Encounter Post #1: An Introduction

I had the profound pleasure of attending the recent Encounter trip to Bethlehem on Thursday and Friday, March 26-27.

Encounter is a program founded by two Wexner alumni, Rabbis Melissa Weintraub and Miriam Margles. Its goal is not dialogue between Palestinians and Israelis, but rather that the Jewish leaders from the diaspora who attend each encounter program return to their communities and change the nature of the Jewish community's discourse about Israel, the Israeli occupation of the West Bank (and, I imagine, the Gaza strip), and the Palestinian-/Arab-Israeli conflict in general.

I adored my experience on the trip; I found my expectations surpassed significantly. Throughout the trip and, as it concluded Friday afternoon, I was conscious and eager for my experience to translate into an extended written testimony and reflection through my blog. Then, as it tends to, time passed, and sitting down to begin to write became a bigger and bigger deal, just as the rest of my experience continued to intrude on the mental space I was able to so completely devote to the trip as it happened late last week. And so, even though I am not currently "in the zone" where I feel like I write best (though, admittedly, that zone is also where I most clearly write in a certain style that I imagine some like more than others), I need to begin to write.

There are moments in our lives when things change around us so quickly that we are confused; where we change so profoundly that we want - need - to feel a difference in our external selves as much as our minds, our personalities, our lived experience feels differently. The most mundane of these experiences, I imagine, are birthdays (do you feel any older? do I look 23?) and long-distance travel (heightened by jetlag and other consequences of air travel that the human body could never have evolved "intentionally" to cope with); more significant ones include getting engaged (two years ago tomorrow), getting married, having a child (I imagine), getting into college, graduating from anything, et c. Leaving camp was always one of those moments for me, one of the reasons why, for so many years, I clung to replicating in some way the experience of my childhood - needing some sort of waystation between camp itself and the jarring realities (and sameness) of "home."

Encounter was this type of experience - I feel, walking through the streets of Jerusalem and conversing with friends and family, that they should be able, somehow, to see how much I have changed, to hear it in my voice, to feel it within me. They cannot. And so it is as if my body thinks it's 2 a.m. but it's really 10 a.m.; as if I am still who I am but I betrothed myself to my beloved the night before. It is not an out of body experience; it is an uncomfortable, discordant inside of body experience. And this offness that I feel demands of me that I respond to it, persistently asks me questions: How will you live your life differently to indicate the impact of this experience? Such, I think, is the consequence of every such experience whereby we internally change and externally remain the same. (And, it is worth noting, such is the trauma of the opposite situation - amputation; a house burning down; losing a loved one; becoming a refugee - when our external world is forever altered but our internal one lags far, far behind.)

I went on Encounter intent more on learning from the program's methods (more on this in a second) than from its content. I assumed that it was not likely that I would be moved politically by the trip - it is difficult for me to imagine myself moving farther to the left while still supporting the State of Israel, and it is harder to imagine engaging in the face-to-face conversations I knew we would be having with living, breathing, human Palestinians and being pushed to the right - and, as far as I can tell, I was not. But I was moved by the trip to think about my politics differently, to try and find ways to have conversations with friends and family, in professional situations (Ramah most necessarily, but elsewhere as well), and to become (I hope) politically active on an issue for the first time in my life.

Interestingly to me, I cannot recall what my expectations were about what I would (or would not) learn on the trip - it seems likely that I never articulated any expectations whatsoever. Though I imagined there were people on the trip who learned many more basic-level facts than me, I learned an unbelievable amount of rich, meaty information that it is difficult for me to imagine being more intellectually stimulated by the experience.

In the end, I am still greatly interested in - and impressed by - the deliberate planning of Encounter and the seeming possibilities of its communications agreement and facilitation model. I have begun the process of scheduling a meeting with the amazingly talented staff of Encounter here in Israel (Ilana Sumka and Benj Kamm) to talk about ways to infuse other settings (Ramah) with the feel of Encounter and different models for implementing the facilitation model in different settings. Even so, the experience itself came to trump my academic interests; they seem, as it were, academic, in contrast to the people I met, the things I heard, the thoughts I had. I was overwhelmed by living through these experiences in a way I had not imagined I could be; it feels good.

My plan is to create for myself (and my readers and, perhaps, some other as-yet-to-be-determined audience) a written log and testimony to what I experienced and saw on Encounter. I will write about the framing of folk songs, the man I would happily elect as President of the United States, maqluba, new versions of backgammon, and a good number of children. I will write about easy answers and hard questions; tragedy and inspiration; Kafka and hope; safety and uncomfortability.

I will take a different approach then I have thus far taken on the blog, creating a series of blog entries which will, when all is said and done (and, with any luck, as the process is unfolding as well) be internally linked to each other and prominently displayed on the blog's home page itself. As I post new entries, I will update the (tentative) list of posts, below, with live links. And so you can always come back to this permanent link - http://jacobcytryn.blogspot.com/2009/03/encounter-post-1-introduction.html - to read the next chapter in this project. The goal is to create more of a long-form narrative non-fiction piece than a single blog entry, a project that might exist on its own.

I plan on writing the following sections:

Hope Flowers

Sami Awad

Security Fence

Personal Narratives

Games + Dinner

The Handans

Saman Khoury

Tent of the Nations

Checkpoing Walkthrough

On Fear

Encounter as an Educational Venture

Reflections

The Elephant in the Room

Only For the Children

Bearing Witness

Next: Encounter Post #2: Hope Flowers