Personal reflection: To Israel and back in 1995
The author wrote this in 1995, after visiting Israel with his wife and children — ages 13, 10 and 6. It is excerpted from a piece originally published in the Long Island Jewish World, where the author penned a column for many years. He is now a resident of Riverdale.
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Water and dust. Dust and water. There were moments when it seemed like the entire country was composed of only these two elements, baked by a fiery and unrelenting sun.
Climbing up and down rocky hills, ducking in and out of caves, we toted our water bottles and drank up our past. We bathed in the natural pools of Gan Sachne in the Lower Galilee, frolicked in the water park of Luna Gal on the Kinneret, and hurled ourselves into the waves at Tel Aviv’s Gordon Beach. As refreshing and welcome as the water was, we returned to the sand and the stones. They had their own stories to tell. If you listened hard enough, you heard them.
We reconnected with our past. We gazed out over Emek Haelah and visualized young David’s brazen encounter with Goliath, the Philistine Schwartzenegger. We clambered over dozens of armored vehicles and aircraft at Latrun, a control point on the road linking the coastal plain to the Jews under siege in Jerusalem in 1948, and Hatzerim. At Mevo Horon we imagined Joshua imploring G-d for more time to complete his mission and the Maccabees lying in wait to ambush their Syrian-Greek foes. At Machon Ayalon we examined a mandate-period armaments factory which had been cleverly disguised as a bakery and laundry facility to conceal it from the British as statehood neared.
We examined actual Roman milestones and the remains of stepped roads and explored the bell-shaped caves of Beit Gurvin and the labyrinth network of cisterns beneath Maresha.
Jerusalem’s turbulent and storied past was made vivid by tours of the City of David and the enormous (underground) portion of the Kotel. Gradually, our eyes became trained to distinguish among the stones of different eras, dismissing those which were a mere 400 years old. We came to admire the foresight and shrewdness of Hezekiah, King of Judea, and that monarch of 2,500 years past became something of a hero to us.
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At the ruins of Susyah, Qazrin and Beit Alphah we viewed the synagogues of our ancestors. As I marveled at the simple beauty of their ancient mosaic floors, I could almost hear their voices addressing my G-d, their G-d, the G-d Abraham, Isaac and Jacob. Our presence in the Jewish state is living proof that those prayers did not go unanswered.
We studied the handiwork of their everyday lives: The olive and wine presses, the cisterns, the columbaria (shelters for domesticated pigeons). I am on more intimate terms with my ancestors now. It is almost like having rummaged around in a relative’s attic or flipped through the pages of the family album.
But for all the fascination that the various places on our itinerary held out for us, there was (for me) no more striking a place than the site known as the Haas Promenade in Jerusalem. The vista of the old city from this vantage point in Talpiot is breathtakingly magnificent.
In the soft, buttery, late-afternoon Shabbat sunlight. the eye skims northward over the Arab villages of Abu Tor and Silwan and finds its way to Har Habayit, the Temple Mount. It is a place to be savored, its windswept beauty engraved in my mind’s eye.
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Child rearing is like farming. One prepares the soil, sows, irrigates, nurtures and hopes for the best. I want a love for the land of Israel to take root in my children and blossom, and objective that is more elusive than it would seem.
Their very familiarity with the idea of Israel functions as a kind of force field which repels true intimacy. How does one smash through the platitudes and superficialities so that the place touches them deeply? How does one elevate Israel in their minds as being something more than one big Jewish national theme park?
The best way, perhaps, is simply to have them experience the texture of everyday life in a place where the Hebrew of the siddur and Tanach is found on the streets, over radio and television airwaves, in newspapers and on road signs. I ache for them to realize that all this is theirs.
Surely, they must take Israel for granted. It is here, it thrives and, by the way, when do we get a chance to actually eat in the kosher McDonalds? At their tender ages they are in no position to appreciate just how miraculous all this really is. For them, notions of refuge and independence are alien.
These children, thank G-d, have not experienced first-hand degradation and second-class status. They haven’t absorbed the epithets and blows that were routinely directed at earlier generations. They live in a comfortable, non-threatening suburban setting and feel fully a part of America. Israel, as both an antidote to persecution and alienation and a catalyst to Jewish creativity, is still little more than a subject for classroom discussion. It remains to be absorbed and felt.
I urged upon myself patience; let the places, the atmosphere, the feel of it all work its subtle magic on them. Like a time capsule, Israel would have to be given time to become for them the imperative it is for me. Slow down, I reminded myself, it won’t happen overnight. This trip need not produce any epiphanies. It is a time for planting seeds.
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The Kotel. My relationship with this massive testament to Herod’s Idumaean insecurity, his Greco-Roman sensibilities and, yes, his Jewish pride, is complex and beyond even my own understanding.
As a religious/national symbol it is a paradox as great as the individual stones that comprise it. It represents our only remaining tangible link with Judaism’s only truly sacred edifice and yet is not a remnant of the beit hamikdash itself but only a part of the wall that enclosed it.
It has long been regarded as a holy place and yet was built by one of Jewish history’s most profane and ruthless personages. It stands today as an austere and simple monument of our faith and yet 2,000 years ago it was an integral part of a grandiose endeavor that was, according to the Talmud and Josephus, one of antiquity’s architectural marvels. It is a magnet for Jews wishing to pray, yet I routinely shun it and its raucousness in favor of the quiet, understated solemnity of the synagogue of the Ramban located nearby in the Jewish Quarter.
When I first visited the Kotel, three years after its liberation from Arab hands, I wanted to feel so much; truth to tell, I felt little and was disappointed in myself. Numerous subsequent visits yielded no change. It was simply another obligation to be discharged. Until a year and a half ago and then again this time.
I approached the smooth, massive stones and rested my head and arm against them and sighed. Tears welled in my eyes and then flowed as I tried to talk to G-d. I wanted, needed, so badly to find Him. Especially there. Especially then.
Why did I cry these times and not before? Was I grieving over a loss of innocence? It seemed comforting to find myself at some fixed, incontrovertible point.
Questions hung unanswered in the arid air. I was knocking at heaven’s door.
Write: Columnist@TheJewishStar.com
