Accomplishments: 11-11-11

Woke up.
Showered.
Did Hindu chants.
Dressed and packed bag.
Stretched.
Packed an apple.
Met friend.
Took vitamins.
Ate sensibly.
Ordered Decaf.
Donut hole instead of donut.
Spoke to Ruthie in Israel.
Spoke to Leener in New York.
Refuted UCB ticket.
Wrote letter to mentor.
Called insurance company.
Filed insurance forms.
At apple.
Called Grandma.
Drove to city.
Got gas.
Met woman.
Found miracle parking.
Found dreamy Palestinian restaurant.
Wrote article.
Made Rugelach.
Cleaned dishes first.
Got pretty.
Made bed before leaving.
Prayed.
Convened with ghosts.
Spoke with strangers.
Connected with non-strangers.
Drove home.
Wrote list of accomplishments.

On Poland, Indellible

Catharsis.

Questions. Questions of belonging. Questions of departure. Questions of niggunim, of womanhood, of Jewishhood.

Overwhelmed with a desire to fix everything in sight. Would like to be the salve to the broken-hearted descendants to survivors. Would like to redo the memorialization at Belzec, at Auschwitz, at Birkenau, at Madjonic. Would like to do Polish – Israeli dialogues. Would like to solve the problems in Gaza. Would like to restore this nation, Israel. Would like to eradicate the acceptance of racist mentalities of Israeli youth. To heal bodies. To heal souls.

I need to excavate that cemetery. To name the dead. To restore the spirits lost in space. I need the shamanic council, I need them all to stand at Belzec and shake with the unreal buzz of dead people unsettled. So many ghosts. They live in black hats. Avenge, not revenge. Nausea. Screams and piles. No one knew they were human. Dogs, buried en masse. Not even those soldiers, liberators, were prepared. Vomiting at the sight of the Jewish vermin. Extinction failed. They are insipid. We have taken over the earth. Am awaiting the rat poison’s return.

USA arrival. Hating the living in the name of the dead. All those deniers of the Holocaust. The word “holocaust.” The numbing out. Giant steel building to represent the unrepresentable. Make a giant and everyone goes blind. People can’t look giants in the eye. That thing. Was. Real.

Chassids at the grave sight. My body in charge. Shakes, leaking, exhausting. Pain before emotion. Entire body, one ache, all those ponds full of human ashe, spilling over in the rain. My boots coated in the Jewish dead. Do I bury my boots? Or walk that mud through the old city, scrape the Auschwitz remains at the Kotel.

Onlooking anti-Semites. Misbehaved Israeli children chiding the hatred. “Why do you care? American kids behave horribly, too.” “Because American children don’t represent the Jewish people.” Peoplehood. His anger at inter-marriage, “how can you suggest that after this trip?” Desperate to hold on to the past, forgetting that nothing can be held when squeezed. It always, undeniably, will pop.

Lost on MeaSharim, fear of my own people because of the length of my skirt. I dared them to mess with me. I dared them. I would have yelled about shame and solidarity and the burnt pile of my people underneath a filthy ugly museum exhibition. Muddy dead.

Hope and beauty and preservation. A book. A CD. A restaurant. And then the fat Chasids and the feeling, all over that shul, of murder, of disregard. Something horrible is still happening.

My cousin in America and the boys at school. They threw money at her feet and said “pick it up, You Jew.” Dirty Jew. She is a warrior, my dirty Jewish cousin, who stood and read to her hater classmates about who she is, what it means to be Jewish. And the apologies that ensued.

Chosen people, indeed. We should, according to plan, according to statistics, according to that extermination camp, those cells in the basement, that firing squad, those gas chambers. Oh, God, those gas chambers. Echoing with the unfinishing of lives. I lulled them all, those screaming wailing souls, with song.

I lulled the dead until so empty I could collapse. There is no love when everyone is torn up with grief. There is only kosher noodle soup.

According to statistics we should all be dead. Left and forgotten in shtetl after shtetl, wasting in the camps where the liberators turned their faces in disgust. An issue, this war, this Holocaust, long forgotten. The memory is an irritation, sand paper on an open wound. We did it too big, giant mausoleum for the giant dead, but no one can look, I said, a giant in the eye.

I tiptoed through history, waded along muddy banks of torture and slavery, starvation as a meal-plan at winter camp. The only real evidence, a bombed crematorium, a desperate attempt to cover a crime. You know the wicked by their guilt.

And then all those hearts, hearts of the destroyers, unclean. “We expect them to begin telling their stories now,” the guide told me. The surviving killers, on their deathbeds, she is referring to. We expect them to come out in tchuvah before they pass. “I raped 500 young women in three years and then bayonet killed my own babies.” Dirty Jews.

