Where do I belong?

This is the first year in many years when I have not been in some way responsible for organizing programming for others on the national holidays that follow Pesach:  Yom HaShoah, Yom HaZikaron and Yom HaAtzmaut.  And my kids are older.  As an organizer, and as a parent of small children, there was a way in which I stood outside my own experience as I was busy mediating the experience for others.  This year I am much more inside my own experience, and it's harder.

This week felt like a spiritual trough on a number of levels:  Pesach ended, my parents left the country, and everyone went back to work/school.  I completed a project I have been working on for three months, one that engaged me daily with studying Tanach and Mefarshim (Medieval commentators).  And it was Yom HaShoah.  Completing the Tanach project felt like it removed me in some way from a dialogue with God I had been in, or from being a spectator to a dialogue with God.  It was on the book of Job, and as the book unfolded I especially came to love the ending chapters, but also to love the engagement with the questions it raises. 

Yom HaShoah also felt like it removed me from a dialogue with God, a time of being confronted by God not made manifest.  I felt I could not stay home and in the day I went to the Conservative Yeshiva to hear Ruth Vleeschouwer and Rabbi Pesach Schindler, who escaped Germany as children - Ruth to being in hiding in Holland and Reb Pesach against all odds to the United States - tell their stories.  I took great comfort in God made manifest in their tellings - in Ruth's humor and self-awareness, in her return to Judaism and her commitment, and in Reb Pesach's quoting Tanach references throughout his talk, his ever present commitment to teaching and referencing Torah as a guide for life.  Leaving their presence I felt loss, and challenge, and deep questions about how on earth such atrocities could have happened, as well as faith in the triumph of the human spirit.

In the evening I went to the choral group I have joined (composed 100% of native born Israelis) and was reminded how hard it is to find where I belong during this period of the year.  I did not grow up here.  I don't know the songs or the social/cultural cues.  Israel is no longer a nation of immigrants, but a nation of children of immigrants.  The stories told are the stories of the parents and grandparents.  One does not hear much about recent immigrants.  On the one hand, I have come to identify with the country and the national holidays.  On the other hand, when I step outside the community of English speaking immigrants I most often spend time with, I feel a large gap.  I spend a bunch of time with native born Israelis, but I always feel I don't quite fit.  Of course were I to spend this part of year in the United States I would no doubt feel quite ill at ease there. 

As much as I am a Zionist, and I am a Zionist, I am not sure where God is in all this.  I can't accept simple answers or platitudes.  I appreciate that we live here in a sovereign Jewish state but I see all the difficulties and challenges that creates, including our own abuses of power.  And I feel the tenuousness of our presence here, a sense of threat from the turmoil and nations that surround us.  I can only hold on to King David's words in 1 Chronicles 29:15 - "For we are strangers before you and temporary residents like all our ancestors, our days are like a shadow upon the land and there is no hope."  And then he asks God to turn all our hearts toward God.  To prepare our hearts.  May this be a strong Omer period of turning and of preparation.  And if my days are a shadow, let me work to turn it in the right direction.