Exceptional Student Work: 'Crying Over Watermelon '

In which current Travel Writing student Lilah Peck gives us an essay that really goes there—it might just be the best student essay I've ever read

Photo by Andrew Hutchings on Unsplash

I think the measure of a real writer is hard. I always ask an aspirant: So what are you reading? Too often the answer is: Not much.

Another measurement is a willingness to revise. Or put it another way: An ability to take criticism. A third example: Knowing a first draft is far from done.

Lilah Peck is a current student in my Travel Writing course. She is unmistakable for her eyewear. But I want to share my perspective, and that’s as an instructor who knows how she works.

First of all, she reads.

But second is what I learned from a phone call maybe week three. She’d written an opaque, ambitious, and not particularly successful draft. As is my habit, I offered to be nice or to be honest. Lilah chose the latter. I ripped into the piece pretty hard, I think. She remained cool and calm. Then she rewrote. And it got much better.

But this was just prologue. In class, we workshopped an earlier version of the essay below. It was quite good. When it was time to look at midterms, I had a feeling I would see this essay again, in a new form, and I expected it to be better.

I had no idea.

Below is maybe the best student essay I’ve ever read? I mean, it’s all about taste but I think this piece rocked me in a new way and I’m super grateful for the chance to share it with you now.

Crying Over Watermelon

By Lilah Peck

I’m crying on Independence Day again. It’s become an annual occurrence. Some people have seasonal depression. For some people its “episodic.” My depression consistently arrives in May, as we ebb from the days that mourn the lost Israeli soldiers to celebrating the wars that took them. I’ve told you this, I’m sure, but when I was sixteen I moved to Jerusalem for a five-month high school program. I don’t mention it so often. I processed things so differently then. My ideologies were nascent and my beliefs were permeable to the passionate rhetoric presented to me and the friends beside me. I’d like to think that’s changed. I didn’t cry on Independence Day that year. That was before my love became tangled with responsibility and with fear. I danced with my classmates. We played charades. We painted our faces with blue and white and hung flags from our clothes however we could. How did you celebrate Yom Haatzamut in 2019? Were you crying yet?

It's five years later and I cry for that girl today. I cry today because of the joy I wish I still felt (the expectation of joy can be the most crippling). But mainly I cry for the land where I feel the most free I’ve ever been and the most afraid of that freedom that I can’t share. I quake at the costs of the freedom I enjoy— costs I’ve only seen slivers of.

On our gap year as we snuck away on the tiny bus to Sheikh Jarrah I don’t remember what I was feeling, do you? I do remember being worried my seminary might find out, as we drove to a Palestinian village on Jerusalem’s fringes. I worried they’d scold me for joining a program that encourages more questions and experiences than their Zionist program would allow. I remember arriving there: the gray earth, how our smiles and jokes subsided when we met our Palestinian speaker. I remember how I tried not to cry when she told us about the soldiers who harassed her children on the way to school. I remember how my stomach dropped when she said the only future she sees is one state that must be called Palestine. I remember my discomfort and I remember my guilt. I remember being reminded that I was safe there because I’m Jewish and because I have an American passport. I can’t hold this memory today. I can’t grind my teeth at the things I hate because my mind drifts to the memories I love, but they repel me too.

How can we sit now, in our dorms outside chants for liberation, and think back to evenings on Shlomziyon, when we ordered so aptly an “Indulgence” pizza? And, on that night away from our pseudo-attendance-taking gap year programs, it was more indulgent than we knew. Indulgent for more than the brie, garlic, and honey drizzled on top, but indulgent for the year off before college, indulgent for the time to do nothing more than discuss our values, indulgent for the land we got to sit on - not only the food we got to eat. We wondered what our lives would look like when we got back to the States. We wondered what that grass would look like. I’m glad I didn’t know.

That grass looks dry now. But, in honesty, it still looks beautiful. I’ll admit, my heart still pulls me there. In Jerusalem, I am all of myself. I am religious and I am artistic and I am curious and I am intellectual and I am brave. I am someone who prays at the bus stop and wears skirts to the communist bar. I pick up halva for the family that is hosting me for Shabbat before I go to Musrara for their latest exhibit: a meditation on medieval Sephardi music practices. Do you remember their winter show? How the drums filled the auditorium and the Arabic flute guided the singer. We closed our eyes. We listened fully. On our way out we passed the wall of Black Panther photos before we saw a woman standing in a box as the exhibit. Do you remember laughing so hard we tripped? I do. I loved the Musrara winter show.

In Jersualem, I pray at a wall thousands of years old and go to coffee shops with New Yorker-clad walls to read Eduard Said. I can hold myself here in all my nuance. My values of arts and culture and secular thought and religious philosophy and Jewish law, they can all coexist here. They can all live comfortably. Even though I can’t.

I can’t hold my memories today. I can’t touch any of them. I can’t touch the ones of us ordering Indulgence pizza or dancing at Mazkeka until we get blisters, or questioning each exhibit at Musrara or Hamiffal. I can’t think about the places I love or how I feel there. I can’t think about the past and I definitely can’t think about the future.

