Vacationing While Jewish (It’s never just a vacation.)
Is this why people look down on Jews? Because we actually have what they’re looking for?
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This is a guest essay by Hana Raviyt Schank, a writer and fourth-generation Brooklyn Jew now living in Israel.
You can also listen to the podcast version of this essay on Apple Podcasts, Google Podcasts, and Spotify.
“I heard everyone’s excited about your new mayor,” said the owner of the new-age retreat as she fixed tea. I’d walked through the door minutes earlier and was waiting for my room assignment.
I smiled. “Some people are excited,” I said. “I’m not one of them.”
“That was very diplomatic,” said the woman from Chicago with whom I’d just shared a car from the ferry terminal.
As we drove through a landscape strewn with the detritus of every civilization since the Neolithic Age, I gave her an earful about the reasons we’d abandoned New York City for Israel, then segued into a critique of its incoming Jew-hating mayor.
A month earlier I’d booked a week at a yoga and meditation retreat in Malta, looking to shed some of the anxiety and trauma I’ve accumulated over the years. I wanted to spend a week away from the news, social media, and exhausting conversations, ideally in bed with a book. I’d forgotten that of course other people would be on my vacation with me. Nine other people, as it turned out, plus four “healers” spanning a range of belief systems and modalities.
As my trip neared, I wondered what I would tell people when they asked where I was from. From my recent travels in Italy, I knew “New York” was the correct answer. I’d tried telling a waiter in Italy that we were from Tel Aviv, and it hadn’t gone well.
“Where?” he asked.
I repeated it. He had no idea where I was talking about. I revised my answer to “Israel” and he was still unsure. Later, I realized he’d heard us speaking English and probably wanted to know which English-speaking nation we’d come from. Maybe he heard our American accents. Maybe he hoped we were from New York City; all of Italy has a trip to New York City on their bucket list.
But when you’re on an island equidistant from Italy, Tunisia, and Libya, saying you’re from New York leads people to ask obvious follow up questions like, “How did you get here?” and “Will you travel around Europe after the retreat?” and “How’s the weather in New York?” All of which led me to confess that, while I’m from New York, I live in Israel now, it was a quick three hour flight, and the weather is gorgeous.
“Israel?!” Most people responded. “You live in Israel?” Some of them stretched the syllables out so it sounded like they were saying, “You live in IS-real?” — as though they were questioning my existence.
I was not the only person on the retreat who lived in one place and was “from” a second place. The other guests included an Italian woman living in Copenhagen, a German man living in Malta, an Iraqi woman born in Yemen but now from the U.K., a British woman living in France, and an American man from Ohio who had most recently lived in San Fransisco but was now retired and traveling full-time.
Our modern world is full of churn, displacement, and people trying to find some quiet. The retreat staff were all from other places, too. The chef was from Greece, the owners from the UK via Poland, the massage therapist from Spain. It was as though someone had given privileged Europe a hard shake, and all the broken people fell out into this cave in Malta. (People in Malta used to live in caves, so most houses have a literal cave beneath them. The retreat involved hours spent in the cave, deemed sacred and spiritual by the staff.)
But even in this well-travelled, multilingual group, no one had a clue about Jews or Israel. “Tel Aviv is the most diverse place I’ve ever lived,” I told the American from Ohio. He was a retired teacher who’d taught both at the high school and college level. He seemed intelligent and well-read. “Israel is diverse???” he replied, baffled. Then he asked if the national language was Yiddish.
I explained the majority of Israelis do not descend from Yiddish speakers. I told him about the large Ethiopian and Filipino populations, the Arab Jews expelled from Egypt, Yemen, Syria and Morocco, the Persian Jews expelled from Iran, and that I hear Russian, Arabic, and French every time I leave the house. He couldn’t square this with his understanding of Israel, which was that it was a nation of Jews from Poland. It didn’t matter how many times I shared something that conflicted with his world view; his misinformed picture of Israel would never change.
“Can I ask you something?” said the Iraqi woman. “I don’t mean to be rude, but you hear a lot about the influence of Jewish money on elections in America. Is that true?” I aligned my chakras, and took a few purifying breaths before answering. The German man sitting next to her stared at me intently, curious to hear from an actual living Jew whether Jews controlled America.
