What's in a (Jewish) name?

With the tenth of February just around the corner, it's hard to believe that I've been in Israel for a month already. I have big plans for my time abroad, and while I've mostly been happily consumed with Jewish studies at Pardes, I feel like there's still just so much for me to accomplish and experience in the short months that I have here this time around. Either time really does fly by too quickly when you're enjoying your life, or I'm just not taking the initiative to make it all happen in the allotted time that I have to be a Jerusalemite, until that distant, undetermined date of aliyah arrives. More than likely, it's a bit of both.

Now that I've returned to Jerusalem, several of the things that I had planned to do or decisions I'd planned to finalize have crept up on me and now stare me in the face as they remain unresolved. Moving abroad for five months takes some serious planning, and hopefully I've learned a thing or two from my previous trips abroad, like how to not run out of money; turns out, you need the stupid stuff to live on. For me, most planning involves crossing things off of lists that were hastily made in a late night panic after unsettling nightmares that remind me that things need to get done--things to shop for, things to not forget to pack, and things to take care of before leaving the country and find you should have done too late, such as notifying your bank that you are leaving the country, and will use the ATM while you're gone, so please, please, please, don't block access to my account and then tell me that I need to physically sign papers that I don't have and fax them to you in order to confirm this when I call you up in a state of agitated confusion at the airport in Montreal without a dime on me (not that I ever did that, or anything...) Other things require mental and emotional planning, such as dealing with missing loved ones, homesickness, and the possibility of escalating tensions in a country such as Israel. Lately though, I've been thinking of this seemingly trivial thing that I was considering before I left the States: should I go by my given name, or my Hebrew name while I'm in Israel?

This might seem like an odd consideration to take into account for some, and it's admittedly unique to Jews who travel to Israel and have the option to introduce themselves as, in my case, either Megan (the name I was given at birth) or Maayan (the name I chose for myself as I came out the mikveh, reborn in a sense). It's something of a tradition that some Jews like to partake in when we step into the Holy Land. It's not just about blending in, especially when you may very well receive unexpected attention and compliments on your "exotic" name if you stick with your non-Jewish, non-Hebrew one--I've met a number of Israelis who have oohed and ahhed over my "interesting" and "beautiful" name, which is immensely flattering, since when I was born, Megan was in the top ten baby names for girls in 1985 in the United States. But what does it matter, anyway? What is in a name, after all?

Choosing a Hebrew name for myself wasn't easy, and I went through a long list of names before finally settling on one. Actually, that is to say, before settling on two names. For a while, I thought I'd settle with Emuna. Phonetically, I love the way it rolls off the tongue, and the meaning of it, "faith," seemed like a good fit for an enthusiastic new convert such as myself. When I excitedly told everyone about what was to be my new Hebrew name as soon as my beit din could get it down on my official conversion papers, I was not met with the favorable responses that I was expecting.

Emuna, I was told, is a "settler name," one that makes me sound frum, and would immediately give off a certain kind of impression to any Israeli that I might want to, not be friends with, but actually date. Emuna is too pious, they said, and really, who was I trying to kid with the sudden piety schtick? It would be a perfect name, I was told, if ever I decided to move to Meah Shearim (the infamous ultra-orthodox neighborhood in Jerusalem, where not dressing modestly can get you spat upon or called names...though, that's never happened to me there, and I once shopped around there all tarted up in a t-shirt--you could see my arms past my elbows!) and get married to a Haredi man, chosen for me by a matchmaker and decided after a couple of coffee dates to test our compatibility as a couple. Yes, I'd better start shopping for my modest curtain skirts and ask myself if I'll be covering my hair with a snood or opt for shaving my head and wear the fashionable sheitel, a wig of someone else's hair, once I'm betrothed to a bearded, sidelocked, black-hatted man who will spend most of his days at shul and yeshiva, pouring over the Talmud (because Talmud scholars are sexy).

