WARNING: This is a long post, so best to curl up in some quiet place and catch up on the twists and turns of pomegranate dreams.
The sun is setting here on the last day of 2020, and I am listening to the muezzin from the Arab town I look out on from my window. It sounds melodic tonight. Usually it annoys me, the sound of Muslim prayer broadcast by loudspeaker over this corner of Jerusalem five times every twenty-four hours, but right now it sets me in a reflective mood.
I haven’t written for a long time. When life feels bad, or hard, or sad, or disappointing, I’m reluctant to write about it, because in order to write about it, I have to acknowledge it. It’s much easier to practice mindless eating as a coping mechanism–probably not the best coping mechanism but better than ingesting other addictive substances, I suppose.
My default persona is generally positive, optimistic, and hopefully even funny. But for months, those words seemed like they could only describe a different person, not me. And yet, 2020 is nothing if not the year of getting in touch with vulnerability, so I’ve decided that in the spirit of growth and healing I’ll go ahead and share.
No single event has been hard this past fall, it’s just all the little things that have added up.
We set dreams for ourselves. We imagine how our life could be better if we only reached our North Star, if we only accomplished the one thing that seems like the noblest goal we can imagine.
For many years, for me that goal was moving to Israel. And despite the fact that my husband will still be commuting to the US to teach, and that my five children were skeptical at best, we actually pulled it off. We are here, here in the land that Jews have prayed for, pined for, and sacrificed so much for to bring into reality.
I think I imagined that upon arrival and for every day after, I would be in a state of full-blown, perpetual euphoria. Okay maybe not full-blown and perpetual euphoria, but at least low-grade perpetual euphoria. At least low-grade, intermittent euphoria. Or at the very least, low-grade occasional euphoria.
Instead, I feel flattened.
On November 17, I wrote this to a friend:
“I miss everything—stability, familiarity, friends, family, my favorite coffee shop, the Pacific Ocean, the Bay. I am broken and in pieces, trying daily to figure out where all the shards are in hopes that I can gather them all and glue them back together. It’s impossible. They can’t be gathered and I can’t be glued. Only hope is to start anew. But that is difficult, maybe impossible. Just too many new things all at the same time to handle while recovering with post Covid. New friends, new neighborhood, new language, new culture, new political and cultural landscape, new identity with inverted status of religion and national identities. I am physically weak and emotionally frail. I cry a lot for no specific reason. Only once a day, if I am lucky. But often more. Kids sometimes come in and snuggle with me as I lie in my bed. I feel too fragile to stand up. The children—resilient, adaptable, young—are thriving. Only I am faltering step after step, always literally and metaphysically losing my breath. Please don’t tell me ‘it will get better’. Of course it will get better. But that is how it is now.”
For twenty-five years, I’ve been pining to move to Israel. And now that I am finally here, all I can do is wallow in self-pity.
Part of it has to do with the quantity of change. Perhaps, I mean, of course moving is hard. Moving countries is even harder. And moving cities and countries with five children ages 7-17 in the middle of a pandemic? With hindsight, it seems a little foolish, although I’d do it again. Somehow we have made it through the past few months but not without overwhelm and tears.
So in the spirit of the day, I present you:
Top 10 Challenges of Moving in an International Pandemic
#10. My iphone is not happy about the move. The phone battery keeps fainting, the screen seems to no longer swipe, and the charger adaptors keep falling out of every outlet so I can’t get a device recharged unless I park it on the floor next to the one or two outlets that reliably work. Also, my phone is from time to time just not working–not hanging up when I tell it to hang up, turning off the volume at odd times. The speaker has basically stopped working entirely. I take the phone to two stores. At both places, they shrug and tell me it is working. It is definitely not working. My phone is behaving like a teenager who is unhappy at being dragged halfway around the world and is acting out in a passive-aggressive way. I already have five moody children I am responsible for. I can’t deal with a moody phone.
