Sitting on the plane as flight attendants offered me juice and blankets in Hebrew and English, I drifted into a thoughtful sadness. At the age of 20, after two years of grappling with the thorny underbelly of the Jewish state and unlearning the rosy mythology of the Jewish homeland, there I sat, disappointed by the banal efficiency of twenty-first-century air travel.
I yearned for a journey in steerage, for a wintry ride in the trunk of a 1930s European automobile, for an exodus through the desert on foot. A round-trip ticket from New York to Tel Aviv seemed like a contradiction in terms. Israel wasn’t for visiting; it was for wandering toward and, in its fantastical version, forming our own diaspora identities around. Surely, I felt, it wasn’t for mortgages and trash collection, and it definitely wasn’t for occupation; it was for remaining the Jewish never-never-land, the one physical thing that remained constant throughout millennia of changes.
What I wanted was not the Israel of my childhood maps, but the promised Canaan of millennia past, and the peaceful Palestine of 150 years ago. When we were so close to landing that I spotted the red-roofed suburbs from the sky, I felt like I had lost something much weightier than my stomach.
As a navel-gazing college junior studying Jewish literature and history, I felt comforted by the melancholia that permeated the books and poems I read. It spoke to my own searching and placelessness, and inspired a personal connection to a long-gone history. Going to Israel that summer served as a reminder that in this age of the actualized Promised Land, Jewish wandering was supposed to have ceased.
After all, why should Jews wander aimlessly and threateningly, as in European Christian legend, if we can settle into the concrete and mortar of an ancient promise made real? What I was really feeling on the plane, I now think, was less about wanting a midnight wagon ride and more about accepting the fact that the Jewish history of dispersal was supposed to be old news by now.
Designed to look like a travel diary, this issue of New Voices, “In Search of Promised Lands,” is a reminder that though El Al might have you think otherwise, Jews’ globe-crossing wanderings remain essential for nourishing our tradition of rich literature and debates over ethical and political quandaries, whether about racism at U of Chicago or student cafes at Columbia.
Literally moved by war, occupation, and the dream of a better life, the Russian Jewish immigrants, Jewish and Arab students, and Israeli Palestinians featured in these stories are part of the modern web of wandering and loss, of dislocation and relocation. And until their lands of promise are found, our lands of potential will have to suffice.
