Trying to Mourn by the Book

Last week was Tisha b'Av, the "saddest day of the Jewish calendar." Commemorating the destruction of the Temple, observant Jews fast for a full day, restrict Torah study to the sad books of Lamentations, Job and Jeremiah, and mourn in typical Jewish fashion. This was my second Tisha b'Av as a Jew, and even though I was in Jerusalem last year for my first one, I just couldn't get swept up in the sorrow associated with the day. This year, in a small American town with so few Jews that you think you'd sooner encounter a unicorn than a fellow Semite, I struggled for a few days with the idea of fasting for the full day before deciding against it. After all, the Olympics were on and it was my father's birthday, too. I wasn't exactly in a mournful mood.

While I understand and can get behind the fact that a large portion of Jewish observance is based on tradition and ritualistic practices, and participating in them enriches one's experience as a Jew, and I certainly am not the only Jew who feels emotionally disconnected from mourning events that happened a couple thousand years ago, Tisha b'Av sits uneasily with me for a number of reasons. Some of those reasons are personal, some are political, and some...I can't quite put my finger on.

Politically, I'm ambivalent about the idea of mourning the destruction of the Temple while Jews have since found their way back home to our ancestral holy land once again. I don't care how volatile or controversial the state of Israel is--it's ours, and as it exists, that's nothing short of a miracle. The fact that people are speaking a revitalized Hebrew as their mother tongue when the language was nearly dead and relegated to religious and academic usage for a thousand years, is remarkable. A country that is home to Jews from Europe, the Middle East, Africa, the Americas and virtually every other pocket of the world along with a historically unprecedented number of converts, is profound. The existence of a country where Jews outnumber all other groups would have been unheard of a half a century ago, and only fantasizing, idealistic Zionists would have ever believed it would one day be a reality. Modern day Israel is a testament to the vitality and endurance of the Jewish people. It's hard for me to long for the restoration of the Temple, or Judaism as a sacrificial and centrally located religion. I long for the Israel that I left at the beginning of June this summer. Sure, it's imperfect (as is every nation on the planet since the beginning of time), and the challenges that Israel and Judaism itself face in a modern, largely hostile world, are massive, to say the least. But it is what it is today, because after the destruction of the Temple and the Jewish exile that followed, Jews were forced to adapt throughout the world and throughout time, maintaining their rituals, customs and traditions, and therefore, their identity. And here I am, a 26 year old WASPY small-town ex-religion-basher who only began to learn about Judaism a few short years ago, embracing a Jewish identity and faith as though it's what I have been missing my whole life...because it is. If Jews had not been dispersed throughout the world, who is to say that I would have found my way to Judaism, and my beloved, sorely missed Jerusalem?

This is not to say that observing Tisha b'Av is useless and the day is irrelevant. It's a part of Jewish history and the events the day memorializes could have very well destroyed the Jewish people. But Jews and Judaism were not ultimately destroyed, and given the present day circumstances of the existence of the state of Israel...well, there's something redemptive about that, right? Isn't it evidence of a Jewish renaissance? A kind of salvation?

Of course, many Orthodox Jews would read this (and they probably aren't) and label me an ignorant convert (that is, if they even considered me a legitimate convert in the first place). True redemption, the end of mourning the loss of the Temple, thus rendering Tisha b'Av obsolete, will only happen when the Messiah comes, all exiles are gathered out from the diaspora and back in the Holy Land, and all with the guidance of God's willing hand. Yes, I'm aware of Orthodox views of the state of Israel (some of them favorable, some of them insisting that Israel is a blasphemous example of Jews forcing God's hand before it is time for our redemption), and I'm aware that deeply religious Jews may actually be capable of mourning the destruction of the Temple and the Jewish exile that resulted from them (both Temples, that is) with a real sense of, well, mourning. But the saddest day on the Jewish calendar? What about Yom HaShoah?

Yes, Yom HaShoah is a new addition to the Jewish calendar, and was only established in 1953 by the state of Israel, and has been more controversial than the electricity vs. fire on Shabbat debate. Why don't we fast on Yom HaShoah? Why don't we engage in traditional Jewish mourning rituals? Why do ultra-Orthodox Jews in Israel refuse to stand in silence during the sirens like the rest of Israel does in honor of the dead? Why are they inclined to go to the Kotel on Tisha b'Av and grieve the destruction of the Temple, but not to stand for a couple of minutes out of respect for the 6 million Jews that were brutally murdered only a few short decades ago? Are they heartless? 

