Madison — When I used to picture Israel, the country took on different forms depending on the context in which it was being described.
When I was in Sunday school, Israel was where all the men had big white beards, as I pictured Abraham and Moses, and sand was everywhere. If I was watching television news, Israel was a war-torn, inhospitable place I could never imagine visiting, let alone feel like it was my homeland.
If I was looking at my grandparents’ photo album, Israel was a Disneyland for people in their 60s — women with big straw hats and men in plaid shorts standing with amazement in front of the Western Wall.
I like to travel and have always wanted to do more, but in the more traditional sense: Spend a month backpacking in Europe or jaunt to the Bahamas for a week in the sun.
But Israel? Didn’t going to Israel mean that I would have to find profound meaning in myself and determine what Israel meant to me? Even my non-Jewish friends realized this, asking me if I was excited about my “pilgrimage.” I could handle a free trip, but could I handle a pilgrimage?
I was raised Jewish in the non-Jewish setting of Johnson Creek, Wis. My community consisted of three Jews: my mother, my brother and myself. Our synagogue was a half-hour from home. For the nine years before my bat mitzvah, my Sunday school classmates were the only Jewish friends I had. When I stopped going to Sunday school, I had none.
My roommate freshman year was Jewish and she frequented the Hillel Foundation. She often invited me along, and I always declined. I had become used to being the only Jew in my circle of friends and saw no need to make Jewish friends. And so this went for the rest of my college years.
As the date of the Birthright Israel trip neared, I began to worry if maybe I wasn’t Jewish enough for the trip. I tried to reassure myself that part of the point of the trip was to strengthen one’s Judaism, and so there couldn’t be 79 “super Jews” and just one of me going.
But at the pre-trip meetings, everyone seemed to know someone, who knew someone and then all three of them knew each other. I didn’t know anyone and to top it off my last name is O’Neil. Whom was I fooling?
But I had to go through with it. It was free, I had never flown across the Atlantic and I had nothing to do after graduation. Not even the mass media-enhanced threat of violence was enough to stop me.
When we arrived in Tel Aviv it was dark. The air smelled different, or maybe it was just the absence of snow and the presence of something green. Car horns were higher pitched, and used more frequently. The signs were in Hebrew and English and Arabic.
They gave us Israeli junk food on the two-hour bus ride to the kibbutz we were staying at for two nights. And there were guards on our buses. Guards with guns.
A clear collage
After a 13-hour flight everything was in a haze. Even the moon looked weird, which we later found out was due to an eclipse. They kept feeding us, something we would become used to.
The trip started out with a fierce pace that continued for the entire time. But we had to. We had an entire country to see, a small one, but with a history thousands of years old.
We spent our first full day in Israel in the town of Safed. The synagogues were unlike anything I had ever seen: Very small, with bimahs in the center and seats all around. Some of the interiors were painted in bright colors usually reserved for children’s toys.
Before lunch, we had our first of several “conversations” on pre-selected topics intended to get us talking and thinking about Judaism. We formed small groups and discussed our first memory of feeling truly Jewish.
From then on our days always started and ended the same: up early and to bed late. But everything in between was so different one day to the next: A rocky tour on a jeep that seemed on the verge of careening off the Golan Heights. A night on our own at a crazy discotheque. Shaking hands with the man who three weeks later would become Israel’s next prime minister. Rappelling down a 90-foot cliff into one of the world’s biggest craters when I don’t even like to look at pictures of mountains.
And doing things just as hard, but in the emotional sense, so that when you’re done even your body cries in anguish. Like walking up to a cold, stone wall and not knowing what to say and at the same time having everything come out at once. And realizing why all those 60-year olds, my grandparents included, wanted to see it all their lives.
And welcoming Shabbat in Jerusalem and having it mean something, when for 22 years it had been just a day of the week. And in one day visiting places so different that are just miles apart, going from places full of death, like the Holocaust memorial and the national military cemetery, to places of promising life, like a charity organization doing work for people I don’t even know and will never see again.
And don’t forget the whole time I’m doing all this with people that ten days ago I never knew and yet we all live in the same city. Not everyone knew each other before the trip and not everyone is a “super-Jew.” But I spend a night in a Bedouin tent in the desert with all 79 of them and can hear camels’ stomachs gurgling 30 feet away.
Going to Israel was like nothing I have ever experienced. It was summer camp, an extended field trip, a vacation, a visit to the shrink’s office and a college career’s worth of education, all packed into ten days.
My picture of Israel is as blurry as it was before I left. But the collage of what Israel is made up of is as clear as ever.
There’s an on-going war and even when you’re not near it, you can still feel it when you need a guard with a gun on your bus. There’s desert, but also seas and mountains and palm trees, city and towns and barren country.
There are the sites that everyone has heard of, and the ones that you find while looking for a place to eat lunch. And although there are Jewish people everywhere, you still leave feeling unique.
Sara O’Neil graduated this past December with a degree in journalism from the University of Wisconsin-Madison.
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