On my final day in Senegal, I left the comfort of Thies, the friendship of my friends in Darou Mouride and Keur Songo, the routine of waking up each morning and spending the subsequent hours confronting the horrors of abject poverty. I left all these things and more and headed back towards the nation's capital, Dakar.
The drive was long and arduous. The forty mile trek should be a straight shot, but can take as long as five hours, depending on things like traffic, police checkpoints, and donkeys stopping along the road.
And so it was, that, on the outskirts of Dakar, still an hour from our destination, our van made a pit stop so people could do their business. I joined the parade of tubobs (Wolof for "white person") towards the gas station's latrines. Yet, after nearly two weeks without touching money, two weeks without even a hint of capitalism, I could not help but enter into the snack shop and walk around.
The refrigerator filled with neatly stacked bottles of Coke Light beamed with angelic light as a heavenly chorus filled my ears with song. I grabbed one from behind the glass. My mouth began to water, my heart beat a little faster. But there, just as I turned around, my eyes gazed to my left and were met dead on with the comforting stare of a large blue and white bag of Bamba.
Bamba, if you did not already know, is a favorite snack of Israelis. Something only conceivable in this land of Milk and Honey, Bamba is like cheese puffs, only with peanut butter instead of orange cheese powder. Sounds gross. Tastes delicious.
I bought a few bags and triumphantly returned to my van, providing gastronomic solace to twenty five future rabbis removed from civilization for far too long.
We all enjoyed the snack, taking little time to think about the experience. But, in retrospect, most surprising about finding the Israeli national snack at a gas station in the capital of this West African Muslim nation was the fact that it wasn't all that surprising at all.
A week prior, we had met with the Israeli ambassador to the country. The tall man - a walking caricature of himself - spoke proudly of the work his home country is doing throughout the Western Coast of Africa.
Not prone to believing others' hyperbole and an eternal sceptic at heart, I was adept at taking everything he said with a grain of salt. Could the massive amounts of development work that he is describing really be possible? Is it true that the Israeli embassy in Senegal is behind a giant tolerance program taking place soon in Dakar. What are the ulterior motives? What is behind his message? How could such a small country be responsible for so much good?
Not that I wouldn't want Israel to be such an or lagoyim - light unto the nations - in this hell on earth. It just seemed too good to be true. Could the country really be funding tzedakah to help non-Jews merely because it is the right thing to be doing?
Surely, Israel has much to gain from such work. A heavily tolerant, Suffi, non-Arab country has much to offer the Jewish State. But the support is real. Is real. Israel?
Low and behold, NGO after NGO that we met with described the great support they receive from the Israeli government. Not the American government with its gag rule and bureaucratic stipulations. No, the Israeli government.
In a country without stable sources of water and an agricultural system stuck in the Iron Age, Israel's drip irrigation technology has giant potential. In a country forgotten by most of the world, that small Jewish state, so embroiled in its own quagmires, is not forgetting.
The Jewish state's embassy is doing the hard groundwork to help this underdeveloped nation and its neighbors realize their potential. All Israel gains is the love of an unknown people ignored by modernity and a market to sell its national treat.
Let's remember after all: most Senegalese have never met a Jew. In fact, most don't even know that such a thing exists. For two weeks, I found it easiest to describe myself as an Israelite. And the Senegalese know what that is only because they read about them in the Koran.
Stellar.
This is the ultimate form of tzedakah, is it not: giving to a people who do not even know you.
In the age of Lieberman and Netenyahu, of showdowns with the US, and ultimate fears of annihilation from Iran, of violent protests against parking lots and never ending hate-mongering, as I chewed on my delicious bites of peanut-coated puff, I felt good, very good.
Surely, the Diet Coke helped.
But each bite of Bamba seemed to carry in it a morsel of redemption. The food was symbolic of everything that I had learned to work for during my time in Africa. This is what giving is supposed to be about. This is human beings helping fellow humans alleviate their most dire problems. This is the work ahead. This is what it means to be a Jew, to be a human, to be privileged and ready to give back.
ברוך אתה ה' הזן את הכל.
Amidst the dew
And soup-thick humidity,
The sounds of roosters and people waking.
