Birthright Israel

By Susannah Dainow

It's Shabbat on the Orthodox Jewish farm village near the Sea of Galilee. Outside, in the setting sunlight, girls skip rope in ankle-length skirts. I am wearing one too, but this is a one-weekend deal for me. For the people who live here, it's a way of life.

I'm in the rabbi's house with the other kids from my kibbutz program. We've all come to spend the weekend seeing what it means to be Orthodox, seeing how a good number of people in Israel live, which is in many respects the same way our great-great grandparents lived, scattered all over the globe. It's a strange feeling to look back in time along what could be the branches of your own family tree, peering through the foliage to find out what you missed.

We're going to play a get-to-know-you game: we, the secular kids from the kibbutz, and a few of the Orthodox Jews from the "moshav," or "village." We are each going to pick one object that represents something about us and, for the visitors, why we chose to visit Israel.

I make a grab for a blue toy car before I've fully understood why. When it's my turn to speak, I've only figured out part of it: "My name is Susannah and I'm from Toronto," I tell the motley crew. "I chose the car because it represents freedom to me; if you have a car, you can just get up and go wherever you want whenever you want. When I decided to come to Israel, I decided to take a break from what I've been doing for as long as I can remember, which is going to school." It occurred to me a few minutes later that I was terrified of driving. I'd had my license for about six months, but I still felt paralyzed behind the wheel, always aware that a slightest mistake could bring disaster and death. Driving had become one of those things, like physics, that went on my mental list of "Things I Cannot Do."

I didn't set out to spend nearly half a year in Israel. Originally, I was only going to be away for ten days during winter break, as one of 20 extremely lucky UNC-Chapel Hill students chosen to participate in the first year of Birthright Israel. The international program provided a free trip for about 6,000 Jews between the ages of 18 to 24 who had not previously traveled to Israel. A combination of student burn-out and a desire to get to know the country in more depth than ten days had allowed stretched my winter break trip into a semester-after much debate and many, many phone calls.

Then there was the question of what I would do after Birthright. Kibbutzim, originally collective agricultural societies founded by Jewish immigrants in turn-of-the-century Palestine, had long fascinated me. A kibbutz-based program that combined work, Hebrew study, art classes and group travel sounded promising. One problem: the program began about five weeks after Birthright ended. That "problem" would turn out to be the best part of my semester.

I wasn't scared of traveling alone. I was petrified. But I had always wanted to try it. The logistics of directions, finding a place to sleep and organizing the trip seemed insurmountable obstacles from this side of the Atlantic. But once in Israel, I discovered that most of my worries were unfounded. Armed with a trusty budget travel guide and a few words of Hebrew remaining from my Sunday school days, I was able to handle anything…eventually.

Staying in hostels was more fun and usually less dirty than I'd expected, and hostels enabled me to meet many of the characters who became as much a part of my travels as the places I went. Some experiences amazed me such as celebrating a Passover seder on a Sinai sand dune by the shores of the Red Sea under a full moon, reading the Haggadah (the story of the exodus from Egypt) by candlelight, and then catching the sunrise atop Mount Sinai days later.

Another remarkable moment occurred in Jordan, in the ancient, carved-in-stone city of Petra. I was traveling for the day with a Danish couple when we happened upon a pathway up through the mountainsWe climbed and climbed stone stairs and ramps for well over an hour, not knowing what we were heading toward, occasionally passing other travelers on their way down.

Once I sat down, sweaty and exhausted, and decided to quit. But a few moments later, I changed my mind - I wanted to get to the top of the mountain, for no other reason than to know that I'd done it. I kept climbing, hemmed in by stone masses on all sides. Suddenly, I came out into an open space, like a rock field. One of my traveling companions stood on the other side in the golden late afternoon sun, her blond, slight, clad-in-hiking-gear figure set near a cave where Bedouin, who live in Petra, were cooking over a fire.

"Don't look back until you're where I am," she told me.
"Why not?"
"You'll know."

I held out until I was about halfway there, and then I couldn't stand it anymore. I turned around and before me, almost in profile, was the smooth stone façade of the Monastery, one of the most beautiful and famous buildings in all of Petra. In a flash, my exhaustion vanished, and I shouted and jumped up and down in excitement.

While I was in Israel's Negev desert in January, it snowed for the first time in eight years. I went out to see the white-capped mountains in the canyon behind my hostel and to take pictures. So did the locals, after they'd built the desert snowmen that dotted the town's lawns and roadsides until the snow melted mere hours later. The memory of waking up to the delighted shouts of children who had never seen snow before will always transport me across time and space to that moment, to that place.

