Sorry to just be getting going with contributing to the blog! It took me a full five minutes to figure out how to post entries, if that gives you any idea.
Anyway. It's not uncommon, but was still surprising somehow, the week or so before I left, to be asked "are you nervous?!" about travelling to Jerusalem this week. I told them I wasn't, but the truth is a bit more complicated. I wasn't nervous for the reasons they were imagining. I was nervous because I hadn't been in Israel since my HUC year of study, nearly a decade ago now (I was ordained in 2004). Preparing to come back I found myself overwhelmed with sense memories, things I hadn't thought about for so long. A time when everything about being a rabbi -- everything about being a rabbinic student for that matter -- was still in front of me.
So I don't know... it's an amazing feeling to be here now, to touch that part of my past and to feel how much has changed, both.
Amazing and full day today. I chose the Arab/Jewish unity walk in Tel Aviv -- our guides took turns sharing with us their particular stories, overlapping and opposing narratives of history in Jaffa and Israel as a whole. One people's war of independence is another's collective memory of disaster. That they could say this in each other's presence and allow it to be ... I wish these conversations at home could feel as open.
Afternoon concluded with a performance called "Not By Bread Alone" by a Deaf-Blind Theater Company. Interspersed with skits that were more whimsical an elegaic were first person narratives from the performers as to their levels of vision and hearing... how they experience the world, what makes them feel sad or shut out. As they explained to us, some of them see but don't hear, or hear but don't see, or don't have either ability, yet all have ambitions and all have dreams.
They could have been talking about any of us. Maybe they were.
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