kibbutz

Expat life and aliyah-versary

/ IlanaB / 1 Comment

I can honestly say that the four and a half months traveling around Europe and the Middle East with my then husband was one of the best times of my life. On the flight home from Egypt, I nearly kissed the ground in Minneapolis and I wanted to hug everyone I met who spoke with that glorious Midwestern accent. But that feeling faded fast. Upon returning home to small-town Washington, I sank into a depression. Suddenly I was waking up in the same room every day seeing the same things and experiencing everything in English in an easy and familiar way.

One of the gifts from my mother is finding a way to be proactive and analyzing feelings to figure out what to do about them. So I went to the library and started researching how to live abroad. I decided that I would do whatever it took to live an expat life. I didn’t know where and I didn’t know when, but this was something that I would make happen.

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Could it be a lion in Zion?

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On the kibbutz, I met a guy from Uruguay. I barely knew where Uruguay was, but I could safely say it was in South America. I had nothing in common with him other than the fact that we were both Jews participating in a Hebrew immersion course in Israel. It was nearly Passover and somehow we had a deep, animated conversation about matza balls. His grandmother and my mother made them exactly the same: they were lead balls that sank in the soup and sat in your stomach for days. And suddenly I understood what the notion of a Jewish People means in the sense of a shared history, traditions, and culture. Meeting Jews in the US still allows us to connect as Americans. But what do I know about Uruguay? I was connected to this stranger in a way that I could never connect with strangers in the US. There a friendship starts at zero and builds. With this guy, we already started at two and grew from there.

I had found the place, Israel the ancestral homeland of the Jews. The when was sooner than I expected. I turned my life upside-down and was living in Israel ten months after this matza ball moment.

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Connection

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Moving to Israel is called “making aliyah” in English. The verb in Hebrew is “to go up” (l’allot). Sixteen years ago this week, I made aliyah. Many people who come to Israel look back on their lives here and conclude that they’ve “made a life” here and they have been uplifted. They usually mean that they found their soulmate, got married, had kids, bought a home, and became part of Israel in some way.

That traditional path didn’t work out for me in the US and it hasn’t work out for me here. And yet, I still choose to be in Israel because I ran to Israel, not away from the US.

Here I was able to discover myself and define who I am. It’s been a slow process. It was only a few years ago that I gathered the courage to go to Thailand to learn Thai massage. I was 42 and apparently finally had the answer to life, the universe, and everything. I came home, quit my stable job (that was draining my life energy), and became a massage therapist and copy editor. I wouldn’t have even thought to enter the field of copy editing if I hadn’t lived in Israel. Even when I have exhausting days and stress myself over deadlines, I wouldn’t trade it for anything.

What has been uplifting to me in Israel is giving myself permission to live an expat life and exploring what it means to me to be part of the Jewish People. And the most uplifting thing – my true aliyah – is my journey of self-discovery.

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Looking back at far how I’ve come already

The in-between time

/ IlanaB / 2 Comments

How do you go from the depths of despair to the heights of happiness in five minutes?  Is it a form of manic-depressive disorder?  Is there a switch that they install in your brain when you make aliyah?

Back in the early days of living in Israel, my emotions and grief on Soldiers and Victims of Terror Remembrance Day were dialed way past 11.  On my first Remembrance Day during my kibbutz experience, I cried all day – after having cried the whole day on Holocaust Remembrance Day the week before.  In fact, my Hebrew teacher asked me to leave class because my outpouring of unfiltered emotion was just too much for her to bear.  Later in the evening, we were all supposed to gather at the main field of the kibbutz to have a closing ceremony for this sad day.  More tears and choking back sobs.  Honestly, my love for Israel was quite dehydrating.  And then everyone was waiting, murmuring to each other in quiet conversation, but just standing there.

Five minutes passed.

And then the fireworks began and everyone was laughing and cheering and they headed off to the biggest, wildest party of the year for Independence Day.

What the hell!?!?!

Today, the switch is working better.  I get it.  Soldiers who fought to protect us and this land died so that we could live.  We honor them and then we not only should, but we are obligated to live and celebrate life.  And this week, I stood for the sirens and enjoyed the fireworks.

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Fireworks 2017 – it’s really hard to catch fireworks well with a phone camera

But what about those five minutes?  As I was thinking about it this week, it seems to me that we are always in those five minutes.  We just don’t notice because we are not switching between the depths of despair and the heights of happiness.  It’s pretty exhausting to be at either extreme, but day-to-day life in Israel is that in-between time.

When an Israeli athlete wins a medal and you hear HaTikvah, there’s a swell of emotion – and we are in those five minutes.

When the internet company representative works on your internet just before a holiday and says the Shechechiyanu prayer of thanksgiving (in a Russian accent) when it works – we are in those five minutes.

When you take pride in Israelis helping wounded Syrians or building mobile hospitals in Haiti – we are in those five minutes.

When the insurance representative says “Tfu, tfu, tfu, that you should always be healthy” – we are in those five minutes.

When you hear Hebrew in unexpected places around the world, and you feel suddenly at home – we are in those five minutes.

When the veterinarian who made a house call for your cat takes a few minutes to say afternoon prayers in your living room – we are in those five minutes.

