Hi Everyone!
The following article gives interesting insights to 
aliyah and living in Israel. I do not agree with most
of his political viewpoints but the emails give a good 
overview of living here.
Jacob

September 30, 2001
E-Mail From an Anxious State
By Daniel Gordis
http://www.nytimes.com/2001/09/30/magazine/30ISRAEL.html


In July 1998, Daniel Gordis, a rabbi and dean of the rabbinical 
school at the University of Judaism in Los Angeles, moved with 
his wife, Beth, and their three children (Talia, then 11; Avi, 8; 
Micha, 5) to Jerusalem for a one-year fellowship at the Mandel 
Foundation. Shortly after arriving, he began sending out periodic 
e-mail messages about life in Israel to friends and family, 
some of whom forwarded them to others (including an editor at 
this magazine). A few months after the Gordises landed in Israel, 
they decided to stay permanently. Below are excerpts from more 
than 30,000 words of e-mail. The final entry was written after 
Gordis heard about the attack on the World Trade Center, an event 
that unexpectedly brought his two worlds together. 

October 1998 
Hi everyone. I think that the major impact of the past few weeks 
has been that our kids, especially the older ones, are getting a 
pretty clear glimpse of how different life is here. Rosh Hashanah 
was a clear example. During our 10-minute walk to shul in the 
morning, we passed at least six other services in progress. 
Everywhere, people were dressed in their finest. We could hear 
shofars being sounded from every direction. Life itself was Rosh 
Hashanah. 

I think Tali and Avi realized how great it was to daven with 
several hundred people, all of whom knew Hebrew and understood 
exactly what we were saying. With Yom Kippur just around the 
corner, our wishes to everyone for a year of all good things, 
but mostly peace. 

Gmar chatimah tovah, D, B and the kids 

November 1998 
Hi again! Hope that everyone's Yom Kippur was meaningful and 
pleasant. Things here continue to be fascinating. Today is 
Thanksgiving. We decided not to celebrate it. It would only 
make our kids homesick. The father of a friend of our youngest 
son, Micha, stayed for dinner this evening. He talked a lot -- 
about being a refusnik for 12 years, about how the Soviets 
desecrated his mother's grave when he applied to leave, about 
what it's like to do 30 days of reserve service body-frisking 
Arabs for arms and explosives at traffic checkpoints, only to 
come back to work at a construction site (he's a road construction 
engineer) and have coffee and draw maps with the very same people 
(Arabs do most of the construction here) he'd body searched a 
few days earlier. Over some good wine, he talked about how crazy 
it all makes him, but how after 12 years of waiting in Kiev, 
there's still never a moment that he's not grateful to be here. 

Seems to me we ended up having a Thanksgiving dinner anyway. 
On to Hanukkah. Love from all of us. We'll write again soon. 

January 1999 
Hi everyone! After a great deal of consideration, a good bit of 
anguish and a lot of excitement, we've decided to try to make a 
go of it here in Israel. 

In a lot of ways, as strange as moving to the Middle East sounds 
to most people, this feels very natural to us, and in some ways, 
the next logical step in our (almost) 40-something lives. When 
we went out for dinner for Beth's birthday in September, we were 
in a restaurant with a variety of couples: an Ethiopian couple, 
an Israeli couple, us and selected others from all over the place. 
Beth remarked that the whole country was a modern-day miracle and 
then asked, ''If you have a chance to live your life as part of 
a miracle, how do you walk away from that?'' 

My parents made aliyah in 1969, and though we only stayed for a 
couple of years, it was enough to get my whole family speaking 
Hebrew reasonably fluently and, perhaps more important, to make 
me feel that I belong here, fit in here better than I do in the 
States. 

Beth, too, has a long history with the land of Israel. She came 
for a year as a high-school junior and hoped to return to live 
in Israel after graduating from college, but life took its twists 
and turns. So, 24 years later, we're back and ready to pick up 
where she left off. 

We really think that this is a great place for our kids. We 
especially love the way Israel, and Israeli society, have 
allowed our older kids to blossom. They are independent here 
in ways that they could never be in the U.S. Tali and Avi both 
navigate their way to school on the public bus, and can go 
shopping, buy pizza or just visit a friend. We let both of them 
walk alone at night to their youth-group meetings; Tali had a 
sleepover with her youth group and came home at 5:30 a.m., 
let herself into the apartment and went to sleep! It never 
occurred to us to wait up for her or to ask her to wake us 
when she got in. It's just that there's really nothing to worry 
about. We couldn't buy that kind of security in L.A. 

