To be(come) or not to be(come Israeli).

Joshua Pitkoff

November 2011

Behind Cultural Lines

Two weeks ago, my camper from last summer asked over Facebook chat, “So are you a part of Israeli culture yet?” This is my response.

    Eighty percent of my high school graduating class is in Israel right now participating in various and diverse programs throughout the country as a gap year before college. Most are in Jerusalem. Most are in American programs. Most have little, if not zero, contact with Israelis on a daily basis. Thank God, many Jewish students are electing to spend a year here, clearly necessitating attractive and comfortable options for us. But, is it possible to imagine such a place where Hebrew is spoken among Americans in the State of Israel? Can a place be envisioned where Americans participate in an Israeli program--living, learning, and experiencing the year truly different from their American life? Say, for example, signing up for an actual Israeli program instead of an American program in Israel.

    Since I am one of The Few, The Proud (trademark, US Marines; l’havdil) nine affectionately named chutznikim (hailing from chutz ha’aretz, outside of the land of Israel) at my Israeli yeshiva, I fall under this category. Let’s start at Ben Yehuda Street, the epicenter, the heart of American gap year social-life. Make a few short turns, continue on Sultan Sulieman, a right onto Yitzchak Hanadiv, through Derech Har Hatzofim tunnel which turns into Route 1, left onto Route 90 N, cruise for 80km and turn left onto Route 667 up the 11km winding mountain road. Your tremp will leave you at the gate of Yeshivat Ma’ale Gilboa, a two hour trip from the center of Jerusalem and the social center of American Jewish gap year students.

    So I choose to isolate myself from the American experience for the overwhelming majority of my time. This year, I enjoy a little timeout from tests and stress and homework and pressure of high school to recharge, as some would put it, before I drain my battery in college overdrive. A year to drink warm tea over Heschel between ceaseless years of caffeine abuse in the science library. Quite different, I must say, than the yeshiva experience of the Israelis. In the very near future, approaching steadily and surely, is their military draft. Meaning this year is one of preparation, testing, being profiled, pulling whatever strings possible to merit a spot in a more respected combat unit or a special intelligence program. They are nervous. They are scared. They will be bringing home their guns for weekends at home. We will be bringing laundry on weekends we go home. Yes, I chose the road less traveled by, but I dare not say it is the same as the Israeli way.

    Unsurprisingly, making the choice we did leads to certain assumptions. “Are you fluent yet? Have you dreamt in Hebrew yet?” “No, we’ve been here three weeks. You don’t get fluent in three weeks.” Some students feel pressure to impress their visiting friends and relatives with their newly improved Hebrew skills, as if to say, “Yeah, I made this hard decision and it’s paying off. Be jealous.” On the other side of the coin, I personally have found that students in American yeshivot, where the Hebrew they have to speak is to direct (psycho) cab drivers and order falafal, have entirely different standards of fluent. I have heard them award themselves the title of “fluent Hebrew speaker,” but I doubt they have tried to discuss Rav Kook’s philosophy or Rav Shagar’s post-modernism in Hebrew, an entirely different experience than “One pita with falafel, hummus, and salad.”

    My Israeli suite-mate, while bemoaning such tragedies of annoying Americans thinking they can just pop in for the year and blah blah blah, made sure to qualify, “But you guys are different.” In what way? “You are making an effort to learn hard Hebrew words, learn about the army, isolate yourselves with us.” In his eyes, we are different from those Americans. Yet, we enter a room and something about us--our clothes, our mannerisms, our less Mediterranean skin-tones--something gives us away and we are thrown right back into the melting pot of all Anglos.

Much like the American college application process (without any of the stress), the gap year yeshiva and seminary application process includes interviews, often as valuable for the students as for the institution. Yeshivat Ma’ale Gilboa, as the rabbi in charge of interviewing always clarifies, is not about coming to Israel for a year, it’s about being Israeli for a year. That is the pitch, but is it accurate? Certainly, we separate ourselves from the rest of our friends for a year, but does that mean that we have become Israeli? Where is the line one has to cross from being non-American to actual Israeli?

    Maybe we should start by examining the qualities, the dead giveaways, of our American roots. “How do I know you’re Americans? By the way you dress, obviously,” one of our rabbis told us. Clothing, check. We tend to wait on lines. Patience, check. We panic at least slightly as the passengers of an Israeli driver. A shiver also runs down my spine when army planes fly very low. General sense of nervousness, check.