Exaggerations aside, since I had yet to experience Israel for myself at that point, I took everyone's advice seriously, and searched for another name. In retrospect, the warnings I received seem utterly ridiculous now; I can think of no one I have met in Israel, religious or secular, who would give a damn that my name would have been Emuna. But naming a person is serious, and once you have it, you're stuck with it. You can't go naming yourself something in a foreign language that might give everyone the wrong impression, especially if you're going to possibly want to live amongst them for good at some point. And for the record, with a better, more nuanced understanding of term, I don't care if I'm perceived of as a "settler" these days.

Maayan became my next choice. Totally secular, Maayan is a unisex name that means "fountain," or "spring." It has a nice symmetry to it with Megan; both start and end with the same sound, and are similar enough to compliment each other: Megan, Maayan. You see? They even look good sitting next to each other.

Everyone agreed that Maayan was the better choice. Still, I couldn't let go of my attachment to Emuna. Finally, someone asked why not just hyphenate the two names, and choose Maayan-Emuna? I have a middle name too, after all (Dolores actually, which is about as non-Jewish as Christina, and the point was really humorously driven home to me last Good Friday when I decided to walk down the Via Dolorosa with a bunch of Christians during their procession to the Holy Sepulchre). Besides, what a neat meaning the two names would have when put together: "spring of faith." It sounds about ten times more religious than Emuna ever did on its own (and a friend of mine recently pointed out that "spring of faith" would make a great name for a band, and I have to agree), but I loved it, and that's what is written on my conversion papers: Maayan Emuna, bat Avraham v'Sara. Or, in English, Spring of Faith, daughter of Abraham and Sara. Okay, now that's just really religious sounding, don't you think?

But recently, my Pardes friends have been calling me Maayan, after an Australian teacher of mine called me "Meegan," and even though I automatically responded with correcting him, I didn't mind, given his charming accent, but he wanted to know my Hebrew name and if he could call me that instead. Turns out, Maayan is a name he has long since loved and wanted to name a daughter (but alas, his wife has never been keen on the idea), and a good number of my classmates wanted to know if it was okay for them to call me Maayan as well. The topic came up again in another class, and since it's Pardes, people are enthusiastic about these Jewish things (go figure!), so more and more people have come around to calling me Maayan. And I have to say, I quite enjoy it.

On a related note, after studying chapter 15 of Genesis last week in my chumash class, we discussed a portion of the text where Avram (before becoming Avraham, or for my non-Hebrew speaking readers, when Abraham is still referred to as Abram) tells God that his inheritance of the land and being blessed with wealth and a great name for himself is meaningless without an heir, and God comes to Avram in a vision and tells him to go outside and count the stars, for that will be the number of his descendants. Rashi comments that God changing Avram's name to Avraham not long after this during the covenant with the circumcision, and the renaming of Sarai to Sarah, is related to their fortune changing when God blesses them with a child. What this has to with God renaming them was lost on me, until our teacher explained to us that there is a practice in some observant Jewish circles, where people who have been sick or especially down on their luck will change their name in order to change their "fortune" or lot in life. It's not exactly a surprising practice--the name of a newborn baby boy is not often announced until their bris, eight days after they are born, and in many other traditions, a baby girl's name isn't announced to a community until the Torah is read at services in shul--Mondays, Thursdays and Shabbat morning. Even though there is some superstition surrounding this practice (warding off the Evil Eye or the Angel of Death by not identifying the new baby, especially a boy before a bris when he becomes "complete" in his initiation into the Jewish people), it also does have to do with God renaming Avraham at his brit millah, according to some commentaries on the text (Zohar – Lech Lecha 93a, Ta’amei Minhagim 929, to be precise...I looked it up!) And in Ashkenazi circles, it's considered bad luck to name a child after a living relative. So this whole name business in Judaism, to put it mildly, is a big deal and does have significance.

