you just model through it

Yesterday was my last day of work at my current job and while I realize that I am not moving far (to a lab five minutes away in order to begin grad school), after 1.5 years in the stem cell group (approximately 75% of my time in Israel since aliyah), I get the feeling that slowly, quietly, another milestone in my aliyah has crept up and passed.

I was super lucky (actually, I’d go a little further than that – I was super blessed). The lab was a great place for me to spend the first stages of my aliyah. People were friendly and so helpful about everything and also, I got the feeling that people truly wanted to help me and didn’t feel burdened.

I was fresh off the boat enough that most everyone, even the veteran olim in the lab, found my general cluelessness and sunny optimism adequately entertaining, amusing, and at times, just plain bewildering.

The only people I habitually didn’t jive with too well were the nurses on the clinical side of the department, who looked upon me with equal parts amusement and disdain with an occasional topping of intrigue. And I responded in same. The nurses station occupies a section of the hallway between the lab and my former desk space in the office area, so I traversed their territory tens of times each day.

Until yesterday my interactions with them didn’t really extend beyond them offering me the occasional “As you please, Queen” or “Don’t you ever say excuse me?!?!” (only said when they are completely blocking the hallway with carts of supplies while I meekly try to slip past unnoticed, flattening myself against the wall).

Sometimes our communication was of the non-verbal sort (once, one of them simply picked me up by the waist and placed me aside instead of asking me to move). I told a lot of friends about this, including some native Israelis, and everyone seemed to agree it was sort of Ms. Trunchbull in Matilda-like until one person was like, “Oh in Israel that’s normal. It’s a sign of endearment.”

More often than not, our interactions consisted primarily of Tobi and I passing by the nurse’s station in fits of spastic, uncontrollable laughter to which they would respond with a simple “What happened?” (Note, this was not a friendly “what happened so that we may laugh with you” but rather a “if you obnoxious twits keep this up we will catapult you across the building javelin-style” what happened).

Also, I should probably add that they have likely long suspected that I am either a drug addict and/or sleep around a lot, a misconception of my own doing, given that one of them once spied me and another individual sitting at the nurses station while transferring a fine white powder into a test tube labelled ‘gonorrhea test’ (to be clear, the test tube was sterile and unused and the fine white powder was actually a baking ingredient, but I understand that appearances can deceive).

Anyway, now that you have the full background, I was a little surprised when they called me over after my goodbye party. “Come here! Alissaaaaaa! Come here!” they barked. “We hear that you are leaving us?!? And where will you go?” I told them about starting school and switching labs, an answer to which they demonstrated satisfaction.

“But we will miss your modeling through the halls.”

My modeling through the halls?!?! I looked at them a little disbelievingly.

“You know, that tall guy who used to work here, what was his name, like he used to say…”

And now I remember, when R. used to work in the lab he would always tell me “Alissa, you have a pretty face and your body is very good but no man will ever notice you because of the way you walk. You slouch the arms and always look down and look to be in a great rush.”

And so when I would rush down the hall between lab and our office area, past the nurse’s station, he would call after me “Gait and posture! Gait and posture! Gait and posture!” (I think in some countries this might be considered a very odd form of sexual harassment.)

“We will miss this very much,” they reinforce. “And where are you from, New York?” I can’t believe after nearly two years of working here, we have finally gotten around to these niceties five minutes after my goodbye party. “I’m from Massachusetts, actually.” (Translation: I can’t believe you’d think I’m from New York!!!)

“Oh it is very nice in Boston, my son is there now. I wish he would come home to me but he will go to San Francisco next.” “Yes, Boston and San Francisco are both really nice cities” I reassure her.

A few weeks ago I had another very similar experience. Somewhat more surprising and dramatic, but more personal and less entertaining. Sometimes people who mystify you or disappoint you have good intentions, you just haven’t gathered enough data for those intentions to be revealed.

And sometimes you just need to give people the benefit of the doubt and assume the best of them, as much as I clearly enjoy making caricatures out of people with my vivid imagination on the basis of limited information.

As it turns out, not all gruff and seemingly rude Israelis are people-eaters or former javelin-hurtling school headmistresses. I should know enough about sabras to have this much figured out; I may not be rude or gruff but I can be misleadingly cool and aloof enough to garner an exterior as prickly and hard as the best of them, but surprisingly sweet and soft on the inside.

At the end of the day I realized my relationship with the nurses in the mysterious department I speak of was much more Boo Radley-like than Ms. Trunchbull-like, it just took me a while to see it. And as Tyra Banks once said, whatever happens in life, “you just model through it.” I’m sure the nurses would agree.

the status quo

I realized I haven’t really written much here in a while. I guess life and my absorption into Israeli society has reached a standstill in the last half year and I haven’t had much of a desire to write about news events, as I find that I have nothing insightful or unique to say about the news here. As Alan wrote on my birthday card, “I’m getting used to not having our first anything in Israel anymore.” It’s not a bad thing. In fact, in many ways it’s a really good thing – it means life is becoming more comfortable and routine here. 

Right now, life is just continuing on as it has – sprinting after the 19 bus, cursing and simultaneously lavishing my silly cat with love, taking care of my cells, shul, lab meetings, bike riding, etc. I’ve collected some pretty good stories in between and occasionally even during the aforementioned activities. But I tend to not write them here, for fear of violating people’s anonymity. 

Like older people worry about Alzheimer’s and dementia, I worry about the loss of my English language abilities. I phrase thinks strangely. I notice useful and simple words slipping from my grasp. I still spend a lot of time on the confocal (or rather, in the confocal room…in addition to imaging, it is a quiet and private place for phone calls, napping, illicit snacking, etc).

I also lock myself in the bathroom a lot. At work it seems to be my new thing. I’ve done it three or four times in two weeks alone. I’ve developed this problem where I sort of over-shoot the lock, and the door gets jammed. I then struggle in earnest for a few minutes, which of course feels like nine hours when you’re locked in a bathroom with no obvious way out. If I am really lucky, there will be someone laughing hysterically outside when I finally extricate myself from the stronghold.  You can see how uneventful my life is because this is basically the only semi-eventful thing I have to write about. 

Hopefully something interesting will happen to me soon. In the meantime, I’ll just be falling asleep while imaging and locking myself in the bathroom for increasingly long periods of time:-)

In Memoriam: Judah Folkman (1933-2008)

On Monday evening, renowned cancer researcher Judah Folkman, Harvard professor and director of the vascular biology program at Children’s Hospital Boston, died unexpectedly of a heart attack at the age of 74.

When I was in my junior year of high school, I saw “Cancer Warrior”, a Nova documentary on public television narrated by Alan Alda. The documentary was about Judah Folkman and his theory of angiogenesis, the process through which a tumor is able to generate its own blood vessel network. In order to grow beyond a certain size, tumors rely on their surrounding vasculature in order to obtain nutrients and excrete wastes. Folkman reasoned that if it is possible to cut off a tumor’s blood supply, a tumor could essentially be starved and maintained in a dormant state.

There was something magical about the way Folkman spoke. His electric energy, his grandiose ideas, and his enthusiasm for the way in which basic research can change the world was completely contagious.Listening to him tell his story about angiogenesis, I felt a passion and excitement for ideas that I had never known before. I remember at one point actually getting up from the couch and moving closer to the television in anticipation of the next turn of the unfolding story, as if I were watching an adventure thriller. Two aspects of the angiogenesis story captured my imagination: Folkman wasn’t ashamed to dream big and to share those big dreams – sometimes prematurely. Also, Folkman had a great, romantic story.

The major focus of cancer research in the 1970s was harnessing the new tools of molecular biology to study cancer cells themselves. No one was thinking about the tumor’s seemingly irrelevant normal environment. For decades Folkman’s ideas about the importance of a tumor’s environment were scorned and ridiculed. After all, he was a surgeon dappling in research in his free time. And he had the whole problem of his big ideas that he talked so freely about before he had any proof to substantiate them.

