For one, it would be like being a new immigrant all over again and I really don't want to re-live that experience. Once was enough. The slang has moved on, the technologies have moved on, the medical system has evolved, etc. I would have to re-learn all that. Even when I was in the U.S. in October I felt out of my depth at times. For example, putting gas in the car.....do you pump first then pay? Pay first then pump? How do you operate the pump? I never drove in the U.S. I got my license in Israel. So the pumping gas experience was foreign to me.
Secondly, I can't imagine raising my kids anywhere else. I don't want them to be a minority. I don't want them to be self-conscious about the fact that they are Jewish and therefore different from the culture at large around them. I want them to live in a place where their history happened. I want to be able to say to them, "Those are the mountains Lot hid in when Sodom and Gomorrah were destroyed." and "That is the valley where David fought Goliath." It takes the history lesson to a whole new level. I want them to live in a place where they are looked upon as treasures by every other mother and grandmother, not just me. And where every soldier that falls is in a very real sense, a family member.
So back to the question. Why Israel?
I have never come across a better answer to the question than the following article written by Daniel Gordis. (Daniel Gordis (http://www.danielgordis.org/) is from L.A., an American immigrant to Israel and Director of the Jerusalem Fellows Program at the Mandel School in Jerusalem.) I have read it so many times I can't believe my computer hasn't gone "pop!". And no matter how many times I read it, I am always in tears by the end. It could not be put more perfectly. (This essay was written in 2003 following a terrorist attack in Jerusalem.)
A Place Where Life Goes Through You
"Over the past few years, particularly on days like today when life here is anything but idyllic, people have asked us more than once why we stay. It's the kind of question that I'm never entirely certain how to answer.
It's about Zionism, of course, and the belief that the Jews need a place to call our own. And it's because there are specific qualities of our lives and our communities here that we could never duplicate anywhere else. And it's because you don't run and hand them a victory. And it's because there's something indescribable about living in the very place that the texts of your tradition refer to in hundreds of places.
But it's more than that, something far less cerebral, and I've always found it hard to communicate to those who asked why, when you get right down to it, virtually no one that we know (admittedly a narrow slice of Israeli society) is even thinking of leaving. Even today, a day when the sadness and fury in this city are so overbearing that neighbors scarcely look at each other, when kids tiptoe around the house, when everyone walks on eggshells because everyone is about to cry.
I got a letter a few weeks ago from someone I don't really know. She was writing about her own complex feelings about Israel, living here versus not living here and the like, and told me that she'd written to a mother of a child who was killed in the violence of the last few years.
That mother wrote her back, and in reflecting on why she still lives in Israel and has never once thought of leaving, told her that in America, she and her family had had a wonderful life, but had always felt that there, they essentially watched life go by. Here, she wrote, life doesn't go by you -- it goes through you.
That notion that this is a place where life goes through you hit the nail on the head. It captures that "je ne sais quoi" that so many of us feel, that explains our collective love for living in a place that many of the people we know are too frightened to even visit. There's an intensity about life here, tragic at times but compelling at virtually every moment -- that most of us simply couldn't imagine walking away from.
It's no surprise that that intensity is felt at the horrible moments. When five soldiers are killed in one day just hours after the signing of another alleged peace accord, or when a bus blows up (a kind of euphemism, of course, because buses don't just blow up on their own) killing sixteen people on the spot, sending a hundred to the hospital and terrorizing (and infuriating) the rest of the city, you expect that intensity.
Those are the kinds of things that might bring any society together, and do so in Israel with an immediacy and regularity which frankly, most of us would obviously much rather do without. None of that is surprising.
What is noteworthy, though, and what has so many of us so in love with this place, is that that sort of intensity strikes at seemingly the most mundane moments. The American press won't cover the mundane moments.
They're not sufficiently interesting; advertisers won't have it. So we'll make the network evening news today, when Americans can gawk at our burnt-out bus, the line of a dozen body bags neatly laid out on Jaffa Road in the center of the capital.