While I'm hesitant to get all mystical and suggest that changing one's name will affect their lot in life  (Rashi and other commentators also put stock in astrology, and while I respect our great biblical scholars who are vastly more knowledgeable than I am when it comes to the Tanakh, it is hard for me to not make a derisive scoff at the mention of astrology...but I digress), I do think that something as big as changing one's name can change a person's mindset, and there's a lot a of power in the human mind and how it perceives something. Becoming Maayan since I've been here has had a positive effect on me. Perhaps there is something in it that makes me feel more wholly accepted and welcome into my still relatively new Jewish life. And since my Pardes community has "renamed" me in a sense, I do approach my studies and interaction within that community with a different point of view. Collecting new perspectives and experiences is all a part of the reason to keep doing down this unlikely path that I've chosen, after all.

So, I'll cross the whole, "what name should I go by?" issue off of my "List of Things to do While I'm in Israel," then. Now, onto learning how to speak Hebrew with any real proficiency, and to put those travel plans for Pesach break into motion...

Lost (and Found) in Jerusalem

After seven months in the States, living a solitary Jewish lifestyle (meaning, an incredibly hollow one, sans community), day after day of ten hour shifts of packing candy on assembly lines, sitting on my tuchus in a call center selling fruit baskets and truffles to rich elderly folks, and waitressing a few hours here and there at a local Indian restaurant, I've somehow found my way back to the Holy Land. It's been a journey, mostly one of monotony and a perseverance of the type that I didn't realize I was capable of, and at long last, I'm back; back in the Middle East, in Israel, in Pardes, in Jerusalem, in Rachavya, in my old apartment, with the Israeli president, Shimon Peres, as my unlikely neighbor. I think I'd be a better fiction writer if my life weren't stranger than fiction.

Because Israel is a place of surprises and unlikelihoods converging together to make up an entire country of simultaneous contradictions that somehow function in a strange, kind of symbiotic harmony that on the surface doesn't appear to function at all except by happy accident, I find myself surprised, and yet not, by the way in which I've reacted to my familiar, but new surroundings. When I began my day long trek from the West Coast of the United States to Israel, I expected myself to be a bundle of excited nerves and emotions; after all, I had dreamt about Jerusalem every day since I'd left, and had been pining away and longing for the vibrant Jewish existence that allows converts such as myself to fall in love with Judaism all over again in every enriching moment that we're here. I romanticized my return to an almost absurd degree, expecting myself to burst into happy and exhausted tears during the final descent into Tel Aviv, and to feel an immense amount of pride in myself for tirelessly striving for the moment that my feet would hit the hallowed grounds of the Holy Land, even the parts beneath the pavement of the Ben Gurion airport's runways and streets. Surely, the heavens would open up, angels would sing, I'd kiss the dirty, holy ground without shame, and my happiness would burst forth from the very center of my nefesh, enough to power the sherut cab all the way to Jerusalem.

Of course, this ecstatic state of being, didn't happen to me--not exactly. My emotions, though always a bit more intense than I'd like them to appear, stayed in check, as I was too grumpy from lack of sleep and was nursing a slight hangover from the night before, as my sister and I had one last hurrah in the wee hours leading up to my early morning flight. I boarded four different planes over the course of 20 hours or so, tried to sleep, failed, watched two good movies (The Fighter, and quite fittingly, the Israeli film Footnote), suffered through half of Dinner for Shmucks until, in my half-confused exhaustion, I wondered why I was subjecting myself to abject torture in the midst of a 20 hour long trip half way across the globe, turned it off, bored myself with a dry documentary on the Great Wall of China, watched two episodes The Big Bang Theory that I've seen at least a billion times, chatted with the excited and bubbly Birthright kids that I was sitting in between, and tried to focus on Joseph Conrad's Lord Jim, until I realized that my brain stew was not retaining enough of the novel to actually recall a word of it, and then tried (and failed) to sleep some more. Just between you and me, it's hard to be a bundle of excitement and happiness under such circumstances.

