Latest on twitter:
The night before the trip, Becky tells me that there’s no chance for anything to happen between us while we’re in Israel.
“There’s no chance.”
I crinkle my face critically.
“None,” she reiterates.
It’s late, we’ve had a few drinks, our flight leaves tomorrow and it has become clear that my plan of staying up through the night is probably a bad idea. Becky and I are supposed to just be friends, but I can’t help but wonder about the possibility of something developing.
Technically, she was still dating “him,” but “he” was a disembodied name, someone from back home who she couldn’t tear herself away from even though she would spend whole evenings telling me why it would never ultimately work out between them, about how they had grown apart, become such different people after all those years removed from high school.
“I don’t know what to do. He’s been in my life for so long now.”
“You guys can break up.”
“It’s not that simple.”
The way she sometimes looked at me, the way she kissed me that night a week earlier when we practically fell over each other and slid into her dorm stairwell where all I could hear was the hollow echoing of doors opening and closing in the distance, made me think that he had become inconsequential, that it was just a matter of time before it would all come apart anyway.
There was no moral ambiguity for me. I was just playing a role, even as I had my own baggage to contend with; namely, being on a “break” from my girlfriend of 8 months. It had happened on her prompting. With the semester ending and things already rocky between us, her impending return to the mid-West for the duration of winter vacation seemed like a good opportunity to experiment with a formalized separation. Her words, not mine.
It didn’t help that moments after midnight on New Year, at a time when the cheap champagne was making me feel a little depressed about things, I got a call from her number and it was some drunk dude laughing and yelling and wishing me a “Merry New Year” with her tucked away somewhere in the backseat of the car they were in. He eventually passed her the phone and I was furious. Our exchange was the last one we would have for the remainder of her time at home.
But back in NY, here’s Becky with the sudden change of heart, the rising up of guilt that visits hours before we’re supposed to get on a plane together, spend half a day in the sky with our legs touching in tiny adjacent seats. I, who have let my imagination run a little haywire, have to stifle the disappointment of lost opportunity. I simply nod my agreement.
Except that when we’re actually airborne, suddenly the conversation from the night before is forgotten, stuck to the drying wine of our unwashed glasses still sitting in her sink. She whispers something in my ear, and then there’s that look, reborn, that she tosses me from inches away. And in response to all of it, instead of leaping at her renewed enthusiasm, I’m just annoyed – annoyed at the idea that yesterday was a “no” coupled with a lengthy lecture on her decision to be faithful and my need to respect that decision, and today is, abruptly and without warning, a “yes.” Apparently, I discover at this inopportune moment, I value consistency.
I decide to ignore her because I don’t know what else to do. But then, upon landing and running straight for a walking tour of the saturated riverbank of the Jordan, the ignoring quickly turns to shunning, and then soon after, into outright arguing.
“We just had a little disagreement, is all. Thank you very much for your concern.”
I say it in response to the looks we’re getting from these people who know nothing about us.
This trip, really, was supposed to be just an exotic journey – a free one, mind you – and not even a few hours after getting here, to this place that I’ve only ever read about before, it has become the search for stability amidst the destructive forces of an ambiguous collegiate friendship. This is definitely not what I had in mind. Against my best wishes, I’ve been thrust into the difficult task of making something more of the next 10 days.
Or so I resign myself to think. As we continue walking, the mud on the bottoms of my shoes begins to cake and dry and I find myself becoming taller with each new layer I step into. I let out a frustrated sigh and kick at a rock that has, quite absent-mindedly, placed itself directly in front of me.
But it’s only a little while later, back on the bus speeding towards a little farm where we are to snake down a hillside on donkeys while dressed in blue shepherd garb, that another prospect catches my eye. Katherine’s eyes are bright even though we’ve been awake for almost a day and it’s still only early afternoon here. I sense in her the air of calm maturity that has always attracted me, perhaps, because, I lack it myself.
She’s here with a friend, a flamboyant guy who asks, moments after we’re introduced, “So can I call you Ru? Or are we not there yet?”
How can I say no?
I, along with the two of them and another girl who makes it her business to deliver puns during every extended silence in a conversation, spend much of the trip laughing when we’re not supposed to and rolling our eyes when the rhetoric disturbs our sensibilities.
“What’s with all this Jewish stuff? It’s all they talk about!”
“Yeah, it’s like all they’re concerned about is making us appreciate this place.”
Becky has all but stopped speaking with me at this point, and other than the occasional pithy comment, you’d never be able to tell that we’ve known each other for a couple of years. Part of me prefers it this way, because I’m really not in the mood for drama and this is my chance to have new experiences with people who I would otherwise never have met. They’re fun, we have a camaraderie that’s wrapped in our shared sense of humor and cynicism, and as the time passes, I find myself getting more and more interested in Katherine.