Probably no Jewish parents relish the fact that their kids will 
have to go to the army; but the fact that the whole army scene 
may soon be diminishing in importance with peace so clearly on 
the horizon certainly makes this issue less central than it 
might have been a few years ago. 

July 2000 
Hi everyone! As it's been more than a year since our most recent 
update, it seems that some sort of communique is in order. The 
kids and Beth (now going by her Hebrew name, Elisheva) have done 
really well this year. 

Here, the miraculous seems to happen completely without warning. 
Several months ago, our daughter, Tali, had Shabbat dinner at 
a friend's house. When she returned home she casually mentioned 
that she thought someone famous had been at the dinner, too. 
It turned out to be Natan Sharansky, who was there with his 
daughter, who is Tali's age. I remembered the days that we were 
out parading with signs ''Free Sharansky.'' If anyone had told 
me back then that approximately 20 years later his daughter and 
my daughter would both be Israeli citizens and would be 
nonchalantly having Shabbat dinner together and playing Monopoly, 
I would have said he was crazy. 

At the same time, there's an ongoing painful side to life here. 
On May 14, the internationally recognized date of Israel's 
independence, you may recall that huge riots broke out in the 
territories. Shots were fired, and there were casualties on 
both sides. 

I think that most people are afraid that Camp David 2000 is 
going to fail. If there's no agreement, Arafat will declare a 
state at some point, and Israel is not likely to stand by and 
watch (for reasons I don't personally understand). But more 
important, the Palestinian populace is (understandably) out 
of patience, and they're likely to return to the streets. 
But unlike the situation in the intifada in the 1980's, this 
time they're armed with a lot more than stones. 

October 2000 
Hello to all. A quick note, before Yom Kippur begins in the 
''city of peace,'' to wish everyone well. Things are tense, 
but physically, West Jerusalem is at peace [following rioting 
that took place after Ariel Sharon's visit to the Temple Mount 
at the end of September]. 

We did assume that the Israel we'd come to would be more or less 
at peace, and we now realize that we may be in for some rough 
days, weeks or even a few months. But even with all the tension, 
we're not ambivalent about being here. We're here because we 
believe that Jews need a country of their own, and we know that 
it's a history of sticking it out here when the going got tough 
that has kept the state going. We're very safe, and frankly, 
I'd much rather be here during all this than watching it from 
afar. I always felt in the States during these episodes that I 
belonged here, and in a strange way, I feel blessed to be able 
to be here for this, whatever it may bring. 

Love from all the Gordis clan. 

December 2000 
It's time to say a quick hello, and to send wishes for a joyous 
Hanukkah or merry Christmas. The most pressing part of life here 
over the last two months has been the matzav (the Hebrew word 
for ''situation,'' the euphemism that the entire country uses 
to refer to the catastrophe in which we find ourselves). A bit 
more than a month ago, when things were really out of control, 
I told Elisheva that if she wanted to take the kids back to the 
States for a while, I'd be supportive of that, and she looked 
at me like I was completely nuts. (Not an unusual way for her 
to look at me, of course.) She's the one who always wanted to 
be here, and in some ways is the most passionate about staying. 
(She's become a bit rabidly right wing politically for my 
taste [!], but is really enjoying herself.) 

About two weeks ago, we took our fellows from the Mandel School 
to Ein Harod in the Galilee to meet some Israeli Arabs to hear 
their perspective. We met with a principal of an Arab school, 
financed by the Israeli government and governed by the Ministry 
of Education, as are all Israeli schools whether they're for 
Jews or Arabs. (Some are mixed, but they're few and far between.) 
This principal, who proved to be a politically moderate Israeli 
Arab, told us that his high-school students, all Muslim, have to 
take at least two units of Hebrew but are not permitted to study 
the Koran as part of the regular school day. They are required to 
study Bialik, Tchernichovsky and the rest of the classic Zionist 
poets, but Darwish, the Palestinian national poet, is not allowed. 
He told us that when he took his students to a Jewish high school 
in Haifa for a day of interaction, the Jewish students wanted to 
talk about the Palestinian charter, which they'd studied in social 
studies (called citizenship here). His students, the Arabs, were 
dumbfounded, because their school was not allowed to teach the 
charter, and they didn't know anything about it. 

