November, 2019 - From Houston to Holy Land: An Oleh's Journeys

Getting through the loneliness of Thanksgiving after America

Someone once wrote about making Aliyah that you feel simultaneously at home and homesick at the same time. Living in that strange in between space of feeling like you belong and missing everything you left behind. When you move here, you come to the place you’re meant to be; but being home could never change the years of life you spent making something outside the land.

Tomorrow it’s Thanksgiving in America, and I can’t help but feel the loneliest I’ve ever felt in this country. Thanksgiving was my favorite holiday on the secular calendar. I remember every Thanksgiving I got to spend with my family, making food with my mom, eating a Filipino Thanksgiving in San Francisco, and frying turkeys to feed my friends. I asked my wife to marry me after coming home from one of those family dinners. I loved posting videos and pictures of my turkey escapades, making a few converts to the fried life along the way; but now those memories popping up on my notifications only to serve to remind me of the people and the life I left behind. They remind me of the people I love that are now several thousand miles away, friendships and relationships stretched over an ocean and time zones that shift days and nights.

After my mom died, I felt like I had lost everything. I felt completely alone in the ruins of our lives. I remember sleeping in my room in her old place, just me, and crying myself until I was numb enough to sleep into restless sleep. I had people around me, my family and friends, but I felt like I was caught in a haze that shielded me from every source of light around me.

Slowly, I made friends and rebuilt my life. I found a community that accepted me, madness and all, and friends that gave me everything they had and more. People that I love, shoulders that I cried on, ears that listened as I howled and screamed out against everything above and below the heavens. I made myself a pillar of the community. One of the rabbis at my synagogue actually told me that I was the conscience of our community, that I spoke truth bravely and bared my heart and soul to others. I felt like I had made it.

And then I left it all to come here.

I don’t have any regrets about coming here, at least not yet; but I definitely feel tonight what I’m missing, what I gave up, what I sacrificed, and what I abandoned. It’s nights like this that someone like me could easily lose sleep to a night of despair and the nonstop reel of regrets that plays in my mind when I feel the downward swing coming.

There’s something though that gives me some kind of strength. Yesterday was Sigd, the Jewish holiday brought to Israel by the Ethiopian Jews after their Aliyah. It’s a holiday that celebrates commitment to the Torah and unity as one people. It’s a unique holiday, now officially a State holiday, that more and more Israelis of non-Ethiopian background are beginning to mark.

I can’t go a day living in Haifa, in the Krayot especially, without seeing Ethiopian Jews. I know that anyone old enough to have a grown child came on one of the missions to save the community and bring them home to Israel. Along that journey, countless lives were lost in the long marches and treks to get to a place where an airlift was possible. Many more died waiting to be brought home. I look at those older men and women and wonder what they saw on their way here, whether they lost someone along the way. While I’ll never know their stories, or at least until my Hebrew gets better, I always see something that makes the Ethiopian Jews here stand apart from everyone else, both sabras and other olim: the smiles. Whenever I see Ethiopian women on the bus greet each other it’s always with a smile. Every chance encounter with someone they know brings out this amazingly deep and beautiful smile.

I look at those smiling women and hope that I have half their strength. That as much as I feel alone, away from my friends and family back in the states, at least I had an easy time getting here. If that woman could survive getting here, and still be able to have a smile that I struggle to have on a good day, then maybe I can make it too. Maybe it’s fate that these two holidays fall back to back this year, my first year in the land, to give me the strength to persevere through the loneliness. I didn’t do anything to mark the day, but I feel it’s effects. I am here because I believe that the same Torah that G-d gave us to bring light into the world is the same one that tells me to be here, and the same one that brings everyone in this land together. This country is filled with men, women, and children from every corner of the globe, a homeland for a people dispersed, a home for a family spread apart.

So tomorrow, I’ll still host my Thanksgiving dinner. I’ll hang my Stars and Stripes, and serve the best damned smoked turkey this side of the Atlantic. I’ll be outnumbered by three South Africans and a Russian, but that’s what both Sigd and Thanksgiving would want me to do. Remember who I am, why I committed to come here, why I believe that I must be here, and to be thankful that I am in this place at this time. G-d blessed my journey here, and I hope that His continued blessings will help my family flourish here. Life is just starting for me here, and I’m going to make the most of it. Tomorrow, before I carve the turkey, I plan on saying a l’chaim just to the fact that I am here, that I am making friends, and that I’ve rejoined the Jewish family here in our own country; but I’ll make one more too. That as much as I will grow here, I will never forget the family and friends I have around the world that made this all possible for me. Without them, and their love and support, I never would have even made it to the plane.

