Locked in the Stairwell
It began with a call from my boss who worked 3 floors above me in the Chase Manhattan building on Pine Street in the heart of New York’s financial district. Thinking myself the athletic sort, I took to the fire stairs taking them two at a time up to the 41st floor. Inserting my security card into the slot I was surprised when the indicator flashed red rather than the lime green I was accustomed to. Retreating to a different floor and a different card key reader produced the same result and it came to me that something was up.
I had heard stories about people getting locked in the stairways and having to descend to the sub-basement to find an open door. When they got there they were met by a phalanx of security guards who would question them intensively and then not release them until they could get someone to vouch for them. I sought an alternative.
Knocking on the door persistently finally got me readmitted to the offices of Davis, Polk, and Wardwell the 13th largest law firm in the United States. I’d been working there more or less happily for two years as a computer programmer. I was one of about a dozen propeller heads in a sea of suits and ties. I made my way upstairs (using the elevator this time) to face what I now figured couldn’t be good. As I proceeded to my meeting all of my security privileges were canceled and my computer accounts were locked. I was, of course, fired but my boss could not really explain why. Just three months before I had received a stellar performance review but management had soured on me in the interim. Oddly, I was not immediately escorted from the building by armed security personnel but given three months at full salary to arrange my affairs. It was the best thing to ever happen to me.
When my wife Lenore and I first began dating we would often discuss things that we would do if we had the time. Back in the early seventies she had taken a trip through Europe and Israel doing the obligatory time as a kibbutz volunteer. She extolled the virtues to my often skeptical ears. Here was a chance, though, to see what she was talking about. Lenore was working as a special education teacher in an upper east side school and had her summers off and, having conveniently gotten laid off in May, she convinced me to postpone my job search until the Fall.
We went for a month that summer, for a year three years later, and for three years two years after that. It became like an addiction. From each according to his abilities, to each according to his needs became like a mantra to me as I engaged and disengaged from the kibbutz experiences. For a guy that had been born and raised in Brooklyn literally in the shadow of Coney Island’s Cyclone, picking bananas, planting a grapefruit grove, herding sheep, preparing simple meals for 120 in a kibbutz kitchen, and taking my turn at evening guard duty was a heady experience. More than the work experiences, though, was being part of a community of people who all wanted to be where they were and were in it for a common goal. Waking up each day to dramatic views in the hills of Galilee didn’t hurt either.
It couldn’t last, though. A friend of mine once remarked that living on a kibbutz was like being in the Garden of Eden, snakes included. To live on a kibbutz for an extended period required applying for membership and applying for membership required surviving a tortuous process. Kibbutz members take the granting of membership quite seriously since membership is for life and they certainly didn’t want to inherit a problem for life. Our backgrounds were checked, our work and living habits examined with a microscope, and our friends and co-workers were quizzed extensively about our idiosyncrasies both real and imagined.
In the end, we bailed. We didn’t like the intense scrutiny, we weren’t sure that we could deal with the separation from our aging parents, and we felt financially insecure. While the kibbutz promised to take care of our needs we weren’t sure that it could guarantee us the luxuries and those included the ability to get on a plane to the US when we felt the need to.
We’ve been back in the States for eleven years now but are not really settled here. What I said before about an addiction still holds true, and it may be hereditary. My daughter, a college freshman who was born between our first and second stays in Israel recently returned from a year of her own in Israel delirious about her own time on kibbutz and plotting her return. My younger daughter, in tenth grade now and born between our second and third sojourns, announced to us a few weeks ago that she intends to follow her sister’s example and spend a year in Israel between high school and college.
I now work as an information technology manager in a large Manhattan based media company on the seventh floor. I’ve checked that all of the stairways are open and no card key is required. While I commute home from work on particularly frustrating days, I gaze out the windows by bus window over the stop and go traffic on the New Jersey Turnpike and think, “is it time for another go at it?”
