Reminder: If you're new to this blog, please start at the beginning to know why I'm calling myself a Turkey Princess and to understand the purpose of this blog.
It's time to talk more directly about my developing relationship with Israel. I've already told you about the man who asked me about my first trip. I also told you about my March of the Living trip and watching my Rabbi then make a point about remembering the Palestinian "refugees" whom he had worked with and who were not talked about very much on the trip.
I have an older blog and I very much invite you to go there both to see ideas I've shared in the past and still believe in now, as well as things that have changed considerably for me. I wrote there about another instance on March of the Living. In this, we visited an army base and were encouraged to join a party. I didn't get involved partly because I don't like big parties and partly because my BS-filter was on. I suspected that this was intended to win me over to supporting something that I didn't yet understand well enough to trust.
The March of the Living came during my senior year of high school. I went on from there to Oberlin College. This was my first opportunity to live with Jewish peers in a non-Jewish environment. Here I both leaned hard into my Jewish community and identity as well as testing it.
For example, many people take a Junior semester or year abroad and I was pretty sure it was expected I'd go to Israel.
I didn't like to do what was expected.
I went to Dublin, Ireland, instead and had a phenomenal time. Part of my calculation is that I wanted to go somewhere where none of my friends were in order to test out the strength of my Jewish identity AWAY from family and friends. I arrived a week before Rosh Hashanah and suddenly realized I hadn't thought this part through. Further, the program I went with wanted me to do a home visit with a Catholic family over Yom Kippur. My nervous system went into overdrive, guiding me towards the realization that I NEEDED to be with other Jews, and that didn't feel (too) guilty when the program got angry at me for canceling with the family. I made phone calls and found myself a family to stay with. We've even stayed somewhat in touch.
While I was there I even took a class on the Middle East. I honestly didn't understand that much of it, but I was intrigued to see the Irish perspective. The Irish see themselves as underdogs under British rule. I correctly assumed they might see things from the point of view of underdogs.
Now Israelis certainly have their own history of being underdogs towards Britan from the British mandate, but Irish by and large focus instead on people who identify as Palestinians. I thought it might be very balanced and brave of me to learn some history in that context. The truth was I actually didn't learn all that much other than that the students in the class didn't seem to care much about the class at all, but certainly weren't interested in Jewish perspectives of what they learned and were dumbfounded the one time I spoke up.
In any case, it was during these first years of college that I started to learn new ways of thinking and talking about Israel and Palestine. Now, many will say that higher education is a breeding ground for anti-Semitism. I'm not going to speak on that now because I'm not experiencing higher education directly right now. Also, I want to make clear that I wanted to learn alternate points of view. I wanted to make sure I wasn't only listening to my team's side.
Back on Oberlin College campus again, here's what I remember.
I remember an enormous photo of a child throwing a rock, an image I now know comes from the First Intifada. I wasn't sure how to feel about this image. I guess it was sort of akin to the famous photo from Tiananmen Square of the man standing in front of a tank. A David vs. Goliath, powerless confronting powerful sort of image. I don't know why it was being displayed then. I think I was supposed to be inspired by it and, frankly, I guess I sort of was. If you listen to the podcast at that link, you'll see I'm not alone in feeling really uncomfortable with the image and asking big questions about the role of the Israeli military in conflict with the Palestinians, specifically during the First Intifada. (Feelings would change drastically during the Second Intifada.)
I want to emphasize something. My discomfort with that image of the rock wasn't unusual or especially enlightened. Many Jews have wrestled with these questions. I wasn't rejecting my community; I was engaging with questions that already existed within it, but somewhere along the way I began to believe that I was unique. I plan to refer back to this later when I tell more about the person I became who thought I had to distance myself from my own people.
In any case, also at Oberlin, I remember celebrating Purim. It is one of my favorite holidays for reasons both obvious and hidden. It's a day of wild frivolity and costumes and, yes, drinking, which as a young college student I definitely participated in. It is also enormously spiritual because all of that wildness is actually about faith in Gd and about subverting a decree that had been made against us.
Well, one year at Oberlin I think I was helping to hand out Hamentashen or something like that when a professor approached me privately. He said my holiday was an excuse to celebrate genocide. I had no idea what he was talking about. To me the holiday was about survival.
It turns out he was referencing the end of the story (a story entirely about subversions) in which we learn that the king who has decreed our destruction is powerless to revoke the decree, but can allow Jews to defend themselves. (Thanks so much for letting us defend ourselves, King.) This segment of the story ends in a total bloodbath. Yes, it's troubling, but Jews are used to grappling with difficult ideas and difficult texts. I highly encourage you listen to this podcast in which Rabbi Daniel Reifman discusses the process of working through difficult texts and addresses this one specifically. Among many other things, he says there is no historical evidence that said bloodbath actually took place. He describes the story of serving the purpose of catharsis, much like the final act of Get Out, an absolute work of genius about racial prejudice and trauma that ends in ends in an intense, violent, and obviously fictional catharsis.
So that's what I remember from this time period. To sum, I looked critically, pushing back on automatically adopting what might have seemed like a one-sided party line.
I also felt singled out and preyed upon. The professor (a person in a position of power in relation to me) approached me when I was standing by myself. I had no one to back me up, argue back or help me understand what was happening. To then accuse me of celebrating GENOCIDE (a word that we absolutely have to talk about more later) was aggressive and flattening. It made me doubt who I was and feel ashamed without understanding why.
It was a moment that foreshadowed where I find myself today.
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