Earlier in the day, we’d had what I’d come to think of as group therapy. We sat in the cave and told strangers about the traumas that had broken us so thoroughly, we’d paid money to sit in a cave. As the German man told his story, he began by referring to himself as a “good German.” He’d gone to university and pursued some socially acceptable career only to find himself living a life he hated. Everyone else in the group giggled and nodded; sure, they could relate to this “good German.”
But I felt my chest tighten; “good German” means something very different to Jews. Good Germans shot us in the streets, turned us in to the SS, designed concentration camps, and isolated Zyklon B as the correct chemical for exterminating Jews.
“Jews are 2 percent of the U.S. population,” I told the good German and the antisemitic Iraqi. “We don’t control anything. And we certainly don’t control American elections. The only thing we control is Hollywood, and we don’t control that either, it’s just populated by a lot of Jews.”
Then I launched into a long explanation about how antisemitism and exclusion led Jews to invent Hollywood, which people listened to with rapt attention. It was all news to them. I was sick of telling the story, and angry I had to spend time on my retreat educating Europeans about Jews and Hollywood.
Later, I wished I’d told them that the wealthiest ethnicity in America are actually Indians, but no one floats any theories about the Indian influence on American elections. No one is chanting “Indians Will Not Replace Us.” No one is vandalizing Indian restaurants, wallpapering Indian neighborhoods with Free Pakistan signs, or blowing themselves up on Diwali.
“I think people who say Israel doesn’t have a right to exist are ridiculous. Whatever happened in the past is the past,” the Iraqi woman said, trying to prove that she wasn’t a full-on antisemite. “And I think Iraq and the U.K. have a right to exist,” I replied.
I’m kidding. I was on a retreat and trying to be mellow and chill, which meant that when people said hateful things to me about Jews I sat and took it. “I was worried about coming here from Israel,” I later admitted to a British woman living in the French Alps. “I was afraid someone might refuse to be in the room with a Zionist.”
“Oh I don’t think that would ever happen,” the woman said. “People are so nice here.”
I flashed back to a conversation with my teenage daughter one summer in Maine. My daughter was working at a historical society in Midcoast Maine, when she came across an advertisement for a tailor with a Jewish name in the local paper from the 1880s. “I wonder what happened to him,” my daughter said, showing the ad to the head of the historical society. “He probably got run out of town.”
My daughter knew that, in 1912, Maine kicked out all of the Blacks, Jews, and Catholics. To this day, Maine is the whitest state in the United States. “Oh goodness no!” said the director of the historical society. “Everyone here is so nice, no one would do anything like that!”
Maine is filled with Good Mainers, which is why it’s totally fine that Maine’s current candidate for Senate has a Nazi tattoo. As nice people and Good Mainers do.
“If this retreat were in New York, someone would have refused to be in the room with me,” I explained to the Englishwoman. “And there’s a lot of antisemitism now in Europe, so I wasn’t sure.”
“Well I haven’t seen anything like that,” she replied. “Nothing at all.”
If she hasn’t seen it — this white Englishwoman who walks through life confident that people are good, while residing in a country that has been haemorrhaging Jews for over a decade, where one-third of French Jews are considering leaving due to antisemitism, where my French cousins removed their Jewish last name from their mailboxes and removed mezuzot for fear vandalism — then it must not exist. I wondered if she also went around telling Black people she hadn’t seen any anti-Black racism. How about the Uyghurs? If she hasn’t seen any anti-Uyghur speech, then it must not exist.
As the week progressed, people shared the traumas that had brought them to this cave in search of healing. Abortions, divorce, infertility, loneliness, jobs that sucked, families that were toxic, countries that were falling apart. It was shocking to hear Europeans, who came from locales that erased their own indigenous cultures in favor of Christianity and then massacred Jews for not doing the same, were now desperately seeking spirituality and connection to … anything.
But it wasn’t until the cacao ceremony, which followed energy healing, ecstatic dance, yoga, meditation and controlled screaming, that it dawned on me that everyone here was flirting with something I, the sole Jew in attendance, had the good fortune to be born into.
As people held their cups of cacao, imbuing the murky liquid with their spirit before passing the cup on, I thought about Shabbat, where we tear a piece of challah off from a huge chunk and pass it on. This thing everyone was searching for, this pastiche of indigenous rituals grabbed from the Cloud forest in the Amazon, India, Guatemala, and Bali, was, at heart, religion. And I already have one of those.
