A New Perspective

I’m writing so I won’t forget. I’m afraid to forget. Because I just had the most jaw dropping, soul enlightening, and life enriching experience of my life. We’re not a religious family. I mean, we used to do Kidush with our family every Friday, but since my grandmother died we don’t do that any more. We don’t do Synagogues, and we love pork. As for me? I’m a Jew, an Israeli and a soldier in the IDF. Am I a Zionist? That’s another matter. I love America. I love everything about it – the places, the people, even the air itself. I’ve been fortunate enough to have visited there about 8 times by now, and I never stop thinking about it. I always tell everyone that I can’t wait to complete my service in the IDF and fly there for a very long time, hopefully with a chance to settle and work there, meet my future wife and have beautiful blue-eyed, blonde babies. But something happened yesterday. Something that changed everything. As a preparation for the visit to Yad VaShem, we did a sharing circle of our feelings about the Holocaust. The things that were brought up there shocked me to my very core. As a child raised in Israel, you really take the whole Holocaust thing lightly. Just because from a very young age, you are forced to listen to stories that are not only horrific, but also don’t contain any superheroes or car chases in them, you have to attend a yearly boring ceremony where everyone wears black and no one smiles, and there are no good shows on TV. For a small child, that’s not a fun experience. So from a very young age you get it in your head that the Holocaust memorial day is just another bumming day where you just need to make sure you taped enough shows to fill up the free time at home. Back to the sharing circle. Each person had to pick off the floor one or more words describing his or her feelings about the Holocaust. I picked “Cynicism” and “Sorrow”. Cynicism because I’m a very cynical person. I make fun of everyone and everything. I even tell the most horrible black humor jokes about the Holocaust. Laughter is just my way of dealing with things. And I picked sorrow because even though I make fun of it, my grandmother had to go through it. Her entire family was killed in the Holocaust. She doesn’t talk about it much, or even not at all, I just remember that from my Avodat Shorashim I did when I was 13. So I didn’t have a lot of family history to share, just that fact. And so we continued through the circle, each person sharing his own thoughts and experiences. I won’t get into the different stories told out of respect for those people, but I will say that I discovered that these people, Jews from all over the world, had to hide their Jewish identity at some point in time, in fear of anti-semitic behavior and just over-all negative treatment. As a Jewish man living in the center of Israel, surrounded by my own people, I don’t experience this kind of behavior. Also, I take my Israeli identity for granted, so I don’t feel the need to put on an Israeli flag on my car on Independence Day. But that very moment changed all of it. After hearing what my fellow Israeli brothers and sisters had to go through in their supposedly “open” communities, I now feel the need to emphasize my Israeliness, even in Israel. I take pride in being a Jew. Before Birthright, my mother wished me a good time, and hoped this trip will influence me and make me a better Israeli. Well mom, I’m glad to say it did.

Amir