Alef: The NEXT Conversation
This Little Light of Mine
“There is a difference between getting a partner and attracting a partner.
Getting implies that our hooks work; attracting means that
our light is bright and appears like a beacon to one who is meant to see it.”
-Marianne Williamson
By Shara Grifenhagen
When I was 28, I packed up my entire life and moved around the world to be in Israel with the Israeli boyfriend I’d met two years prior. I got to Israel with three suitcases and a dream, and quickly lost myself, as was to be expected (in hindsight). I mean, I moved around the world…of course it was going to take some getting used to. I don’t know why I expected to just show up and be myself. There’s a new culture and a new identity to assume. Sadly, with all these changes, my inner light began to flicker and fade, and I focused so much energy on keeping this guy happy because I could not…under any circumstances…end up alone in a foreign country.
I found myself losing a little more of that inner light each day in order to be the most perfect girlfriend ever. I was convinced that it was him…or nothing.
So you can imagine how devastated I was when that relationship ended. Twice, in fact. We did the break up, get back together and break up thing. And every time we broke up and got back together, my inner light dimmed until it was so dull that I then entered the most volatile and dramatic relationship of my life…a 2-year relationship which I dragged out for about 2 years longer than I should have.
Better to pretend to be someone else than to be alone, right?
Better to pretend I was ok with his questionable fidelity and his dramatic mood swings, than to attend another wedding or another party without a date. Yes, I was officially in darkness at this point.
My hooks certainly worked. I got his attention…but did I really want it?
I feel like we, as women, spend many of our formative years worrying about getting the guy. We lower our necklines and make our skirts shorter. And sadly, we often find ourselves competing with every other girl in the room to get “that guy.” And then when we get him…we do whatever it takes to keep him. Even if it means losing a bit of ourselves.
I mean…let’s be honest. How many of us have been in a relationship where we were so scared that the partner may ditch us and we’d end up alone that we did whatever it took to keep him interested? We went to that stupid emo rock concert and pretended it was the best time ever. We helped him polish his skateboard or arrange that old stamp collection. We encouraged his singing or told him that his disgusting, lumpy chicken pot pie was the best. We were REALLY REALLY interested.
Better to pretend a little bit so this dude likes us more, right? I mean…better to be a little bored (or even boring), than to be alone.
Oh how very very wrong.
When I finally got the courage to end that crazy, unstable relationship and move on, I spent the next few months finally working on myself. I was now 32 years old and had been living in Israel for more than four years. I had to get back to my roots…rediscover the person I’d abandoned when I got off that airplane at Ben Gurion…the woman I was scared I’d buried so deep in my soul that she’d never see the light of day again.
I finally worked on my Hebrew so I could better express myself out in public. I signed up for a photography class since I hadn’t picked up my camera since university…when I was still developing prints in a darkroom. I enrolled in a creative writing class…to challenge me and help me get some of my stories on paper. I was searching for myself…looking for the girl I once was…and hoping that in the process, my inner light would start to shine again.
As the days turned into weeks and the weeks turned into months, I began to find that inner self. With every day that I dedicated more time to myself, to reading, to writing, to taking pictures, to just having a bottle of wine with my girlfriends, I felt my light start to shine a little brighter.
I was alone and I was content and I knew I was going to be ok. I knew that my happiness wasn’t dependant on any man, but on myself. I knew that if I couldn’t love myself and let myself be loved exactly the way I am…it was never going to work.
Somehow, women have been socialized to believe that in order to find a mate, we must quiet down. We should learn how to cook and love to clean. We should want a career and never…never talk about wanting babies. We’re told that no man will like a woman with opinions that are too loud…and that being the cute girl perched on the end of the bar silently sipping her cosmo while some guy admires her cleavage, is more important than speaking up and being heard.
What we SHOULD be told instead, is that the only voice we need to hear is our own, really. And we should be exactly who we are… when our inner light shines bright enough, he will find us. And we’ll be in a place where we’ll want to be found.
…
Shara Grifenhagen made aliyah with Nefesh b’Nefesh in July, 2005. She grew up in North Carolina and earned her undergraduate degree in journalism and mass communication from the University of North Carolina in Chapel Hill. Since moving to Israel, she has earned an International MBA at Bar Ilan University and now makes creative marketing videos for companies around the world.
Photo by Magda Sobkowiak, licensed under Creative Commons.
Outside the Walls
By Danielle Selber
Here’s a pop quiz: where, according to traditional Judaism, is the center of Jewish life today? The answer is: the home. Traditional Judaism sees the home as our “temple”, the heart of our personal Jewish experience.
But most people’s first instinct would be to guess the synagogue. A synagogue is by definition a place where Jews congregate to meet and worship. In places where Jewish life is prevalent today, you will often hear a which-came-first, the-synagogue-or-the-community debate, because synagogues become so integral to communities that it becomes difficult to parse out one’s influence on the other.
