Monday, November 23, 2009
Holit Final Week
I'm in the last week of Holit. I really can't believe it. In some ways time went by so quickly, but when I think of things like my relationships with other people and how much I've learned and experienced here, its incredible how much time has passed. Its so sad to know I'll leave here, and more than anything it is so sad to know the South Americans will be going home. I want each of them so badly to know how much they mean to me, what beautiful, amazing people they are and how they've changed my life so much for the better. Its ridiculous to spend this kind of time and have these kinds of experiences with people you'll most likely never encounter again. Thats life, I know, but that doesn't make it any less difficult to deal with. For the South Americans, I can't imagine what its like to come to the end of a year like this and know you're going back home, however great home might be, it is so difficult to know that people you love so much are experiencing an end to a year like this. Everything we do now is for the last time together. I appreciate so intensely, and its definitely the kind of thing to be happy about that it happened, but something that is definitely worth being sad about.
In other news, for the last two weeks the Australian Shnat group is joining us on Holit, also as the last two weeks of their Shnat. There are eight of them, and they came from Kibbutz Samar, which is further south in the desert, closer to Eilat, and is an anarchist and entirely socialist kibbutz. Everything there is free, they're pretty rich. Its pretty fantastic having the Austalians here, and I really wish we got to have more time with them. Its great having other native English speakers, people we can joke with and use slang the way we would normally, plus they're a really fun and amusing bunch of people.
This past weekend we had a seminar about self-actualization, realizing one's values in the way they live. The seminar was held up North, by the Kinneret, where the first pioneers came to settle. We learned about the pioneers, people who had a dream for a new society, a new human being, living an equal, communal lifestyle. They were young, they left everything they knew and the futures ahead of them, of a bourgeois life, working as professionals, in an office, making money, and went to an unknown place, to an unsettled Israeli wilderness, to start farms, work in agriculture, build a new world based on their beliefs for the way people should live their lives. Many of them died in accidents, the kind of things you would expect from a bunch of idealistic, driven youths who really don't know 100% how to make things work. They went, they made mistakes, but they worked and developed themselves, their abilities, their communities. Some of the places we went to, like the Kineret cemetery, where all the early pioneers are buried, I've been to before and heard the same things, but it was different this time, feeling the spirit of these people who really wanted to change things and who risked so much to venture out and create.
After that, we went on to learn about the kibbutz movement, ideas in why it has failed and is failing, and ideas in how the concepts and values that were relevant in the beginning can be actualized in a currently relevant and meaningful way. Kibbutzim grew large and ideology faded, because you can't stay so personally connected to hundreds of people that you feel personal responsibility for them as a member of your group, and when the policies of responsibility and cooperation are forced upon people, they work to create distrust and alienation rather than solidarity. We learned about ideas now to have intertwined groups within the kibbutz, meaning that each person is a member of many groups, like kvutzot, family, work and committees, and the groups mix and combine so much that everyone is working together with the other people of the kibbutz and cooperation then comes naturally. I'm not so sure what I think of that working, how much sense it really makes, but it was interesting. We visited a new kibbutz of Hashomer Hatzair where kvutzot from the movement live together, as an idea for a new way for kibbutzim to work, made up entirely of kvutzot. Also interesting, but they don't really seem so solidary. Who knows.
The seminar was a really special experience. I love the Kineret, it was a very special place for me when I went to Israel with my kvutza two years ago, when we learned about the first kvutza and their process of becoming close to one another, and again being there was a very beautiful, epic experience. It was really nice to spend the time all together, in such a beautiful place, where we all slept in the same room, ate all together, had bus rides and discussions and everything together. We don't usually get to have time like that together because all our classes are separate, some days we don't even see each other most of the day. It meant a lot to have that time now so close to the end.
There are more birthdays and weekends and other random fun things to recount here, but again, not in this moment. Laters.
Monday, November 16, 2009
Time Is Flying!
As I try to update this blog, the days and weeks continue to melt by. Its really difficult, trying to remember and document so much, but I really think its well worth it.
