Coming Home to a Place I've Never Lived
How place informs character and character can be defined by place. In real life, and on the page.
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“Is it safe? Are you scared?” People always ask this when I say I’m going to Israel. I’m leaving tomorrow, actually, for a short, quick trip to show solidarity and volunteer and be a witness to the aftermath of October 7th.
But people asked this every time I went before. In 1994 and 1996, when I went as a journalist. In 2000, with my fiancé for Passover. In 2007, married with three very young kids. In 2014, with my new and current husband, and in 2015, with my three biological children, after the first two had their bar and bat mitzvahs. I was supposed to go in 2020, but covid. So now, it’s long overdue, and I can’t wait to touch down in the land of Israel, kiss those stones (which really look pink and not muddy brown as in the pic above) and wonder at how the ancient Jews carried and stacked them so high to create the Temple.
We’re talking 30 years that people have wondered if it’s safe to visit Israel, and this is my first time to visit while the country is at war. And every time I say, “I feel safer there than anywhere else.”
The first time I went to Israel, my newspaper sent me on a singles mission and expected articles out of it. I wrote 8 in a week and a half, and those were the days before the Internet and email and so I’d call it in and dictate to my editor who typed furiously to get all the words. I think we had a way to transmit photographs over the news wire, but I can’t remember. I might have faxed something.
Either way, I interviewed a modern Orthodox rabbi that I met with immediately after landing, after a bumpy taxi ride over a jutted road past Bethlehem to the settlement of Efrat. I wrote about losing my luggage and shopping in East Jerusalem on Shabbat, because that’s the only place shops were open, and buying jeans from a kind Palestinian man in a little store, and then having coffee as another Arab man played guitar and sang and it was very kumbaya.
I wrote about visiting the place where Prime Minister Yitzhak Rabin had been shot just weeks before. I wrote about my first ever visit to the Western Wall and that feeling of coming home to a place I’d never been before, where Jews were strong and sun-kissed and mezuzahs blessed every doorway.
The next time I visited Israel, also as a journalist, I was a guest of Sar-El, Volunteers for Israel. You can actually go to Israel as a volunteer for the Army, and they wanted articles to share with American audiences. I stayed in a barracks on the Golan Heights with a fiery coal heater in the corner and a trough-sink and a shower with a trickle of cold water.
That visit, I spent a cold and rainy Shabbat in the home of friends of my father, who were Orthodox, and the power went out, so a kind Gentile had to come and restart the electricity so the stew could keep cooking in the oven.
The next time I went to Israel was with my first fiancé for Passover, my first experience in an Orthodox family on that holiday, and boy was it a deep-dive into religion. On our 7-hour layover in Amsterdam, we walked through the Red Light District and shopped at an open market and then had lunch at the Jewish community center because it served kosher food, and then we flew to the holy land and met up with my family-to-be, whose Passover Seders lasted until after 1 a.m., and all the nieces and nephews were overtired and slumped into sleep on the floor in the private event room my mother-in-law had reserved at a hotel.
Although it wasn’t really acceptable, since we weren’t yet married, we left for a few days in the middle of the holiday and drove to Eilat on the Red Sea and spent time just the two of us. And I learned there the many ways to be religiously Jewish. So many rules and interpretations and it was complicated if you let it be, but I wanted it to be easy.
We married that August and had kids quickly - three in four years - and by the end, when our marriage was holding on by a frayed thread, we took all three to Israel one last time for another holy land Passover with the family I would soon leave. And when I stepped into confidence and my own life as a single mother, and then a newlywed all over again with a man who really got me and continues to get me 15 years later, I wanted to experience Israel on my own terms, as a complicated and multifaceted Jewish woman who truly loves this identity I’ve been handed but define it in my very own way.
Dan and I went in 2014. He’d traveled to Moscow and Antarctica and hiked through Spain but never stepped foot in Israel. So we hiked under waterfalls in the Golan Heights and slept in the mystical northern city of Tsfat and felt the cool stone of the Western Wall under our hands in Jerusalem and walked along the Mediterranean from Tel Aviv to Jaffa where we visited art galleries and ate hummus and salatim, dozens of Israeli salads overlooking the frothing sea. A year later, I took my kiddos after two of their mitzvahs to show them Israel from a liberal Jewish angle in the hope that they could build a connection to the land separate from the religion.
I travel a lot, and rarely return to the same destinations unless it’s to visit family or friends. But Israel has a place in my soul like no other. It’s never a long enough visit, and it never gets old. In this way, place and identity are all wrapped up in one another, which is a fascinating angle to come at for a writer.
What is it about place that informs character? And what is it about character that is drawn to a particular place?
So I’m going tomorrow, to be a witness, to write about what I see and feel and hear. I’ve been intrigued lately with writing about place. Place as a character. Place as a concept.
What is home, anyway?
Israel is a place that seeped inside me from the first visit and has never left. I can feel the cold of the pink stones right now, I can read the history in the dusty paths. And oh, Israeli breakfast…
I was supposed to be going on a Literary Solidarity Mission, but not enough people registered, so I’m taking myself on a literary solidarity mission of my own making. Writers are the witnesses of the world. Not an easy job, but an important one. So many voices, so many perspectives, and we need them all.
Thanks for reading the Rebel Author Newsletter! I hope you’ll spend time this week writing about place and how it informs character, or how it becomes a character. Follow me on social media for posts in real time from Israel. Instagram, Facebook, LinkedIn.
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