It will confirm everyone's impression of what life is like here, and it will fortify those alleged supporters of Israel who are secretly thrilled to have confirmation that they're right not to want to come, even for a visit.
But that is not the stuff of which life here is made, and especially on a day like today, it's important to remember that. It's important for us to recall, and for others to begin to understand, that to live here is to live in a place where very little gets taken for granted, where even the simplest things are often seen for the miracles they are.
My parents were recently here for a brief visit. When they arrived, my father told me about their flight over. They were flying El Al, and as the plane began its descent into Tel Aviv, the pilot got on the PA system (that's PA for "Public Announcement," not "Palestinian Authority") and said in English, "Ladies and gentlemen, we will shortly be landing in Tel Aviv. Tomorrow is my 65th birthday, and thus I'll be retiring. This, therefore, is my last flight as an El Al pilot, and I wanted to thank you and wish you the very best."
Then, in Hebrew, almost the same thing: "Ladies and gentlemen, we will shortly be landing in Tel Aviv. Tomorrow is my 65th birthday, and thus I'll be retiring. This, therefore, is my last flight as an El Al pilot, and I wanted to thank you and wish you the very best. I chose to make this announcement in English first, in a departure from general El Al practice, because I wanted my last words as a pilot to be in Hebrew. Shalom u-le-hitra'ot."
My father thought, and I agreed, that there's something extraordinary about a moment like that. This is a country where even the language we speak strikes many of us as a miracle. It's true that popular Jewish education has exaggerated a bit the revolution wrought by Eliezer Ben Yehudah. He didn't quite re-invent Hebrew, as Jews had written in mellifluous Hebrew constantly throughout history, through the middle ages and early modernity, long before he did his work. But he did restore Hebrew to the status of a spoken language after it seemed that Hebrew's days as a lingua franca were long gone.
True, this is now a country where English is ubiquitous, where "le-farmet" means "to format" and where "diskim" is the plural for "disk." It's a country in which foreign phrases from English and Arabic now pepper everyone's discourse and where so many millions of Israeli children speak Hebrew so naturally that there doesn't seem to be anything so extraordinary about our hearing Hebrew all day long.
But it's still a country where lots of us believe that even our language is a miracle. To many of us, waking up in the morning to a radio broadcast that tells you the news and the weather in a language that not too many decades ago, virtually no one in the world spoke, is miraculous. Sure, it would be nice if the news were different, and tomorrow's news will be brutal, because most of us will have dreamt of other things, and will awaken to a voice dragging us back into reality, citing the latest body count, the listing of times and places of funerals and analysis of all the diplomatic fallout.
But after that rude awakening, some of us will still be in awe. Really. For what makes it possible to get through the news and all that it implies is the simple realization that a Hebrew news broadcast is an extraordinary accomplishment. That, actually, is an advantage that we immigrants have over native Israelis. We're still struck by that stuff. We don't take it for granted. And that's why, even as lots of them stream out to greener and more peaceful pastures, we just watch and can't help but feel that they have no sense of the profundity of what they're giving up.
A couple of days after my parents arrived, I thought it would be fun to take them to an outdoor Yom Yerushalayim (Jerusalem Reunification Day) concert that was being held in memory of two American students who were murdered last year in the bombing of the cafeteria on the Mount Scopus campus of the Hebrew University.
A couple of good bands were scheduled to perform, and it sounded like a nice way to both honor their memories and to celebrate Yom Yerushalayim without getting caught up in the annual debate over whether it's good to celebrate the "conquest" or the "liberation" or the "unification," all words that have so many overtones in Israeli life that I just usually sit the day out and avoid the stress. But this seemed important, and potentially fun, so off we went to the Sherover Promenade where the concert was being held. If nothing else, I figured, we'd get a great view of the city -- from West Jerusalem to the Old City to Scopus and then Jordan beyond -- on Jerusalem Day. That, too, seemed appropriate.
