First Quarterly Report

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Marc Frankel

First Quarterly Report

2006-2007 Watson Fellowship

Given the kind of college student I was, I could probably crank out these few pages on what I've learned in about two seconds: the Jews of Tahiti eat freshly caught tuna on Shabbat, the Jews of New Zealand are standoffish, the Jews of Perth are almost all from South Africa and are eminently welcoming, I've grown as a person, et cetera, et cetera. I’m finding myself working hard to find meaning in what I’m doing here though, and that’s something I’ve never done before. An assignment or a project has always just been an assignment or a project. You type it up, you print it out, and you get on with your life before that episode of Friends that you already know all the words to comes on. But not this time. Who knows? Maybe I really am growing.

First of all, let’s begin with what I’m learning about the Jewish communities. My big revelation has been that the Jewish communities are, at least so far, a product of their circumstances and situations. When I first met the Jews of Tahiti, they welcomed me unquestioningly. I was sweating when I first arrived there, not because of the tremendous humidity in the South Pacific (which didn’t help), but because all of their prayer tunes were in the Sephardic tradition, which meant that I could barely follow along in the siddur (prayer book), let alone participate. I was convinced they would think I was faking the whole thing, a la Wedding Crashers, for a free meal and a few drinks at their Shabbat table. I still feel awkward and guilty when someone asks me something like, “Well, what’s your favorite zimriyah?" or "Don't they have shidachim in New York?" and I don't necessarily know exactly what they're talking about, but that's what I started with: my Judaism is a product of my years in Hebrew school and my youth in Westchester. That was my baseline. Time to see what's different from that.

But back to the Tahitian Jews: they came almost exclusively from Morocco and Algeria after the revolutions there, and they were all tremendously friendly. Eerily so. I was convinced, as they toasted me with shot after shot and brought out course after course of delicious food, that they were somehow up to something, but they weren't. It was simply a case of nice people living in paradise, all with good jobs, nice families, and children who preferred to be at the Shabbat table much more than out with the "uncivilized" Tahitian Polynesians at nightclubs. According to them, there is no real anti-Semitism to speak of, and their Sephardic traditions have even given the local Polynesians the impression that these men in prayer shawls and skullcaps are Muslim. Life, in short, is very pleasant for the Jews of Tahiti, and as such, they've come to extend that friendliness and easygoing nature to strange, nervous boys from New York who suddenly and very awkwardly find themselves in a foreign shul on a Friday night.

The Jews of New Zealand, conversely, were more or less the exact opposite. The one Shabbat meal I was able to share in the entire six weeks I was there was in Auckland at the home of the rabbi, who was originally from New York. From the shwarma shop owner in Kerikeri in the north to the four elderly men I met davening in the Canterbury Hebrew Congregation in Christchurch, everyone greeted me with caution. The picture I have of the Wellington synagogue could have just as easily been the entrance to a prison, and there were no outward signs or indications at all that it was a house of worship, only two stickers advertising the name of the security company that the synagogue employed. In the Auckland Central Synagogue, I was buzzed in through the security gate, given a perfunctory tour of the grounds, shown a shop where I could purchase a history of New Zealand Jews, and asked, "Will there be anything else?" The atmosphere towards Jews in general in New Zealand is cold, and when the topic came up with a native Kiwi, he said to me, "I'm not prejudiced. I don't care one way or the other, don't have a problem with anybody, but I don't see why they [the Jews] have to live here. There's nothing holy for them in New Zealand, right?" From a normal tourist's point of view, Kiwis could not be more friendly and their country could not be more beautiful. When I dropped my passport on a hike on Rangitoto Island, the park rangers alerted the entire staff to be on the lookout for it, and when I wanted to do something special for a friend I was visiting, a restaurant made mint chocolate chip ice cream from scratch--free of charge--just to help me out. Put on a yarmulke, however, and everyone quickly sings a different tune. Even Helen Clark, the New Zealand prime minister, is an outspoken and fervent advocate against Israel. Anti-Semitism isn't uncommon--I saw many swastikas during my time there--and I could easily understand why I would have to hold up my passport to the security camera at a synagogue before being allowed in.

With six weeks of that under my belt, you can imagine how worried I was about the next ten and a half months. What if nobody took me in and welcomed me? What if the rest of my Watson year was spent in synagogue administrative front offices, explaining my project and being shown the door? Thankfully, when I arrived in Perth, those fears were almost immediately dispelled. People were practically fighting to have me at their Shabbat table. Everyone knew someone in one of my next destinations, or had a brother who used to live somewhere, or had the name of a good book to read. Since writing is forbidden on Shabbat, I struggled mightily to keep straight all the e-mail addresses congregants told me to remember during services. "It's easy," they would say, "Just remember my name, Shmuel Rabinowitz, all one word, at cybernetxpw dot com dot A-U," or something very nearly along those lines. Imagine having to retain six or seven of those with Hebrew chants swirling in the background and the continual hand shaking and "Shabbat Shalom" greetings every two seconds.

