When Mom and I bought our Subaru Crosstrek last summer, the car salesman demonstrated how to link an iPhone to the car’s computer in order to answer phone calls hands free. But as soon as Mom’s phone was linked to the car’s computer, a podcast or a phone call or a voice mail came bursting out of the speakers at us, and we had to press every button in the car before we could finally make it stop. And as a result we decided, as we often do, that this latest technological advance was not for us.
But then, a few months ago, when I was listening to music on my phone in the car because I was tired of hearing the same Olivia Rodrigo and Taylor Swift songs on the radio over and over, I noticed that the battery was low and plugged my phone into the car charger, and suddenly my Spotify account was playing over the car’s speakers. And it was wonderful! So now, as soon as I get into the car, I put my phone on the car charger and open my Spotify app and my music fills the whole car instead of just the cup holder next to me.
Of course, I still pay attention to the news, but only when I feel like I have the energy to deal with it because trying to make sense of the different narratives of what’s going on in the Middle East (and here), as reported by different outlets through varying lenses feels like trying to untangle a pile of fishhooks. But listening to Israeli music, with a playlist that has ballooned to over 300 songs, has become my sanctuary. Especially when I’m on my way to school to teach my students, listening to Israeli music instead of news about Israel helps me get into a mindset where I can have hope for the future, so I can be the person I need to be for my students.
Alas, I only have a free Spotify account, which means I can only listen to my playlist on shuffle, and I still have no idea how Spotify decides to shuffle the songs. Luckily, even though my Israeli music playlist is ridiculously long, it is filled with songs I really like, so even if the shuffle decides I need to hear the same song on the drive to and from work, or jumps from one style of music to a very different style of music, it’s all good. And there’s actually something comforting about having the app choose which song to listen to next, because it makes me feel like I’m not really alone in the car; like there’s a tiny DJ in there, somewhere, keeping me company and telling me everything’s going to be alright.
If you haven’t had a chance yet, please check out my Young Adult novel, Yeshiva Girl, on Amazon. And if you feel called to write a review of the book, on Amazon, or anywhere else, I’d be honored.
Yeshiva Girl is about a Jewish teenager on Long Island, named Isabel, though her father calls her Jezebel. Her father has been accused of inappropriate sexual behavior with one of his students, which he denies, but Izzy implicitly believes it’s true. As a result of his problems, her father sends her to a co-ed Orthodox yeshiva for tenth grade, out of the blue, and Izzy and her mother can’t figure out how to prevent it. At Yeshiva, though, Izzy finds that religious people are much more complicated than she had expected. Some, like her father, may use religion as a place to hide, but others search for and find comfort, and community, and even enlightenment. The question is, what will Izzy find?
As part of our preparation for Passover this year, my students and I looked at different elements of the Haggadah, the book used to guide the Passover Seder. We tried to figure out the mysteries of the ten plagues (What’s so terrible about frogs? Why do you need Lice and locusts? What does it mean that God hardens Pharaoh’s heart against letting the Israelites go and yet also sends plague after plague to convince him to let them go? Does this mean that God wants to cause Pharaoh pain? And if so, why must all of the Egyptians suffer along with their leader?); and we looked at the objects on the Seder plate (does anyone actually eat the parsley dipped in salt water? Couldn’t we just substitute pickles for the green vegetable and the salt water, all in one convenient package?); and, why is the Seder so freakin’ long?
I bought a roll of these stickers for my students last year. Lice was a favorite.
But the part that always gets to me most is when we read about the four sons (the wise, the wicked, the simple, and the one who doesn’t know how to ask) and how the rabbis recommended we answer their questions.
There are many reasons to find fault with this section of the Hagaddah, but first and foremost my reasons are personal: my father always chose for me to read what the wicked son had to say. He thought it was hysterical that every year he could call me evil in front of guests and get away with it. But having read that passage so many times has focused my attention on the question: what’s so wicked about the wicked son wondering what this whole Exodus story has to do with him?
I’ve seen dozens of revised versions of the four sons: changing it to the four children to include the other half of the population; renaming the wicked son to the rebellious child; and imagining the four children as four parts of all of us.
I actually love the idea that the rabbis thought to add a section to the Hagaddah where we are told to look at the children at the table and try to figure out how to answer their questions. It’s just that the rabbis gave terrible advice, and their method of categorizing the children is both vague and judgmental and still doesn’t really help us figure out what to say to them.
Earlier in the Seder, the youngest child recites the official Four Questions, chosen by the rabbis long ago and usually answered before Passover even begins by your friendly neighborhood synagogue school teacher. Why Matza? Because the Israelites had to rush to bake bread the night they escaped from Egypt and the bread had no time to rise, or because we used to rely on sympathetic magic at this time of year to encourage the harvest, and preventing the bread from rising was a way to reserve all of the fecundity for the crops. Why bitter herbs? Because slavery is bitter. Why dip a green vegetable in salt water? Because the green vegetable (often parsley) represents spring and the salt water reminds us of the tears of our ancestors. Why do we recline at the Seder? Because free people are able to relax while they eat and somehow don’t mind the resulting heartburn.
The recital of those four basic questions is supposed to be the beginning, and not the end, of the questions people ask at the Seder, and in the same way I wish we could portray (at least) four different kinds of children at our Seders in a way that would inspire us to be more curious about the actual children in our lives and to come up with ways to spark their imaginations.
What if instead of labeling the child who agrees with us as wise, and the one who disagrees as wicked, we could listen to them long enough to figure out the who behind the concerns they are bringing up?
In that spirit, I asked my students which children they would choose if they were writing the Hagaddah today, and they had a lot of ideas. They thought about the depressed child and the bored child, the discombobulated child and the hungry child, the happy child and the lonely child, the frightened child and the curious child, the constipated child (too much Matza), the self-absorbed child, and the brave child. And really they could have gone on and on. What they didn’t do was to describe the children in the judgmental and external ways the rabbis had done. They focused on who the child is to him or herself: she feels sad, he feels uncomfortable, she’s shy around so many strangers, and he wants to see what happens if he feeds horseradish to the cat.
The central obligation at the Passover Seder is not to eat Gefilte fish or hide the Afikomen, but to re-tell the story of the Exodus, because we recognize the power of this story to help us find meaning in our lives: to teach us to have hope even in dark times, to learn how to stand up to bullies, to remind us that we can ask for help and that we should help others on the journey when we can. This yearly retelling also teaches us to remember our own individual traumas, and name them, and embrace the ways they have made us who we are today. If we pretend that life is beautiful all the time we won’t search for new ways to solve our problems and will remain stuck in Egypt. The mantra to “never forget” has been associated with the Holocaust in modern times, but the lesson is thousands of years old and stems from the Exodus story and the command to retell it. Our ancestors knew the power of memory and the need for storytelling to help us shape those memories into life lessons.
The Israelites are never portrayed as perfect people in the Hebrew Bible, they are intentionally portrayed as human and flawed so that we can see ourselves in them and learn the lessons they learned from their lives. The four children can be seen as part of this tradition too: the one who complains all the time (Manna? Again?!), the one who is always jealous of someone else’s share (why does Moses get to be in charge all the time?), the one who is afraid to cross the sea (why does everything have to be so difficult?), and the one who has the faith to take the first step and lead the rest to freedom. They are all part of the same whole; they are us.
Splitting of the Sea, from Chabad.org
Moses’ first try, from The Jew In You
If you haven’t had a chance yet, please check out my Young Adult novel, Yeshiva Girl, on Amazon. And if you feel called to write a review of the book, on Amazon, or anywhere else, I’d be honored.
Yeshiva Girl is about a Jewish teenager on Long Island, named Isabel, though her father calls her Jezebel. Her father has been accused of inappropriate sexual behavior with one of his students, which he denies, but Izzy implicitly believes it’s true. As a result of his problems, her father sends her to a co-ed Orthodox yeshiva for tenth grade, out of the blue, and Izzy and her mother can’t figure out how to prevent it. At Yeshiva, though, Izzy finds that religious people are much more complicated than she had expected. Some, like her father, may use religion as a place to hide, but others search for and find comfort, and community, and even enlightenment. The question is, what will Izzy find?