    Certainly, there are smaller-scale tensions between our cultural tectonic plates. Milk is 3% and comes in bags. (From this was born the “shoko b’sakit,” chocolate [milk] in a bag, the greatest invention of Israel’s food industry.)  Americans tend to enjoy small breakfasts, moderate lunches, and heaping plates of dinner. Israelis favor large breakfasts, larger lunches, and, at least in yeshiva, practically no dinner whatsoever. Hitchhiking is part of everyday life for some, extremely common in the more remote, public-transportation-lacking, regions of the country. And naturally, who could forget the complete elimination of late wake-ups and delicious brunches on Sunday morning?

    I find the big kahuna of the American/Israeli divide, to be the language barrier. Not only fluency in Hebrew, but idiom-use as well as, probably the biggest hurdle to overcome, the Israeli accent. Even among the Americans in the yeshiva, there are several ways of attempting to bridge that gap. Some will make a careful effort to speak the language as they hear it. Meaning, Israelis, to our American ears, pronounce the lamed (L-sound) and the reish (R-sound) essentially the same, which Americans attempt to emulate, some more successful than others. Some saturate their sentences with Israeli idioms and slang, frequently using words such as k’eilu (like), achi (my brother), b’keif (with pleasure), gever (loosely, “a man,” usually endearing), and walla/why (wow). Perhaps they mumble a little, deepen their voices, anything to attempt to drown the voice screaming out, “Look at me, I’m American.”

    Others, including myself up until now at least, have kept their American accent purposefully. Probably a subconscious response to the failed attempts of others to “fake” the accent, I find no shame in others knowing my American roots. Unfortunately, my whole life there have always been classmates of mine who faked the accent in Ivrit (Hebrew) classes with a definite stigma attached. Maybe while amongst Israelis in a situation such as ours it is generally more accepted, but upon returning to America, it would likely be considered strange for me to have an Israeli Hebrew accent. People would certainly judge me, justifiably or not, for “faking” it because that is not really who I am.

    Several weekends ago, I spent Shabbat with my friend from home who has been buzz-cutting his own hair as well as several of my friends’, for a few months now. I needed a haircut and figured, “Why not? My hair is usually short anyway, it’s easier and cheaper than a barber.” His American, electric razor--plugged in though a converter that could have blown up on my head at any minute--trimmed down my thick hair to half an inch on top and the sides a mere ⅜ inch. “Oh, look at Josh all Israeli now.” And I reacted defensively because, well, I don’t want to be judged negatively for false reasons. I’m truly not trying to fake who I am and be someone I’m not.

    I am very unsure whether or not I envision my future as one of an Israeli citizen. Sometimes I visit communities and feel like I can definitely see myself raising a family with such a warm neighborhood and thriving B'nei Akiva (Israeli youth program); but sometimes I wander the area and feel a clear and unbridgeable divide between its residents and myself. I read Time magazine's descriptions of America's failing economy, education system, and government, considering Israel more and more as solid option; but then I attempt to switch Israeli phone companies and use customer service and realize nothing in this country works how it should and I have no desire to voluntarily deal with that. Or will it be an ideological decision based on my desire to build the Jewish State versus developing the American Jewish community? For me personally, this discussion of culture all depends heavily on how I view my future. If I plan on returning to America and spending the rest of my life striving to achieve the American Dream, then keeping an American accent poses no problems and I will certainly not be judged. However, if in time, I envision myself making aliyah, maybe this year is the time to incorporate those more Israeli aspects into my personality, including “developing” my accent. One free Shabbat which I spent in the Jerusalem neighborhood of Ramot, we met a woman who made aliyah many years ago, but still had her American Hebrew accent. Do I want to still seem, like that woman, obviously American even after living here for many years? (And of course get ripped off accordingly at the shuk and in taxis.) On the other hand, I would be faking it, essentially trying to be Israeli. Would it be considered legitimate to get buzz-cuts and change my accent if I planned to eventually include myself as part of this culture?

    The question is where exactly is the line between faking and changing--being something you aren’t and this being who you now are? At a certain point, you are incorporating this aspect into a part of you. Not putting on a mask to disguise, but rather changing the face itself. In a more current example (by the Israeli entertainment media standards lagging roughly a decade behind American), Michael Jackson getting plastic surgery to make himself actually white instead of just pretending to be white. Maybe that’s a little extreme, but the general idea. To a large extent the issue is at its core, a discussion of intent. Do you trust another person is changing for himself and not to affect how others view him?

    Once we assume this individual’s change to be well-intentioned and to develop him or herself, congratulations we have just passed go, collected 200 NIS, and are right back at the beginning: at what point does that individual actually become Israeli, or is it even possible? Even if I make aliyah, can I ever truly be Israeli with such strong American roots?

