Changes
I wrote the following as an early assignment for a Creative Writing course I'm taking in Jerusalem at Pardes. I think it reflects some of how my experiences here have changed, and how I am so often in dialogue internally with my last year-long stay in Israel...
14 September 2008
For this first out-of-class assignment, I've chosen to sit in front of the Super HaMoshava on Emek R'Fayim. The Why is simple: it was here, just off Emek R'Fayim, that I lived the last time I was in Israel, seven years ago, at Beit Nativ.
It was here that I gorged on Burger's Bar - before it became a sizable chain, and existed in a small hole where the cook/cashier chain-smoked as he prepared the delicious burgers. And yes, they tasted better back then.
It was on Emek that I ordered heaping portions of Thaliandi stir-fry in an effort to quell my rumblings resulting from lack of good Asian food. I gave them a lot of business back then. Now, they are gone.
It was at Beit Nativ, on Yoshua bin Nun street, just off Emek, that we sat, seven years and three days ago, watching together in silence, as one - then two - airplanes were flown into the twin towers of the World Trade Center. It was in that living room, just off Emek R'Fayim, that I whispered a silent prayer of thanks through my stunned senses that, as we watched the towers fall, my sister had decided to go to work late that day. She worked in the WTC building next door. She was still at home when I called some thirty minutes earlier, getting ready for work, as yet unaware that anything about that day was at all unusual.
It was at Beit Nativ, just off Emek R'Fayim, that I again witnessed terror from afar. I had left the US, having weighed the dangers of terror attacks in Israel witnessed from afar, only to arrive in Israel and find myself again on the other side of the Atlantic, watching. It was here that I watched as the my home country began to make less and less sense. Here, at a strange removal from events at home, I watched an administration co-opt terms like Patriotism and Loyalty and I watched as this administration sent out its hunting dogs on the trail of revenge for an act that, however terrible and despicable, I felt we did not fully understand. It was here that I witnessed the first moments in the subsequent tarnishing of our nation's image in the world around us. I watched how pity and empathy were inverted into scorn and disbelief.
So much has change since I lived here seven years ago. My bag still gets checked when I enter a school or cafe, but I can sit and enjoy my meal or coffee without wondering whether the backpack of the sketchy man who just came in contains the device that will blow this place apart.
There is life here, where seven years ago were only the trappings of those who chose to come anyway, despite the atmosphere of danger. Instead of Thailandi, now, there is Soya - three times the menu, three times the expense. Instead of Burger Ranch, there's an Aroma coffee shop. And where once sat the Kabbala Center, there is now a Buffalo Steakhouse.
The place isn't the same. But then, how could it be? For I also am not the same as I was, seven years ago, living in Beit Nativ, just off Emek R'Fayim.