Thankfully and appropriately, the place was mobbed. The press later reported that 3,500 people attended the concert, a huge number for Jerusalem. It was a very mixed crowd. Young and old, from pre-teens to senior citizens, a few charedim and lots of "national religious" and secular, the dreadlock crowd to the yeshiva-dress-code of black pants and white shirts (also, today, the costume of choice for animals about to blow themselves up on a bus in a sickening homocidal gesture).
People without kippot (skullcap worn by religious Jewish men), with knitted kippot, with Bucharian kippot (a religious and cultural statement which cannot be fully explicated in this forum!). People who were there to dance up a storm, and those who were content to listen and watch. People who knew Ben and Marla and were there to honor their memories, people who didn't know them but still felt it important to go, and people who were there to honor and celebrate a city which much of the world still says we're going to have to split, or share or return. Or whatever. It must have been a security nightmare, so many people gathered so densely in an outdoor space so close to so many Arab villages, so the area was ringed with cops and other security personnel. But none of that prevented people from having a fabulous time.
Looking around at this scene, thousands of people out to celebrate a city (think about that for a moment -- when did we ever think that Baltimore, or New York, or Los Angeles, as much as we liked them, were miracles to be celebrated?) and to mourn a horrific loss of life, dancing and singing, swaying to the music, connecting with friends, marveling at the flickering lights of this ancient city visible from there as it is from no where else, it struck me.
This country is an unmitigated success. It's an achievement of cosmic proportions.
True, we've got an economy in tatters with unemployment, poverty and hunger. True, we're still lights years away from a workable peace agreement and too many people have died in the past three years, and as today proved again, will continue to die. True, the roads are far too dangerous and the streets too dirty. The public education system is a catastrophe. Israeli Arabs don't get their fair share, and neither do Jews of North African extraction. Yes, the democratic tradition here needs a lot of bolstering. And no question, the army has to be more careful, more disciplined. Those are all critical issues, and we have to address them.
But those are minor issues. Really. They can be fixed. This is our country, and if we mustered the will to fix those things, we could. I watched the hundreds and hundreds of kids at this concert (my two oldest kids, who had come with us, had long since disappeared into the crowd, having found friends, assuring us that they'd eventually make their way home and we shouldn't even bother looking for them), swaying and dancing to music almost exclusively about peace, totally at home and relaxed in a city that to many is synonymous with terror, conducting their evening in a language that not long ago people didn't even speak.
And I thought for a fleeting moment about where the Jews were 60 years ago, which to my kids is an eternity but isn't -- my parents were the age of our youngest kid at that point.Where were the Jews? Going up smokestacks, barred by FDR from American shores (while American Jews watched and did virtually nothing), blocked by the British from entering Palestine and imprisoned if they persisted in trying, thoroughly vulnerable to violence even here as the British watched (helped?) the local populations terrorize each other.
And look where we are today. Today's problems -- yes, even today's horror included -- seem minor in comparison. You can't survive here without some perspective. But with perspective, you can't help but see how much better off we are.
When the first of the two bands ended their set and played their best known song, "Od Yavo Shalom Aleinu" (rough translation - "peace will come some day"), a song in which the refrain is one Arabic word "Salaam", and the crowd went wild, cheering and singing along, I could scarcely believe my ears.
Ringed by security personnel because there really are people out there who would like to kill them, as we were gruesomely reminded today, these kids were still singing and clapping to songs about peace. Looking from the Promenade into an Arab village from which they probably wouldn't emerge if they actually walked down into it, they were still singing "Salaam" and swaying to a song they didn't want the band to stop playing. It was kind of too bad that the leaders of Hamas and Islamic Jihad couldn't have been there for a few moments to witness this. For if they did, maybe they'd get it. They'll never, ever win. No matter how many busses they blow up, no matter how many people they kill. This is not a population or a generation that will be scared into leaving or into despair. The hope of this place runs too deep. You go to a night like that, and you know we're OK. Despite everything, despite all the scars, despite the wet blood still on the streets of our downtown, we're going to be fine.