Still, there were glimmers of incredibly happy moments along the way, especially on the last leg of the trip from New York to Tel Aviv, such as when I found myself smiling at the busy and obviously excited crowd at the terminal. Amid the buzz of the crowd, there were dozens of Birthright kids chatting noisily about their typically Jewish, over-achieving academic aspirations, brimming with excitement over the prospect of partying in Israel, and the cute IDF soldiers and lowered drinking age laws awaiting them. There were large Haredi families that I couldn't help but watch later on with quiet fascination as they davened Shacharit, the morning prayers, right in the aisles of the plane while the rest of us dozed restlessly or stared at our movie screens with glassy, tired eyes. Then there were the tourists who have been to the Holy Land dozens of times, and yet think of it as a second (if not first) home. And of course, there were the Israelis heading back to their country and, in typical Israeli fashion, doing their part to turn the line to board the plane into a crowded free-for-all, all while shouting in Hebrew into their cell phones.

Such moments I've come to expect after living in Israel for a year, and from becoming familiar with the ways in which this country works, how Jewish life here exists both in Israeli and visiting Anglo terms, what it means to be a part of it, to be swimming in it, to be an extension of it, and how absurd, amazing, frustrating, exhausting, trying, fulfilling, rewarding and strangely normal it can suddenly all be. I know from experience that it can be impossible to explain to people who haven't been afflicted with Jerusalem Syndrome (the kind where you fall hopelessly in love with the place, not where you suddenly think that you're Jesus or a biblical prophet) what it's like to be here and feel more at home than anywhere else in the world, even with the language and cultural barriers, even with the political situation, even with the existing tensions, and even without all the luxuries of living in most places in the West (public transportation and open businesses on Saturday and readily available hot water are a couple of things that come to mind). It's not a paradise if you're looking for a slice of an idyllic and relaxed life, where people and the environment are easy going and life seems to hand itself to you on a silver platter. Life here in Israel is far too complicated for that, and being here does require a thick enough skin to appreciate Israeli brusqueness (a friendly kind of bluntness, in my opinion), a sincere and realistic understanding of the political situation in order to realize that living here isn't nearly as treacherous as the media in the West would have you think, and perhaps of course, a love affair with Judaism that is as complicated as every other love affair that I've been involved in (love is never so simple, is it?)

But it was all so normal for me to come back to, as though I was simply picking up my life where I'd left off after taking a long pause. That isn't to say that I didn't enjoy being with my family and friends back in the States, or that I didn't value the time that I did have to collect my thoughts about my next move in my life, and the direction in which I'd like to go; far from it. Whatever steps I had to take to get back to this life that I ultimately want to call my permanent, settled, day to day living, they were a part of a larger learning process where I was, more or less, figuring things out. My parent's home will always be the home that I grew up in, and Oregon, from Medford to Portland, is also a place for me to call home--and there's a certain kind of security and comfort in the familiarity of it all. But the difference between those homes and Jerusalem as my home, is that I'm all grown up now, and being grown up means to leave the nest and build one of your own. This nest will take some time to build in its entirety, but I've found the tree to build it in, which is the first step. That tree is called Jerusalem. Perhaps my quiet happiness over my return to Jerusalem, as opposed to the grandiose emotional display that I was bracing myself to erupt in, is a signal of my settling in. I don't feel as panicked this time about missing out while I'm here, or what I'm going to do about aliyah, or if the perceived legitimacy of my conversion is going hinder my ability to be as freely Jewish as one who was born into their Jewishness. This time, I feel much more Israeli in my approach to my life here: "yihyeh beseder...le'at, le'at" (it'll be fine...slowly, slowly).

