I felt terribly guilty, but in my stubborn pride I could never allow myself to bend to her wishes.
To make it worse, in comparison Erin and Adam glided by, untroubled by my father’s expectations to excel, to be upbeat and outgoing, to “Go get ’em! ” Erin and Adam had no problem doing that. But I seemed doomed to always be the black sheep.
My family also struggled to observe my mother’s Jewish heritage. We were never particularly devout—unless counting our weekly Hebrew school visits, when, truthfully, we were more excited for the trip afterward to Burger King for Chicken Tenders (always the six-piece pack, until they expanded it to nine, which Mom found excessive).
I recall in my junior year we were celebrating Yom Kippur, the Jewish high holiday. Traditionally, Yom Kippur means an occasion of atoning and repenting for one’s sins. In our family’s version, we gathered at Schaumburg’s Volkening Lake to sit around a picnic table, taking turns pledging our goals for the coming year. In my rebellious manner, I thought it was all tedious. I put on my typical sour attitude, thinking, This is dumb. What a waste of time. When Mom tearfully said her biggest goal for the year was to work on her relationship with me, I felt horrible. Of all the goals she could focus on in life, she focused on . . . me? When I barely gave her the time of day, a brief glance, let alone a smile or kind word? Yet in my defiance I could never allow myself to cry in front of her, or assure her doubts.
I hoped that going away to college would be my big breakthrough. I broke up with my boyfriend, looking to make all new friends and sever all ties. I refused to bring petty distractions from high school along with me to college. I’d be far enough away from my parents that I wouldn’t have to do anything they said. I wouldn’t have to answer to anybody.
Arriving at the Urbana-Champaign campus of the University of Illinois in fall 1999, the reality wasn’t quite as I expected. Majoring in speech communications, I enjoyed my classes and quickly made friends. But the opportunities I’d imagined, the chances for freedom and to find an exciting new path didn’t come as readily as I’d hoped. Student life was fairly mundane: classes, studying, eating pizza and watching movies with my dorm-mates, overeating at the residence’s all-you-can-eat buffet to the point that I gained nearly thirty pounds. It was actually kind of a letdown.
One day I stopped to read one of the many flyers I’d seen around promoting something called Birthright Israel. The purpose of this international organization is to inspire young people to explore their Jewish heritage. They provide anyone born Jewish the experience of visiting their faith’s spiritual home, all expenses paid, to help them to learn about their cultural history.
Birthright Israel seemed a blessing: an easy, low-risk way to break out of conventional expectations and get far away. Spots for their trips were very competitive, so I signed up without a second thought that I might actually be selected. Truthfully, I felt I barely qualified because of my family’s relatively relaxed approach to our faith.
As it turns out, given recent events—I applied shortly after the attacks of September 11, 2001, and during a peak in the longstanding Israeli-Palestinian conflict—travelling internationally was widely seen as reckless, even dangerous, so very few people had signed up. To my surprise, I would be on my way to Israel that December.
I immediately called home. I hadn’t spoken to my parents in a while, so I was eager to tell them about my plan. When my mom answered, I was prepared to gloat.
“Oh, Robin!”
I could picture her in her bedroom, idly watching television before nodding off to sleep. She called to my father. “Tony, Robin’s on the phone!”
I heard him pick up the kitchen extension.
“Robin!”
I readied myself. “Guess what I’m doing over Christmas vacation?”
My mother sounded overjoyed. “You’re coming home? Oh, Tony, she’s coming home!”
“Ma, stop,” I said, instantly annoyed. “I’m going to Israel.”
I could almost hear their jaws dropping. They were of course thinking of terrorists and suicide bombers, the violence reported in the news every day. To them, this trip seemed insane.
They didn’t really know what to say, and the conversation ended abruptly. I learned that in the following days they’d discussed my proposed trip with various family members. My aunts and uncles, all the family, all told them, “She is your daughter. She is your responsibility. If you need to tie her down to a chair, that’s what you need to do. But you can not let her go.”
But by then my parents were learning they couldn’t tell me what to do. So they did the best thing they could. They both individually came to me on campus to privately discuss my plans. Why was I going so far away? Why couldn’t I just come home? Why didn’t we use this time to work on our family?
They asked with such sincerity, such intensity, I thought for the first time I could speak the truth and air all my feelings. But the truth was I didn’t know why I wanted to go so badly. So I brushed off their concerns, still concerned with nothing other than my need to break free.
I promised my parents I would search my soul about exactly why I’d signed up for the Israel trip. So one gloomy evening, I showed up early to one of the nightly practices of the residence’s Ultimate Frisbee team I had joined in my second year of university. With no one around, I sat under an awning against the cold stone of our dorm building, curled up with pen and paper in hand.
I had journalled since high school, but now something stirred inside me, yearning to be articulated. I felt on the verge of understanding what it was, but it was so big, just a jumbled mush, tied up inside me. Slowly I felt the knots loosening.
I started thinking, why? Why did I want to go? What would this trip mean within the larger picture of my life?
Just as I felt words approaching, my pen hovering above the page, the dorm hall’s doors flung open and my Frisbee friends burst onto the field.
“Robin!” they called, “Let’s go!”
One of them threw the disk long and the others chased it upfield. I instinctively moved to follow, then paused. Instead, I told them I’d catch up later.
As a soft rain began to fall, my pen raced across the page. I’d wanted to express these feelings for years, to scream them out, but never knew the words to use.
I feel tied to this life. Bound by decisions I never made, decided by people I have never met. Greeted with an outcome, beginning with an end, I am struggling to free myself of an upbringing I did not choose ...
I don’t remember if I went back to practice that day, but I do remember filling most of that page, then returning to my room in Allen Hall to type it out into my laptop. By putting my feelings into words, I knew I was closer to some sort of conclusion. I needed to go as far as possible, to do as much as I could. And, for better or for worse, the first step would be this trip to Israel.
Eventually, my parents gave me their blessings for the trip. Not that I was waiting for their approval, but I was glad to receive it nonetheless.
It was a fascinating two weeks. We visited the Western Wall on New Year’s Eve at midnight and scaled Mount Masada at sunrise. We explored the old and new cities, repelled cliffs in the Negev Desert and swam in the Dead Sea. I was humbled by a visit to the Holocaust History Museum at Yad Vashem and later had
