Us and Them

On the bus to the reunion I meet my old T.A. who says people from Jerusalem are special. They're more serious than Tel-Avivians; they get him better. And these people, on the bus to the reunion of the Hebrew University Amirim Interdisciplinary Program, are the most Jerusalem of Jerusalem. The most serious, the most deep, the most geeky. He's almost overcome with geeky reverence.

When we get there, M. motions me aside. Instead of going into the colloquium on the Sorry State of the Humanities Today, we go off and smoke long feminine cigarettes that come in a rectangular box like high class tampons. He's the black sheep of his settler family. It's strange, we muse, how polite one's settler family can be. He gave a ride once to some settlers going off to volunteer for a disabled children's camp who in the same breath spoke murderous words about Arab killings. My settler relatives too, oblivious to our anger, continue to populate the hills around Jerusalem, killing off the peace process year by year, and invite me with relentless politeness to weddings and births.

M. says the warm blanket of approval I've felt since I've arrived in Israel isn't a contradiction to the latest horrible war in Gaza, but connected. When there's a "them" to be against the feeling of "us" gets stronger. When I arrived in Tel-Aviv with my prodigal daughter narrative, I made all of "us" feel better.

Meanwhile, the professors congratulated us and themselves for Hebrew University's pursuit of excellence, and I thought, like one of the bad sons at the Seder, why are there no Arabs here, or even Russians, Ethiopians - hardly any Sephardic Jews, hardly any women on the panel? They were not chosen by Hebrew University for excellence.

This week is sandwiched between Holocaust Remembrance Day, Memorial Day, and Israeli Independence Day. So many Days to grieve and mourn and celebrate! So many days to feel "us". What do we do? We light memorial candles, we grill meat, we hang our flags from the window, we dance in the streets to shake off 2,000 years of exile. What do "they" do while "we" are doing our remembering?