After landing in Tel Aviv, I had an extraordinary turn of good luck and spent only minutes in customs, which was not the case last time I came to Israel, ("Are you Jewish? What was the last Jewish holiday you celebrated? Can you speak Hebrew? Why are you in the country? Do you know people here? Did anyone ask you to bring a package into the country? Why are you traveling with a Tanakh? Do you know what your "Na Nach Nachma Nachman Me'uman" sticker on your laptop means?"), found my bag almost immediately, and hopped on a sherut just minutes later, and was on my way to Jerusalem. A rare morning snow had blanketed the city, and as we careened into the city limits (what other way do you travel with an Israeli driver, except to careen madly down the road?), a white carpet greeted me as I became reunited once again with the city that I've come to think of as home. For the next five months, Jerusalem will be my home, and is there ever anywhere better to be?

Why Can't We Be Friends?

A couple of weeks ago, I posted in this very blog about Operation Pillar of Defense. I expressed my dismay at Hamas aiming rockets towards the holy city of Jerusalem, of the continued assault on Israeli civilians without a care in the world for civilian life, my concern for my friends taking refuge in bomb shelters, and my worry about the escalation of tensions, and what that means for peace on both sides of the conflict. I also expressed my desire to be in Israel and to stand with her and the people I care about, because I'm one of those wacky people who sees Israel as an actual functioning democracy in a sea of extremism and violence, imperfect as it may be, and love it so much, that I don't want to see its destruction. After having lived there for a year and having many friends and loved ones there who call it home, and actually possessing a non-biased education on the conflict itself, I sort of feel, you know, entitled to my opinion.

Entitled or not, I am usually pretty quiet about my political beliefs these days, meaning, I don't bother to preach them; I just live them instead. I've learned that some things cannot be discussed calmly and rationally with some people, and no matter what your intentions might be, you can't change a mind that doesn't want to be changed. But what can I say? Every once in a while I go out on a limb and talk about the things that I think and feel to people who may not be so sympathetic, or with one of those rare people who can disagree with me without hating me. Since I'm not the best at handling confrontation (I tend to get flustered and either sound like I've forgotten how to speak English or I start crying pathetically once the confrontation gets tense), I bite my tongue a lot. In some ways, it's taught me to let things go, shrug things off, and keep friends from all across the political, religious, and social spectrum. Still, I have had moments where I've felt personally attacked, and a bit disappointed in myself for not "saying something." There's something to be said for not saying anything sometimes, though. We are taught to"stand up for ourselves" so much in our culture that we seem to disregard that you can do that without starting an argument. We're also taught to pick our battles, but for some reason, we're never told how to actually do that; a battle is a battle well fought as long as we walk away feeling that we've won, and we've been vindicated through our perceived victory. We may walk away with one less friend or with a gaping wound in the relationship that is sure to only fester due to a lack of personal resolution, but damn it, who cares as long as you're still so sure that you're right?

So, I dared to discuss what was troubling me during the conflict, and it costed me a "friend." And I endured the loss of that friend in the most insulting way possible: I was unfriended on Facebook.

That's right! Unfriended. In this day and age, you might as well kick someone in the shins to express your dissatisfaction with them if you're going to remove them from your friends list. And since I was sort of anticipating less than positive feedback from some people, I kept an eye on the number of people on my friends list after posting a link to my blog, just in case someone was so disgusted with my views that they no longer wanted to even peripherally be my friend via a social network site that claims that we have hundreds of friends, simply because they are on a list of people that we know really well, went to high school with, are vaguely acquainted with, or met at a party once. Sure enough, that list changed to one number less, and I was filled with that ever familiar sense of anxiousness, because I was sure that it meant that someone had unfriended me due to my blog, and because it's pretty exciting to think that someone actually took the time to read my blog in the first place. Hey! Did this mean I had written something "controversial?" How thrilling! I felt an odd blend of pride in my rebelliousness and disappointment in what I was sure was someone unfriending me over my different opinion.