There was fresh graffiti near the old synagogue “Juden” and a $ sign. Mass graves of babies, the only marker, a fence. NAMES. Where are the names? A sword, a monument, candles, photos. Find the names. Excavate the dead. Why do healers convene in the Alps, together, secluded? I call upon the shamans, worldwide, to join me at Auschwitz. The mud is full of the dead. The graves unmarked. The names, afloat, drowned. Gone.

I need a council; I need an army of healers to wander with me. Arizona, on my mind. A boy whose soul is a reflection of a national dilemma. God is dying, everywhere. Help me. Bring. God. Back. Into these hearts.

I am so small and my body so weak. Help me, heal me, join me, I need to fight a giant war on the hearts of killers. A war of love, of resuscitation. “It is the government, not the Jews,” said my cab driver today. “I am Muslim. I like the Jewish. They believe in Allah. I can talk to them. It is the government, not the Jews. Jewish does not say kill people.”

Gripped by fear. Gripped by shoulder pain, knee pain, a stomachache, a headache, a cold, a lack of self-control. God, Baruch Hashem, sangoma, Bangladeshi monk, the writing teachers, the acupuncturists, the shamans, the rabbis, the priests, the seers, the believers, whoever you are. We need to cut through, like a meditator cuts thoughts, we need to cut the air, the culture, the social layers, the blinders. Help people fall over. Help people wail. Release, Yared, release the pain in the chest. Release the dead. Writhe at the emptiness, a body born anew no longer inhabited by ghosts. God, release us, release the Jewish people.

Questions of Judaism. Questions of solidarity. Questions of pork, of kosher sandwiches at airports. Questions of the beauty in secular eyes, the clouds in those who herald god. Give me a shovel, help me dig. We need to erect a monument to our suffering, to release it, to visit it annually and live between hearts and eyes the other 364 days.

I miss my grandmother. I saw everything that haunted her, the good, the beauty, and the absolute horror. Synagogues of gold, acoustics that echo pure glass, a countryside, a grove of trees. It looked like DC, only thinner, gaunt, those trees. The only witnesses to everything. Silent mourners. A group shot in the forest. A group. No. Group after group after group until they quit. Too expensive killing Jews with bullets.

You want to tell me I am stuck in the past? That Israel is stick on the Holocaust? Try to unglue yourself from a grave that large, the size of a football field, coated in imported volcanic rock. Imported stones to represent the immensity of the local dead. Representation an insult to reality. Nothing is needed to imagine. Just lie there, flat on the earth, long enough and it will rush through your system. You can feel them clawing for air, hear their prayers sang until choking on “gift-gas.” We fail at mourning. We, the people, by the people, for the people, fail at mourning, fail at witnessing. A woman of two nations, her people ruining themselves.

God help me. God help my people to mourn so that they may begin, anew, to see their neighbors. Grief blinds. Blind Jews with guns will shoot their neighbors. Clear our vision, unblock our sight, cleanse our hearts. 300 candlesticks in San Diego, a way of holding on, in case, just in case, they decide to do it again. History, says the Torah teacher, is already written. Your country will lose its Jews too. And the question is, are we left to preserve the Jewish people, or to restore dignity to the world? Or both? Or neither? The task is too great, this superhero expectation that I will fix a nation. Or two.

Jerusalem Nights

Inspired by one Bhanu Kapil, yet again, I will attempt a blog entry. I have a lot of friends in the world, some old, some new, some very new and very quick and then suddenly gone to San Francisco. I was in Poland last week and met a Russian princess who, in the back of a bus that said, in Polish and English, “You can dance” on the exterior, a Russian princess who coached me in bravery.

I am back now, in the land of neither here nor there, this place called Jerusalem/America/the devil everyone sees from the other side of the ocean. I go to school with a whole lot of people of all walks, big people, small people, Jewish people, not Jewish people, American people, people from New Zealand and Australia.

After class tonight I met a friend on a street corner for a clandestine talk about planning our futures. We are both holding each other’s secrets like gold, and helping to build, what we pray, is a solid long-term plan. These types of things, plans, careers and goals, require secret meetings for women of Torah. This is off the books.

I had an appointment at six, and she walked by us during our clandestine chat. The six pm appointment was also secret, so like ships in the night, I shifting positions from sitting to walking, waving one woman goodbye and meeting the other. We walked.

I am being interrupted now by someone hitting a car outside my window. It wasn’t hard, but I can hear the muffler scraping.

I also can usually hear my landlord but tonight, quiet, thanks to an inspiring talk from my new Peace and Conflict studies professor on the importance of finding peace in the home before and during bringing peace to the world. I visited my landlord, told him about Poland. He is a big Israeli man who is very kind to me, thinks of me as a daughter and often ends conversations with a fatherly “I love you.” It is strange, but also endearing.

