Fall 2005 to so summer 2006:
One interpretation is that I was teetering on a nervous breakdown after college and had no idea what to do with my life so I went on the first artist's program I could find and checked out for a year to delay adulthood.
Issue solved.
The other reason is that I was looking for something very specific that I could not find anywhere but Israel.
It had very little to do with the propaganda I'd heard every day of my life about how Israel was our Jewish home. It had everything to do with the personal anecdotes I heard. the land where Yiddish speakers could go to the store without getting beaten up or mugged, where old Germans could still go to the opera without worrying they'd be banned from it, where young Israelis were free to innovate and travel to an extent no Americans do, where a dozen languages were spoken in the streets, where democracy was kept alive in a region where democracy was the exception, where existential issues were discussed in a place where existence can't be taken for granted.
I never fit in Baltimore: Jewish Baltimore or urban. In Pikesville, Baltimore's 90% Jewish neighborhood, everybody's crazy and thinks themselves sane. In urban Baltimore everybody's sane and thinks themselves crazy. Both places think themselves the acme of liberal tolerance in diametrically opposite ways, and nobody is truly free to be themselves unless themselves fits in a truly narrow rubric. I felt much more free to be eccentric lil' me in DC, a city where freedom comes at a price nobody can afford.
In Israel, I sought out a place where a Jew is free to be a Jew who can't stand being Jewish. Nobody has as much contempt for religious superstitions as secular Israelis, who head to the beach on Rosh Hashana and picnic on Yom Kippur. I sought out a place a cultured person is free to be as pretentious as he likes without worrying that the European smart set's tolerance for Jews and Americans is next to nil unless they top Europeans in badmouthing both the US and Israel--an impossible task because nobody hates either the US or Israel quite like rich European socialists whose entire lifestyle is based on the benefits they most derive from the US and Jews.
The stories I heard about Israel made it seem a place where an underachieving Jewish boy from Baltimore was more free to practice the best values of both the US and the EU than anywhere in the physical places. I pictured a life in a small, beautiful country where everything I valued was possible: a place that valued used books in multiple languages and local art exhibits, local pop musicians and American box office hits. A place where the bars stayed open till 5 when the afterhours started, good physical shape was built into the lifestyle and the best restaurants weren't too expensive (my how things change...). A place where history could always be studied and the present always makes new history. A place where ideas and actions were virtually the same thing. Every country has its ideals, but Israel seemed closest to mine.
And tragically, I found in Israel just about everything looked for, and what a fucking price you pay for it.
Israelis have so many options that they have no idea what to do with them, and they are the most miserable people on earth: rude, arrogant, constantly aware of their dangerous existences and international pariahdom, which gives them chips on their shoulders as big as Jacob's older sons against Joseph. It's a whole country existing on history's biggest faultline, and it simultaneously makes them free and enslaved. It is precisely the rudeness of Israelis which creates the endless dynamism of the society. It's a place where people hold nothing back, and as such, the aggression creates a greenhouse of innovation and progress that I've never seen in any other place except the similarly aggressive New York.
I went in with huge plans and went out heartbroken--not socially or romantically, heartbroken for the life I hoped was possible and would never have.
Israel is a country just like any other country, and yet it isn't. Israel is the proof that living your dreams isn't any better than not living them. Some ideal worlds are real, but they're always disappointing. Whether Israel lives or dies, Jews will always live with the gates up, and living the dream may not be worth the price.
Is the threat to Israeli democracy the natural byproduct of how Israel treats Palestinians? Is Israeli democracy threatened because liberal Jews have collaborated with conservative Jews in making Israel too free from accountability? Is Israel worth defending anymore? I have no idea, and to a certain extent it doesn't matter. It is what it is, and it experiences the same right-wing authoritarianism that threatens every first world democracy on the planet, only Israel's further along.
As Mark Twain said: Jews are like everybody else, only moreso, so whatever happens to Israel first is what will happen elsewhere. If the most militarily trained society on earth has a civil war, expect that here next. If Israel is unable to preserve its borders and ill-intentioned native peoples come pouring into Israel sponsoring their violence with legitimate grievances, expect that here next. And however doubtful, if Israel again shows that liberals and conservatives can overcome unbridgeable gulfs to still live in peace, expect that here next.
Israel is the freest and the most chained place on earth. It's everything we are but to the nth degree. They are the guinea pigs for every historical trend that comes to you next. It has all the glories and agonies you have, it's simultaneously the most livable and unlivable place on earth. It's evidence that the impossible is always possible.
So maybe they'll pull it out and democracy can still thrive, even with its existence threatened as it always is. Any rational projection says that Israel is fucked right now in a hundred different ways; but in a hundred different ways, Israel is the impossible nation. It is a place where nobody sane would ever want to live, and yet life goes on.
I am endlessly fascinated by Israel, but I find it an endlessly frustrating place. I think that's precisely what it's supposed to be.
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