Of course, the answer is no, they are not inherently heartless, and like most things involving Jews and Judaism, it's complicated. While I was struggling with observing Tisha b'Av last year in Jerusalem and figuring out what exactly that meant to me, I pondered these same questions. As it turns out, the way in which Yom HaShoah was established is a perfect example of Jewish modernity butting heads with Jewish tradition, and the schism in Jewish thought over how Judaism should thrive in the modern world.

Yom HaShoah happens to fall in the month of Nisan, a month that traditionally forbids some mourning rituals and is supposed to be a festive time. Why did the Knesset, then, decide that (against the suggestion of the Rabbinate to designate the Tenth of Tevet as the official day to memorialize the Holocaust) Nisan would be the month that Yom HaShoah was to occur? Perhaps there's something kind of poetic about observing the solemn Yom HaShoah right after Pesach, when we celebrate our freedom from slavery in Egypt, followed shortly by mourning those who fought and died for the establishment of Israel or were killed in terror attacks on Yom HaZikaron (Israel's Memorial Day), to immediately (seriously, the next day) celebrating our freedom again on Yom Ha'atzmaut (Israel's Independence Day). Or maybe the Rabbinate and the Knesset just really didn't like each other and often bickered over how much say one should have over the other...seems plausible. 

But there's more to it than that. Standing at attention during a nationwide sounding of a siren, observing a moment of silence, flying flags at half-mast, showing Holocaust documentaries on television and playing somber music on the radio, are all fairly modern and goyish ways to commemorate the dead. It's understandable that some ultra-Orthodox Jews would have reservations about mourning in such a way, especially if there is a disconnect between how they do mourn, how they understand mourning, and how they feel when they mourn. Imagine being expected to mourn someone close to you in a completely foreign way, and how uncomfortable and even meaningless that would seem. In ancient Egyptian culture, mourning Egyptians supposedly shaved their eyebrows when their cats died. Wouldn't it feel strange, if not absurd, to engage in such a practice after your beloved kitty passed, if you were, say, not an ancient Egyptian? Wouldn't you do more than raise the eyebrows that you refuse to shave off at the mere suggestion of it? And as your deceased cat is given a lavish funeral before being embalmed and mummified and lovingly placed in a tomb with cream and mice for the afterlife, you would protest. After all, you probably didn't regard your feline companion as a deity (much to the chagrin of your cat), and these rituals would feel meaningless...even offensive.

Some of the ultra-Orthodox in Israel also claim that their way of life commemorates those killed in the Holocaust. They continue to live just as they lived in Eastern European shtetls before that world was wiped out of Europe, and at every moment, they are remembering and honoring the dead...but I can't help but wonder what that means as far as remembering and honoring the Jews who didn't live in Eastern European shtetls, such as the assimilated and cosmopolitan Jews who were killed simply for being Jewish, even if they looked and behaved like their non-Jewish counterparts. 

And finally, Tisha b'Av, some opinions hold, is the official Jewish day of mourning, and the Holocaust, while horrific and still so fresh in the memory of the Jewish people, is just another tragic episode in Jewish history, like the destruction of the Temple. It's a hard argument for me to accept, especially if the destruction of the Temple is so far removed from our understanding of tragedy, while the entire world, Jewish and non-Jewish, is still reeling from the trauma and repercussions of the Holocaust. I was in tears all throughout the day on Yom HaShoah. I was feeling guilty for sitting in an Aroma cafe drinking Turkish coffees with my laptop open in front of me, researching and pondering how much Tisha b'Av should mean to me, on Tisha b'Av. But I don't see Judaism as a guilt-based religion, hence the lack of observance of something that I am ambivalent about. It's important to me to find a balance between meaning in my observances and rituals so it doesn't feel like hollow, just-go-through-the-steps tradition, but to also recognize the worth in engaging in such traditions and rituals as a Jewish person. The ex-atheist in me tells me to tread lightly and consider what my religious observances mean to me, and the newly spiritual side of me tells me not to shrug off observances that remind me of who I have chosen to be. I can keep kosher while I cook on Shabbat, drop f-bombs as though I suffer from Tourette Syndrome all throughout my pining for Jerusalem blog, and appreciate and value modesty while I love wearing fishnet stockings with heals and a mini-skirt. Not every Jew would agree with me, but I see nothing conflicting or contradictory in my behavior. I want to be Jewish, but I want to be Megan as a Jew, more specifically. If the day ever comes where it feels right to trade in my mini skirts for ankle-skirts, keep food on the hot plate on Shabbat and to clean out my filthy mouth, then I'll still be Megan as a Jew. But it has to feel right.

