Heads or tails. I just don’t know what to make of it.

Folks, it has been hard. Every day I feel like my head is spinning.

One day I feel pride for the efforts that many people in this country make every day to make it a better place. They struggle against conflicting values within themselves. They raise families. They live in this Jewish place. It has been built. It is being built still. A thriving Jewish culture exists. I could go on.

Not much time passes, though, before I feel pulled in an emotionally, rationally, realistically charged way in another direction. What myths have I been fed as a child, and hell, even as an adult. It is not only the myths that I have since realized were partially if not entirely faulty. It is the fact that like a relationship that ends leaving you feeling dazed and confused in a strange place you have no clue how to get out of – you have to constantly be searching for new hidden baggage that you are carrying around. You don’t know that you still have the baggage. You don’t know that you are still draped in a reality or imagined-reality that was. You have to live your day feeling confused: how do I move on from here? How do I change my entire way of thinking, my assumptions, my preconceived notions, my prejudices?

Were the myths necessary? Do the ends justify the means?

How do I deal with the fact that Israel is a modern state. Israel as this modern state has powers. At this point in time it has a significant amount of power over millions of people who are relatively powerless. It has the power to dictate the religious and private lives of the people living in its borders. Israel can act as an entity which promotes Jewish ethics or it can act as an entity that breaks international laws, internationally accepted human rights and makes me want to hide under the bed. Its leaders can be investigated and/or tried in cases of sexual crimes and any other criminal activity. It can manage to maintain itself with an underbelly of a poor, powerless and vulnerable working class made out largely of Arabs and Thai temporary workers.

Israel can be a place where there are thousands of elderly holocaust survivors are not taken care of. Israel can be a place where sexual trafficking is a prevalent and widespread problem. Israel can be a place of racist and unequal legislation. Israel’s Jewish citizens can believe in the acceptability of different standards of living and of law for its non-Jewish citizens. Israel can pollute.

Israel can feel like home sometimes. That I am with “my people” that parts of myself can be expressed here where they cannot, or can only with great sacrifice and effort, be expressed elsewhere. I can see myself living here.

I don’t know what to do in those times.

Sometimes it feels like a strange place. Foreign, distant and removed from a place in which I want to live. A place that I do not need to exist as a modern state to feel connected to.

I don’t know what to do in those times either.

What I mean to say is this: I find it hard to write to you all on most days. Every day I feel immense joy to be finally living here and exploring things I have wanted to explore since I was a child. I feel proud of the things Israel does well and sad or ashamed at the things it does not do well. I don’t know how to express those feelings to you all. It is hard to come to some consensus in my own head and tell you what is happening. How am I feeling. What challenge I am engaged in now.

The issues I struggle with are complicated and emotionally charged and sometimes I wish that they just didn’t exist or that they didn’t matter to me.

But they do. So I continue the struggle.

This weekend I am going to Tiberias to be a “Shabbat guide” - lead services and some programming for a Birthright trip for there one Shabbat here. It is my second time doing it this summer. The last time I was both disgusted and impressed by the people in the group of participants. Some were cool, open minded and interested in hearing anything they could get about this crazy place. And then some were just plain racist and open about it. Par for the course American Jewry…I think this week I have a British group. I’ll let you know how it goes. It is a pretty sweet deal really. I get paid to go work for a few hours doing Jew and then spend Shabbat in an air conditioned hotel with my only other responsibilities being eating, sleeping and hanging out with the participants.

I am wishing all of you a peaceful sabath, or just plain old Saturday if that’s how you roll:).

Missing you all big like a big blue whale.