Happy Thanksgiving y’all, sending love to all of my family and friends, wherever you may be.

Why I write and this blog’s master plan

So, I figured that 7 posts deep is probably too far in to be writing this blog without sharing with y’all why I’m doing this in the first place.

I’ve been a writer for a long time, with varying degrees of success and consistency. I’ve dabbled in spoken word as well, but I think that I might be a little more limited in that arena when the English-speaking percentage of the population around me has drastically shrunken. I’ve had a couple of other blogs before this, now languishing in complete inactivity due to my own lack of focus and drive.

But this time, it’s going to be different.

So why do I write?

I write because it’s the only true outlet I’ve found so far to relieve the burdens in my soul when they start to overwhelm my shoulders. I write because I can pour out everything I feel onto the page, words gushing out of me with reckless abandon. In my short twenty-nine years, I’ve seen and done so many things that I will never be able to forget, both for the good and for the bad. I can’t tell you about the countless nights I spent without sleep, unable to close my eyes without seeing the horrors of the day, writing away all of the pain in me. My phone is full of unfinished poems and essays, odes to sadness and despair, monuments to days of mania and nights of madness.

There also those rarer moments when I experience something so beautiful and profound that I have to write them down. My memory being what it is, I need to preserve those moments of happiness and hope for when the sadness returns, when my consciousness starts to disconnect from the world around me.

I also write because I want to share with you what I’m feeling, what I’m thinking, what I see, what I experience. I’ve heard a thousand times over that people with bipolar disorder feel things more intensely than the average joe. I feel sometimes like I’m one of those little shrimps with extra rods and cones that let them see colors we could never even imagine, but instead of a color palette, my emotional range is just extremely saturated with nuance and depth. When you have so much depth to your feelings, you can’t help but just want to express them.

So what’s this blog going to be about? Well, I can tell you that it won’t be only focused on one thing. I’m going to write about politics, about faith, about food, and maybe some poetry. I can also say that this blog about my journey through aliyah, but I don’t think that the journey will ever end. I think that I’ve been here long enough to realize that I will never stop discovering things here, seeing new things, experiencing life constantly as if every day was a rebirth of the entire world. It’s taken a long time for me to get to this place, both physically and mentally. I spent so much and sacrificed to come to this land, and I’ve finally reached a time in my life where I want to see the next day in a land I truly love.

Other than that, I can’t say where else this blog will take me. Everything I write is 100% me, the unfiltered, uninhibited, completely real me. I will never lie to you, never try to sugarcoat this place or myself, and I will never say anything that doesn’t reflect who I am.

So that’s why I write, what I’m going to write, and now I just need you. I need you to read, to digest, to see what I have to say. I want to connect with you, wherever you may be. My words come right from the soul, and they’re made for you. So, thank you for reading so far and for hopefully reading in the future. This blog is just beginning, and so is my journey in this holy land. I hope you can walk alongside me as I explore this beautiful place, and we can share a connection that will last longer than any words I pen.

Welcome (officially) to From Houston to Holy Land.

Am I Israeli now?

I didn’t hear the sirens. I was praying at the synagogue close to our hotel in Tel Aviv when they went off. My wife and her father were walking on their way to get coffee when they heard them warning us of an incoming missile. My mother-in-law saw the smoke and the explosion from a missile launched by the iron dome from her balcony. The only thing I felt was the constant buzzing of the red alert app on my phone going off, but I only saw the alerts for the communities to the south, close to Gaza. I didn’t know that it would get so close.

It’s a weird experience, to know that for a few moments there was the chance of a rocket haphazardly landing in the middle of our street, on a home, or a hotel, or a synagogue, or a school. I always thought of the rockets as something that plagued the towns next to Gaza and the cities south of Tel Aviv, I never expected to be in a place where the iron dome was needed.

My immediate thoughts were to pack and get the hell back north (at least Hezbollah isn’t firing at the moment). Then, I asked some of my more veteran olim friends about what to do. One friend in particular said something that stuck out at me. After he calmly texted me what was going on and what I could or couldn’t do, he simply said that maybe we should take a trip to Jerusalem and make a day there, show my wife’s family that this is not something that will deter us from living our lives.

We ended up staying in Tel Aviv, toured Jaffa, and frantically searched for a kosher restaurant that was open since non-essential businesses had been closed earlier, and only later allowed to reopen if they were near a bomb shelter.