Wednesdays switched halfway through the program from learning about alternative education to learning about globalization. Our peulot are fantastic. Nothing in particular comes to mind about any in particular right now, though...
BUT, we do have an exciting update in kvutza process! Today, Tuesday, we worked on the kibbutz because we didn't have a trip elsewhere, and since we finish work relatively early in the day, we finalized our kvutza name! We are now Kvutzat Ga'ash. Emphasis on the first "a", spelled in Hebrew with an ayin. "Ga'ash har" means volcano, but "ga'ash" itself is the bubbling of the lava before the eruption, and it is also the word for a sea bubbling before a storm. We chose it because ga'ash is in preparation to do something big, to really have an impact and take action, which is a really excellent hope to have for our kvutza on shnat. Also, with all the heat and bubbling, there are all the chemical reactions happening very fast, which is a very good metaphor for 18 people living and working so closely together for a year. I really like the name. We went through a lot, like "hippopotam", mostly for jokes' sake, the fact that a hippopotamus is an aggressive vegetarian, but on a serious level because the hippopotamus changes the environment it lives in, the way the water runs and vegetation grows, because of the path it chooses to take over and over again over time, and its really great to think you can have that effect on your environment. We also thought about "shoddedim", robbers, but more as vigilantes or renegade, someone taking matters in to their own hands, to change things, working from the underground, but we couldn't find a good Hebrew translation.
Thursdays have become a regular lemon picking day for me and I really enjoy it. I don't know when else in my life I will find myself spending ours picking lemons. I enjoy the solitude, relative silence, and monotony, looking for lemons, picking, filling the bucket, emptying...I find it kind of meditative. I realized almost two months in that I had only once not gone to the lemons, because our meetings to decide the jobs are so annoying and I really don't care enough to fight for any job, and I decided it might be good to try something else, so I went to the garden for two weeks. The first time I was digging trenches for irrigation hoses, and the second time picking up garbage all over the kibbutz and moving furniture around on the tractor, which was all good fun work, but I really missed the lemons. Today when we worked there was no fruit picking option, because the fruit they were picking today was mangoes, and a good number of people got really bad, persistent allergic reactions to the mangoes, so I was gardening again and we planted flowers.
Now some weekend updates. The first weekend where I left off was Simchat Torah, and we all took a bus to our regional bus station, which was hosting a region-wide celebration. There are a lot of soldiers here, so it was mostly for them, but also a lot of other people from the area, and a lot of families. There was lots of singing and dancing, very similar to what I'm used to at home for holiday celebrations in Temple or at NCSY, and not at all what I'm used to being here. We don't really do traditional religious things here, so it was a really, really nice experience for me to have, especially with these people I'm on the program with, even if they weren't as in to it as I was. Afterwards, I skyped with my family for the first and only time so far in Israel, which was really wonderful. I miss them, and my house and my puppy... but I'm pretty well distracted here.
One thing we have been doing fairly consistently in the line of Judaism is Kabbalat Shabbat. Its not a traditional Kabbalat Shabbat, but every week we have someone from a different country do Kabbalat Shabbat for everyone who wants to come, in the way they like or want to do, maybe how they do in Hashomer Hatzair in their country, or just something they want to do with everyone from shnat, so its really nice.
One weekend on Holit all the South Americans and a few others went to the beach in Tel Aviv. I was considering going for a time, because I thought it would be a good time to bond with all of them and it sounded like fun, but reality is this language separation IS a separation. Its not something to be angry or frustrated at anyone for, because I just don't understand Spanish and its just much easier and more comfortable for the Spanish speakers to speak in Spanish, and its still something we all make our compromises for and work around all the time. I just didn't feel it would make sense for me to go to the beach and be surrounded by Spanish and not know what was going on while I spent money on bus fair and watched Argentinians barbecue kilos of meat. So, I stayed on Holit, and as it turned out, some Europeans also traveled that weekend, and we ended up with a very, very cozy little group of about 8 people. We had a Kabbalat Shabbat together, had our meals together, hung out and watched movies, and had a really wonderful dance party despite the fact that no one was here.
