Pretend You're A Tourist

An essay by Alice Gomstyn

Maybe it’s your book club. Maybe it’s the school playground where all the parents congregate before pickup. Maybe it’s your gym. Maybe it’s your workplace. Maybe it’s your dentist’s office with the friendly receptionist who always asks how your kids are doing.

It could be anywhere. Often, it’s almost everywhere: Places where, as a Jew, you feel like you’ve ventured into an alternate universe. Here, the horrors of the last nineteen months (let alone the last few days) never happened.

It’s bewildering, destabilizing, bizarre. Not a single mention of that beautiful young couple, gunned down outside a museum? What about, before them, the pregnant woman slaughtered on her way to the hospital? And, before her, the flame-haired children whose light was extinguished by someone’s bare hands? Did it happen, here, in this alternative universe, if no one’s talking about it?

My advice: Pretend you’re a tourist.

The people silent in response to the violence mean you no harm. They’re just not attuned to what’s felt like 9/11 and a slow-motion Uvalde all rolled into one. They have so many things demanding their attention; they can only devote so much of it to your cause.

That’s what it is to them — another cause. If that. You see, in this foreign land you’ve unwittingly entered, the news is different, the priorities are different, the language is different.

It used to be your language. But it’s not anymore.

So pretend you’re a tourist. When you visit another country, you don’t expect the native residents to speak in your tongue and to know the intimate details of the troubles in your homeland. You’re not disappointed when they don’t. You’re not hurt when they don’t acknowledge what you and your loved ones have endured. You’re not expecting their sympathy or expressions of concern. All they know about you is that you’re visiting, so you must be happy to be there. And they treat you accordingly.

This is what Jews may find when they visit non-Jewish spaces today.

The receptionist who asks about your kids isn’t prepared to hear about the armed guards posted at their Hebrew school after yet more global threats against your people. The trainer at the gym won’t offer his condolences on deaths he’d never heard about in the first place. They weren’t your family anyway, were they?

Well, no. But also yes.

You’re too tired to explain. And as a tourist, you don’t have to. You’re just grateful for permission to be somewhere you don’t belong, like any tourist would be. (Maybe you used to belong there, but not anymore.) You’re grateful for the people who smile your way and accept that you’ve entered their space. You’re grateful to exist, if only as a tourist.

Right now, in this moment, it’s easier that way.

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Alice Gomstyn is a veteran journalist and essayist. Her work has been published by The Washington Post, The New York Daily News, Business Insider and many other outlets.

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Five tiny delights:

1. A not-too-sweet caramel macchiato;

2. Purring cats on my lap;

3. Fresh sheets;

4. Hugs;

5. DMing a co-worker a wisecrack on a Zoom call and watching them suppress a giggle.

Five tiny Jewish delights:

1. Challah;

2. Hebrew when it's written with vowels (because I still can't read it without them);

3. My son managing to keep his kippah on his head during services without it slipping off;

4. Small children dressed in costume for Purim;

5. Tossing bread into a stream for Tashlich.

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For more by Alice Gomstyn, please visit her website HERE.