Simplifying Things Somewhat

One morning this week, I traveled to the Judean Desert with fellow activists to guard a Bedouin community. They had reached out for protection from the young Jewish men who cut their water lines, stole their livestock and menaced their community.

We arrived at the remote encampment and took up our posts. Caravans sat empty, their floors lined with worn carpets and cheerful embroidered pillows. A stack of magnetic toy blocks sat abandoned in the dirt. The family who lived there had recently fled, ground down by the harassment. We had come to watch over the last of their belongings until they could return to collect what remained.

Just up the hill, a pair of teenage boys with long peyot stood next to a hastily-constructed outpost, watching us.

I climbed the slope on the opposite side of the camp, trying to get a better sense of my surroundings. Standing in the wind, I turned in every direction, taking in the bleak lunar beauty of the desert.

When I moved to Israel fifteen years ago with my husband and our three young children, I planned to assimilate. I aspired to be like the veteran immigrants who seemed to blend gracefully into Israeli culture. I wasn’t sure which community our family would eventually call home, but I knew I didn’t want to live in an English-speaking enclave, clinging to familiar trappings of the Diaspora. I was going to become Israeli.

I could do this, I was sure, because I had already pulled off a reinvention. At eighteen, I moved from Arizona to New York to join an Orthodox community. I was new to strict religious practice at that time, bursting with enthusiasm after a summer in seminary.

I went all in. I started using my Hebrew name, and I adopted a new mode of dress (modest) and new patterns of speech (pious). I was an observant Jew in every sense of the word, scrutinizing the people in my religious community and striving to emulate their ways.

I wasn’t ashamed of my past. Quite the opposite. I was proud of my redemption arc, triumphant in my status as a baal teshuva, one who charts a new course in life by returning to tradition. I didn’t pretend to be someone I wasn’t or obscure my background. Still, I wanted to fit in.

Was this attempt at fitting in successful? I thought so at the time. Now I’m not sure. Maybe I didn’t reinvent myself after all. The older I get, the more I feel connected to all the parts of myself I thought I left behind.

I didn’t become Israeli, either, as it turns out. At least not yet. I understand Hebrew fluently, but I still get flustered trying to express myself. My closest friends are fellow immigrants. After visiting many different communities in Israel and living in a couple of them, I feel right at home in a neighborhood where I hear English at the playground and the supermarket.

It’s not just language, of course, but everything that comes along with it. I had planned to observe and adjust to Israeli culture, but something within me resisted and held tight to being American.

Although I don’t feel entirely American anymore, either.

The title of this blog, Making Things Complicated, came from words of encouragement I received from Benjamin Wittes of Lawfare. He told me: “Keep up what you’re doing. It’s important to keep making the world more complicated.”

This helped me name what I’m seeking as I move through life, collecting identities, communities and worldviews. I’m every version of myself, all at the same time—Israeli and American; strictly religious and heterodox; rationalist and mystical. I’m halachically Jewish, and I’m connected to my mixed heritage. My politics are radical, but I’m inclined toward moderation and pragmatism. I’m a feminist with a casual affinity for traditional gender roles.

And the longer I live in this land, the more my passion for Zionism and Jewish national renewal is coupled with support for Palestinian self-determination.

I’m never at ease in any one place. I’m at war with myself, struggling toward resolution and synthesis. I wish I could compartmentalize instead of trying to force everything to fit together peacefully. I long for simple clarity, stark truth in black and white, but I’m drawn to complexity.

I keep thinking about this quote by Mikhael Manekin, who co-founded Smol Emuni, the movement of Orthodox and observant Jews aligned with the political left. In Israel, most religious Jews are right wing, and most leftists are secular. But in a video about Smol Emuni, Manekin said that the organization is “a home for people who are left-wing because they are believers.”

Members of Smol Emuni hold progressive political views not in spite of Torah, but as an outgrowth of its tenets. We are pulled to the left because, as observant Jews, we value the rights of workers and vulnerable members of society. We care about economic equality and environmental responsibility. We strive to protect the dignity of all human beings.

This framing led me to consider that I might be thinking about all my dualities in the wrong way. Perhaps these contradictory identities are actually inherently linked. Parts of me that seem to be at war may instead nurture and sustain each other, holding me in balance.

Standing on the hilltop above the Bedouin camp, I looked out across the desert as far as I could, past bleached rocky hills to the distant riverbed, over red-roofed homes in Jewish settlements and back down to the valley below, where sun-parched volunteers kept watch. Across the highway, steadfast Bedouin families still herded their flocks. I ached for all of it, for everyone, even for the scraggly, misbegotten boys on the hilltop opposite me.

I may never be entirely Israeli, but I am wholeheartedly a Religious Zionist. Precisely because I love our land and our Torah, I am compelled to speak about what is happening to us here. What a shame to succumb to brutishness and apathy. What a shame to miss the opportunity to become who we must be: confident and secure, compassionate and just. Sometimes, it’s actually not that complicated.