#9. Our apartment jinn is not happy with her new tenant. She is sharing her petulance by breaking the toilets, the fans in the bathroom, the faucets, the door to the shower, the dryer, the washing machine, the light fixtures in most rooms, and countless other small but critical household fixtures. Our landlord is very responsive and her husband comes right over and fixes things within 24 hours, for which I am eternally grateful, but I am yearning for a home where everything just works. I wake up wondering what will break today. Now truth be told, we are getting a great deal on our apartment, and we love the location, and we like the layout, and it is plenty large which is hard to find in Jerusalem, and if I weren’t feeling fragile I would not be bothered by it. I wonder if the jinn is just mirroring my emotional state, and each internal upheaval she transmits into another hinge, outlet, air conditioner or toilet flushing mechanism going awry.
Magnifying my abode angst is the fact that for the first two months of our time here, our furniture was still making its way around the Pacific Ocean in a large wooden container that I said goodbye to in the Oakland port in August. While we had a few loaned furnishings from my parents, and my sister did do an Ikea run before our arrival for mattresses and bed frames, it still feels like we are camping out. Our living room consisted of a yoga mat, a jump rope, and a few folding chairs brought in from our balcony. We are eating off of mismatched plates and cooking with well-used pots and pans returned to us from friends who borrowed them three years ago. Everything feels temporary and unsettled.
#8. When our lift finally does arrive, it’s not as complete as I thought. We did a good job at shipping big things–tables and clothes and kitchenware and many, many books. We brought a good 80% of the stuff we would need. What we didn’t count on was the stress caused by the last 20% of household items and appliances we thought we’d just pick up in Israel: sheets, towels, cereal bowls, glasses, wine glasses, and a thousand other objects that seem insignificant but add up. Now a single family trip to Ikea could solve all of these problems, but for one unexpected challenge…
#7. Because of Covid, all customer-facing stores are still closed. I never thought that I would spend so much time pining for Ikea. I scan the news daily waiting for an update on whether or not Ikea is allowed to open. Finally, in early November Kenny sends me an article announcing that Ikea has just opened an online portal. The interface is clunky, and the delivery takes a week or so, but I place an initial order, wait impatiently, and do a happy dance when it arrives. Now at least we have towels and kids’ desks, which have become a necessity because…..
#6. Having children at home in zoom school is exhausting
From September 22 through early October, there is no school at all due to the Jewish holidays. When school starts back up, Isaiah, Niva and Ezra are challenged by the fact that school is both online and entirely in Hebrew, but seem to muddle through. Second grade, however, is a disaster. Although Talia’s comprehension is strong, she barely reads Hebrew. The teacher only instructs for an hour or so a day, and the rest is online assignments, and suddenly I find myself responsible for supervising homeschool assignments in a language I don’t read well myself. In part, this feels overwhelming because I am still weak and frail and easily overwhelmed from being sick with Covid. But the bigger problem is that…
#5. Trying to work and supervise a 7 year old in Zoom school simultaneously is impossible.
I had the poor judgement to take on a new consulting project at this time, which was, with hindsight, wildly, even comically unrealistic. Our lift has not even arrived yet and I am still weak post Corona and Talia needs 24/7 attention, and I’m trying to work???!! I naively thought the project would take 10 hours and it turns out the work is exponentially larger than I expected. I feel underappreciated, as the work is for a friend, and yet I also know I’m underperforming, me with my foggy post-Covid brain and my lack of real work space in my unfurnished apartment and my seven year old interrupting every few minutes. At the same time, I am acutely aware that I had come up with the idea for this project, and a half-finished product is not very useful to my friend. I feel full of self-loathing for my poor judgement and empathy for all the parents on the planet who have been juggling work and kids all in the same house these past many months.
#4. I have two children who are embodying my own fracturing identity.