The work to prove angiogenesis was painstaking and slow because Folkman and groupies had to invent most of the tools and systems used to study angiogenesis themselves. Eventually, vascular endothelial growth factor (VEGF), a major stimulator of new blood vessel growth, was identified and in the years that followed a host of other stimulators and inhibitors of angiogenesis were isolated. With proof of such stimulators and inhibitors, tumor angiogenesis became a credible, accepted phenomenon. Overnight Folkman went from the quack with irrelevant, unprovable ideas to super science celebrity. The list of other diseases in which pathological angiogenesis is implicated keeps growing.

In 1998, two endogenous angiogenesis inhibitors, angiostatin and endostatin, were shown to cure cancer in mice, a study that made the front page of the New York Times and prompted co-discoverer of the DNA double helix, James Watson, to prophesize that “Judah will cure cancer in two years.” By the time I sat in my father’s downstairs study watching “Cancer Warrior” at the beginning of 2001, a whole new field of cancer research had exploded and a biography of Folkman, Dr. Folkman’s War by Robert Cooke, had just been published.

The next day I went to my high school biology teacher and I asked her if I could do an independent study reading about angiogenesis under her supervision in lieu of a regular course. She thought it was a great idea. I didn’t have Powerpoint, so for my end of semester presentation, I drew pictures of tumors in magic marker and color-copied them onto overhead transparencies. I loved every second of my independent study and by the end of my junior year, I decided that I definitely wanted to be like my hero Judah Folkman and become a scientist.

During my first year at Wellesley, I met a Harvard scientist who trained in Folkman’s lab and now had her own angiogenesis lab. I ended up working in her lab every summer during my time at Wellesley and also did independent studies in her lab during the school year. It was very lucky and special to actually become part of the research I first learned about in high school, especially since it was what inspired me to want to do science in the first place.

Every summer, Folkman would lead the annual surgical research department (later renamed vascular biology department) meeting at the Academy of Sciences in Cambridge. The meeting would consist of his own lab and the other collaborating labs in the department. Folkman was a pretty quirky guy (for instance, he drove a silver VW bug right into his 70s) and had very particular ideas about how this meeting should be run. For one thing, jacket and tie were required. The other rather interesting twist was that no Powerpoint or slides of any sort were allowed – “chalk talks” only. So you had everyone dressed in his or her finest garb in the middle of the day giving these very informal short talks with magic marker and chalk.

Every year Folkman would give a talk at the meeting that would more or less dictate the major themes of angiogenesis research for the next year. He’d get up there and be teeming with his electric energy and excitement and you’d know there was something special going on. It was just like watching the Nova documentary in high school all over again except it would be so much cooler, because I’d actually be in the room. It would set the standard for me of how I think all scientists should love their science and talk about their science.

The last time I saw Judah Folkman, he joked about his own death. Avastin (the first angiogenesis inhibitor to make it big which interestingly works more by normalizing the tumor’s convoluted vasculature to enhance deliverability of chemotherapy than by choking off the tumor’s blood supply) had just finished the last stages of clinical trials and had been put on the market. He said he was at a big press conference marking its release and one of the speakers commented, “If only Judah Folkman were still alive to see the results of his research.” Folkman then went up to the microphone during the question and answer session to say “This is the ghost of Judah Folkman!” (I think he really liked to tell this story).

I know that Dr. Folkman’s life and work affected thousands of other people very much like me and also very different from me and changed their lives forever – young people who were inspired to study science because of his story, scientists and physicians at all stages of their careers whose career paths and choices were impacted, patients in the death throes of cancer, some who lived and some who died, but all healed in some way whether by words or by drugs.

Now the patriarch of a whole new field, the man holding the light out front, is no longer with us. I am very, very sad. But I am pretty sure his boundless enthusiasm for ideas, his imagination, his creativity, and his unshakeable and stubborn pursuit of truth in the face of skepticism and adversity could reach from here to infinity. The stubborn rabbi’s son from the midwest turned surgeon “quack” scientist turned science superstar – you changed the world, Dr. Folkman.

Judah Folkman, cancer’s innovative enemy, dies at 74 Boston Globe

Monkeys on the Bus

This morning started off as a fairly unremarkable and typical journey on the 19 bus. I was sitting on the bus on my way to work reading a section on evolution in a biology book. Having suffered from motion sickness when I was younger (and by younger I mean until about three weeks ago), I have been relishing the opportunity to read on the bus lately, and I feel as if I am making up for years of lost time.

I noticed that my favorite rider was on the bus today, a middle-aged woman with a raspy smoker’s voice who exclaims “Omigod! Omigod!” every time the bus approaches a stop with many people waiting (which is every stop at 8:15am), and then takes it upon herself to be the human traffic manager, shouting, “Yalla! Let’s go! Yalla! Let’s go!” as passengers board the bus.

Entertained by my favorite rider while reading my biology book, it was hard to pay attention to much else, but I did catch that the woman sitting diagonally across from me had stopped davening and was now scribbling furiously on notebook paper. I didn’t think much of it, and looked back down at my book. A couple minutes later, she tapped me on the shoulder and presented me with the following note:

The idea that man came from monkeys was after the horrors of the 1st World War when the Europeans wanted an excuse for sexual freedom.

Look on internet. Tel Aviv University Prof. Raz made a theory that there are apes and there are men. Men didn’t come from monkeys.

ShXXXXXX, 054-XXXXXXX

(Below this was a convoluted postscript about a religious text that, according to her, implicates one who believes in evolution will become a monkey.)

I thanked her for her reading suggestions and she asked me to call her so that she could present me with more material on the topic (and to introduce me to her very wonderful, very eligible son according to the careful analysis of the situation by a certain chemistry professor’s husband).

I was neither angered nor threatened by our interaction, only a little stunned. I could have been offended that she was suggesting I was ignorant about the subject and that she was there to enlighten me and inform me of the truth, but I knew that she meant no malice.

I suspect that Professor Raz is probably a credible scientist and also that his work does not attempt to disprove evolution, but rather that she took his work regarding evolutionary relationships between man and primate out of context and misinterpreted it. I am interested to find his work but a few cursory Google searches turned up nothing promising – perhaps she got the name slightly wrong?

I think that some of the onlookers on the bus probably thought I was an impressionable young girl being indoctrinated by this woman’s ideas because I was so receptive to what she had to say. But it was clear to me that refuting what this woman believes or arguing with her served no purpose; unlike her perception of me I did not believe for a moment I had any chance of changing her mind, especially if she is convinced that she has credible scientific “proof.”

Another added irony and level of complexity to the interaction is that while I am actually religious, she would have no way of knowing of this. The whole interaction made me reflect on what it means to be a religious Jew in science (certainly not an inherent contradiction in my opinion), but I am going to chicken out on expounding upon this one for now!

Once I shared my note in lab we got to wondering – what is this sexual freedom that the monkeys supposedly have that the Europeans wanted so badly? We secretly wish we didn’t have to wear underwear? I will leave you this question to ponder, but in the meantime, it’s really not half bad to be a monkey on the bus.

The Great Sufganiyot Search: 2007 – 5768

Every year around Chanukah, the Jerusalem Post puts out a sufganiyot guide. The authors of the guide sample sufganiyot at a bunch of bakeries around town and then write a compiled review of their findings. I had a few concerns about this process last year: Did the authors have an appreciation for the scientific method? What was their methodology? For instance, if they sampled a bunch of sufganiyot in one trip, they would clearly be biased against their samplings by the end of the day, by which time they would surely be ready to vomit.

