I get the first hint of evening when the cool wind brings scents of zaatar and carob by way of cat dung as it comes off the Judaean hills, and my curtains start dancing against the windows. I have been living in Israel for over six months now. I return to the States in May, much to the disappointment of many I meet here, who attempt to convince me that making Israel my home for the foreseeable future will bring about the redemption of the Jewish people.
My only other visit to Israel was on a right-wing summer program in high school; this was the first time I would make it my home. The night I arrived in September, I kissed the ground outside Ben Gurion airport, right next to the taxi stand. In my cab to Jerusalem, I marveled at my first Jerusalem sunset of the trip.
During my first few weeks, however, my Jerusalem tale lost that divine luster. I settled into the everyday life of the metropolis: shoving to get on public buses, getting overcharged because of my American lilt, being narrowly missed by cars whizzing down residential streets on Shabbat. When the High Holidays arrived, I was full on into a crisis: I had never felt as distanced from God, precisely when I thought myself closest to the heartbeat of God’s presence in this world.
On Yom Kippur, I thought visiting the Western Wall for the first time in eight years might help. In 1998, I had stood for hours lost in prayer, with my head against the cold stone. When I padded onto the arcade before the prayer area this time, the first thing I noticed was that the women’s side was one-sixth of the size of the men’s. They had countless sturdy tables with white tablecloths for study. We had a few small rickety stands. While we waited our turn to touch the ancient stones, the men had the expanse of time and space.
In the time it took to register the fact that 50 percent of the population gets 83 percent of the space, the ancient wall surrounding the Temple became, to me, a big, old wall with gender problems. No longer the eternal symbol of Jewish longing, the Wall, that day, leapt from the pages of Jewish national history into the pages of my personal life story. Suddenly I was moved more by thinking of the stonemasons who carved the worn stone millennia ago than I was by the idea of the place’s inherent holiness.
We all map our lives in constellations of symbols, objects, and experiences that give our lives meaning. And when, at sixteen, I lacked my own set to draw from, I absorbed the Jewish national cosmology fed to me by my Israel program. The land became holy because upon it my ancestors trod; the Western Wall was layered with my people’s ancient grandeur and modern military might. In the eight years since, however, my personal Jewish life has gained a lushness and depth I could never have dreamed of then. As I have populated my life with personal spaces of holiness – a prayer hut in which I felt called by God to a life of Jewish service, a forest lodge in which I found peers also seeking Jewish community, a wooden floor on which I cried with thankful joy – I no longer need to lean on that ready-made Zionist narrative.
Youth programs like the one in which I participated set out to instill in participants prepackaged emotional connections to politically and religiously contentious landmarks. A true relationship to a place, though, cannot be had by accepting romanticized visions of its splendor; rather, by engaging with its scents and tastes, people, and struggles.
When I touched down in Los Angeles for a visit a few weeks ago, I was homesick not for the Eternal Homeland, but for my own bedroom, shopping at the shuk, and hearing the tune of “Shalom Aleichem” flowing out of my neighborhood’s windows on Shabbat. I have lost that Pavlovian rush of emotion at seeing the Western Wall. But I have gained a personal Jerusalem.