Other than the delayed lunch, it was a relatively normal day. I had Mexican food. I almost bought something at the market I didn’t need. I walked around the city without being afraid, but knowing that at any moment things could drastically change. I knew that my brothers and sisters in the South were really hurting, and over 150 rockets have been launched from Gaza today. My Facebook feed is filled with images of children hunched down in buses, people looking at gaping holes in their roofs from a rocket falling on their home, and with people huddled close to buildings because they couldn’t get to a shelter in time.

But there was one video that I saw that summed up life here so much that I cannot help but feel hope in the midst of the anxiety and fear. An older woman in Sderot waved down a TV crew reporting what was happening to offer them homemade food. Some pastries, some stew, freshly baked bread. Life here goes on, despite the people that seek to end it.

I’ve seen a lot of things in my seven months here, and now I can say that I’ve been through a red alert. Thank G-d, we are ok, but many people in my country are injured and even more go to bed tonight not knowing whether they will have to run with their loved ones in the middle of the night to a shelter. I cannot say that I know what that is like, and I hope I never have to; but I feel like I understand now a little more of what it means to live in this country. We are always a target, but that cannot stop us from living our lives. Rockets cannot stop us from praying, mortar shells cannot stop us from opening our homes to one another, and terror will never stop us from living life to the fullest at every moment.

Safe here in Haifa again, praying for calm in the South, and hoping that if you’re reading this, you’ll know that Israelis are under attack, but that we will meet anything thrown at us with all of our strength, all while living our lives without compromising our love of life and this land. Much love from Israel, please send some back, we could all use it.

Trying to make sense of the incomprehensible at Theresienstadt

Last week, I walked through a little town outside of Prague, home to a few thousand people living close to the forests of Bohemia. Old pre-war buildings lined the small streets. I sat in a little park and watched the people pass by. A woman walked her two young children home from school, the children pausing to look at me, a strange man with a little fabric disc on top of his head, strange strings peeking out from the bottom of his long coat. They passed in front of a rather unremarkable building, save for one word written atop the entranceway in Hebrew letters: Yizkor, Remembrance.

That little town is called Terezín, and it once housed the concentration camp I know by the German name: Theresienstadt.

Throughout our journey in Prague, I took lots of pictures and posted them immediately to social media (what do you expect, I’m a millennial). My wife and I really enjoyed Prague, especially the Jewish history of the town. The old Jewish Quarter is one of the biggest tourist attractions in the city, and the Alt-Neu (Old-New) Synagogue is the oldest continuously used synagogue in Europe. We encountered plenty of Jewish tourists as we visited the old synagogues, the cemetery, and the few kosher restaurants; but I was overwhelmed by the amount of non-Jews exploring the remains of a once vibrant community, home to some of the greatest rabbis in Europe’s history.

It was surreal, to be both the tourist and the subject of tourism. To go into a synagogue that was once used for so many life events only to be turned into a museum of Judaism, or a memorial to the victims of the Shoah. One particular synagogue had all of the names of Czech Jews murdered by the Nazis and their collaborators, and the sight was staggering.

But that was nothing to seeing the real thing in person.

To be honest, I didn’t know what to expect, how I would feel. What would go through my mind as I walked through the places where tens of thousands met their deaths, and even more waited to be sent off to the death camps. I didn’t know if I would be able to hold it together. Honestly, I was afraid of it all. As a bipolar person, speaking for myself specifically, I feel things more intensely than the average person. My emotional sensitivity is always jacked up to 11, and I didn’t know how confronting all of the death, the suffering, and my identity’s connection to all of that would affect me.

What I definitely did not expect were the stares. Out of the hundreds of visitors that day during the few hours we were there, I didn’t see a single other obviously Jewish person, save for one guy who I knew was Jewish from a chance encounter earlier in the day. My wife, in her wig and hat, can pass as just another tourist, but my kippah and tzitzit mark me from a hundred feet away as an Orthodox Jew; and let me tell you that I could feel the stares from that far away. Huge groups of teenagers, speaking English, French, German, Czech, passed us by and every one of them stopped talking for a moment to see me. I felt like every single pair of eyes was on me, probing me, wondering what I was thinking. I couldn’t help but look back at some of them, and whenever we locked eyes, a flood of emotions flashed back and forth between us. From them, I felt shock, curiosity, uneasiness, tension, and sometimes a tinge of guilt. All they got from me was hardness, eyes made empty of light by the sight of ARBEIT MACHT FREI on the top of the gateway, harshened by the sight of the pits where they shot and buried thousands of my brothers and sisters, drained by crematoriums where they burned the bodies and scattered their ashes in the river. Could I ever drink from the water there ever again knowing that its soil must still have the essence of the Jews of Bohemia in its banks?

