Babies!

Again, it's Shabbat and I am so bored with nothing to do but write all day......so I'm punishing you with it:

This has always interested me, but right now I’m thinking about it a lot since I’m clearly at an important turning point in my life. I’ve always found it interesting to look at pictures from a while ago and think about how the people in the pictures don’t know what I know. For example, I remember looking at a picture of my brother and one of his friends from when they were 15, and I thought to myself, “Wow, my brother’s friend didn’t know he was gonna get married four years after taking this picture.” I know it’s not that exciting because that’s just how time works, but there we are….

So right now I have in front of me a passport from the US, my birth certificate and a copy of my proof of Judaism from the synagogue I grew up in. The things I’m gonna need when I go to Misrad Hapnim. And my birth certificate is just blowing my mind in the same way that old pictures do because, you know, a birth certificate is the first record there is of a person….and it’s so weird to think that at one point I was just a little baby and no one had any idea that 19 (almost 20) years later I’d be 8000 miles away in a foreign country.

It’s also weird to look at the record of my dad on my birth certificate. His name is clearly not a Jewish one, and my birth certificate states that he was born in Arkansas. So then I get to thinking, wow, my grandparents had no idea when my dad was born that he was going to marry a Jew and have Jewish children and one of them was going to abandon the country that that side of the family had lived in for centuries…since before the U.S. existed.

Hell, even as recently as when I was 12—the last time I saw a grandparent from my dad’s side—they couldn’t have predicted that I would be where I am now. What did I want to do when I was 12? I think I wanted to be a Latin scholar at Oxford. I mean, I loved Israel but when I was 12 it wasn’t my priority. If my granny somehow knew that 7 years after the last time I would ever see her I’d be in the Jewish state, she wouldn’t believe it! I mean, for Christ’s sake, I was visiting her for CHRISTMAS!

It’s weird to think of all the Memorial Days of the country of my birth I celebrated by attending festive BBQ’s, having no idea that one day I’d spend the Memorial Day of a different country at a ceremony in a cemetery. It’s weird to remember that from the time I was five until I was 11, I had to say the Pledge of Allegiance 3 mornings a week during flag salute at school, and yet a few years later here I am about to declare citizenship of and allegiance to another country. It’s weird to think of my elementary school’s annual “American Appreciation Day” in which we all had to dress up as Americans—you know, blue jeans, white shirts and red bandanas—and sing songs about how great the United States is. And yet, for all the singing I did about how great the US is, I’ve left it.

It’s also weird to think about the slightest things that could have prevented me from reaching this moment. First off, my parents have told me that right before I was born they were seriously considering moving from California to Tennessee. And obviously I would be seriously different if I were raised in the south. Would I have never come to Israel? Or would I have come sooner? Then I think, what if the night before “The Big Earthquake,” during which a huge wardrobe fell on my bed, I hadn’t insisted on not sleeping in my own room? What if my parents had let me go to the high school I originally wanted to go to instead of the one I ended up going to and loving? Then I start thinking about what if certain larger things hadn’t happened, like the LA Riots or September 11th. Would my family be any different, and would I be any different? It really is crazy. The possibilities of what can happen in life are infinite, for better or worse.

It really is exciting when you think about it. And a little frightening. I mean, when I was a newborn my parents had no way of knowing what I was going to do with my life. It’s scary to think about. You know, you have a kid, but have no idea what’s gonna happen to it. I think of my brothers and me, how extremely different the three of us are, and yet when each of us were born we probably didn’t look too different from each other or act too different from each other because, let’s be totally honest, babies are pretty much the same. Parents have NO way of knowing what their little blob of a human is going to become. Sure, you might be birthing the next Einstein, but you also might be birthing someone who will grow up to be a serial killer, or someone who will grow up to cause great destruction in the world, or someone who will abandon you and move to Israel.

I don’t know if any of this made sense.