He has a collection of toy owls and a small white bird in a cage near his flat screen TV. His kitchen is a bit like a little prarie house, and heated like mad. We discussed Poland and how they looted and killed, the Poles, not the Nazis, in order to get all of our people out. We then discussed a way to ensure quiet at sleep time, also evaluating American quiet time (10pm) VS. Israeli quiet time (11pm.) I can “call every five minutes” and ask him to be quiet and it won’t annoy him, he claims. He said he just needs a reminder.

This, of course, is in response to a 3, 4, and sometimes 5am rude awakening to the sound of TV, radio, and/or yelling in Hebrew. I am mostly sequestering myself this week, attempting somehow to post my photos from Poland in a coherent and honorable way. I am failing, and spent five hours tonight simply attempting to download and then upload and failing on all fronts. I think these photos need incubation time.

It is way past my bedtime. I aspire to one day be as amazing as Bhanu Kapil on paper, in looks and in action.

Last Week

There is little to say when so much takes place. I can describe where I am. I am somewhere between perfect and imperfect, sitting by the Mediterranean on my computer drinking mint tea. It is Friday, our Saturday, and I forgot my phone at home. Someone might be trying to reach me for our lunch date. I will get to them when I eject from said balcony over the sea.

Things here are crazy. Always. I made lovely Nigerian friends on the Sherut a few nights ago and then lost my cool when the bus driver and some random small woman started yelling at me in regards to my destination. “Are you American? I don’t like your country. I don’t like Americans.” People are very good at insiting anger here, at provoking edges and thorns. It is a nation that is constantly navigating boundaries, inside and out.

I got a ride from a stranger who gave me chocolate milk and had me listen to his recording CD. A religious boy offered to helpo carry my groceries. I made friends with a cab driver after asking, sincerely, if he was ok. He stopped the meter and drove me for free. I found my little friend from New Mexico.

Habib sang songs for me and other staff members and demonstrated breakdancing skills while I sang “I believe I can fly.” My Congolese student was sad so I played a Nico song for him, he learned the words, and sang away his misery. I learned a few language skills, smoothed over relations with a thirsty crazy lady, and regained my appetite for the first time in over a month. I ate out with my favorite Israeli twins and started cooking for myself.

Everything is fine, weird, edgy, injected with the craziness of this place, but fine. I have a beautiful friend in London who is happy, and I have another en route to North Carolina to begin to seal the matrimonial deal. I saw Twilight Eclipse and ate popcorn and Jelly-Bellys with my cousin.

I can still hear the sea. Focus is not my forte right now. There is a glimpse.

Shabbat Shalom.

Arriving

This morning. So loud, those 8’s and 10’s and 12’s of Orthodox children, it felt like they were all in my bed, jumping, yelling in Yiddish and Hebrew to get up. I was slow. It was a religious weekend in the city of mystics. 20 minute uphill walks, 40 minutes downhill, 20 more up. Impossible on the calves.

I went to my well. I drank. I ate with a midget and her giant children in a secret hole in the wall. She fed me many forms of flour. Flour with apples. Flour with jam. Flour with flour. I had a stomachache walking 20 minutes uphill, 45-degree angle, home to my room with the orthodox reverberating children.

For moments, in mystical cities in the mountains where everything is quiet bar children, and everything is holy, for moments you might think you are home. But by the passing of the Sabbath life resumes and cracks reveal themselves. This is inevitable, even in the concreter marble mansion. Once they left, I saw the unfinished edges. Nothing is completely what it seems.

I left after breakfast. A one-breasted sage and a Canadian religioso tried to save my soul. Whether they succeeded is to be determined. I left quickly and overwhelmed, relaxing more and more as we left the epicenter. They took me to a tomb the night before. Women wept before the grave of the author of the holiest mystical text, the author of “light.”

Then they fed a tour group pizza and told stories of why war is bad and then my stomach, more flour, no nutrients, continued to grumble. I walked home alone to my room, through naked shuttered streets that are thousands of years old. Like Florence or Venice only everyone is orthodox. I walked and there were stray cats and a crazy-looking lame dog that could have killed me but walked right past. Between the tomb and the pizza I was haunted. Through and through.

I dreamed of rooms and drawers and a plane and packing wrong and forgetting bags and sitting with cool kids. I woke to more raucous ortho-brats. I left after the sage. I sat next to a musician on the bus. I slept. I got home. I got agitated. I left home. I walked to the beach. I walked. I didn’t care that I was hungry and dehydrated. The beach was alive and I was blessed. Mountains and holy cities and beaches in one day. My mind was quiet. Something happened there, in the city of angels.

