A few years back, I did a lecture tour in Israel: Tel Aviv, Haifa, Jerusalem and Beersheba. Tough audiences. Great experience. I had three minders organising the tour, with Eric the one in charge. Eric and his wife and children met me at Tel Aviv airport and invited me to dinner that evening. I said thanks, but I am really tired, but ask me for tomorrow night and the answer is yes. Which is how I came to be having dinner in a Jewish home on Friday evening, the eve of the Sabbath. Thank goodness they felt able to have a gentile at their table for the Sabbath meal. Eric’s mother, Sonia, took pity on me and tried to guide me through the ceremonial. The children giggled at this goy’s clumsy attempt to follow the prayers and the rituals. I loved every moment of it, and just wished I had a tradition that went back four thousand years.
My minders were wonderful guys, looking after me and introducing me to filafel and Jewish culture, enabling me to visit kibbutzim and all the while arguing with each other about every damn thing,. All I had to do was ask a question “How far are we from the coast?” or “Why do you leave rusting tanks along the roadside?” and they would build a whole mivneh out of it in moments.
Because I had worked for many years with a Jewish man, a German scholar who delighted in teaching me Yiddish expressions, my speech was, and still is, larded with yiddish words and syntactical peculiarities, so it was not surprising that people in my audience frequently asked my minders “Is he Jewish?”
Anyway, I came home with a very positive impression of Israel and its people. So impressed that I arranged for my daughter, Sarah, then aged 18, to spend a summer on Sonia’s kibbutz in northern Israel. Sarah didn’t like the experience, soon left and did her own version of an aborigine’s Walkabout. She became very involved with the Palestinian community in the process.
When she came home, and we began to talk about Israel, it soon became clear that she and I were talking about two different countries. She couldn’t recognise the Israel that I described, and I had no grasp of the Israel that she had experienced. We didn’t fight, but the dialogue between us soon dried up as there seemed to be no common ground.
A funny thing indeed happened on the way to the kibbutz.
2 comments:
interesting that an outsider's experience can take on so much of the culture's opinion.
About the language: I'm Mennonite and spent my entire childhood listening to all four of my grandparents speak Pennsylvania Dutch. I never learned to speak it but I realized after I left home how much it had seeped into me!
I have read your blog....and I admire!
Good point, Heidi. I think I was already predisposed to have a favourable impression of Israel, partly because I was old enough to be affected by the horrors of Belsen when the pictures were published at the end of the war. And maybe my daughter
was predisposed to support what she saw as the "underdog".
I had to look up Mennonite, although I had a vague idea that it has something to do with the Amish. Very impressive. God bless.
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