The day after, some of us left the little Holit group, Meirav, Adi, Dana, and I, to go to the birthday party of Maya Herman, our crazy, fantastic counselor from home, who is Israeli and worked in the movement in New York for two years. Another friend, Sapir, who worked at our camp this past summer, drove us to her party. We had a long, long car ride together, ate DELICIOUS food, and got to see lots of wonderful people from home who are in Israel now. It was great.
Another excellent weekend was Halloween. An amazing girl from Argentina, Natasha, has her birthday on Halloween, and she's always wanted to have a fun, scary, costume Halloween night. Most people here are not from the US and have never done Halloween before, so we all thought up costumes, some scary, some not, and made decorations for both Halloween and Natasha's birthday. We had a dance party and EVERYONE was dressed up in costumes, even all the kibbutz members who came, and everyone went all-out. I was a tomato, because being a gluten-free vegan (explanation later), it is a major, major staple of my diet here. Other costumes included a pair of sad clowns, a pair of Satanists, Jim Carrey in The Mask, a nerd, a cowgirl, Aladdin, a cavewoman, a vampire, a zombie fortune teller, an 80's dancer, a rag doll, a dead rag doll, KISS, and many more. Usually for dance parties, our counselor DJs, and he plays the same music every time, not particularly good music, and is really difficult about requests or questions about the music, so generally, it could be a lot better. THIS night, Oren from the kibbutz, who does the gardening, was the DJ, and he was absolutely fantastic. Everyone was dancing. The energy, from it being Natasha's birthday, and it being Halloween, and so many kibbutz members being there, and all the costumes and decorations, and most of all with Oren DJing, was completely different and really a fantastic thing to experience. At one point he played about 8 Bob Marley songs in a row, and please believe me, nothing has ever been better. It was really an epic night.
More weekends to update on, and a lot more random info, soon but not right now! Peace.
BUT, we do have an exciting update in kvutza process! Today, Tuesday, we worked on the kibbutz because we didn't have a trip elsewhere, and since we finish work relatively early in the day, we finalized our kvutza name! We are now Kvutzat Ga'ash. Emphasis on the first "a", spelled in Hebrew with an ayin. "Ga'ash har" means volcano, but "ga'ash" itself is the bubbling of the lava before the eruption, and it is also the word for a sea bubbling before a storm. We chose it because ga'ash is in preparation to do something big, to really have an impact and take action, which is a really excellent hope to have for our kvutza on shnat. Also, with all the heat and bubbling, there are all the chemical reactions happening very fast, which is a very good metaphor for 18 people living and working so closely together for a year. I really like the name. We went through a lot, like "hippopotam", mostly for jokes' sake, the fact that a hippopotamus is an aggressive vegetarian, but on a serious level because the hippopotamus changes the environment it lives in, the way the water runs and vegetation grows, because of the path it chooses to take over and over again over time, and its really great to think you can have that effect on your environment. We also thought about "shoddedim", robbers, but more as vigilantes or renegade, someone taking matters in to their own hands, to change things, working from the underground, but we couldn't find a good Hebrew translation.
Thursdays have become a regular lemon picking day for me and I really enjoy it. I don't know when else in my life I will find myself spending ours picking lemons. I enjoy the solitude, relative silence, and monotony, looking for lemons, picking, filling the bucket, emptying...I find it kind of meditative. I realized almost two months in that I had only once not gone to the lemons, because our meetings to decide the jobs are so annoying and I really don't care enough to fight for any job, and I decided it might be good to try something else, so I went to the garden for two weeks. The first time I was digging trenches for irrigation hoses, and the second time picking up garbage all over the kibbutz and moving furniture around on the tractor, which was all good fun work, but I really missed the lemons. Today when we worked there was no fruit picking option, because the fruit they were picking today was mangoes, and a good number of people got really bad, persistent allergic reactions to the mangoes, so I was gardening again and we planted flowers.
