The Beginning of Israel

To be quite honest, it still feels a little bit surreal. I stepped off of the plane into Ben Gurion Airport on Friday afternoon and felt what I hadn’t really felt three years ago when I last visited Israel. This time, the signs in Hebrew seemed comforting and the sign reading “Welcome Home” was really beckoning me to enter the country and feel comfortable here. After I had zipped through Customs (I always walk through with confused glances at the guards wondering why they aren’t stopping me to look through my luggage) that feeling of welcome was intensified by the warm smiles and hugs that greeted me as Ofra and Eitan (family of my close family friend) stepped forward from the group of welcomers.

We proceeded to spend a very nice few days together, though I didn’t really practice my Hebrew other than trying to understand what was being said on the TV. Even that, though, managed to serve as a fairly universal language. We spent hours watching World Cup matches, commentated in Hebrew, and then discussing them in English. I’ve received promises, however, that when I meet more of the family, I’ll need to be able to whip out the Hebrew since other family members don’t speak English. Thank goodness!

As it turns out, the best form of motivating for utilizing an unfamiliar language is lack of alternative. I learned this today as I wandered around Hebrew University’s campus, trying to find my way from the dorms to the building with the internet (my success in this pursuit is responsible for the previous two posts finally having made it onto this blog.) I realized that if I didn’t want to become hopelessly lost, I needed to ask for directions. Though I’m pretty sure that either the directions that I received were quite incorrect (probably from a misunderstanding of my pronunciation of the building name) or my understanding of them was hopelessly flawed, I was pretty excited by my first modest attempts at utilizing my Hebrew. One can only hope that in the coming days I can report further success on this front and in my explorations of Jerusalem…

New York: The City that Never Sleeps (Or Allows You To)

I don’t think that my feet have ever hurt this much before. Including the time I hiked to the top of the Sandia Mountains. Apparently New York City has something that the deserts of the Southwest don’t offer: the desire to wear cute shoes when you’re planning on walking 20 miles rather than hiking boots.

Aside from my NYC fun induced foot pain, however, my stay in the Northeast was absolutely amazing. Which, of course, I knew it would be. I arrived in New York on Friday afternoon, lugging around two months worth of luggage since I hadn’t been able to drop it off in Manhattan before going to Common Ground. I heaved my way through Grand Central (largely with the help of my train buddies from Common Ground) and caught a cab to my mom’s friend’s apartment to drop off my big suitcase. After that, the fun ensued. I spent the next few days visiting with some of my best friends from Bronfman, driving up to Ithaca (though my view of Cornell was mostly limited to the superb grocery-shopping experiences the town offers) and back down to Princeton where I toured campus and took some House-related pictures.

Back in New York, I said goodbye to my friend Julie as she prepared to head off to her big summer adventure in China and made my way to Manhattan to spend the next couple of days roaming around the Met, meeting people for meals (because we all know that my life revolves around food), and just walking and walking and walking. Basically, in summary, I LOVE NEW YORK (as the t-shirts so astutely point out...)

Common Ground: A Much Delayed Account of My Excursions into the Interfaith Wilderness

Like most of the people going to Common Ground, I went into the program not really knowing what to expect. Was the focus going to be on the environment? Would it be on interfaith dialogue? To be quite honest, I think even the organizers weren’t quite sure since this was the first year of the program. It took us about the first hour to figure it out. By the time I went to sleep on Monday night, I had already had some pretty intense discussions. Of course of the oil spill, but also I had the chance to speak with people about religions I really had never been exposed to before all while hiking around the retreat center by the lake. So all in all, it was a fairly amazing initial exposure to the program: tons of people who were interested in interfaith dialogue and the earth, and tons of water which I always find pretty incredible especially coming directly from New Mexico!

We spent much of the day on Tuesday learning about the religious environmental movement. As is apparent from the lack of cohesive response to scientists’ warnings about our treatment of the environment, science alone cannot effect change to the drastic extent necessary. Rather, it is essential to bring in other fields so that the message can be reframed in ways that are appealing to a larger group of people. One of the most important communities to reach out to is religious leadership. By reexamining religious scripture or lore with environmental protection in mind, large groups of people will realize the importance of protecting the earth and all of the people who are being harmed by the pollutants that we are injecting into the environment. We were given this earth and as stewards, it is our responsibility to be mindful of what we do to it.

We also had speakers from the Jewish and Muslim traditions come and speak to us about some movements within the communities as well as arguments from within the traditions that speak to the importance of protecting the environment. After all of these fascinating speakers and all of the fascinating discussion, I just didn’t see how it could get any better. On Wednesday night, however, we delved into the realm of text study, something that I’ve only ever done in a purely Jewish setting. We read texts from the Jewish, Christian, and Muslim traditions that discussed man’s role as steward of the earth and discussed how they related to each other. To me, this really exemplified the dedication of the participants to learning and understanding each other’s cultures. Rather than stopping at developing friendships across faith lines, there was real discussion and questioning about what religions were about.

As might be expected, this program left me with a lot to think about. I came away shocked that I had stumbled upon a group of people who cared about religion and the environment simultaneously without one trumping the other. This almost makes me think that these two parts of my focus are not so contradictory after all! I also, of course, came away with a lot of ideas for how to improve interfaith dialogue on WashU’s campus which will hopefully play out well in the coming year. And I have no doubt that they will with all of the support and experience of the people I met at Common Ground.

