Reflections

Some things that have been on my mind.

Today, as I was scrubbing the floor outside Building 3 with Sarah from Australia, it suddenly struck me how much freedom I have. I signed up for this kibbutz ulpan, but nobody is making me stay. Even if I do stay, I'm pretty much free to do whatever I want. There are some rules, but they are easily broken. I don't have a curfew. I can travel wherever I want, hang out with whomever I want. And then there are people like Scott and Laura, who decided the ulpan just wasn't for them, and they picked up and left. I think Laura is back home in the States now, but Scott is volunteering at that place for people with disabilities in Jerusalem, and he gets free (room and?) board. My cousin Adina was telling me yesterday about Sarel, the volunteer program she did, which also has free room and board. If I wanted, I could quit my cleaning job today, catch the next train out of Haifa, and travel until my money runs out, or volunteer at some place or another in exchange for a place to crash. I'm almost totally free. It's dizzying. It's so dizzying that I don't think I would ever just pick up and leave--but I can, I really can.

Sometimes I think about how my life has always seemed a little dull, a little too ordinary, and I wonder about whether or not I've ever made any important decisions. I've made small choices, I've made ordinary decisions that most people in my situation have chosen as well--to go to college, for example. I even chose a school that I love and that I can't wait to return to senior year. But I have never made a big, important, surprising decision for myself.

Or maybe I have. I chose to come to Israel, after all. And although it often seems to me that I don't have that much say when it comes to my own life, I realized today that I do. I realized how free I am. But freedom and responsibility come hand in hand, right? So maybe with all this freedom I've got, I also have the responsibility to use it wisely, to choose wisely, to make smart decisions. But still, there was that dizzying and breathtaking realization that I could--today, I honestly could--go wherever I want. Nobody's stopping me.

*

Another thing I've been thinking about: some of the subtle differences between Israel and America.

One, as I already mentioned, is the unbearable heat and the lack of rain here. It's been so hot that they opened the ulpan bunker, which is air conditioned, for students who don't have air conditioning in their rooms. Lots of people moved their mattresses down there, and are sleeping in the bunker.

That bunker is another thing. There are shelters all over the kibbutz, small cement squares labeled in Hebrew as "Miklat" (shelter). Most of them are closed, but one doubles as a pub, and another is the ulpan bunker. There is a steep flight of cement stairs leading underground, to a pretty open, completely sheltered space. No matter where you are on the kibbutz, you're not too far from a Miklat.

Last summer, there was an ulpan like this one, also with around 40 students. And then the Second Lebanese War started, and many of those students left for home, or to the south of Israel, where it was safer. About half stayed on the kibbutz, even though every day there were reports of more rockets landing in the area, more deaths. Two rockets even landed on kibbutz property, although no civilians living here were killed. The students, instead of learning in the classrooms like we do on our ulpan, had all their classes in the bunkers. They, like the students on this ulpan who have no air conditioning, also slept in the bunker, but not for the same reason.

Security here is always an issue. After my Taglit Birthright trip, I was traveling to Egypt via Eilat with my friends Kim and Zibby. We had just boarded the bus to Eilat from Tel Aviv, and people around us were still stowing their luggage under the bus, boarding, finding their seats, getting settled. In Israel, a bus ride like that from Tel Aviv to Eilat will have assigned seats. A man started to make his way to the back of the bus until he reached the row behind where Kim, Zibby and I were sitting. On his seat there was a bag. Does this bag belong to any of you, he asked us? It doesn't, I said. The man looked around, but there was nobody else sitting in our vicinity. Does this bag here belong to anybody? he shouted to the bus at large. Nobody answered. The man hurried to the front of the bus and conversed with the bus driver. More and more people were boarding the bus and finding their seats, but nobody had claimed the bag yet. A few minutes later, a uniformed man rushed onto the bus and asked, Where is the bag? Over there, said the man who had discovered it, and led the uniformed man to the bag. He was about to confiscate it, when a young soldier burst onto the bus and shouted, It's mine!

In the end, it really was the soldier's bag, and she had simply gone to the bathroom for a few minutes and left her backpack unattended on her seat on the bus. In the States, if somebody saw a bag like that on a greyhound, they probably wouldn't think twice about it; they would assume that its owner had gone to the bathroom, or something like that. But ownerless bags in Israel are a really serious situation.

Bags in general pose a problem, whose solution is to search everybody's bags before they enter any public place. Restaurants, train stations, bus stations, malls, supermarkets, bars, pubs, clubs, the Kotel--outside of all these places, there are security guards whose job it is to search your bags before you enter. It's like mild airport security wherever you go. But you get used to it. It's not uncommon to find, when you're looking at the bill after you've eaten in a restaurant, that there is a small charge added at the bottom for security.

*

Sunday night I went to my kibbutz family's house for dinner, and the children helped me with my homework.

Yesterday after class, I traveled to Netanya to meet my cousin Gary and his 14-year-old daughter, Adina. We went to the beach, had a falafel, and licked ice cream cones while we window shopped. I bought a pair of sandels that every breathing Israeli owns, so now I am officially Israeli. Adina and Gary had been volunteering at an army base, that program I talked about in the beginning of this really long post, and they had a fabulous time. Even if I'm not about to pick up and leave the kibbutz, it might be something to look into for next summer.

Adina's really excited about being in Israel. She wants to do the volunteer program with me next summer, she wants to spend her last two years of high school here, she wants to make aliyah, she wants to go to the army.

This country is just the kind of place people fall in love with.