Day One: Arrival

Jason Mast
Sep 2, 2018 · 7 min read

On the flat desert road from Ben Gurion Airport to Tel Aviv I’m struck by the implausibility of it all. I’ve never been one for the nationalist agitprop or the Israel-centered Judaism that sometimes dominates the communities I grew up around; something about the notion of a place where a particular ethnic group was explicitly privileged ran counter to the values we Americans were raised to profess, if not often actually live by, and to the Hippie-and-Heschel notions of American Judaism itself. But I have long felt the allure of myth, understanding viscerally the power of narrative to give direction in a meaning-starved world. It’s easier, sometimes, to live by legends. And so I’m less struck by Zionism’s pull anywhere than I am staring out the window of a bus to Tel Aviv, jet-lagged and half-asleep, seeing a group of white cabs that say “Moneet” in black on the door and beyond, past the shrubs, apartment buildings rising like oasis mirages, each window-ledge telling the story of a family inside, eating or fighting or despairing. It’s the details, I guess, that catch you unguarded. They sneak in when I can’t mount the intellectual defenses, the series of notes and facts, dates and philosophies, quotes and statistics, moralisms and articles that ultimately just amount to a verbose cowardice, a carefully hedged out moderation, the intellectual equivalent of fortifying the walls and holing in a castle while there’s a war raging outside, which there is, which there has been for a hundred years.

The whole grand narrative comes together for me in the taxis and the apartment. I understood it all in that moment, as I would come in later days to understand it overlooking the carefully placed highway lights lining the Jerusalem Hills and even the gratuitous kitsch of Little Israel. In ways I had never been in any previous trip, I was struck by the Messianic impossibility of what has been accomplished here. For this, an innumerable number of wars large and small were fought, claiming an innumerable number of men and women. For this: that there may be a Jewish civilization after 2,000 years when the dreams of a return to Zion were just similes for dreams of the Days to Come. That such a civilization might allow Jews to safely have such concerns as food and family and fights over whose turn it was to wash the dishes or choose the channel. That it might develop to the point of window treatments and taxi drivers — or maybe that’s not it. Maybe the Hebrew letters sneak in and hit whatever part of me understood as a young child that Hebrew words balanced themselves on my tongue as English never did, like a perfectly baked chocolate, and that its guttural harshness could, in the right mouth, be the sound of a cat purring.

Much of the first days did indeed feel like a return. I had come because I was not accepted at various jobs and fellowships and I didn’t know what to do other than that I needed time and a lot of it, to think, to pause, to gain direction. Indeed, I was a walking cliche. I had that classic suburban American driftlessness, that desire to get out. But I had also come, vaguely, to finish something that had been left unfinished, to answer a question I never really began answering and had all but put aside for the last three years of college, never really knowing the precise wording of what was being asked to begin with. Perhaps this is nothing like why most people come to this promised land, and perhaps it is exactly why. The best phrasing might be to say that I came to uncover my relationship to Israel, but that term has been so overused, so hammered in by the teachers at the Jewish day school I attended, so commodified by an entire industry of Israel boosters and Jewish–American elders terrified by the supposedly ever-disappearing, ever-intermarrying population, that I can scarcely type the phrase without shuddering. It’s become too American, too surface. I don’t want to sound like a 20-something on Taglit, high off their first taste of limestone and Dead-Sea salt, although I probably am closer to them than I’d admit.

The question, instead, I’ve begun to use to describe my views of the country and conflict is this: How do we reckon with the cost of this country, the Palestinians kicked off land and subjected to abuse for over 70 years? It’s the question I ask every time I’m struck by the implausibility. “Oh my god,” I say, and “at what cost?”

