half a longing: December 2009

The theme for this 34th year will be boundaries: knowing when to set and hold them; knowing when to let them down. (Admittedly, it's been a theme before.) When I used to co-teach a women's self defense class, we found that self defense was less about how to physically fend off an attacker than it was about how to prevent someone from encroaching on your space to begin with. So much of self defense is prevention, recognizing the signs of discomfort in your throat and in your chest when you don't feel safe or respected. Recognizing what you want, asking for it, standing your ground. (Thanks to my lesbian self defense teacher Judith Fein, author of How to Fight Back and Win, for this insight.) And, also, remembering to be open to vulnerability. Remembering not to be so fiercely independent as to cease letting anyone else in. Ah, balance.

In preparation for a recent trip to Israel for my brother's wedding, I was looking online for a downloadable map of Jerusalem, where I would be staying, and was struck by what the maps I found did and didn't say, by the inherently political nature of mapping supposedly physical boundaries, which are really just superimposed by the people who get to draw them. I was trepidatious to go at first. I'd been avoiding returning there for the past 15 years after having learned the other side of the story of the creation of the State of Israel as an adult - the massacre at Deir Yassin; the forced dislocation of Palestinian people whose homes were bulldozed before they could move back in - which was very much in opposition to what I'd learned at Zionist summer camp as a child, where we made Israel out of ice cream and were told that Israel was "a land without people for a people without land." And then, before going, I read The Invention of the Jewish People, a book by Shlomo Sand. Its basic thesis is that, contrary to popular mythology, there was never a mass exodus of Jews from Palestine after the Bar Kohkba Revolt in the 2nd Century CE; Jews left gradually and mixed with other groups wherever they lived. And, most of today's Ashkenazic Jews are not direct descendants of the Jews of Ancient Israel, but descendants of people who converted to Judaism in 10th century Russia. Jews do not make up an ethnicity, but a religious group, and so are not an exiled people returning to their land, as is claimed in the Israeli Declaration of Independence.

And, the inspiring part where this all leads: if Israel wants to be a real democracy it needs to give equal rights and citizenship to everyone who lives there, not just to Jews. His ideas are basic, and, according to reviews, a conglomeration of other scholars' ideas, some of which are verified and some of which are questioned. What's inspiring about the book is that an Israeli historian is trying to throw a wrench into the Zionist mythology that justifies oppressing and excluding Palestinian people, some of whom, the book claims, may have converted from Judaism to Islam in the 8th Century. Maybe if you're not Jewish this doesn't mean as much to you, but for me it was an enormous eye-opener. I'd always wondered why, if I was descended from the people of Israel/Palestine, my skin wasn't darker and my grandparents came from Russia. Why did we eat borscht and kasha instead of falafel and hummus? This book explained some of that. And so, in celebration of my 34th birthday, we feasted on the kinds of blintzes, latkes, split pea soup, borscht, and piroghis you'd find at B & H dairy on 2nd Avenue & St. Marks in Manhattan, which are the foods I associated with home, whatever that means.

As for the trip to Israel, it ended up being all right. Druze, Jewish, and Palestinian Christian and Muslim religious leaders all participated in and blessed the wedding for my brother, who does interfaith peace work in Jerusalem; it was incredible.

From Jerusalem

Ibrahim im Ahmad Abu El-Hawai, Sheikh Bukhari, Eliyahu McLean, and Orr Dalal

I felt like I could be there for my brother without having to buy into all of this stuff about Israel. People, buried on the Mount of Olives outside the Eastern wall of the Old City of Jerusalem, waiting from the grave for the Messiah to come: