When the Jewish holidays roll around, I inevitably find myself longing for my old life, in Israel.
I miss being a Jew among the Jews. I miss everyone knowing why you’re stocking up on apples, conversations about the inflated price of honey, and the inevitable “Eifo atem ba’hag?” (“Where are you for the holiday?”) — by which everyone always meant: Where are you going to be eating? In my experience of Israeli Judaism, that was always the most important question. If you had no place to be, or people thought you had no place to be? You would be immediately invited to join the person doing the asking. Because God forbid you should be hungry! Or spend the holiday alone.
There’s a lot of talk in cyberspace about “Zionism” this and “Zionists” that. Many of my fellow-travelers on the road to peace and justice in the Middle East can get very angry about Israel and What Israel Does, conflating the horrors of occupation with the daily life of folks just hoping to get by — and far be it from me to blame them. I’m more often furious than not, myself.
But much as there is little understanding of the Palestinians on the side of Israel and her right-wing supporters, there is also little understanding of Israelis on the pro-Palestinian/pro-peace side.
I know the occupation is evil, I know it must be fought, and I know that my people have been far too complacent in allowing it to continue and buying the lies that their government has sold them for decades.
But I also know my people to be good and generous and warm. The year that everyone thought I had no place to go for Passover, I received no fewer than eleven invitations to other people’s seders — I don’t think my foreign-born husband has been asked once, by a single American he has ever met, where he’ll be for Thanksgiving, and if he and his family want to swing by for some turkey. Not once.
And so this is part of what makes me so furious about Israeli government policy and the complacent acceptance and promotion of same by far too many Israelis — it completely covers and distorts all that is good about the place, all that is right, all that I miss.
I miss the smell of guava every fall. I miss the light of sunset into the sea, and over the stone of Jerusalem. I miss the greetings from complete strangers, on the bus, in the store, down the hall: Shana tova! A good year! And to you, too! I miss my people. I miss being home.
I don’t expect Palestinians to feel sorry for me, or even to much care about all this. They are the receiving end of a machine of destruction run by my people for their own ends. I know that many Israelis genuinely believe there is no safety to be found in any other set-up — that all the proposals for peace put forward to date would put them and their family in real danger. But I don’t expect the genuine nature of that fear to carry any weight with people who are literally hungry for food, and forced to regularly bury their dead.
But the genuine nature of my peoples’ emotion does make it very hard for me to turn my back on them. It makes it very hard for me to not keep hoping — always, always hoping — that someday, they will see their errors and correct them. Will do the right thing, let go of their hate and their fear, and share with the Palestinians that which (whether they like it or not) is just as much Palestinian as it is Israeli.
And so tonight, as I welcome the new year in my lovely suburban home outside of Chicago, with my beloved husband, boy, and girl, and friends we hold very dear — a very large part of my heart will be where it always is on these days: in the east. In Tel Aviv, in Jerusalem, walking along the beach, still dreaming of the peace I thought we had achieved back in 1993.
Shana tova u’metooka, a good and sweet year, to one and all. May this be the one that brings peace.
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Programming note: Because Rosh HaShana is a two-day holiday, and is this year immediately followed by Shabbat, I won’t be checking in with the blog until after Shabbat is over, on Saturday evening. Comments remain open, of course, but if you get caught in moderation, I won’t be able to fish you out until then. My apologies!
Emily L. Hauser - In My Head 