All you have to do to get a free trip to Israel from the Birthright organization is be a Jew. The innocent claim of the organization is that all young Jews (18-26) who haven’t seen Israel should see Israel. You don’t have to be religious. You don’t even have to be practicing. They don’t care if you discovered philosophy as a junior in college, and soon after discovered that all the cute boys were atheists and became one yourself. They don’t care if you called your parents up one day to say, “I’m forsaking Judaism.” They just care if one of those parents is Jewish. Or so they say.
Both of my parents are Jewish. They were relatively unimpressed by my rejection of our faith; I remember my junior year when I received a voicemail from my father, half chirping, half chiding: “Hi Rachie, it’s your Daddy…I know you’ve forsaken Judaism, but I just wanted to call and wish you a Happy Hannukah, anyway, Sweetheart.”
I was aggravated by this, but a year later, I was willing to do whatever it took to get a free vacation, including pretending that I might still believe in God if I heard the right argument. In my first interview with Birthright staff, I got the vibe that this was what they wanted to hear.
Approaching Masada.
I sensed they wanted more than a Jewish ancestor. They wanted me. In the interview with the Birthright people, they asked, “What’s the reason you want to go to Israel?” Rather than admit it was to compensate for graduating Penn without marrying a doctor, I looked at the woman with wide eyes and said, “Well, when I was in college, I gave up Judaism. But now that I’m graduating, I want to make sure I didn’t make a mistake.” I should have just worn a shirt that said: “Yes, I’d love a glass of punch! And a refill.”
But the truth was, I sort of believed my own story. After all, I didn’t have a job lined up for the fall. Maybe there was a God, and he was punishing me for dating a Catholic for the first two years of college and spending the second two hopelessly in love with an atheist, lapsed Jew. Maybe if I apologized to God for denying his existence, he’d send me a life plan. Maybe the answer to all my questions was Israel.
Me and my new friends, dancing the Hora.
The Birthright organization bent over backwards to convince me that my suspicion was true. Once we got off the plane, our trip leaders told us we were home, and taught us Hebrew words. They gave us all the wine we wanted at dinner and led us in trust games to prove that all Jews shared a bond.
Never mind that I hate trust games—I liked looking at the Mosque in Jerusalem. I wanted to sneak into the Arab quarter. I was the only member of the trip not to cry at the Holocaust memorial. I befriended the two most cynical boys on the trip and fiercely noted every instance of apparent brainwashing attempts.
I was determined to resist, but the fates, and the Birthright organization, were equally determined to break me. It started with some persuasive speakers—leaders, writers. They didn’t just talk about Israel. They talked about love. They focused on a love of Israel and Judaism. They talked about what a challenging relationship it was: one filled with deep sacrifices and rich rewards. Although I had forsaken Judaism in college, I had embraced challenging relationships rife with sacrifice. Against my better judgment, I was intrigued. I started to look around for something to love.
Noah's Ark, rendered as a candle, in a shop in Safed.
At 26, Sam was the oldest guy on our trip, and I immediately perceived that he was going to be the perfect Jewish husband to some very lucky, very manicured young woman some day. I gave him a try. I walked around Jerusalem with him and helped him choose gifts for his family. I complained while he haggled prices, and openly resented his cheesy sense of humor. I thought, “this could be your life, married to the perfect Jewish MBA, embarrassing in public and mediocre in bed.” I started to get uneasy thinking about a passionless marriage with Sam. I soothed myself by arguing that marriage was just an entertaining convenience, like cable. I remembered I didn’t watch TV. My heart was suddenly pounding, and not in that way.
I was on the verge of hyperventilating when the trip leaders introduced the Israeli soldiers that would travel with us, ostensibly to teach us about life in Israel. However, I suspected it was more of an attempt to infuse Birthrighters with subliminal positive feelings about the State. “Sure! Bomb all the Palestinians you want! With biceps like those, who needs peace in the Middle East?”
Soon after they joined us, I found myself bored at the Western Wall after placing my note: a love letter to Indiana Jones. My wandering eyes (don’t let them see you looking at the Mosque!) landed on a green-eyed, tanned, skinny and serious-seeming soldier, who was, in my opinion, begging for a batty extrovert like me to help him come out his shell. It took a lot of long meaningful stares, but eventually I got his attention. By the time our caravan had migrated to a Bedouin tent in the desert, we had started to talk.
He was quiet and thoughtful, but sometimes hilarious. He invited me to ride a camel with him and I pretended that I was being shipped away for an arranged marriage, which would ideally be more exciting than the one I envisioned with Sam. He loved music, he knew how to be silly and was willing to learn yoga. Unfortunately for the Birthright crew, I discovered that he was also desperately depressed about being in the army and wanted to get out of Israel. He gave me his e-mail address. I threw it away.
But Birthright had a back-up plan: instilling a love of the land, and I found the desert compelling. They took us to a tree farm and gave each of us a sprout. When we planted them, I crouched in the dirt and sang mine songs and told it stories. I told it everything I wanted to hear: that it should strive for happiness before perfection, and that the future was nothing to fear. I found myself wanting to stay. I had discovered a love of dirt.
The Western Wall. Don't let them catch you looking at the mosque!
A few days later, we visited an onion farm owned by Europe’s wealthiest patent lawyer who donated all the food to charity. After an hour of farming, I was hooked. I announced that I was ready to move. Little did I know, it wouldn’t be hard to do. The Lawyer-Farmer needed no convincing before offering me a job where I’d spend half the day as a paralegal and half the day farming. He handed me his card. I was effusive. I was wanted – by Israel, by the Jews. For the first time in a long time, I belonged.
I was skipping as his office assistant walked us out. Her head was covered and she wore a long skirt in the sweltering heat. “I came here after college,” she told me, “to work on the farm and in the office. I was totally secular. First I met my husband, an Israeli. Then I became Orthodox.” I stopped skipping. When they want you, I realized, they really want all of you.
But it was two nights later when I realized what they really wanted, and two nights later when I vowed it was something they would never get. On the last night of the trip, they threw a colossal concert at a stadium on a plateau for all the thousands of young Jews traveling through Israel on a Birthright trip. By that point, I was fully on board. I led my trip-mates and a random group of soldiers through in a Hora. Our leaders beamed at me. “You are perfect,” they said. I forgot the advice I had given my little sprout. I loved hearing it. Then the man who funded much of the organization started talking. Over a loudspeaker, he explained to us what they really wanted: “Seven Jewish children,” he calculated, “is how many you all need to have to compensate for the loss of the Holocaust.”
Now, unlike some other Jewish women, I do not have birthing hips. Nor do I like to think of myself as a baby farm. But they were courting me for my eggs. And not just one or two eggs like the personal ads for childless couples seeking women over 5’10” with high SAT scores. They wanted seven of them. And when my eggs became little people, they probably wanted me to spend all my time scaring them with stories about the Holocaust and teaching them to hate Arabs.
For a few minutes, I was crushed. All the people who claimed to like me actually just liked my potential offspring. And they wanted to be able to tell my children what to think, just like they’d been telling me for the past 10 days. Although I had been nearly convinced to change my own life, I was inflexible when it came to how I wanted my eggs.
I liked the autonomy of onion farming, but not as much as I like having autonomous rule over my own womb. So I decided not to make the big move. I left Israel with a great tan, the ability to say the word threesome in Hebrew, and a mezzuzah for my dad. And although I cannot offer up my body as a vessel for the line of Abraham, I am very grateful for the free vacation.
