Stuck in the Middle

The first time I was ever teased about being Jewish, I was 11 years old. I remember sitting in my history classroom, two weeks into a new year at a new school. The girl sitting across from me told me that when we chant Torah it sounds like screeching.

Recently, I was faced with a Nazi salute for the first time in my life. It was 12-year-old kids, in their second week at a new school. The gesture was directed past me, not at me, and they were joking.

They didn’t know I was Jewish. It still hurt.

It hurt because of the message a Nazi salute sends. It hurt because half of my family came to the states as Jewish refugees. It hurt because the country to which my family fled has now made the decision to close our borders to refugees of another race. It hurt because of the current unaddressed rise in anti-Semitic actions at home. It hurt because these kids simply didn’t understand the implications of what they had done.

And so I sat down with them and a teacher, and I told them. I told them no matter their gestures’ intent, they convey a serious message. I told them you never know who is around and what a gesture will mean to someone. I told them how my family fled the Holocaust. I told them there is a large Jewish community in Melbourne. I told them the reason they may not know they’ve met a Jew is because most of the community consists of Holocaust survivors and their descendants, and they do not advertise themselves. I told them a Nazi salute is racist and discriminatory. I told them there are things happening in the world right now that make a gesture like that even more sensitive than usual. I told them how much it hurt to see that gesture, and I could not keep from crying.

I’ve found such a disconnect here; a casual and systemic racism; an isolation from and ignorance toward other races and cultures. I think it stems partly from the fact that people are geographically just so far away from anything else in the world. News from home makes it to Australia: it gets spit out in headlines like the country is watching a freak show through a pane of glass. Kids take what they see and they run with it. They don’t comprehend that these are real people, races and cultures.

Big, beautiful, communally built sand sculptures morph into Trump’s Wall. “Mexican bomb!” I hear as sand is rained down onto the wall. “Dead Mexican!” It hurts, and it is absolutely infuriating, to watch the actions of my country’s leaders mold a generation halfway around the world through racism and discrimination, teaching exclusion and generalization and dehumanization and violence.

And here I stand, stuck half way through that damn glass portal to the freak show.

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I have this vivid memory from when I was 21 years old, in Ethiopia’s Simien Mountains, above the remote, ancient town of Lalibela. A man working the fields found out I was American and his face lit with excitement. “Look,” he told me. “Look!” He pointed to his belt buckle: a giant, shining rectangle emblazoned with President Obama’s face in front of an American flag. I can’t imagine how many days’ wages it had cost.

I’d been sick for a week, I’d been hiking all day, and I was tired. I brushed him off.

I’m not proud of that moment.

His pride in a president descended from African parentage; his joy, his hope, his excitement to meet an American– my pride to introduce myself as such? I took it for granted that day.

It’s easy to detect peoples’ hesitance these days when they ask where I come from. Introducing myself as American is not currently a source of pride for me.

I’ve never been a highly political person. I’ve voted in every election, but aside from fostering an understanding of and appreciation for the things I care about? I don’t like telling people how to live their lives.

However: When swastikas appear on train windows, when bomb threats are called into community centers and synagogues in waves, when the President of the United States refuses to address a rise in anti-Semitism; when he actually misinterprets and labels a request that he condemn anti-Semitism “revolting:” When our leadership’s hate and racism and “alternative facts” become commonplace rhetoric to be parroted from children’s mouths half way around the world? I may not be able to do anything at home, but I cannot simply stand by.

I have become the token Jewish American. If that means that every time a 13-year-old kid talks about building walls or killing Mexicans or throws up a salute, I’m the one who gets to impart the reality of what they’re doing through a first-hand perspective? Every time I have that conversation will become an opportunity to educate, and to open someone’s eyes to what racism and discrimination consist of and imply.

Conversations are objective. Personal opinions do not make appearances. But: to not have these conversations would go against the stories and lessons and teachings that formed the moral foundation of my upbringing. It would be an insult to my family, my people, my history and my culture.

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Yesterday I attended Shul for the first time in more than two years. “Shabbat Shalom,” strangers greeted as I walked through the door. They welcomed me as family. Everywhere in the world, even as melodies may change, we pray the same words. Though practices and interpretations vary, we share the same core. Music filled the sanctuary as cantors sang verses and prayers which have been in my bones since childhood. My heart lifted when the ark opened upon the Torahs, clothed and gilded and glinting. It felt like coming home.

The pages in my hand held a poem:

We oughtn’t pray for what we’ve never known,

and humanity has never known:

unbroken peace,

unmixed blessing.

No.

Better to pray for pity,

for indignation,

discontent,

the will to see and touch,

the power to do good and make new.

The young man being Bar Mitzvahed yesterday gave a Drash addressing leadership and refugees, sympathy and empathy, and the mitzvah of taking people in. He was 13 years old, in his third week at a new school. He was the same age as the girl who teased me when I was in middle school. He was the same age as the kids who threw up Nazi salutes two weeks ago. His name was Daniel, and he gave me hope.

Two Years and Counting

January 2^nd, 2017: the beach is so perfect I’m almost afraid to step on it. Water gurgles gently as wavelets lap the shore. White sand sweeps in a graceful crescent in front of me, broken by two small clusters of granite boulders extending into clear turquoise water. Sunlight refracts into a web of millions of golden rings laid on the soft sand beneath the waves. The shallows’ clear, pristine aqua fades slowly to a deep, intense cerulean blue-black further from shore before exploding into a shining silver sheet as, in the distance, it reflects the midday sun.