The muezin calls his people to prayer,
In a land devoid of color.
There, in the distance, is a yellow house;
The only color among miles of brown.
A woman comes out.
She cleans a mat and tends to her chores,
In poverty,
In filth.
She is so unlike me.
But there!
On the roof
Of the small yellow house.
Is a fiddler.
A man and his fiddle, sitting on the roof.
He fiddles away the morning,
With the tune of donkeys and cattle, goats and hens,
As the people come and go,
Doing their things,
Waiting for a better life.
He fiddles, she cleans.
The rooster welcomes the morning.
In an instant,
The fiddler dissapears.
But she is still there.
And so is her yellow house,
Surrounded by dirt,
In a land devoid of color.
Standing on a rooftop, I looked around, and felt anywhere but home. As far as the eye could see was a morass of concrete and dirt. The thick humid air smelt of smoke. The sounds of donkeys, and horses, and a muezzin filled the air.
I was surrounded by twenty four colleagues - fellow rabbinical students from throughout the United States - as we prayed the morning service from atop a building in downtown Dakar, the capital of the West African nation of Senegal.
For two weeks, our delegation joined the American Jewish Service to work with its grantee, Tostan, aiding in community-led development in rural villages facing extreme poverty throughout Africa.
No prior experience could have prepared me for what I saw in Senegal: children with flies in their eyes; distended bellies; open sores; bare feet; hunger; sickness; a land parched by drought. At first glance, the place seemed like hell. How could God allow such a place to exist?
For ten days we worked with locals in the villages of Darou Mouride and Keur Songo, building latrines and helping them in their daily chores. I swept, I tilled soil, I brought forth water from wells. All the while, I built bonds with people so different from me, and yet so similar. They love, they cry, they laugh, they play.
I played with many kids. Two in particular I will never forget, Tidiane Geye and Popmusonjop showed me firsthand the power of the AJWS and its grantees to bring positive change to the world.
As I butchered their names time and time again, the two kids laughed in a way that any would at a blubbering foreigner standing before them. "Tubob" they called me - white man.
Finally, Tidiane Geye crouched down and spelled out his name in the sand below him. In a country with almost no literacy, this defiant act writing was nothing short of miraculous.
But my new friends need far more than an education. They need food. They need mosquito nets. They need basic health services and access to a world which has left them behind. They need shoes.
They need an American Jewish community that remembers them, and does all we can to help the billions of people like them who live in abject poverty, trying to make ends meet on as little as a dollar a day in conditions more horrific than most of us could imagine.
I returned from Africa inspired by the work of the AJWS. I returned motivated by my new cadre of rabbinical students dedicated to bringing our message of social justice to our home communities. I returned ready for the hard work ahead.
The Wolof word used in response to a greeting is "mangifee," which translates literally as "I am here." The Hebrew equivalent is "hineini", the response by Abraham when God first calls out to him in service.
To all my brothers and sisters in this world stricken by the disease of poverty - to Tidiane Geye and Popmusonjop - to all of the communities where AJWS works and those yet to be helped, I cry out Mangifee. I am ready to help you. I am here to work on your behalf. Hineini.
In a few days I'll head with a delegation of rabbinical students and the American Jewish World Service to the West African nation of Senegal. We will spend two weeks building latrines in villages outside the regional capital Thies, and learn about the work of the NGO Tostan. The trip will conclude with a visit to Goree Island.
From there, I travel back to the States and, then, four days later, to Israel. Come July 1 I will have the time and the commitment to return to my writing.
I look forward to sharing the journey with you then.
-David
The semester is finally over, and final papers are near their end. There is finally time again for the real work in life: travel to far-off places, relaxation and, of course, writing.
I have plenty of things that need commenting; many encounters which need to be explored on this blog: racism and anesthesia, autonomy and movementalism, social justice and earthquakes.
All this in due time.
Meanwhile, I give you two gifts before Shabbat.
First, two letters were written to "Plainviews" in response to my piece, "Turkey, Chaplaincy, and Pastoral Care." I encourage you to check out this thoughtful feedback, here (about a third of the way down the page).