As we sat and listened to this guy, who clearly said that he wants 
peace, coexistence, etc., the right-wingers among the fellows were 
noticeably silent. The ridiculously small-minded way which we both 
carry out the occupation and treat Israeli Arabs (Israeli citizens, 
like this principal) is simply undeniable. Yeshayahu Leibowitz, 
the Orthodox Israeli philosopher who argued in July 1967 that we 
should retreat right away and give back everything we'd captured 
the previous month because an extended occupation would rot the 
soul of the country, was clearly right. 

But the leftists were in for more of a shock. We went to the 
Galilee to meet with representatives of three of the largest, 
most mainstream Arab Israeli political parties. Despite minor 
differences among them, they all shared the following: 
(a) they do not acknowledge any difference between themselves 
and the Palestinians and now want to be called Israeli 
Palestinians, not Israeli Arabs; 
(b) they insist that their ''brothers'' be given a state with 
East Jerusalem as its capital; 
(c) they insist on the right of return for the refugees (a huge 
political issue here that gets little play in the West, probably 
because everyone knows that it will never happen); 
(d) they insist that if the state genuinely wants to respect 
them as citizens, then the national anthem and its references 
to 2,000 years of Jewish yearning for Zion has to go. So far, 
no real surprises. 

At a certain point in the conversation, one of the fellows raised 
his hand and basically said: ''What you're demanding actually 
makes perfect sense from your point of view. But from our 
perspective, from the perspective of people whose parents or 
grandparents came here from across the world to build the one 
place on earth where Jews would be able to live in a Jewish 
state with Jewish values at its core -- what can you say to 
reassure us that the Jewishness of the state won't disappear 
if you're given what you want?'' 

The most articulate of the three speakers, the leader of a major 
Arab party represented in the Knesset, responded more or less 
as follows: ''Your question shows that you don't really understand 
the Middle East. The Middle East is a Muslim part of the world, 
and this country will ultimately be Muslim, too. It may happen 
next year, or in 50 years, or in a hundred years. But it's going 
to happen. The sooner you accept the inevitable, the sooner the 
region will know peace, and then we can all get on with life.'' 

Here were several dozen rabidly left-wing Israeli intellectuals, 
confronted for the first time with the realization that even 
these Israeli citizens want something radically different from 
what these left-wing Jews are willing to contemplate. In addition, 
their whole intellectual arsenal has been crafted to battle 
against the stranglehold that they believe Orthodoxy has on 
private life, so much so that they paid no attention to what 
they wanted to preserve in the Jewish state. 

February 2001 
It's Monday morning, the day before elections, and a kind of eerie 
calm prevails. 

Last month, seeking to gain some relief from the crisis, and 
wanting to see something that reflected a well-entrenched 
democratic tradition, we decided to watch the Bush inauguration. 
The kids actually liked the pomp and circumstance. But Elisheva 
and I found the opening prayer and the benediction incredibly 
Christian. Many of our friends here and back in the U.S. wrote 
that they were appalled by the blatantly Christian character of 
the ceremony. I wasn't appalled at all. The U.S., as great a 
place as it is to live (and by virtually all measurable standards, 
it's a much better place to live than Israel), is simply a 
Christian country. Why shouldn't they be allowed to mention Jesus? 
I now realize, more and more, that the inauguration encapsulated 
why we're here in the first place. America never felt like home, 
and Israel always has. Aliyah was not so much a decision as a 
willingness to give in to some gravitation-like force. 