My sister wants to move to Israel. She’ll probably move there in the next few years. My dad wants to move there too. So do my friends Batyah and Raanan. So does the boy I like. So goes my community and so goes my world. As you know, the universe of religious anti-occupation Jews is horrifyingly small. My nieces and nephews may grow up in that land, they may grow into soldiers. I’m excruciatingly angry at that. I’m angry at them serving a government I despise - at the idea they would twist my faith into a militarist machine. I’m enraged but I’m also envious.

I’m envious of the joy they will get to relish in - the Aroma coffee cups changed for Purim and Chanukah. My Starbucks cup will have a Christmas tree or perhaps a more nondenominational snowflake. But I don’t want a snowflake. I want my children to be sabras too: Jerusalem rugrats, or “cactuses,” with thick prickly skin and big hearts. I want them to learn that Jerusalem stone gets slick after it rains, and the most beautiful path to get from north to south is the Tayelet. I want them to feel the silence of the city on Shavuot morning as everyone crawls back into bed after a night of learning ancient words. I want them to taste the sticky honey of fresh Marzipan in the shuk. But I won’t have them be soldiers. Even if their cousins are.

I’m livid that my sister might get that future I yearn for. A life I can’t live with or without and which keeps me up at night wondering: Can the rugelach in New York be as delicious? Can the ancient hymns sound as sweet on West 95th? Is my living in diaspora saving Palestinians from theirs? More tears flow. I have no answers.

I can’t go to the past or the future so where that leaves me is right now. In Los Angeles. Thousands of miles away and heartbroken and bleeding for a nation that makes others bleed. I hear the chants around me.

I wanted to sing for the encampment. I wanted to go and show that there are proud religious Jews who are anti-occupation - who are critical of the state. Who support Palestinian liberation, if perhaps on different terms. On terms that might feel less aligned with language of “Genocide” and “Intifada,” but who believe with grief-stricken hearts that to be “Pro-Israel” one must also be “Pro-Palestine” and who feel shattered that “peace” is such an unpopular word.

I wanted to lead Kabbalat Shabbat. The centuries-old service that ushers in the Sabbath bride, the queen. These Hebraic hums that give me chills each Friday evening, you can’t hear them without your soul being stirred to compassion, even to hope. The chords would coalesce and so would we. We would share these tunes and we would pray for a better land. A government that can hold us both and that can share respect. That we could usher in the Sabbath bride and not fear alarms calling us to bomb shelters carefully kept ready. I pray for that Jerusalem.

But I led no songs.

Maybe because I live in the Jewish co-op where I share walls with men who would do more than glare at me if I pledged myself seemingly “against” their homeland. Or maybe I didn’t go because I feared more radical people there might make me regret it- they might make me think peace is less possible than I hope for. Or maybe it was the language that I didn’t align with fully or the demands I didn’t support. Maybe it was the drum and the flag and the nationalism, that like all nationalism, instills me with despair at the joy of a rally. But really I didn’t sing my ancient hymns on the lawn protesting for things I do, to large degree, hope for, because of my grandfather.

My Zayde, not a year lost to me, fought for that state, fallible and flawed. My Zayde knew the rawness of the genocide of Jews. My Zayde who had three cats and poured cream on his late night cake à la mode, kept his passport in hand and his valuables ready in open coat seams. He dreamt of this state. My Zayde wouldn’t want me there. My Zayde would cry for me. My uncles might too.

Do you remember Cafe Kadosh on Koresh? We went there when I called you crying after my doctor's appointment. You met me there and we got the eggs benedict I’d been wanting for months. I went there for the first time with Ava on Chanukah when we rated the best sufganiyot in Jerusalem (Kadosh tied with Roladin we decided). Well I went to Cafe Kadosh a year later, when visiting for my cousin's bat mitzvah trip. I showed my uncle my favorite highly-rated treat. After waiting in line with doubt, he eventually agreed with my assessment -- but it felt like less of an achievement that time around. It was harder to be there. It was hard to share my melancholy with him. To him, it was just chocolate-filled joy it seemed. Something to share with his daughters to help them fall in love with a land so important to us. And it will always be important to us, to me, and to them. Do you think it will be to you?

On the other side of Koresh is where we went to brunch on our final morning in Jerusalem. At Naadi, Miriam suggested it to us. It was mediocre. We each ordered shakshuka. You got one with spinach. I got plain. I wasn’t not feeling festive or experimental. I was feeling tired. Together we wondered when we would be back - we wondered if we would want to be. We cried a little into the red of our shakshuka, carefully avoiding the sweltering bowl that held it. We cried into our olives and into our hummus. We cried for the pita that wouldn’t taste the same from the kosher supermarket in our soon to be college towns. We cried because we knew we would miss it there and because sometimes heartbreak tastes like the food of a culture you hate to love.

Can I make it here? Can I survive untethered from a place I love so much but that causes me so much pain? Please don’t ask me if I’ll go back. Please don’t hate me if I do. Here I’m living with neglect of who I am at my truest, and there I’m living with selfishness and neglect of those around me suffering. How many years will I cry on Independence Day? What soil will I be crying on?

I pray to avoid these thoughts. I face East, toward the Western Wall, as is custom. I focus on the words, I can’t think about the wall. So old and so strong. I can’t think about the awe and hope it inspires and how that godliness feels lost when I read death counts trying to preserve it. I try not to visualize the slips of paper prayers that overflow from its cracks. The tradition is to fit them in. To somehow make space. There’s space for all of them we were always told. I hope that’s true.