Essay

Considering 4000 Years In 2 Moments

None of the things I’ve seen or places I’ve visited on this last trip to Israel were new to me. Between the six times I’ve been here, there are few places in this country where I have not tread, and yet as I stood on a rooftop in Tsfat looking over the valley beneath I was overcome with the awe of Our Survival.

Minutes earlier I walked through an ancient synagogue which bore a hole in one of its walls from the shrapnel of a bomb. At the time of the explosion, 1967, the synagogue was full of worshippers, but none were injured from this burning piece of metal as they were simultaneously bowed as it whizzed over their backs and into the wall. It was but one piece of shrapnel and it is possible none would have died had it hit them, but at that moment that hole represented 4000 years of my people’s struggle, and there was little I could do about myself.

Instead of passing, the emotion further flooded my already leaking ducts when I came to the rooftop overlooking the valley. I saw the place where the source of every living civilization has trodden. From the far reaches of Europe and Asia and the Americas to the very cradle of humanity in Africa – all peoples at some point traversed the valley I now beheld. The great human migration came over this tiny, tiny land, a land to which we have desperately clung for countless millennia, but which has always eluded us as we were flung, time and again, into the far reaches of the globe.

With the valley below me blurred, my mind took me back 10 years when I first stood at the Kotel (the Western Wall of the Temple Mount in Jerusalem). There have been very few dull periods in my life, in fact, looking back, there is a certain maniacal ribbon along which I have soared and which has brought me countless incredible experiences. But this moment, 10 years ago, in the holiest place for Jews around the world, stands out more clearly than almost anything else in my life.

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Forever Refugees

Are refugees limited to the images which come to our minds?

People walking in herds with their possessions reduced to what can be easily carried or put on a mule. Camps, dirt roads and tents, tents, tents. Communities of tents always contained within barbed wire; tents for sleeping, tents for eating from enormous pots, tents with outhouses, the few and far between tents for children and hospitals. Volunteers, red cross, soldiers, havoc, disorder, chaos, tears, fights, death, hope. Old people carted about like the young. Young men in protest – of what they are not always sure.

The tearing apart, tearing away, something always tearing, like life itself coming apart at the seams. African, Albanian, Kurdish, South Asian, Chinese, Vietnamese, Russian, Jewish… all these faces you know, or think you know. You recognize us from something – a billboard, a commercial, a telethon, a magazine article… but this is not what a refugee is; it is not what you see, it is precisely what you don’t see that makes being one so…amazing!

Amazingly difficult, amazingly angry, amazingly inconsistent, amazingly dissociated, amazingly…unique. The fires contained within our souls, the unquenchable thirst in our throat, the turbulent imbalance in our brains… these things cannot be seen, cannot be spoken about, cannot have funds raised for them, cannot be mended – will not die out! We can only hope that the generations that follow will find peace, will find their place, will find a balance.

For the Russian-Jewish refugee circumstantially things have changed, the world as we found it having landed in an airport and disembarked from a jet, is quite different from the one found by those who landed in Ellis Island and disembarked from a steamer. Ironically, the challenges have remained the same – in spite of advances in technologies, communication, social awareness and social programming. Because the greatest challenges are not contained in the physical realm of the tenements, ghettos, sweat shops, mills, factories, street corners, pizza parlors, kitchens, living-rooms, retirement homes, oil stained handyman trucks, sweat drenched movers trucks, or pizza funk infested delivery trucks. No, the greatest challenges are in fact contained within the hearts and minds of the doctors, professors, engineers, musicians, scientists, writers, psychologists, artists, pilots… who work these new jobs and are placed in section 8 housing in neighborhoods which rank only slightly higher than the slums of our native lands.

We were “welcomed” with crossed arms into communities where what we were mattered not, for we did not speak the language of the land. This seemed to be the measure of whether one is worthy of kindness and graciousness and respect. Neither our post-doctoral degrees in nuclear physics nor the characters chiseled from years of hard struggle and making daily miracles from nothing so as to bring happiness to our loved ones, mattered. No, we were judged by whether we pronounced “please” as “pleeze”, or “birthday” as “biorzday”. For they knew not, and cared not to know, from where we came and who we were. Their only focus was on how well we fit in and how quickly we went about it.
Retention of values? Retention of traditions? Retention of pride? What for? To what end? They have no place here. Our identity, our quality as people, is now judged within the parameters of how well we pass for Americans. To this end many forsook our roots and ignored the history of our ancestry. America welcomes refugees with mores, rules, predispositions, prejudices, hatred and anger. Because it does not know, it does not see, the TV did not say, who we are. It could not, it chose to not, there probably was no way it would be able to, see and understand us for what we were, what we’re worth and what we brought to the table.

Like any human being we sought freedom, rights, choices, options, opportunities, and open doors – the fertile soil of a free society. We sought liberty, open mindedness and respect. We sought all this because, though taken for granted here, from where we came these things, these seemingly natural and unalienable rights, did not exist – not for everyone and certainly not for us. From where we came we needed to forsake ourselves, our religion, our rights, our hopes and dreams… our very lives. Forsake it all for the sake of staying alive.

There is not a thing, person, god, or place that is worth, that deserves, that has the right, that has such a claim on, your life. And yet there we were in such a place.

But within that place we came to define ourselves. From there we grew and identified with, acculturated and accepted, and regardless of the opposition, became a part of Russia . We became citizens and contributing members of society, we adopted traditions and style, we adopted all that is best and some of what’s worst. We rose in the ranks, regardless of glass ceilings, pogroms, outright denial of rights and passage, we rose. We, some holding fast, others balancing, and yet others who completely disregarded our Jewish selves, rose to the top of the sciences, the visual and performing arts, music, medicine and literature.
Does all this sound familiar? Does Germany from the turn to the middle of the century sound familiar? Is all this not the repeating story of Jews everywhere? One little difference though: we did not stay. We did not blindly stay when the door of opportunity was opened; when the chance came to escape, we did not wait for the return of pogroms and executions, mass murders and mass defamation. We did not wait.

We, stripped of our belongings, stripped of our citizenship, stripped of everything but our pride, were shipped to a foreign land with no claim to any place on earth. And there we waited, bated breath, waited and waited, in the arms of pity extended by Italy, for America to take us in. Some waited a month, some waited a few, others a year and still others never made it and were taken in by Israel or Canada. We huddled week in and week out for a sign that America realized that we had nowhere to go, that we were not comfortably home at tea waiting for the approval of a visa, that we were the “huddled masses” desperately praying for acceptance.

The changes! How immense the alteration! What we knew to be real was gone; what we thought was truth was no longer so; whom we considered friends were left behind; that which made sense was a world away; the tongue which we spoke no longer native and no longer understood. Now we are unable to express ourselves, our pain and suffering, our hopes and dreams, now we are unable to contain our anger, now we are forming into something as strange as the land where we now live, and the tongue we don’t yet speak.

Where did we go? If everything outside of us has changed should we at least contain within ourselves…ourselves? Is this not how we are going to survive?

Alas, it’s not.

The anchors of acculturation sink deeper and deeper, detached from our understanding. Every day we have less and less which makes sense, every day we become someone we do not recognize. If before we had friends to whom we could turn for help, for a shoulder, for an ear, for a hand, for a song, for a bowl of soup, a cup of tea, for a walk – they are no longer here. If before we had a job that brought us no money but a great deal of satisfaction because of the great barriers we had crossed to obtain it, the education that qualified us, the experience that now defined us – it is no longer here. If there was a soul, a spirit with which we could identify, as it embodied the place where we lived, as it contained its history that we shared, as it gave meaning to stone and street, bench and tree, symphony and hall, as it gave light and color to our pathetic little lives – we are no longer in contact with it, we no longer sense it, if one even exists where we now live.

This dis-identification, dissociation, societal and cultural dismemberment, disembodiment…is with what we are left. This is now what defines us. Now we are told to make our way in the world, and good luck! How? The answers shall never come. Some of us will strive and succeed, others will remain irrelevant and mediocre, others will die of desperation, others will take their own lives, still others will turn to drugs and crime and hate.
But in the end we will be redefined; in the end we will, as we did in Germany, Russia, Spain, Italy, Africa, Persia and the east… become a part.

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Choosing The Truth Of Our Humanity

Rain doesn’t start as a drop; a cloud begins to empty its content of moisture in a torrential release, like a damn breaking. But no matter how hard or how much it rains we feel it one drop at a time. When we soak, we are soaked by individual droplets: small pieces of that release broken from the whole and falling desperately towards earth. When rivers rise and flood, and land tears away from the slopes of mountains, when the sea engulfs us – it all happens one drop at a time. So we too, a living mass of billions of people, do not destroy as a whole, do not irrigate as a whole, we do so individually. All the horrors of which we are capable are enacted one person at a time. All the good that we bring, all the beauty we create, is done so by individuals. And just like each drop of water is indistinguishable from any other, though unique it may be, so we too are just single parts of a whole – a whole from which we are not really all that different.