And of course, the subject of mourning for me as a convert is also complicated. A week before Tisha b'Av, was the one year anniversary of the death of my best friend from my childhood. When he passed away, quite suddenly and unexpectedly, I was in Jerusalem. I had been there for about a month and was living in the dorms at Hebrew University, exhausting myself in ulpan. I had few friends since I was one of a handful of students who were there for the whole summer, and it was months before I found my circle of friends at Pardes. I was also having trouble disengaging from some relationships that I left behind in the States. I was lonely and still settling into my new environment, still settling into my Jewish skin, and then suddenly, friends I had hardly spoken to since grade school were emailing me about Ryan's death. 

I didn't mourn, not completely, anyway. I cried a bit, reminisced about my childhood, felt remorse for the reasons why we eventually drifted apart, unburied some dormant, unresolved issues from that time, contemplated my own mortality, panicked over the thought of wasting my life, second guessed everything I'd been doing for the last several years, and then cried some more. I didn't come to terms with any of it, though. I didn't know how to. So instead, I pushed it all away, shoved as many of the worms back into the can as I possibly could, and stared at Hebrew textbooks and flash cards until I thought my eyes would bleed. Somehow, a year passed, and the occasional sense of sadness that comes with loss would suddenly boil up to the surface, even as things improved for me, and I'd panic a bit and worry that everyone and everything I love might suddenly disappear from my life, and loss after loss from the whole year stacked up on themselves. Then I came back here. Another loss.

I am relatively ignorant when it comes to Jewish mourning. I haven't been faced with a close death in a Jewish community and my confusion over how to simply mourn someone even outside of a Jewish context, only makes it more difficult to wrap my head around. As the anniversary of my friend's death approached, I started to wonder what I should do; do Jews mourn non-Jews the same way they would mourn a Jew? How would I mourn my parents and other family members when the time comes? How would they mourn me? Will I be laid to rest in Israel? What about my Conservative conversion? What will the Rabbinate say about that? Will I be married and have kids? Will my grave be separate from them? Does Mom know that I shouldn't be cremated? What do I do?

After speaking on Skype with a teacher of mine from Jerusalem, I was comforted a bit to be told that, while such questions are big questions and are important, there are some satisfactory answers to them. It also became apparent that I obsessed over Jewish mourning rituals around the anniversary of my friend's death in place of actually mourning him, and coming to terms with his death and all of the things that his death had conjured up for me. "I'll visit his memorial," I told myself. It's been a few weeks. I can't bring myself to visit it, even though I know that I need to. Maybe confronting it in some concrete way will keep me from tearing the scabs off, and will finally allow some old wounds heal.

Which brings me to my final thought on mourning, rituals, and Tisha b'Av. Mourning a past that is only mine in a collective sense while I live in an exciting, miraculous, amazing time that allows a country like Israel to exist in a post-Temple destruction, post-exile, post-Holocaust world as a Jew who does not have the distinction of being born as such, feels...weird. Not weird like, "wow, you Jews are weird with your sack cloth and ashes, your fasting and sitting on the ground style of mourning...you guys wear black all the time, so isn't that, like, a symbol of mourning and stuff?" But it feels weird on a personal level. When I participated in the minor fasts like the Fast of Gedalia and the Fast of Esther, I did so because I was living in a Jewish environment where it felt enriching and meaningful to participate in such observances. But Tisha b'Av carries so much more weight with it, that I have to pause and consider what it means. It's certainly possible to glean meaning from Jewish holidays even if there is a bit of a disconnect between the actual thing it's based on and your life as you live it. Judaism is, after all, an ancient religion filled with codes and laws, and yet it has stood the test of time precisely because we are so hesitant to throw out the old and welcome in the new, redefining Jewishness and pushing boundaries that lead off into no man's land...or no Jew's land, as it were. That kind of attitude is a double edged sword; on the one hand, it means preservation of a people and its culture, but on the other hand, it means a lot of strife and clashing with the changing world, and the Jews who want to change with it while bringing Judaism with them as they go. Tisha b'Av, because of it's weightiness and because of it's association with mourning, and because of my disconnect between mourning and being observant, it feels weird for me.

