Neighborhoods and community

I have lived in a few different types of communities. I grew up in a suburb, went to college in a semi-rural area with fewer than 18000 people, lived in the mountains for a few summers on a camp, studied abroad in a city on a harbor with about 394,000 people, spent a year in St. Louis in the city, and I'm now living in Israel in a town with fewer than 20,000 people. While it is not rural like Carlisle, it is not a city like St. Louis. All these places have had different vibes and perhaps different definitions of community.

In the neighborhood where I grew up, it was quiet. People knew each other, maybe not everyone on the street or in the neighborhood, but we were close with people who may have lived a few doors down and we checked in on own neighbors who were older adults. Kids could play in the street, well some of the streets and I remember riding bikes in the neighborhood with friends without parental supervision a few times. Our suburb was definitely a community and worked to become an independent city by 2005.

College was different from this, obviously, and it could be louder into the night because of parties or people up and about late into the night. There were pockets of friends and you sometimes lived with your friends and sometimes not. In the dorms, we may have regarded each other at times and not at others. We didn't get to choose where we lived or who we lived with until we were upperclass, but it still worked. We were Dickinsonians and if we run into others who went to school there, even if they were in a different year, we are all members of the community of Dickinson alumni.

Last year, living in a city for the first time, I got used to noises from the street, and I remember being woken up by a domestic dispute one morning in winter when it appeared someone was kicking another person out of their house. My apartment building for the first 6 months there was filled with half young people in their 20s and half over 40. I didn't know my neighbors. For the next 6 months I lived in a building filled with mainly young professionals and graduate students, and again I didn't know my neighbors. While the neighborhood was quiet sometime, it was clear that I was in a city and there were times of day I wouldn't go out by myself and places nearby that I wouldn't go alone. I was involved with a nonprofit and a community of Jewish young adults who lived in different areas throughout the city and worked or studied different things. Being Jewish, we had a connection that brought us together.

The neighborhood I am living in now is different yet again from all my previous experiences. It is often loud, mostly with the sound of children. Sometimes it is playful, but I hear a fair share of crying children and yelling between adults. Most mornings I am woken to the sound of a particular child who is always crying. Children hang out in the streets in large numbers with one or two adults and stay out even when it is dark. The Shapira neighbors where I live in Gedera seems to be small, but welcoming.

At a barbecue the other night, we had a discussion about what makes a community a place where we want to live, and many of the answers had to do with knowing your neighbors, feeling safe, good facilities and schools, and a general sense of belonging in the community. Every place I've lived has been different but I have been able to fit in somehow. While many the above observations are concerned with the physical surroundings, and Gedera definitely is different than anywhere else I have lived, I think that the feeling of belonging is important and as we get more involved in the community, I hope that I can feel like more of a member of the community rather than an outsider Just before sukkot, we talked about temporary living, like the Jews wandering the desert for 40 years. This is my home for the next 9 months and while I am only here for a short time, it is important to me to feel like a member of the community, both within our house of Yahelnikim (the Yahel participants) and in the Gedera community. The group of Yahelnikim go together because we all have an interest in social change and what we are doing here, but we also are a group a strangers getting to know each other and live harmoniously in a house for the next 9 months - like the Real World but actually unscripted and hopefully without the drama.