I felt it was important that each sufganiyot be allowed its own day; its own moment of glory; its own sacred time for contemplation, enlightenment, and introspection. Also, what if the testers just sampled a piece of a sufganiya? You can’t compare the center of one sufganiya with the edge piece of another.

I wanted to level the playing field for all the sufganiyot out there and I wanted to introduce a little objectivity into the study. Most of all, I wanted to sample every sufganiya in Jerusalem. And, okay, as anyone who ever attended the Scooperbowl with me will attest, I am a very competitive eater. I feel strong loyalties towards my favorite foods.

Despite a few well-intentioned concerns about my cholesterol fielded during last year’s study, I am up for the challenge once again. My yearly sufganiyot experiment may still not be a double-blind controlled study, but I have goals in place and I’m working towards them. Ultimately, I aim for my study to be worthy of Nature publication by Chanukah 2009 or at least an Ig Nobel Prize. I still have two more sufganiyot seasons to perfect things. How can you help, dear reader?

There are a couple things you can do. You can recommend locations around Jerusalem for me to try – good and bad, but mostly good, please:-) You can add to the comments section of this post your own reviews of sufganiyot you have consumed in the Jerusalem area. And finally, dear reader, you can work on your own major scientific breakthroughs. I am sure the sufganiyot connection won’t be very difficult to establish. Not a very sophisticated system for now, I know, but as time allows maybe I will start a sufganiyot blog that will take on a life of its own.

Ready…set…go!!!

And Happy Sufganiyot Season 2007 – 5768.

P.S. Definitely last week’s news, but for those following the saga, Harriet was successfully spayed.

From Jerusalem to Sderot

The best remedy for those who are afraid, lonely or unhappy is to go outside, somewhere where they can be quiet, alone with the heavens, nature and God. Because only then does one feel that all is as it should be and that God wishes to see people happy, amidst the simple beauty of nature.
- Anne Frank

This past Monday I took a vacation day and had the opportunity to ride my bike from Jerusalem to Sderot as part of a solidarity ride with the residents of Sderot organized by OneFamily Fund. The plight of the residents of Sderot is a cause that is close to my heart and something I care quite deeply about.The ride itself included a hodgepodge group of approximately 90 participants ranging from competitive cyclists to families to some folks who looked as if they hadn’t been pedaling anything with wheels for quite some time.

We were joined on the ride by victims of terror in Israel, including three young people who lost both parents in terrorist attacks. While not everyone was able to complete the ride on his or her bike, vehicles stayed at the end of our entourage and picked up stragglers so everyone was reunited in Sderot.

I was certainly among those moaning and groaning about the late start and also the frequent and lengthy breaks at the beginning of the ride, but the timing ended up being such that we arrived in Sderot against a dramatic foreground of orange, red, and gold as the sun set and I was grateful for the colorful sky along with cool early evening air that ushered in our arrival to Sderot. In addition, by the last 40km of the ride, when we really got going without frequent stops, we spread out, and I enjoyed the freedom and solitude of the open stretch of road, which provided some nice alone time to enjoy the beauty of the land and get lost inside my head.

It was interesting to see the change in the topography of the land as the ride passed on, from the slow, long, curving hills of Jerusalem to the quick, steep up and down and long areas of flat terrain through Kiryat Gat and Sderot. The first part of the ride afforded dramatic, panoramic views of hills and yishuvim while the second half of the ride consisted mostly of open fields turned golden and brown by the dry summer heat and undeveloped land. 

When we arrived in Sderot we had a festive meal of Middle Eastern fare at a local restaurant and then proceeded to the yeshiva, where we were greeted by over a hundred Sderot residents for a Simchat Bet Hashoeva.

The residents of Sderot have been living in constant terror among a barrage of daily Kassam rocket attacks that receive little attention from both the government and the international media. The reason for this is two-fold: the rockets are rudimentary and highly inaccurate so they rarely kill, but instead maim with shrapnel, which is not considered very newsworthy. In addition, the residents of Sderot are mainly poor Russian and Ethiopian immigrants with little political clout. In other words, more often than not, the forgotten ones.

The festivities included music, singing, dancing, and in my opinion, a really bad comedian who kept making stupid jokes about Americans. It was funny (and also a little awkward) to be singing and dancing in the yeshiva still in my cycling clothes with my Camelbak.

Overall, it was a very uplifting day but I look forward to the day when we don’t need to ride to Sderot for solidarity and we can just do it for fun. As one of my fellow cyclists commented while being interviewed when asked why he was doing the ride, “Because we are Sderot and Sderot is us.” I couldn’t have said it better myself. Now if only our government and the international community could appreciate this.

In the moments that the sun set directly upon our cycling envoy and cast a glow over the land, before night fell, I pedaled alone on the shoulder of highway leading to Sderot through the thick silence of dusk. No sirens, no Kassams, just the rhythmic sound of the turn of my pedals and the rotation of my chain. I could see a few cyclists ascending the hill in front of me and if I turned my head I could see a few colorful dots behind. I was in a complete state of peace in what some consider a war zone, but how could I not be? I knew that even in Sderot, as my fellow cyclist implied, we are still home.

My Aliyah-versary

Today I celebrated the one year anniversary of my aliyah. Here are some pictures from my aliyah flight one year ago.Shabbat shalom.

Volunteers Wanted

Everyone has heard the familiar Israeli adage:
“Maybe means yes.
 No means maybe.”

I am giving an hour-long department seminar next week. I am mildly terrified to put it lightly after watching many of my co-workers descend into a panic the month before. And I’ve observed one or two of them sitting in front of Powerpoint weeks before crafting elaborate animations illustrating their experimental schemes. Animations so fancy that they can dance, play basketball, and oh you know, pipette and analyze data for you. In other words, robots.

Today I was sitting at my desk with my eyes staring into space, most likely drooling or foaming at the mouth (while mechanically consuming about 600 grams of peanut M&Ms – thanks Dad) when SK stopped by my desk. “You know, it’s so great that you’re so cool about this.” “Cool about what?” “Your seminar next week. I mean you seem really calm.” And I guess it’s true, being in a self-induced coma was a pretty calm thing to do. “I wouldn’t say that I am so cool, I am just … thinking,” I replied.

About an hour later RA breezed by with one of his three major pieces of advice about life: “Ohhhh bayyyy-beeee you don’t know what you’re missing!” (Sex… his second major piece of advice about life is that I should bring my graphing calculator on my next date and nonchalantly pull it from my pocket “because it is very prestigious” and his third piece of advice is that I should eat pork). 

Next it’s ST at my desk. “So I hear you volunteered to give the seminar next week. You go girl!!! When I heard I thought ‘Alissa is so awesome! She’s only been here six months and she volunteered!’” “Volunteered??? Who said I volunteered!?!?” “Oh, LO told me, she told everyone that – that you volunteered. I mean didn’t you?”

“She told me about six weeks ago that I had to present and I said, ‘Really?’ and she said ‘Yes’ so I said okay.” “Oh honey, you totally volunteered, then. You just need to become more Israeli. But don’t feel bad, you’re changing already, you really are. Now let’s practice you saying ‘no’ without laughing a few more times.”

“No. I can’t practice right now. I need to work on my seminar,” I say as I turn back to the computer screen keeping a straight face just long enough for her to slip out the door before returning to my usual self: a goofy American-Israeli consuming an inordinate number of colorful candies in front of a computer screen in a Jerusalem lab on a hot August afternoon. After all, I volunteered for this.

Happy Birthday, Gilad

Dear Gilad,

What I remember most about the day you were kidnapped, 25 June 2006, were your thick glasses. In later pictures, pictures your family got to choose and send to the press, you would be wearing more stylish frames or no glasses at all. But what I remember on that first day, the day when the summer began to unravel so quickly, the summer of my own aliyah, were your thick glasses and your shy, childish grin beaming onto the newspaper page.