In any case, Tisha b'Av isn't going anywhere any time soon, and hopefully, neither am I (except to Jerusalem, of course). Perhaps I'll have enough time on the planet to come to terms with the fact that, at this point in my life, I can't feel the meaning of Tisha b'Av in my soul, even if I try to translate the day into something personalized for me. So many things to come to terms with, so little time. Maybe all I'm really trying to say is...I've mourned so much lately, that adding a day of even existential sadness, is too much. I want to be happy that there is an Israel in this world, and I was there, rather than lament the many years of exile that seemed to destroy Israel altogether. That in itself, like the personal losses we can't get over, seems unbearable and impossible to come to terms with.

Nazis Caught in The Twilight Zone

So, instead of writing fiction to smear all over my blog like a child smears feces on what would otherwise be a passable crayon sketch to put on the fridge (I still suck too much to show my fiction to the wide world, is what I'm trying to say), I've decided to climb out of my "why am I not in Israel, I'm going to die here, oh God!" mood for a bit and, you know. Live. And what would life be without good stories?

I love stories. It's safe to say that I'm probably addicted to them. Whether it's books, movies, history, poems, songs, people with interesting lives or thoughts, the crazy guy on the street corner, my own bizarre, half-cocked ideas and fantasies, or even television, I love stories. Sometimes I make up stories about people's lives when I don't know much about them, just because it makes the ho-hum moments of the typical day a little more interesting. Sitting next to a weirdo who won't stop talking to you about God knows what on your morning bus route? Well, what if that weirdo was really an undercover agent playing up his cover to blend into the type of scenery we commoners expect on a city bus, such as the typical weirdos who won't leave us alone, no matter how far we shove our noses into our books or how loud we crank up the volume on our iPods? Well, what if he was a secret agent on some sort of risky, confidential mission that only people in the higher echelons of politics and crime know about? What if he knows all the things that conspiracy theorists have wet dreams over, and he's just in disguise because he has to keep his holy-shit-worthy knowledge to himself until he gets paid a gajillion dollars to get that information into the right hands?

You know, like Val Kilmer in The Saint.

This scenario gets weird and borderline creepy if you let it run away with you, and you have to remember that the smelly meth-head on the bus is, well, just a smelly meth-head on the bus...as boring as that is.

But what if...okay, just hear me out. What if the meth-head was like Val Kilmer in The Saint, and you're totally missing your chance to be his Elisabeth Shue love interest? What if?

Bizarrely placed day-to-day fantasies aside (seriously, I might have an undiagnosed psychological issue or tumor, so if you don't do this kind elaborate and extensive daydreaming in your daily life, you're totally normal and healthy, and probably function much better than I do), I do love me some stories. And lately, I've been getting into the stories of The Twilight Zone.

Yeah, that's right. The Twilight Zone. The late 1950s-mid-1960s television show about all things creepy and bizarre. The paranormal, sci-fi, post-apocalyptic world scenarios (we were in the throes of the Cold War then, after all), mind over matter, life after death, missing time, and that creepy motherfucker that William Shatner saw out on the wing of the plane, all have their special place in the stories of this beloved classic television series, and in our psyches.

Seriously, WHAT THE FUCK?

But what I really love about The Twilight Zone, is not just that it can legitimately give its viewers the creeps 40+ years after its airing, long before our culture decided to dive off the deep end of the creep factor and into the gratuitous gross-out, sociopathic, depraved cheapness that are movies such as Hostel, The Human Centipede, and other over the top cinematic crap that I refuse to waste a second of my life indulging in. (Yes, I have an opinion about those movies, and I've never seen them. When a movie or story is known more for its reputation of ickiness rather than what it actually is, like say, American Psycho, which I have seen and don't care to read, then I think I can skip the hour and a half of mindless brutality masquerading as something deep and profound, and get right to the judgment and condemnation part of the movie-going experience). No, what I love most about The Twilight Zone, is that it goes into the depths of the human psyche and explores our fears, emotions, memories we'd rather forget, and really, the darkest parts of our humanity--the things that, for better or worse, make us human. It does a damn good job of doing this, too. It's impressive that a show dating back to the infancy of a new storytelling medium, the television, can so consistently and successfully examine difficult human experiences and emotions in both a nuanced and bizarre fashion. Or maybe not. Perhaps I give modern television too much credit. While there are some good series out there today, so much airtime is dominated by the never-ending stream of "reality" television shows that basically have millions of viewers watching to see who will fuck who at the end of (or during) whatever stupid competition they are involved in. Seriously, these shows are all an elaborate mating ritual for us to watch like a bunch of voyeurs who forgot that you can just as easily access free porn on the internet, and get to the final outcome of the show's premise, and in more detail to boot. The existence of these shows are only here to feed us a sad slice of the crap pie that we've made of our pop-culture. It's all so hollow. 