Now some weekend updates. The first weekend where I left off was Simchat Torah, and we all took a bus to our regional bus station, which was hosting a region-wide celebration. There are a lot of soldiers here, so it was mostly for them, but also a lot of other people from the area, and a lot of families. There was lots of singing and dancing, very similar to what I'm used to at home for holiday celebrations in Temple or at NCSY, and not at all what I'm used to being here. We don't really do traditional religious things here, so it was a really, really nice experience for me to have, especially with these people I'm on the program with, even if they weren't as in to it as I was. Afterwards, I skyped with my family for the first and only time so far in Israel, which was really wonderful. I miss them, and my house and my puppy... but I'm pretty well distracted here.
One thing we have been doing fairly consistently in the line of Judaism is Kabbalat Shabbat. Its not a traditional Kabbalat Shabbat, but every week we have someone from a different country do Kabbalat Shabbat for everyone who wants to come, in the way they like or want to do, maybe how they do in Hashomer Hatzair in their country, or just something they want to do with everyone from shnat, so its really nice.
One weekend on Holit all the South Americans and a few others went to the beach in Tel Aviv. I was considering going for a time, because I thought it would be a good time to bond with all of them and it sounded like fun, but reality is this language separation IS a separation. Its not something to be angry or frustrated at anyone for, because I just don't understand Spanish and its just much easier and more comfortable for the Spanish speakers to speak in Spanish, and its still something we all make our compromises for and work around all the time. I just didn't feel it would make sense for me to go to the beach and be surrounded by Spanish and not know what was going on while I spent money on bus fair and watched Argentinians barbecue kilos of meat. So, I stayed on Holit, and as it turned out, some Europeans also traveled that weekend, and we ended up with a very, very cozy little group of about 8 people. We had a Kabbalat Shabbat together, had our meals together, hung out and watched movies, and had a really wonderful dance party despite the fact that no one was here.
The day after, some of us left the little Holit group, Meirav, Adi, Dana, and I, to go to the birthday party of Maya Herman, our crazy, fantastic counselor from home, who is Israeli and worked in the movement in New York for two years. Another friend, Sapir, who worked at our camp this past summer, drove us to her party. We had a long, long car ride together, ate DELICIOUS food, and got to see lots of wonderful people from home who are in Israel now. It was great.
Another excellent weekend was Halloween. An amazing girl from Argentina, Natasha, has her birthday on Halloween, and she's always wanted to have a fun, scary, costume Halloween night. Most people here are not from the US and have never done Halloween before, so we all thought up costumes, some scary, some not, and made decorations for both Halloween and Natasha's birthday. We had a dance party and EVERYONE was dressed up in costumes, even all the kibbutz members who came, and everyone went all-out. I was a tomato, because being a gluten-free vegan (explanation later), it is a major, major staple of my diet here. Other costumes included a pair of sad clowns, a pair of Satanists, Jim Carrey in The Mask, a nerd, a cowgirl, Aladdin, a cavewoman, a vampire, a zombie fortune teller, an 80's dancer, a rag doll, a dead rag doll, KISS, and many more. Usually for dance parties, our counselor DJs, and he plays the same music every time, not particularly good music, and is really difficult about requests or questions about the music, so generally, it could be a lot better. THIS night, Oren from the kibbutz, who does the gardening, was the DJ, and he was absolutely fantastic. Everyone was dancing. The energy, from it being Natasha's birthday, and it being Halloween, and so many kibbutz members being there, and all the costumes and decorations, and most of all with Oren DJing, was completely different and really a fantastic thing to experience. At one point he played about 8 Bob Marley songs in a row, and please believe me, nothing has ever been better. It was really an epic night.
More weekends to update on, and a lot more random info, soon but not right now! Peace.
Wednesday, November 11, 2009
Been a While
Okay okay. Its been a long time since I last updated. This post is gonna be packed.
I've been on Holit for over two months now. Its pretty nutty.