I thought you looked very young and also, no offense, like a dork. The newspapers said you had a low military profile so you chose to serve in a tank unit. But you still chose a combat unit when it would have been totally acceptable for you to serve as a jobnik. I would have done that, too.

We heard that you are good at physics and math, that you are quiet and gentle, and also that you can make anyone laugh. We don’t know much more about you than that. It’s been over a year since you were kidnapped, but still, you are in the headlines here almost every day. I think that means we haven’t given up yet on your return. We may be a generally impatient people, but we are equally as stubborn.

I hope that you haven’t given up either; I hope your life is not a cruel, taunting game and that you haven’t lost your imagination and the gift of blocking out reality by getting lost inside your head. I hope that when you are sleeping, you can still dream of beautiful things. If I am lonely sometimes, I cannot imagine your loneliness. If I miss my family, I cannot imagine how much you must miss yours.

And I wonder what it is like, to have been Israel’s looking glass for the past 14 months. When we look in the mirror, we see you smiling back – your thick glasses and shy grin – and then we see our own reflection. You did not choose this and yet here you are; our country’s reaction to your plight a recording of our own blunderings, our own wavering and indecision.

First we reasoned that we would not give into extortion, that there would be no prisoner exchange. If we give in, we will pay the consequences with even more similarly heart-wrenching abductions by setting the precedent that kidnapping Israeli soldiers is an effective bargaining chip, we thought. So we said that we would exercise tough love; we would not give in. There would be no prisoner exchange.

We thought about sending in a rescue mission but we were haunted by the botched rescue attempt of Nachson Waxman and then we got distracted with the Lebanon War. Many of us thought you may have been dead all along, but then in mid-September of last year, a letter in your handwriting came.

Finally we were ready to consider the prisoner exchange and then there was the constant back-and-forth, newspaper headlines assuring of your release any day, any hour, any minute, really. The negotiations stopped and started undulating with the back-and-forth of quiet and trouble in the region and again we saw our country’s own reflection in your plight.

Then on the one year anniversary of your capture, the audio tape was delivered. In it you read a message, its content probably dictated to you by your abductors. You implored us to accept a prisoner exchange and you said that your health was deteriorating; that you needed to be hospitalized. But soon after, the talks all but ended with the Hamas coup in Gaza. Now we hear of renewed talks, but are we more cautious this time? Or are we still convinced that it could be any day, any hour, any minute?

Where did we go wrong in this whole mess – what should we have done differently? I am not sure, but I am humbled by my inability to answer these questions. As we enter a new Jewish year, I hope the government will pick up its pace. I hope that we stay stubborn and defiant and continue to pray for and believe in your safe return. And I hope this year will be the one that marks the end of your nightmare.

I am haunted by knowing that you exist and think and breathe only a few kilometers away from where I type and yet you live in a parallel universe that may as well be on a different planet. But mostly I am haunted by your thick, dorky glasses and your wide, shy grin staring back through our nation’s looking glass, recording our rise and fall, our triumphs and failures, like a seismograph.

Happy 21st birthday, Gilad. I hope that for your 22nd birthday, you’ll be home.

List of Israel’s Missing Soldiers
Prayer for Missing Israeli Soldiers

moshe, of beer sheva st.

Rabbi Eliezer said: Let the honor of your fellow person be as dear to you as your own. -Pirkei Avot 2:15 

Moshe is a wanderer. This is partially why we become quick friends, because I like to wander, too. Moshe sits at the Y Café on Nissim Behar the whole day and reads newspapers and talks to the customers. I sit at the Y Café with my laptop to work on my editing, so Moshe and I spend many hours a week in each other’s company. Moshe spends the rest of the day either wandering or learning at Kol Rina, the shul on Beer Sheva St.

He walks me to the framing store to pick up a newly framed print to drop off at his apartment. His hands and fingernails are dirty from newsprint. He struggles a bit to get around at his age, but there is a jolliness in his stride and he walks with a sense of purpose in his wanderings. He is happy to be going wherever it is that he is going.

When I am at the laundromat Moshe sits in a white plastic chair beside the television and tells me about the news and about his shul and his classes or he watches me play anagrams, cross-legged on the hard floor with Elka and Jess. For weeks he tells Jess and I that he wants to take us out for a nice lunch. This is his big plan. We hesitate because we don’t want him to spend his money on us. We have no idea how much or how little he has and we don’t want to chance him spending too much of it. But he keeps persisting; he really wants this date.

Finally we schedule a day and a time. We meet him after his class at the shul. He announces we’re not going to go to the café on Nissim Behar. He has big plans for us. He wants to take us to a nice place on Bezalel, a change of scenery for all three of us he says. It takes forever for our entourage to reach the restaurant, all the while Jess and I thinking he’s going to fall and break a hip any second.

To him, everything we say, everything we do is wonderful. I love him for his unconditional acceptance and his unconditional approval. To him we are young and smart and happening. We can do no wrong. We sit for hours talking. I am thirsty for his stories but really, he is more interested in hearing about our plans and telling us how wonderful we are. That is the treat for him. He insists on getting us extra brownies to go.

In a few weeks, Jess will return to America and I will move to Beit Hakerem with Elka. As we part ways at the corner of Nissim Behar and Beer Sheva he scribbles down his mailing address. “You tell your roommate Elka, I want to bring her some ice cream. Once you leave here I don’t think I’ll ever see you again. I don’t think you’ll come here to visit me anymore. But, please, come back sometimes and visit me,” he pleads.

Weeks pass by and I never go back to Nachlaot to visit. A few months later, I walk through the neighborhood to see a friend. It is nighttime. Through the window of Y Café, I see Moshe at his usual spot. He is drinking tea, his grubby fingers smudged with newsprint, clasped loosely around the cup. I can’t tell for sure, but I think he is arguing with the waitstaff. Probably about something he saw on the news. I hesitate for a moment and keep on walking; I do not see Moshe again.

I still don’t understand why I don’t go back to visit him. My only explanation is that, sometimes, I am not a very good person. For this I have no answer: how I can make a person so happy just by being there and yet instead I seek the approval and praise of those who cannot or do not want to love me.

the boy in the sack and other heroes

Say this city has ten million souls,
Some are living in mansions, some are living in holes:
Yet there’s no place for us, my dear, yet there’s no place for us.
Once we had a country and we thought it fair,
Look in the atlas and you’ll find it there:
We cannot go there now, my dear, 
we cannot go there now…

Went down the harbour and stood upon the quay,
Saw the fish swimming as if they were free:
Only ten feet away, my dear, only ten feet away.
Walked through a wood, saw the birds in the trees;
They had no politicians and sang at their ease:
They weren’t the human race, my dear, 
they weren’t the human race.
Dreamed I saw a building with a thousand floors,
A thousand windows and a thousand doors;
Not one of them was ours, my dear, 
not one of them was ours.
Stood on a great plain in the falling snow;
Ten thousand soldiers marched to and fro:
Looking for you and me, my dear, looking for you and me.
-from Refugee Blues, W. H. Auden

I was at the Singer’s for Shabbat lunch last week. I am not sure how it started, but we went around the table sharing aliyah stories. It went like this: Mr. Kaplan is a Holocaust orphan who left Germany on the Kindertransport in 1940. After a brief internment in Britian, he was sent to Australia on the H.M.T. Dunera with a large group of other boys. As a young teenager, he was then given the option of staying in Australia or making an illegal voyage to Palestine. 

Palestine sounded exciting and he felt an ideological connection to the Land of Israel, so he decided to sign up for the adventure and join the voyage to Palestine. I asked him why he would choose to do something so risky having just escaped grave danger in Nazi Germany and made it to somewhere safe. He said he was so young and so alone, he had nothing to lose and that being so young he felt invincible. 

