The Tears of Brothers

Yesterday they hugged. The green soldiers, the hands of the government, the hands of this decision that we have been forced into with our back against a wall and our hands raised in the air in surrender, yesterday these soldiers fanned out into the quiet neighborhoods with heads bent, determined, yet weeping inside, delivering the inevitable notices to houses that stood, filled with the noise of children, and the books of an ancient religion, as if it was an ordinary Monday morning in the continuum of history.

But this day was not an ordinary Monday morning in the continuum of history. And the residents, these setters, whose lives had been risked, whose hands had been callused, whose hearts had been lightened and hardened, whose lives had been dedicated to living and building there, in what they saw as theirs and what they were told was theirs, in what they had built from nothing to beautiful, shining, dancing centers of life, these settlers were handed pieces of paper telling them, as if they had no hint that this was going to happen, that this was no longer theirs. And now they could no longer deny the future; they could no longer deny that a Jewish soldier was standing at their door telling them to abandon their Jewish house.

And they broke down crying as if they had no idea that this would happen. And they lifted their tearful eyes to look at the bent head of the eighteen-year-old dressed in the army-green uniform of the Jewish army, the Israel Defense Force, who had come to deliver this law, who now also lifted her face to reveal her eyes which now each had one single tear streaming from them, staining her cheeks.

And in the few feet between them, there was pain and agony and sympathy and compassion and love for this land, their land of Israel, as they knew that no matter whether this would be good or bad or bring peace or war or neither or both or nothing, no matter what, it was happening, and they looked at each other and cried, and their tears streamed down their faces to the floor between where the two of them stood, gathering into a puddle, the tears mingling together in their common sorrow.


But today they fight. These residents are of a different breed; their hearts are still hardened. Their eyes are still turned upward, toward the sky, toward the God that has failed them and turned their brothers into the enemy. They refuse to look into the eyes of the soldiers, to see the heartbreak, the national pain that everyone in this land is carrying on their shoulders these days, whether orange or blue or purple or yellow. Today, they screamed and prayed and hoped that the Messiah would still come any minute, hoped for what only peace and love can bring, as they jeered and insulted and pushed and degraded the respected uniform of the army of their state, the uniform that they and all their children had all worn, the uniform that once represented to them the ultimate, the serving of God by protecting, by being strong, by being prepared.

These settlers, they were still fighting. These soldiers had come to take their hands, to walk singing, through a trail of tears, yet in peace, out of the gates of their lives never to return, yet this community today, they are still kicking and fighting. They will not let themselves be scooped from their homes. They will not let the green uniform of the IDF be defiled by letting the soldiers drag them away. So they fight, defiling the uniform instead with their spit.

And some give up, and finally call out, “God, Almighty, my Savior, my King, how can this be? But since it must be, then let me go now! Before one of Your creations dies, before my children’s eyes are scarred! Before Your holy books that are stacked on my shelves are burned!” And so they too finally take the soldiers hands, and in some way, they allow themselves to understand that they are the leg that must be cut off to save the heart, and the soldiers are the surgeon, pained at the thought of causing pain, bleeding at the thought of drawing blood, crying at the thought of destroying something that had been beautiful.

But the ones that won’t give up fight on, and now turn on those that had moments before been their brothers. They commit crimes of proportions great enough to destroy a Third Temple before it can even be built, for now they shout at their new enemies, turning on those that had been their leaders and their guides, feeling lost and abandoned with nothing: no land, no houses, and an ideology that no longer makes sense.

They turn to their weeping Rabbi, who now holds the hand of a weeping soldier, the two of them melting in the desert sun and this pot of boiling water that we all live in, whose heat is slowly being turned up until it eventually kills us all, and they turn to their Rabbi, who has just betrayed them and they shout at him, “Rabbi! Teacher! Have you brought us into the desert to have us die here? Have you led us here to defend you only to then desert us? You were once our leader, our Rabbi, but now you are a dog. You are a nothing. You are lost.”


And God looks down on His Children who drown in their own tears, whose ears are being shattered by pain and hate that flies through the air from one to another, tangling in the particles of the atmosphere and in the eardrums, turning on each other as His Children do. And He gathers up all of Israel in his hands and reinfuses in His Children the hope that they have never lost, the hope of 2000 years that has wavered in the past days. And with heavy hearts, His Children cry but know that they will go on and they will all hold hands again one day and dance in circles and sing through tears with one beautiful voice.