Let me go over what we've been up to these past 5 weeks. Sundays- Hebrew class is alright. We started learning through songs. One Sunday we went to an Idan Reichel concert in Jerusalem, free for all people on year programs in Israel with MASA, the organization I'm with. My cousin Joe was also there, and it was really awesome getting to see him and show him my friends for a minute. The music of the concert was pretty good, I got to enjoy myself, but the whole experience was really bizarre. It was the first time since I've been here that I really felt faced with the world I'm accustomed to at home. There were a lot of Americans there and a lot of entertainment and presentations besides the concert. It all had this air of extreme superficiality that I really had a hard time handling. I didn't like being advertised to by the speeches and presentations, and seeing all these rich American Jews, blindly Zionist and blatantly materialist, I really had a hard time stomaching the idea of returning home after 9 months in a semi-utopia and being faced with all the sick qualities of the society I come from. Man, it was weird.
We've also started a kvutza process for those of us who will move on from Holit to our communa in Naharia in less than a month. Right now we're with a group of South Americans who are finishing their year in Israel. The whole time on Holit we've been having classes split into English and Spanish speaking, but two people, a girl from Mexico and a boy from Venezuela, are on our shnat program, so this was the first time we really had discussions with them. We started looking for a name to call ourselves, which is really a process that highlights certain aspects of us working together. It's tedious, since we all want a name that everyone likes, we think about what we want to represent ourselves as, or what we hope to be in this name we give ourselves. We realized that our language barriers really need to be taken much more seriously in to consideration, and that that means our fast-paced, back and forth, talking over each other really, really can't happen.
Our class on Judaism has had some really great discussions come out of it. We're learning a lot from Maimonedes, our teacher is a big fan, and there are some really interesting concepts we're dealing with. The class is small so we have some pretty good discussions, everyone there is pretty commited to coming, which is better on everyone's end than having people there who don't want to be there because they don't like the school setting or don't want to learn about Judaism or whatever their reasons are. We read from Maimonedes commentary on the Garden of Eden, which brought up an interesting contrast between the intellectual and the corporeal, as different types of knowledge brought about by the Tree of Knowledge and punishment of eating from it. We also had a really interesting discussion about reletivism versus absolutism, and I really hope to talk about it many more times. Throughout life. But also now. I have a hard time with the idea that anyone can know something that they think better than another person can think, and that they know what is right FOR the other person, but at the same time, I know I believe in certain things being right or wrong for all people. I think I definitely tend to lean on the hand of relativism more often, which makes it harder for me to communicate my opinions at times, but its hard to know what is better or what kind of a balance to create. I really want to get more in to it with people. Tell me all of your thoughts.
We've been to a lot of cool places on our trip days. One day was cancelled because plans fell through and we worked on the kibbutz instead. I was olive picking. It was very ironic, smacking olive trees with big sticks so the olives fall out. Just how it's done. There was miscommunication and laziness that lead to me spending the afternoon that day watching Rent with three Spanish speakers. It was great.
We visited a youth village, where the students live and work on a moshav and help in the larger community in various social works. The people we met worked with disabled children. It was interesting and nice that these people looked for a more positive way to live their lives and take action to help communities. When we came back to Holit that night, we had a peula where we talked first about what aspects, such as education, political action and communal lifestyles, are necessary for revolution, and how important each aspect is, then we read one of my favorite texts, Zion and the Youth, from Martin Buber. I've never gone over that text in a group of people from different countries, and it was a really intense conversation. The text talks about how it is the role of youth to change society and bring about necessary change, despite and because of the fact that the adult world is repressive towards the spirit of youth. We talked about how revolution isn't historically something done by teenagers, but by older members of society, and we went on to talk about how we can change things, what we can actually do. It was an incredibly motivating yet weakening conversation, because I want to change things and not live an isolated lifestyle that makes me happy but disregards the tragedy in the world around me, but at the same time there is nothing I can do. At this point I was right in the middle of reading a sociology book of my brother's I found at home a couple years ago and hadn't looked at until now, titled Why There is No Socialism in the United States, by Werner Sombart. Before this peula I had been reading the section about the American political system, and how the political machine and party system really amount to no voice from the people, as votes are drowned out in the masses, politicians have to corrupt themselves to succeed, and the parties have little real difference in platform. I've since finished the book, and it has some pretty interesting points, but it doesn't really apply specifically to the United States, or make a lot of sense in modern times, as it was written in 1906. I'll stay side tracked for a minute. He made valuable points about capitalist societies in general, like about large democratic states and their invalidation of the individual voice, the capitalist incentives, such as stock options, and an increased standard of living that sufficiently subdues the class conciousness of workers and gives them an affinity for the system, for example, and he had an interesting conclusion that the Homestead Act and constant availability of freedom from the urban capitalist world allowed for such capitalism as in the US to thrive. Anyways, the things I was thinking about from the book really tied in with the peula, and I became so frustrated with politics and industry and not knowing what I can ever do to have any actual impact on anything. If you have that revolution recipe, lemme get a look.
