Reflections on Reentry

To those of you who are hotly following my rocky (re)immersion back into Israeli life, I’d like to pick up a few things from comments on yesterday’s post.

First of all, one friend emailed me to say that my allusion to my writing teacher had inspired her to take a writing class herself. To that I say, you go, girl!

I only got back into writing because a friend told me that after a 35 year career in the law, he was finally focusing on the thing that was his mission in life–writing.

His security that he was doing what he was supposed to be doing was so foreign and so powerful that it made me think much more about what I really, really love doing. And the main thing that came up for me was writing.

If these posts inspire you to remember what or who you love–a hobby, a sport, a different country, a person from your past—I will kvell. And I hope you can take some small step towards retrieving that part of yourself and finding the joy and satisfaction of just being you.

Second, another person asked me what I had done to prepare for the return to this uphill battle of bureaucracy, being an immigrant, etc.. I’ve been thinking about that all day, and think there really are only two answers to that.

One, I’ve been cultivating a higher tolerance for vulnerability, and two, I’ve been working to see even the most exasperating moments with a sense of humor. More on both of those in upcoming posts.

And even if the next few months are a bust, I’m happy to have had two weeks to readjust our palates to zatar pita chips (seriously amazing), oven baked frozen cheese and potato bourekas, schnitzel and pita, hummus and tehina, tasteless cookie crackers that are strangely appealing, bottles of chocolate milk, milkies (single serving chocolate puddings with whip cream on top), Israeli salads, minty frozen lemonade, and endless bags of bamba and bislee.

I would never have bought any of these things–I’d have stuck to Berkeley staples like kale and brown rice and squash and the like–but the great part of family is that they do what they think is right, and I can just say thank you. With a great act of love my mom and sister have kept our kitchen stocked with two weeks of food that we are only now getting through.

So although we have barely stepped foot out of our apartment, the taste buds are happy to be back…um….home?