The shore brims with life: oystercatchers strut and shriek after one another as they probe the sand in front of me. Terns swoop delicate, angular bodies low over the shore. Stingrays cruise the shallows, lazy fins emerging from the water as they glide over rocks. Small schools of glimmering silver fish dart through the water around my legs, presence given away by their telltale shadows on the sand. Feathery, dusty gold seaweed dances in the water’s gentle roll against the shore: in and up, out and down.

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I’ve walked into Cook’s beach from nearer the beginning of the Freycinet Peninsula after spending a day exploring the coast further northward, circumventing a compact granite range known as the Hazards. From my elevated track I gazed down to where kelp and reefs claim residence in patches through the coastal waters, darkening the bay in crude patches. I made friends with a wallaby and negotiated Hazards Beach’s three-kilometer stretch, littered with monster scallops and abalone and oysters, fragile layers shining in blue and purple iridescence. A gentle breeze accompanied me as I ducked through the forest beneath Mt. Freycinet, keeping mosquitos at bay. I passed a deep rusty ochre creek cutting across the beach to arrive at my present position, 17 kilometers from the car park.

Sheltered beneath a stubby she oak, my campsite perches on the short dunes overlooking Cook’s Beach. White crab shells decorated with deep orange spots lie half-buried in the sand. Receding water reveals verdant tide pools warmed by the afternoon sun, filled with anemones, snail shells and seaweed. A gentle, increasing rhythmic roar of breakers cuts the silence as water encroaches on the beach’s steeper ground. Giant black cicadas’ sharp buzz drowns any other ambient noise as the insects fall from trees by the thousands. Common in this world has become extraordinary for me, watching the water come and go at twice the rate from my shady perch just above the tideline: the last time I experienced a tide, I lived in the world of a 25-hour cycle.

By night, possums emerge. I discover possum-proofing to be far and away an entirely different game from the bear-proofing methodology we use at home: I wake from a cozy slumber to a brush-tailed marsupial clinging upside-down like a sea-star glommed onto the basket-ball sized food sack I’ve hung from the limb of a nearby tree, hands, feet and tail clutching for dear life as it scrabbles with straps and fasteners and sways through the air like a pendulum.

Just as much surprise and beauty and intrigue fill the rest of my four-day adventure on Freycinet. I take a day walk down to Bryan’s Beach, wandering through rolling hills dotted with saprophytic orchids, bright fuchsia blossoms springing from a leafless maroon stalk so deep near the base as to be almost black. I arrive to find myself alone on a wild, isolated arc of sand rimmed by delicate violet blossoms and dotted with cormorants, jellyfish, rays and abalone, displaying the sea’s spoils in an unfeigned half hazard array. In the evening clouds come in. Everything turns to a soft, muted aqua gray, fading gently through an obscured skyline into hazy mist.

I summit Mt. Freycinet the next day to clearing skies and somehow manage to pull off a suitcase-sized slab of rotten granite as I boulder hop on the summit, resulting in a too-close-for-comfort encounter with a monster funnel web spider and a miniature scorpion. My vantage point at the summit looks straight down over the peninsula’s isthmus, where Wineglass Bay and Hazard Bay swoop in to meet each other beneath the Hazards. As I sit and bask in the wind before making my way down to Wineglass Bay, a keen-eyed wedge-tailed eagle nimbly dives and reels through the air below me.

Wineglass Bay itself feels like it spirals in toward me like a seashell, as if I’m the focal point of a Fibonacci Sequence. Water curls around glowing orange rock and green foliage on the near point, enveloping it in clear gradients of turquoise and silver, whitecaps dancing in the wind beneath the Hazards’ deep gray peaks. Sun-warmed, silky silver sand squeaks beneath my feet. Jellyfish as big as myself, red and cream, pulse lazily along the shoreline.

Throughout a lazy last morning before my hike out, serpentine clouds form over the Hazards’ heads as a northwesterly carries moisture off the ocean. We watch dolphins hunt in the bay, sending up sprays of water, dark fins arcing out and down in rhythm. And a great big grandpapa tiger snake takes up residence next to the bridge to the bathroom, so engorged and skin stretched so tight around a recent meal that when he tries to slither away from us across the sloping stream bank, his body actually begins rolling down the slope behind him.

On my rest day I wake to the cover of low, flat clouds, extending out of sight like a quilt thrown over the world. I scramble and hike over slippery, water-streaked granite slab to the summit of Mt. Amos and find my way to a rocky outcrop straight above Wineglass Bay, from where I watch cloudcover clear. Peeled back by western winds, a crisp line of deep blue marks the sunbreak far out at see as it advances steadily toward the muted bay beneath me.

My vantage point reveals a clear view down the east coast: past my path over Freycinet Peninsula’s ridges and mountains and plateaus and whorls, past Schouten Island and south to Maria Island beyond. As I descend back toward my car, I leave behind a week of sheer wild, rugged, pristine beauty and danger, vibrant life, death and adventure.

Two years, one week down. Here’s to the rest of Year Three.