sunrise

From Masada to New York to Salt Lake, I've followed a steady string of sunrises halfway across the world. Sitting here at my computer, in our frigid Salt Lake City sunroom, I find myself backtracking the miles from B to A, retracing my steps to the top of Masada.

Hiking through the dark, my chest tight and pounding, I remember explaining esoteric English vocabulary to Bar, our Israeli madricha. We stumbled over dry creekbeds and pressed our knees down against the stone steps, our eyes occasionally spinning up and back to look at the stars, speckled and brilliant against the navy blue sky. I lagged behind as we neared the top, my head aching and my sweat turning cold on my back. And then Elliot, who I still didn't even really know, was there standing next to me, with a quiet word of encoruagement and the soft presence of someone who didn't mind waiting up. We reached the top together, and I collapsed on a rock to gaze out at the distant Trans-Jordan mountains, glowing faintly with the coming dawn.

I watched the moutains glow brighter and brighter, butter yellows and blue-pinks oozing up towards the fading stars. We crowded around the cobbled defenses, elbows rested on the stone walls that held in our ancestors as we locked our eyes to the peaks across the valley. I can still see the sun as it appeared, suddenly, as if by magic, in the crux of two dark peaks. A distorted orange orb peeking up and out, its attention focused not on us, but on warm blue sky stretching endlessly above it.

Weeks later, I spent a restless night in a navy blue upholstered airplane seat, my nose runny and my eyes crusted open. Every now and then I would glance out the window, focusing vaguely on the black behind the oval where I could find no landmarks. Twelve hours passed on that plane; leaning up against Nathan as he drifted through medicated sleep, glancing back at him enviously through restless eyes as I woke, again and again, to the tone of the fasten seat belt sign. We landed at JFK at dawn. Walking down the glassy terminal towards passport control, clutching our bags to our chests and talking feverishly, I began to realize that soon, we would all be gone. Outside the window, through dark grey clouds on a backdrop of white-blue, the sun rose vaguely over the airport. The dull thunk of stamps on passports yanked us to the baggage claim, and within an hour, I found myself alone, dozing restlessly in another blue chair and waiting for the sun to set on my next airplane.

And then this morning. I didn't take Tylenol PM last night, and so at 5:00 I found myself alive and restless, twitching like a bellydancer below my heavy down comforter. I spent a few moments thinking about my muscles, a few moments thinking about the weather, a few moments thinking about hot black tea with sugar. I listened to three songs on my iPod (Pretty Things - Rufus Wainwright, Fair - Remy Zero, Against all Odds - The Postal Service), read two chapters in a book my father gave me months ago, and then put on my glasses. I watched the dark branches outside my windows grow backlit with the dawn, watched the sky morph from black to blue in the quietest way possible. The clouds, strung out at high altitude, stayed grey with the morning. I took a deep breath and stepped out of bed, treading down my house's carefully carpeted stairs to a glass of tea and the computer screen.

My cold fingers, clacking at the keyboard, can only reminisce for the Middle East.

cottonmouth

listen to: regrets, by ben folds five.

Last night I was awake until 2:30am, just because I felt listless and had work to do and kept stalling for hang out time with everyone. This morning, when my cell phone alarm went off at 8? I let it go through three full ring cycles before I realized omigawd it's MY alarm that's going off, not Rachel's or Laura's or Sam's, and then I turned it off and lay there in bed for way way too long. By the time I actually made it to the hadar ochel, it was ten minutes to closing and the angry cafeteria ladies barked at us in Hebrew. I ate shitty off-brand frosted flakes with 3% milk, because for some reason they drink 3% here, not 2%. And instead of skim being skim, it's 0%! Madness.

Then I went back to the dorm to grab my English stuff (everyone in my room: still asleep) and now I'm here, in the comp lab, stalling. Today and yesterday have been finals for our sequentials: yesterday was Biology, today is Physics. For English I had to write an essay on a poem by Margaret Atwood, and now I have these hideous CHARTS about Joyce's Dubliners, and...ugh. Charts. The best part is that this is only the beginning-- this afternoon I compose the study plan of all study plans re: final exam in the core curriculum. All of Jewish History from biblical times to the present. In four hours of testing.

Niice. Mom says it's good practice for college but mostly I don't listen to her. Becuase...well, because she's my mom. No offense, Mom.