My synagogue had planned a big trip this spring – to Germany, Israel, and Jordan. It was originally planned for 2020, and then Covid hit; and it was rescheduled for this spring, and then October 7th happened. The plan for the trip was still up in the air for months, as the clergy watched to see how long the war would last, and what conditions would be like for tourism, but somewhere along the way the decision was made that they would just do the Germany leg of the trip this year, for the people who were still interested in going. A small group of congregants went to Berlin, with the same tour guide who was going to lead the big trip, to experience the different ways Germany has memorialized the Holocaust, and how they are dealing with Jews and anti-Semitism today.
I was not planning to go on the trip this Spring, even if October 7th hadn’t happened, because I wasn’t interested in the Jordan and Germany legs of the trip, and because it was going to take place during the school year and I hate missing time with my students if I can help it, and probably most of all because it was going to be expensive and I am still paying off steep medical loans and I feel guilty being in so much debt at one time.
But if the synagogue group had gone to Israel, in this post October 7th landscape, I would have been jealous of everyone who was able to go.
I have wanted to go to Israel for a long time now, and I’ve gone over and over all of my internal conflicts around the costs, the weather, the social issues, the health issues, and the security issues, without really coming to any conclusions. But post October 7th the drive to go to Israel has increased tenfold.
Don’t get me wrong, I’m not blind to the security issues, or to the parts of the country that are still off limits because they are under direct attack by Hezbollah; and I still have money issues, and health limitations, and I still worry about being lonely and feeling lost and alienated while I’m there. But the part of me that wants to be there, not to see the Western Wall or the Dead Sea or other touristy things, but just to be there in solidarity and offer my presence and compassion and love, feels newly strong. Maybe because, until now, I felt like I had nothing to offer my Israeli cousins; I even expected them to reject me, because of so many of the clichés about Israelis, that they feel superior and look down on weakness, be it emotional, or physical, or psychological.
But on and after October 7th it became clear to me that Israelis aren’t really the image they project to the world, or at least they’re not only that; they are human like the rest of us. Yes they are courageous, but they are also frightened. Yes, many of them are adventurous and confident, but a lot of their bravado is a defense mechanism against lives lived in a very small country surrounded by people who hate them and keep trying to kill them.
I wish, with all my heart, that this unveiling of their true selves had happened any other way, but I am truly grateful to feel more connected to them and to learn more about who they really are. There are, of course, some people who are so frightened and defensive, like Benjamin Netanyahu and his fellow politicians on the far right, that they never let the facade drop, even on October 7th itself.
I am also aware of, and overwhelmed by, the news about the war itself and how it is being conducted. It has been especially difficult to watch the news about the seven aid workers from World Central Kitchen who were killed by an Israeli airstrike in Gaza. It’s painful and disheartening to see something so awful happen to people who are there only to offer help to those who need it. And I don’t understand how a mistake like this could have happened when the aid workers and the IDF say they had deconflicted their itinerary ahead of time to keep the workers safe. But it’s also heartbreaking to hear people insist that this was an intentional, rather than accidental, killing. I don’t believe that the Israeli army would target innocent aid workers intentionally, but, given the complications of managing a war in this territory, with so many voices pulling in different direction, I don’t understand how the army hasn’t become more and more careful over time, and I don’t understand why mistakes like this are still possible. At the beginning, when they were first trying to figure out how to fight a war like this, the mistakes in targeting and choice of munitions that led to so many civilian deaths was horrifying, but maybe understandable. But now? I don’t know what to think.
And yet, with all of my questions, and however conflicted I may feel about how the war is being waged, and interpreted, Israel and Israelis themselves are still very close to my heart. If I could plan the perfect trip right now I would want to visit my niece at her school and go with her and her friends to volunteer somewhere, picking clementines or folding uniforms or whatever volunteer activity the girls are doing now; and I would want to stay with my best friend from high school, and hear from her kids and their friends about what their lives are like right now; and I’d want to sit on trains and buses and listen to the conversations around me; and I’d also want to go to every concert in every venue possible; and visit my teachers in Tel Aviv, and finally taste real Chummus, since I’ve been told over and over that the Chummus I can get in New York is a pale imitation of the real thing.
Knowing me, though, I would be too shy to really talk to anyone, or to ask the questions I really want to ask, and I would spend half my time beating myself up for not having the courage to go and do and say what I want. But that’s still the trip I’d want to take, if I could. Those are the experiences I wish I could collect and bring back home with me.
For now, accepting my own limitations and the state of the war, my plan is to take another online class through the Hebrew language school in Tel Aviv, where I’ve taken classes in the past. That way I can continue to build my confidence in speaking Hebrew and listening to Israelis, for when I’m ready to go in person. And, through the zoom screen at least, I will still be able to make some of the connections I’ve been looking for, with my teachers and classmates, and through the music and stories and culture of Israel.
As always, I’m listening to podcasts and music to try to understand what’s going on. The latest podcast episode of For Heaven’s Sake, hosted by Donniel Hartman and Yossi Klein Halevy, is an honest accounting of how things feel for Israelis after six months of war.
And I’ve been listening to a lot of music by Idan Amedi, an Israeli musician who was injured while serving in the reserves in this war. He wrote a song twelve years ago about how hard it is to talk about the pain and memories of life as a soldier, even to the ones you love most, and the song still resonates.
If you haven’t had a chance yet, please check out my Young Adult novel, Yeshiva Girl, on Amazon. And if you feel called to write a review of the book, on Amazon, or anywhere else, I’d be honored.
Yeshiva Girl is about a Jewish teenager on Long Island, named Isabel, though her father calls her Jezebel. Her father has been accused of inappropriate sexual behavior with one of his students, which he denies, but Izzy implicitly believes it’s true. As a result of his problems, her father sends her to a co-ed Orthodox yeshiva for tenth grade, out of the blue, and Izzy and her mother can’t figure out how to prevent it. At Yeshiva, though, Izzy finds that religious people are much more complicated than she had expected. Some, like her father, may use religion as a place to hide, but others search for and find comfort, and community, and even enlightenment. The question is, what will Izzy find?
We had our yearly Women’s Seder at our synagogue recently (far in advance of Passover this year, because of scheduling issues), and the music was lovely, and I got a chance to sing with friends, but it was bittersweet because so many people I hadn’t seen in a while asked about the dogs. Some knew that Cricket had died, but not Ellie; most didn’t know about either one. And I found myself having to explain, over and over, that they’re gone and I’m heartbroken. Like a mantra.
The fact is, I’ve had to go over their deaths again and again, just for myself, to remind me why there won’t be a dog at the door when I get home, or to explain to myself how I managed to get through a whole day without going outside.
Kevin, the mini Goldendoodle in our complex, left a squeaky tennis ball on our steps the other day. I don’t know if he left it for Cricket, still hoping she would come out to see him, or if he just left it for me; either way, it felt like a gift.
I’ve started to have more memories of Cricket from before she got sick; just glimpses, of her standing on my chest to wake me up, or bouncing around the yard with Kevin, or flying like the wind when she was younger, fitting as many sticks as possible into her mouth at one time. But I’m still haunted by Ellie’s last days. It’s very hard to remember happy Ellie, for now. I just keep seeing her struggling to breathe, looking to me for help but I didn’t not know what to do. I hope this stage will pass soon and I will be able to remember her happy years, her joy, and her peace.
“I could’ve fit more in there.”
“I was so happy, Mommy!”
I’m trying to be patient with the grieving process, letting it unwind at its own pace, even though I wish it would hurry up. I’m still not ready to spread the dogs’ ashes and say a final goodbye. I think it took a year before I was ready to say goodbye to Butterfly, and back then we still had Cricket with us for comfort. Losing both dogs at the same time has been brutal.
One of the families at my synagogue has an emotional support dog who comes into the sanctuary for services. He’s basically a smaller version of Kevin: a poodle mix with curly reddish gold hair. He’s very well behaved and knows how to sit on a chair by himself; looking as if he’s listening attentively. A few weeks ago he came to services wearing his new blue satin Kippah, with a Jewish star on it, and the cuteness almost killed me.