We also went to Sederot and saw an urban kibbutz there. It was insane to see the life people have, many in a chronic state of trauma, and see that what they live has so much in common with those in Gaza, that both live in this awful situation they find themselves in because of their governments, they deal with such similar problems, and yet all the product of that is more hate between them because all they are able to see is the other causing these problems for them. The urban kibbutz was interesting, our lecture was after a long day, but between observing a woman cooking dinner in the background and this rediculous guy who looked like some small city riff-raff, huge grin on his face, arguing with our lecturer, hugging and pounding everyone from the kibbutz as they came in, i was entertained sufficiently to keep focus. The people there I guess live an alternative way of life that works for them, they maintain a community based on the people, have part that is communal and part that pays privately, have various jobs and a system that works for them, but the urban kibbutz is still an idea I don't know yet what I think about. In a society that isn't agriculturally based, or agriculturally profitable, I don't know how relevant a rural kibbutz really can be, but at the same time, when we're talking about alternative communities, I don't know if they really can be all that relevant. It takes enough effort just to live in a sane way in our world. Smaller communities, a break down in voice between the individual and the masses makes sense if our world can change, but none of these changes are ever being made in a scale that can have an impact.
Another trip we took was to a Bedoin city called Rahat, where our permanent bus driver lives, and had a driving tour, as well as some free time and a very generous, relaxing visit at our bus drivers pseudo-tent. Since they're in the city, they have tent-esque buildings adjacent to the house to welcome guests in. The situation of the city was very unfortunate, no money to continue construction projects or pick up the garbage and provide the public works its people need. It felt so strange to drive through in our tour bus and see kids and pedestrians gaping up at it. We did some gardening/cleaning outside a school for disabled children in the city, which was really great. I picked up garbage, of which there was lots, and of varieties I would hope never to see in a school's grounds, and swept. We could tell nothing of this sort had been done in years at this school, and it was good work, so I very much enjoyed.
I've been on Holit for over two months now. Its pretty nutty.
Let me go over what we've been up to these past 5 weeks. Sundays- Hebrew class is alright. We started learning through songs. One Sunday we went to an Idan Reichel concert in Jerusalem, free for all people on year programs in Israel with MASA, the organization I'm with. My cousin Joe was also there, and it was really awesome getting to see him and show him my friends for a minute. The music of the concert was pretty good, I got to enjoy myself, but the whole experience was really bizarre. It was the first time since I've been here that I really felt faced with the world I'm accustomed to at home. There were a lot of Americans there and a lot of entertainment and presentations besides the concert. It all had this air of extreme superficiality that I really had a hard time handling. I didn't like being advertised to by the speeches and presentations, and seeing all these rich American Jews, blindly Zionist and blatantly materialist, I really had a hard time stomaching the idea of returning home after 9 months in a semi-utopia and being faced with all the sick qualities of the society I come from. Man, it was weird.
