I visited Israel: And This is How It Felt

Here's me at Startup HQ in Tel Aviv. 

I wrote this while sitting on the plane in Israel during boarding. These are the days I miss, when words just spill out of me like the overflowing havdalah cup on Saturday nights. It doesn't always happen like this, but when it does, I know I'm getting close to being back to my happy place. 

When I made aliyah back in 2012, I had two — count 'em two — solid jobs. I was pretty sure that neither would let me go, because both were Jewish organizations and I was, after all, moving to Israel. Then, just a few months after arriving in Israel and meeting Mr. T, I was let go without much ceremony. It was heartbreaking. I got married, I got pregnant, and I was jobless. I picked up some freelance content writing work through connections, I applied for several full-time jobs in the tech sector doing stuff I didn’t want to do, and I turned down a few jobs because I couldn’t handle the soul-sucking possibilities.

I spent the second half of my time in Israel underemployed and mostly broke. It was incredibly depressing and demoralizing. My English was great and a definite plus, but my Hebrew wasn’t good enough to make it in most workplaces.

For the longest time, my biggest worry about returning to Israel has been the financial one. Everyone says where there’s a will, there’s a way, but I refuse to live in poverty, constantly in the red, wondering how I’m going to buy groceries. I’ve done it in Israel. I’ve done it in the U.S. I refuse to do it again — and I refuse to live on credit.

During my trip this past week to Israel, I was supposed to spend a day touring the Old City and Har Ha’Bayit. I found out last minute that I can’t visit Har Ha’Bayit without visiting the mikvah first, and then our rabbi said it was a blanket “no” for visiting anyway. There were three other tracks, and I opted for the one that seemed least attractive: a high-tech day in startup nation in Tel Aviv. Some of the people I’d really connected with on the trip were heading on that track, so I said okay, and we were off.

We met with some really fascinating people (and one guy who wasn’t so fascinating) and I ended up realizing that, since leaving Israel, I’ve acquired quite a bit of experience in fields that could — and should — make me marketable in Israel now.

Not only did I spend nearly two years working for a hardware IoT startup that I took to market, but I’ve also been working in inbound marketing and all it entails as a copywriter and editor. My English is 100, and with the right time and patience, my Hebrew can get back to where it was.

As the tour guide said when I told him my recent experience, he said that people would be doing backflips to hire me. Now’s the time to come back, he said.

My ultimate dream is that Tesla opens an office in Israel and Mr. T can put in for an easy transfer and that my job, in which the entire company is remote, will let me work from Israel as long as is humanly possible. I’m just thinking about all of the potential business my company could acquire in Israel.

My wheels are spinning, and I’m considering carefully and thoughtfully what a return to Israel looks like. It’s so funny that I arrived and spent two or three days thinking to myself that a return to Israel with my three monkeys and husband in tow was an impossibility. And then, at some point, the magic of Israel, of the place, the people, it all hit me hard and I can think of nothing other than a quick return.

So, we’ll see how/where things go. Mr. T would drop everything tomorrow to move back. I, on the other hand, am much more practical and have to consider all the variables — financial chief among them.

And now? Time to buckle up for wheels up on my way back to the U.S. L’hitraot Yisrael (see ya Israel).

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Here is something I wrote while visiting the Kotel (aka the Western Wall, and please don't call it the "wailing wall"), I wrote this in a moment of overwhelming emotion in which I felt like my breath had been knocked out of me and my heart leapt out of my chest. I was crying, overwhelmed, more so than I've ever been at the Kotel. I don't know what or why, but something was happening. 

Pigeons pining for our prayers

Pecking away at souls they know are there

Digging deeper into walls of stone

Finding comfort in this place we long to call home. 

Heartsick and the breath stolen

From my breast I can’t breath,

I can’t speak, can't see,

Because all there is is stone.

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Re-imagining Israel Education Part II: Hebrew!

Okay, so I already posted some theories of mine about the importance of Hebrew in Jewish identity and identification with the land, people, and state of Israel, but I think I need to hit the point home a little more and a little more clearly.