Why would one stay here? I don't really get the question. I wonder about other questions. How could one leave? With even a thin, cursory sense of the tapestry of Jewish history, how could one not want to be here? (I can easily understand why many people cannot come. What I can't understand is those who don't genuinely wish they could.) Those are the questions I actually find harder to answer. Who wouldn't want to live in a place where even concerts are miracles?
And then, a couple of nights after that, a Bar Mitzvah party for a kid in our community. This was one of those classy, creative affairs that you don't forget. We were told to meet at Liberty Bell Park in Jerusalem and then were bussed to a destination that we could only guess at. Eventually, we arrived -- all two hundred of us on four different buses -- at Beit Guvrin, about an hour west of Jerusalem, where there was dinner and dancing, more or less the standard works.
Except that there was a huge space for dancing, and the best band that I've ever heard in Israel. They were outrageously good and after a couple of sets of standard "Jewish stuff," they turned to the Beatles and onward, all the music that the parents' generation had grown up with. And this crowd, almost exclusively Anglo immigrants, partied, and partied hard.
Dancing and singing late into the night, it was clear. This was not just a great party; it was much more than that. It was a chance to celebrate, to let loose after almost three years of far too much stress, too much fear, too many tears. It was the perfect night for people desperate to feel joy, to forget the rest. Because we're tired, and hurting, but not despondent.
I looked around the crowd. Lawyers (lots of them!), venture capitalists, educators, therapists, a good smattering of high-tech folks (including, if I might be forgiven a blatant plug, the creator of by far the very, very best Web searching tool I know called GuruNet, which if you ever, ever search the Web you should definitely check out at http://www.gurunet.com/), some academics. A couple of government types. Different professions, a full spectrum of religious orientations, a reasonably wide socio-economic spread. Huge gaps between their political viewpoints, particularly on the subject of how to achieve peace, or how to live if you're resigned to peace never coming.
But most had one thing in common. They were immigrants. Mostly from the States and England, but from Russia and other places as well. And as such, it was a crowd who had chosen this life, elected to be here and thinks that being able to be here is about the greatest blessing life can offer. None of the despairing that one reads about in the Israeli press (though admittedly, also none of the poverty). Just a sense that out in the desert, celebrating a Bar Mitzvah surrounded by hundreds of other people who wouldn't want to live anywhere else, life just doesn't get better.
Towards midnight, it was clear that the party had to come to an end. After all, we had to leave as a group, and most people had to work the next morning. But the band wouldn't stop playing and the people wouldn't stop dancing. Finally, father of the Bar Mitzvah went to the band leader, whispered something in his ear and the band started to play HaTikvah (national anthem). For a split second, I was worried. I'm not a big fan of singing HaTikvah at every turn, and all too often, it strikes me as kitschy, or forced.
But there was nothing to worry about here. At the very first strains of HaTikvah, two hundred people who only a minute or two earlier had been wildly dancing up a storm stood perfectly still. Almost standing at attention, everyone sang. There we were, staring out at the desert hills, or up at the star-filled sky, or straight ahead at nothing in particular, singing words we understood and an anthem in which we deeply believe.
This was no Star-Spangled-Banner-Before-the-Ballgame moment. It was one of those existential moments, in which when you least expect it, you're reminded of what your life is all about.
Od lo avdah tikvateinu
Hatikvah bat shenot alpayim
Lih'yot am chofshi be-artzeinu
Eretz tziyyon vi-Yerushalayim.
Our hope is not lost
That two thousand year old dream
To be a free people in our land
The Land of Zion and Jerusalem.
It was one of those moments, when surrounded by people you knew and people you didn't, but people nonetheless whose life revolves around the same existential passion that yours does, when the power of this place overwhelms you. One of those moments when life doesn't just pass you by, but in ways that words can hardly attest, a moment in which life goes through you.