Our evenings become a repeated repertoire of Lemon-flavored Keglevitch vodka filling the flimsy plastic cups spread out along the floor of our hotel rooms, half-eaten bags of Bisli peeking out from bed covers and open suitcases. Large portions of the group pack into small spaces, throbbing in exhaustion from the day and now itching for the drunken stupor that brings on the accidental brushing of arms, the resigned pilings onto beds and sleepy cradling of heads against necks with warm breath and closed eyes.
I always try to place myself near Katherine. I try to make myself relevant to her and get all bashful when she flirts with me. So much of what I’m doing here becomes about getting her attention. There is no Wailing Wall or Old City or Dead Sea. Only her with that dark hair striking against her light skin that refuses to hue no matter how much time we spend under the sun.
Our arrival in Safed is met with frustrated exhalings. The bus lurches on the cobbled, uneven streets so that we have to abandon it a little distance from the hotel and drag our suitcases to the front door.
“This blows.”
Safed does not look fun. It’s old and quiet and dark. There’s no sound of the ocean or of the wind, just the constant rumble of passing cars crunching rock under-wheel and the tap-tap-tap of shoes against the stones, soles carrying the bodies of unknown, unseen people who pass back and forth, to and from irrelevance.
That night there is no alcohol because there’s nowhere to buy it and no one had the foresight to bring some from civilization. We’re forced into a state of sober conversation which reveals less substance than I remember from the previous evenings. Katherine disappoints me, yet again, by giving me a big hug that holds me steady for a moment too long, and then yanking her way out of any accountability.
“Off to bed for me.”
Later I spot Becky in the hotel lobby and I find that, for the first time since we’ve gotten here, I feel bad for her and the dissolution of our communications. The way she looks, she seems even more removed from this place than me. She’s chatting with a soldier attached to our trip and a sweatpants-clad girl who has become her constant companion and has been chasing the soldier around like an expectant puppy ever since his 6’2” frame hobbled onto our bus a few days earlier, his Israeli Air Force jacket shimmering angelically even in the dim overhead lights.
We briefly make eye contact and I nod before disappearing into the elevator.
The next day, faced with an offer to join Katherine and our little crew on an adventurous shopping excursion through the touristy shuk, I surprise myself by declining the invitation and choosing instead to follow the Rabbi who’s leading my trip into the foothills of Safed. For whatever reason, I’m starting to feel a little bored with our self-righteous click. It could be because of all of Katherine’s rejections or maybe just a creeping sense of guilt about how little I’ve cared about anything other than her approval.
“There is the tomb of a holy man in that place,” the Rabbi says. He’s a young guy, no more than 25, and he has an inhuman energy and enthusiasm about him. His little winter cap with the pom-pom on top, together with his thick beard, makes him look elfish.
“There is a pool where people go to purify themselves,” he adds.
It’s me, him, and about 10 other guys who are drawn by the mysteries he promises to reveal. The line of us tread through the misty chill to a cemetery where we strain to read fading inscriptions and climb into small caves to find dirt and damp and candles with bubbling flames that seem to wave to us. I move in slow, thoughtful motions, afraid to do something wrong in this place that I don’t understand. Hassidic men bow their heads and mumble under their breaths as I hold my own. They pass ghost-like, in shadows that float through me as time seems to still.
From the cemetery we’re led to an exposed hill face where the Rabbi tells us that there’s a fresh-water “mikvah” fed by the springs that run their veins through the mountains, a spot that serves as a ritualistic bath.
“You need to strip down, remove all piercings and jewelry from your body, and immerse yourself completely three times. This is the way it has always been done.”
It’s the middle of Winter, none of us has towels or a change of clothes, but we don’t even spend a moment reconsidering our decision to come here. There’s something about this place that quiets our minds; we each have the look of composed certainty.
In the makeshift locker room we remove our clothes and leave everything in small piles along the benches. I watch the edges of discarded jeans flapping in the drafts that the wind passes through. Removing my glasses, I also unclip the simple silver hoop earring I still wear at the time, I rip off the club bracelet I’ve had on since Tel Aviv, and place everything on top of my own pile.
As we step over the cold stone headings towards the mikvah at the end of the room, there’s the feeling that the bottoms of our feet are burning, that skin is searing. I bite down on my lower lip and join the line that edges its way towards the black water. Men climb down the steps and disappear into it violently, splashing about for a few seconds until there is nothing but the sound of a dull dripping and an emerging body, pale and wrinkled, walking away in silence.
It’s then that, for a moment, I’m no longer here, I’m somewhere else, and I see who it is that we are. We, these hushed Jews, naked and cold, walking to the place we have heard others speak of but of which we never believed, the place where the gas comes in through the false showerheads and you notice, only when it is too late, the human scratches on the walls and the bodies that drop and writhe, fish-like, for a few moments, until everything is just a cloud of pure sickly green and you can’t see even your hand in front of your face, until you can’t see anything at all.