We've also started a kvutza process for those of us who will move on from Holit to our communa in Naharia in less than a month. Right now we're with a group of South Americans who are finishing their year in Israel. The whole time on Holit we've been having classes split into English and Spanish speaking, but two people, a girl from Mexico and a boy from Venezuela, are on our shnat program, so this was the first time we really had discussions with them. We started looking for a name to call ourselves, which is really a process that highlights certain aspects of us working together. It's tedious, since we all want a name that everyone likes, we think about what we want to represent ourselves as, or what we hope to be in this name we give ourselves. We realized that our language barriers really need to be taken much more seriously in to consideration, and that that means our fast-paced, back and forth, talking over each other really, really can't happen.
Our class on Judaism has had some really great discussions come out of it. We're learning a lot from Maimonedes, our teacher is a big fan, and there are some really interesting concepts we're dealing with. The class is small so we have some pretty good discussions, everyone there is pretty commited to coming, which is better on everyone's end than having people there who don't want to be there because they don't like the school setting or don't want to learn about Judaism or whatever their reasons are. We read from Maimonedes commentary on the Garden of Eden, which brought up an interesting contrast between the intellectual and the corporeal, as different types of knowledge brought about by the Tree of Knowledge and punishment of eating from it. We also had a really interesting discussion about reletivism versus absolutism, and I really hope to talk about it many more times. Throughout life. But also now. I have a hard time with the idea that anyone can know something that they think better than another person can think, and that they know what is right FOR the other person, but at the same time, I know I believe in certain things being right or wrong for all people. I think I definitely tend to lean on the hand of relativism more often, which makes it harder for me to communicate my opinions at times, but its hard to know what is better or what kind of a balance to create. I really want to get more in to it with people. Tell me all of your thoughts.
We've been to a lot of cool places on our trip days. One day was cancelled because plans fell through and we worked on the kibbutz instead. I was olive picking. It was very ironic, smacking olive trees with big sticks so the olives fall out. Just how it's done. There was miscommunication and laziness that lead to me spending the afternoon that day watching Rent with three Spanish speakers. It was great.
We visited a youth village, where the students live and work on a moshav and help in the larger community in various social works. The people we met worked with disabled children. It was interesting and nice that these people looked for a more positive way to live their lives and take action to help communities. When we came back to Holit that night, we had a peula where we talked first about what aspects, such as education, political action and communal lifestyles, are necessary for revolution, and how important each aspect is, then we read one of my favorite texts, Zion and the Youth, from Martin Buber. I've never gone over that text in a group of people from different countries, and it was a really intense conversation. The text talks about how it is the role of youth to change society and bring about necessary change, despite and because of the fact that the adult world is repressive towards the spirit of youth. We talked about how revolution isn't historically something done by teenagers, but by older members of society, and we went on to talk about how we can change things, what we can actually do. It was an incredibly motivating yet weakening conversation, because I want to change things and not live an isolated lifestyle that makes me happy but disregards the tragedy in the world around me, but at the same time there is nothing I can do. At this point I was right in the middle of reading a sociology book of my brother's I found at home a couple years ago and hadn't looked at until now, titled Why There is No Socialism in the United States, by Werner Sombart. Before this peula I had been reading the section about the American political system, and how the political machine and party system really amount to no voice from the people, as votes are drowned out in the masses, politicians have to corrupt themselves to succeed, and the parties have little real difference in platform. I've since finished the book, and it has some pretty interesting points, but it doesn't really apply specifically to the United States, or make a lot of sense in modern times, as it was written in 1906. I'll stay side tracked for a minute. He made valuable points about capitalist societies in general, like about large democratic states and their invalidation of the individual voice, the capitalist incentives, such as stock options, and an increased standard of living that sufficiently subdues the class conciousness of workers and gives them an affinity for the system, for example, and he had an interesting conclusion that the Homestead Act and constant availability of freedom from the urban capitalist world allowed for such capitalism as in the US to thrive. Anyways, the things I was thinking about from the book really tied in with the peula, and I became so frustrated with politics and industry and not knowing what I can ever do to have any actual impact on anything. If you have that revolution recipe, lemme get a look.
