Hva Er Du Redd For?

Things are back to normal again: it’s raining in Bergen, I’m swamped with work, and listening to “ka e du redd for” over and over again as I grade essays in the hopes that absentmindedly listening to Norwegian songs will acquaint my ear sufficiently to understand the next cashier who mumbles “kvittering?” in my direction.

I just bought my ticket home. Jes, this is a pretty awful moment. Heh, I wrote “jes” instead of “yes.” This year in Norway is going to come back to bite me in the butt when I’m trying to finish my English degree. But oh, it’s been wonderful, and the knowledge that it now has an absolute end date has reminded me to seize every second. That and the essays on Shakespeare quotes that my high schoolers have been writing— a huge percentage of them chose “cowards die many times before their deaths; the valiant taste of death but once.” Apparently that fires up the high school imagination. It also goads me to try everything that comes my way and leap at new experiences. After all, hva er jeg redd for?

The Norwegian movie we watched this week was “Jeg Reiser Alene,” which is set not only in Bergen, but at the university here. And not just at UiB, but at the Humanities Faculty building where I work. Which, incidentally, is right next to where the movie was being shown. Never before have I walked out of a theater and into the setting of the movie I just saw. It abrogated the life-fiction line a little sharply for me. I’ve been certain I’m living in the Truman show ever since.

I have “winter break” this week, and am not sure what to do with it. Sure, I have mountains of work to catch up on, and plenty of literal mountains to climb as well, but I’d like to do something out of the ordinary. With a week off, I could do a mountain a day… Friday I hit both Fløyen and Rundemanen, and of course today (Sunday) was a Løvstakken climb… Ruth and I were talking about skiing—yep, we caught the bug—but with the Bergen weather the way it is, we’re more likely to be able to wash our hair in the rain than find enough snow to slide on.

Freaking out at the desecration

Saturday I walked up to town to the Fisks, who were having a Fulbrighter tea. We got onto the topic of our Fulbright application process, and I was surprised to find that the professors had also needed three recommendation letters to apply. Of course, they just go up to a friend and say, “hey, Dave, write me a rec, will you, buddy?” And then Dave says, “sure, no problem, but I’m busy so write it yourself and I’ll sign the bottom, okay, buddy?” Which is only a bit like my life; one of my professors told me that now I’ve graduated and have a Fulbright, we’re on equal terms and I should start calling him by his first name, but it freaked me out so much I stopped emailing him. Anyhow, the tea was so much fun that we’ve planned a Fulbright ramble around the Stavkirke this weekend when Amanda comes in to visit again. Hopefully Davin will bring his kids so that we can run around with them and show them Oskar the pig.

I went to a MIFF (Med Israel For Fred, With Israel For Peace) board meeting the other day. They asked me to speak in May at the Municipal Hall about my experiences with FRIEND, the Muslim-Jewish interfaith dialogue group I started in college. We were stuffing envelopes with newsletters when suddenly Erik, whose apartment we meet at, jumped up and turned on some music. “Rachem” by Avraham Fried ripped out of the cd player. He was so gleefully proud of himself that I smiled. After all, I haven’t heard it since high school when it was used to torture us by the high school production zombies, and it made me a bit nostalgic for freaked-out-frummy-ism at its brain-deadest. Then, he told everyone to close their eyes. With mine open a slit, I saw him walk around clapping everyone on the head. When we opened, they were all wearing kippot, and looking pleased as punch with themselves. It was possibly the most surreal moment I’ve had in Norway, and I laughed and laughed until I could barely stop.

On the literary front: I’m reading things I’ve never had a chance to before this year. More modern stuff than ever before, and Norwegian novels (after reading Out Stealing Horses, which I recommend to all, I’m now tackling Ut og stjaele hester, though part of the incentive’s gone now that I know what happens). This past shabbat I read the first novel of the Foundation series. I can’t believe, with all my affection for Asimov, that I’ve never read them before. I’m going to have to pace myself and allow only one a shabbat, or my entire break will be gone and I’ll have gorged myself on the series without doing any of the serious work I’m meant to this week.

Views from Løvstakken:

אז למה את לא גרה בארץ? The Land.

טוב לזכור שאני לא היחידה בעולם. טוב ליראות כיפות, ונרות חנוכה, והשמש ירושלמי. טוב לשמוע עברית. טוב להיות בארץ

Absurd and utter culture shock. Icy winds of 5° changed to balmy breezy 15°. Political politeness shifted to fanaticism-driven lawbreaking. Passersby transformed from reserved strangers to rollicking, friendly family. Even the moon is in the wrong place, and has climbed higher in the sky, aloof above the palm trees.

At the Kotel (Western Wall)

Arriving in Israel was comfortable, and familiar, and a good regular mind blip. I arrived at 2 am to a country that speaks my language, shares my religion, and gives me my history. The nesher (cab) driver shocked me completely—when the guy sitting in front of me tried to offer him payment, he turned and said, “can’t you see I’m driving?” Granted, he did turn around completely, but the refusal to multitask while driving represents a complete shift in Israeli cabby mentality. We drove through Ramot and Geulah first, and I got to remember the uncomfortable part of Israel too: huge signs saying “Women and girls, please dress modestly” (can you think of a more subtle way to tell someone they’re only a body? The advertisers who use women's curves to sell beer and charedim who insist women cover up every last inch of skin possess one thing in common-- they both think of women only as sex objects. They just have different reactions to it) and smaller signs saying “No Zionists.” Well, I don’t like you either. 

Disclaimer: I thought about translating and explaining every piece of this to those not familiar with Israel or Hebrew, and then gave a huge mental shrug and decided it would lose some flow and integrity if I did. המבין יבין. And everyone else is free to ask questions in the comments which I will answer thoroughly.

Hooded against the Israeli sun

We pulled up at my Bubby’s apartment and I woke my mother and got the hug I’ve been missing for four months. She did a quick check for new piercings and then returned to sleep.

Friday was lovely—my parents, baby sister and I went down to the biblical zoo, where they only host animals mentioned in Tanach. Lots of antlered creatures that would have been bloody sacrifices 200 years ago. We had sufganiyot (jelly- and caramel- and chocolate- filled donuts) as a pretaste of Chanukkah yumminess. Then our cousins from Ramat Beit Shemesh came in, and the apartment devolved into pre-shabbat chaos.

The kids have had a bit of trouble placing me this year when we skype. My aunt asks them:

Do you know where Hannah is living this year?

Blank stares.

Norvegya!

More blank stares.
אמא, איפה נורווגיה?

בצפון.

Oh! Suddenly they get it. על יד החרמון?

Face-palm.

Moriah, six-years-old-going-on-twelve, asked me how long it took to get to Israel from Norvegya.

“ten hours,” I told her.

“אז למה את לא גרה בארץ?” she asked. She’s been well-trained. Cue the guilt trip.

Shabbat was full of the zemirot and chicken/cholent/beef and family that I’ve been missing. I bumped into old Bnei Akiva friends, and walked with my family down to Gan Sacher past the old monastery, and up into the Hebrew Museum’s sculpture garden, and checked out the Ramat Gan campus of Hebrew University (where my baby sister may live next year). Sunday my middle sister came in from the States, and we did a mid-intersection sisterly hug smack in the middle of Emek Refaim. Monday we headed down to Eilat for our vacation. We meant to stop for a hike on the way, but as we were about to drive down the dirt road, we saw a sign that said “shetach aish” (firing zone). After a lengthy family discussion about the age of the sign, the likelihood that the Israeli army would actually be practicing here, and something from my mom on how she’d do it if it was just her and my dad but with the three of us the risk was too high, we decided not to hike. Which turned out to be a good idea, judging by the herds of tanks engaged in training exercises that we passed as we continued. Instead, we stopped at Timna Park and  walked through and up and between all the strange rock formations.