I do my best to absorb my doggy vitamins from witnessing the joy of the dogs in my neighborhood whenever possible, and I watch a lot of dog videos on Facebook too, to take the edge off of the longing for another dog, because I’m not ready to start over again, yet.
There’s something about the Passover story, the escape from slavery to freedom, that seems to fit this stage of grief. We tend to see the Exodus from Egypt as an ecstatic, completely positive moment; but how can it be? There’s so much fear and grief in leaving a familiar place, even if it’s full of pain, and there’s so much anxiety in going somewhere new and unfamiliar. I like that the Seder encourages us to sit with all of those feelings, and I love that we go through this process every year as a way to practice these difficult skills so they will be there for us when we need them. It makes me think of how tennis players practice their forehands and backhands, or figure skaters run through their programs endlessly, or football teams practice different plays so that it can all be automatic under stressful conditions, when it’s impossible to really think it all through.
I like that the Passover Seder creates space for talking through the story of the Exodus, and asking questions and arguing about how the lessons of the past can apply today, but is also filled with physical experiences, like eating the maror, the bitter herb, with the Charoset, the sweet apple or date sauce, to remember that we can survive the bitterness, and this is how. I remember learning about a group of Sephardi Jews who would carry a pillow case filled with heavy books around the Seder table, to feel the burdens of slavery and then to experience the relief of letting the burdens go.
I’m trying to use all of this practice now, to remind myself that I can handle this transition better if I take the grief in small bites, and with the help of some sweetness to balance out the pain. I’m trying, but each day the grief turns again to a slightly different edge, and it feels like I have to learn all of the same lessons all over again. Maybe the point of all of the practice isn’t that it will make these difficult transitions easy or automatic, but that it will give me a memory of having made it through to the other side, so I can have faith that I will make it across the sea this time too.
“We’ll always be here.”
If you haven’t had a chance yet, please check out my Young Adult novel, Yeshiva Girl, on Amazon. And if you feel called to write a review of the book, on Amazon, or anywhere else, I’d be honored.
Yeshiva Girl is about a Jewish teenager on Long Island, named Isabel, though her father calls her Jezebel. Her father has been accused of inappropriate sexual behavior with one of his students, which he denies, but Izzy implicitly believes it’s true. As a result of his problems, her father sends her to a co-ed Orthodox yeshiva for tenth grade, out of the blue, and Izzy and her mother can’t figure out how to prevent it. At Yeshiva, though, Izzy finds that religious people are much more complicated than she had expected. Some, like her father, may use religion as a place to hide, but others search for and find comfort, and community, and even enlightenment. The question is, what will Izzy find?
In my adventures through Israeli music I’ve found one song title coming up over and over again: Lo Levad, or, Not alone.
At first, I thought they must all be covers of the same song, because Israeli music is filled with covers and mash ups and duets, in a way that makes it feel like the whole country is one big Glee club. But when I listened to each recording, I realized that, no, they were all different songs, with different lyrics and musical styles and intentions.
Since loneliness is a feeling I’m very familiar with, I wanted to understand why Israel in particular would have so many songs on this topic, not just referenced in the lyrics but in the titles themselves. So, I chose three songs that I found particularly powerful, maybe only because they are “my” kind of music, to examine further.
Jane Bordeaux’s Lo Levad (written by Doron Talmon) was posted on YouTube soon after October 7th and is set at a kibbutz overrun by Hamas. A lone, burned tree is the first and enduring image of the song, but the roots of the tree are still strong, because of the people who are coming together to remember those they lost, and to rebuild. The melody is sad, but the message of community coming together is hopeful, and that melancholy contrast lingers long after the song is over. It’s not a big, banging rock song, or a cry for help; maybe it’s more like a folk song, the kind of thing you’d sing at a campfire, after a long day of cleaning up or picking clementines, to remind yourself that the effort is worth it. The basic message of Jane Bordeaux’s Lo Levad: some limbs of the tree may have been burned, but the roots are strong and with help the tree will heal and grow again.
The second Lo Levad I chose was posted just before October 7th this year, and is performed by Aviv Alush and Omer Adam, and written by a collective of artists called Veteyn Chelkaynu, as part of a yearly project leading up to the Jewish high holidays, to inspire secular Israelis to return to religious study in some small way. The message of this Lo Levad is that you can always go home again, by which they mean return to God and to Torah (the Hebrew bible), which is very much in sync with the message of Rosh Hashanah, and the month of Elul that leads up to it. This is my favorite of all of the Lo Levad songs I’ve heard, and did the most to genuinely make me feel less alone each time I heard it, maybe because the idea of prayer and study, as part of a community, actually does resonate for me, a lot; though I wouldn’t limit it to religious study, because in my experience almost any group studying together, or singing together, and willing to acknowledge weakness and the need for comfort, creates this same powerful energy. I also like the contrast of the two voices, one gruff (Aviv Alush, a popular Israeli actor) and one sweet (Omer Adam, maybe the most famous and certainly the most prolific of Israel’s singers), and I like that in both the lyrics and the music, this song champions both crying out for help and reaching out to help someone else; there’s no sense that one role has more value or respect than the other. The basic message of Aviv Alush and Omer Adam’s Lo Levad: life is a difficult journey for everyone, with lots of choices along the way, but you don’t have to go on this journey alone, and you can find your way home, with help.
The third Lo Levad I chose is from Hanan Ben Ari (co-written by Roi Chasan), a popular Israeli singer/songwriter who sings a kind of pop/religious hybrid that really seems to crossover well. His Lo Levad, which is actually from seven years ago, is anthemic, built like an uphill climb, both in the music and in the lyrics (or what I understand of them, because the Hebrew here was hard for me in certain places). It’s written in third person, so it has that distance of speaking about someone else’s pain (even though it could be about him, who knows), and there’s a choir that jumps in when the song builds. The basic message of Hanan Ben Ari’s Lo Levad: even if you fall into the dark cavernous pit of loneliness, you can find the light and even the wings to fly.
Together, all of these songs feel like puzzle pieces in the larger picture of how loneliness feels and how we try to combat it. Loneliness is certainly not unique to Israelis, but maybe their willingness to acknowledge it, and their focus on combatting it in community fits the Israeli ethos in particular. In the United States, where our most insistent value is independence, we have mixed feelings about acknowledging loneliness as a problem. We, maybe, see loneliness as a necessary price for the kind of rugged individualism we are supposed to strive for. But in Israel, where collectivist kibbutzim played such a big role in its beginnings, and mandatory army service brings people together from all walks of life, community is the key to survival.
The loneliness theme also resonates in the physical isolation that is inherent in where Israel is located in the world, surrounded by Muslim majority countries that have, historically, seen Israel as a cancer that needs to be excised; and it responates with the long history of Jewish wandering that has led to being seen as the other by the majority populations of pretty much every place in the world.
Wherever the loneliness comes from, though, it’s a relief to have it expressed, in music and in words, in so many ways; just the chance to hear about someone else’s struggle, and their attempts to find comfort, helps me fight off at least the bitterest edges of the loneliness.
I didn’t include translations for these songs, because I wasn’t happy with my inability to really capture the magic of the words, and because I think it’s the music that is most powerful in these songs. There are, of course, other songs that have helped push away the loneliness, even when loneliness wasn’t even mentioned in the titles:
Shleimim/Complete is performed by Idan Rafael Haviv (written by Avi Ohayon, Akiva Turgeman, and Matan Dror) and is a gentle love song about the kind of love that grows with every year together. https://youtu.be/kRy0xSsly_o?si=DKlSPPCyykkSRcdU
Am Echad/One nation is written by Eli Keshet, Ben Tzur, and Omri Sasson and performed by a bunch of different Israeli musicians, and it’s a call for national unity in response to the current war, but also manages to capture the sweetness of coming together, even in hard times. https://youtu.be/u7CeOuIrxBM?si=8dtFFim9SZTnF9Bk
Im Hayah Lanu Zman/If we had time, performed by Elai Botner and Noam Kleinstein and written by Elai Botner and Oren Jacoby is a re-recording of a song from a movie I never saw, about a different war, but Noam Kleinstein’s voice, even if I never understood the words, cracks me open every time I hear this song. https://youtu.be/mwPAlYxqLqE?si=uXKDfSQDW7xHKIXD
As usual, I’ve been reading and listening to lots of voices about the war, and I found two people who were especially helpful in explaining the difference between the media coverage of the war in Israel and internationally:
It still feels pretty lonely to be Jewish right now, but all of these resources have helped in different ways, and writing the blog and hearing from my readers and fellow bloggers, helps immensely. I don’t need everyone to see things the same way I do, but I do need to feel like I’m part of the picture, part of the community of voices that are hearing and being heard.