After a risky and indirect journey in which his ship was attacked several times, he made it to Palestine where he became a war reporter, a job that would develop into his full-time career as an adult.

Orna’s father hid his brother in a sack in Auschwitz to prevent his selection (the little brother was too young to be helpful for labor). Both made it to Palestine, and Orna’s uncle, the boy in the sack, would go on to become a very famous rabbi here in Israel. 

I made aliyah on a Boeing 747 with a personal television screen and an iPod. The journey took ten hours. When I arrived, the Israeli government gave me money. When the young Mr. Kaplan arrived several decades earlier, he was given a garden hoe to fight in a war in which one-percent of the population was killed, many of whom were Holocaust survivors who had just escaped the gas chambers and furnaces of Eastern Europe.

I am able to be here today, a new immigrant in Israel, because of people like Mr. Kaplan and Orna’s father. Sometimes, it is important to just stop and remember.

From out of the depths did I call upon G-d; 
G-d answered me with expansiveness. 
Hashem is with me, I have no fear; 
how can man affect me?
You pushed me hard that I might fall, 
but Hashem assisted me…
I shall not die! 
But I shall live and relate the deeds of G-d.
(Hallel)

Harriet the Spy (Sabra Secret Agent) Edition

The last month has been a little hectic between work, being sick, and searching for a new apartment but it’s a poor excuse for having not yet devoted a posting to my new family member, trust-worthy confidante, and absorption counselor extraordinaire: Harriet the Spy, licensed sabra kitty secret agent. Harriet and I share many common passions and interests including but not limited to chopped liver, spying, raw salmon, jumping all over the place,  and a general curiosity about people.

Here are some pictures of The Spy in action:

Here is Harriet in an illicit mid-nap pose on my bed. Illicit since she really isn’t supposed to be all over my bedding because according to allergy tests, I’m allergic. Unfortunately, she’s often at her cutest when she is on my bed. This was only a few days after I got Harriet. Harriet has almost doubled in size since then!

Here’s Meera with Harriet. The Spy loved Meera and especially loved snuggling with her. The Spy requests that Meera come back to Israel soon to see how much she’s grown.

I am lucky that Harriet loves to clean herself. Here she is in licking action. She also likes to lick me as well, especially my face. A sweet gesture Harriet, but I prefer washing it with soap and water to your spit – sorry, pal.

Thanks to Meera who took the pictures below of Harriet when she came to visit:

Okay, that is all for now from The Spy and from me! We will keep you posted on all of our adventures.

Love,
Harriet the Spy and Alissa the Wannabe

Science JAPs and the kit bag problem

Just as I am always interested in learning more about Israeli culture, my co-workers are very curious about American culture, specifically American Jewish culture. One day in lab, O. and R. asked “Alissa, can you tell us what it means if someone says a woman is a JAP?” So I did my best to explain.

The next day we got an order of some new stuff from Alex Red, a distributor of labware and science supplies in Israel. Included in our order, which was placed by S., were two mini-coolers that hold microcentrifuge tubes so we can keep our growth factors chilled in the tissue culture hood, those weight rings you can place around bottles so they don’t float away in the waterbath, and two new ice buckets specifically designated for our group’s room.

R. enters and says “What IS all this new stuff?” “Oh, S. ordered it,” I tell him. “S. really loves to spend money, look at all this stuff! She loves to buy. You know, Alissa, I think she’s a real science JAP.” I did not know that there could be science JAPs, but the sabras are teaching me new things every day.

Another resurfacing issue at work is what everyone refers to as my “kit bag problem.” There’s this story of a unit of soldiers. The officer announces that they are going on an extremely long and grueling hike. Then one of the soldiers speaks up and says “Officer, with our kit bags?” The officer then pauses and nods his head and says “Oh yeah, good idea, with your kit bags.”

I suffer from a severe case of the kit bag problem. This manifests itself in several ways. For instance, whenever I need something, I follow my very American instinct and ask for it, you know, before taking. Apparently this is very un-Israeli. Want a new chair? Another set of drawers? Need a USB stick? Another set of pipetman or a new aliquot of laminin? Want to leave work four hours early and lie on the beach in Tel Aviv? No problem, squander whatever resources exist all for yourself, be your own boss, but whatever you do, do NOT under any circumstances ASK PERMISSION.

See, my problem is that in my very American way, I only want to do things with the blessing and approval of everyone I know. In my new environment, I tend to do this with my co-workers pacing around in the background doing a nervous dance muttering “Kit bag problem, kit bag problem.”

So, apparently, I am still walking around with “olah hadasha” taped to my forehead. In the mean time, I am still trying to figure out how to model my every day work behavior after my relationship with my younger sister, which is probably the most Israeli relationship I will ever have. I’ll leave it up to your imagination what that might be like.

“You should be ashamed of yourself, you have forgotten us in war. Signed, the children of Sderot.” (graffiti in Sderot)

A direct hit to a classroom in Sderot a few days ago.

“Because not all of our classrooms are protected, we have to study in shifts. We have no gym class because there is no safe place to practice… During the night we can’t fall asleep because of the drones and helicopters flying overhead, and during the day we can’t concentrate because we are too tired.” -Gon

“We have no normal life. We never know what will happen the next hour when Qassams fall; we are not only afraid for ourselves, but also for our families. It’s traumatic to think that someone close to us will get hurt. It’s just terrible.” -Bar

“I have a hard time concentrating in school, and the Qassams affect my entire life…Every time I want to do something, I give up because I think that the alarm will go off at any moment. I can’t study and I can’t even play soccer.” -Niv

quotes from Ynet News Sderot kids: Can’t Remember Life Without Kassams by Miri Chason

Dear World,

I am very sad about some of the awful things that are happening to my country right now. I am sad about the events themselves and I am sad that my country refuses to protect its citizens because of the shame and ridicule she feels from the international community.

Our country was designed to be a place where Jews could finally be safe and escape persecution. Instead, we have become sitting ducks for those who hate us most. Yesterday, 35 rockets landed in Israel proper and 35 people were injured (ironically one for every rocket fired). Today 16 rockets landed in Israel proper. More were wounded. Actually, Kassam rockets fired from Gaza have been landing in Israel, primarily in southern towns such as Sderot, almost every day for several years now.

You might be surprised to learn this. After all, it hardly ever makes international headlines anymore. It doesn’t make headlines because Israel has done little to make it stop. Without Israeli retaliation, dead and wounded Jews don’t make much of a news story. Nobody cares. Our government is too scared to do anything because it doesn’t want you to hate us more than you already do. Our leaders seem to be the only people in this entire country unwilling to accept that no matter how much restraint we use, you still hate us.

So, let’s take the example of last night again. In the first round of rockets, an apartment building was directly hit. A mother was critically wounded. She was found lying on the living room floor, her children also injured from fragments crying hysterically at her side. While the MDA (Magen David Adom) paramedics were treating her, another “Red Code” alert was sounded. The paramedics continued to treat victims of the first round of missiles while additional missiles were falling all around, meters away. Sometimes they protected the wounded with their own bodies. They admit that they are frightened but they say matter-of-factly that this is just part of their job.

The rockets fired into our borders hit nursery schools and community centers, gas stations and homes, soccer fields and restaurants. All of this largely in part because we got out of Gaza two summers ago. Some of us thought it would make you like us more and that it would make the Palestinians like us more. Instead, the Palestinians have turned the land we gave them into a killing ground with which to reach Israel proper with rockets.

We forced our own people kicking and screaming out of their homes, homes that the government encouraged them to build on once barren desert land that the government asked them to settle in the first place. They transformed this land into a lush paradise with exotic greenhouses and exported more produce than anywhere in the country.

