Thousands of grey cranes stretch their feet toward this consecrated land as they calmly descend upon it each spring and fall. Africans in the winter, Europeans in the summer, these migrants feel at home in the lush green peanut and wheat fields of this tri-continental wedge of earth.
Bordering the desert, this earth has water, this earth has life, this particular earth is overflowing with human passion. For thousands of years, layers of human story, holy and unholy, have rubbed against one another, creating a hot and tangible friction. The place is quaking with human history and desire. This place is in the news.
Though I often wish I were, I am not a crane whose outstretched feet meet this land in happy reprieve from miles of flight. I have a human history and identity that brings me here and my shame is in dramatic conversation with my joy. My guilt and my pride taunt and tickle and test one another.
I am both a simple creature of the present and a complex daughter of history. I am a Jewish American College-Educated Vegetarian Heterosexual Leftist White Farmer Woman of Eastern European descent. I am an animal.
I am spending February of 2009 in Israel. In exchange for my free airfare I was the staff person on a tour trip funded by an organization called Birthright whose mission is to send young Jews to Israel on peer group trips. The leaders of and financial contributors to Birthright are Jewish Nationalists.
I am a humanist first and foremost. Secondly, I am a speciesist, meaning that I also believe in the multi-disciplinary worth of all species. I don't think I am a nationalist but I can recognize the appeal. I have yet to figure out whether or not those three -isms (nationalism, humanism, and speciesism) are mutually exclusive. I like to believe, that they can, at least in small ways, coexist.
The rest of my time here will be spent attempting to emotionally recover from and intellectually deal with the tour that got me here for free, visiting friends who I deeply deeply love, trying to investigate whether or not there is anything I can do to support the vision of Israel as a humanist state, hiking, learning, and indentifying my identity.
I'd like to create a few chapters/entries on this blog that will chronicle the things I have done so far in Israel. Who knows how much time I will have to write these but I'll give it a go. I want to use this writing as a tool toward understanding the layers of story that massage and aggrivate one another here and what my role is within that process.
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