This temporary reality, it’s not so far removed, it’s too close to deny or forget. A few decades earlier and I might not have had any other story to tell about myself, about these other boyish men who I’m standing here with. Faces blanched in terror, but mouths moving in prayer, eyes still blinking in a rebellion against our own inevitability. Even in the final moments, amidst the moans and the tears for an existence we haven’t even had a chance to get to know that well, there is still a warmth that pulses through our bodies and envelopes us in the hope for another world that has not yet arrived but which will find our descendents renewed and strong and proud. And in that world these same prayers that we have said for centuries will continue to be said, and every moment that they breath will be an honor to us, to all those who have come before.
The slapping of our progressing feet, our continued and sustained and enduring motion, brings me out of the spell and I can hear, from the pool I am approaching, the yell not of an animal being led to slaughter, but of a man, alive and exhilarated, reacting to the cold water against his skin in an explosive shout of triumph. And I hear in that voice the sound of conquest over all the pain, all the nightmares we have endured.
Eventually I reach the front of the line and by now, my eyes adjusted to this ancient, hidden place, I can make out the steps leading into the mikvah. I let my toes hover just above the water and then I rush in, feeling that same infatuation with existence that I sensed in the other man’s yell. Raising and lowering myself three times, I manage to bang my shin against one of the steps, and by the time I’m out, I notice a growing welt and a little slick of blood gliding down towards my ankle.
“I think you’re bleeding,” someone says to me, pointing at my leg.
I shrug, “I guess so.”
The Rabbi somehow manages to find a single towel for the lot of us standing with our arms crossed over our chests, shivering besides our clothing. But even this towel comes used, pawned off of a leaving Hassid who sees our predicament and only has this one little thing to offer as a consolation prize. We each take turns dabbing ourselves just enough so that our dry clothing can pick up the rest and we don’t soak everything straight through when we have to emerge back into the total cold of the air outside the locker room.
My wet hair falls onto my forehead, dropping down over my eyes so that my world is interspersed with hanging, stringy strands, droplets of water beading at the ends.
As we make our way back towards the group, I see that we’re running late because everyone is standing by the bus, faces awaiting our return so that we can drive out of this town where we only, ultimately, spend less than a day. I see Katherine standing around with her friends, holding a little brown bag. She doesn’t ask me anything, and just pulls out a Star-of-David necklace she bought at the market.
“Do you like it?” She holds it up against herself, laid flat against her skin.
“It’s nice.”
Nodding in agreement, she begins to look around.
“I’m so hungry. Do you think we have time to grab some falafel before we leave?”
“Probably.”
“Cool, we’ll be back.”
I stay by the bus as I watch them scurry over to a little Mediterranean-style food cart. Becky catches my eye, standing next to the soldier and that girl that keeps forcing a laugh and feigning annoyance so that she can touch him playfully at every opportunity. She looks in my direction and tilts her head quizzically, almost not recognizing me. When she makes the connection she leaves them and walks over.
“You look funny.”
“I do? Why?”
“Your hair, it’s so floppy. It looks like a toupee.”
She chuckles at her own joke and I smile.
There’s a few seconds of silence that isn’t awkward, but reaches deep into us, rich and questioning, and I wonder about how I’ve come to this place, to this state of affairs with her, with myself, with everything here and back at home, back in the real world. I sigh.
“Let me buy you some falafel,” I finally say.
Watch Ruvym’s Birthright Monologue on his Spark Experience HERE.
I became more involved after the trip. The Rabbi who led it, a Chabad Rabbi, ended up asking me to serve as the President of the Chabad Student Board at NYU during my last year of law school, and after I considered it a bit, I took the position.
From there my involvement continued to increase because I was totally emersed into the Jewish sphere. I learned with him as a Sinai Scholar that last year as well. After school, when I started working, I got involved with the JEC’s Young Philanthropist Committee and various classes/lectures they had. I went back to Israel three other times, the last time on a UJA-Federation Shapiro Fellowship. I joined the ADL’s Glass Young Leadership Committee and the AJC’s ACCESS group for young leaders. I became involved with the “Monologues” show through Birthright Israel NEXT, and now, well, I work here.
So in four years I went from no involvement at all to where I am now.
After everything, it suddenly became valuable to self-identify as Jewish and, on a reproductive level, know that my kids would one day carry on the traditions and customs and values that I was fortunate enough to inherit from my ancestors who had to endure what they endured to make it possible for me to be who I am today. You can’t just ignore all that because it’s inconvenient or you don’t feel like it. It’s almost a responsibility that you have to the past.