The dignity of the residents of Gush Katif was uprooted along with their homes and their livelihoods. Today most of them live in tent cities, like refugees. No permanent housing solution has been found. Many are unemployed and none have been adequately compensated by the government for the loss of their homes and livelihoods. A significant number of the youth are no longer religious. They can’t believe in G-d anymore. Many of the former residents of Gush Katif have lost their faith – faith in the State of Israel, faith in the Zionist idea, faith in the government, faith in G-d, and for what?

For this. So the elderly woman minding her own business in her apartment could wake up this morning and be critically wounded by a rocket. And for this I am sad, sad for my country, sad for the Zionist idea, and sad for the cowardice of our own leaders.

When you don’t explicitly hate us, you look at us with pity and disdain and think “Let both sides kill each other” and then you look away. We leave a sour taste in your mouth. World, please give us a chance this time. We need you. We need the permission to defend ourselves. We are mothers, fathers, brothers, sisters, wives, husbands, daughters, and sons just like you. We are overall a good people. We treasure and love life. More than anything, we just want to live normal lives like ordinary people. Stop cajoling and threatening and judging us. Let us defend ourselves. And to our leaders – please show the world that Jewish blood isn’t so cheap. And let us defend ourselves. Always remember, that’s a big part of why we created this land in the first place.

World, I leave you with this message: Today children in the south of Israel couldn’t go to school because of the rocket fire. Photographs in the newspapers show them standing outside, their eyes wide with terror, looking skywards. I pray for the day when the children of Sderot will only look up into the sky to see fireworks or the stars at night instead of rockets raining down.

The Price of a Passion for Life

I enjoy writing observations about the things in Israel that I find to be somewhat novel or unique – the type of endearing and ‘ethnic’ things that I think might interest those back in the Old Country. The relationship between Israeli culture and Jewish culture is often a blurry one, given that we do live in a Jewish state. Sometimes the problem is that these lovely cultural practices are a bit TOO familiar. In my opinion, many aspects of Israeli culture are just extreme manifestations of obnoxious, stereotypically Jewish behaviors.

For an example of what I am talking about: the Israeli workplace and the whole meeting phenomenon. Israelis LOVE their meetings in a way that borders on unhealthy fixation. In my opinion, this meeting fixation/fetish has a distinctly Jewish origin.

In college, I was very involved in Hillel. I enjoyed Hillel very much and we did a lot of really great things. However, the one thing I could just not stand were the endless meetings. There were always meetings because no one could ever keep quiet for longer than three seconds or agree on anything and thus nothing could ever be entirely resolved, therefore warranting another meeting.

A three item agenda could easily take over two hours as everyone weighed in at great length as to whether straws were really necessary for the bagel brunch on Sunday and if so, whether they should be bendy straws or whether straight straws would do the trick. You get the point.

No other meetings were as lengthy, ineffectual, frustrating, and inefficiently run as our special Jew meetings – whether it was Hillel student board, Hillel alum board, Hillel personnel committee, the Hillel director search committee, or even our short-lived Hillel book club – whether it was young Jews, medium-aged Jews, or senile Jews the overall governing theme was my insatiable desire for a fire alarm, real fire, or medical emergency. Anything to make the torture, I mean meeting end.

I realize all of this information might come as a shock to those who know me in real life as pretty good-natured, like the whole part about wishing personal harm upon myself or even possibly others in order to make a meeting end.

My favorite meetings in college involved organizations with high concentrations of non-Jews and science majors, two populations known for being people of considerably fewer words.

So, yes, getting back to Israel. I naively imagined that the end of my Wellesley College Hillel days would mark the end of the Jewish torture meeting phenomenon. This was before I settled into my first Israeli job. If it’s even possible, these lab meetings are worse than the Hillel meetings. For one thing, since the meetings are in Hebrew, I have totally exhausted one month’s worth of concentration in comprehending approximately four sentences. According to this calculation, it takes no longer than 2 minutes for my ADD drooling glazed eye vegetable coma to kick in.

In addition, here in Israel, the mastery of the “let’s sit in silence for 30 seconds and gather our final thoughts…oh wait someone has one last thing to add now let’s repeat this routine 395 more times” ritual is beyond proportions I ever thought possible. Inevitably during these meetings I am either shivering cold or melting and either my bladder is about to explode or I feel parched dry and in addition I have inevitably lost feeling in one or two or four of my extremities due to my sitting position. This element of physical torture serves to mirror the depth of my psychological torture.

The reason for the excessive length and inefficiency of these meetings is that we Jews love to talk. Everyone has a passionate opinion on everything and in addition, the conviction that his/her thoughts on every topic, no matter how mundane or ultimately inconsequential or how completely unrelated to one’s area of expertise are a)correct and b)deserve to be heard and c) absolutely need to be heard or his/her universe will cease to exist.

However, even though these meetings are often a form of extreme torture and even though everyone is really self righteous (in the most endearing way possible) in his/her unshakeable belief that his/her opinion on every conceivable issue is so important, isn’t it wonderful? Isn’t it wonderful to be part of a culture that so values an individual’s opinion? Isn’t it wonderful to be raised in a culture that says to a kid that your opinion is important and deserves to be heard?

Well, we certainly aren’t an apathetic people, that’s for sure. If this is the price I have to pay for the free exchange of ideas, I’ll happily pay it because isn’t it wonderful to live in a place where there is such an abiding passion for life that everyone wants to squeeze life to its fullest and argue and discuss and overanalyze everything to death until there is truly nothing more to say? In the mean time, I should probably be working on how to fake a nosebleed without red marker.

The Lucky Ones

I wanted to share this article that Alan sent me:
Israel – love it or leave it

And he’s right, I’m one of the lucky ones. Lucky to no longer be dreaming grand romanticized aliyah dreams. Lucky to no longer be longing to the east like the generations that came before me. Israel is where I work and food shop and pay my bills. I have a pretty normal life here. Jerusalem is my playground and the places of the Tanach are my backyard. That’s all very lucky.

Regardless of the impression the news might give you, I’m lucky to call Israel home. I consider myself extremely lucky to be an Israeli living in Israel in 2007.

Thank you, Bradley Burston, for reminding me of my good fortune and the many miracles that brought us here.

Happy Birthday, Israel!

A beautiful Yom Ha’atzmaut (Independence Day):

So, yes, I too have noticed that I am the worst blogger ever and in addition, I am incapable of responding to an email with more than two sentences. I am not sure I can promise that any of that will change. I definitely go through phases where I really enjoy writing but lately, I have just been too busy (and after I am done being busy, too tired!) to have any desire to write for fun.

The last couple weeks have marked my first set of spring holidays in Israel on aliyah. The juxtaposition of feeling very much on the inside (Yom HaShoah) and very much on the outside (Yom HaZikaron) caught me by surprise. I pray that I will never feel like an ‘insider’ on Yom HaZikaron but I also appreciate that the longer you live in this country, the greater the chance you will lose a loved one fighting for the country.

Yom HaShoah took on a different and more meaningful dimension for me in Israel – the ultimate response to anyone who has wished for our destruction. The Nazis hoped to build a museum about Judaism once they exterminated us from the earth. We built the State of Israel instead. I cannot think of a better way to honor the memory of all those we lost.

Last week I attended my first scientific conference in Israel, the Israeli Society of Gene Therapy Conference at the Technion in Haifa. Lucky for me, the talks were in English. It was also my first time riding the train in Israel! It was all the more fun because it gave me an opportunity to chat with more of the people in the gene therapy department who I don’t see every day in lab. I am still surprised by how friendly and inclusive everyone is given that I am significantly younger than most everyone else, a newcomer, and have yet to master the language.

