My first flight of
the day was scheduled to leave from Ithaca Airport at 9:29 am on Tuesday. I said goodbye to my Father at 8:20 am, who
had a meeting with some Biology and Society advisees later that morning, and my
Mother and I drove to the airport. My
Mother is concerned that I'm going to be too excited and busy in Israel to eat
well, and doesn't want me to return home looking thinner than I was when I
left. I'm hoping to see her, as well as
the rest of my family, sooner than that, though; my parents, as well as all of
my siblings, are planning to visit me during my sojourn in Israel.
The flight from
Ithaca to Newark was unexceptional: I fell asleep for part of it, as I often do
on plane flights. I had about a six-hour
wait in Newark airport. I finally
finished reading William James's Varieties of Religious Experience,
which I had begun in New York City, reading it on my Kindle during my daily
commute to Drisha Institute. It's a
fairly boring book, in fact, and I don't recommend it to anyone; for the life
of me, I can't understand how such a banal, dreary work ever made it into our
canon of great literature (don't ask me about little Willy's younger brother,
either, for that matter). Luckily, this
left me free to continue a book that I have been enjoying, Benny Morris's Righteous
Victims: A History of the Zionist-Arab Conflict 1881-2001, which I began
reading last week. Reading this book is
part of my attempt to shore up my pitiful knowledge of Israeli history. Until this summer, I had never read any
full-length books on the history of the modern State of Israel, and I never
took any classes at Cornell on Israel, or even on the modern Middle East. When I left to study abroad in France, I went
with a very rough sketch of the last few hundred years' worth of French history
(thanks largely to Mrs. P-B). I don't
even have a sketch of Israel's history, though: more like a few crayon-strokes
on construction paper. I desperately
need to learn more about the various aliyot, the Mandate period, both world
wars, the Arab-Israeli wars, Israeli domestic policy, Israel foreign policy,
Israeli agriculture and infrastructure, airlifts, Oslo, Camp David, the PLO,
Chamas, the IDF, refugees, the Yemenite and Ethiopian communities, the
intifadas, the government in Gaza, the religious authorities – there's so much
I just don't know. And this is just a
short list of the items of the past century and a half; there's good things to
be said to read up back through the Ottoman period, the Crusades, the early
Muslim conquests and the Pact of Umar, the Byzantines and the Sassanid
Persians, the Romans... I have a lot of learning to do, in other words.
My Father
mentioned to me the other evening that I was very calm for someone about to
travel internationally, and leave the country for nearly a year. I thought about my lack of travel anxiety
when I was in Newark. I have the same
feeling that I did when I was abroad last summer; I am leaving Ithaca, but I have
a clear goal, which I am excited to pursue.
I have commitments in the U.S., but that's also where all my problems
are; when I'm abroad, I'm an ocean away from my biggest problems. But I'm not running away from them; rather,
just as was the case last summer, I'm going to return home more capable than
ever of solving my problems, because I'll be a more skilled, more experienced,
and (perhaps) more mature person upon my return. Knowing this, and knowing that I have a fixed
mission, has given me significant mental endurance in the past, even when I
found myself in upsetting, unhappy situations.
Yet again, I'm
doing something I care about: teaching.
In the past few months, I don't think I've done a good job of
emphasizing to those around me just how much I'm looking forward to the
day-to-day work that this job entails. I
want to teach. That bear repeating; I
want to teach. I want to be an
educator. Every time I've been in a
teaching role, no matter how formal or informal, I've taken an enormous amount
of pleasure in the act of explaining and communicating. Just a few days ago, I had the opportunity to
sit down with my friend Sammy, helping her to study vocabulary for her upcoming
GRE. I was sitting in 104 West!,
surrounded by friends with whom I hadn't had a real conversation in months –
and I was completely engrossed in the list of words in front of me, and trying
to elucidate their meanings, that I spoke to nobody else, and completely forgot
about the plate of food that was lying in front of me, despite not having eaten
in about 18 hours. Sammy, I'll admit,
will be different from most of my future pupils, who will be neither my
friends, nor smart students in Ivy League schools, but nevertheless, I'm
looking forward to teaching them.
I'm now sitting in
Frankfurt airport. In Ithaca, it's 2:00
am, but here, it's not yet 8:00 am. The
flight from Newark to Frankfurt I spent entirely awake, reading maybe a hundred
pages of Benny Morris, as well as watching Iron Man III. Victor, you were right; it's not that good of
a film. Like Man of Steel (which
I reviewed a couple of months ago), it lacks a good beginning-middle-ending arc,
but whereas the latest Superman film dwells forever in the beginning, Iron
Man III has almost no beginning, and is mostly middle. The pacing is all wrong, in other words; the
film-makers wanted to jump immediately to certain sections, without giving the
viewer the opportunity to catch up with the characters' motives. I still think that the villain's scheme is
unbelievably complex, and doesn't really benefit him much, given the amount of
risk involved. The whole setup seems...
contrived, and the plot twists failed to draw me in. Also, it's a revenge story; I think that
Hollywood produces altogether too many of those.
Thank you,
Frankfurt Airport, for 30 free minutes of Internet access!
All right, cool
people, you'll hear from me again once I'm in Israel!
~JD
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