Call me...Ishmael?

One of the major tasks of anyone who moves, whether it's across town or across the world, is figuring out where you fit in. For most of my life, I've been pretty good at that: Tel Aviv is the eighth place I've lived in my 26 years. This whole "fitting in" was never that difficult for me.

Israel, though, is a new experience. If you look at the country itself, politics aside, it's vastly different from it's neighbors. All of the countries bordering Israel are Arabic, as are most of the countries bordering those countries. Aside from Israel and a few scattered communities, the vast majority of the Middle East and northern Africa is Muslim.

In the Bible the destruction of the second temple in 70 AD created the Jewish diaspora, the scattering of the Jewish people across the globe. Israel's founding in 1948 allowed the possibility for the diaspora to end, or at least diminish, as Jews now have some place to again come together. But the two thousand years since the beginning of the diaspora has placed Jews all over the map: many Jews still live in Europe, those that fled the Holocaust went to the US or South America, there is a very old Jewish community in Ethiopia, not to mention the smaller Jewish communities that exist in other places. There are all, though, highly different areas of the world.

New immigrants to Israel (called "olleem hadasheem") therefore are just as varied as the Earth's population: in my ulpan class alone there are Americans, a guy from Finland, a guy from Argentina, two Frenchmen, a woman from Spain, a woman from Italy, and a guy from Ecuador. The Mechina, a program for olleem hadasheem who want to attend an Israeli university, have whole classes of Russians and French immigrants. Add on top of this the Ethiopian Jews who were brought to Israel in the early 1990s and the new generations who have born in Israel, and it's a wide range of very different people.

So, in a country that is younger than my grandparents, how does anyone fit in? Who are the Israelis, when they all come from such different cultural backgrounds but still share the Jewish culture? Who is Israel? What does she want? How does she fit in with the other countries, and how do her people fit with her?

For the most part, everyone here has one common feature: their Judaism. There are common stories, common values, and a shared history. For those of us that aren't Jewish, though, this can be very strange. And not just for us, either. People here that find out I'm not Jewish always have a surprised look on their face and usually ask some form of the question, "...then what are you doing here?", usually on somewhere on a continuum between "curious" and "accusatory".

For some people, there is no place for non-Jews in Israel. This is their land and their home for their people. This is a lot of what, I think, drives the Israeli-Palestinian conflict: it's more than who gets what land, it's what that means to the national identity of the Jewish state. If Arabs and non-Jews are allowed Israeli citizenship, that makes it less of a Jewish country. If a bunch of Christians or Muslims showed up, that would make it less of a Jewish country. Because the people in Israel are so very different, they have to hold strongly to the once common thread they have: their Judaism.

So for those of us who don't share that common thread we are left, in a way, to fend for ourselves. We have to find our own place in the midst of all this diversity. That's not to say that we don't have help; the people I've met here, both visitors and Israelis, have been extremely welcoming and friendly: they deal with my poor Hebrew, they entertain my gentile-questions, and they include me in the daily going-ons. I think I confused a few people this morning when I was sitting in shule with a kippah on my head and a cross around my neck, but they helped me follow along in the prayer book and invited me for kiddush following the service just the same.

I think some of the difficulty is that we're both at a loss: the Jewish people in Israel are just finding out what it's like to be the norm, and aren't used to being the majority. I would guess that, for a very long time, it was always the other way around. So, as they're trying to figure out how they fit into Israel and how Israel fits into the larger picture, they also have me and the other non-Jews to contend with. It's a giant search for identity by everyone, from the individual to the entire state.

So it's interesting to be here as an outsider. Much like being at Gallaudet where I have courtesy membership in the Deaf community, here in Israel I will have to earn my Jewish street cred nevermind my deaf Jewish street cred. In DC, everyone is an outsider and no one is a native. Here, though, I am distinctly an outsider by both religion and culture. We'll see where I find my place.