Herzl and Aliyah to the Mountains

On Thursday, I went to the new Herzl Museum in Jerusalem. It's one of those "multimedia" museums, where the museum sort of happens around you, and you, the viewer (perhaps thankfully), don't have to do much moving.

When you first walk in, you enter a room made to look like the square in France where Alfred Dreyfus was publicly stripped of his military status. We, the museum goers, watch the footage of the event on a video screen and then suddenly, we are interrupted by a young Israeli actor and his director. The actor will be playing Theodor Herzl in an upcoming play yet he knows very little about Herzl. So of course the director goes about describing Herzl's life and dream to the actor and by eavesdropping, we also learn all about Herzl as we move through various rooms where we see simulations of the different Zionist Congresses, a bit of the actors being cheezey, all the original furniture and books from Herzl's office, more of the actors being cheezey, and then we finally move into the last room, where we are the audience of the final performance of the play we have all along been watching rehearsals of.

And that's when I broke down. We sat watching the video screen, and there was "Herzl" standing before us with beautiful pictures of Israel running behind him and he stood describing his dream for the land and the reality of the land and the hardships and the successes and the ways that Israel has outdone even his wildest dreams and the ways that Israel is different from his wildest dreams and all I could do was sit there and cry. Like a baby. Because the idea that this land, this place that means so much to me, that it is so very historic, that it is so very amazing and beautiful, and that this entire reality rests on the shoulders of a few amazing dreamers that willed their dreams to be true so much that the most powerful thing in my life today now exists.

I spent shabbat on a beautiful kibbutz in the North, the Jordan Valley. It was on the top of a hill and as the sun began to sink on shabbat afternoon and the day was leaving, I stood alone on the edge of a field on the top of a hill and looked around me to the right and to the left to see beautiful mountains and sky and golden dried grass and off in the distance the Kineret. And I suddenly felt the same thing I had been feeling in that movie earlier at the Herzl Museum. This was all created for me and for you and it is beautiful and it rests completely on those dreamers, it is solely the fruit of those dreamers and idealists and now people like you and me, who felt the land calling to them and knew that this place and this country and these mountains and hills and deserts and flowers would be something historic and beautiful and they wanted to make their dream a reality.

Welcome, Alex (and others who drop by)

I was always one of those people who thought blogging was silly. I still am one of those people. I think it sort of implies that you think you have thoughts that are so worthy that others will want to read them in their spare time. Well, I guess I've reached that point. So welcome to my worthy thoughts. Perhaps this is more an excercise for myself (the eternal question: Do writers write for their readers or for themselves?), but either way, I'm not really sure why I'm writing this blog besides the fact that I think I have things to say and I want people to read them. That sounds good enough to me.

So I think I'll jump right into it and tell you that I am currently in Israel for the summer. I've been here since June 1 and I'm leaving August 21. I'm living in a somewhat-dirty-yet-still-entirely-loveable apartment in Givat Shmuel which is right next to Bar Ilan University which is in Ramat Gan which is a suburb of Tel Aviv which is the biggest city in Israel (in case you didn't know any of that). I've been working in a leukemia research lab at Bar Ilan for the past seven weeks or so, doing some weird stuff with chick embryos (I think I'll explain some other time). It's sorta interesting, mostly boring...don't really like my boss, he's kind of a jerk. Whatever. (Did I really just type "whatever"? Blogging is already corrupting my oh-so-beautiful writing on the first post!)

So, after that introduction, there are plenty of things that I'm thinking about right now that I would love to expound upon, and I'm sure I will at some point, things such as life in Israel as an American (and the humor of being an American who isn't really a tourist but hasn't yet made aliyah and can't really speak Hebrew but gets insulted when an Israeli speaks English to her...it's a land of contradictions, why should I be an exception?), disengagement (is there anything left to say?), my feelings about America right now, my feelings about Israel and aliyah right now, my excitement about returning to Columbia in the fall, and my general, almost ethereal and even disconsertingly all-encompassing, pervasive happiness.