So the other night, while I was staying up way too late yet again, I was looking through the premises of the Twilight Zone episodes available on Netflix, and came across the one called "Death's Head Re-visited." This episode is not quite like the other episodes, at least for me and probably many other Jews, because of it's subject matter: the Holocaust.

"Death's Head Revisited" was written and aired in 1961, during the infamous Eichman Trial. In the story, a former SS officer returns to the Fatherland from his exile in South America, convinced that enough time has passed for him to return and wax nostalgic over his days as a brutal officer at Dachau during WWII. The officer, Gunther Lutze, checks into a local inn and the woman at the front counter is clearly shaken by his presence. She reluctantly admits to him, after he intimidates her, that he reminds her of an SS officer from the war, as the SS commonly used to stay at the inn. Lutze insists that he was battling on the Russian front during the war, and she must have him mistaken for someone else. Still, clearly getting off on her obvious fear of him, he implies rather heavily that he is that former SS soldier that she suspects him to be, but what is she going to do about it?

Lutze decides to go to the Dachau camp to revisit his glory days of absolute power. A true sadist, Lutze wanders about the ruins of the camp, and reminisces fondly of hangings, denying water to a dehydrated man begging on his knees, and rousing exhausted prisoners from their slumber early in the morning in freezing temperatures to go outside into the snow and do "some exercises." The imagery used during Lutze's recollection of the days from the war are quite convincing. By this time, seventeen years after the end of the WWII, the world knew what those death camps looked like, and what the prisoners suffered through within their walls and electrified fences. It's somewhat alarming to see it in the context of a Twilight Zone episode.

Lutze imagines his victims as they were in their last moments.

Then Lutze encounters a familiar face when a former inmate, still clad in his striped prisoner's garb, shows up. They discuss the war and the past a bit, with Lutze nonchalantly considering the past to be nothing terribly offensive, that a few silly mistakes were committed, and of course, he was only following orders, just like any good soldier would. The man from his past, Alfred Becker, is calm in his demeanor...as calm as the dead. He reminds Lutze that ten million human lives were extinguished in the camps and that the tortures and inhumane evils they were subjected to are a bottomless pit of human depravity and injustice. When Becker informs Lutze that he's there to be put on trial, and Lutze suddenly remembers that Becker was among the many victims killed by his brutality, he panics and tries to leave. The Dachau gates close; Lutze can't leave, because you see, he is to be put on trial for crimes against humanity by the very people he tortured and killed. 

Lutze, of course, flips out. But there's nothing he can do, and within the blink of an eye he finds himself on the floor of one of Dachau's bunkers. As he looks up, the camera lingers on his horrified expression before revealing to the audience what he sees:

Lutze's jury

Gripped with panic, Lutze attempts to plead his case ("Let me go! This is inhumane! I was following orders!"). He tries frantically to escape while Becker reads from a list of charges, all that Lutze is on trial for. He numbers the murders, the tortures and the human experiments while the faces of the victims look on solemnly and hauntingly real. Lutze begins to scream in protest as Becker continues to read, almost drowned completely out by Lutze. His screams are so piercing, so convincing, that there's an uncomfortable moment as the viewer, where you almost feel sorry for him. Almost: "What, feel sorry for a Nazi? What's wrong with me?" But that's the point: most of us, I like to think, have a heart, and naturally deplore the sound of the tortured screams of another human being. And yet there's some satisfaction in it as well, because we know what kind of man Lutze is. Many like him got away with murder and so much more after the war, and were never brought to trial. This realization makes the whole story that much more compelling. Lutze, of course, has no remorse for his actions. The remorse he feels comes from being caught and to face punishment for what he really knows was beyond wrong.

Lutze passes out, and when he comes to, only Becker is there. Lutze begins to run all over the camp like a wild animal caught in a cage, while Becker reads him his sentence: a lifetime of insanity. What's more, is that he can feel the pain he has inflicted upon his victims; he feels the bullets that pierced their bodies, he feels the fear that gripped them and he feels the torment of the medical experiments. He writhes and screams while Becker tells him, "This is not hatred. This is retribution. This is not revenge. This is justice. But this is only the beginning, Captain. Only the beginning. Your final judgment will come from God." 

Lutze writhing in pain while Becker looks on.

