Going for Round Two!: Israel: Coming Home, Again

I so often find myself at a complete loss for explaining how I relate with this country I spend so much of my life studying and visiting. When I left Israel 15 years ago, I felt as though I was leaving home. I had never felt anything like it, and the sense that this country would forever be a part of my life didn't leave me. Home now has many layers for me, and I have many homes that I have had to leave many times. Of course, the most frequent, and usually most difficult, is leaving my dear family and friends far away in Wyoming/Utah each time I return to visit. My heart resides in many places, and one of them is here.

But this place has become much more like home in some interesting, hard to explain ways. I fell in love with it in a rather quick, passionate, rather simplistic way. It was enough to leave an impression on my mind and heart that would eventually pull me back, but I did not know this land and people in any kind of intimate way. When I began studying Israel in a serious way, I learned many facts, frameworks, theories, statistics, historical realities and other important elements of the country that filled in much of the picture, but now it was from a distance. Two years ago, I returned for the first time. The land and the people were familiar and strange to me. I suppose this was, in my own small way, not unlike so many millions of Jews have felt when they immigrated here to this intimately familiar, yet painfully strange land.

Now here I am again. My visits here have become more commonplace, and each time my mom asks me whether I'm excited for my trip, I kind of shrug and say, "I suppose." The reality is, it feels like coming home. (Let me be clear, however, that I am always much more excited to come home to visit my family and friends than the somewhat apathetic response I described above would indicate!) I suspect that, for most of us, "home" is complicated. Of course, not being married and without my own family, I refer to home as that great place where we all (grown siblings meeting at Mom and Dad's home) shed our masks and performances - where our best and worst selves usually compete for center stage in the family drama. Where love and loyalty are deepest, and frustration and old hurts resurface most easily. Home, a place of implicit love, understanding and peace, is often also a place of misunderstanding, irritation and frustration. It is history and the now, the complex and the simple. Because it's Humanity in all its rawness and ephemeralness, striving, sometimes achieving, Heaven with its sense of eternity and wholeness.

That's the way in which Israel feels like home now. I watch it and interact with it in much the same way: frustration at the brokenness of it all, at the bitterness and tedious feuding; empathy for the divisions and pain that run deep; and awe at the history and humanity - the juxtaposition of the heavenly and the human. Still, I am an outsider. I don't live here, and I don't really deal with daily life here in any significant way. But one of the things that fascinates me with this tiny strip of land, is that so many of us "outsiders" feel, deep in our heart of hearts, like this is our country. We have a stake in it. Among the many competing claims on this land, we make our own, through our personal interest (no other country in the world has the kind of international news coverage that Israel enjoys/puts up with - not even by a long shot!), our own hopes for the place and the people, our religious narratives, and so on. It seems to belong to all of us imperfect souls.

I am now helping facilitate an academic study tour of Israel and Palestine. It is a truly remarkable experience each year I am privileged to participate. But the intensity of the tour makes for overloaded brains, tired bodies and minds, and raw nerves all around. Today it exploded on the bus, as certain individuals began to belittle others who didn't share their own views of the place and experience. It was a hard day - a kind microcosm of the tensions that pulsate here all the time, and sometimes flare. Yet, life is also life here. People live, love, work, dream and achieve great things. It is a land and people of contradictions. And I love it.

I will post more in coming days about specific issues that I think my family and friends will find interesting. For now, thanks for allowing me to pontificate. Here are a few pictures by way of a little compensation.