My thoughts have been racing since 6:30 this morning, Monday, June 27, when I kissed my 15-year-old daughter, Naomi, goodbye.
By now, the bus — on which she is surely snuggled next to a camp friend, snoozing — is well on its way to Chicago’s O’Hare Airport. From there, the 33 teens will board an El Al flight for Tel Aviv, where they will begin a four-week community trip called Teen Adventure Israel, which is coordinated by the Harry & Rose Samson Family Jewish Community Center and the Milwaukee Jewish Federation’s Israel Center.
In my mind, images linger from last week: I see her decisively choosing what to pack; confidently organizing her passport, debit card, and papers; calling friends to say goodbye for now; and patiently biding her time as the days drag before her departure.
More and more, I am forced to realize that she’s gradually acquiring a life of her own.
There was a time when I wasn’t so sure I wanted my daughter to go to Israel. Even though I spent most of my growing-up years living abroad, I didn’t know much about Israel and, though I wasn’t anxious to admit it, I wasn’t sure I wanted to learn more.
I had heard that Israelis are very Middle Eastern, culturally, and that their communication style can be “in your face.” My image of Israel’s climate and rugged land seemed impossibly foreign to me. After spending so many years living in Japan — possibly the most opposite culture to Israel on the planet — I didn’t know whether I wanted to try to understand Israel or fit in there.
Then, when Naomi was admitted to the Milwaukee Jewish Day School kindergarten at age four, I was forced to decide whether to “put my money where my mouth was” and commit myself to giving her a serious Jewish education — or not.
A visit to MJDS convinced me that the Jewish and secular education she would get there would be worth the risk that she might fall in love with Israel and someday leave me to go there. After all, deep down I knew that she would eventually leave me to go somewhere. Besides, that was so far in the future.
What I hadn’t counted on was that, as she would learn, so would I. As she has grown in knowledge and interest in Israel, so have I.
In spring 2001, a year and three months before Naomi became a bat mitzvah, our family traveled to Israel for the first time. Our guide, an American oleh (immigrant) with a background in Jewish education, opened our eyes to many faces of Israel. We reveled in as many spiritual, intellectual, and emotional moments as could possibly be crammed into a two-week trip.
Hearing the story of David and Goliath read from the Bible by our guide while standing in the riverbed where David picked up the stone he used to kill Goliath; holding each other and sobbing for 20 minutes after walking out of the children’s memorial at Yad Vashem; hearing bullets from the Arab village of Beit Jala crashing into a cement wall in the Gilo neighborhood while leaving a Jerusalem restaurant one night; peering down at the imprint of a Roman camp below Masada; wandering in the narrow ancient streets of Zefat and Jerusalem’s Old City — these are just a few of the visions from that trip that I carry with me, visions that enrich my Jewish identity immeasurably.
Since she graduated from MJDS and entered the wider world of her public high school, which is inhabited mostly by Christians but also with a sprinkling of Muslims, Buddhists and others, Naomi’s MJDS education has particularly enabled her to grow in her Jewish identity. Now she has something against which to view her Jewish world.
The opportunity to spend a month in Israel, in the company of close childhood friends from school and camp, new teenage friends and young adult counselors with their own commitment and experience in Israel, seems like the best next step I could wish for Naomi.
It’s time for her to start making her own personal connection with her people in the Jewish homeland, to begin understanding the power of our history, and the complexity of today’s realities in Israel.
As she walks among Israel’s Jews — those who came to Israel from centuries of isolation in Ethiopia, religious Jews who immigrated from New York, secular Jews from the former Soviet Union, Jews who walked out of hostile Muslim countries, sabras who have worked the land and fought in the wars, Israeli teens who hold their country’s future in their hands, Jews who are wearing orange to protest their nation’s disengagement from Gaza and those who are avoiding orange — she will begin to feel the heartbeat of the country that stands at the center of her spiritual life.
For me, that’s a step that brings me full-circle, to a place of wholeness. Now, as my daughter prepares to fly across the world on a big Jewish adventure, with her strong education as a foundation, I know we have done our best to offer Naomi her birthright as a Jew.
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