Max, 17, spent the fall applying to colleges in the US. Isaiah, 16, spent the fall coming to terms with joining the Israeli army, and exploring different options for service. Two boys. 18 months apart. Two very different trajectories. While I understand that for Max, returning to the States for college seems like the right thing to do, and if he decides to do it, I will support him, tears well up in my eyes at the thought of him being so far away for so long. Not that joining that joining the army is a straightforward decision, but at least he’ll be home every weekend.
#3. The administrative process of aliyah feels endless. ENDLESS. Ennnnndddddllllesssss.
Upon arrival, Nefesh b’Nefesh cheerfully explained the panoply of tasks before me: Sign up for Health Insurance and Bituach l’eumi. Head to Misrad Haoclusia to register in the national system and get a teudat zehut (social security number); then visit Misrad haKlita for signing up for benefits, open an Israeli bank account for personal money and monthly deposits from the government, then sign up for an Israeli credit card, contact the municipality for a discount on arnona (property tax), go to the Misrad Harishui (department of transportation) to transfer a driver’s license, head back to the Misrad Haoclusia for an Israeli passport, and then register for free ulpan (Hebrew language classes), up to five hours a day, five days a week, for five months.
It makes sense that taking on a new nationality has a lot of steps, and Israel is extraordinarily generous with the aid packages it gives all new citizens to help them integrate into society as quickly and smoothly as possible.
With that caveat, I’ll highlight the two things that make working through the above list Sisphysian. First, navigating bureaucracy in a foreign language is like walking blindfolded. Or swimming through mud. Or sprinting uphill while carrying a boulder. You get the picture.
For me, texting or typing in Hebrew is hard, reading in Hebrew is hard, writing grammatically correct sentences is hard, and spelling is really hard. So ordinary tasks quickly become onerous. Despite my Ivy League education, I am functionally illiterate here, and thus no more effective or efficient at working through these tasks than any other illiterate immigrant.
But the other thing that is unique to this particular country is that true to its identity, its bureaucracy behaves like a start-up nation in the Middle East. On the start-up side, sometimes the workflows are surprisingly efficient. For example, ordering supplementary health insurance to the free national health insurance I received when I made aliyah was simple and enjoyable. I called the number, and I was asked by a machine if I wanted service in English, Hebrew, French, Russian or Arabic. That menu itself made me smile, and I tried out the various options just for kicks as I thought of all the Israelis who felt the same relief I currently felt at being able to speak in their myriad native tongues.
Eventually, I was forwarded to a person who spoke English, but her English was so halting that I told her she could switch to Hebrew. This made both of us very happy–her because she could talk freely, and me because I’m actually pretty decent at understanding. While I’m not sure I understood all the details of the dental and gym discounts she was explaining, I got enough to ask her to take my credit card so I could pay the whopping $100 or so dollars a month for the gold standard of health care for all 7 of us. She took my credit card number, told me her name was Revital and I could call her anytime, congratulated me on my aliyah, and sounded so nice I wanted to thank her for being so warm and helpful. I immediately received both a text and an email confirmation and I could put a big check on that item on my list. I felt competent, and even victorious.
On the other hand, trying to get the bank to change my cell phone number–a task which should be done online–took 45 minutes of waiting on hold only to have an annoyed sounding woman tell me the only way I could change my phone number on my account was to show up in person at a bank, even during Corona. I tried showing up at the bank branch down the street, and after an hour of waiting, the teller informed me I had to go to the branch an hour away because that was the branch where my account was physically located. So I did that, and asked to change the number, and the teller claimed he did it while I watched, and when I went home to try it out, it still wouldn’t take my new phone number, and still doesn’t, despite emails and whatsapp messages to the bank to ask them to make the change. After interchanges like this, I feel defeated, incompetent, and exasperated with the country and its third world service.
It’s hard to know which way a particular task will go, but we’ve learned to assume that no mission gets accomplished on the first visit. This way, we avoid the disappointment when we are sent home because we have come at the wrong time, or the person we need to see isn’t working that day, or we have the wrong form, or the form has the wrong information, or the computer is down, or a name is misspelled and needs to be corrected, or any other reason that a relatively straightforward procedure can sometimes take weeks to accomplish.