It's hard to know what will be the future here. I hope the country will make it, but some of us know that there's a chance that it won't. And the price our society has paid and continued to pay even today for wanting to stay here has been horrific. But despite all that, I don't think that anyone there at that moment had any doubt that it was worth it, or thought that there could be any gift greater than to have been born at this moment in Jewish history and to have the chance to be part of charting our future. When you think about it, what more could one possibly want from life?
Why would one stay? Like our friends, we never wonder. If we wonder about anything, we wonder how so many others could choose to live a life not filled with those moments. For the truth is, we didn't really need the buses to take us back to Jerusalem at the end of the night. Because even out there, in the desert, miles away from our apartments, everyone standing there singing HaTikvah knew and felt exactly the same thing.
That two-thousand year old dream has already come true. Even out there, in the middle of nowhere, we were already home. And especially on days like today, we're reminded -- we're home to stay."
But it's more than that, something far less cerebral, and I've always found it hard to communicate to those who asked why, when you get right down to it, virtually no one that we know (admittedly a narrow slice of Israeli society) is even thinking of leaving. Even today, a day when the sadness and fury in this city are so overbearing that neighbors scarcely look at each other, when kids tiptoe around the house, when everyone walks on eggshells because everyone is about to cry.
I got a letter a few weeks ago from someone I don't really know. She was writing about her own complex feelings about Israel, living here versus not living here and the like, and told me that she'd written to a mother of a child who was killed in the violence of the last few years.
That mother wrote her back, and in reflecting on why she still lives in Israel and has never once thought of leaving, told her that in America, she and her family had had a wonderful life, but had always felt that there, they essentially watched life go by. Here, she wrote, life doesn't go by you -- it goes through you.
That notion that this is a place where life goes through you hit the nail on the head. It captures that "je ne sais quoi" that so many of us feel, that explains our collective love for living in a place that many of the people we know are too frightened to even visit. There's an intensity about life here, tragic at times but compelling at virtually every moment -- that most of us simply couldn't imagine walking away from.
It's no surprise that that intensity is felt at the horrible moments. When five soldiers are killed in one day just hours after the signing of another alleged peace accord, or when a bus blows up (a kind of euphemism, of course, because buses don't just blow up on their own) killing sixteen people on the spot, sending a hundred to the hospital and terrorizing (and infuriating) the rest of the city, you expect that intensity.
Those are the kinds of things that might bring any society together, and do so in Israel with an immediacy and regularity which frankly, most of us would obviously much rather do without. None of that is surprising.
What is noteworthy, though, and what has so many of us so in love with this place, is that that sort of intensity strikes at seemingly the most mundane moments. The American press won't cover the mundane moments.
They're not sufficiently interesting; advertisers won't have it. So we'll make the network evening news today, when Americans can gawk at our burnt-out bus, the line of a dozen body bags neatly laid out on Jaffa Road in the center of the capital.
It will confirm everyone's impression of what life is like here, and it will fortify those alleged supporters of Israel who are secretly thrilled to have confirmation that they're right not to want to come, even for a visit.
But that is not the stuff of which life here is made, and especially on a day like today, it's important to remember that. It's important for us to recall, and for others to begin to understand, that to live here is to live in a place where very little gets taken for granted, where even the simplest things are often seen for the miracles they are.
My parents were recently here for a brief visit. When they arrived, my father told me about their flight over. They were flying El Al, and as the plane began its descent into Tel Aviv, the pilot got on the PA system (that's PA for "Public Announcement," not "Palestinian Authority") and said in English, "Ladies and gentlemen, we will shortly be landing in Tel Aviv. Tomorrow is my 65th birthday, and thus I'll be retiring. This, therefore, is my last flight as an El Al pilot, and I wanted to thank you and wish you the very best."