Thank you for helping me feel less alone.
If you haven’t had a chance yet, please check out my Young Adult novel, Yeshiva Girl, on Amazon. And if you feel called to write a review of the book, on Amazon, or anywhere else, I’d be honored.
Yeshiva Girl is about a Jewish teenager on Long Island, named Isabel, though her father calls her Jezebel. Her father has been accused of inappropriate sexual behavior with one of his students, which he denies, but Izzy implicitly believes it’s true. As a result of his problems, her father sends her to a co-ed Orthodox yeshiva for tenth grade, out of the blue, and Izzy and her mother can’t figure out how to prevent it. At Yeshiva, though, Izzy finds that religious people are much more complicated than she had expected. Some, like her father, may use religion as a place to hide, but others search for and find comfort, and community, and even enlightenment. The question is, what will Izzy find?
I’ve been obsessively listening to Israeli music for a few years now, but the obsession went into overdrive after October 7th, when I needed to feel a connection to Israel that wasn’t all about the news. And as the months have passed, Israeli musicians have been creating more and more music, and finding new meaning in songs that came out before October 7th, as performers have crisscrossed their small country singing at soldiers’ last minute weddings, at hospital bedsides, for evacuees from the south and the north of Israel, and really for whoever has needed comfort. David Broza and Hanan Ben Ari and Shiri Maimon and Ishai Ribo and Sarit Hadad and Omer Adam and Keren Peles and Benaia Barabi and so many others have been singing at small parties and huge vigils and everything in between with a generosity and humility that’s hard to imagine in American superstars. It’s as if the whole music industry in Israel has mobilized to try to help people put their feeling into words, and to fight off the isolation of grief.
I wish the outside world could hear what I’m hearing, but because most of the songs are in Hebrew, they just don’t reach across the divide. And, despite listening to all of this music out of a desire to connect, I’ve actually felt even more isolated, because so few people around me are listening to the same music. Even at my synagogue, where the situation in Israel is top of mind, there are very few people who understand enough Hebrew to listen to this music and enjoy it. So, a few weeks ago, I started trying to translate some of the songs into English, in the hopes that I could close some of that divide.
My goal was to try to make the music accessible to people who don’t know Hebrew and for me to understand the songs better myself. I’m certainly not the first person to feel called to do this; there are multiple sites online where amateur translators can upload their translations of songs from other languages (my favorite is lyricstranslate.com).
Some Israeli pop songs have been professionally translated: there’s a popular video on YouTube of Tamir Greenberg on Kochav HaBah singing an English version of Hanan Ben Ari’s Shvurei Lev/The Broken Hearted. And there’s a lovely half English/half Hebrew version of an Ishai Ribo song (with the Solomon Brothers) that manages to capture something of the original magic.
But more often than not, the English translations are awkward. The problem is that Hebrew has so many internal rhymes and rhythms, and English is so chaotic and free form that you can’t make the songs sound alike. So, when I approached my own translations I didn’t even bother trying to rhyme, and focused instead on capturing the rhythm and the emotion of the original Hebrew, to the best of my ability.
The first song I chose is called Zeh Beseder/It’s Okay and it was a collaboration between an Israeli singer named Benaia Barabi and survivors of the Nova Music festival. It’s written in simple Hebrew, so I didn’t have to spend too much time on Google Translate, and it’s all about survivor’s guilt and needing to heal at your own pace, so it felt pretty universal.
Zeh Beseder/It’s Okay – Written and performed by: Benaia Barabi, et al.
(My Translation)
It’s okay that we’re not okay now
It’s okay to sing when it hurts
It’s okay to cry every morning
And even then to choose to rise
It’s okay to not feel normal
It’s okay not to say a word
It’s okay to dance ‘til morning
In a darkness full of hope
It’s easier to hide my face
To keep the pain in for a thousand years
The voices that keep screaming in my head
To pray for those small moments
When life is normal and we start to change
Only for my broken heart, I’ve tried to keep the faith
I want most of all to be together
To never have to be alone
To choose to sing at the top of my voice
And to reach out for your hand
We want most of all to live without fear
It’s okay to laugh just like that
Most of all I want to hug you close
Is it okay for me to love?
Most of all I want to hug you close
It’s okay for me to love
It’s okay to put on make-up and dress well
It’s okay to start to lose direction
Life keeps moving forward
So who am I not to go along?
It’s okay not to find the answer
It’s okay to need to pray for faith
It’s okay to ask a thousand questions
Of whether to be or not to be
It’s easier to hide my face
To keep the pain in for a thousand years
The voices that keep screaming in my head
I want most of all to be together
To never have to be alone
To choose to sing at the top of my voice
And to reach out for your hand
We want most of all to live without fear
It’s okay to laugh just like that
Most of all I want to hug you close
Is it okay for me to love?
The second song I chose is called Habayta, which literally means, “Towards Home,” about wanting the hostages to come home. The performance of the song, by Raviv Kaner, captures everything, even if you don’t understand any of the words, honestly. And if it were a song in English, about Americans being held hostage, it would probably be on American radio 24/7.
HaBayta/Return Them Home – Written by: Raviv Kaner and Elnatan Shalom
(My translation)
My father’s up, he’s already awake
My mother’s here, her pain just never ends
Mom and Dad go back to sleep again
Maybe it’s Shabbat and not Sunday
Surrounded by the noise and the chaos
There’s nothing left, there’s no point
Return him home to me right this moment
There’s nothing left, there’s no point
Return her home to me right this moment
Return them home
It’s dark now, turn off all the lights
Maybe for a day or two, at least
Because between despair and hope, I dream
When it’s over, I will breathe again
Surrounded by the noise and chaos
There’s nothing left, there’s no point
Return him home to me right this moment
There’s nothing left, there’s no point
Return her home to me right this moment
Return them home
There’s nothing left, there’s no point
Return them home to me right this moment
There’s nothing left, there’s no point
Return them home to me right this moment
Return them home
Maybe, in the end, I’m just doing these translations as a way to spend more time with music I love, but it would be really nice to share it with other people.
Let me know what you think.
Bonus: Two versions of a Jewish prayer (that didn’t need translation) that has become popular for months now, because it asks for the release of captives:
If you haven’t had a chance yet, please check out my Young Adult novel, Yeshiva Girl, on Amazon. And if you feel called to write a review of the book, on Amazon, or anywhere else, I’d be honored.
Yeshiva Girl is about a Jewish teenager on Long Island, named Isabel, though her father calls her Jezebel. Her father has been accused of inappropriate sexual behavior with one of his students, which he denies, but Izzy implicitly believes it’s true. As a result of his problems, her father sends her to a co-ed Orthodox yeshiva for tenth grade, out of the blue, and Izzy and her mother can’t figure out how to prevent it. At Yeshiva, though, Izzy finds that religious people are much more complicated than she had expected. Some, like her father, may use religion as a place to hide, but others search for and find comfort, and community, and even enlightenment. The question is, what will Izzy find?
On October 7th, 2023, when I started to see media reports of the Hamas attack on southern Israel, I was at a loss – I had no frame of reference for what I was seeing. I knew this was something different from previous terrorist attacks or rocket strikes, but I didn’t know what to compare it to. Early on, I heard some people reference the surprise of the Yom Kippur War, because the fiftieth anniversary of that war had just passed, but those comparisons faded quickly. Then there were the voices calling October 7th Israel’s version of September 11th, but 9/11 didn’t involve hand to hand combat, or rape, or children, and, fundamentally, the world wasn’t as horrified by October 7th as they were by 9/11. And then people said, over and over again, that this was the worst loss of Jewish life in a single day since the Holocaust, as a way to capture the overwhelming shock and grief of the attack; but comparing October 7th to the prolonged and systematic killing of six million Jews (and many millions of others), over the course of years, and across many borders, just didn’t seem helpful to me, and didn’t offer me any idea for how to cope with the horror, or how to respond to it.