I wrote a paper for one of my courses this semester called "The DNA of Jewish Education: Modern Hebrew and Identity Formation" (<-- that's the Google doc). I don't expect anyone to go read the entire thing, but I want to highlight a few of my findings from my research. For those of you who don't believe that Modern Hebrew language literacy is key in Jewish identity formation and ultimately identification with Israel, I hope this information is compelling! Feel free to argue back any of the points made below or in the full paper. Mad props if you actually read the paper, too.

A thought to consider while reading: Had we decided to teach Yiddish in Hebrew and Day Schools, it likely would have stuck. Why? It was spoken at home; Modern Hebrew as not. But the Zionist lobby won out on this front and thus Modern Hebrew became the tour de force of the Talmud Torah and even made its way into public schools in the New York area (and is still offered as a foreign language in 36 U.S. public schools).

In Gilead Morahg's Language is Not Enough, he cites a 1989 University of Wisconsin survey of all 284 students in the university’s Modern Hebrew program that shows “very clearly” that most of the students chose to study Hebrew because, on one level or another, they were seeking an “authentic connection to their own culture and a more coherent sense of their own identity.” Ultimately, the survey showed, when asked students to indicate and rank the areas in which they anticipated using Hebrew later in life, the students ranked the following as the top three: (1) Travel to Israel; (2) Educating Your Children; and (3) Religious Services.

...

Students in many schools take French or Spanish for language requirements, and so Hebrew tends to fall into the pit of general language instruction. The missing piece, Gilead Morahg argues, is that for most students and teachers, Hebrew is presented as a foreign language, but that for most students and teachers of modern Hebrew, it is not the language of a foreign country but of a people of which they are a part. Morahg refers to this as the “suppression of the profound cultural connection between the Hebrew language and its Jewish learners,” and that this is what threatens to invalidate much of what goes on in the classroom. “It disorients and frustrates the teachers and it almost invariably disappoints the students,” Morahg says.

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A people has traditions, a shared history, memory, and, most importantly, a common language. “A group speaking the same language different from that of other groups in the same or neighboring location, and identifying with the same language as a symbol of this social unit,” one scholar says, “has basic advantages for maintaining its own existence as a distinct community." Thus, without a common language, cultural and structural assimilationist tendencies become stronger. When groups are faced with rapid assimilation, Elana Shohamy argues, groups tend to use the device of language to recreate their identity, which is what we call subtractive learning in the language acquisition.

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Elana Shohamy cites a 1996 Imber-Bailey study that examined the hypothesis that children acquiring an ancestor language develop an ethnic identification that differs from those not acquiring it. The study concluded that bilinguals perceived themselves as part of a community using “we” more frequently than monolinguals, not to mention that bilinguals tend to have a more positive evaluation of their culture.

...

If parents and educators can begin looking at the Hebrew language as Waxman does, as “symbolic communication” and as Hayim Nachum Bialik and Ahad Haam did, as a “repository for a culture’s cherished attitudes and values,” perhaps headway can be made.

...

Identity, Morahg argues, is a mode of action: Who you are is not a function of what you know but of what you do. The ability to communicate using the Hebrew language, then, is probably the “most powerful means of enhancing and expressing a personal sense of Jewish identity.” In this way, Hebrew language functions in an entirely different way than most other aspects of a Jewish studies curriculum, because language is more than a form of knowledge, but a “behavior, a mode of personal and cultural action.”

And my conclusion:

Just as Jews cannot agree on a universally accepted definition of Jewish identity, so, too, it is unlikely that educators will ever agree on why we teach Hebrew, let alone how we should teach Hebrew. What is agreed upon is that Hebrew is critical to the social project of Jewish education in its formal and informal modes” and it is a “key component of transmitting Jewish religious and cultural identification.” Citing a Jewish educator, Sharon Avni accurately observes that “Hebrew is the DNA of Jewish education” -- it permeates all areas of study. But there are few external incentives for children to learn Hebrew. 

Aside from the need for central institutions, realistic goals and outcomes, appropriate learning conditions, and a dedicated, passionate, and educated workforce, there are basic ways we can start to infuse Jewish education with the taste for Modern Hebrew. Educators must create classroom environments that encourage students to identify with the communal feelings they have during a Passover seder or when lighting Chanukah candles. Educators need to express the validity of Hebrew as the language of the Jewish people as a cultural construct, and not just a foreign language or rote of the Zionist dialogue. Only then will Jewish students become more engaged in their heritage language, Hebrew, and, one can only hope, in their own Jewish selves as well.