There are no substitutes for Remembrance Days and Independence Day and they’re important, but we ought to remember to declare our Zionism and love of Israel in those in-between times.  We don’t need grand gestures and emotional extremes every day; it’s those ordinary everyday minutes that are the most special if we just take a moment to pay attention.

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Greetings from Denmark!

/ IlanaB / 1 Comment

This week I’m in Denmark.  I thought it might be hard to relate my Danish experience to Israel, but it turns out that Denmark does have a few connections to Israel.

Land of Israel’s winter desserts

Always a fan of dessert, I had forgotten that the legend about Krembo is that it originated in Denmark.  Krembo is sold only in the winter (mostly because in summer it would just turn into a gooey mess on the grocery store shelf).  It’s a chocolate-coated, fluff-filled, sweet mess on a thin cookie.  Here in Denmark, it’s called a Flødebolle and you can buy them any time.  There are differences though.  Here they can add coconut on the coating and they use a wafer for the base, fancy ones use marzipan.  Israel has vanilla and mocha, but here they have vanilla and strawberry.

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I went to the bakery to get a treat after dinner and I bought a sugar-coated fried donut.  Then I took a bite and realized, “Oh, it’s a sufganiah!”  But here they call them a Berliner.  It’s not originally Danish, but apparently you can get them year-round.

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Kibbutz volunteers

In Israel it’s not uncommon to meet someone who volunteered on a kibbutz.  I didn’t expect to meet two Danes who were volunteers within two days.  On the plane to Denmark, I sat next to a man and his son and in the course of the conversation, I found out that the father had volunteered on a kibbutz in the north 20 years ago.  This was his second visit this year and he hoped to come again in December.  He visits his kibbutz and has fond memories of it.

I arrived at my conference and while talking to the organizer he came out with a few words of Hebrew.  He spent 3 months volunteering on a kibbutz in the Negev.  At 22, he’s already a multilingual, open-minded, curious individual.  I’m a bit jealous that he’s fluent in Danish, English, Greek, German and Hungarian with a few words in other languages.  I guess it’s never too late to improve on my one and a half languages.

These volunteers tend to go to kibbutzim to have adventures and an unusual experience.   They aren’t Jewish and are not Zionists.  It’s just that no other place in the world has this kind of volunteer experience.

Here are a few highlights from my trip so far 

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Fancy Danish Krembo

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“Your Rainbow Panorama” at the Aarhus museum

A look out the windows on and on the floor

Appreciating the curve

Open-air museum with houses from all around Denmark reconstructed exactly as they had been in their original locations

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It’s very green here!

 

Toilet tanks of Memory Lane

/ IlanaB / 4 Comments

This week I got a new toilet tank.  I know.  That doesn’t sound so earth-shattering or life-changing.  And it isn’t.  But this toilet tank triggered a few memories and those are usually worth writing about.  It’s especially well-timed because this is the first post in the second year of my blog (hooray!) and the toilet tank reminded me of how I got to Israel in the first place.

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Back in February 2001, I began kibbutz ulpan on Kibbutz Ma’agan Michael.  Half the day I would study Hebrew and half the day I would work somewhere on the kibbutz.  I began my kibbutz life in the kitchen and I was put in charge of the dairy cart – cottage cheese, soft white cheese (like sour cream), sliced cheese, and whatever other dairy products were available.  Needless to say, I couldn’t even look at dairy products after a while, much less eat them.  This was a great weight loss plan!

Ma’agan Michael is a rich kibbutz with multiple income streams including tropical fish, edible fish, bananas, cactus fruits, and a few other small industries.  But their big moneymaker is Plasson.  They make plastic plumbing parts and ship them all over Israel and internationally.

After my stint in the kitchen and noticeable weight loss, I begged to be outside, so I transferred to the banana fields.  I knew how to drive a manual transmission so I was an asset as a tractor driver.   But when it was too hot, we weren’t allowed to work outside and I spent one, possibly two, days at the Plasson factory.  We were put to work putting plastic rings (washers) of different shapes and sizes into a plastic bag.  We did it BY HAND!!!  Seriously, it was the longest day of my life.  I’m not really cut out for factory work.  But I did my job and I have a memory tucked away of once having worked at Plasson.  So every time I see a Plasson toilet tank, I think of my time on the kibbutz.

The truck and one of the tractors that I drove.

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Tying bunches of bananas.

Looking back now, I can see that the 5 months on the kibbutz was a transitional time for me.  Life was not really moving forward the way I had envisioned.  Taking a time-out on the kibbutz gave me the opportunity to truly see it.  Moreover, I unexpectedly felt very drawn and connected to Israel and my Jewish heritage.  I had been to Israel many times before, but I never felt like this.

I went back to the US that July and had a difficult summer trying to figure out what I was going to do.  And then 9/11 happened.  Watching the chaos and trying to comprehend the tragedies unfolding on my television screen made me realize that life is short and I would not accept a “life of quiet desperation.”

For my 29th birthday the year before, I jumped out of an airplane – freefall for 5,000 feet (1,500 meters), parachute for 5,000 feet.  For my 30th birthday a few weeks after 9/11, I jumped out of a life that no longer made me happy.  Life in Israel was my parachute.

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Some of the best sunsets in the world are at Ma’agan Michael!

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Environmental side note:

In Israel – and probably a lot of other places – we have two flushing options.  The small button is for small flushes and the big button is for when you need a big flush.

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