But to assume that a synagogue must be the central place of meeting is to forget something important about Judaism. A religion of the exiled and the expelled, Judaism puts virtually no emphasis on place or space. Right in the Torah, G-d destined us to be a wandering people, a people “scattered among the nations”. Our place is no place.
With this in mind, it makes sense why my Jewish life has unfolded far outside the walls of synagogues. Though I consider myself relatively religious – keeping Shabbat and kosher – I’ve never felt comfortable in a formal Jewish setting. Synagogues make me feel stifled, insecure, judged. It’s hard to feel open to spiritual or personal connections when you have one eye on the clock. I prefer to be caught off guard by Judaism – to discover it in places where it really ought not to be.
One such place exists in my hometown of Philadelphia. Nestled caddy-corner to one of those quaint little alleyways that Old City is famous for is a hole-in-the-wall called Café Ole. It’s the kind of place your eyes would slide right by if you didn’t know you were looking for it. Israeli owned and operated, Café Ole’s speakers play an endless Israeli playlist and it remains the only place in Philly to score a “café hafuch” coffee. Hebrew vocabulary is scrawled on a blackboard by the Israeli servers, who will ignore you for minutes at a time while you wait to order and then suddenly ask how your mother is doing. A handwritten sign hung next to bejeweled chamsas declares in Hebrew “this place is not kosher”. There was a time when I was working from the café that my cell phone rang and I answered in Hebrew, simply forgetting that I was in America. Israelis and Americans who have visited Israel have reported feeling that same connection in Café Ole, a feeling of transport and comfort. But though it’s a definitively Israeli place, there is nothing conventionally Jewish about Café Ole. Their food is not kosher, they are not closed for Shabbat or the Jewish holidays, and most of the clientele are not Jewish.
When I worked for Birthright Israel NEXT in Philadelphia, we asked the owners if we could take over the café after hours once a month. To our surprise, “Israeli Café Night” became our most popular event by far. It drew a completely different crowd than any of our other events, and with no publicity outside of a Facebook invitation, the attendance at the Café Ole nights doubled and sometimes tripled every month. In a city where happy hours and bar crawls prevail, this was a truly surprising development. What drew such crowds to a simple little café on the edge of the city?
Our one-night-a-month simple premise was this: come here, drink coffee, meet Jews. Not being in a bar made the event intimate yet pressure-free; not being in a synagogue made it unassuming and decidedly unreligious. It was an evening without pretense, with easy laughter and casual conversations in any combination of English, Russian and Hebrew. Our crowds spilled out onto the sidewalk, with girls arranging their skirts so they could sit on a neighboring stoop and people dragging chairs from inside to join in on a particularly interesting conversation. The night was always slated to end at 9pm, but people frequently stayed around until midnight. Someone came up to me at the end of one night and said, “you know, something special happened here tonight”, and I knew just what he meant.
Our Israeli Café Night was held in a place that just happened to be Jewish, instead of being in a Jewish place, and that made all the difference. People came to Israeli Café Nights and connected, not necessarily to Judaism, but to the idea of a Jewish community. A brand new concept for many, this connection didn’t so much open doors as tear them off their hinges. The same people we couldn’t pay to come to our events before began to become more involved in our community, becoming advocates and leaders and bringing their friends along with them. When Judaism exists outside conventional walls, its’ reach is greater, its’ appeal more accessible. Something special happens.
Read more posts from Issue 21: Places and Spaces.
Photo by austinevan, licensed under Creative Commons.
The Earth is Not Quiet
By Laura Jo Hess
No place but a sidewalk crack, a bridge across water, the oily death of a crooked coast. Here, you sip tea on a balcony made of wood, spit tears from a hotel roof, jut eyes across a dimmed room. Hammocks are slung between bedposts, blankets pile high on the floor, shadows take the shape of a sailboat. If you try hard, you can recall the angles of the woman in the marketplace and the hue of her orange skin. You can locate love in the zee of two bodies clasped together at a bedside or a coffee shop. All you need to know is this smeared window and the existence of plastic tables and telephone poles. Take your feet and place them down—learn the loose alleyways and etch your face on the tavern wall as you turn to leave.
What life there is, is remembered on the balcony of a soon-to-be vacant room. Shirtless boys with tanned skin bend at the hips and knees; girls in shoes walk like birds to the local bar, kiss gloss to the side of glass and make you remember their scents. I, in canvas shoes, just learned how to breathe. I, an animal, forgot you when the air came through. How must the cracks in the desert hide jewels, a scroll of history, bedposts of old lovers. How must soldiers hold metal in clasped hands and recall, broken, the face of their best friends, their brothers, shema over the arch of a bomb. A man wipes the skin beneath his eyes and his teeth shine as he speaks—I can’t hear the words but his lip movements are inevitable. I can’t see his hands but later they place stones on a grave flat and secure. Later, his chest heaves and his gun sags with the weight of his tears.