I don’t have answers to these questions and I certainly won’t pretend to. I wanted to provide a small insight into tension most people take for granted when thinking about the yeshiva/seminary year and even making aliyah. For me at least, it is a remarkably complicated issue and is relevant day in and day out, whether we consciously recognize it or not.

Only at the end of the year will we know how we have been transformed by the experiences of our time in yeshiva. There is, however, one person I met who already knows. Our guide for a tour with a mission from my shul heard I am a student at Maale Gilboa and made sure to tell my dad, “That’s an amazing place. I hope you know you’re going to lose your son.”

Maybe when all is said and done, who cares about the differences?

Reflections on the Transition to Israel and Maale Gilboa by Kal Victor

It is hard to fathom that it was a little over two months ago that I arrived in Israel as a stranger, just barely proficient in Hebrew, not yet sick of falafel, not yet addicted to persimmons, not yet having experienced firsthand Gilad Shalit’s momentous return; the list could go on for ages. To be entirely honest, I had no idea what to expect when I got here, and no idea—beyond some illusive, vague combination of obligation and craving—why I had decided to come.  That is to say, I came here with no real idea what to do or where to begin.  I think I can say more certainly now that why I’m here is precisely to think about those questions, as they relate to my decision to take this gap year, my broader Jewish identity, and my own personal dogma.  I’ll try not to wax too sentimental in this post, though, don’t worry.  Maale Gilboamanages to simultaneously cultivate my already hardy New-York-Jew cynicism, as well as my romantic, idealistic side.  I think it takes a place that could, on the Day of Atonement, interrupt a somber six hour morning service with half-an-hour of impassioned dancing and shouting to do that.          

The months that have passed have been filled, just like all others, with peaks and troughs: excitement, learning, thinking, exploring, but also, of course, worrying, time-wasting, and goofing off.  I had some small challenges adjusting in the beginning—nothing too major, though.  Israelis are funny creatures.  Their being obsessed with Western culture (even though their tastes are always lagging about a year behind what’s vogue in the States), one can often forget that Israeli society has its own deep-rooted tradition and etiquette, which have to be addressed sensitively and conscientiously.  For example, just because it may not be customary for Israeli male youth to bathe or change their clothes more than a few times a week, doesn’t mean one can hold his nose and wave his hands in front of his face in dramatized disgust when they walk by.  So too, when one’s roommates blast Mizrachi love songs (this one is a favorite of mine:

or the Macarena, recommending them as great, innovative, fresh music, one can’t gag or even pantomime suicide with a finger-gun to the head. 

On a more serious note, though, I have noticed that my Israeli peers are approaching yeshiva from an entirely different mental context. Not only was their education different in the sense that they focused on Israeli rather than American literature and history, and that their schools were catered more to math and science (because it’s good for the army), but that this year is, for them, defined in ways I couldn’t ever really understand.  Yeshiva, for them, is defined in relation to their looming military service, defined in relation to a religious culture that exists in step with the national culture, defined by a strict secular-religious dichotomy (that I have begun to see dissipate at Maale Gilboa, at least, but that still thrives in Israeli religious life), defined in the shadow of the religious-Zionist dream.  While I have certainly formed my own beliefs about Israel—its politics, religious dynamics, people, and culture—I find that keeping an open mind to the opinions of those who experience life here firsthand is by all means a worthwhile endeavor.

Over vacation, I was all over the land: Chaifa, Yehudiya, Rechovot, Yerushalayim, Tel Aviv, and Eilat with the Americans from Maale Gilboa (literally almost a full circle around the entire country).  And it really occurred to me—most clearly when I was on the move, hiking, hitchhiking, seeing the sights—that Israel can be an alien place, even though it is meant to seem, and certainly can feel like, my home.  Luckily, the hospitality of relatives and friends from the yeshiva has been nearly overwhelming, in the best sense, reminding me that people can transcend superficial barriers and relate to each other on an essential level.  It helps to have a joint system of beliefs, of course, but even though Judaism is lived and dealt with very differently in the Jewish State than in the Melting Pot, openness and welcoming have bridged the gap, and I’ve noticed the presence of international students in yeshivot is a very important beacon, on both sides, that Judaism is interconnected and alive throughout the world.