Each person, regardless of race or creed, carries within themselves all of what a human being is capable. Our being a part of the greater mass ensures that we are just a small, yet an exact, manifestation of humanity’s whole. The power to inundate, the power to create and grow, the power to choose which of those paths are ours, is something contained within each of us as well.

The water, once released, once born, immediately takes on a course towards earth. That course is altered from the second of release by dozens of factors, like wind, other drops of water, pressures rising from earth itself. So we too, from the moment we are born have our trajectories constantly affected by our environment. But just as the water has no choice but to eventually hit earth and bring its effect, whether that of destruction of irrigation, regardless of influence on where it will land, so we too, inevitably, leave our mark upon the planet.

There is only one difference between us and the rain, similar to the difference between ourselves and the other species who live on this rock, and that is choice. Our trajectory is hard to break, the influences of the world, with its winds and pressures and other peoples, are hard to navigate, but in the end we are capable of doing so. We are capable of choosing our effect, we are capable of deciding where on this planet we will land. That is an enormous power that each individual holds. No matter how insignificant we feel, there is no denying that we are a very real part of a whole which cannot function without us, that when we are gone, or when we decide to leave, we must be replaced for the whole to continue to function.

Regardless of race, creed, sexual orientation, or any other “something” we choose to differentiate ourselves, the fact remains that we came from the same place, and that we are going in the same direction and we will bring our effect to bear. For any person to claim they are the right form of human, is for a droplet of rain to say it is more rain than another. We come from the same place, though our manifestations are slightly different, at the end of the day we are just copies and mutations of the same genetic code. Even from the point of religion, if we are all children of God, then we cannot be made wrong. There are no sins worse than others, except for the 7 deadly sins, none of which say anything about sex, religion, race, sexual preference or anything else that defines who we are – the deadly sins only define choices and actions. There is no religion on this planet which claims that the “sins” of who we are, are worse than the sins of our choices.

This makes who we are irrelevant. The only important thing to consider about a human being when deciding whether they are good or evil, right or wrong, is their actions toward our home and toward each of us. Does it matter whether the person who saves your drowning child is a homosexual Mongoloid Christian male, or a heterosexual Caucasoid Jewish female, or a bi-sexual Negroid Muslim hermaphrodite? Will you be any less grateful to one than another?

As long as we continue to judge people based on aspects of their lives over which they have little to no control, we continue to keep open the doors of inequality and injustice – which are the only things which stand in the way of our development as a species. If today White, Christian males are in power, but the doors for inequality are open, it means one day some other group will take control. And as long as those doors stay open, the grip of control will continue to shift. This does nothing to improve our lives, it only perpetuates actions, like war, theft of natural resources, and exploitation, which destroy lives. And if we are willing to destroy the lives of others so that we may save our own, or worse, to make ours better, then we again, in the face of truth and justice, blatantly state that though we come from the same place, though we are part of the same whole, one droplet of rain is more important, is better, than another.

To me that is more than nonsensical, it is idiotic. And if we believe people who make such claims, claims which are contrary to logic and contrary to what is claimed to be the word of God, what does that make us? If we stand by and allow pure, exposed, lies to be thrown in our face, when we are fully aware that they are lies, what does that make us? If we continue to benefit from things which we have not earned, realities for which we have not worked to create – which are so simply because of where and from whom we were born, what kind of people are we? When we have to continue to fight to grant individual groups equal rights, one at a time, how stupid does that makes us? If we realize that we cannot discriminate against one group (i.e. Women, Blacks…), how have we not come to the conclusion that we cannot discriminate against anybody? We claim to be intelligent, but have remained blind to that simple truth for thousands of years. Instead of focusing time, money and energy on the very real problems of our world, we continue to waste our resources battling over something which is self evident: equality.