Tuesday we hiked Emek HaNeelam, the Disappearing Valley (is that it? No, I think it’s that one. Wait, this one! They were all disappearing valleys). We wound between the red, purple, white, and black mountains of Eilat and up and down its fantastic rock formations and tried out the echoes. We skidded down futuristic moonscapes and sent cascades of rock showering down to join its brothers. My dad told me not to climb so much, I was destroying the nature, so I explained to him the law of conservation of mass and that all of it would still be here for future hikers, and that his attachment to surface appearance is troubling and indicative of the influence of shallow materialistic society. Then we headed back to the shore where we swam by the coral reef. A fish bit my leg so that blood poured down whenever I left the water. Still worth it. And kind of cool to have a battle wound from coral reef gazing. 

That night I finally got around to checking what I need to apply for my Canadian passport next year (born in Montreal, I of course have citizenship, but a Canadian passport will come in handy as a student at the U of T). I ended my frustrating search by sending an email to the embassy that ended with “How can I apply for my social number so I can apply for my ClicSEQUR account so I can apply for my birth certificate so I can apply for my passport?” It was with great difficulty that my sisters restrained me from tagging an “F you” onto the end of that, but I think it may have been implied in the question.

Wednesday we did the hike we wanted to do on Monday, Nachal Adah. My dad called the IDF and checked, and they said there’d be no firing practice during Chanukkah. You’ve got to love a country that runs on the same schedule as you. Anyhow, the first ten minutes of the hike was a hellish jog through increasingly narrow canyon walls which I don’t remember scrambling out of but must have practically spat myself out through onto a plateau way higher than the actual trail. Once they caught up, my parents talked a bit about paying for therapy to help me with my claustrophobia, but since the only big problem it causes is them having to hurry along a trail, I really don’t think it’s worth it (plus, wouldn’t they put me in small spaces to accustom me to it?). And at least I could stride along the narrow ridge of the mountains for several hours afterwards, relieved and relaxed while several thousand meters in the air.

At the restaurant that night, chabadnicks entered and lit a chanukkiah with the waiters, singing “haneirot halalu” with off-key energy. A young girl in tight jeans jumped up and started to sing and bounce by the candles. Te looked and said “uh-oh,” and we all burst out laughing.

Shabbat in Jerusalem again. Friday night we davened at Shirach Chadasha, and it was the first time in six months I was actually in a synagogue. European shuls usually relegate their women to balconies in the manner of an audience at the Globe Theater; they haven't quite reached the twenty-first century yet (to be fair, neither have some shuls in the Gush). Shabbat morning we went to Yakar, which I love for the melodies and the mix of Israeli-American-young-old-shtachim-styles-conservative-dress, and the break for shiurim after Torah reading.

There is a peculiar magic to Jerusalem. You bump into your entire past here: friends from high school, Bnei Akiva, midrasha, university… Normally this drives me crazy, but the gods of serendipity must have been watching out for me, because I ran into the best of every era of my life: my closest friends from Maryland, favorite Orot Israeli, funniest Bnei Akivaniks, and the Nishmater with the driest sense of humor. Thank you, ye gods.

After my parents left the country, my sisters and I went up to Haifa to see our favorite Israeli family friends. They’re highly educated yet super-chill. Yoni’s a prof at the University and gave us a tour, showing us the 400 BC Phoenician boat that was dragged up from the harbor and now sits in the archaeology museum, and the view of all Haifa from the university tower. U of Haifa held streams of students that filled a gap that nags at me in Bergen: diversity. In Haifa, students in hijabs passed the students tanning in mini skirts while students holding their kippot to their heads rushed between the two. I heard Hebrew, Russian, French, and Arabic, and skin colors ranged from pale pearly to deep bronze. I’m not usually acutely conscious that Bergen lacks this kind of human mix, but some part of me keeps scanning the crowd for the normal difference that I’m used to.