#2. Yeah, there is still a pandemic out there.
Not a lot of explaining necessary here, if you’ve been living on planet Earth. Endless debates about how to balance public health and the economy. A lot of different opinions. A lot of fear and anxiety. No guests in the house. Hard to make friends. No eating in restaurants. You experience all of this. Except for us, now its in a different country.
#1. The disappointment of achieving a dream.
Looking back on all the above challenges, I have realized that underneath them all is a cognitive dissonance that has made this period particularly challenging.
We are all well-versed in the disappointment that comes with failing to realize a dream. But what about the disappointment that comes with success? For decades, all I have wanted is to return to Israel. However, it seems I underestimated not just all the practical challenges that it would entail, but that the move itself would send me into a state of grief.
I am more fragile than I thought I was.
Moving to a new country, even the Promised Land, means leaving so many of the things that I took for granted but that are actually a core part of my identity. The language I speak. My national identity. My cultural experiences. Friends. Family. Community. Neighbors. Treasured objects. My favorite haunts, walks, roads, beaches, forests and even beloved trees.
The list is endless, once I start thinking about it. Shopping at the Berkeley Bowl and Monterey Market. Playing squash at the Berkeley RSF. Taking runs at the Berkeley Marina and walks at the San Francisco Marina. Attending services and kiddush at CBI. Skiing in Colorado. Coaching Ultimate Frisbee. Drinking brewed drip coffee in a cafe. Eating fresh berries. Having endless teens arrive at our house on Shabbat for lunch and stay until we count three stars. Long Shabbat meals with new guests and old friends.
I am mourning the loss of all of these touchstones at the same time. I feel adrift, like the cliched shipwreck survivor on a makeshift raft in the middle of a calm and endless sea, lacking any point of reference in any direction save the horizon.
*****
For me, and I reckon for all of us, 2020 has been a year about grief. Unlike love, or fear, or jealousy, all of which are induced by a stimulus, grief is a reaction to loss. I and the rest of our Berkeley community felt this most acutely in August, with the loss of 19 year old Yonim Schweig z’l. Like the biblical Noah, with whose story Yonim (meaning doves), prophetically intertwines, Yonim walked with G-d. This was something that was clear to all who knew him, even those who only knew him briefly. His soul, though embodied like the rest of our souls, yearned to reunite with Divinity. Most of us are not aware of this yearning; Yonim was. He wrote about it, sang about it, danced about it. Yonim’s unusual spiritual self-awareness lead each of us to connect with the depth of our own soul. It was, I suspect, why his passing was mourned so deeply by so many from such diverse backgrounds around the globe.
We have grieved this year for many and for much: first and foremost for the 1.8 million loved ones who we have lost to Covid, including an unfathomable almost 350,000 Americans. And we’ve lost a number of great leaders and thinkers. Rabbi Adin Steinsaltz. And RBG. And Rabbi Lord Jonathan Sacks. But the grief has been much more far reaching than that: we grieve for the loss of our jobs, our economy, our freedom, our sense of invulnerability. We mourn the loss of trust that other people are safe to hug and touch. We mourn our former assumption that children can always go to school, and hospitals always have enough room for sick people. We mourn the pre-pandemic belief that we won’t catch a mysterious virus that will invade our physical and mental faculties and take months, if not years, to fully recover from.
And for me, personally, moving presents its own mourning.
As I think about 2021, I think the biggest challenge is what to do with all of this grief. Do we eat, drink, or drug ourselves to forget it? Do we ignore it? Does it render us fearful, passive, helpless or depressed? Or, difficult as it may be, do we somehow find a way to hold it, honor it, embrace it, and internalize that love/loss/change/grief is a necessary part of the cycle of life? I’m hoping for the latter.
May 2021 be a year of blessings.
Shabbat shalom.
Pomegranate Dreams 