On Sat, May 28, 2016 at 7:53 AM, Natalie Portman wrote:

You know, the word “Hebrew” (ivri, as in a nationality, like Abraham the Hebrew) comes from the root for “to cross over” — la’avor. I think it’s related to Jews being nomadic people, or maybe Abraham being the first one to cross a river in the Bible? But it does feel like a state that is emblematic of our people, and maybe all people — that we are always in the midst of replacing one fulfilled desire with a new desire, accepting a new piece of knowledge with another question.

When I first encountered Buddhist thought in my 20s, I was so confused. I’m supposed to be content with what’s going on here and now? I realized how much Judaism for me was connected to yearning — to wanting what you don’t have — which is maybe why Israel is so complicated emotionally for Jews: It’s built into the emotional structure of our religion to yearn for a homeland we don’t have.

So then if we have it, what do we yearn for? We say “next year in Jerusalem” as if we are still in exile. But maybe Jerusalem as an idea is never attainable — so we can keep longing for it even when we have it, like a spouse you desire eternally. You keep feeling that you can’t get them, as if it were the perpetual beginning of a flirtation. Jerusalem does have an aura. The air feels thicker there. It feels like the city, itself, is manipulating, pushing passions around.

An ex-boyfriend of mine used to call me “Moscow,” because he said I was always looking out the window sadly, like “Moscow,” like some Russian novel or Chekhov play. Clearly there were grounds for this ex getting fired, but he did have a point — I have that longing, yearning, it’s-better-over-there tendency. It was illuminating for me to have Oz describe that kind of behavior in his mother as “Slavic romantic melancholy,” because it associated it with a cultural tendency. And it’s true that there is a very cultural influence on that sort of yearning, depressive “Moscow”-ing out the window (there must be one German adjective that describes this exact feeling).

Do you remember how in the ’90s there was this sort of “sad girl chic”? Like “Reviving Ophelia” and Fiona Apple, and just a lot of sad, beautiful girls. And it felt like being deep or interesting or even attractive was being a little sullen, to use Ms. Apple’s word (whom I love by the way). And then living in France, I got the same ’90s sense, that there’s a beauty there culturally associated with sadness. It was kind of a revelation for me to acknowledge, through Oz’s book, that mood could be so influenced by when and where you live, and the feelings of that time and place about feelings. That it might not just be your chemical makeup. Because I was adapting the book over almost a decade (not consistently — I’d pick it up and then put it down for a few years before picking it up again), this was a later connection.

My first connection to Oz’s book was the etymology. For me, more than the religion or the country or the food, the Hebrew language is the center of my engagement with the culture. Finding the etymological links between words feels like unlocking poetry from thousands of years ago — aligning with souls of humans across time. The way Oz traces these linguistic genealogies stops my breath: earth (adama), man (adam), blood (dam), red (adom), silence (doomia). Etymology might seem dry, but the connections between words feel to me like the connectedness I felt while giving birth — that I was related to every woman who had ever given birth throughout time. I guess it’s having an experience that gives you a feeling of wonder, to use your word, that you can then feel that you share with people — not just people around you, or people exposed to the things that you’re exposed to, but people in the desert looking at slightly younger versions of the same stars while herding sheep and believing that lightning was the wrath of G-d.

Time to get my boy out of the bath, where Lego Batman is alternately battling dinosaurs and performing a concert.