Last week, I was walking home from work at the end of the day 
(at least one advantage of having left the sprawl of Los Angeles) 
and stopped at a light. Also waiting at the light, in the middle 
lane, was a car with four young, well-dressed Palestinian women. 
In keeping with unspoken Israeli etiquette, they didn't look at 
me, and I didn't pay them much attention, either. Meanwhile, 
another car pulled up next to them in the left lane. This car 
had four Jewish kids in it, all in their late teens or early 
20's -- two men and two women -- wearing army uniforms. Something 
apparently rolled under one of the seats of their car, and 
laughing hysterically, they were trying to pull it out but 
couldn't. So, they all opened their doors, and stood outside 
the car, presumably to bend down and find whatever it was. 
As they got out, their M-16's slung over their shoulders, 
laughing good-naturedly, I noticed that the four Palestinian 
women looked terror-stricken to see four armed soldiers suddenly 
standing next to their car. I saw four kids, barely older than 
my daughter, having a grand old time about some joke, while 
these women saw the enemy, the occupying soldiers, unpredictable 
danger. Walking home, I realized the mess we're in, and how 
desperate we all are to disentangle, to separate from each other. 

That's what's tempting about voting for Barak in the election 
tomorrow. That's why even (many) people who will vote for Sharon 
will regret that they couldn't vote for Barak. People want peace, 
at best, and a bloodless separation if peace isn't possible. 

Unfortunately, tomorrow we have to decide whether to be the first 
Jews in history to willingly give up the Temple Mount (voting for 
Barak) or the first generation of Israelis to say no to peace 
(Sharon). Really, when you come down to it, when we walk into 
the polls tomorrow, the question is which dream are we willing 
to betray. 

March 2001 
Hi everyone. I got an e-mail the other day from a human rights 
organization I used to be a bit involved with, asking for people 
to travel together to a small Palestinian village on the other 
side of the green line that's been completely cut off by the 
large trenches that the Israeli Defense Forces have dug. The 
people in the village can't get access to medical care, can't 
get to school, etc. The e-mail said that this is no way to treat 
a civilian population, and Jewish values demand that we do 
something. So bring your shovels and we'll fill in the trenches. 

A line at the end of the e-mail said that this ''should be'' 
pretty safe. 

But, it noted, there is some danger. The whole thing struck me 
as noble but absurd. We'd spend an entire day filling in a trench 
or two that the I.D.F. bulldozer would open up again in an hour. 
And we'd have to do it in fear of being shot at by the people 
we were trying to help. No, thanks. 

When we first got here, I did lots of stuff like going to 
Palestinian villages to meet with people whose homes had been 
bulldozed by the army, collecting money to get them materials 
to rebuild, etc. Now, two years later, I still care about the 
things that I cared about when I went to those villages in 1999. 
The closing off of villages causes untold pain and suffering for 
the Palestinians. But I also know that if those trenches are 
filled, someone will get out and try to hurt us. The army's 
clamping down -- quietly, but very firmly -- and we're all 
breathing easier. 

Well, on to Pesach. 

April 2001 
Hi all. These days, the kids no longer ask about peace. I think 
they know the answer. They've gotten used to the sounds of tank 
shelling at night, of not being allowed to take buses, of seeing 
the face of the latest dead soldier on the front page. Nor do 
they ask if this will get worked out before they have to go to 
the army. They know the answer to that too. 

Tali's had a rather acidic digging-her-heels-in-the-sand response. 
A pretty open-minded kid for the most part, she consistently 
indicates her profound distaste for the programs her school does 
with a group of ninth-grade girls from a local Arab school. 
''I don't have anything to talk to them about,'' she says, 
''and they can't stand us. So why bother?'' 

Our liberal tendencies are to give her a gentle lecture about 
how you build relationships, how talking is critical, how this 
is the only way to move forward. But she's right. They really 
can't stand us, and -- though she won't say it -- the daily 
Israeli death toll makes her not able to stand them. 

May 2001 
I was working in Tel Aviv this week. One evening, I had a beer 
with a friend at one of those trendy Tel Aviv pubs. He's in his 
mid-30's and had just gotten back from Milu'im (his annual stint 
of reserve duty). He said it was the hardest Milu'im he'd ever 
done. Usually, he said, they run around, shoot a bit and basically 
have a good time. This time they took part in vigorous war games. 
Tanks, A.P.C.'s, helicopters, planes, the works. The task was to 
''retake the Golan'' after three days of Syrian control. 

