Life is full of bumps along the way. These may take the form
of tragedies large and small, day-to-day inconveniences, and disappointments,
too. In Israel, somehow these wrinkles that appear in the fabric of everyday
living are larger than elsewhere.
And sometimes larger than life.
It may be the heat of the day, or the heat of the food,
turned up high with exotic spices and peppers. It may even be the hot political
climate that keeps us hopping, as if we are dancing on hot coals as one nation.
The heat of the day, the food, the politics, leads to tempers simmering just
below the surface, at times exploding.
There's the obstinate clerk who is determined to be
unhelpful. The shopkeeper who ousts you from the premises when three
consecutive clothing items decide not to fit you. The ministry that decides to
close its gates as your number comes up. The person who jumps ahead of you in
line at the supermarket—she only went to get a bag of milk—after you're finally
next in line, after waiting 45 minutes to check out your items.
Will you let it get to you? How can you not?
And yet, if you lose it, they win.
It definitely seems worse here in Israel. In America, you
get your stress served with a smile, with politeness. Here it's just full on
rude.
Sometimes.
And sometimes not.
Because there's the other stuff. There's kindness. A
bus driver will wait until an elderly person wends his slow way toward the bus
stop and then on up the bus steps. Passengers stand for pregnant women and
seniors on the bus, so that they might sit. A bus driver may even drive an
elderly person all the way to his home instead of leaving him off at the designated
bus stop, though technically, he can be fined for this "offense."
If your car breaks down on the road in the middle of
nowhere, someone, a complete stranger, will stop to help you change your tire,
charge your spent battery, or give you water for your sizzling radiator/overheated
car.
The doctor who knows you can't afford the private fee for
his services, insists you come in, "No charge."
Your favorite grill restaurant gives you a steak in a pita
to go, and as he hands it to you, you might mention it's for your wife who just
had a son, and the entire restaurant breaks out into Mazal Tovs and ululations
(no charge for the steak). The same thing happens on the bus, when you bump
into someone you know and mention you're on the way to the hospital to visit
your wife and new baby. The entire bus full of people (who are not supposed to
be listening) will congratulate you and clap you on the back.
Like you're one big family.
And with all these extremes, these ups and downs, the
kindnesses, frustrations, and anger, there is the heart-stopping terror you
feel when you hear or see many ambulances go by and you know that terror has
struck someone's loved one: a mother, a grandfather, a beloved teacher, a
tourist. Then, you need to know where your family members are in a hurry. The
wait can be unbearable.
Terror can hit every other day, every day, or even several
times a day. You live with fear, you live in a state of denial of that fear,
doing the Stanislavski method, acting "as if", as if everything were okay,
even when it is most emphatically not. If you're a performer, you perform. If
your child is being bar mitzvahed, the bar mitzvah goes on. If you need to shop
for groceries, you go, even if you might not come home with that sale-priced
economy bag of laundry soap (or at all).
But sometimes you can get a break and just appreciate the
good friends you have made that are like family, because your real family is thousands
of miles away in the land you left to live here.
Sometimes you can just
appreciate the night sky with stars so close you could reach out and pluck one with your bare hand and hold it there, glowing in your palm, a holy relic
from a holy night sky.
Sometimes you go outside and that smell you smell is the
good, fertile earth, filled with the promise of growing things, lemons and
tomatoes that taste of the sun, cucumbers so crunchy and fresh it's a sin to
peel them. The earth is more immediate here. You want to take a bite out of it,
take it into you, make it part of you, as you will someday be a part of it,
when you are no longer sensible of the fact.
But it is a tough life here in Israel, no matter that we are
too stubborn to leave and cling to the land with all our hearts.
Why do we do it then? What is the reason we stay here? It's
this: no matter what happens here, you know your life will have had meaning just for having lived here, and
if you should die? You died here for a reason.
Sometimes, in spite of everything, you know that all you
have ever done here, gone through here, was all about arriving at a single
moment: that shining moment when you know that what you did here, the roughness
of life, mattered, because it brought you to this.
For every person, that moment is unique to one's personal
universe. For this author? For me? It was that moment when my daughter
got married under the stars of a Jerusalem night and I knew that my
grandchildren would grow up Jewish in Jerusalem, dedicated to the study of
God's holy Torah. The realization that somehow a boy with roots in Iraq,
Gibraltar, Spain, and Jerusalem, had ended up with a girl with roots in
Pittsburgh, Chicago, Lithuania, Poland, Germany, Ukraine, and yes, Jerusalem, too,
to build a Bayit Neeman B'Yisrael, a faithful house in Israel.
It was these two young people following rituals as old as
history, as old as Jacob and Leah and Rachel, rituals that varied little from
country to country, wherever we wandered. It was the way he checked it was she,
lowering the veil over her face with gentle, shaking hands. The way she then slipped
off her golden bracelets commemorating that long-ago sin by our people in the
desert. How they stood under a prayer shawl, a tallis, side by side; too
shy to look at each other, sharing sips of wine from a goblet.
There they stood for several minutes, surrounded by four
parents holding candles in fluted glass candle holders. Parents with wandering
roots, a people come home to roost, come home to Jerusalem, where we belong,
where our people belong. The beginning of a new home, a new family, Jewish
children here in this holy city.
The way he slipped the ring onto her finger, that first
touch. The way he vowed never to forget Jerusalem and stepped on a glass, the
sound audible to all, eliciting cheers.
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Thursday, November 30, 2017
Elder of Ziyon