A Bahai friend of mine from college is in Israel for two years volunteering at the Bahai temple in Haifa. When he heard I was coming, he offered a private tour through the gardens. We got to pump him with questions about the Bahai faith (no ritual, a goal of working to create spiritual communities regardless of their being Bahai or other faith, no women on the Justice Board (!), international presence, and the thing about only Bahai walking up the terraces is a myth, we walked upwards). Ben would make a good representative of any religion. He’s composed and kind, quiet and yet unpretending and casual. He showed us the Ark, the gated section where the four buildings that world Bahai work in stand: the archives, education center, textual study, and justice building. I like that as the core of a nation: all the world really needs are schools, courts, and libraries. We also went into the shrine at the bottom of the gardens, which was closed to visitors just then. I asked Ben first if there were any statues in there, and it turned out it was simply an utterly serene space. In the center were different kinds of flowers and lights: trailing plants, blooming petunias and planters of roses, and candelabras of flame or electric light. A delicious aroma perfumed the air. We stood respectfully as Ben sat cross-legged and prayed. A prayer on the wall seemed a blend of the stereotypes of Judaism, Christianity, and Islam: it had one God, sacrifice, and infidels in it. The bit I like best was about God’s creation of humanity. “Be Thou,” He said. And we were.

 

It struck me, as I moved to sit cross-legged on the carpet, that Bahai is the perfect religion for a twenty-first century human. Individualistic prayer, communal social action, based on a desire to help all people achieve spirituality in whatever faith they choose—it contains the perfect amount of world-optimization and nonjudgmental tolerance. Closing my eyes to the symbols of human hope—light and greenery—I breathed in peacefully for a moment, holding only serenity in my mind. Then I thought of the mess that is Judaism, the halachic tangles and the misogyny and the in-fighting and men spitting on little girls in Ramat Beit Shemesh and price tag attacks in the shtachim and women’s faces vanishing off billboards in Jerusalem, and breathed in deeply once more, and walked carefully backwards out of the room. 

 

That night I met up with the Lewis twins and Thea from Nishmat and we went to a concert by an Israeli singer (Amir something). Think Mizrachi rock. He sauntered up to the mike as though it was just luck it happened to be there, and belted out Biblical ballads and love songs. He stopped singing at moments, stroking his beard or adjusting his cap, and let the crowd roar out the words instead. It was half concert, half sing-along. Very Israeli, and we danced in the aisles and pretended to know the words.

My last night in Jerusalem, Te and El and I went to see the second Sherlock Holmes. It’s more fun than in an American theater, because everyone’s whispering, not just us. On the way back we had a loud altercation about the female characters’ relative depth and the feminist response to a cardboard femme fatale, which must have woken every protestor sleeping in a tent in Gan Sacher.

My nesher back to the airport was as positive an experience as my nesher there had been awful. We wound through my favorite streets in Rechavia and Bacca, past balconies of clean Jerusalem stone climbing up the slope, then into an area lost somewhere between the picturesqueness of Nachlaot and the shuk, and finally went down from Yerushalayim by way of Shaar HaGai. Bab El Wad. The Gate of the Valley. Gate av Dalen. My favorite route, that passes the beit knesset that looks like the Beit Hamikdash, and my sabah’s kever on Har HaMenuchot and the memorial to the convoys from 1948. A good way to leave Yerushalayim.

My Abba has this thing about moving big rocks so my Ima can sit comfortably. It's cute, but dangerous.

In Eilat 

Nachal Adah

Kenyon HaShechoret-- Black Canyon

Our lovely penthouse apartment with private pool

Gan HaBotani-- Botanical Gardens

Speak no evil, smell no evil, pick your nose

Five again

Gone to Narnia, brb

Calling a two-week hiatus in my blog. Tomorrow I'm flying to Israel, where I'm spending the first half of Hanukkah with my family in Eilat (my mom's terribly afraid I have a vitamin D deficiency and no amount of explaining my terror of the Israeli sun has budged her-- I don't dare to expose any skin in that climate), and the second half in Jerusalem where I will skitter from coffee date to coffee date, trying to cram in 23 years worth of friends-who-actually-followed-through-on-their-idealism-and-made-aliyah into four days. אני מאוד מתרגשת!!!
God jul, חנוכה שמח, and happy New Year's to everyone!

