Bat Yam,
Israel is
really hot. Like really, really hot.
I spent my
first month here sleeping in just underwear with a fan on its highest setting
shooting right at me, and using no blankets or sheets of any kind. The second
month was marked by my adding a thin sheet, but the the fan stayed in its
place. Finally, in my third month, I turned off the fan but still used just a
sheet, pretending that it was a blanket. In the scorching world of Bat Yam, that meant that
fall was upon us.
In the United States,
with the autumn season came the president election. For a bunch of Americans in
Israel,
it meant watching Obama and McCain spar from thousands of miles away.
On the
night of November 4, how I would sleep would not be an issue as I wasn't
planning on doing anything of the sort. To understand this, we'll need to do a
little math, kids. If Israel
is 7 hours ahead of the United States (EST), then with polls closing on the
eastern seaboard at 7:00 PM
and results continuing to come in until roughly 11:00 PM, what time would those of us in the holy land be
able to see the map fill up with red and blue? If you said 2:00 AM to 6:00 AM
then you are correct, and if you said anything else then you need to review your
third grade arithmetic.
And so,
some friends and I set out to spend our night sitting in front of the
television in my apartment watching Fox News tell us who was winning which
states. Yes, you read that correctly. Because of some complicated contractual
issues, the only U.S. news
channel that airs in Israel
is the Fox News Channel. There I was, a nice, liberal, Jewish boy from New Jersey watching the
media wing of the Republican Party tell me how McCain might still pull an
upset. (I must admit that watching Karl Rove, their newest anchor, and Brit
Hume, seemingly their oldest, inform viewers through gritted teeth of Obama's
victory was true schadenfreude.)
Now the
contradiction of my American compatriots and I watching this from Israel
was obvious. On the one hand, we had not been in the U.S. to witness the election really
get heated up. We knew from what we had heard that the hot temperature in our
apartments in Bat Yam
barely compared to the heat of the election in its final weeks. In addition, we
will not be around for the inauguration or the first hundred days of the new
presidency, which are said to be the most important. On the other hand, we are
still Americans and will experience most of the new presidency at home in the U.S.
In some ways, we were even a little saddened by the thought that we were
missing our first election as voting citizens. Most of us submitted absentee
ballots, but we still felt that we were sort of missing it.
The more we
talked that night, the more we realized that being this far away has given us a
chance to really reassess things. We have been sizing up our lives endlessly
and thinking about our priorities. Also, we have been able to see how
non-Americans perceive the U.S.
We have been able to think, to truly think, about how we feel about American
politics.
Sometimes in order to understand
something, you have to take a step back. Sometimes in order to feel the heat,
you have to move away from the fire.