We also went to Sederot and saw an urban kibbutz there. It was insane to see the life people have, many in a chronic state of trauma, and see that what they live has so much in common with those in Gaza, that both live in this awful situation they find themselves in because of their governments, they deal with such similar problems, and yet all the product of that is more hate between them because all they are able to see is the other causing these problems for them. The urban kibbutz was interesting, our lecture was after a long day, but between observing a woman cooking dinner in the background and this rediculous guy who looked like some small city riff-raff, huge grin on his face, arguing with our lecturer, hugging and pounding everyone from the kibbutz as they came in, i was entertained sufficiently to keep focus. The people there I guess live an alternative way of life that works for them, they maintain a community based on the people, have part that is communal and part that pays privately, have various jobs and a system that works for them, but the urban kibbutz is still an idea I don't know yet what I think about. In a society that isn't agriculturally based, or agriculturally profitable, I don't know how relevant a rural kibbutz really can be, but at the same time, when we're talking about alternative communities, I don't know if they really can be all that relevant. It takes enough effort just to live in a sane way in our world. Smaller communities, a break down in voice between the individual and the masses makes sense if our world can change, but none of these changes are ever being made in a scale that can have an impact.
Another trip we took was to a Bedoin city called Rahat, where our permanent bus driver lives, and had a driving tour, as well as some free time and a very generous, relaxing visit at our bus drivers pseudo-tent. Since they're in the city, they have tent-esque buildings adjacent to the house to welcome guests in. The situation of the city was very unfortunate, no money to continue construction projects or pick up the garbage and provide the public works its people need. It felt so strange to drive through in our tour bus and see kids and pedestrians gaping up at it. We did some gardening/cleaning outside a school for disabled children in the city, which was really great. I picked up garbage, of which there was lots, and of varieties I would hope never to see in a school's grounds, and swept. We could tell nothing of this sort had been done in years at this school, and it was good work, so I very much enjoyed.
We had a trip to Tel Aviv to see the economic gap. Israel and the US, we were told, go back and forth between having the largest economic gaps in the world between rich and poor. This tour was very similar to a tour the North Americans had had two years ago when we were in Israel for the summer, but this time we were a lot more focused and understood a lot more what we were seeing. We went to the central bus station, a building with 7 floors, where 5 are used and 1 is shut down. The two unused floors are space for the crumbs of society, the "unseen people", who live, sell drugs and prostitute there. One of those floors was shut down because it was too dangerous. As you go up the floors, you start to see more and more people, fewer foreigners, more brand name items, and higher prices. We also learned about foreign workers in Israel, the difficulties they have with citizenship, rights, wages and living conditions. Hearing about how children of foreign workers, whose parents need cheap supervision during the day, are often left in rooms full of small square play pen after small square play pen, all day long, without the space to play with other children, and where the only time they get attention is when its time to change diapers or feed, and the way this life affects their early childhood development upset me so much. We learned about Israeli sex trade and they way women are smuggled in to the country, not knowing that the job they're coming for isn't what they think it is, not being able to communicate, and then facing the horrors of the sex trade... It was a lot to think about. I know these things happen worldwide, I know they are facts of our world, I know that doesn't make them okay, and I know I have no idea how to change this reality, but it was a good, however difficult, experience to really look at all these things right in front of me as they are. We had discussions that day about charity and justice, how justice essentially means equality and charity does good things while maintaining that inequality. I have a lot against charity, in that it makes injustice more and more tolerable, and that it often necessitates coming out of an attitude rich in the notion that the giver is better, stronger, more, than the receiver. At the same time, justice is not a means, and there is no solidly just way to help a person without changing the entire system that put them in need of help. I think charity can run on a scale from less just to more just, and helping is ultimately better than not because I don't know what else there is to do, but charity will always involve one person being better than another and it will always make injustice easier to let stand.
Thats all for now. I have lots and lots and lots more, to be added shortly, I hope.
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