I was fortunate enough in my second week here to meet Benji Raymond, a university student my age, who has introduced me to his entire clique of friends. Between Benji and his friend Blake, I've gotten to stay about two weeks in the Jewish suburbs of Perth and met a great number of their friends and acquaintances. One thing I must say about the Perth Jewry: for all their welcoming to a fellow Jew, they are very exclusive when it comes to their youth. There is one Jewish school here, Carmel School, and nearly all Jewish students end up forming groups of friends among fellow Jews. While the more secular Jewish people I've met will readily violate the Shabbat laws to watch an Aussie Rules Football match on television, they'll watch it with other Jews. If I were to go out for a non-kosher lunch with Blake, we'd go with other non-kosher Jews. It's somewhat ironic, I suppose, but it sustains the community feeling here very well, as these friendships and cliques begin as early as kindergarten. It's in stark contrast to what I grew up with. I can distinctly remember confronting a good friend of mine in 8th grade, upset because I hadn't been invited to her Bat Mitzvah and I had invited her to mine. She laughed and said, "Marc, I'm not Jewish." We had been friends for years at this point, and I had had no idea. Naturally, the Perth situation is something very new and interesting to me.

The biggest challenge I've faced in my research so far is the Jewish halakhic (legal) restriction against taking pictures on Shabbat. There are so many wonderful intricacies that I would love to document. I would have liked very much to record the melodic and sometimes haunting sounds of Jewish congregations at prayer. I would have liked to have committed to film the organized chaos of the devout, bearded orthodox Jews of Dianella shul, the Tahitian Jews with their shot glasses full of tequila singing out into the Papeete night, and the four wizened old men who made up services on Saturday morning in Christchurch, but I can't. I have to remember what it looked like to have a circle of men standing in the dark around a lone havdalah candle because I'll never get a picture of it. To me, it's a shame that I can't bring those wonderful moments home to share with everyone, and I may or may not ever keep Shabbat fully again once this year is over, but for now, I'm restricted to the nature of the topic I've chosen to study.

On the flip side, I know that I'm very lucky to have gotten to do this trip to study Jewish communities. So many people have shown so much kindness and friendship to me, and I've come to realize that I've done very well to select this project. It's not that they feel an obligation to host me or feed me dinner, but that there is a kinship between us. I can offer all the feeble, "And if you're ever in New York..." comments I can muster, but we both know that if they were to show up on the doorstep of nearly any Jew in New York in need of a kiddush and some chicken soup, they'd be welcome. My destinations so far have largely been very much within my comfort zone, but once I find myself in places like Spanish Morocco or Windhoek, Namibia, I will probably come to appreciate this kinship much, much more. What would I do if I was studying basketball, bamboo, punk culture, or any of the other proposals? Who would feel such a connection and a reason to look after me in those communities? I'm very lucky indeed.

As for what I've learned for myself, it's impossible to list it all. Human interaction is definitely at the top of the list. I miss walking across a university quad and being able to say hi to dozens of people. I miss the ease of being with people I know and love. I even just miss my phone ringing. Being at home means that there are people who will think to call you and invite you to things, or ask you if you're up for a movie. I spent six weeks in New Zealand with hardly a person who knew my name or my business, and it's troubling to be in a place where nobody cares. I was hiking up on Farewell Spit on the South Island and slipped on a little root sticking up on the trail. It wasn't a big deal--I didn't even fall down--but as I walked on I realized that if something terrible had happened, nobody would have known. Who knew I was on Farewell Spit? How many people in this hemisphere could account for my whereabouts? Terribly, disturbingly, frighteningly few. It has made me realize that I took the times where my friends and I sat around and said, "Ugh... I'm so bored," for granted. There's something worth appreciating in being bored with the people you know so well.

My other big lesson is that I don't know what I don't know. I know that sounds strange, and it took me a few tries to write it down properly, but it's what I mean. I simply have no idea what I don't know yet. I read my journal entries from the beginning of the trip and I realize how young and naive I was, even though that was just a handful of weeks ago. I think we all have this tendency to think that whatever stage we're at in life, that's as smart as we're ever going to get. We think that our decision-making skills are perfectly honed, our experiences so momentous and comprehensive, that we couldn't possibly learn any more from life than we already have. I remember thinking when I left, "Okay, $25,000 divided by 365 means I have 65 bucks a day to spend. I just won't let myself spend more than that on any given day. Got the budget problem solved." Some things cost much more than $65, and some days I don't spend anything at all. I also remember sitting in my rank, fetid, moldy hotel room in Tahiti on the first night, horrified at the $100/night price tag and unable to imagine what a $20/night backpackers hostel room would be like for the next 364 days if this was what I was getting for $100. I had no idea that French Polynesia is one of the most expensive places on Earth for a tourist and that being on a tiny island in the middle of the South Pacific meant that I was at the mercy of anyone even remotely connected with the tourism industry. I had--and still have--a lot to learn.

