They weren't kidding when they said it was intense!
We got up bright and early and made a few stops at lookout points around Jerusalem. Here's the group (foolishly we're standing in front of the sun...) on Mount Scopus overlooking the Judean Desert. You can see me top row, third from the left:
Then we headed to Ein Prat, a school in Alon.
So this is an extremely complicated location that so far hasn't been discussed, though I have little doubt it will come up extensively in the future days. Alon is a Jewish town in the Judean Desert. Or someone else might say it is an Israeli settlement in the West Bank. I'll talk more about the controversy in my entry on my West Bank trip (And yes, I do still plan to write that), but essentially this is contested territory. Entering Alon, frankly it looks pretty grim. Watchtowers and barbed wire fences everywhere.
Inside, however, it is very beautiful. The school is lovely and the mountains and desert hills all around are gorgeous, it's hot but it's dry and there's a strong desert wind all the time, and the lighting is perfect. Orange and Purple and Gold. Housing is fine, I'm in a tiny dorm with four girls, two in a room. I love the food - it's total kibbutz food, and I just gobble it up. Shnitzel, shakshuka, hummus, pasta, cucumber salad, that kind of thing. Maybe I'll gain back those lost 6 lbs.
I'm finding myself on the outskirts of the group a lot. I think because I've been constantly networking for the past few weeks, now I'm ready to do more thinking and contemplating and listening, so I think I've been a little anti-social. I don't think I really mind.
There are a bunch of Israelis here on a parallel program which makes the place really lively. They're always running around and singing and cooking things. Today when we were studying I looked over and two of them were doing some kind of contortionist act on the veranda.
We have classes back to back to back, and most of the classes contain this kind of study called chaveruta (sp) which means pairing up and reading/discussing a text. It's really challenging, especially with time constraints. Right now it feels like new ideas are just raining down on me and I'm not really processing yet, but I'm okay with that. I think it will filter through me with time. Dr. Goodman suggested we end the day in pairs again to discuss the day, and maybe I will eventually get to that. But for now, my buddy is my blog.
Things are about to get really nerdy. If you're not interested in religion/zionism you can check out now.
Okay, study partner, what did we do today?
-Dr. Goodman said that happy people are usually 1) connected to something bigger than themselves 2) surrounded by great friends. The aim of the program is to provide both. Sweet.
-We talked a lot about Genesis 3, with which I am very familiar. I think it's a lesson in parenting, like most of the Torah. Don't refuse your children knowledge, rather walk them through it. Don't prefer one child over the other (ala Cain/Abel and also Joseph and his brothers). Dani made a good point: Isn't God making that very mistake in "choosing" The Jewish people over all others? And isn't the fate of the Jews very similar to the fate of Joseph as a result? YES. Wow.
-The theory that the fruit of knowledge was only forbidden us to a point - that eventually God would have shared it with us in time, matches with the prevalent ban in Judaism against fortune tellers. All knowledge at the proper time. I personally find this theory to be bullshit.
-Dr. Goodman talked about Jeremiah 7 and how the Jews did not listen to Jeremiah because they believed God would protect them from the impending siege. They believed, in a rather Pagan way, that God lived in the temple and so dwelled among them, and thus Jerusalem could not be destroyed since it was God's house. The issue, Micah argued, is that the Jews believed that history would repeat itself, that were they were protected in the past they would be again, without closely considering the reason for that protection.
Micah draws a parallel to Israel in 1973 when the Yom Kippur war broke out. Israeli intelligence had all of the info required to see that they were about to be attacked. They saw the tanks coming. They saw the forces assembling. But they assumed they were just routine training maneuvers BECAUSE they were under the assumption that the Arab powers had the motive to completely wipe out Jewish Israel, everyone always tried to completely wipe out the Jews, and it was obvious they did not have the power to accomplish this, so they must not be planning to attack. But Israel did not consider their motive may have been only to seize SOME Israeli land, and so the threat was very real.
Micah's point is that you cannot assume history will repeat itself. You cannot really base your expectations for the future on events of the past, it will blind you to the details of the present situation. He said time is like walking backwards - you can see what happened to you, but you can't see where you're going, but still basing your trajectory only on what you can see behind you is not wise at all.
He said the Jewish people are "Trapped in our own memories. Trapped in our own biography." Which is something that really resonated with me. "Is it possible," he asked, "to have a sovereign state not haunted by Jewish memory? Is it possible not to be trapped by your own experience?" He continued, "We never see what we're looking at. We only see what we're expecting to look at."
I would add to this that you have to balance an attempt to look at the present and future with fresh eyes with a cognizance of the past. You can't just throw out past experience, either. In the case of the Yom Kippur war, the aggressors DID want to kill the Jews, that expectation was accurate, it was just the degree that was wrong. As for how to learn from memories without because totally consumed by them, everyone reading this knows I really wish I knew.
-Then we read and talked a lot about different roots of zionist thinking. A lot of people complained about how Jewish identity and Zionist desires seem to be so frequently built up by antisemitism and negative Jewish experience. Sartre wrote: "The Jew is one whom other men consider a Jew: that is the simple truth from which we must start. In this sense the democrat is right as against the anti-semite, for it is the anti-Semite who makes the Jew."
There was a bit of an outcry in the class about this. But not from me. It's been my repeated story this trip that until Birthright, I was a Jew in precisely this way. It was completely my negative experience that defined me as a Jew, and that defensiveness is still an enormous, overwhelming percentage of my Jewish identity. I have my doubts that it will ever be replaced by something else.
-I noted that Herzl's writing is not really about a "Jewish" state as much as a new state in which Jews can live. There's hardly anything "Jewish" about his vision. In fact he frequently argues against a theocracy, and passionately supports freedom of religion and acceptance for all in this new state. Gil Troy, our professor for this session, said it was because Herzl didn't really want a Jewish state. He just wanted to build another European state in which he could be a normal person, like everyone else.
This is a serious question that feels kind of like a cavity in me right now. What do we want? Or more fairly, what do I want? Do I want a Jewish state? Or do I want a state in which I feel normal? Are they the same thing?
-We ended the day with a lecture about the events leading to Ben Gurion's declaration of the State of Israel, which I was happy was mostly review. For once I felt like I knew what was going on! I found out some things I don't really love about Ben Gurion. Like that he wanted to fill the makhtesh with water for storage. OI.
Sorry as usual for how messy this is. I really had to cram it in. Love you all!
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