In less than forty-eight hours, I will be in the air, travelling hundreds of miles per hour, over a vast ocean, to a place that I call home; or at least I did. I catch myself calling America home, and I always feel the need to correct myself; that I left the old country behind to build something in this new state in an old land. I have to say to myself that the United States is no longer my home, that I made a conscious decision to leave behind my possessions, my friends, my community, my family, my entire way of life to make a go of it here in Israel; but I still keep catching myself saying, “back home in America…” The reality is that that I am still living in-between worlds, a foot in each door, not really American, but not really fully Israeli.
Today, I was talking with someone and he said that he was Israeli and that I was American. When I corrected him and said, no I’m Israeli too, he said to me in broken English that I was still an American. There is something unbridgeable between the sabra and I, or at least while I still speak broken Hebrew. This language barrier always comes up when I am in a big group of people that are speaking Hebrew. My mind still thinks in English, so I spend so much time trying to keep up with the fast-speaking sabras and translating in my mind that by the time I finally understand what’s happening, the conversation is already on another topic. When I’m speaking one-on-one with someone in Hebrew, my mind can switch, but inevitably I run into the wall of not knowing a word, or how to translate a phrase, or conjugate a verb correctly; my mind stops working when it’s in Hebrew mode, and I can acutely feel the inability to express myself in the language of this place I desperately want to call home and speak with the people who I long to be equal with; but is more than that.
I am caught in a place where my mind is stuck between worlds, between my old home and my new one. It’s been two years since I first stepped foot on these shores and the Ministry of the Interior handed me a little laminated card that said, Status: Israeli Citizen. In those two years, I’ve slowly undergone the process of klitah, absorption, into this society. I’ve changed the way I look, the way I speak, the way I interact with people, the way I view the world, and the way I view myself. I started off surrounded by fellow olim in my Hebrew ulpan, all of us coming from different corners of the world, trying to make sense of this new citizenship and this new identity of being an [insert country of origin] Israeli. Now, I’m surrounded by natives and every day is a challenge to navigate their world, or is it mine too? Everyone says I’m doing well for how long I’ve been here, that it takes time and patience, slowly slowly; but I still feel like something is missing, that I am out of place. I do not feel like I fit in to the puzzle that is this country.
Where did it all begin, this feeling of never having a place feel completely whole, of never feeling completely whole in a single place?
My parents got divorced when I was a small child, and I think that’s when I lost the real concept of what it meant to have a home. Shuttling back and forth between my parents, having two houses, two rooms, two places filled with “my” things, I learned to never put down roots. Every day could bring about a new change in where I slept at night, and that makes a kid think that nothing has permanence. I think that the old euphemism for my situation was that I came from a “broken home,” but my therapist said something different today. She said that really, I learned what it was like to be homeless, to never feel settled in a place, to have a place where I could crash and sleep, but never call home in the way that all of my friends spoke about the places they lived with their families. I would always envy my friends who went to summer camps, or went on trips together, or just always knew where they were going to be for holidays. I was jealous that they could just go to the same little building every day, go to their own designated quarters, and have a place they felt was theirs. It’s hard to sleep in a bed when you know that you have another one a thousand miles away that you’re also supposed to think of as yours. It’s hard to attach yourself to things when you also have treasures hidden away in another state. It’s hard when a parent has to tell a child, like a guest, that they’re always welcome in a place that’s supposed to be their home.
So, I spent most of the time after I left home at eighteen thinking exactly like this, thinking that no place was really home. Every year in college I moved: from my dorms, to my fraternity house, to an apartment with friends, to living with my girlfriend, to my first apartment after college, to my next apartment after that, until I finally got married and shared a space with someone again for the first time in years. I built what you could call a home, or at least a decent apartment. I bought furniture, decorations, bathroom furnishings, all the little things that make it yours. In five years of marriage, we moved three times. I never felt completely at home in any of them, or at least, I was already for the next move. I never felt so connected to any one place that I knew that this would be my home. It was always home for now, until we got something better, or felt like doing something new. Even with the best of intentions, I sowed the seeds of my own rootlessness.
Then, a little over two years ago, my wife and I made the ultimate decision to really cut off our roots and transplant ourselves to a place that we had only ever known on brief excursions. It was fun and exhilarating, but I’m only now beginning to understand how traumatic and stressful it all really was. I’ve always had mental health problems, and I feel like they were just bubbling beneath the surface in America, with occasional flareups making me get help. When we came here, everything that I had that kept all of those dark thoughts and problems under the surface just disappeared. I lost my support group, my habits, my routines; I lost the ability to just blend in and hide the problems away. Eventually, things got to a breaking point, and after a year here I was hospitalized in a mental institution, and my world literally shattered. I had gotten so used to changing places that I felt at home in a psych ward more than I did in the outside world. I got used to the cotton pajama clothing and sharing a room with a stranger, I got used to it all so quickly that when I tried to leave for a couple of days I completely lost my connection with reality and had to be readmitted.