Not only do I have a religion full of rites and rituals that I can dip in and out of as I please, but it is filled with indigenous knowledge from people I am related to by blood. I don’t need a pilfered cacao ceremony when I have Shabbat. I don’t need screaming therapy when I have tashlich1 and Yom Kippur. I don’t need meditation when I have the silent Amidah. I don’t need ecstatic dance when I have Simchat Torah.
It works the other way around too. Feel like sleeping outside but making it spiritual? Try Sukkot. Need cheesecake imbued with meaning? Bring on Shavuot. Want to get drunk and wear a costume? It’s called Purim. There are so many Jewish rites and rituals that I’m still learning about them in my 50s.
What did I need a cacao ceremony for?
I also didn’t need to comb through different countries looking for a spiritual home, because I’d never lost mine. As long as I don’t mind living with neighbors who want to kill me and attacks from Iran that come on like a nor’easter, returning to my spiritual home didn’t require me to roam the earth. I just had to book a flight on EL AL.
Is this why people hate us? Because Jews have the thing everyone else wants? We have a larger purpose, a sense of peoplehood and belonging, and thousands of years of evidence that for as long as there have been Jews, we’ve stuck to the same basic principles about how to live life.
We are commanded to enjoy nature, rest on holidays, and seek joy and peace. We are told to live for this life, not some hypothetical next one. We don’t need Sanskrit or ancient Mayan languages; we’ve got our own impossibly ancient language, thank you very much. And we definitely do not need any more ritual foods to eat when we’ve got four course meals consisting of nothing but symbolism.
Once, a non-Jewish friend dropped by during Passover and I offered him a Hillel sandwich because the fridge was empty. “Of course!” he said, excited that he’d get to taste a secret Jewish food. As he bit down, his face crumpled. Hillel sandwiches taste good if you’re Jewish. “Oh, I forgot,” I said. “It’s not supposed to taste good.” He looked relieved, as he chewed, but confused. “The food is all symbolic. It’s supposed to taste like wet cement on bread that didn’t have time to rise, flavored with the pain of bondage.”
“That makes more sense,” said my friend, obviously confused as to why I would feed him something meant to taste terrible. I’d forgotten that unless you grow up with Hillel sandwiches, they taste like mortar on cardboard.
The cacao at the cacao ceremony was fine as symbolic foods go, though personally I prefer my cacao in a superfood breakfast shake with bananas, avocado, beets, and ginger like the bougie American I am. But ritually imbued cacao seems like overkill when I have a banquet of other ritual foods to choose from, including challah, wine, apples, honey, latkes, specially slaughtered chickens and cows, and jelly donuts during Chanukah.
Western civilization is at a breaking point. No one knows what they’re doing or why. Everyone is lonely and living existences divorced from the people they want to be. The privileged people of the West are in pain, desperate to be healed by another culture’s rituals.
In the end, I told everyone at the retreat where they’d find the answer they were looking for. “Come to Israel,” I said. “Everyone is always outside having coffee or wine and talking with friends,” I told the Italian living in Copenhagen. “The weather is beautiful and I swim in the sea every day,” I told a woman from Cork, Ireland, who was lamenting returning to rain and cold. “The food in Israel is fresh and perfect,” I told a woman from northern England, after we ate a meal of subpar falafel and hummus, plus over-hyped Maltese sheep’s milk cheese.
My new friend from Chicago plans to visit me next fall, along with a few others on the retreat. “I guess I’m going to Tel Aviv!” said the woman from County Cork. “You should come,” I said, “assuming there isn’t another war thanks to the Irish government aligning with Hamas.”
I’m kidding. I’m a Jew who knows how to duck her head; obviously I said no such thing. Instead, I smiled and told her our spare room was waiting for her in Tel Aviv.
Tashlich is a Jewish ritual performed during Rosh Hashanah where people symbolically cast their sins into a body of water, typically by throwing breadcrumbs or other small particles into the water to represent atonement. The practice is rooted in the idea of “casting off” sins to start the new year fresh and is derived from the biblical verse in Micah 7:19, “You will cast all our sins into the depths of the sea.”
This was good writing.
Brava for schooling your retreat in an equitable way and for enlightening them. I love your writing!