This friend of mine, who made aliyah almost 20 years ago, came 
from England, did the army, college, graduate school, got married 
and has four kids, is extremely politically active -- the works. 
And, he's leaving. Not for good, he says, but for three to five 
years, because he just can't take the intensity anymore. For me, 
that revelation was much more distressing than any other part of 
our conversation, because he'd always struck me as one of the 
die-hards. He says he still is -- he just wants a break. I think 
he's much more representative of the larger picture than we 
commonly suspect. 

Yesterday, we took our fellows to Rabin Square, the spot where 
the prime minister was murdered. It's a pretty stark monument, 
and a depressing place. It literally always makes me cry. But as 
we talked about Rabin, it was clear that the sense of tragedy 
that used to accompany any mention of his name has dissipated. 
We used to think that with his death, the peace process also died. 
But now, most of us believe he was wrong. Noble, but wrong. 
Arafat probably wouldn't have behaved any differently at the end 
with Rabin than with Barak. He wouldn't have signed. And he would 
probably have resorted to violence, because that's what he does. 
And in the meantime, because of Oslo and the rest, the Palestinians 
are armed, organized, legitimate. And they're killing us. 

The Palestinians are ready for massive armed confrontation, and 
we're not. This is an ugly, dirty war, and we're being just ugly 
and dirty enough to bring down the world's wrath on us, but not 
nearly ugly and dirty enough to win it. To win it, we'd have to 
wipe them out, and though we could, we won't. This is going to go 
on for a long time, and like my friend in the pub, people are 
tired of it. 

Even the right-wingers and the left-wingers among the fellows 
and among our friends basically don't argue anymore. We all know 
the truth. There's no peace to be had. They want us out of here. 
So we can either pack our bags and go back to the States and 
Europe, or we can prepare to fight it out for the foreseeable 
future. Some of us will leave, some will stay. (That's not a 
hint, by the way. We're staying.) Some of us will die and some 
will live. Some of them will live, and some will die. And in the 
end, there will still be millions of Palestinians left who think 
that the building I live in belongs to them, and they'll never 
sign anything that doesn't give them the right to this street. 
And we'll never sign anything that does. 

On the bus back from Tel Aviv yesterday, it suddenly struck me 
that it's really possible that this country won't make it. No one 
here wants to fight forever, but no one thinks that the 
Palestinians will compromise on anything. They've been told by 
their own leaders over and over again that it's all theirs, and 
they're willing to fight for it. It was the first time that I 
could seriously envision the whole enterprise just falling apart, 
little by little: people leaving, no one coming (certainly not 
from places where Jews are welcomed), the world turning against 
us, the backbiting that arises out of the frustration and rage 
getting worse, the war of attrition going on endlessly; and in 
the end our signing a deal that we shouldn't. 

I wondered if I should share that thought with Elisheva, and 
decided against it. She's depressed enough as it is (unlike my 
euphoric tenor!). But last night, right after dinner, as she was 
reading the paper and I was unpacking from Tel Aviv, she looked 
up and said, ''Did it ever occur to you that this whole country 
could be one big failed experiment?'' So much for not burdening 
her with my worries. . . . 

Shabbat shalom and chag same'ach. Here, we'll do our best. 

July 2001 
A couple of months ago the Mandel School invited a writer to 
talk about his book on Stalin's ''secret'' pogroms. He brought 
along three of the adult daughters of Jewish intellectuals 
Stalin had executed in the 1950's. As they told their stories, 
we could hear outside the windows of the seminar room the 
pounding of tank shells, firing at something we couldn't 
identify. Everyone was aware of it. But we were also aware of 
how much has changed. As these elderly women told of the 
disappearance and murder of their fathers, I couldn't help 
noting that this time around we don't have to be passive. 
We have the capacity to react, to protect ourselves, to make 
sure that history doesn't repeat itself. 

August 2001 
The day before I was heading to the States for a long-overdue 
vacation, the bomb went off at the pizza parlor in the middle 
of Jerusalem. That night the city was in a kind of subdued shock. 
The war's come home. This isn't about the territories, we all 
know. It's about our right to be here -- in any part of this 
place. This isn't about settlers, or the expansion of settlements, 
but about the fundamental right of the Jews to have one little 
place on earth that they can call their own. That's why the 
intersection of King George and Jaffa streets was the perfect 
place for the attack. It's Times Square, or Michigan Avenue. 
The ultimate statement that there is no square inch of the 
country that's not a battleground. 

