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Fateful Encounters

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On the sidewalk in front of my house, I bump into two friends whose kids went to school with my oldest son, and so we catch up on how the kids are doing in college and whether they plan to study overseas. Neither feels that her kid needs to spend a junior year abroad – they’ve travelled enough, they’ve encountered plenty of diversity growing up in New York City, and they don’t need to be indulged on what is really a junket for a year. At first, I nod my head in agreement, but then, after about five minutes, my internal sense of hypocrisy starts to surface, and finally, I have to confess, “You know, I spent my junior year abroad in Israel. And that’s why I’m standing here with you on the Upper West Side and wishing you a shana tova, a happy new year.” Maybe it sounds grandiose, but it’s true.

I’d gone to the Overseas Office at Indiana University to apply for the program in Germany, which was my ancestral homeland and to which I’d felt quite connected throughout my Strassenfest and chicken dumplings childhood. But idly flipping through the brochure, I saw that there was a study abroad program in Jerusalem. Goodbye Kunigunda, hello camels.

I hoped that by being in the Holy Land, in the place where God appeared, where Jesus walked, where the spiritual world met on the physical plane, I would get the Holy Spirit. The Holy Spirit–which I apparently didn’t have–was something inexplicable, something that was given to you by God, and once you had it, you understood God’s plan as put forth in church doctrine, or at least, the doctrine of the fundamentalist church in which I was raised. There were a number of church teachings that made me uncomfortable–for example, its conviction that the entire black race had been cursed because Cain was black. I was sympathetic to gay people and didn’t think that any human being was an “abomination.” I wasn’t convinced that the television shows Bewitched and Caspar the Friendly Ghost were truly tools of Satan. But if I could only get the Holy Spirit, I would understand all of this.

I couldn’t fathom why other people who were not nearly so knowledgeable about the Bible–I could expound on the significance of the number seven, deception, stolen birthrights and thievery–had gotten the Holy Spirit. I figured there was some flaw in me, so God had decided not to give it to me. Once I had it, the church’s stances on everything from the imminence of the end of the world to its recent ban of make-up (a tool of Satan) would become clear. I was less concerned about the end of the world than I was about relinquishing my Maybelline. I hoped that Israel would clue me in as to the error of my whore of Babylon ways.

When I arrived in Israel, I felt as if I’d dropped myself into the middle of an unknown world. The people, the language, the history, the ongoing conflicts—all were a mystery to me. I’d romantically envisioned the Mount of Olives where Jesus stood, the Sea of Galilee, Bethlehem and Nazareth…It was the Israel of the Bible, understood through a particular Christian lens, a world of prophets and patriarchs, of King David and the apostles. A big part of me expected to see dark, Semitic sorts wearing tunics and sandals and watering their camels at the wells. Time for me had stopped after the first century. What had happened to the Jews after Jesus’ crucifixion, well, I didn’t quite know what the past two thousand years of Jewish history had entailed, the Holocaust aside. It simply hadn’t come up in history class in Indiana. And frankly, when the Jews rejected Jesus, God had abandoned them and created a new covenant with Christians. I was savvy enough – barely – not to share these observations with my new Jewish friends.

I didn’t find the Holy Spirit in Israel, but I learned all sorts of new, fascinating information, like that Barbara Streisand was Jewish. Neil Diamond. When Freud, Einstein and Jonas Salk turned up as Jewish, I managed not to display my astonishment one whit. I discovered that a JAP was not a person of Japanese origin, but a Jewish American Princess who, apparently, liked to spend money and wear nail polish to the Sinai Desert. I found out that praying to God, at least for Jews, might entail reciting proscribed Hebrew prayers which you may or may not understand. Unlike me, Jews were oblivious to the fact that the world was going to end soon. (I worried about their salvation quite a bit, and secretly cherished the notion that I could be the conduit through which they could be converted to Christianity, wouldn’t that be something?)

I continued to believe that there was one right faith, one that I had yet to find or commit to. Not for me, with my black and white, German, judgmental background, was the loosey-goosey, I’m-okay-you’re-okay-and-we-can-all-worship-any-which-way-we-please attitude. I had not really given up my search for the Right Answer, the Right Faith, the one that God approved of. When I left Israel after two years (yes, the junior year abroad was extended, and that remote possibility in itself is reason enough to forbid one’s offspring to flee the nest), it was without the Holy Spirit and worse, with even more spiritual conundrums than I’d had when I set out. It wasn’t just the church’s teachings I’d begun questioning. It was the entire premise of Christianity. My heavily-mascaraed eyes had opened wide and were seeing things I hadn’t expected or wanted to see.

Now, without going into all of these details, I tell my friends that for me, studying abroad was life-changing. “Fateful encounters,” my friend, Sharon, smiles, referring to my unknowingly fateful decision to flip through the overseas brochure and reject my geographical homeland for my spiritual one.

She’s right. So here I am, a former fundamentalist Christian from the cornfields of southern Indiana, standing on the sidewalk with an Argentinian Jew and a child of Holocaust survivors. Isn’t that something?