Wow. Good journal entry, Dory! Mostly I just felt obligated to put some kind of buffer between my awkward poetry and the future tense. I'll be concrete/coherent soon, I swear. After Shabbos? It's on.

xoxo

poetic interlude

a week from today
i will be panicking as i try to track down lost shoes and socks and pack 900 shekels worth of gifts and traded t-shirts into my bags,
a week from today i'll be choking back the bittersweet foreign words that mean i'm finally, oh god, i'm finally going home.
a week from today i won't be sleeping, not at all; i'll be on the bus to the airport and we'll just sit there in the intl terminal, trying so hard to make so much of the last few hours before we're sealed in and sleep through and pop out
in nyc.
and then everyone will disappear through the cracks in the short-rubbed sanitary grey-blue carpet and i will fly home alone,
knuckles white on the blue pleather armrests and eyes locked on the clouded white mountains that i know will tell me i'm home.

tiyul: galile #2

Today's tiyul brought us from home to home across Israel's Galile region-- first, a family of four living in a Bedouin-style tent to be closer to the land. Next, our guide's mother, one of the chalutzot, or pioneers, who came to Israel in the forties. Later that afternoon, we visited an Arab village; all 33 of us huddled into a stranger's basement sitting room, drinking small styrofoam cups of hot tea and listening to Aubrey's summarized translations of the man in the kafiya who explained to us the challenges an educated Arab faced in today's Israel. Discrimination in jobs, land rights, representation in the government-- the list was brief, but hit all the points that we take for granted as citizens of any country. Strange and somewhat depressing to see such a thoughtful, intelligent man inform us that our Promised Land and his Holy Land was also a land where he couldn't get a decent paying job.

In between housecalls, we returned to the misty hillsides of Zefat to visit the Artist's Quarter in the rain. Everyone says that Zefat is beautiful in the summer, that it's really too bad we couldn't see it in the sunshine, but I like it better the way I've come to know it. There's something about the place, with its crooked, Harry Potter-esque alleyways and lampposts, the music playing in small stone courtyards, the lovely overlooks of the mountains below-- I think if the mist lifted, it wouldn't be nearly as romantic, nearly as magical. Me and Jacqui looked through the shops, I couldn't find a keychain tacky enough for my liking, and we purchased hot chocolate and ice cream, respectively.

Dinner tonight was in the restaurant of a Yemenite Jew whose name I can't remember. I have no idea what any of the food was called but it was all delicious and I ate so much that, to be perfectly honest, I spent the entire 2.5 hour bus ride home wanting to vomit on myself. For those of you readers back home-- brace yourselves for the new Dory. She has gained the Freshman 15 a year early and she will kill a man for a choclate covered Oreo. Except that she doesn't have to, because her roommate Sam buys them on a regular basis and pretty soon she'll have a heart attack and drop dead.

True story.

Nothing else to report for tonight. Go Home Day is drawing ever nearer (10 days technically, but I'll round down to nine). I'm not really sure how I feel about it-- I miss everyone, to be sure, but saying goodbye to my friends here is defenitely going to smart.

Expect lots more entries before I leave! It's not over till...till it's over. Actually, more like until finals are over.

You get it.

xoxo

the negev

So today I went here. Israel's Negev Desert-- over 50% of the country's land with less that 10% of it's population. All my friends pressed their foreheads to the windows with bleary eyes and said,
"It's so strange, it's so beautiful; only in Israel."
But looking out at those wicked badlands, rough bushes and sharp stones, I couldn't help but feel like I was home. The Negev was nothing new to me; as Uri stood in front of the group talking about the solitude the desert could offer, the clarity of mind it could give, I found myself thinking
I know. I live here.
Because I do, I really do live here. Scrambling up the backbone of a mock crater, squinting down at the dull earth bulging up around me, I understand more than ever that I am, first and foremost, a Citizen of the Desert. No matter where I go, the intensity and the emptiness of desert will always make my freedom.

"the holocaust martyrs' and heroes' remembrance authority"

The last three days have left me completely exhausted. Every morning, I wake up the same way I always do-- reluctantly hauling from my bed, brushing my teeth, eating crappy food, and fumbling to class or the bus --and stare down eight to ten hours of Holocaust Studies.

On Monday it was endless classtime; reading excerpts from Nazi documents and partisan correspondence, writing down facts and figures and bulleted lists of political thought and motivations. All morning in class, lunch, afternoon with a Holocaust survivor, class, dinner, class, sleep. There was no time to think about what was coming into my head, no time to consider the gravity of the subject-- I was too busy taking notes.

The next day was our Resistance Tiyul. Wandering vaguely through the Carmel Mountains and looking out past a ruined crusader castle to the Mediterrenean sea, I kept myself awake with a steady stream of chewing gum, chocolate gelt, and whiny conversations with my friends. After the hike, we went to the Ghetto Fighter's Museum, one hour away. I gazed blankly into the pixelated photos of partisan soilders, smiling grimly out at me from their dull foamboard.

And then today. Yad Vashem. It's so hard to write about these things coherently; please forgive me.