Then, in Hebrew, almost the same thing: "Ladies and gentlemen, we will shortly be landing in Tel Aviv. Tomorrow is my 65th birthday, and thus I'll be retiring. This, therefore, is my last flight as an El Al pilot, and I wanted to thank you and wish you the very best. I chose to make this announcement in English first, in a departure from general El Al practice, because I wanted my last words as a pilot to be in Hebrew. Shalom u-le-hitra'ot."
My father thought, and I agreed, that there's something extraordinary about a moment like that. This is a country where even the language we speak strikes many of us as a miracle. It's true that popular Jewish education has exaggerated a bit the revolution wrought by Eliezer Ben Yehudah. He didn't quite re-invent Hebrew, as Jews had written in mellifluous Hebrew constantly throughout history, through the middle ages and early modernity, long before he did his work. But he did restore Hebrew to the status of a spoken language after it seemed that Hebrew's days as a lingua franca were long gone.
True, this is now a country where English is ubiquitous, where "le-farmet" means "to format" and where "diskim" is the plural for "disk." It's a country in which foreign phrases from English and Arabic now pepper everyone's discourse and where so many millions of Israeli children speak Hebrew so naturally that there doesn't seem to be anything so extraordinary about our hearing Hebrew all day long.
But it's still a country where lots of us believe that even our language is a miracle. To many of us, waking up in the morning to a radio broadcast that tells you the news and the weather in a language that not too many decades ago, virtually no one in the world spoke, is miraculous. Sure, it would be nice if the news were different, and tomorrow's news will be brutal, because most of us will have dreamt of other things, and will awaken to a voice dragging us back into reality, citing the latest body count, the listing of times and places of funerals and analysis of all the diplomatic fallout.
But after that rude awakening, some of us will still be in awe. Really. For what makes it possible to get through the news and all that it implies is the simple realization that a Hebrew news broadcast is an extraordinary accomplishment. That, actually, is an advantage that we immigrants have over native Israelis. We're still struck by that stuff. We don't take it for granted. And that's why, even as lots of them stream out to greener and more peaceful pastures, we just watch and can't help but feel that they have no sense of the profundity of what they're giving up.
A couple of days after my parents arrived, I thought it would be fun to take them to an outdoor Yom Yerushalayim (Jerusalem Reunification Day) concert that was being held in memory of two American students who were murdered last year in the bombing of the cafeteria on the Mount Scopus campus of the Hebrew University.
A couple of good bands were scheduled to perform, and it sounded like a nice way to both honor their memories and to celebrate Yom Yerushalayim without getting caught up in the annual debate over whether it's good to celebrate the "conquest" or the "liberation" or the "unification," all words that have so many overtones in Israeli life that I just usually sit the day out and avoid the stress. But this seemed important, and potentially fun, so off we went to the Sherover Promenade where the concert was being held. If nothing else, I figured, we'd get a great view of the city -- from West Jerusalem to the Old City to Scopus and then Jordan beyond -- on Jerusalem Day. That, too, seemed appropriate.
Thankfully and appropriately, the place was mobbed. The press later reported that 3,500 people attended the concert, a huge number for Jerusalem. It was a very mixed crowd. Young and old, from pre-teens to senior citizens, a few charedim and lots of "national religious" and secular, the dreadlock crowd to the yeshiva-dress-code of black pants and white shirts (also, today, the costume of choice for animals about to blow themselves up on a bus in a sickening homocidal gesture).
People without kippot (skullcap worn by religious Jewish men), with knitted kippot, with Bucharian kippot (a religious and cultural statement which cannot be fully explicated in this forum!). People who were there to dance up a storm, and those who were content to listen and watch. People who knew Ben and Marla and were there to honor their memories, people who didn't know them but still felt it important to go, and people who were there to honor and celebrate a city which much of the world still says we're going to have to split, or share or return. Or whatever. It must have been a security nightmare, so many people gathered so densely in an outdoor space so close to so many Arab villages, so the area was ringed with cops and other security personnel. But none of that prevented people from having a fabulous time.
