Note: I’ve gotten several responses commenting on the lack of a blog for Days 8 and 9. Damn, give me a break, this writing stuff isn’t that easy. For all you guys know, I’m just sitting naked in my Berkeley apartment in my fluffy slippers making all this stuff up. The fact of the matter is that I’m not that resourceful and life isn’t that interesting, but I will try to keep trucking, I mean blogging, on.
Photo Caption: The imposing Diaspora Museum building
My topic today is my visit to the Disaspora Museum. It doesn’t take much insight to recognize that below the surface of everything in Israel is a very deep river or lake of emotional angst. Tel Aviv does a good job of hiding it, ignoring it or just plain covering it up. Jerusalem is obviously less successful. One can go on a simple search for a stalk of celery and just an inadvertent glance at a bookshelf and suddenly you are transported down into that river. Whether it’s the Holocaust, the progroms, or even Moses at the Red Sea, there is always lurking the story of why this place is called Israel and not Ali Babaland. That “story” is what the Diaspora Museum is about.
The building is a huge block structure in the middle of Tel Aviv University so to get to it, you have to pass through thousands of beautiful, young students all hanging out on the lawn talking about matters of consequence. (actually I’m guessing at that part) A sign in the lobby says something like, “This exhibit takes 4 or 5 hours if you don’t have the time to do that, come back another time when you can.” And since I only had about an hour to spend, I left and actually came back the next day.
There are several paths to take on this journey. For right brained people (or is it left) you can go down the chronology wing, which is what I did. It starts with an excellent video and then rooms and rooms starting with the destruction of the temples (500BC? and 70AD) through the Babylonian exile, Spanish Inquisition, Russia, Germany and back to Israel. Or if you are a left brained person (or is it right) you can follow the religious path which follows the Torah as it is schlepped all over the world, more on a geographic odyssey rather than by time. Finally, there is a cultural path which goes by subject, family, community, art, philosophy and music. The music room was great; there was a long video of Itzhak Perlman and a group of Klezmer musicians jamming for about an hour. It was mesmerizing.
The highlight for me was the journey from Vilna, Lithuania to the streets of New York around the turn of the century. That was the trip my mother’s dad took. I know this is corny, I know the story has been told ad nauseam, and I’ve already done the Elis Island trip, but this was different. Why? Because I was in Israel. There I said it and I’m sure that is one of the reasons the Museum was set up in the way it was, so that I could feel that exact emotion. The entire tour came down to this one epiphany which was watching my grandfather Abe, who lived with us for 10 years and almost never spoke a word climbing on a boat in Eastern Europe and dragging his sorry butt to America. (Actually, not specifically my Grandpa Abe but someone’s Grandpa Abe) Because of the 4 hour prelude, I was prepared to feel his fear of the Cossacks, his bundling up of his possessions, his saying goodbyes, seasickness on the ocean and landing in New York with nothing and finally making his way to of all places Aurora, Illinois. What was he thinking? This was not a brilliant man or a man with incredible drive, he was just a poor Jew running away from danger. He came to America, opened a small furniture store, married a dynamo of a woman, had 4 daughters and from then on the cycle took its natural course. As I walked out of the Museum I had shed some tears for Grandpa Abe and really kicked myself for never having sat down with him and asked him to tell the story in his own words. He never spoke of his youth and not only did I never ask him, but I never even had curiosity about it until today. Honestly, how could I have missed that chance.
I’m not sure what this Diaspora journey has to do with Israel. I’m sure the story is a good one and worth telling whether or not it has a Zionist ending. Personally, I think I would have preferred that Jews ended up spread out all over the world as a small but enlightened minority. The point being that as a Jew I don’t need Israel to give the story a happy ending. The enduring lesson, if there is one, is that it is possible to start with nothing and end up with something. But that lesson can easily apply to almost any dot-com entrepreneur, as well as its associated lesson of going from something to nothing. There’s another level to the “lesson” and that is that not only is there a Jewish way to go through this process, but that Jews have done this over and over again for the last 3000 years. So depending on your philosophy on life, Jews are either doing something really, really right or something really, really wrong. I think to some people (probably not me at this point) the ultimate fate of Israel will determine what side of those competing philosophies you agree with. For myself as a good Jewish Dad, I think I taught my kids whatever the Jewish “secret” was as best as I understood it and as it was handed down to me. It’s too early in my trip for me to know what Israel has to do with that process, I’m sure it can play a role, but it doesn’t have to. I’m sure I’ll know more about how I feel after a few months in Jerusalem, but at the moment of leaving the Museum, I was both happy and proud to be Jewish, but didn’t need Israel one way or the other to validate that feeling. Still, it was an awesome feeling to come out of the darkened museum into the bright sun light of a Jewish center of higher learning and even the McDonald’s sign in Hebrew and the smell of kosher French fries made me feel proud.
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