Interestingly, people weren't as hysterical as I would have 
expected. The restaurants were full, people laughing and 
enjoying each other's company as if nothing much had happened. 
What are we supposed to believe now? That hearing the sounds of 
ambulances racing across the city, sirens blaring, is normal? 
That it's just part of life when going to have a slice of pizza 
for lunch means that you might be blown to bits? And what, I ask 
myself, should we instruct Tali, our not-yet-15-year-old daughter, 
who's on a plane winging her way back to Israel? She's going to 
stay here by herself for a couple of weeks until we get back. 
Should we tell her she can't go downtown? No pizza on Emek 
Refa'im, the major street near our house? No buses? No going 
out of the house? Just order everything in and be a prisoner in 
your own home? 

I fly to New York, meet Elisheva and the kids and drive up the 
Taconic Parkway. No military checkpoints. No Arab villages on 
the side of the road where your antennae have to be more 
sensitive. Farms that look as if they've known only peace and 
predictability for hundreds of years. 

What happened to our country, that place full of hope, that 
place that always felt happy and so replete with promise? 
How did we get where we are? With nowhere to turn, nothing to do? 

Because that, of course, is where we are. None of the options 
are any good. Every Israeli has had this conversation hundreds 
of times. We could unleash a full-scale war, and probably win, 
but win what? Recapture the land we've given back since Oslo? 
And then what? Just to be back where we were before the peace 
process began? 

Or we can continue this way -- they kill us, and we kill them. 
A low level of loss, to be sure, but how long can the country 
take this? How long until sane Israelis who have the money say 
to themselves that this just isn't a normal place to live, 
a fair place to raise kids? Is it possible that we'll lose 
this war -- and this place -- not because we get attacked and 
overrun, but because too many of us are going to get too tired 
of being scared, exhausted, pursued? 

We know that peace isn't around the corner. We've learned how 
deep runs the hatred. And we're all stuck in this together, 
with no place to go. That, of course, is the real point. 
There's no other place to go. Israel, with all its agony, 
is home. It's the only spot on the planet that we have a shot 
at calling our own, so we can't walk away from it. And that, 
it strikes me, is why it will somehow work out in the end. 
Because it simply has to. 

Sept 11, 2001 
It's been two hours since the World Trade Center disaster. 
We're glued to the TV. The big kids are silent, taking in the 
images. Micha eventually wanders in, and we explain what's 
happened. To our surprise, he watches for a few moments and 
then bursts into tears. He says he's crying because when he was 
in New York two weeks ago, he wanted to go to the top of the 
World Trade Center, but we said we didn't have time. Now, 
he says, he'll never get to go. 

But we know it's not really that. For him, New York City -- 
walking in Central Park, ice skating at Chelsea Piers -- was 
the place where he was safe from all this. Now he knows there's 
really no escape. He's only 8 years old, and he has nowhere to 
run to. 

''Is Uncle Elie O.K.?'' Avi wonders. We've been trying all day 
to call the States, but there's no getting through. We assure 
him that Uncle Elie is fine. ''But how can you be sure he didn't 
go down there for a meeting?'' he asks. We can't, of course. 
Avi goes to sleep on the verge of tears, and it strikes me, 
now we're experiencing what our family experiences every time 
there's a suicide bombing in Israel. And in the States, they're 
now living with the feelings that we know so well: the panic, 
the confusion, the fear, the fury. New Yorkers, tragically, 
will learn what it's like to live on edge all the time. 
Nervousness each time the subway stops. Take the tunnel? 
Or is the bridge a better idea? Should we go out to dinner or 
stay at home? The questions that change an entire way of life, 
questions that Americans will now, like us, begin to ask each day. 

I'm ready for the holidays, for the beginning of a new year. 
Of course, last Rosh Hashanah was the beginning of all this 
horror. I look out the window at the beauty of this city even 
in the dark of night, a city that's survived attack and siege 
for thousands of years. Maybe, just maybe, next year will be 
better. 

Daniel Gordis is the director of the Mandel Foundation's 
Jerusalem Fellows program at the Mandel School. He has written 
several books and is now at work on a book about Israel since 
the collapse of the peace process.

Copyright 2001 The New York Times Company