Re-imagining Israel Education

Toward the end of May, I spent about four days at a conference of sorts as a member of the 2011 iCenter Fellows. What is the iCenter?

The iCenter serves as a national address and advocate for high-quality and meaningful Israel education. The iCenter is dedicated to developing and enhancing the field of pre-collegiate Israel education in North America, in both formal and informal settings. By building upon existing strengths in the field, the iCenter supports the work of Israel educators; identifies compelling educational resources and initiatives; and fosters the creation of a cadre of lay and professional champions of Israel education.

What are the Fellows? Basically we're 19 people who are going to take on the world of Israel Education and completely blow it up in an awesome way. With our powers combined, we're going to make Israel Education what it should be: meaningful, long-lasting, passion-inducing, and fun. But for more specifics:

In a new partnership, six American academic institutions have teamed up to offer their graduate students a Master's Concentration Program in Israel Education. Students study a common curriculum, gather together for eight colloquium days, receive individual mentoring, and create their own learning experience in Israel.

The schools represented in our cohort include New York University (that's me!), Azrieli Graduate School at YU, Davidson School at JTS, Hornstein Jewish Professional Leadership Program at Brandeis, HUC, and Spertus (in Chicago). We spent a Sunday-Thursday presenting on our views of Israel education, what makes good Israel education, listening to the "Jewish Jordan" Tamir Goodman speak, among other informative aspects of the colloquium.

The most interesting thing to me was hearing from a group of six high schoolers with varying levels of observance but all with membership at Reform synagogues/Hebrew schools. One of the students had never heard of Birthright, another came from a Muslim-Jewish background. And all of them responded to my question about the importance of Hebrew language in identification with Israel as extremely important and disappointingly lacking. My takeaway from the colloquium? We're doing our young people a huge disservice by not emphasizing the importance of Hebrew language in Jewish identity formation. My suspicions were confirmed by the high schoolers as well as my cohort from the six institutions.

Another thing I found absolutely fascinating was a text study we did with the Declaration of the Establishment of the State of Israel from 1948. (In Hebrew, it's called a megillah!) We focused on the following passage:

WE APPEAL to the Jewish people throughout the Diaspora to rally round the Jews of Eretz-Israel in the tasks of immigration and upbuilding and to stand by them in the great struggle for the realization of the age-old dream -- the redemption of Israel.  

אנו קוראים אל העם היהודי בכל התפוצות להתלכד סביב הישוב בעליה ובבנין ולעמוד לימינו במערכה הגדולה על הגשמת שאיפת הדורות לגאולת ישראל.

The reason we focused on this passage? We spent a lot of time asking WHY Israel, why should we in the Diaspora care, and why should we convince our kids that we care. So on our last day, we looked at this passage. Why? A few things.

This passage uses the word "them" to refer to those who are physically in the land, while appealing to the Jews of the Diaspora to help this them, those who choose to live in the land, with immigration and upbuilding (infrastructure, basically) and to stand by "them" in their struggles to realize the redemption of Israel. Many people often ask whether Jews have a right to exist outside the land, as it was David Ben-Gurion's dream for all Jews to live in Israel. But this very passage in the declaration of the state validates the existence of those outside the land. However, it also obligates Diaspora Jews. It basically says, if you're not going to join us, you better stand behind us.

Of course, this is merely regarding medinat Yisrael (state of Israel), and we spent a lot of time during the colloquium analyzing the differences between Am, Medinat, and Eretz Yisrael (people, state, and land, respectively). Likewise, we discussed how we would prioritize the following three phrases (hat tip to my awesome roommate Allie, who is studying to become a rabbi at HUC, for this activity):

• A State for Jews
• A State for All People
• A Jewish State

How would you rank them? And do you view a difference between the people, state, and land of Israel? Or are the three the same? Should they be the same?

Do you think your kids are getting a quality Israel education? Is Hebrew important to you or your kids as it pertains to Israel identification?