February 27, 2004

Alison on Aliyah:  Fulfiller of dreams

            I’ve spent the past couple of weeks deliberating over an essay that I had to write for my applications to graduate school in clinical psychology here in Israel.  It was one of those dreaded “personal essays” – no specific instructions on what to write, no hint of what direction to take, just “tell us about yourself.”  I’ve always hated tasks like these, because my lack of creativity always leads me to the most mundane self-descriptions and efforts to sell myself.  Because my desire to get into school here is so strong, I really wanted to make this essay different.  I wanted to stand out, to dazzle my readers, and to convince these schools that I am worth accepting.  But for the life of me, once again, I couldn’t figure out what to say in order to accomplish this.

            As I mentally flipped through my life thus far, I was wholly uninspired.  I couldn’t think of a single thing that would make me look more desirable than any of the other more-than-qualified candidates for these rigorous and highly competitive programs.  Finally, I began to ask my friends and family for their advice.  No more than two minutes into each conversation, I was always met with the exact same answer:  “Well, to start with, you’re obviously going to talk about your aliyah, right?”

            I had not even considered going this route, but once I thought about it, I wholeheartedly rejected it.  After all, this is already old news in my book.  And anyway, everyone over here is in Israel – who cares anymore how we all got here?  I didn’t think anyone would be interested in the same old sappy story about how much I love it here, how long I had waited to fulfill my dream, blah blah blah… But a friend of mine here – a man now in his fifties who was born here in Israel, whose parents immigrated from Baghdad when they were in their forties, along with their seven other children – convinced me otherwise, and changed my entire view of myself in an instant.

            He told me that Israel is unique for a variety of reasons, but most importantly because everyone here is or was an immigrant at some point in their lives or their family’s history.  “What is wonderful about this country,” he told me, “is that you can walk up to anyone on the street and ask them how they came to be here.. And you will find that every single person is here because there was someone in their family, no matter how far back it was, who had the desire, and the foresight, and the determination, to come here to live.  If you peel back the bark of each family tree in this country, inside you will always find at least one member who had an inner compass pointed east.”  He spoke of an inner force in each one of us (immigrants), some type of innate programming that causes us to yearn for a return to roots of which many of us aren’t even wholly aware.  It is as if we are being pointed in the right direction by some “greater power.”

Yitzhak made me realize that in my family, I am that person.  I grew up in a family of Reform Jews, receiving only peripheral Jewish instruction and almost no education about Israel and its role in our traditions.  I was the first of my entire extended family to visit Israel, and still very much in the minority as far as my love and passion for the country.  I knew nothing about it until my seventeenth birthday, when something beyond my control drew me here.  I knew I would fall in love with it even before I stepped off the plane, and now I cannot imagine my life without this all-encompassing love.  In sixty years, when someone asks my great-grandchildren how they ended up in Israel, they will say that their great-grandmother came here when she was 26 years old to fulfill her dream.

            For months now, inasmuch as I have appreciated it, I have to admit that I have wondered why everyone has been so helpful and friendly to me.  Everywhere I go, I receive invitations for Shabbat dinner, offers of furniture, requests to fix me up with “a nice Jewish boy,” even monetary assistance.  Everyone seems to want to help me succeed in my aliyah and klita (absorption into the culture and life here).  When I asked my friend about this, he chuckled, saying, “Of course we all want to help!  We remember what it was like to feel your optimism and awe and passion.. and a part of us wants to reconnect with those feelings again.  Your determination and enthusiasm are contagious, and we all want to be around you and take part in this process with you.”

            I have to admit, I never saw myself as unusual.  Part of the reason I had trouble coming up with an idea for the essay is that I was still viewing myself as totally ordinary.  After all, in the states, I was “a dime a dozen.”  There are thousands of Jewish girls in their twenties, who went to good schools on the East Coast, visited Israel in their teens, and have “always wanted” to live here.  For most of my young adult life, I felt as if I was just one of the crowd, with no unique reason to want to come here, other than the standard, “I love it.”  To be honest, making aliyah was always more of a dream, a romantic notion that, in the back of my mind, I never really expected to fulfill.  My family was hoping the same thing.

            But the moment I actually did it, the moment I proved to myself and the world that I had the chutzpah to pack up and move halfway around the world, leaving everyone and everything I knew – that was the moment that everything changed.  I was no longer a person who just really wanted to do something.  I became a person who really did it.  I was no longer just a dreamer, I was a “fulfiller.”  And even though I didn’t realize it at the time, that fact seemed to change my image in the eyes of those around me.  As an olah chadasha (new immigrant) here, I am seen as someone with character, passion, and inner strength.

Above and beyond this – and one of the things I didn’t expect – I am viewed as extremely unique here.  A young, non-religious, American Jew who decides to move to Jerusalem is increasingly becoming a rarity here, and I have found that many people are more curious about my motives and ambitions than those of my more religious friends.  In this day and age, during the current matzav (political situation), the huge majority of new immigrants are either very religious or not interested in living in the “center of terror,” so to speak.  It takes a special kind of belief and desire (and let’s face it, a little bit of insanity) to want to live in Jerusalem, and most people here assume that the only people who possess those characteristics are religious.

So here I am, standing out from the crowd for the first time in my life, but I didn’t realize it until my friend brought it to my attention.  The moment I stepped on the plane with my one-way ticket, everyone’s opinions of me changed, but it hadn’t sunk in for me.  Only when I heard it articulated in his words did I realize that my own self-image needed to change as well.  I realized that what I have done is incredibly gutsy, and scary, and maybe even admirable.  I guess I am not so ordinary after all.