Of course, I’m not so altruistic or academic. This is about me. I think often of a poem we were told in synagogue and school growing up. It’s “Silver Platter” by Natan Alterman, written shortly after the 1948 war. In it, Alterman depicts land fresh from battle, and the new country’s young, bloodied soldiers “showing no signs of life or death”, telling a nation — the word here referring to Am Yisrael, the diaspora and those in the land, rather than any political entity state — “We are the silver platter on which the Jewish state was given.” It’s meant to martyrize. It’s meant to hallow. It’s meant to remind the young and diasporic of the high cost of a promised land, and to elevate the New Jew from hero into God. (Notably, God is absent from the poems. The soldiers give Israel “the miracle, the only miracle”). I want to know what other silver platters there were, what other peoples were sacrificed, willingly or unwillingly, what other lands, what moral choices were made that might not stand well in history: What precisely was the cost? And I want to know where I am in that poem’s picture, if I am there at all. I wouldn’t have framed them as such then, but these were much of the questions I had as a schoolkid, trying to make sense of the gaps in the stories we were told.

There are no more stories here. This is not my high school trip, where they dropped us from Poland’s concentration camps straight to Shabbat at the Kotel, a move I understood as half-truth and half-manipulation even as I felt its pull. No one’s forcings an agenda as we arrive at the secular Yeshiva in Tel Aviv, where a several-hour orientation awaits. An extensive meal — Falafel of course, with all the fixings –is spread out on a long picnic table instead, and we mill about on line, sometimes mingling and sometimes just standing awkwardly. We take our food to a large multipurpose room inside, but they wait far too long to start the presentation and I feel like a kid again, trying to navigate a room of people like Daedalus’ Maze, where sitting quietly seems almost as unbearable as trying to carry on a conversation with the person next to you. Maybe my social skills haven’t improved as much as I’d like to think they have.

It’s a marginally motley crew. The woman next to me is in her late 20s or early 30s, from Brooklyn, with several years of experience teaching, and there’s a married couple who came here to teach together for a year. But most everyone is all but fresh out of college, apparently completely white and most, although not nearly all, from the northeast or the west coast. We get a presentation on BINA, the Jewish movement for social change, and their concept of social Judaism, which basically encompasses an open-door policy, social justice, and the idea of building a community through Judaism. I’m reminded of all the progressive Jewish causes I’ve heard of before, and the unaccountable distaste I have for them: I agree with most of what they all do, and yet something about them repels me, their new-agism perhaps or the way they bring me back to my time in school . I’m reminded of the orientations I had for the Israel trip in high school. Evan, a boy who has just made Aliyah and will soon join the IDF, was fixated for much of it on schwarma. Now I know no one and the stakes are more serious, even if they aren’t higher at all. There’s a presentation from the director, who made aliyah ten years ago, and then ice breakers involving each person doing a dance move and saying where they’re from and where they’ll be teaching. I listen intently for the cities they’re going to, mulling who I’d like to hear say “Nazareth.” I remember very few names. There are occasional down moments where we talk to one another. I’m terrified of them.

On the bus to Nazareth, I try to watch the countryside, the fields of wheat citrus and all the trees planted in the names of good, God-fearing bar-mitzvah boys. This is a place, like most places, where land matters almost as much as myth, and I’m always curious about what I’ll see, what new revelations a stray bush might reveal. But I’m off of one hour of sleep and I crash hard the moment the conversation lulls.

That night, we move into a plain but livable apartment. The madrich has left us a menu I can sort of read for a nearby pizza, pasta and sandwich place. We eventually walk down to the nearby kiosk to ask the clerk there where exactly it is (why we don’t call, I don’t know). I stutter over three words, words I know but can’t say, before she asks me Eizeh Safa and I tell her Ivrit, but really English, and she calls on the phone for us, and, in Hebrew I understand perfectly, tells the man on the other end, “they speak utterly no Hebrew.” It’s takeout, she says eventually, but points us to the mall, where the same language problem repeats itself at a food court shawarma place, but the shopkeepers are nice and I’m tired and starving, and in Nazareth’s nightly wind, tahini and hummus taste like 18, the last time I was in the Promised Land to stay, curious and lost and hungry.

Jason Mast

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