At the end of the episode Lutze is found on the grounds of the Dachau camp and has to be sedated before they take him away to a sanitarium. Meanwhile, doctors try to understand what could make a man unravel so quickly. As they stand in the Dachau ruins, the doctor wonders aloud, why Dachau is still standing. The innkeeper from the beginning also mentions wanting to burn the place to the ground. In Rod Serling's closing monologue, he states, "There is an answer to the doctor's question. All the Dachaus must remain standing. The Dachaus, the Belsens, the Buchenwalds, the Auschwitzes - all of them. They must remain standing because they are a monument to a moment in time when some men decided to turn the Earth into a graveyard. Into it they shoveled all of their reason, their logic, their knowledge, but worst of all their conscience. And the moment we forget this, the moment we cease to be haunted by its remembrance, then we become the gravediggers. Something to dwell on and to remember, not only in the Twilight Zone but wherever men walk God's Earth."

I sometimes have a difficult time with anything revolving around the Holocaust. I've never completely explored Yad Vashem despite my year in Jerusalem; one walk through the Children's Memorial after visiting other parts of the museum knocked my spirits too low to continue through the rest of the place. I attended only half of the day of classes at Pardes on Yom HaShoah, knowing that there is only so much I can stomach. I am consistently disappointed in, and sometimes disgusted with Holocaust movies. I have accepted that Hollywood is not in the business of telling historical truths or striving for accuracy, nor should it be. And I am, for some reason, more receptive to theater productions that touch on the Holocaust. But most movies, no matter how well-made and well-acted The Pianist is, no matter how sensitive and respectful Schindler's List is, I just can't watch them with any sort of cathartic satisfaction. What actually happened is too awful for me to wrap my head around, so watching a movie about it seems ultimately absurd.

But I do also recognize that people tell stories, whether through cinema, stage, music, text, or conversation, to try to understand, analyse, describe and express the wide variety of human experiences and emotions. We're complicated, we do complicated things for complicated reasons, and we don't always fully understand why. And yet, isn't that what people are always trying to answer? Who, what, when, where and how are easy enough most cases. It's the why that we understand the least, but try so hard to. 

I was really surprised by and impressed with "Death's Head Revisited," perhaps because it doesn't ask why. It's simply the story of a sadistic brute who thought he got away with murder a thousand times over, but was ultimately caught, tried, judged and punished. That is satisfying catharsis. I had the same feeling, (but a bit more exhilarated), when I watched Inglorious Basterds (the many times I've watched it). Sometimes, I just want to see Hitler get his face blown to bits by a machine gun, and clap my hands in triumph over a theater full of Nazis exploding. Sure, it sounds awful, but hey, I'm human. We can be pretty awful. Better to satisfy that desire for revenge via fantasy and storytelling, especially when feeling so powerless. Revenge stories help us cope. We get to imagine taking down evil and bringing it to justice. It's great a story, and we tell it over and over again. 

Now, if you'll excuse me, I have some more stories to watch, read and listen to. I'm always living my story, so I might as well escape from it for a bit and tell myself another one. Storytelling and fantasizing, if you do it well, can be rather illuminating and thought provoking, after all.

Still Lost in Jerusalem...

It's bizarre to physically be in one place, and the rest of you in another. As new problems, revelations and uncertainties arise, I've become single-minded in my focus to get back to Jerusalem, and it has become an all-consuming obsession. Sometimes I think I'm running away from something. Sometimes, I think I'm running towards something. In either case, as things currently stand, I'm running in place. I'm sure I'm not the first or last young Jew to fall in love with Jerusalem only to be brokenhearted by forced separation from her, but for those of us who have experienced it, we know that one may fall in love dozens of times throughout an entire lifetime, but Jerusalem is the love that takes your breath and your heart away. I'm just not the same person now.

People spend years deciding and carefully planning on moving to a foreign country, permanently. Me? I dive in head first with reckless abandon. My impulsive nature has caught up with me and my recognition of it has had no effect on alleviating my desire to go back to Jerusalem. Start over. Begin a new chapter. The current story arc has become tiresome.

So, while my days are pretty much the same, and my mind is set on one, single goal, I've decided to escape for a while from this...whatever this is that I'm doing in this blog, and wander off into the land of fiction. I used to be a daydreamer, so it shouldn't be too hard to conjure up that old behavior again, and put it to use with my writing. Fiction is not something that I do all that often, so I'm terribly rusty, but I need to put my mind somewhere else for a while before I snap, and I might as well throw it onto this blog. So, it's story time, folks. Stay tuned...