In one of the rooms is a narrow display shaped like a strip of film negatives. Each panel shows a different image. In one, men running from trucks to a forest clearing, S.S. officers urging them on. In the next, the men pick up shovels; in the next, they begin to dig trenches while the soilders look on. Gold and grey captions run below the images: "The Jews were made to believe they were simply performing forced labor" one said.

Among the panels is a photograph taken right on the edge of one of the trenches, looking down at the men and boys working below. In the center of the image is a young man, with rumpled dark hair casting a shadow over his eyes. His head is turned, his brow furrowed; he stares out of the frame at something we will never be able to see. He looks preoccupied, concerned. Behind him, two older men work, their backs turned to the camera. The young man wears a numbered canvas jumpsuit, one size too large and bunched up around the waist. And his hands: still wrapped around the handle of his shovel, reaching down to take another load of earth from what, in moments, will be his grave.

In the next panel, the Einsatzgruppen-- the death squad --line up the men along the trenches, one man every twelve meters, backs turned on their murderers. Five gunmen point their weapons at each man, and the officers, thumbs between their buttons, look on. In the final photograph, they fire. The photo blurs as the bodies fall.

This display is the only thing in the museum which made me cry.

after 1.5 hours listening to an auschwitz survivor...

"Surviving a camp like Auschwitz is not just a miracle, it is a string of miracles. To survive, you needed a few miracles per day."

"Many of us who did not think we had a chance went to the wire. That is what we called it, going to the wire. It was electrocuted barbed wire, 40,000 volts. They would say, we don't have a chance, why should we suffer? One day more, one day more. So they went to the wire."

"Before Auschwitz I was a young kid, in Auschwitz I became an old man. I learned everything about life there. It is the university you can imagine-- if you can survive it."

"I go back to Auschwitz usually two times a year, I make pilgrimage...why do I go back? To pay my respects to the memory of those who did not come back. The second reason is...that I can tell my taxi to meet at the front gate at say, 3:00, and it will wait for me. I can go in and out. I can leave Auschwitz as a free person every day."

the beginning

Today marks the beginning of HSI-learns-Holocaust week, and also the beginning of a series of actual, assigned journal entries.

We'll see if I'm capable of maintaining any kind of quality in my writing. To repeat one of my new favorite words: assigned pieces? Fabricated.

Evian-Les-Bains, home of the famous bottled water, was also home to a conference which could have saved half a million human lives. There, in 1938, world leaders from 32 "Countries of Asylum" met to discuss potential solutions to the growing problem facing German and Austrian Jews-- the problem of pogroms, the problem of random arrests, of public humiliation, of hangings and corruption and the hatred of Jews.

They met, they talked, they played golf and had spa days and rode horses through the lovely mountain scenery. Not so far away in Germany, countless Jews were looking down the barrel of a fate that no one deserves. And these bureaucrats spent ten minutes each saying,

O, O God, it's so sad, so terrible, those poor innocent men and women and children. Those poor innocent Jews, we pity them so immensely, we care so much.
But I'm afraid that laws are laws and the people are the people and
no.
No, we won't be helping.
We can only pray that someone else will.

And again and again throughout history, people express their sympathy and look away and move on. The conference at Evian was just another moment that people chose to wait, another moment when politics left us with a dream-- a dream of life --deffered.

Making a difference is not something that can be postponed. We have to make a difference now, or we'll all really be screwed; you can't postpone the issue because in the case of the men and women at Evian it was as good as murder. And if all they wanted was to point at that weekend in France and say, look, we tried; say that so they could sleep at night, then fine. They got what they wanted. They didn't take issue with the extermination of innocents.

But someone has to. Someone has to take responsibility for the things and the people that the fools of this world shatter like clay vessels. Someone has to care for the broken, someone has to stick the earthen sherds back into one another like a jigsaw until our water glasses can be the mirrors for the voices we can only just hear, like the dull roar of ocean in a seashell.

Someone has to fix it,
someone has to listen.

If we don't, who will?

so this is the new year

Today's song of choice: The New Year, Death Cab for Cutie. Obvious, but so appropriate.

The group spent the weekend chilling with a bunch of kibbutznikim about an hour from Hod. They were all kids about our age who had kind of deferred their army service to spend the year taking classes in Judaism and Zionism and get to know the country more-- not unlike what us HSI chillins' are doing. We spent the night on their little campusy area, talking to them and just hanging out. The idea was more fun than the reality; I had trouble forcing myself to really talk to people because I was so unintrigued by the awkwardness. I made a few friends, though, and had some bonding time with some of our group who I haven't hung out with so much. So a weekend well spent, I guess.