Thankfully, things are better now. I’ve been in my outpatient program for a while, and things are finally starting to feel better. I still have bad days, but I can deal with them. What I still haven’t been able to get over, and this is one of the things that keeps me up at night, is still feeling like I’m an alien here. That as much I answer people that question, why I would choose the challenges of Israel over the comforts of America, with my love of this place and feeling connected here more than I did in America, I still feel disconnected from society; and if that’s the case, what does that say about how connected I ever felt to anything back in America?
I think it all comes back to what I think home means, or at least what it means to have a home or feel at home. It’s hard for me to define, such a simple concept. It’s a building, a place, but that word means so much more than any physical structure. It means having a place where you feel comfortable, more than just a place you can rest your head. It means feeling like you have a place to call your own, and not just a place that you feel like you can stay at. It means feeling like you have a sanctuary, and not just shelter. It means even more than anything you attach to the place, it is a feeling you have with the life that is connected to that physical location. The home is what you base your life on, the foundation for everything else. All of the other places in your life are in relation to home, and in relation to yourself. You may be a worker at your place of employment, a congregant at your place of worship, a patron of your favorite bar or restaurant; but your home has to be the one place where you can feel like you can be completely yourself. The rest of the world could be going to hell or feel like an alien world, but your home is the one place you’re supposed to feel safe enough to be in your own skin.
When I close my eyes and imagine the home I want, I see experiences and not things. I see myself watering the plants in my garden. I see myself sharing a meal with my wife and laughing. I wish that my home would be a place where I can take off my shell and let myself feel comfortable in being exposed. I want it to be a place where I can sit and write to my heart’s content. I want it to be a place where I can curl up and just feel relaxed reading a book. I want to look around at then things on the walls and see expressions of what I hold dear in life. I want my bed to feel like the safest place in the world, and not just where I go when life’s troubles have me to exhausted to keep on going.
I don’t have that yet. Besides the physical things, I still struggle to feel like this place is my home. The food in my fridge has labels that I still sometimes struggle to decipher. When I get a phone call and have to speak in Hebrew, that outside feeling of alienation comes into my home. I don’t want my home to feel like a bastion or a fortress, I want it to feel like a hidden garden. I want to feel like life flourishes just for me, and that I am privileged to see it. Everyone brings their problems home with them, but it still feels like my home is dominated more by them than the refuge from them. I want to feel like a part of the rest of the world outside, but I want it to be my part of the world. I want to feel comfortable with not being comfortable all of the time, and I think that leaving America forced me to really do that for the first time. I’ve had hardships before, but there is nothing that compares to this immigrant experience.
Still, I have hope. When I lay my head down at night, it doesn’t feel like a hotel room, I feel like it’s my pillow underneath my head. When I pick up the phone and struggle to speak, I know that it’s ok, and that I am better now than I was when I finished my formal Hebrew education. I have more confidence, and part of that comes from knowing that I am different, and that the differentness might last forever. I look at my government and see people that were not born here, and I feel hope that I might one day make it here on my own terms. So many Hebrew phrases all boil down to the same idea, that things are going to be ok, and that someone upstairs is watching out for us.
When I pack my bags tomorrow, I know that I am not really leaving one home for another. Those days in my life are long gone, I do not have to bifurcate my existence between two worlds. I can be complicated, I can be nuanced, I can live life in a way that is not always one way or the other. There is even beauty in living this complex life, always learning and adapting to new situations. When the first pioneers came to this land, they came speaking a foreign tongue, and even the stilted Hebrew of our founding fathers betrays the fact that so many still spoke in their mother tongues in private. They learned to live and adapt to this world, but they also built it into something new, each generation of immigrants adding another layer to this beautiful Zionist project in the holy land. I may not always feel like it, but I am part of that too. To be alienated here is to also be essentially Israeli, to be a pioneer, to step outside your comfort zone and try and build something amazing even when you don’t always understand everything.
I will always be an American, but I will always be an Israeli; and that is something that I chose. I never got a say in where I was born, but I have a say in my future, and that future is here. I may not be where I want to be, but I will be one day. For now, I might still be between worlds, but I know where my home is. This land, these people, this country, they are mine. This is where I belong. This is where I am building my home, and G-d willing, I will have the home I’ve always dreamed of.
I will make it here. Israelis are resilient like that.