I had the culprits of my unfriending narrowed down to a few likely candidates, and pretty soon, I found out who it was. The predictability of it only compounded my sense of disappointment; I was hoping someone would surprise me, or that the unfriending wasn't due to what I knew it was over, but instead over something like someone realizing that we had met at a drunken party three years ago and had no reason to be friends with me, because I barely exist in the fuzzy, drunken memory in that person's psyche. But I was right, and I knew who it was almost immediately. Usually, like anyone, I love it when I'm right. But sometimes, I hate it because I don't want my assumptions to be correct. I messaged the culprit and asked him if I'd done anything to offend him. His only response was, "I support Palestine."

It's an interesting response because I support Palestine, too. I would support a Palestinian state, just like there was supposed to be one during the UN partition that was going to ensure an Arab state and a Jewish state in British mandate Palestine 65 years ago, before the Arabs declared war on the new Jewish state that supported them. I support them so much, that if I could be given any kind of reliable reassurance that such a state could co-exist peacefully with Israel, I'd be the first to wish a sincere mozel tov to my new Arab neighbors in their new homeland. Since it's been 65 years and we've been shown time and time again that that is not the aim of a Palestinian state as of  yet, I don't have high hopes. Hamas says it will never recognize Israel, and I believe them. I also support a theoretical Palestine so much, that I care about Palestinian safety, freedom and well being, that I don't support Hamas, an extremist terror organization that rules the Gaza Strip with an iron fist. I support Palestinians  so much, that I'd love to see them overthrow violence, extremism, propaganda, censorship, corruption and hatred in their governing bodies. I support Palestine, but nobody knows what that means in practice. You have to actually know what the reality is first before you can say that you support or don't support Palestinians or Israelis. People are baffled when you say both, because they don't know that it doesn't have to be an Us vs. Them situation. So far, the Palestinians give Israel no choice. Israel defends itself, the world watches while it gets pummeled with rocket fire, and somehow, Israel is the villain. Call me crazy, but that's crazy.

In any case, nuance is not a strong suit of a lot of people, especially in regards to such a polarizing issue, in the very polarized country that we live in. Being moderate tends to get looked down upon, no matter how moderate people claim to be. I've met true blue extremists who insist that they are so moderate, that they can't understand why everyone thinks they're crazy.

I used to be extreme in my views as well. I was very far left, and believed in ideals more than I believed in reality. I have nothing against ideals these days, but at some point, you have to take in your experiences as you grow, and understand that it is a rare treat when life presents you with such clear cut, black and white, right and wrong, good guys and bad guys situations. Life is so complicated, and yet, we seem to be unable to resist the urge to simplify things down to a yes or a no, or a right or a wrong. We're all guilty of that sometimes. I used to live that way, too. I didn't want any friends who could challenge my notions of the world, and because I was in my early 20s, I was sure that I knew everything, and was beyond impatient and intolerant of people who didn't agree with me. Needless to say, I was angry a lot, and my friends started to bore me, and my life started to bore me, and I started to bore myself. Sometimes, you need someone around who will challenge and push you to question all those things that you are so sure of. Once I started to allow those views into my life without fear of being proven wrong (and those views started with an academic interest in Judaism), life became a lot more colorful and I became a lot more open, and less angry. I made more friends, and they came from all over the spectrum of human experiences and thought. I began to value disagreements, and was humbled to be proven wrong from time to time. Turns out, it can be really satisfying to be wrong. Victory is not everything, especially when you're still angry after you've won.

So, why can't we be friends? I can't speak for the person who no longer wants to be my friend over my blog post, and it's tempting to assume what his reasons are. Whatever they are though, it makes me a bit sad. I still hold out hope that one day, the conflict will come to a peaceful resolution for both Israel and the Palestinians, even though it, as always, looks grim. It feels even more hopeless when you realize that this is an issue that some people cannot agree to to disagree upon, and that friendships can break to pieces over it. If we can't peacefully disagree with each other over a political situation and there are no rockets, or suicide bombers, or bus bombs or military operations standing between us, then I wonder what we can expect from the people who do have these things between them, and between conflict and peace?

This is one of those things that I'd love to be wrong about.