Hark, Hear the Bells

I don’t know how to talk about the beauty of Bergen at night. Every evening, as dusk sets, fairies tiptoe up the mountains leaving their glitter along the creases in the slopes. The hills are strung with lights and the fjords and lakes in the valleys shimmer with their reflection. Walking through a wild Norwegian night, the wind billowing out my hood and the rain gusting strong against my face, those lights signal cheer and home steadfastness and rosy golden safety. Bergen, where it gets dark by 3 pm, is always a city of jeweled lights on the water.

So, Saturday night, when friends told me about the Bergen Lysfest, or annual Christmas light festival, I was happy to walk up to town and experience some more of the magic. We made it to the Byparken just as they lit the Christmas tree floating out on the lake in the middle of the city. It was simple, a large pine decked with strings of lights and a star at the top, swaying in the wind out on the water. The trees around the fountain had also been festooned with white lights. A huge stage was erected in the plass, and a youth choir soared carols out over the heads of the crowd. Every child had snap-lights and every few adults clustered around a torch that blazed into the rain. In the high-rise buildings around the lake, we could see people on the top floors looking down the same way Americans do for Thanksgiving day parades and the Fourth of July. It felt… like Christmas. Not perfect Christmas, exactly, not Christmas with my family where we go to the zoo and watch the lights along the lake change in time to “Carol of the Bells,” but it was close. Then, the fireworks started. Great, glorious, elegant fireworks that had a shimmering fairy dust sprinkling along the lower edge and exploding pinwheels of color up above. And there were happy face fireworks, which neither Nina nor I had ever seen before. Not to mention it was fireworks in the rain, a feat that I’d believed only the Weasley brothers could pull off. And yet, somehow, it didn’t feel very different from normal Bergen. This city blossoms into a radiant Christmas splendor in the dark every night. Winter night lasts from October to February, and the brilliant glimmer of Bergen’s lights keeps it illuminated, keeps the dark a mere accessory to sheen and shine.

Great news: I just bought my tickets, and I will be in Oslo for the Weekend of Peace. Doesn’t it just thrill you to read those words? I’ve been grading my high schoolers’ latest essays on “their responsibility, as Norwegians, to global democracy,” and I’m all tingly with hope for the future.

Ohio in a nutshell

I gave my guest lectures at Katten today. The Ohio presentation, to Norwegian immigrant high school students, went very well—I had them singing “hang on Sloopy” and shouting “O-H!” “I-O!” at me. The teacher was boggled. She’d never seen them speak that much before, let alone sing and chant Ohioan propaganda. I love my job.

I also gave a lecture on “A (brief) History of Judaism: the Past 4,000 years squeezed into 40 minutes,” to the oldest high school religion class. At one hundred years a minute, I think I got all the major events in. You know, the discovery of monotheism, the beit hamikdash, the Haskalah, and of course the fact that I’m descended from the Alexander rebbe and that Gloria Steinem is Jewish. I left out the names of all the Hasidic dynasties that I memorized in 7^th grade. They'll have to learn those somewhere else.

I was particularly nervous about the last slide: the creation of the State of Israel. I wanted to do a number of things: To leave them with a history of modern Israel that would give them an image of something besides the war-torn Middle East, to help them understand that Jewish is not the same as Israeli (a concept a lot of Norwegians have problems understanding), and to be unapologetic about Israel’s right to exist without presenting an entire argument about politics in the middle of my Jewish history presentation. So, this is what I did: I put a gorgeous picture of the Israeli flag billowing in the wind up on the screen, along with the date 1948. I told them that in 1948, the UN voted on the partition plan which created a state of Israel. Then I said that obviously modern Israeli history is not the exact same thing as modern Jewish history, so I’m going to focus on the part that most affects world Judaism. Which was: the Right of Return. I explained that every Jew has a right to citizenship in Israel. Then I gave them a list. I told them about Operation Flying Carpet which rescued 45,000 Yemenite Jews in 1950. I told them about Jews who fled or were expelled from Libya, Lebanon, Syria, Egypt, Algeria, Afghanistan, Iraq, Morocco, Kurdistan, and Tunisia in the years between 1949 and now. I told them about Operation Moses and the airlift of the Ethiopian Jews. And the Soviet Jewish immigration. And the recent immigration of French Jews who are fleeing recent anti-Semitic attacks. In short, without discussing a single Middle Eastern war or concentrating on one ethnicity, I made a compelling argument for the existence of the state of Israel that was in no way politically charged. I felt pretty proud of myself. And you know what? The kids were fascinated. They leaned forward in their seats. They laughed at all the right times. They asked questions afterwards about my personal observance of Judaism. And I knew I’d pulled off quite a good deal. Guess what? I love my job.

