Connectedness

This post was drafted on July 29 but revised on August 10.

I'm sitting in Ben Gurion airport, wired with caffeine to help me through the time zone shift and distracting myself from the complicated feelings about leaving by writing this blog post.

LN read my previous post, appreciated it, and then we started up a back and forth about some of what she appreciated about her trip here. The word she used again and again was "connectedness." She used this word to describe both the way people communicated with each other on Shabbat as well as our everyday interactions with strangers. She also said she felt a sense of joy permeating wherever we went. It might be surprising to see that in a country at war, but I think she's onto something. 

Before I came here people asked if I was afraid. While I was here people were surprised that I would prefer to be here than back home. What's hard to explain is this growing sense of anxiety I feel at home. A growing sense that even if a stranger is polite, I don't know the truth of what they're thinking. I don't know what rhetoric they've heard and what they've rejected or maybe just a little bit agreed with. I don't know when they're biting their tongue or tiptoeing.

There is great diversity in Israel. Yes, there is diversity in religion but I also mean diversity in politics, diversity in religiosity, diversity in lifestyle, diversity in experience with multicultural groups and more. But even people who might stand on different parts of a spectrum are united on certain basic understandings around survival and self-respect as a people. 

I might have thought I felt this myself and I might have been wrong about it. 

But then LN saw it and named it.

In response I said, "I know this might sound weird, but you've been asking me what is behind Jew hatred and I actually think this connectedness might be one of them."

LN is vegan for health reasons. I leveraged this to make my point.

"You know how if you tell someone you're vegan the first thing they do is challenge you on why and assume you are judging them for not being vegan? I think there is an element of that towards Jews. We have a good thing going and sometimes I actually think it makes people uneasy, like by being who we are we are judging who they are."

I've heard the "they're just jealous" argument about anti-semitism before, but this time I felt it internally too. It struck me was that LN could appreciate what she was seeing without immediately feeling the need to qualify it, balance it, or explain it away. And when I named this to her, she voice messaged me back, again as an outsider observer. "Oh my gosh," she said, "I think you might be right."

I think about her discussing all this with me both as a friend and also as an outsider. I wonder what that's like for her to see it, appreciate it, and not be completely part of it even as we welcome her.

In any case, I leave today knowing I'm leaving a kind of cocoon that has nourished my sense of belonging. Yes, I have a vast and dear Jewish community back home, and I don't take that for granted. But there was something different about spending such a long time in a place where even strangers shared certain assumptions about why this peoplehood matters. I hadn't realized how much energy I had been spending feeling uncertain until, for a little while, I no longer had to.