We have in our hands the greatest tool yet created by man: the ability to communicate with the world – without censorship. Can we, for a moment, take that ability, leave the cats and the memes alone for just a day, and proclaim our realization of the truth of our equality. Can we take a moment and in a voice almost every person on the planet will hear, say that we are not the fools we seem to be, that we know the truth, and that we will have no more lies? Can we say to each other that we realize how important each of us are, that each of us deserves the respect of everyone else simply for the reason that we, each of us, are human? That the choices we make, the decisions we enact on the world and each other, are the only thing which matter and determine the quality of our humanity? And that anyone who says otherwise is an enemy of humanity, and therefore an enemy of each one of us, and that we will not stand to have enemies controlling our lives and the future of our race.

I believe we can because I believe in the fact that deep down inside each one of us, beyond the greed and jealousy and misunderstanding and unfounded hate, we are capable of every good which is possible for our species. I believe that within each of us there lies justice, truth and respect. I believe that we all have the ability to change and grow and know what is right, not what is easy, but what is right.

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The Motorcycle

Though a lonely endeavor by virtue of space, motorcycles function to bring people together. It doesn’t matter whether you ride a sport bike, cruiser or enduro, or whether it’s a Honda, BMW or Harley, as long as you ride you belong. On the loneliest road, after hours of solitude you will pass a biker and he will extend his hand in greeting, engulfing you in a wave of warmth and camaraderie.

A thousand unspoken words pass through that hand, and there is only one way to hear those words: buy a motorcycle. Then, as you make your first fall, soak during your first unexpected downpour, blow a tire in the middle of nowhere, have your marrow frozen by the damp and wind, become happily lost on precipice framed switchbacks… then all of you will be shared in the wave and as the other passes he too will know and share your story.

This sounds like owning a motorcycle is an exclusive pursuit, but I would argue that it is one of the most inclusive activities in the world, capable of bringing together people from every corner of the world.

A motorcycle is the cheapest form of mechanized transportation available, and the most ubiquitous throughout the world. This means that rich or poor, 1st or 3rd world, you have access to the club. Doctors will ride next to teachers, and plumbers, and fruit vendors. Unlike so many other pursuits, regardless of whether you are seasoned or a novice, you are welcome in the club, and no grizzly rider of 30 years will scoff at the youth on his first steed when he waves “hello”. The motorcycle is the great equalizer; it eliminates the divergence of peoples that society inflicts on us. The motorcycle also means access. Access to parts of the world where cars cannot reach, access to people who are generally more empathic towards the traveler for whom safety and comfort are not a given. That degree of shared danger, like that of wars or other worldly struggles, creates a bond between riders, and those who understand their challenges.

Invariably motorcycles pique interest, arriving in a town or village on a motorcycle brings out the children and the locals. You are more likely to be invited into a home, more likely to be told stories and dreams of travel. You are therefore more likely to discover the underlying veins of similarity between yourself and the strangers you have met. In that manner a motorcycle functions to create ties of peace and understanding that few diplomats can achieve. You don’t need to go to college to learn how to ride a motorcycle and to understand the people you meet. All you need is an open heart and an open mind. And it is meeting real people which is the best weapon against ignorance and hate.

Futbol (soccer) has had a similar unification of peoples, as has art. But motorcycles offer even more as they bring people together who are further apart geographically, as well as financially or socially, and engage them in a shared struggle and joy which binds them ever firmly together. In the past, war has served as the great unifier, the creator of lifelong friendships. But these ties rarely cross borders, and the world pays a debt of millions dead for those sacred ties.  Whereas bikers from every country will meet and share stories of their adventures, and open the door to sharing their lives, and friendships flourish quickly as people discover otherwise hidden similarities. No death, no hate, just a shared love of the road and of our world’s great natural gifts.

A secondary influence of motorcycles is that of natural preservation. The average motorcycle is as fuel efficient than the most advanced hybrid, at a fraction of the cost. The average biker seeks the road to witness in person our glorious mountains and forests and lakes and sunsets. This exposure, this removal from our encasement in houses and offices, makes bikers appreciate our world and work all the harder to see it preserved for future generations. I would argue that if every person on the planet were to spend just one weekend in a place like Glacier National Park, or in the Alps, or in the Serengeti, they would think twice before throwing something out the window, or voting to remove protections on wildlife refuges, or waste water. Bikers are witnesses to our nature’s beauty more often than most people, and if they are not environmentalists at first, they quickly become so.

The travel informs, the struggle unites, and the passion infects. Motorcycling is truly the next step in cultural understanding, the creation of the bonds of peace, the promotion of sustainable travel, and preservation of our planet.

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