Looking around at this scene, thousands of people out to celebrate a city (think about that for a moment -- when did we ever think that Baltimore, or New York, or Los Angeles, as much as we liked them, were miracles to be celebrated?) and to mourn a horrific loss of life, dancing and singing, swaying to the music, connecting with friends, marveling at the flickering lights of this ancient city visible from there as it is from no where else, it struck me.
This country is an unmitigated success. It's an achievement of cosmic proportions.
True, we've got an economy in tatters with unemployment, poverty and hunger. True, we're still lights years away from a workable peace agreement and too many people have died in the past three years, and as today proved again, will continue to die. True, the roads are far too dangerous and the streets too dirty. The public education system is a catastrophe. Israeli Arabs don't get their fair share, and neither do Jews of North African extraction. Yes, the democratic tradition here needs a lot of bolstering. And no question, the army has to be more careful, more disciplined. Those are all critical issues, and we have to address them.
But those are minor issues. Really. They can be fixed. This is our country, and if we mustered the will to fix those things, we could. I watched the hundreds and hundreds of kids at this concert (my two oldest kids, who had come with us, had long since disappeared into the crowd, having found friends, assuring us that they'd eventually make their way home and we shouldn't even bother looking for them), swaying and dancing to music almost exclusively about peace, totally at home and relaxed in a city that to many is synonymous with terror, conducting their evening in a language that not long ago people didn't even speak.
And I thought for a fleeting moment about where the Jews were 60 years ago, which to my kids is an eternity but isn't -- my parents were the age of our youngest kid at that point.Where were the Jews? Going up smokestacks, barred by FDR from American shores (while American Jews watched and did virtually nothing), blocked by the British from entering Palestine and imprisoned if they persisted in trying, thoroughly vulnerable to violence even here as the British watched (helped?) the local populations terrorize each other.
And look where we are today. Today's problems -- yes, even today's horror included -- seem minor in comparison. You can't survive here without some perspective. But with perspective, you can't help but see how much better off we are.
When the first of the two bands ended their set and played their best known song, "Od Yavo Shalom Aleinu" (rough translation - "peace will come some day"), a song in which the refrain is one Arabic word "Salaam", and the crowd went wild, cheering and singing along, I could scarcely believe my ears.
Ringed by security personnel because there really are people out there who would like to kill them, as we were gruesomely reminded today, these kids were still singing and clapping to songs about peace. Looking from the Promenade into an Arab village from which they probably wouldn't emerge if they actually walked down into it, they were still singing "Salaam" and swaying to a song they didn't want the band to stop playing. It was kind of too bad that the leaders of Hamas and Islamic Jihad couldn't have been there for a few moments to witness this. For if they did, maybe they'd get it. They'll never, ever win. No matter how many busses they blow up, no matter how many people they kill. This is not a population or a generation that will be scared into leaving or into despair. The hope of this place runs too deep. You go to a night like that, and you know we're OK. Despite everything, despite all the scars, despite the wet blood still on the streets of our downtown, we're going to be fine.
Why would one stay here? I don't really get the question. I wonder about other questions. How could one leave? With even a thin, cursory sense of the tapestry of Jewish history, how could one not want to be here? (I can easily understand why many people cannot come. What I can't understand is those who don't genuinely wish they could.) Those are the questions I actually find harder to answer. Who wouldn't want to live in a place where even concerts are miracles?
And then, a couple of nights after that, a Bar Mitzvah party for a kid in our community. This was one of those classy, creative affairs that you don't forget. We were told to meet at Liberty Bell Park in Jerusalem and then were bussed to a destination that we could only guess at. Eventually, we arrived -- all two hundred of us on four different buses -- at Beit Guvrin, about an hour west of Jerusalem, where there was dinner and dancing, more or less the standard works.