I also remember thinking, as my flight from JFK sat on the tarmac for an hour, how much time I was losing. I tapped my foot, checked my watch for the hundredth time, and wondered if this plane was ever going to get off the ground. It hit me like a ton of bricks to think that I couldn't possibly be late for anything for another fifty-two weeks. This was hour number one out of over eight thousand. Why was I so anxious? Excited to get going on this adventure, of course, but it was also just my personality kicking in. I think back to that moment now and realize what a neurotic and tightly-wound person I was (and to a certain extent, still am). I was the kind of person who couldn't just be somewhere on time: I had to be early. It wasn't enough to make good time on a highway: I had to get there ahead of everyone else to have more time at the destination and to be better prepared for whatever was next. I was rushing through life. I still do it. I know I do. I catch myself at a beach, looking at a beautiful sunset or whatever, thinking to myself, "Okay, the sun's going to go down in about twenty minutes, then I'm going to put away my camera and then buy food for dinner. That'll take me to about 7:30, and by then there'll be something else to do." It's not as bad as it used to be, but it's still there.

I think my biggest concern and fear is this constant nagging of what I'm "supposed" to be doing. The huge challenge on this trip is the fact that there's no guidelines, no grades, nobody to tell me if I'm doing a great job or ruining the best experience of my life. There's no evaluation, and that's so hard to reconcile. What if I show up at the Fellows conference next August and everyone else wrote scientific papers and literary masterpieces with their experiences? What if I come back and have to sit there like a schmendrick, mumbling, "Ummm... I have these pictures of some sand dunes. Ice climbing was pretty cool too, I guess. Foreign Jewish people are really nice." I've heard enough to know that won't be the case, but even so, the fear of not making the most of my time is always there. Every third or fourth person I meet says, "What an incredible opportunity. You have to write a book about your experiences." What if I don't? What if I do, and the book is terrible, and I've gotten nothing out of this thing except a bunch more passport stamps?  Sometimes I really crave a measure of my success or failure, but of course, there is none.

All told, it's so hard to believe I've been away for three months already. I have a really proud feeling of, "I'm actually doing it: I'm actually making progress. Look at me go." This, of course, was the easy part. Friendly, first-world countries with potable water, cable television, and glass-and-steel elevators. It's not exotic so much as it is Westchester with Paul Hogan. To be honest, I'm a little scared for places like rural Argentina and the Venda region of South Africa; travel without the safety net.

A big moment for me on this trip was when an acquaintance of mine, a 19 year-old yeshiva student from New York here on holiday, drowned on a beach not far from Perth. It made me realize that this isn't a game. Nobody's watching this whole adventure, saying, "Ahhh... that's okay, Marc. You didn't see that oncoming car this time, but here: I'll start you again five minutes earlier and let you have another shot at it." This is for real. It really made me start to think about the time I was spending and the people I was spending it with. Think of all these petty little games we all play: we scheme and we plot and we put on our fanciest button-down shirt and pair of khakis so that we can put on a good show and people can think we're cool. Well, what if one day we didn't come back from a trip to the supermarket, or the bar, or the beach? Each day of my life, have I spent it wisely? If it was the last crack at this world that I ever got, would I be happy with how I left things? What am I not saying because I'm counting on getting to say it down the line? I learned a lot about this particular feeling when I told people I'm from New York. I get asked a lot about 9/11, and whether I knew anyone in the towers, etc. The first time someone asked, I told them the whole story about how my father works in Manhattan, but that Manhattan was shaped like a pencil, and he worked on the eraser end, whereas the towers were down by the tip. "No, we couldn't reach him... no, he couldn't drive home... yes, we were scared..." Now I just change the subject. Sometimes it's a lot better not to face these things head-on. A certain amount of happiness in this world comes from forgetting that it won't be here forever.

Finally, I began to realize as I spoke to backpackers and friends I had made on the road that some of them simply didn't understand when I started talking about this sense of impermanence or what it's like to be alone on the road. Most of the time when I come back home after a trip, my friends ask me how it was and I say, "Fine, great. They put beetroot on their hamburgers there... how weird is that?" This time, however, I won't be able to come home with a year full of experiences and conclusions and expect everyone to understand. Postcards and photo albums show people where you went, but not who you became while you were there. I can talk until I'm blue in the face, but I still won't be able to express what it's like to have a phone number that nobody knows. What a ridiculous thing it was the day I got my Australian number. I heard a phone ring while I was on a bus, and I actually checked to see if it was mine. Not a single person on the planet knew that number yet. It couldn't possibly have been someone calling me, and when I realized that, I felt very lonely indeed. I have pictures of the thermal pools in New Zealand, the dolphins in Shark Bay, and the beaches of Tahiti, but I don't have a picture of the look on my face when I came to the realization that it couldn't have been my phone ringing on that bus. Those are the moments that tell of my travels so far. That's worth putting in the next e-mail I write to a friend back home. "Hey buddy, good to hear from you. Where am I, you ask? I'm in Perth right now, and I'm about a quarter done changing how I think about the world around me. That's where I am. How's everyone back home?"