Lab is going well in general and I am starting a few projects of my own. I am pretty excited about that. I love to talk about my work but I will spare everyone the details on my blog so if you want to hear more about stem cell stuff you’ll have to get in touch with me personally:-)

Last Thursday I went to Tel Aviv and saw a really weird movie about the Yom Kippur War with Alan, Shiri, and Shaul. Afterwards we went out for sushi. I think I was the person who was happiest with the dinner arrangement. We woke up bright and early on Friday and went hiking up north, near Tiberias. We finished at the Kinneret and then took the ’scenic’ route back to Jerusalem along Rte. 90 and Rte. 1.

On Monday we had a ceremony for Yom HaZikaron at work around the time of the air raid siren, like on Yom HaShoah. On Monday night I went to a Yom Ha’atzmaut ceremony and fireworks in Efrat with Naomi, Elka, and Becs. It was freezing! After that, we headed to Tel Aviv for Alan’s roof party, where it was significantly warmer. Yesterday Alan and I had a late brunch at Coffee Bean and then headed to Ramat Aviv where we spent the rest of the afternoon jumping the waves and walking on the beach.

Okay, that is my major life update!

I want to post two things that are special to me:
1)audio of the Declaration of the State of Israel, 1945 (click on the speaker icon)
2) One of my favorite poems in honor of Yom HaZikaron and Yom Ha’atzmaut:

The Silver Platter
by Natan Alterman

The land grows still
Crimson skies dimming, misting
Slowly paling again
Over smoking frontiers

As the nation stands up
Torn at heart but existing
To receive its first wonder
In two thousand years

As the moment draws near
It will rise, darkness facing
Stand straight in the moonlight
In terror and joy

When across from it step out
Towards it slowly pacing
In plain sight of all
A young girl and a boy

Dressed in battle gear, dirty
Shoes heavy with grime
On the path they will climb up
While their lips remain sealed

To change garb, to wipe brow
They have not yet found time
Still bone weary from days
And from nights in the field

Full of endless fatigue
And all drained of emotion
Yet the dew of their youth
Is still seen on their head

Thus like statues they stand
Stiff and still with no motion
And no sign that will show
If they live or are dead

Then a nation in tears
And amazed at this matter
Will ask: who are you?
And the two will then say

With soft voice: We–
Are the silver platter
Upon which the Jewish State
Was served to you.

Then they fall back in darkness
As the dazed nation looks
And the rest can be found
In the history books.

A 6.75 month progress report

I just realized that I don’t live in America. I was on the website of one of my favorite NPR shows, This American Life with Ira Glass. Just last week, a TV version of This American Life debuted on television. I was excited to see a link for a free download of the first episode on the website, especially since I don’t have a TV here in Israel. But then when I clicked on it, it said “Sorry! We at Showtime Online express our apologies; however, these pages are intended for access only from within the United States.”

I sat there for a moment in silence, sort of stunned. Um, slicha? What do they mean I can’t view this content? The longer I spend in Israel, the more “normal” my life here starts to feel. Instead of thinking about how I live so far away from my family and friends I wonder why they don’t live near me. I don’t live far away from them, they’ve chosen to live far away from me. I realize that this backwards-logic (or maybe it’s actually really forward-thinking logic) is sort of strange, but I’ve finally reached the point in my aliyah where Israel feels like the natural place to be. It’s not some far-away foreign place because, well, it’s my home. So to sum up the past 6.75 months in review…

I knew for a long time that I wanted to make aliyah as soon as I graduated college but it always seemed so far off in time and so ridiculous and far-fetched, part of me never believed that I would actually do it. When I was sitting on the plane during my aliyah flight looking out the window and saw Israel below me, I was not happy. In fact, I was in a complete state of shock that I was staring down at my new home. I don’t think I have ever been more genuinely terrified in my life than when I gazed out the window of that plane and saw land down below. Don’t tell Nefesh B’Nefesh that.

Now it all seems so normal. Of course I’m here, but where the heck is everyone else? I have been living in Israel as an Israeli for almost seven months now. It doesn’t sound like a very long time but in the context of what has happened to me between the time I stepped onto the tarmac at Ben Gurion and now, a lot has gone down, I think. I survived ulpan and the French roommates and the 2006 Vomiting Olympics – Jerusalem. I learned how to cut right back in “line” and have no conscience. I searched high and low for a job doing something research-related before scoring what I wanted.

I’ve worked two jobs (and still do – one full-time and one part-time). I’ve made some great new friends and have really missed my friends in America. I experienced homesickness for the first time in my life. I’ve almost gotten killed on my bike by Israeli drivers more than once. I am surrounded by Hebrew all day – at lunch, lab meetings, you name it. I can frequently be found perched with my little notebook making a fool out of myself saying things like “Ech omrim to thaw?”

After over half a year as an Israeli (not a very long time at all), I still miss Red Sox games (at Fenway Park with my dad, not on TV) and I barely function without Sundays. I now think in shekels and kilograms and kilometers and I keep my watch on 24 hours. When I went to America to visit, I had to convert shekels to dollars in my head. I have a really tacky faceplate for my cell phone and I wear Crocs everywhere and a gray fleece Fox sweatshirt. On some level, I probably secretly think these things make me cool. I can eat cucumbers for breakfast without flinching and I covet my hofshi hodshi (unlimited monthly bus pass). I push and shove in line when it becomes necessity but always offer my seat on the bus to older people.

I can SMS as fast as I can type and I have developed less patience for most things than most New Yorkers. I still hate hummus and tomatoes. I can sing along to most songs on Galgalatz. I solve every aliment with ice caffe and if that doesn’t work, with Acmol or Kal-Beten. I think Cafe Hillel is overrated and ridiculously overpriced. When people ask for directions I sometimes just tell them, “yishar yishar” even if I really have no idea how to get there. I have absolutely no idea what I did with papers before I started putting everything in those clear plastic sleeves (oh wait in America we had filing cabinets). At least I don’t alternate between “Ehhhhh” and exclaiming “Why!Why!Why!” every five seconds. Oh and I’m not a pack-a-day smoker. Yet.

Sometimes it’s hard to just be me in a society that forces us into categories but ultimately, I know I must keep true to myself and try not to worry about people judging me too much.

I have begun to reconcile real, actual Israel with the romanticized, idealized Israel that used to exist in my head. I am trying to figure out how to still be a Zionist with my knowledge of the real, current day Israel. This is an on-going project. It is one I will never give up on because I believe in it with all my heart. I am glad things are starting to come together for me in my new home.

gan eden in hell

On Friday, Alan and I drove south to the bike trails around Kibbutz Be’eri, just outside Gaza, to go biking. We heard of field upon field of kalaniyot in the hills situated between the Mediterranean coast and western Negev, so we decided to go check it out for ourselves. Unfortunately, looks like we missed most of the kalaniyot this year, but there were still open fields full of many other wildflowers to admire.

En route to the bike trails, the familiar road signs for “Kissufim Junction”, “Gush Katif” and “Neve Dekalim” began to appear. How odd that over a year after the disengagement, all of these road signs were still there as if these places still actually existed. As if we could take a turn at Kissufim and end up at the entrance of Neve Dekalim. It felt like a dream. 

I wondered what Alan was thinking. In my head, I could see the red lights in the sky at Kissufim Junction that spelled “Ahuva” in the sky and then the sand dunes would come into view, I thought, and the verdant greenhouse upon greenhouse filled with Israel’s lushest, most exotic flowers and the kids and playgrounds and the shuls full of men and women swaying in prayer, pleading to G-d not to let this awful thing happen, not to let their land and livelihoods and homes be taken away, and the neon electric orange that pierced and screamed through everything that whole summer, that whole year really. But none of this existed anymore. The shuls and homes and playgrounds were burnt to the ground and razed by bulldozers. It was all a lie, like the sign at the bus stop in Ashkelon that still says “Gush Katif.”