The gaps and difficulties on the macro scale have seemed to narrow with time and kindness, but my personal acclimation has been centered more on my emotional response to a new environment: my being away from New York and its vibrancy and diversity, being away from friends with whom I’ve experienced many of my fondest memories, not being in the direct comfort and care of my family, and most importantly, not knowing exactly what it is I hope to gain from this experience.  I think my dad explained it best in brief pep-talk before I left, although it didn’t really sink in until recently.   He explained to me that this year is not about turning my life around on a dime, and that I shouldn’t expect that I will undergo some sort of precipitous religious metamorphosis, necessarily.  He told me it was about experiencing the year for what it is as it it’s happening in real time, and I realized that the experience of learning and living in an environment centered around Torah and its dynamism, my own choices and ideas, and the land of the Jewish people, has extreme intrinsic value.  My biggest hurdle was dealing with the reflexive need to compare my own story to those of friends in college and other gap year programs.  Once I realized that my purposes here were unique and my own, incomparable with what others were doing and seeking elsewhere, my dad’s advice for taking this year in stride and letting time work out its meanings and implications has become a much more relatable bit of parental wisdom.  I’ve had the desire, before working out the ins and outs of my Jewish observance, to see what tradition has being saying the past millennium about the issues I’m dealing with.  And believe me there’s a treasure trove of opinions and insights out there that I have only just begun to examine in my time here.

What have I been learning?  Well, there’s been Talmud, specifically the tractate of Baba Metzia; there’s been Halakhic theory; there’ve been Chassidic and Kabalistic parables; there’s been Levinas and Kierkegaard; Prophets and Pslams; Maimonides; Israeli politics; and the list goes on. A lot of what’s amazing about the learning here is precisely how diverse and unpredictable it is.  In discussions, rabbis will shout at rabbis, students at rabbis, rabbis at students, and students at students, because so many people, especially (thankfully) among the faculty, are genuine and unique thinkers who approach Judaism in radically different ways.  Albeit sometimes chaotic, sometimes reminiscent of epically intense Pokémon battles (at least in my mind), I really feel like this is the Judaism that is meant to be: the kind that is intellectual, thoughtful, individualistic, but still open, inclusive, and anchored in community and tradition.  Of course, I couldn’t really convey effectively what it is I’ve been doing without some recent examples, though.

The other day in a Bible lesson on the Book of Exodus, our teacher, Chezi, guided us through Moses’s personal growth and development, which culminated, of course, in his Divine appointment to leader of the Israelites.  Chezi’s approach is fascinating and a personal favorite of mine: a modern and exciting literary lens held up to the Bible, its characters, structure, and meaning.  He argued that Moses’s development was a personally guided trajectory, one impelled by his need to seek justice in the world, that eventually created a man worthy to lead the Jewish people outside of Egypt and experience God “panim el panim,” face to face.  It was Moses who earned his position, and in no way was he born a leader.  He spoke about how Moses’s need to chase righteousness and justice straddled all levels of his existence and interaction with the world.  First, Moses leaves Pharaoh’s palace and sees and Egyptian taskmaster oppressing a Hebrew slave.  His moral instinct, in its least refined early stage here, immediately kicks in and he kills the taskmaster.  The next incident reported in the narrative is when Moses sees two Hebrew slaves fighting amongst themselves, and he immediately rebukes them for it.  Next, he encounters the daughters of Re’uel, also known as Jethro, according to commentators, who are hassled (the text is vague about exactly what occurred) at a well by shepherds who Moses fends off valiantly.  It is after this chain of events that Moses settles down in Midian, marrying one of Re’uel’s daughters, and becoming a shepherd, which one day leads to his discovery of the Burning Bush.  Moses’s entire journey is marked by the initial words “va’yetzei el echav,” and he went out to his brothers, denoting that Moses actively decided to leave the comfort and wealth of an Egyptian home in order to fight for the oppressed, his Hebrew brothers.  After he fights for the rights and safety of a slave, he is then dealt an even harder task, rebuking his fellow Hebrews for infighting, shifting his idealized notions of good and evil to a much more complex, troubling place.  After that, Moses still has the incredible inner strength to turn outward and fight for the weak at the well, even though they are not his kin and even though he knows now that things aren’t as black and white as a zealous Moses immediately thought when he left the palace. 