And then the word pogrom started to be used, but it didn’t resonate for me at first, either. The word pogrom came originally from Russian, meaning “to destroy, to wreak havoc, to demolish violently,” but historically it has referred to acts of anti-Jewish violence perpetrated by civilians and supported by the military, in Eastern Europe, between about 1880 and 1920. And, at least in my mind, a pogrom was supposed to be about the dangers of being a minority in a world where the majority hates you. Except, for a lot of Jewish people, and not just Israelis, this did feel like a pogrom, and I wanted to understand why.
The thing is, while Jews are the clear majority population in Israel, they are surrounded by an Arab world that is majority Muslim, and the Palestinian cause has often been supported financially, politically and militarily by the surrounding Muslim countries, so the question of who is in the minority and who is in the majority depends on how closely you focus in or how widely you zoom out.
Some Jewish media outlets mentioned the 1903 Kishinev pogrom in particular, early on in the coverage of October 7th, so I decided to do more research to see if I could understand the comparisons.
The Kishinev pogrom took place on April 19-21, 1903, Easter day, in Kishinev, then the capital of Bessarabia in the Russian Empire (now Moldova). The attacks began after church services on Easter Day, which was also, maybe more significantly, the last day of the Jewish holiday of Passover. During the pogrom, 47 to 49 Jews were killed, 92 were severely injured, 700 houses were damaged, hundreds of stores were pillaged, and 600 women were raped; while the police and army did nothing.
Leading up to the attacks, the most popular Russian language newspaper in Kishinev was regularly publishing headlines like: “Death to the Jews!” and “Crusade against the hated race!” So that when a boy was found murdered in a town twenty-five miles away, and a girl committed suicide by poison and was declared dead at a Jewish hospital, the newspaper had a ready audience for its insinuations that both children had been murdered by the Jews so that their blood could be used to make matzo for the coming Jewish holiday of Passover (a bizarre blood libel that keeps coming up throughout history to incite violence against Jews, despite the fact that matzo is made of only water and flour, and blood is strictly forbidden in Jewish dietary laws).
On April 28th, the New York Times reprinted a Yiddish Daily News report smuggled out of Russia that described the pogrom:
“The mob was led by priests, and the general cry, ‘kill the Jews’ was taken up all over the city. The Jews were taken wholly unaware and were slaughtered like sheep…babes were literally torn to pieces by the frenzied bloodthirsty mob. The local police made no attempt to check the reign of terror. At sunset the streets were piled with corpses and wounded.”
Many pogroms had taken place before this one, but the graphic descriptions, and especially the photographs, of the Kishinev pogrom were sent around the world and made a deep impression, especially on American Jews who began organizing financial help for the Jews of Kishinev to emigrate to America and Palestine. The danger to the Jewish population of Europe was convincing to most people, though the Russian ambassador to the United States at the time tried to deny that the attacks had anything to do with anti-Semitism, blaming it on Jewish moneylenders upsetting the local peasants with their corrupt business practices.
But even more than the news reports and the photographs, the biggest impact the Kishinev pogrom would have on Jewish history came in the form of a poem.
Chaim Nachman Bialik, a journalist, poet, and publisher, was commissioned by the Odessa Jewish Historical Commission to travel to Kishinev and collect testimonies from the survivors of the pogrom. Bialik, who later came to be seen as Israel’s national poet, with his poems taught across the Israeli school system, was an early advocate for Zionism and the need for a new kind of Jew, a stronger, bolder Jew who wouldn’t be so vulnerable to antisemitism.
As he walked through Kishinev and listened to the survivors of the pogrom he began to form an idea for a long poem in Hebrew that would be published in 1904, meant to wake Jews up to the impossibility of life in the diaspora, called “In the City of Slaughter.”
“Do not fail to note, (he wrote)
In that dark corner and behind that cask,
Crouching husbands, bridegrooms, brothers peering through the cracks,
Watching their wives, sisters, daughters struggling beneath their bestial defilers,
Suffocating in their own blood,
Their flesh portioned out as booty.”
Bialik’s vision of the diaspora Jew’s weakness, and his willingness to blame the Jewish men for the rapes of their wives and daughters, became a rallying cry to find a place where Jews could be in the majority and therefore able to defend themselves. He, significantly, left out any references in the poem to the fact that local Jews had tried to defend themselves, but had failed because police dispersed those Jews attempting to defend Jewish homes and businesses, while allowing the rioters to go unchecked (Russian courts later used those attempts at self-defense to suggest that it was actually the Jews who struck first, and were therefore responsible for the riots that killed them).
But even if Bialik had acknowledged those attempts at self-defense, the lesson would still have been the same: life in the diaspora, in the minority, isn’t safe.
“Of murdered men who from the beams were hung,
And of a babe beside its mother flung,
Its mother speared, the poor chick finding rest
Upon its mother’s cold and milkless breast;
Of how a dagger halved an infant’s word,
Its ma was heard, its mama never heard.”
As a modern day Jew living in America, when I read this poem I got really angry, at Bialik, for the way he blamed the victims of the atrocity. It felt like identification with the abuser, in today’s therapy speak, but at the time it was galvanizing and convinced a lot of people that Zionism was the only answer for Jewish survival.
The word diaspora is often used as a stand-in for the Hebrew word Galut, which means “exile.” The idea is that after the destruction of the second temple in Jerusalem, in 70 CE, God exiled the Jews from the land of our ancestors, for our sins. This is how we are supposed to see our lives in the diaspora, as outside of God’s favor. But we don’t, or, I don’t. (This belief that we are in exile because that’s how God wants it, is why certain Chasidic groups are anti-Zionist. They believe we have no right to return to Israel until God brings us back there, in the time of the messiah). The Zionist cry was, let’s not wait for God’s permission to go home anymore, let’s not wait for the messiah, because if we wait too long we will be annihilated.
There was actually a second pogrom in Kishinev two years later, killing nineteen Jews, as part of a huge wave of pogroms across the Russian Empire during which 200,000 Jews were murdered in an estimated 600 different attacks on Jewish communities. But it was the first Kishinev pogrom that was remembered, and Bialik’s interpretation that lingered.
Interestingly, at the same time that Bialik was teaching the Jews about the power of a poem to inspire action, Pavel Krushevan, the publisher of that Russian newspaper in Kishinev that had incited the pogrom in the first place, had also learned an important lesson: incitement works. Within months he had published The Protocols of the Elders of Zion, a fictional account of Jewish leaders plotting to control the world, presented as if it were true. This book later spread around the world, teaching anti-Semitism to an ever wider audience. Hamas even refers to elements of the Protocols of the Elders of Zion in their charter.
As I continued to read Bialik’s poem, and the details of the Kishinev pogrom itself, it became clear that even though some of the circumstances of a pogrom didn’t fit what happened on October 7th, many of the victims of October 7thfelt the same powerlessness of the Jews in Kishinev, in large part because of the failure of the Israeli government to prevent the attacks, or to intervene to protect them in time, and, all over again, the lessons of Kishinev, especially the need for muscular self-defense, were back in the forefront of people’s minds.
The most penetrating message of the poem, for me, is Bialik’s anger at the Jews of Kishinev for not being angry enough.
“Turn, then, thy gaze from the dead, and I will lead Thee from the graveyard to thy living brothers, And thou wilt come, with those of thine own breed, Into the synagogue, and on a day of fasting, To hear the cry of their agony, Their weeping everlasting. Thy skin will grow cold, the hair on thy skin stand up, And thou wilt be by fear and trembling tossed; Thus groans a people which is lost. Look in their hearts, behold a dreary waste, Where even vengeance can revive no growth, And yet upon their lips no mighty malediction Rises, no blasphemous oath.”