I had a meeting afterwards with the professor in charge of the Britlit survey course at UiB next semester. He’s a slouchy, personable Englishman who I like because every so often he pauses and lets me throw in a clever off-the-cuff comment. I’m not sure how the topic was raised, but we went through the basic difficulties of the Norwegian education system. Stuart spoke pretty hopelessly about how profs aren’t allowed to demand student attendance in class—it impinges on students’ rights— and about how there’s not enough resources to create a desperately-needed freshman writing class, and about how little power he as a professor has to teach effectively.

How about a mutual partnership?
Nah, just kidding, I know that's naive.

Now, all this nonsense about students’ rights is really adorable, but the truth is that Norwegian university students, while all have the right to government-funded college education, lack the basic right that American students pay thousands of dollars for: the right to have a professor kick their butts into high gear and challenge the hell out of them. Professors go on and on in the States about how American students treat college as a consumer product and expect to get exactly what they want because they’ve paid for it, but that is nothing to the Norwegian system, where Norwegian students expect, as their legal right, that professors not inconvenience them by demanding too much from them. After teaching a literature survey course which was really more of a methodology course, I’m aching from having passed so many of those students on their papers when I know they’re going to fail the exam. If I could have demanded that they come to class, that they write and rewrite and rewrite their papers and attend special seminars on citation, I could perhaps have brought them up to scratch. But the Norwegian system won’t let. 

I love my job, but sometimes, it gets complicated. 

Intersections

The Blue Stone in the middle of Bergen where people leave flowers.
Every day, the city clears them away and people bring new ones. 

The young woman who sat beside me let a quick, focused frown cross her face. It might have been thoughtful, or angry, but from our conversation of the past few minutes I figured it was the only sign she’d show that she was not about to let another emotion take over.

Flowers stuck in a fence near a
building that was attacked in Oslo

She is one of my high school students in my English class, and she had just come from a memorial for two of her closest friends, who were killed in the Oslo attacks on July 22^nd. She was worried about starting high school, and about the upcoming elections in which she felt she had to play an even larger part campaigning now that several of her friends weren’t there to help, and, of course, worried about coping with the emotional trauma she’s been through. She presented a weird blend of kid and adult. I was impressed by her maturity and determination to power through, and stymied by my inability to tell her that everything would be okay. All I could offer was help getting through this.

At roughly the same time that we sat in the hallway outside of the English classroom, another country was dealing with terror. Israel is one hour ahead of Norway, time zone-wise, and Thursday, as I comforted a Norwegian suffering from fallout of the Oslo terror attacks at 11am, Israelis on a bus near Eilat at 12 pm were being shot at in the beginning of what became an eight-hour terror attack.

Egged bus 392 after the attack

In Norway I’ve seen people cope with the destruction of security, stability, identity as a peaceful country. Israelis shouldn’t have to deal with that; it’s not a country where people assume safety. But the anger and fear and loss and trauma and desperate helplessness that hit when terrorists strike all bob up nonetheless. I know that, in some ways, the terrorists in each of these cases want to represent themselves as on opposite sides. But at the end of the day, what’s left are the survivors, and the victims’ families, and a picture of a smiling student on a screen where there should have been a kid ready to start their first year of high school. The innocent should not have to suffer.

We shall find peace. We shall hear the angels, we shall see the sky sparkling with diamonds.

                                                                        -Chekhov