Except that there was a huge space for dancing, and the best band that I've ever heard in Israel. They were outrageously good and after a couple of sets of standard "Jewish stuff," they turned to the Beatles and onward, all the music that the parents' generation had grown up with. And this crowd, almost exclusively Anglo immigrants, partied, and partied hard.
Dancing and singing late into the night, it was clear. This was not just a great party; it was much more than that. It was a chance to celebrate, to let loose after almost three years of far too much stress, too much fear, too many tears. It was the perfect night for people desperate to feel joy, to forget the rest. Because we're tired, and hurting, but not despondent.
I looked around the crowd. Lawyers (lots of them!), venture capitalists, educators, therapists, a good smattering of high-tech folks (including, if I might be forgiven a blatant plug, the creator of by far the very, very best Web searching tool I know called GuruNet, which if you ever, ever search the Web you should definitely check out at http://www.gurunet.com/), some academics. A couple of government types. Different professions, a full spectrum of religious orientations, a reasonably wide socio-economic spread. Huge gaps between their political viewpoints, particularly on the subject of how to achieve peace, or how to live if you're resigned to peace never coming.
But most had one thing in common. They were immigrants. Mostly from the States and England, but from Russia and other places as well. And as such, it was a crowd who had chosen this life, elected to be here and thinks that being able to be here is about the greatest blessing life can offer. None of the despairing that one reads about in the Israeli press (though admittedly, also none of the poverty). Just a sense that out in the desert, celebrating a Bar Mitzvah surrounded by hundreds of other people who wouldn't want to live anywhere else, life just doesn't get better.
Towards midnight, it was clear that the party had to come to an end. After all, we had to leave as a group, and most people had to work the next morning. But the band wouldn't stop playing and the people wouldn't stop dancing. Finally, father of the Bar Mitzvah went to the band leader, whispered something in his ear and the band started to play HaTikvah (national anthem). For a split second, I was worried. I'm not a big fan of singing HaTikvah at every turn, and all too often, it strikes me as kitschy, or forced.
But there was nothing to worry about here. At the very first strains of HaTikvah, two hundred people who only a minute or two earlier had been wildly dancing up a storm stood perfectly still. Almost standing at attention, everyone sang. There we were, staring out at the desert hills, or up at the star-filled sky, or straight ahead at nothing in particular, singing words we understood and an anthem in which we deeply believe.
This was no Star-Spangled-Banner-Before-the-Ballgame moment. It was one of those existential moments, in which when you least expect it, you're reminded of what your life is all about.
Od lo avdah tikvateinu
Hatikvah bat shenot alpayim
Lih'yot am chofshi be-artzeinu
Eretz tziyyon vi-Yerushalayim.
Our hope is not lost
That two thousand year old dream
To be a free people in our land
The Land of Zion and Jerusalem.
It was one of those moments, when surrounded by people you knew and people you didn't, but people nonetheless whose life revolves around the same existential passion that yours does, when the power of this place overwhelms you. One of those moments when life doesn't just pass you by, but in ways that words can hardly attest, a moment in which life goes through you.
It's hard to know what will be the future here. I hope the country will make it, but some of us know that there's a chance that it won't. And the price our society has paid and continued to pay even today for wanting to stay here has been horrific. But despite all that, I don't think that anyone there at that moment had any doubt that it was worth it, or thought that there could be any gift greater than to have been born at this moment in Jewish history and to have the chance to be part of charting our future. When you think about it, what more could one possibly want from life?
Why would one stay? Like our friends, we never wonder. If we wonder about anything, we wonder how so many others could choose to live a life not filled with those moments. For the truth is, we didn't really need the buses to take us back to Jerusalem at the end of the night. Because even out there, in the desert, miles away from our apartments, everyone standing there singing HaTikvah knew and felt exactly the same thing.
That two-thousand year old dream has already come true. Even out there, in the middle of nowhere, we were already home. And especially on days like today, we're reminded -- we're home to stay."
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