A big part of Maale Gilboa’s ethos is the emphasis on being worldly, absorbing wisdom not only from Jewish sources, but from secular ones, incorporating crucial insights and wisdom into your Jewish observance and overall worldview, independent of their origins.  Just like Moses’s penchant for seeking right was not limited to his Jewish brethren, so too do we believe that our quest for truth and right is not confined to Jewish tradition alone.  An oft quoted adage here is “Chochma ba’goyim ta’amin, Torah ba’goyim al ta’amin,” you shall believe the wisdom of the nations, but not their “Torah” (Eicha Rabbah 2:13).  While it is mostly only the first half of this verse that makes it into a quote, I think there is something to be said in the second clause, as well.  But I’ll get there in am moment.  To demonstrate the first half of the verse, I wanted to share a thought I came across in an extremely interesting, albeit in my mind somewhat flawed, book called All Things Shining by Hubert Dreyfus, Sean Dorrance Kelly, which cites a commencement speech given to the 2005 graduating class at Kenyon College by David Foster Wallace.  In it he said, “Twenty years after my own graduation, I have come gradually to understand that the liberal-arts cliché about ‘teaching you how to think’ is actually shorthand for a much deeper, more serious idea: ‘Learning how to think’ really means learning how to exercise some control over how and what you think. It means being conscious and aware enough to choose what you pay attention to and to choose how you construct meaning from experience” (the whole speech, amazing and much food for thought: http://online.wsj.com/article/SB122178211966454607.html). 

Maale Gilboa seems to share a similar goal in their education: to teach you how to think.  They have no desire to brainwash or indoctrinate you by defining what’s right and wrong and how this and that are done correctly, their purpose, as it’s revealed itself to me, is to give each of their students the tools and inspiration to connect with their own needs and desires, to learn how to think and search for meaning in life and Judaism as they can in their own way at their own pace.  Implicit in this approach is the trust in students to make wise, carefully considered choices.  Although this is certainly not the easiest or prettiest way to preach religion, for me, and I think I speak for a lot of Maale Gilboa when I say this, its fruits are the sweetest. They become, instead of a store-bought, generic crop, those grown and toiled over in one’s own orchard. 

I think this is where the “Torah ba’goyim al ta’amin” comes in.  Learning Torah (literally meaning instruction or law), beyond the world of Halakha and faith, is about cultivating one’s ability to learn, analyze, think, and seek meaning, fostering what I have heard termed by a few students and faculty, “reading with yirah,” literally meaning “reading with fear,” loosely corresponding to a notion more commonly known as “reading with charity.” What I mean by this is that rather than read texts critically, using my individual, modern sensibilities to search for flaws or anachronisms, I need to try as best as I can to inhabit the world and mind of the author, to see the truth and wisdom in what he or she saying and get as much as I can from it in its context before I decide whether its insights will apply to me and my own ideologies.  Although this is a near Herculean task, the goal is to try, to try and gain wisdom by respecting that the author may actually know better than you, by opening your mind to possibilities of insight where a selfish, solipsistic mind would willfully exclude it.  Although the ultimate goal is to apply this method of studying and reading to all texts, it is a skill that, at least for me personally, is seldom absorbed from sources outside of Judaism. This is what has to be learned by reading holy texts, be they Talmud, Maimonides, Bible, what have you, because, for me, there is an element of awesomeness and wisdom in such texts that seems to both necessitate and enable reading them with yirah. 

Now the time has come to tie my ramblings together and relate this all to some of my own personal reflections and apotheoses. In some ways Maale Gilboa has come to be my own “va’yetzei,” my own journey into the world at large.  In attempting to read with yirah, in attempting to extract wisdom from all sources indiscriminately this year, I’m starting to venture into a world of ideas and opinions that can be overwhelming sometimes.  But like Moses, I think that an essential guiding force through this vast tumultuous sea of thought can be found in the yearning for morality and justice, in the most universal, but also the most particular sense it can be understood, applying both to those closest to you and to those who you may not be able to relate to at all.  Just as my challenges here, in Israel, a foreign place, have been greeted with an equal and opposite reaction by the kindness of others, so too do I hope to begin my quest to work out a Jewish identity that, among other things, exists in a way that it can achieve just that—a transcendent, all-inclusive kindness.  Rav Bigman once gave a short speech about a man who walked an old lady across the street.  Why did he do it?  Because he pitied her in her old age and frailty and felt she needed taking care of.  Rav Bigman proceeded to ask why we need a Divine commandment to love our neighbor as we would ourselves.  He answered that if we did not have God in the equation, a Being who can look down at all of humanity and recognize their equality, we would never be able to achieve a love of others that stems from a sense of equality, because humans dwell on differences and relate to other humans largely on what distinguishes them rather than what unites them.  The man who pitied the old woman was wrong—he should have helped her across the street because she was human and because God sees her as his equal, not because she was elderly. 

I know these might be some lofty goals, but this year I’ll certainly have time to think about them, at least a little.

Kal