The story of Kishinev, and the shame of it, had largely faded from the minds of American Jews by October 7th 2023, to the point that I don’t think it was even mentioned at my orthodox Jewish high school, where we studied Jewish history as part of our daily coursework, because it didn’t resonate for us, here, where, even now, despite growing antisemitism, and incidents of horrific violence, we feel at home in the diaspora. We feel safe. But in Israel, where the philosophies of Bialik and the other early Zionists are well-known, and where the population is largely the descendants of refugees from the diaspora, or the relatives of those who did not survive, feeling safe is more elusive.
To many, and maybe most, Israelis, the horror of October 7th was that even the new, strong, brave, well-armed Jew couldn’t prevent a Kishinev. And if the New Jew wasn’t enough, what would be?
Interestingly, while many Jews continue to see Israel through the lens of the Holocaust, and the pogroms of Eastern Europe, the Arab world has been taught to believe that these things never actually happened. Mahmoud Abbas, the “moderate” President of the Palestinian Authority in the West Bank, has consistently misrepresented, minimized and even denied the Holocaust. He has said that Hitler killed European Jews not because of anti-Semitism but because of the Jews’ “social functions” in society, such as money lending (just as the Russian Ambassador to the United States had said about the Jewish victims in Kishinev). In his doctoral thesis, written at a Russian University, Abbas argued that the Zionists had even colluded with the Nazis, agreeing to the extermination of the Jews of Europe in order to convince the world of the necessity for a Jewish state in the land of Israel. He has said that it’s possible that 6 million Jews were killed, but it’s also possible that it was less than a million. And, while he’s denying and minimizing the Holocaust on one hand, he’s also accusing Israel of committing “fifty holocausts” against the Palestinians on the other hand. And he’s not alone. Holocaust denial is rampant and normalized in the Arab world, where Mein Kempf and Protocols of the Elders of Zion have been widely published, and using the language of the Holocaust against Israel (calling them Nazis, accusing them of genocide, etc.) continues to be a common rhetorical tool.
And the thing is, if you’ve been raised to believe that the Holocaust was at the very least exaggerated, if not created from whole cloth, for the sole purpose of stealing Palestinian land in 1948, no wonder you would hate the Jews and think Israel has no right to exist. The fact that these ideas are so easily disproven is maddening. The Holocaust was minutely catalogued by the Germans themselves, similar to how Hamas documented the October 7th massacre with their Go-pros, and yet many Palestinians, and some of their supporters in the Arab world and in Europe and America, have even said they believe that October 7th was not only not as bad as it has been portrayed, but that it was perpetrated by the Israeli army itself.
The Kishinev comparison has been helpful for me in a lot of ways, especially in understanding the Israeli certainty that the right response to the attacks was overwhelming force, but there’s one overriding reason why the analogy doesn’t fit: the hostages. When Hamas militants and their civilian supporters took hostages back to Gaza with them, specifically to instigate a bloody ground war with Israel in order to turn world opinion against the Jews, they also, intentionally or not, created a double bind for Israelis that would create a whole new kind of horror; the choice between saving the hostages, by ending the war now and releasing all terror suspects along with all of the other Palestinian prisoners from Israeli jails, versus continuing the war so as to prevent future attacks and to prevent future hostages from being taken, is an impossible one.
The horror of knowing that so many hostages are still being kept in the tunnels of Gaza, and that the world stopped thinking about them a long time ago, is unbearable. It can’t be understood by a comparison to any other event; it refuses to be categorized or contained or ignored.
So here we stand, with the Palestinians in a constant state of Nakba, or catastrophe, ever since the creation of the state of Israel in 1948, believing that their land was stolen by vicious invaders who constantly lie about their origins and intentions, and Israelis constantly afraid of another Kishinev and, inevitably, another Holocaust.
I don’t know how we move past these narratives to help us see a new way forward, but maybe a new poem could be written, one that addresses the narratives of both peoples, or rather of the many different people within the larger mosaic of the Israeli-Palestinian conflict, and maybe that new poem could imagine a future where something other than violence prevails. I wouldn’t know how to write that poem, or who might have the skill and perspective and confidence to try, but I’d like to believe it will be possible. One day.
If you haven’t had a chance yet, please check out my Young Adult novel, Yeshiva Girl, on Amazon. And if you feel called to write a review of the book, on Amazon, or anywhere else, I’d be honored.
Yeshiva Girl is about a Jewish teenager on Long Island, named Isabel, though her father calls her Jezebel. Her father has been accused of inappropriate sexual behavior with one of his students, which he denies, but Izzy implicitly believes it’s true. As a result of his problems, her father sends her to a co-ed Orthodox yeshiva for tenth grade, out of the blue, and Izzy and her mother can’t figure out how to prevent it. At Yeshiva, though, Izzy finds that religious people are much more complicated than she had expected. Some, like her father, may use religion as a place to hide, but others search for and find comfort, and community, and even enlightenment. The question is, what will Izzy find?
Tu Bishvat is a Jewish holiday marking the New Year of the Trees, and this year it took place from sundown Wednesday January 24th to sundown Thursday January 25th. In ancient times, Tu Bishvat, or the fifteenth day of the Hebrew month of Shvat, was simply the day set aside as the birthday of all trees born in that year. This was important information to have, because it was forbidden to eat from a fruit tree in the first three years of its life, and in the fourth year you had to bring the fruit of the tree the Temple in Jerusalem. Only in year five did the fruit belong to the farmer.
Trees have always been important in Judaism: like the tree of Knowledge of Good and Evil in the story of the Garden of Eden, or the Torah itself (the Hebrew Bible) being referred to as a tree of life. I read recently (on Ritualwell) that in ancient Israel a tree was planted when a child was born, and as the child grew he or she would care for their tree and then eventually use its branches for their wedding canopy. Even the Rabbis were tree-centric, with a quote from Rabbi Eliezer saying, “When a tree is wantonly cut down, its voice rings from one end of the earth to another,” which makes me think of my Pawpaw tree, which really did seem to set off communal keening among all of the trees in our backyard when it was cut down, and then sent out saplings to take its place.
Poor Pawpaw
Pawpaw saplings
But it wasn’t until the 16th century that Isaac Luria (a Kabbalist, or Jewish mystic) and his followers in Safed transformed Tu Bishvat from a date on the calendar into a festival celebrating the fruits of Israel. They believed that the spark of the divine was as present in trees as it was in people, and they believed that eating the fruits of those trees would release the divine sparks into the world (I’m pretty sure they did not use the same technique for releasing the divine sparks from people. We have our demons and dybbuks and Golems, but as far as I know cannibalism has never taken off in the Jewish tradition).
The Kabbalists, being good obsessive compulsive Jews, decided to create a Tu Bishvat Seder, modeled on the Passover Seder, to celebrate four types of fruits (and four glasses of wine to go with them). There are many different versions of the Tu Bishvat Seder, but this is one of them: The first fruit is one that is hard on the outside and soft on the inside (like almonds, walnuts or coconuts), and they can remind us of the protection the earth gives us, or the ways we keep ourselves separate and protected from one another, hiding the divine spark within; the second fruit is soft, with a pit in the center (like olives, dates, peaches or cherries) and they can symbolize the spiritual strength within each of us, or the potential inside of us that has not yet been tapped; fruit number three is soft throughout and completely edible (like figs, grapes, blueberries and raspberries) and I’m not sure what mystical significance they have, but they are certainly yummy; the fourth fruit has a tough skin on the outside and sweet fruit within (like mangos, bananas, avocados and pawpaws) and they are all about the mysteries of our world and our hunger to uncover the juicy secrets.
The four cups of wine for the Tu Bishvat Seder are drunk in a specific order and in varying shades of red, pink, and white, to represent the cycle of life and the four seasons, but just like on Passover, you can get away with varying shades of grape juice, in case you need to drive home afterwards.
When I was in elementary school they never mentioned a Tu Bishvat Seder to us, but each class got a tray of fruits and nuts common in Israel, especially carob, which was almost impossible to eat but traditional, because it was one of the few fruits from Israel that could make the long trip to the European shtetls of my Ashkenazi ancestors without spoiling. Oranges and pomegranates were much harder to get.
