Printer Friendly

Email to A Friend

Friday January 25, 2008

Returning to the other homeland

by joanna steinhardt

Yossi — let’s call him Yossi — loaded my suitcases into the trunk of his cab with an empathetic smile. I watched the familiar plains outside Tel Aviv slip by in the fuzzy darkness, too dizzy with apprehension and relief to feel the dramatic emotions I once imagined would define this moment.

We spoke about America and Israel, his brother in Vegas, the good and bad things of here and there, the weather in Detroit, and then fell silent. He stood at the curb at Ben-Gurion after I paid and thanked him, watching me gather my impossibly full suitcases into a wheelable pile, and said with a knowing glint, “At takhziri.” You’ll be back. In my stupor, I just smiled and waved. Not until I was inside did the words register.

Back in the States, I came to San Francisco for a visit, scoping out my potential new home. I weaseled my way into the generous good graces of some members of the Mission Minyan and found my way to a Shabbat meal with an eclectic group of Bay Area Jews. To my right sat an impeccably dressed young man with the boyish face of a middle school crush, the nimble mind of a young genius, a shy grin and a bow tie.

Somewhere in the overture to conversation, we got on the subject of halachah. “Why does anyone follow it?” I asked. I was raised Reform in the suburbs of Detroit and became a tripped-out raver in high school, exploring the industrial ruins of the city on the weekends. I was into the psychedelic side of Vedanta and Zen for most of my youth, until I discovered Judaism in my early 20s and became Orthodox. In the last few years, I fell into the ambiguous regions between observant Jew and lazy spiritualist. Jewish law must have been on my mind that night, since I had just undone the most Jewish deed of my life so far by moving away from Israel.

In Israel my ambivalence and equivocations were in context. I walked outside and it was a Jewish country, not just on paper, but deep in the heart of the culture. I could reference yitzi’at mizrayim, the Exodus from Egypt, while ordering a latte and get a laugh from the barista. Blessings flowed freely at the falafel stand; kabbalistic talismans protected every stall in the market. Even the hedonistic secularists of Tel Aviv were deeply embedded in the Jewish tradition of doubt and measured antagonism. (I mean, nowhere else in the world would they actually put bacon on their sushi — on their sushi!)

But here in the States, what’s the use of Jewishness when it lacks the rich context and querulous history around it? What’s the point of being Jewish in the diaspora?

The young man in the bow tie told me that he believed there were two types of young observant Jews: one was in search of the transcendent experience of the Divine, while the other was in it for aesthetic reasons — for the ritual, the structure, the idea of being part of an ancient tradition. I clearly fall into the first category (as I quickly admitted), but I know many people who fall into the latter. (I assumed the young man with the bow tie was one of them, and he confirmed this.) Yet both types strike me as profoundly individualistic. Is this America? Is Judaism just something I’m into?

A rabbi I know in Israel would call this, reproachfully, a “compartmentalized” life, while my professor at the university in Jerusalem would call it postmodern consumer Judaism, made to order for the discerning urban Jew, user-friendly for the self-absorbed globalist.

While life in the diaspora might not appear “spiritual,” I wonder if there’s not a holistic unity in its disparate components. A divine singularity amid the cacophonous plurality of the world around us — is that not the most basic and beguiling first law of our commandments?

In the end, I decided to make San Francisco my new home. So far, I have no answers to my questions, just many new questions to add to the growing list. They often arise in my most Jewish moments, as I listen to the parshah chanted in an archaic lilt on Saturday morning, staring out the window and wondering about the neighborhood around me.

I’ve returned again, but it’s a very different return this time. Now, I’ve come back to my first homeland. In many ways, it is just as new and strange as the other.

Joanna Steinhardt recently finished her master’s thesis in cultural studies at the Hebrew University of Jerusalem.

Did you find this article interesting? Subscribe to our FREE newsletter and you'll be notified each week when "J." goes online. We'll tell you about the most important stories of the week and give you a link to each one.

This page contains a BETA version of Amazon contextual links. They are marked by the dashed underline.  Your purchases support our site. At times they point to items which are not related to the actual link. Please alert us by email if you discover objectionable links.