We had dinner at our teachers' houses last night, which turned out to be a lot of fun. We got to meet Aubrey's family and look through his photo albums and eat the AMAZING sufganiyot (fried dough with powdered sugar) that his wife made. We played a couple games of Chinese Whispers (that's what Aubrey calls it, for the rest of the world it's Telephone) and failed at one of those counting/clapping things, and then the bus took us back to Hod. An excellent bus ride, as a total side note: Brooke & I rocked out to Dashboard, and then Jack & I rocked out to Taking Back Sunday, and then I tripped over Ali's feet like nine times and Elliott made the smelliest fart in the world and Laura and Aimee made epic raps.

And then it was 10:30pm and omigawd it was almost New Years! Legs were shaved, asses were packed into denim miniskirts, glorious hiphop playlists were made. And then, once everyone (us and some kids from Akiba) were downstairs? NOTHING HAPPENED. Me, Sarah, Fallon, Jacqui, Brooke, and Ali tried so hard to make a party. We danced, we sang along, we drank Pepsi MAX and made Jack skip all the songs that sucked. Nothing.

As we counted down, I felt even less than I usually do on New Year's. The superficiality of it, how fabricated the time shift seems, left me smiling vaguely as the couples necked and one of my dancing buddies kissed me on the cheek. Three minutes later, Ben (the Akiba madrich and the older brother of one of the boys in our group, Sam) sent his kids home. In the immortal words of my father, and now Ben:

"New Year's ends at midnight. I want you home by 12:10."

After all the Akiba kids were gone and we were left to mill aimlessly around the moadon, Jack put on The Verve's Bittersweet Symphony and those of us still awake formed a circle in the middle of the room, swaying with our arms draped over each other's shoulders. Sandwiched between Bar and Nathan, I looked around the circle at all of my friends (and family, really) and felt myself cheer up a little bit. Each person took turns stating their hopes for the new year-- I hope we all do well on our SATs, I hope we all get into the colleges we want, and I'm so so glad to be celebrating New Year's with all of you who I've come to love so much.

We cracked jokes, we improvised a sacreligious rap, and I was happy about it. At 3:30am, I crawled into bed, Death Cab for Cutie slipping from my earphones to my subconcious as I drifted off to sleep.

This morning I woke up with a hacking cough, a splitting headache, and fever-sore muscles that refused to lift me out of bed. Yoni told me to go see the nurse, but I fell asleep by accident and didn't wake up until 1 in the afternoon when Rachel woke me up to ask if I wanted anything to eat. After being chastized for missing class, I showered instead of attending my first sequential, bought an iced coffee, and stumbled my way over to English. And now I'm here, in the comp lab, waiting for 4:40 and coughing mucus into a pile of Kleenex.

I go home in 19 days. I'm not going to miss Israel, I'm not going to miss classes, I'm not going to miss Mosenson Youth Village. But I am going to miss my friends. My God, am I going to miss my friends.

Happy New Year. I wish you all the very best.
xoxo

FUN FACTS

1. In Israel, every little restaurant and cafe and crap stand sells this stuff called iced coffee. But it's not like American iced coffee with coffee and ice, it's like a delicious milky sweet coffee SLURPEE and you can buy a medium for 10 shekel at Ofer's on campus and they're SO expensive but SO good. SO. GOOD.
2. You know how there are two day weekends? Like, with Saturday and Sunday? I don't. Because in Israel, SUNDAY IS A WORK DAY. So there is one day and one night of true, honest-to-God weekend, but even with that Sunday is Shabbos so everything is closed until sundown. Moral of the story? Madness.
3. Yesterday while eating lunch in the Hadar Ochel, we looked up and the ceiling tile above us was all wobbly, and Leeron was like, "I think it's dripping..." and then it FELL on the TABLE, right on Brooke's tray. And there were chunks of ceiling everywhere and I laughed so hard I almost peed my pants.
4. I just got iced coffee all over the front of my shirt and I'm too lazy to change it, so now I'll smell like rancid milk ALL DAY.
5. Tonight is our super-duper exciting "Hanukah Halluh" party with the Akiba kids. Akiba is made up of 45 students from the same American high school who are doing the Alexander Muss program at the same time we are, just separately. We don't really know what a "Hanukah Halluh" entails-- although I suspect that by "halluh" they meant holla, as in holla back or "Hollaback Girl", if you will --but on the dorky little flyers they handed us it said to dress in your best 60's get up and that there would be free food. I'm down.
6. I spend most of Physics every day attempting to explain to my teacher exactly how I expect him to teach me. When I'm not teaching him how to teach, he's doing labs for me and getting distracted by Orli, who has an inborn gift for sidetracking teachers.
7. I'M going to go take a nap!
8. And then I'm gonna pick out my favorite 60's ensemble and get my groove on, Hanukah Halluh-style.


Happy Hannukah and Merry Christmas to all! Much love.
xoxo