Of course, traveling alone wasn't all beauty and amazement. My second day in Petra, I was on my own. Atop another of the city's "high places," a tourist police officer who spoke garbled English insisted on accompanying me down the mountain. I made him walk first, just in case - even the most popular hiking routes in Petra are all but deserted in January. We descended the stone stairs, conversing occasionally. He was behaving very well, and I was beginning to feel bad for having suspected his motives, when he started asking me about boys in America. From what I could make out, he seemed to be asking if a girl could be the friend of a boy, or if she could only have contact with one boyfriend. Thinking that I was acting as a great vehicle of cultural exchange, I told him that, amazingly, in America a girl could be friends with boys and she could also have a boyfriend. But something must have gotten lost in the translation, because the next thing he said was: "Can I kiss you the way you kiss boyfriends in America?"

It's difficult to get bored in Israel. Something important is always going on, and because the entire country is about the size of New Jersey, it's always going on nearby. I started my kibbutz program in the north in early February. Two weeks later, the north's main city was evacuated when Hizbollah terrorists in Lebanon started firing Katyusha rockets into Israel. That city was a half an hour away from where I was.

Prime Minister Ehud Barak's coalition government began to fall apart while I planted pine tree seedlings in the kibbutz nursery. Peace talks with Syria disintegrated while I fed the chickens and milked the goats at the children's farm. Weeks later, on a field trip, I saw one of the areas that caused the talks to fall to pieces: a strip of land between the Kinneret and the current Syrian border, home to a highway and not much else, but crucial for Israel's access to its only source of fresh water.

I lived amid history, both made and in the making, right up until I left. Palestinian riots dashed my hopes of visiting the West Bank during my last days in the country, and the morning I left Israel, Israel left Lebanon.

I got used to living in the middle of the conflicts and clashes I'd only known before as stories on the front pages of newspapers. But I never got used to what living that way meant. I never got used to the walls of my Hebrew classroom shaking and the windows rattling when nearby army planes flew beyond the speed of sound, creating sonic booms that sounded like explosions. The country is a perfect example of why the ancient Chinese saying, "May you live in interesting times," is actually a curse.

If I had to choose the thing that impresses me most about Israelis, it would be their willingness to die for an interesting present as they struggle with what is rooted in the past. They do not have the luxury of taking leave of history… like I do.

Perhaps it is fitting, then, that history became more personal to me in Israel than it has ever been. My travels were full of marvels-from Masada, the desert fortress where the Jews' last stand against the Romans ended with mass suicide in 76 CE, to the Giza sphinx and pyramids (that the Bible says my ancestor slaves helped build), to the mud and mirth of the Dead Sea, to the psychedelic stone monuments of Petra. But the most amazing thing I saw on my trip was a wall. The plaza and prayer areas at Jerusalem's Western Wall were quiet the January morning I visited. While a few people paused to write prayers, which they wedged into the cracks between the massive off-white stones, I walked slowly toward the wall to touch it.

I felt heavy and light at the same time - almost dizzy, almost unreal. The retaining wall wasn't even part of the ancient Temple, but it is now the only remainder, made holy by default and 2,000 years of longing. Two thousand years. I think it was the knowledge that I could never fully grasp this length of time that made me cry. Those massive off-white stones, and the history that had brought me to them, had overwhelmed and engulfed me. I never did write a prayer. I didn't know what to say in the face of so much.

Around Passover, the kibbutz allowed us some time off. I knew I wanted to use it to make the long journey south to the Sinai. Later, some of my peers from the program decided they wanted to go too, and though originally I wanted to tackle the trip on my own, I grew to feel somewhat comforted by the thought of having travel companions, especially in Egypt.

But we ended up with different itineraries in mind. Our first stop was a town called Tarabin, home to a lovely beach but not much else. I had heard great things about Dahab, an hour and a half away, but the rest of the group was content to stay put. It became clear that if I was going to move on, I was going to have to do it on my own.

It's really amazing how quickly one can forget what one is capable of. In about three months on the kibbutz, I had gone from fearless independent traveler to feeling like those five weeks on my own had never happened. About to break off from the group, I once again was terrified. But I did it anyway. Despite several glitches, my stint in Sinai provided some of the most rewarding and freeing moments of my time away, and traveling alone gave me an opportunity to reflect on how I had grown and discovered the culture, history and people of my birthright.

At the time of this writing, Susannah Dainow was a university refugee, but in fall of 2001 she is returning to the fold, either at the University of Toronto or McGill, in pursuit of a degree in history and psychology. In her year and a half off from formal schooling, she traveled in Israel, Egypt and Jordan, worked on a kibbutz, and was thrice an intern at the Herald-Sun newspaper, Saturday Night Magazine, and The Chronicle of Higher Education, respectively. Her post-B.A. ambition: more travel. sdainow@yahoo.com