And, second, after much anticipation, the text book I wrote last fall for Torah Aura Productions is being published. "Yisrael Sheli" teaches Israel to third and fourth graders through the Jewish heroes who have been connected to the land over the last few millenia. It will be in religious school classrooms beginning this fall. You can check out a preview of the textbook by clicking here.
Shabbat shalom,
David
In the months preceding a move to the other side of the world, and with it the expiration of my all-encompassing, overly-expensive, perfect-example-of-America's-health-system-malfunction-disaster health insurance, I decided to take a trip early this week to the Allergist.
Since college I have struggled with my body's auto-immune response to problems non-existant. You're a fighter, David, I was always told. And so I am. In the absence of a real fight to pick, my body chooses to attack things like dust, and pollen, and pet dander.
Cue the histamine, the runny nose, the congestion.
In the fight against allergies, I buy pillow covers and mattress covers. I use air filters which suck all of the impurities from the air I breath at night. I flush salted water through my sinuses each morning with a bottle shaped to fit a genie. I vacuum and sweep and vacuum again.
It is a never-ending battle against a microscopic invader against which I am helpless. The evil fills every space into which I enter, floating harmlessly in the air, until I breath it in, and my body reacts, and, low and behold, my sinuses no longer function.
So I went to the allergist to pinpoint the exact nature of my allergies. Forty pricks on my back of forty common things on this planet later, my body was charted like a connect the dots picture yet to be used.
And within minutes, my back had exploded in redness. The itches could not be contained. Scratch me! Scratch me. I could not. Fifteen minutes of not scratching passed, as I awaited the doctor's eye.
Then came the moment of truth. The list of offending allergens was brought forth. Dust. No surprise. Cats and dogs and hamsters and cockroaches. There goes veterinary work. Olive tree pollen and some grasses and mold. Fair enough.
And then, there, at the end of the list, the one allergy I have to food. Screaming blatantly from the page, as if it were highlighted two times over and written in red-ink, circled around with arrows pointing to it: shellfish.
And not just a small allergy, at all. Rather, it's about as severe as any other allergy I have, a '4+' on a scale of zero to four.
Yet what exactly that means, I do not know. I will not know. I cannot know.
In the days of my youth, there were times aplenty when I dined on various parts of the swine. Bacon, pepperoni, sausage - all delicious delicacies which have found their ways into my mouth throughout the ages. To be clear, I never ate ham. No such goyisher item would be allowed near me. But derivations of the pig so delicious as these were never forbidden to me.
As much as I did eat pork, as I did not eat kosher, as I made little distinction between what is treif and what is not, I still never touched shellfish. Shrimp and crab and lobster and such, always seemed so not-Jewish, not to mention unappetizing.
I'll confess that I did eat clam chowder, but only because it was creamy and in a giant loaf of bread. Once I was old enough to realize that something called "Clam Chowder" has clams inside, I gave up that practice entirely.
And once I did eat shrimp. But only because it came deep fried and battered - there was more crispy goodness than pink living animal of the sea. And I was seven. Dinner called "Popcorn Shrimp" is much more appealing than grilled salmon.
That is all to say, that in the twenty six odd years of my life, shellfish has entered my lips maybe a handful of times, all of which the taste of the shellfish was so utterly covered and masked by some other delicious substance. And now it turns out that I am very allergic to shellfish. Very allergic.
Maybe so allergic that I would die if I ate it. Maybe not. Probably not. But I will never know.
I won't ever know what will happen to me if I eat it. I will never know the taste of these most-celebrated of dinner items.
I won't know. I cannot know.
I can't because my both my body and my God are in agreement that this is a forbidden fruit.
It seems that there is so much I can learn from that. There are so many good drashes to give.
What does it mean that my body seems to be screaming out in support of the halakha? What does it mean when the natural order and my religious system are in utmost agreement? And what if I were allergic to not wrapping tefilin, or allergic to putting a stumbling block before the blind.
I'll ponder that.
And what does it mean to be so removed and unable to know something as simple as shrimp, or crab, or lobster? All the more so, what if I cannot know God, or the meaning of the universe, or my place in this world?
I'll ponder that too.
Time to go start.