Fili’s world

It’s quite unique experiencing the country you grew up in through the eyes of a tourist. I don’t really know what it was like for my Asian friends to show me around their countries and hear my responses, but I can imagine it was quite naive and bizarre. Erin, a Jewish Canadian girl I met very briefly in Vietnam, came here recently with the BirthRight-Taglit plan intended to provide Jewish youth the chance to explore Israel. Seems like even as a Jewish girl, her perception of what Israel is was very far from the actual truth. It starts from simple things like how advanced, safe and green everything is, her maybe expecting a desert wasteland where everybody is scared of potential suicide bombers, and goes on further to discover what Israelis and Israeli culture is like - trying to overcome the gap between the Israelis she met in India and Thailand and the people she met here (Link to a funny Eretz Nehederet video about Israelis in India). I’m sure that as a Jewish gal living in Canada, this whole trip was quite the shock. There were so many questions that my family and I had to face that we haven’t really thought much of before, especially those regarding the Jewish religion.

While for her the experience was more of finding out something completely new which she knew nothing of before, the experience for me ever since my return here is somewhat different. I know most of what’s happening here. I’m a bit familiar with Israeli culture, Israeli food, Israeli people and also with Jewish costumes, Jewish history, maybe even a bit more than the average guy because of my semi-religious school education. But, it seems, that knowing all that from within is a very different experience than seeing it from the outside, and - Buddha knows - that recently I sometimes feel very foreign.

Sitting in Far-East classes at the Hebrew University with lecturers telling our glorious details about China/PRC/Japan while never actually visiting there I’ve often wondered what contribution a foreign researcher has being unfamiliar with the culture he’s researching - having been exposed to that culture only by reading articles and books from others’ observations. Does someone need to be in a culture in order to really know it? Can someone, who grew from within a specific culture, ever truly understand it and realize its uniqueness?
Is the only way you can truly study French Art (18th century :P) is by going to study at France with a French professor who’s been researching that his whole life? how would that compare to studying that same French Art subject in - say - England with a British professor who’s never been to France? would they both differ from a professor in Holland?

(Canadian Erin:)