“Time flies glory…one blaze of glory” – RENT

This has been an incredible trip and has moved incredibly fast.

I remember the last month long trip I took — it was when I landed in Israel for the first time. In many ways people are surprised at how much of Israel I have yet to explore. The reality is that almost as soon as I landed after moving there I was in an intensive language program for six months and then I was home for three weeks and then I was in basic training and then I started my service in the Foreign Relations Branch. I’ve been going at an incredibly fast pace since the day I landed in Israel as a citizen instead of a tourist. I think this is part of the reason why I’m so excited to be in the first weeks of 5770…this is the year where I get to go back to some of the basics…where I get to travel a little bit more and educate myself a lot more while taking a lot of other things slower…much slower. One of the things I’ve added to my 5770 list is to explore one new place a month. Twelve awesome sites for the year.

This trip home has been incredible, for so many reasons. I’m not blogging about most of it, primarily because I’m getting set to release my long overdue travelogue and there’s no point in posting it here twice. It has, however, been incredibly spiritually uplifting. There are few words to describe the joy of praying at my family’s synagogue once again for the High Holy Days. Hard to imagine that we’ve been members there for 19 years. While my parents originally tried to remain anonymous, by accident they were outed as the ones who donated the new walls inside the sanctuary so now I get to write about how they came to be instead of just saying “oh look…magic…we have Jerusalem walls.”

My father took a lot of pictures when he, my mother and my twin came to visit me this past year. He then had an artist come in and take his photos of the stone walls of Jerusalem and recreate them in the sanctuary…just high enough so the sky could be painted above them…the stone walls of Jerusalem are something to behold in person…and these look as if you had just turned the corner into the Jewish Quarter from the road that leads to the Armenian Quarter if you were to enter from the Jaffa Gate. They are made that more awesome by the light that streams in from our (now somewhat old…yet still breathtaking) stained glass windows depicting Mt. Sinai, the Ten Commandments, and numerous elements from Kabbalah. To pray in my synagogue has always been an experience and this just adds to heighten the sense of wonder and amazement that comes with it.

This trip has taken me to New York City, West Palm Beach, New Jersey, Buffalo and Long Island. I’ve gotten to catch up with old friends, make some new friends, and get to know some former acquaintances better…and while there were some friends that I wasn’t able to meet up with, which is disappointing, it was amazing none the less and I hope to see them on my next trip this coming July when I come up for my friends wedding. To see my friends from the LGBTQ community in Buffalo…friends of mine who, together, went through incredible ups and victories marching for things that we still stand for…and incredible downs, hugging each other at funerals of people who died too young. To see spaces that we used to call our own being kept and filled with a new, younger-than-us generation of amazing students who are having it worlds easier because of some small things we were able to accomplish but yet are still managing to fight their own battles is just…there are no words for how awesome it feels. To finally have the university administration say words like “Transgender” and “Queer” after explosive meetings where you thought they’d never recognize that there really was anything outside of heterosexual and homosexual is a miracle.

To walk into the Art Department and find professors that I had more than four years ago who remembered me as if it were just a minute ago that we finished class together…to walk into the Linguistics Department and see the redecorated lounge that my fellow cohorts and I fund raised for still being kept nice, neat and pristine…and friends who are now at the edge of completing their dissertations smiling as they sit in their offices…to eat at restaurants that we used to call home…Amy’s Place where you could bring your own tea bag and ask for a hot cup of water and sit there free of charge for as long as you wanted because they also fed the homeless in the mornings and are a politically conscious restaurant and really didn’t mind. There’s a lot of wonderful memories in New York City where I came out of the closet at sixteen, West Palm Beach where I dealt internally with the death of my Grandfather and was able to finally move on, New Jersey where I have both a close friend, my grandparents, and a romance that wasn’t in Jersey City but still manages to bring a smile to my face, Buffalo where I found myself lost myself and was where I eventually decided to move to Israel and get back to basics and Long Island where I grew up…what words can be used to express the memories that are ignited by a smell…colognes of former lovers and crushes alike, a crispness in the air that at once reminds me of pumpkin picking as a child and walking around my base during basic training remembering my childhood memories of what remains white picket fences on an island devoted to family, friends, and the ocean…what words to look at where my friends are and see how happy they are but to have no regrets for moving away because it’s the right path for me to be on right now…to know that all of it is worth it…and knowing that all of our paths are intertwined…that at some point they’ll meet up again…because it’s been two years since I’ve been there and we’ve kept in touch…and being in a room with them is not only joyful…but as if I just went out for a stroll to the market…though the pain of missing friends is still sometimes there…the love remains.