It is New Year’s Eve 2004. I am at the Y’s home in Atzmona, 500 yards from the Rafah refugee camp. Like most places always on the news that I have come to visit, I am surprised by its ordinariness. C and A are both American olim who came to Israel as teenagers with their families. They have eight children, C, age 3 and R, age 15, with six boys in between. None of the kids speak English. For ideological reasons, the parents have chosen not to speak English in the home. They are generous and warm and kind and of course want to make Aviva and I, both young Americans in Israel for the year, understand their love of Gush Katif and share it with our friends.

They unfold a map of the area from the early 1980s. A bloc of undeveloped land along the Mediterranean coast, a vast pit of sand, the Labor government offered incentives to young, religious couples to settle the Katif bloc and plant the land, the Y’s among them. Here they would build homes and plant gardens and bring children into the world. They would also construct an elaborate network of greenhouses which would house Israel’s largest and most exotic flower collection. Among their flowers and peppers and cows they sought a peaceful, pastoral life, reaping the miracles of the land and studying Torah.

The Y’s quaint, modest home is surrounded by pink, white, and purple flowers and decorated with prints of paintings of the tehillim by my cousin’s chevruta and close friend, Moshe Tzvi Berger, who started painting tehillim when he saw an article in the New York Times reporting that most Jews surveyed thought that the psalms were a Christian text. As someone who deeply loves psalms, he was very troubled by this, and went to his rav with the article, asking what he could do. The culmination of this conversation is his Museum of Psalms, which houses a painting depicting his interpretation of each of the 150 psalms.

By the time of the First Intifada, when the violence really began, C’s mother came up with a new name for Gush Katif: Gan Eden in Hell. And so it felt like this on the dawn of New Year’s Day 2005, when shells from Rafah started to fall and C pulled everyone in the house out of bed and into the living room, the only room of the house with reinforced walls. Aviva and I asked all the usual, naïve, and undoubtedly painful questions for the family: Do you think the evacuation will really occur? What will you do if the army comes? Where will you go? Their answer to every question was the same, and it was not answered with resentment or anger or any degree of uncertainty: This won’t happen to us, because in the last moment, Hashem won’t let it. Because it’s impossible.

After Shabbat ended, the Y’s took us for a car ride to show us around. At Kissufim Junction, they pointed out the red lights that spelled out “Ahuva” in the sky. “Her aunt lives next door to us. She was shot by terrorists on the way home to her husband and children, a real tragedy,” said A. I realize he is talking about Ahuva Amergi, the name on my bracelet, and that is where my second story begins.

My sophomore year at Wellesley, we ordered a bunch of victims of terror bracelets from One Family Fund. In the end, Hillel decided not to distribute them out of fear that it was biased and politically divisive to only recognize Israeli victims of terror (this was obviously very upsetting to me and a classic illustration of how truly crazy Wellesley Jews can be) and Friends of Israel inherited them instead.

The name on the bracelet I randomly pulled out of the bag was Ahuva Amergi, wife and mother, shot and killed in her car near Kissufim in February 2002. For three years I never took the bracelet off. I had always wondered about her, and as disengagement seemed imminent and the question of what would happen to the bodies of those buried in the Gush Katif Regional Cemetery became relevant, I thought about whether I could somehow visit her grave. Now I had the missing link I needed.

***

The Body Transfer

My mom calls to tell me about an article 
in the Boston Globe:

A young woman, shot dead 
on her way home from work, two small sons;

When Israel withdraws from Gaza 
they will have to dig up the body.

“So sad,” she says, 
“I cut it out to send you in the mail.”

And I know right away 
she is talking about Ahuva Amergi,

wife and mother, 
the name I wear etched 
on a bracelet against my skin.

I can see the red lights at Kissufim Junction 
that spell out her name in the sky.

I can see baby Chana sitting on my lap 
as the car speeds through the dunes

towards the Gush Katif Regional Cemetery.

Ahuva was talking to Sarah 
on her cell phone about the new house

and all the things she wanted to have done inside.

Then Sarah heard shots and 
she didn’t hear her sister’s voice again.

Rafi took the kids to Spain, 
and found a new wife. 
It was just too much.

Kneeling on the floor, 
I open up the envelope with the article.

“We’re not thinking about 
where to transfer the body 

because we don’t believe 
we’ll have to leave this place,”
 
Sarah says to the reporter.
“I thought you might be interested,” 
my mom wrote on a post-it.

In the picture, the grave is surrounded 
by smooth white stones along the edges.

She does not know I put them there.

***

After a couple months of summer research in Boston, I arrive back in Israel on July 31. K, my old roommate from the dorms at Hebrew University, a talented aspiring photojournalist, calls me as soon as I land. She is camping out in the tent city in Kfar Darom. Of course I worry for her, at seventeen she is somewhat of a kid sister, and I wonder how she even charges her cell phone out there. A few days later is the first day of Israel’s disengagement from Gaza.

K’s picture is the front page photo of the New York Times. In the picture, a young boy, bawling and furious, soaked in sweat and tears, pushes against a soldier no older than twenty. The soldier does not resist or look angry. Instead, he slumps in shame, his muscles slack. And he shirks back a little, arms drooping, transformed into a young boy in the millisecond before bursting into tears. No one told him the world would be this unfair. He is very sad and very confused, as much so as the little boy, no older than ten, who shoves him and resists him and bawls with flailing legs and flailing arms.

I am volunteering at the MDA station every day, doing the day shift. In between calls, I spend most of my time watching Channel 2 in the break room. My Hebrew isn’t even good enough to understand what most of the people are screaming, but I spend many hours on one of the hard plastic chairs watching people lose everything they have on TV. 

They show buses driving off full of families, leaving only great clouds of dirt and dust in their wake and then they pan back to more people screaming and hysterical with fire and smoke in the background. Lots of other people come to watch too, and mostly we sit in silence until an announcement goes off over the intercom for an ambulance.

On my way home from the MDA station every night I pass by whole families sitting outside of the central bus station, huddled together with some suitcases, their vacant, alien eyes stunned and confused, as if they’ve just arrived from another planet and have never seen Jerusalem before and they are not quite sure why or how they are here.

**

I am back at Wellesley for my senior year. The army has finished evacuating all the people of Gush Katif. The hype has died down and the evacuation is hardly mentioned in the mainstream news anymore. Then I read a little article, it is no more than a paragraph really, about how the Arabs have begun to enter the area to loot and set everything on fire, including shuls. I imagine the shuls as once living entities with souls, now empty hollow shells, like so many dead bodies burning. 

I sit in my dorm room and cry silently. It seems like everyone, at least Jews in America, has forgotten already. I wonder why I am so sensitive and I feel a sense of guilt in my sadness; I still have a home, I don’t even live in Israel – this awful thing did not happen to me directly. I wonder if maybe I am indulging in sadness, in a loss that is not my own. Later that week I take out my paints and I paint and paint on a huge canvas. I paint Gan Eden in Hell, just like C’s mom said, an image still seared in my head.

Many surreal things happened to me in Gush Katif. Things that I am still not yet able to fully comprehend over a year later. What I do intuitively understand is that these events are part of something larger, and I wonder whether I will ever be able to piece them together to make some sense of what I saw. But, still, even now, I feel only a loss, the loss of something that I was never truly really part of, but something that I was still able to feel very deeply and appreciate both for its beauty and its potential. I may have been an outsider watching from the side, but I was up so close to the front sometimes that I could almost fool myself into thinking that I was a part of it.

I still look back on the summer of 2005, and the events in the months leading up to it, with great shock and confusion, as if just the thought itself revisited each time in my head is a huge surprise, one to which I still do not know or admit to know the outcome; one hot, crazy summer during which the line between the good guys and the bad guys blurred, a time when our protectors became our enemies and our enemies were ourselves.