And then I walked and walked and walked and I found the medusa heads and I found the stones and then the Herzliya hermit’s house. He changed it. It is more wonderful, more glorious than I remembered. I wanted him to come outside. “I have been waiting for you, Miriam.” But he never did. I imagine he is my soul mate. I imagine living with him in the sandcastle baby the sea. I wanted to bow, to supplicate myself before his home. I am in love with his choice, the patterns in the wall.

But he never came out and we aren’t soul mates and I didn’t get invited to see the inside. He didn’t come and tell me the secrets of my soul and I was still on the beach in rare beautiful form, the beach. And so I walked and then lay flat on my back in the sand. I could lie there forever if my body and mind didn’t have so many needs. I am in love with the ocean, even if its boundaries and borders terrify me. This country is unreal in its beauty and treachery.

Today. Not sick.

A quick ten-point commitment of the day:

1) I found a bus. Bus 90. Bus 90 takes me from my door to class. Do you know what this means? My commute is no longer three busses. I no longer fight for a seat on the mini-van, battling for fairness in culture wars. No more protecting the person who was there before me. Nope. None. Just one big fancy bus half the price of my previous three. Deeeeep breath.
2) I might be making friends. I am the least sick that I have been since arriving, which is pretty un-sick, and that means I smiled today, like a real wide smile. Smiles bring friends. I made one from Belgium. There are other potentials. In my language class they range from Brazilian to Thai to French to the American boy that everyone loves but I know better than to love him too much because he has the face of a man and the body of a teenager. That is trouble. I smell it from here.
3) Motorcycles on sidewalks are allowed here. Motorcycles on a walking strip are scary.
4) I saw a Chasid on rollerblades on Ben Yehuda street.
5) I found the Black Hebrews today. I walked into their vegan organic restaurant and said it reminded me of Everlasting Life in DC. The man asked, “On Georgia?” I said yes. He said he used to live in DC and his uncle bought that place out. No more Everlasting Life on Georgia.
6) Then I found an organic food place next door and was given a tour of their clinic in back, acupuncture, shiatsu, etc. They said I was going to slowly fall in love with this country. I gave him a very dubious look. We debated US voodoo Vs. Chinese medicine.
7) Habib, my very best student, brings in the lyrics to songs by Miley Cyrus. He also brings in quotes from facebook in need of translation. He is amazing and showed videos on his phone of himself breakdancing.
8) Habib walked me to the bus tonight because I no longer feel safe walking alone. I teach Sudanese refugees in a very sketchy neighborhood. There are a lot of skinny white crack-heads and weird suspicious activities, and cats. I had Habib walk me to my bus.
9) I asked Habib about the marks on my students. Everyone has scars and burns and other marks, and a few have these intense lines around the circumference of their skull at the hair line. I figured they had been tortured with some sort of string, but Habib told me they are tribal markers. I asked more questions and he revealed that we have two Southern Sudanese tribes represented in our class, explaining the circles scars and the protruding forehead dots. Habib is good.
10) I went home at 9:30. Arrived home at 9:30. I left the house at 8am. Today was a full day and I was healthy today. Can you imagine? After over a month of mystery illnesses and hives and infections and fevers, I had the strength to walk the city, take a class, teach a class and then some.

Saturday Indoors

My roommate emerged yesterday and asked, "There is a water war, have you heard?" Naturally being that I am in the Middle East surrounded by war-zones and water shortages, I assumed that "water war" was somehow related to my recent use of the sink and something to do with water rights control. In fact, he meant, "water fight." Annually there are a lot of things in this funny city, like a "white night" where everything is open all night, and a "water war" in a downtown fountain.

I passed on both. I packed up my room yesterday, for maybe the 10th time, probably more than that, this year. That room caused headaches and allergies like I have never known, all that dust in thick layers over everything from a nearby construction site. I moved and a friend helped relocate me. I navigated the feelings of others, found someone eating and watching TV in my new room, ignored it, deposited bags and went to dinner.

Dinner here is family times ten. I cry when I see people I love here, because the hours and spaces in-between are often voids, loveless, scary even. I am reading Dance Dance Dance by Haruki Murakami, which may not be helping with this drifting floating feeling.

My neck is off. I am in between settled and unsettled. I have three weekends to go, 8 or so classes to teach, and 16 to take. I miss something, like deeply American, and I can't quite put my finger on it. I have flashbacks to places I didn't know I cared about, like Bradley Road in Bethesda or Koreatown, L.A.. Something is birthing in me, but there is only one person, someone way upstairs, who has any idea what that will be. In the meantime, Edward Scissorhands and World Cup soccer are today's saving grace.