A Tu Bishvat spread (not my picture)
Carob (not my picture)
Tu Bishvat changed again in the late 19th century, when Jews were able to buy land in Palestine (because the Ottoman Empire ended its ban on selling land to Jews), and European Jews established agricultural settlements and planted trees to re-green the land and plant deep symbolic roots. The Jewish National Fund was established in 1901 to buy property in Palestine, and Tu Bishvat tree planting ceremonies became an annual event.
Today, Tu Bishvat is celebrated in all of those ways, but also as a Jewish Earth day: a chance to celebrate nature and learn how to take care of the earth. It’s celebrated in Israel as a full holiday, with tree planting ceremonies and special ecological awareness programs and, of course, lots of food.
Recently, some of the families whose loved ones were killed by Hamas at the music festival in southern Israel on October 7th joined with the Jewish National Fund to plant trees on the concert site. Around a thousand people came together to plant 200 seedlings, both to celebrate Tu Bishvat, but more importantly to try to bring new life, and hope, to land suffused with death. And so the meaning of the holiday continues to grow and change, as we change.
When I asked my synagogue school students why we would have a special holiday to celebrate the birthday of the trees, they said that it would be very difficult to keep track of the birthday of each individual tree, remembering to send a card or bake a cake, so having one day to celebrate all of the trees is much easier. They took for granted that, of course, you should celebrate trees; that wasn’t even a question.
We also talked about why now? Why celebrate trees in the middle of winter? I told them that the date had been chosen because it was the end of the rainy season in ancient Israel, a propitious time to plant a tree in rich soil, but, really, maybe celebrating trees in winter, when they are at their most naked and vulnerable, and least beautiful, is the perfect time to throw them a party; just like we celebrate light in December when the days are at their shortest and the dark of night feels endless.
And maybe we can learn from this idea of celebrating trees when they are at their most fragile, or light when it is most rare; maybe that’s why we should keep praying for peace even when it seems most impossible. We need to believe that spring and light and peace can return in order for our faith to sustain us through the hard times, and through the hard work that needs to be done to reach peace.
My students have decided that Tu Bishvat should be celebrated by hugging a tree, or singing it a song, or knitting it a sweater to survive the coldest days, though I’m still a fan of eating as celebration myself. Let’s hope the trees feel all of our love this week, and that God hears our prayers, and that we all hear each other and our hopes for a peaceful future.
Pawpaw tree in summer
If you haven’t had a chance yet, please check out my Young Adult novel, Yeshiva Girl, on Amazon. And if you feel called to write a review of the book, on Amazon, or anywhere else, I’d be honored.
Yeshiva Girl is about a Jewish teenager on Long Island, named Isabel, though her father calls her Jezebel. Her father has been accused of inappropriate sexual behavior with one of his students, which he denies, but Izzy implicitly believes it’s true. As a result of his problems, her father sends her to a co-ed Orthodox yeshiva for tenth grade, out of the blue, and Izzy and her mother can’t figure out how to prevent it. At Yeshiva, though, Izzy finds that religious people are much more complicated than she had expected. Some, like her father, may use religion as a place to hide, but others search for and find comfort, and community, and even enlightenment. The question is, what will Izzy find?
(A Note: A wild bird – a Junco – visited for a few very cold days recently and read the hard copy of my essay before publication, leaving a few responses)
“I have a few notes.”
As the nature of Israel’s war against Hamas changes, becoming more targeted and with fewer soldiers on the ground in Gaza, the conversation in Israel has been moving to the question of what happens the day after the war ends. (Of course there are a hundred other conversations going on at the same time, but my brain can’t process all of it. I can’t make sense of a genocide charge at The Hague, or continued terrorist attacks in Israel, or ongoing calls for Israel to stop fighting even as rockets are being fired at the north and south of Israel and the Houthis are firing on ships in the Red Sea. So, for now, I’m trying to focus on something hopeful.) Recently, I was able to watch a zoom call from the Reconstructionist Rabbinical Association called Holding on to Hope, which hosted leaders from three different Israeli organizations who have been working towards peace and coexistence between Israelis and Palestinians.
One message that came through consistently from these leaders is that the efforts that are most successful are the ones that address self-interest, rather than arguing for peace from a selfless altruism. Another theme was that what happens in Gaza impacts Tel Aviv, in terms of health, and air and water quality, as well as violence, and there are no walls high enough to change that.
“Walls? Pfft.”
One of the organizations on the zoom was a joint Jewish and Arab school in Israel called Hand in Hand. The public school system in Israel separates out Arabs and Jews into separate schools, in large part as a gesture to allow Arabs to maintain their own culture and language and not have to study Jewish subjects, but over time this separation has widened the divide between Jews and Muslims and Christians in Israel. The Hand in Hand schools bring these children together to help them learn to understand each other’s narratives and grapple with how to move society towards coexistence. There are six Hand in Hand schools in mixed Arab and Jewish towns so far: in Jerusalem, Haifa, Jaffa, Kfar Saba, Wadi Ara, and Galilee. And the schools also work at building connections among the adults in the surrounding community.
The representative of the Hand in Hand schools on this zoom was a Palestinian citizen of Israel, with a background in film in particular and the arts in general. His sense of hope for the future came from his belief that education is what will create the next generation of leaders, able to speak each other’s languages and understand each other’s cultures and see each other as companions on the same journey.
“A feather in feather school would be nice.”
Coincidentally, I recently read about a new Israeli TV show (not yet available here) set in a Hand in Hand school (or something like it) in Jerusalem. The review I read in Kveller suggested that, because it’s a comedy, it often wraps up complex issues a little too quickly, but the fact that it can represent those complex issues in an entertaining way could make a big difference in what people begin to see as possible in the future.
The second organization represented on the zoom was Standing Together, a political action organization that brings together Jewish and Palestinian citizens of Israel, and secular and orthodox Jewish Israelis, to work on issues on which they have common cause, as a way to build consensus and community so that over time they can begin to work together on the bigger battles yet to come.
I’d seen a previous zoom, earlier in the Fall, that focused entirely on the Standing Together group, but I found it alienating, maybe because it was so soon after October 7th and everyone’s emotions were still so raw. This time around I heard a lot more acknowledgment of the pain and fear of both Jewish and Palestinian citizens of Israel, and ideas for how to bring both peoples to the table in order to create a sustainable peace.
The third organization represented on the zoom was completely new to me, called A Land for All (previously called Two States, One Homeland). It’s a think tank made up of Jewish and Palestinian citizens of Israel, and Palestinians from outside of Israel, to problem solve the nitty gritty policy issues necessary for peace. The basic idea that they’ve come up with is a two state confederation, where a Jewish State and a Palestinian State live side by side, with open borders and some joint institutions. The specifics of the proposal weren’t discussed in this zoom, but the idea that some people are ready to sit together and seek workable plans for a peaceful future is encouraging.
Except, with Israel being accused of genocide at the International Court for Justice, and Hezbollah and the Houthi rebels attacking from the north and from the sea, and hostages still being held in Gaza, I don’t know how many people within Israel are up to hearing any of this right now, which is probably why this was a zoom for American Jews.
A final peace deal between Israel and a Palestinian state has been so elusive, in part, because the two sides can’t even agree on the preconditions for sitting down to talk. Palestinian leadership wants all new Jewish settlements in the West Bank stopped, and preferably for all of the existing ones to be removed as well, as a precondition for discussing peace with Israel. And Israelis have wanted reliable promises that the terrorism will stop before they discuss the settlements, let alone final agreements on where the borders of a future Palestinian state should be. Many Palestinians and their supporters seem to believe that terrorism is the only way their voices will be heard, by Israel and by the world at large, but every terrorist attack has pushed the Israeli public further away from any belief that peace is possible, and therefore from any willingness to make difficult compromises for that unreachable peace.
When I discussed the concept of peace recently with my synagogue school students, they weren’t thinking about Israel or even peace between countries, instead they looked at peace through the lens of family life, saying that there has to be a lot of room within peace and coexistence for disagreement, and even some bloodshed (their point of reference was fights with their siblings, so, hopefully not too much blood). They spend a lot of their time working towards peace in their daily lives, managing disputes with their friends and family, dealing with hurt feelings, and learning how to compromise, but all of that feels possible for them because they know they are safe in their homes and that people care about them and are listening to them.