Simply awesome.

Last night I was incredibly lucky, LIW stayed at my parents’ house on his way to his current journey and it gave us a wonderful opportunity to catch up in the late night hours. It also allowed my mother to meet one of my friends from UB who she hadn’t met yet (she’s met most of them, as she’d fly up every now and then when I was an undergrad and stay for a few days). LIW was also drafted and successfully helped me balance my bags so I only have to pay $25.00 a bag for overweight luggage rather than $125-200.00 in fees that ELAL would be more than happy to charge me if I didn’t manage to have each suitcase be no more than 23-32 kilos.

Unfortunately, I’m still on the tail end of a chest infection which I picked up while I was in Buffalo (the more things change…). Not having insurance in the United States poses some problems (especially since the IDF is my insurance provider but doesn’t offer travelers insurance). I was able to score a Z-Pack which seems to have done the trick…and I’ve been using a neti pot and decongestants and taking Vitamin C and drinking plenty of fluids…so there’s hope that I’ll be able to have this entirely out of my system before I leave…it just means that I have to take it slower than I would have liked to as I finish what has been an incredible month.

As I get ready to wrap up my time here I find myself looking forward to returning to Israel. It’s been wonderful to see everyone, stressful in that it’s hard to fit it all in and I want to see everyone and just can’t…but wonderful. It’s been a lot of reverse culture shock…coming from a daily life where I hear three to five languages spoken regularly to hearing mostly English is oddly depressing. I’m looking forward to the flight where I can relax and reflect and in the process switch over from Matt to Matan, from American to Israeli…it’s like how I felt on the subway when I was doing my student teaching and I was moving over from student to teacher on my way into the city and then teacher to student on my way back to UB.

This trip has had one incredibly hard part that repeats itself often. I’ve been asked (I don’t recall how many times): “so when are you coming back home” and while I do want to go to graduate school in the United States (I’d love a nice, sprawling campus), Australia or somewhere in Europe it’s just something I don’t have an answer for. I love Israel, I feel at home wherever I am, I love Hebrew and Arabic, and while I have no idea where my base of eventual operations will be…I do know that Israel will play a large part of my life and so I take a holistic view of it…just let things fall into place…let them happen instead of make them happen. The problem with this approach is that the only answer I can give is that “I don’t know.” The only things I know are that I have two more years of military service (more if I go to the Officers School), that I’m going to do a few language programs after I finish…maybe one or two years in total while working, and then apply to graduate programs…or maybe take the opportunity to live in a few other places of the world for awhile. I know that there’s a lot of teaching opportunities I want to take in places like Tibet and Dharm Sala and I would love to volunteer with groups in Darfur…and I think a year of Israeli National Service could be a fantastic opportunity…I also want to explore India and Peru. The only thing I know for sure is that I’m moving forward rather than backwards…I’m just providing the momentum…the direction isn’t coming from me though.

Later today will be filled with phone calls from Oregon to Albany and Canada to Tel Aviv…Friday is going to be a relaxed kind of day involving mostly pajamas and then to lighting Shabbat candles and reconnecting on the weekend with my family. Saturday and Sunday are the last hurrah. Sunday I leave for Israel at night, during the day I’m helping my father with some work at our synagogue in Jericho and at night having some pizza with my cousins at my parents’ house. I land in Israel Monday at 16:15IST and after dropping off my bags in Tel Aviv I’ll be heading to Jerusalem where I’ll be placing the 204 notes I’ve collected from my congregation in the Kotel (the “Western” or “Wailing Wall”)…then I’ll be heading back to Tel Aviv and then to base on Tuesday…for now though…I’m heading to bed.