The shooting gallery where executions took place

Even now, it’s difficult to put into words what I felt. There was the annoyance and anger as my tour guide, in her little scripted walk, kept on saying “the Jews” as if we were an ancient object and not a living person standing right in front of her. I can tell you about the rage I felt when I saw people laughing or smiling in a place made bitterly holy by the thousands of martyrs slain on its grounds. Or about the tears I shed as I placed rocks by the memorials, the mass graves, and as I lit a candle on the car of one of the ovens to remember at least one soul devoured by the flames of that dreadful stone building. I felt disbelief that people could still live there, in a place so associated with death and misery, that children could play just a short walk from where countless children met their deaths from starvation, from disease, and from torture.

But I can’t really express what I felt as I walked the grounds of the camps, this overwhelming numbness to it all. Maybe it was my mind’s way of protecting me from it all, from having to process it all emotionally. It was hard to speak there, I felt like my throat closed up to avoid having to breathe the air that still held the cries and screams of Jews facing the insurmountable and the unthinkable.

Beds from one of the barracks used to hold Jews and political prisoners

I’ve been to funerals, I’ve buried my own mother, I’ve buried friends, I’ve seen children’s caskets lowered into the earth, but the sadness and despair I felt there were incomparable. With a funeral, there’s an order, something created to give you closure, something to comfort you. At Theresienstadt, all you’re left to see is that was left over from the killings, it was something we were never meant to really see. Theresienstadt was supposed to be the model camp to show to the world that the Nazis were treating us humanely, a temporary charade. The reality is that tens of thousands of my people were killed in this camp, or waited to be sent to their death in another camp, and we have no way to remember them other than visiting these horrible places.

Near the crematorium, there was a memorial cemetery for the victims, and monuments. They were for the people that they knew that died there, but at the end of the cemetery there were graves unlike any I’ve see before. There were all black, set on a slanting hill, literally standing in contrast with the greying tombstones in the regular cemetery. They were the graves put up by surviving family members who never knew where their loved ones died, or when, or how. They just knew that they were gone, and they needed something to at least focus on as a place of mourning and sorrow. I think that is what that whole place was like. We as a people lost so many, just completely lost, people and communities. Entire villages lost to the flames, devoured by the monsters. It is something so unfathomably large, horrible, and inescapable that we have to focus on something tangible just to be able to process a fraction of the trauma, whether it’s a stone monument, a grave, a tree planted in remembrance, or even the killing grounds themselves.

This is the place where thousands of men, women, and children were erased from this world

Tree planted by the survivors of Theresienstadt

I’m still processing what happened there, what I saw. In my 29 years, I’ve seen things that will forever be burned into my eyes. I am not trying to brag, and honestly I would give up many of my better memories to be able to forget some of the horrible ones. I’ve lived on the edge of death, on the edge of sanity, and through deep and profound loss. I’ve seen and heard things that no one my age should have seen by now, things that no man should have to see, stories that I must bear for the rest of my life. This place stands apart, a place filled with death, with stares, with hardness, and with feeling so lost in the deaths of millions. There are times I’ve felt small because of the grandness of the world, but this was one where I felt emptied by the vastness of the suffering. I don’t know if I could ever go back, but I think everyone should go at least once in their lives.

I do know that visiting that place made me realise even more that I need to be here, living my life to the fullest. Too many good people, innocent people, Jews of every age and background were murdered, slaughtered, butchered, erased. I need to live my life for them, for the Jews of Theresienstadt, for the six million, and for the countless future generations stolen from them. I need to live proudly, in a Jewish country, and shape the world so that their fates are never repeated. I need to live so that they are never forgotten, so that those buildings in Terezín will never become just buildings.

I can’t find the right words to end this, so I’ll end this with a poem from a boy named František Bass, born 4 September, 1930, held in Theresienstadt, died in Auschwitz on 28 October, 1944, age 14.

A little garden,

Fragrant and full of roses.

The path is narrow

And a little boy walks along it.

A little boy, a sweet boy,

Like the growing blossom.

When the blossom comes to bloom,

The little boy will be no more.