In all of the coverage on the news, and in all of the opinion articles that I’ve read and international voices I’ve heard, no one has offered a workable plan for peace that addresses what is actually happening right now. No one has come up with a way to disempower Hamas and destroy the tunnels without causing unacceptable damage to the structures and the people above ground in Gaza. In fact, the UN refuses to call Hamas a terrorist organization, and since Gaza is not considered a state and has not signed agreements to follow international law, they can’t be held officially responsible for their actions, but Israel, which is an acknowledged state and has signed these agreements, is being brought to The Hague for fighting back against Hamas. The international community has not addressed this invisibility of organizations like Hamas, Hezbollah, or the Houthi rebels, who are acting as proxies for Iran’s interests in the Middle East, and Hamas has taken full advantage of its political invisibility to press its war against Israel, which certainly didn’t start on October 7th.
The fact that Israel is under attack from, basically, all sides, has not changed the rhetoric around the world that has portrayed Israel as a lone menace in the Middle East, causing all of the trouble.
All three of these Israeli organizations are working towards long term goals that will require consistent commitment and ongoing efforts and will not be put in place within the next few months, but the world, and the combatants on both sides, are too impatient for that slow growing peace process, and the extremists on both sides keep taking advantage of that impatience and offering apocalyptic solutions that will only work for one side or the other. Every time I watch the news I hear this ticking clock, and the absence of hope, but I know there are people out there who are thinking and breathing and working for peace, and that’s what I want to hear more about, because that’s where a livable future will come from.
If you haven’t had a chance yet, please check out my Young Adult novel, Yeshiva Girl, on Amazon. And if you feel called to write a review of the book, on Amazon, or anywhere else, I’d be honored.
Yeshiva Girl is about a Jewish teenager on Long Island, named Isabel, though her father calls her Jezebel. Her father has been accused of inappropriate sexual behavior with one of his students, which he denies, but Izzy implicitly believes it’s true. As a result of his problems, her father sends her to a co-ed Orthodox yeshiva for tenth grade, out of the blue, and Izzy and her mother can’t figure out how to prevent it. At Yeshiva, though, Izzy finds that religious people are much more complicated than she had expected. Some, like her father, may use religion as a place to hide, but others search for and find comfort, and community, and even enlightenment. The question is, what will Izzy find?
I decided to rewatch When Heroes Fly, a fantastic one season Israeli drama (with English subtitles), because I found out that it was about to leave Netflix in January. The first time I’d watched the show was for my online Hebrew class, almost two years ago, with Hebrew subtitles, but it was so vivid and powerful that I understood most of what was going on, despite missing a few words here and there (and everywhere).
When Heroes Fly follows four guys in a reserves unit who lose their leader in war. Each one deals with the loss, and the trauma of war, in a different way, but the main character, Aviv, truly falls apart. He’s away getting help when his ex-girlfriend, Yaeli, goes on a trip to South America that he was supposed to go on with here, and, it seems, dies in a car accident.
The mystery that has to be solved, years later, is whether Yaeli actually survived the accident after all, and if so, where is she, and does she want to be found? That’s the frame of the show, but the real drama is in how each of these four men work through their past mistakes and confront themselves and each other.
What got to me the first time I watched this show was how completely Aviv’s character resonated for me – his inability to heal, despite so much effort and time, and his self-loathing, and how others judged him for being such a mess. His physical expressions of depression and self-loathing, and that sense of truly falling apart – that was me. Even two years ago, after a lifetime of therapy, it all still felt deeply true for me. And yet now, despite grieving both of my dogs, and still having “issues,” and still feeling frightened and incapable at times, I don’t feel that wracking whole body depression anymore. It’s been receding for a long time, but until I watched this show again I didn’t realize how long it’s been since that was my daily, and then weekly, and then monthly experience of life.
Another thing I relate to, deeply, in this show is how much these friends need each other and yet can’t quite connect or hear each other through the fog of their own trauma responses. We want to believe that if we try hard enough and love hard enough we can fix anything, but sometimes our need to help is the problem, stopping us from seeing the real person in front of us who is in so much pain.
A new character is introduced late in the series, an Israeli detective with her own deep trauma who has to find the four men and Yaeli as part of a larger case. But she isn’t cut off from her pain, or completely lost in it, she’s strong and broken at the same time. I want to be this woman, this strong, capable woman who is also deeply attached to herself and to reality. I get the feeling that a lot of people think I already am this women. I’m not, yet, but just seeing her on screen makes it seem more possible.
But the biggest revelation for me in watching this show now is the impact of collective trauma, which goes beyond each individual’s experience of trauma, when they are all experiencing the trauma together. As an American Jew I can try to take an “objective” view on the current war, because my family isn’t running to shelters at any moment as rockets fall, and I’m not grieving a loved one who died in the massacre or was taken hostage, and no one in my family is a soldier in this war, risking their life every day. I am Jewish, but as an American Jew I have the privilege of not feeling the depth of the collective trauma that is tormenting Israelis, and Palestinians, as they try to figure out what happens next.
When I watch the news and do my deep dives into the history to try and understand what I’m seeing, I still find much of it incomprehensible, because I can’t see it through their eyes; I can’t feel it in my body and know the darkness that prevents clear sight on things that, from here, seem obvious. I keep trying to understand anyway, and I try not to judge the decisions and opinions I can’t understand, because I know that people who are not under the influence of trauma think a lot of things should be possible that people within the trauma can’t fathom and can’t choose.
Interestingly, while the English title of this show is When Heroes Fly, which suggests that these four men are clearly heroic, as if they are morally unambiguous and selfless and always know what to do, the title in Hebrew is For Her Heroes Fly, suggesting that heroic behavior has to come from somewhere, from some internal motivation, beyond the theoretical goodness and righteousness we keep expecting from our heroes. These are not men with infinite courage and a willingness to die for a cause; these are men who are willing to fight for the people they love.
People want to believe that Israel only has a right to exist, that Jews only have a right to exist, because we are supposed to be a beacon of light to the nations; and some Jews try very hard to live up to that ideal, but most of us are just people, like everyone else. Requiring Israel to meet standards of behavior that no one else can live up to is unfair and inhumane. No one gets through wars unscathed, and Israel has had to face war after war, and then terrorist act after terrorist act, throughout her short existence. Israeli soldiers, like all soldiers, are capable of mistakes in judgment and tactics and behavior. When three hostages were accidentally killed by the IDF, Israel had to deal with that reality, because Israel itself has inhuman expectations of its soldiers and its military, just like the world at large seems to have. Israel, this tiny country, with soldiers culled from all walks of life, drafted into service as teenagers, is meant to be a perfect military machine, capable of fighting tunnel warfare without making mistakes and hurting non-fighters, even when the Hamas fighters wear civilian clothes and embed in civilian neighborhoods and buildings. The Israeli soldiers who killed those three hostages, and the soldiers who have killed Palestinian civilians when aiming for Hamas, are all going to have to live the rest of their lives with that burden of guilt and failure, not out of choice but out of necessity, because they have to fight for the survival of their tiny country. The trauma that results will last a lifetime, and will alter everything that comes next.
We, on the outside of all of this, can have whatever hopes and dreams and judgements we want, but it is the people on the ground who will have to make it happen, and that means we have to accept who they are and what feels possible to them, as they carry this war, and every previous war, with them into the future.
If you haven’t had a chance yet, please check out my Young Adult novel, Yeshiva Girl, on Amazon. And if you feel called to write a review of the book, on Amazon, or anywhere else, I’d be honored.
Yeshiva Girl is about a Jewish teenager on Long Island, named Isabel, though her father calls her Jezebel. Her father has been accused of inappropriate sexual behavior with one of his students, which he denies, but Izzy implicitly believes it’s true. As a result of his problems, her father sends her to a co-ed Orthodox yeshiva for tenth grade, out of the blue, and Izzy and her mother can’t figure out how to prevent it. At Yeshiva, though, Izzy finds that religious people are much more complicated than she had expected. Some, like her father, may use religion as a place to hide, but others search for and find comfort, and community, and even enlightenment. The question is, what will Izzy find?
rachelmankowitz 