But how could this be in a place that just began? Let us recall a boy in shirtsleeves and a tie clip, ten years old, studying letters in black ink, shapes that start with lines and end in squares: moments you mustn’t trust until spoken. Climb aboard, his father says, yelp these words from rooftops havens and hammock beds. Place sounds in wood petrified to stone, in the stratified parallels of doorways, the limestone fibers of a place you claim to love. If you want language, he boasts, learn to love a foreigner. If you want history, memorize these words, tattoo them on the inner side of your wrists; remember them once I’m gone. When addressed in Yiddish, respond in Hebrew. When wide-eyed boys throw stones in your direction, throw back in Hebrew. If you want food, shiny shoes, or a slice of bread, use only Hebrew words.
A hundred and fifty years later, a street moans in language: lamps sway and sound emits from the crown of the head, light from the back of the throat. What you know is limited to distance and boiling points, minutes of mediocrity. Amid a circle, find swans dancing limbs across the radii, blonde arms flailing and torsos aghast, static becoming motion momentarily. Let me explain you the drummers with tanned skin and definition, a shofar in hands callused, lips pursed red. But at a beach in the afternoon, a light splits the air in thirds and a white horse prepares for a ceremony, human legs sturdy on either side of its tough and furless hide. I heave my body upon sand, haul breaths from my open center, pause for heat to gather on my chin, my toes. I suppose it took such a contrast of color to make me weep.
At synagogue, a woman with thick stockings and a wig leads my finger along Hebrew words. She picks the lint from my skirt and covers my calves with fabric. You come to my house, she whispers, you eat Shabbat. If Israel is a moment, then put me in a café with a wooden deck and chairs with straight backs, a cue. Give me a real hand on a real thigh, an instant of smoke billowing from the lungs. If Israel is a day, then sit me on a bench at Jaffa with jagged coastlines and flags folded over in wind. For now, Israel must be larger—sand surrendered in the fiber of a pant leg, a graveyard set at dawn.
Photo by acroll, licensed under Creative Commons.
Laura Jo Hess is a midwesterner living in Brooklyn. She is attending The New School in the fall.
Israeli Slang for V-Day
Tu B’Av is the Jewish version of Valentines Day. Although it’s still months away, we wanted to give you the in with our resident Israeli (i.e. smooth, suave), Yishai. Take notes as he shares some tips on how to woo your mate.
Israeli Slang 101 – “Shalom, Mahmi” from Birthright Israel NEXT on Vimeo.
Photo by naama, licensed under Creative Commons.
Hebrew for Hanukkah
By Adam Oded and Rafi Samuels-Schwartz
With our third issue, “Tongue Tied,” winding down, and Hanukkah just around the corner, many of you may be wondering why we at Alef chose this time to focus on language, and in particular, Hebrew. Well, believe it or not there is a method to our madness; this confluence of Hebrew and Hanukkah was not simply a random coincidence of scheduling.
But first, some brief history:
About 2200 years ago, our ancestors faced an attack on their religious practices. The Seleucid Syrian Greeks under the rule of Antiochus IV Epiphanes, banned Shabbat observance, circumcision, and Torah study. In public ceremonies they attempted to make respected members of Jewish communities eat forbidden foods. Antiochus’ efforts were aimed at attacking the things that made Jews different from the rest of the Greek-speaking world. Some Jews, like the Hasmonean family (sometimes called the Maccabees), rose up against these decrees and fought back. The Jewish victory over the Syrian Greeks represented the triumph of Jewish identity over forced assimilation.
A little over 100 years ago, the Hebrew language was resuscitated into a living language after being relegated to ritual use for nearly 1800 years.  Today, Hebrew is spoken not only in Israel but in Jewish communities around the world. Outside the Untied States, Hebrew has supplanted Yiddish as a Lingua franca of the Jewish People, enabling French Jews to talk to Russian Jews to talk to Brazilian Jews,to talk to South African Jews.
The connection between Hebrew and Hanukkah, while not immediately obvious at first, is still striking. Without the cultural victory (to say nothing of the military one) of the Maccabees over the Syrian Greeks, Hebrew would be dead. Not, to quote Miracle Max from The Princess Bride, “mostly dead,” but entirely, and totally finished, and the last two weeks on Alef would have featured stories about learning Greek.
So, as Alef moves into Issue #4, “The Holiday Season,” we wish you all a Happy Hanukkah, and a Chag Urim Sameach. And, no matter what language you speak, go easy on the latkes, folks!
Image provided by mfajardo, licensed under Creative Commons.
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