Question: You don't look very happy in this picture.

Answer: I'm not very happy in this picture.

Question: Why weren't you happy in 1986?

Answer: I was living a false life, walking around with a kippa on my head and thinking "Shulamit Aloni is right about everything!" (She was a left wing Kinneset member at the time). Meanwhile my friend David was dying or had just died of cancer. Furthermore, I knew I couldn't live in Israel, but I couldn't admit it to myself.  Furthermore, I needed to become a temporary resident (the document above) but I didn't want to. I lived in a world that was not mine, and that I could not understand. I was a walking bundle of nervous contradictions, political confusions, and personal uncertainty. I knew that I hated the religious/orthodox life that I was leading, or the fact that I was in Israel, or something, but it was terribly painful to admit these things to myself and to face up to the fact that the choice I had made to live in Israel, in the religious community I had chosen, was the wrong choice for my life.

Question: So you don't like what you see in this photo and document? Answer: I remember what it felt like, and it seems like a sad time, a cul de sac. There was no apparent way to move my life forward. Something had to change, and soon. But at this moment the future was almost completely obscure. Question: Is that the whole truth? Answer: The truth is never whole. It is always fragments of broken pottery that lie scattered across the floor, waiting to be reassembled. But one of those fragments of truth is that there were friends who helped me, and one girlfriend in particular, without whom I would not have survived.

1986