You know you've got a problem when you have 6 boarding passes in your hand....

Up until today, I’d always seen a boarding pass as a ticket to an unknown and exciting adventure. Well, today didn’t change the unknown part. This morning started much the same as any other excursion to New York. The plan was to fly through Chicago to New York Laguardia and spend the night at my mom’s childhood friend (and basically my aunt) Helen’s apartment in Manhattan before taking a train to New Haven to start the Common Grounds program tomorrow. One of the best parts of this plan was the fact that I would leave my 50 pound (yes, some books had to be moved to my carry-on to meet the weight limit) bag in her apartment and not have to drag it around for a week.

Part of the day went according to plan. I arrived in Chicago not only on time but five minutes early! I easily found my gate and settled in to wait for two hours. At some point during that time, someone announced that the gate had changed, but that was no big deal. I just moved and settled myself in a new seat. Then the trouble began.

A perfectly pleasant sounding voice came over the loudspeaker informing everyone sitting around Gate K4 that the flight to Laguardia had been cancelled due to weather. Of course, this started a mad rush to the phones that were available to call the American Airlines rebooking service. On my first go-round, I was informed that the best flight that I would be able to get would land me in New York at 10pm tomorrow. That certainly wasn’t ideal, but I booked myself on it anyway. As soon as I got off the phone, I called my mom who was also on the phone with American Airlines. As she was on the verge of finding an alternative flight, her signal cut out. Great.

So, we hung up with each other and both got back on the phone to try to figure out a way to get me to the Northeast before the program started. Though every earlier flight to New York was booked (probably by the people whose earlier New York flights had been cancelled due to weather) I somehow managed to book a flight to Hartford that landed at midnight. I didn’t know where it connected through or what would happen to my bags or even me once I landed, for that matter. I was just happy that I was going to be moving. I called my mother with the news. She already knew. The man she had spoken with had informed her the instant the switch was made and she proceeded to fill me in on the details. I would fly through Miami and my bag would be redirected to Hartford. I’d have to drag it around but at least it wouldn’t have gotten lost! When I arrived in Hartford, my dad and uncle’s childhood friend George would go to the airport (at midnight!) to bring me home and then drive me to the train station in the morning. I couldn’t believe how nice this was, especially considering that the last time I’d seen him was when I was five years old.

I quickly got the boarding passes printed for the Miami/Hartford route and hurried over to the gate. I might as well not have. About half an hour after my arrival, they began to steadily move back the estimated time of departure. Every time, I would trudge over to the information desk to double-check that I wasn’t going to miss my connection. Finally, when the flight had been pushed back from 3:15pm to 4:40pm with every chance of being stuck in Chicago for even longer, it was obvious that I would either have to spend the night in Chicago or Miami. So, we called up our family friends in Chicago and off I went to a fun night of playing with their little boys and walking around the neighborhood. So, my day of disillusionment with the aviation world ended on a high note. Hopefully, tomorrow will bring more flying luck and I will arrive in Hartford with no further phone calls. Just in case, though, my phone’s getting a thorough charging tonight.

Canyon de Chelly: Not quite Israel yet....

Though I’m not quite in Israel yet, I thought that I’d give this blog thing a shot and talk about the family pre-kids going off adventure. Albeit only for a few days and only a few hours drive away from home, our trip to Canyon de Chelly was pretty amazing. Before going, I had heard it described as a smaller version of the Grand Canyon, so my expectations were not so high. But though the canyon, geologically, did not present such a striking impression as the immensity of the Grand Canyon, Canyon de Chelly offered so much more with respect to Native American history and modern life.

Our first impression of the canyon was mostly from the car. We drove a little bit about the periphery, getting out to see a couple of the overviews. We did one hike (the only one open to the public without a guide) on the first afternoon. I’ve gotta be honest, though, that first impression was not the most convincing.

As it turns out, Canyon de Chelly is a National Monument full of interesting politics. The canyon was the home of many different Indian tribes including the Anasazi, Hopi, and, more recently, Navajo. Because of the ties that the Navajos have to the land, they were given Canyon de Chelly as part of the reservation. However, due to the Navajo Nation’s difficulty with policing the area and preventing theft of artifacts, they turned governance over to the United States government, making Canyon de Chelly a National Monument. However, the land belonging to each clan remains in their possession and the clan members have permission to enter and even live in the canyon on their ancestral land.

Much of this information, we discovered on our second day at Canyon de Chelly when we went on a 6 hour jeep tour of the canyon (though in reality it ended up being more like 5 hours which was too short for my mom and me, but still too much for my brother and dad.) Our guide, Bobby, showed us a canyon full of spectacular pictographs painted on the canyon walls by the generations of residents of Canyon de Chelly as well as the amazing Anasazi ruins perched up in caves lining the canyon. Along the way, we also learned about the struggles that modern Navajos have with the effort to preserve their culture and the new generation’s desire to return back to the original name for the tribe, Diné. We also saw the scattering of summer homes belonging to families that move into the canyon to live during planting and grazing seasons and then come up to live in the neighboring town of Chinley. Mixed in with those were a couple of year-round houses as well as an ancient ruin that had been converted into a modern house!

All of this history and the love that the Navajo people have for this beautiful piece of the natural world made me see the canyon as much more than a gorgeous and interesting geologic occurrence to be studied (which is saying a lot for me!) No, Canyon de Chelly is nothing less than a home.