shady courtyard. I had coffee with a friend in Dizengoff Square. I came home and got changed and glanced briefly at my computer screen, and left again for an Idan Raichel concert. I came home and ate watermelon on the roof with three other Americans. We talked about school and our friends at home and plans for the Fourth of July. We did not talk about the murders.

In the morning my computer screen still stared at me like a demanding child. While out in the city I had humorous misadventures a plenty– a thousand cute short stories waiting to be told. But to throw one of them onto my laptop screen would be like trying to appease a hungry baby with a pacifier. Enough to stop the crying for a moment, but that’s all.

Idan Raichel plays with a band whose 14 members come from a variety of Israeli heritages– Ethiopian, Yemenite, Arab, Sephardic, Ashkenazi, Greek, etc. His music, and it’s truly beautiful music, attempts to merge the musical traditions of multiple backgrounds together, so that each song has a mixed parentage of sorts.

The concert was only for members of the Israeli Defense Force; I had a press pass and a plus one. Raichel and his band played outdoors in Hayarkon Park, under a starless sky with a moon low to the ground. About 20,000 soldiers my own age were in attendance, out of uniform,sitting in circles on the grass and swaying to the slower songs. The girls wore maxi dresses and cut-off shorts. The boys wore cargos. Everyone ate ice cream cones and greasy Sabich, or hot dogs, or baked potatoes stuffed with sour cream and pickles.

Raichel was clearly very popular with them; sometimes it seemed like the audience anticipated the next song before he did. Everyone knew the lyrics, in Hebrew and Arabic alike.

The concert ended at 10:30. My friend and I walked back to our dorms. I don’t know where the soldiers walked; many of them were probably going home for the weekend. But on Sunday they’d be back at the bases. Most of them, probably, would be doing office work. But some of them would be in tanks and behind screens showing the location of missiles. Some of them might overhear commanders talking about kidnappings and revenge killings, rockets going off in the Gaza strip and the possibility of retaliation.

You wouldn’t know it, though to look at them, now.

In the past five days I have realized both how totally absorbing a tragedy can be and how completely easy it can be to avoid thinking about it,to fold it into a tiny ball that you only take out occasionally, to store in a different pocket.

Paradoxically, the 24-hour news cycle and portable devices, while ensuring that you can stay updated on every development of a major news story wherever and whenever you are,takes away some of the all-consuming nature of national tragedies. Gone are the days of huddling around the neighbor’s TV, watching the same stock photos flash on the screen. Replaced by rolling news updates, to be swiped right off your screen.

We find out that way,about the boys, from someone’s i24 news update on Monday, in the middle of a meeting. There’s a moment of shock, unanticipated, and then a moment of silence, planned. About halfway through the moment of silence a group of students carrying groceries run up the stairs, chatting noisily.

Maybe it’s necessary not to dwell on things, in Israel, when all around you there is danger and the possibility of war. Maybe it’s necessary, for all of us, to write about everything except the thing that needs to be written about, to think about everything except the thing that needs to be thought about.

Now, I write this, but later, I will celebrate American Fourth of July on the beach. And around Israel, rockets will continue to explode.

The Routine of Things

Found: Just another sunset

The sun rises at 5:37. The alarm goes off at 8:00, but today is a Sunday, which means that I wake up at 6:45 to the university construction workers drilling what seems to me, from the disturbed quiet of my room, an endless hole to nowhere. On Mondays it is sprinklers. Wednesday, hammering. Thursdays, someone rings the buzzer. Breakfast at 8:45. A packet of instant oatmeal and fruit. The type of fruit varies.

At 9:00 I am out the door. If it’s a Monday, I am soaked by the sprinklers. Every day, three construction workers share a coffee on the bench. A tall Israeli student I have passed several times before gets his bike stuck in the revolving gate. The gelato stand has its first customer. The 13 comes at 9:08, unless it’s a Thursday, in which case sometimes it does not come at all.

Every day, restauranteurs lay white cotton tablecloths and glass water jugs outside. Every day, the bus hurtles toward the blinding blue of the beach and makes a sharp turn left, past sunbathers, only a dozen or so at this hour, getting into position.

At 9:45, I stop at Aroma, the Israeli Starbucks, and buy what in America would be called an iced coffee and here is called a cold espresso (what’s called an iced coffee here would be called a frapuccino in America). Every day, the same cashier, medium-height, rectangular face with eyebrows that almost touch in the middle, takes my order, and every day, he asks for my name. To be fair, I certainly don’t know his.

I am at my desk by 10:00. Laptop and water bottle out. A cup of tea, one sugar, from the kitchen. I work until 3:00 or 4:00, which usually means four short articles, three Facebook posts, and countless e-mails to someone’s PR guy.

The 13 goes back to Tel Aviv University, too. Every day, it hurtles toward the blinding blue of the beach and makes a sharp turn right, past what has become by now a full horde of sunbathers, shoulders already satisfactorily burned or uncomfortably tanned, towels covered in sand.

At 4:00 or 4:30 I am home. Shower, fruit, tea. If it’s a Sunday I have Ulpan, Wednesday, a meeting.

The evenings can go in any direction. Every day, the sun sets over the Tel Aviv beach, and low red clouds meet pink-fruited trees in the distance. Every day, restauranteurs provide over dirty tablecloths and long empty water jugs until the last diners leave in the early hours of the morning. Not necessarily drunk, just on summer time.

Time spent abroad is said to be a break from the routine. But it’s impossible to spend more than a week in one location without falling into a new routine, a pattern that settles over you as softly as a Mediterranean wave. Every day, and every where– the sun rises and sets– the rhythm of your day will raise and fall just as surely, whether the time difference adds or subtracts a few hours.

And this comforts me, because to have a routine is to be settled, to be in motion but not transit. I am still a foreigner– I still can’t really speak Hebrew or quite grasp the bus system– but I am something more than a tourist. A tourist, after all, cannot match construction tasks to days of the week, and a tourist might see a thousand beaches but not hurdle toward the same blue every day.
Photo Credit Emily Roche