26 February
Something I never tell Israelis (but I am now, since I'm connected to many on Facebook) is that since my last few trips, I try to drink in everything I see and save every scrap and memento because what if the place is finally fully destroyed by terrorists? I don’t tell them because I don’t want to demoralize them or myself by saying it aloud. This morning, as I wake up in the most Carmel-by-the-Sea place I know in the country, in one of the warm, but not too warm beds at my cousin Nitza’s house, I’m realizing that my mindset is no different than wondering, what if I die before I’m old, which I wonder more than I need to probably.
Last night, a guy in a black kippah, holding an electric scooter, gave me directions to the western gate of the Netanya train station. As I walked toward the gate, I saw that he had reached his destination, hanging with Chabad homies, calling out Tzadik, Tzadik/Righteous man, Righteous man! They were trying to draw men to lay tefillin. Why you’d do that during rush hour at a busy train station, I don’t know, but like McDonalds and where they choose to build new franchises, they must do their location research.
Participating in the train system, as I did yesterday, makes me feel like Israel is here to stay...though my mother’s theory was that people who wanted Israel to be de-Jewed would never destroy its infrastructure because they wanted the country intact when they took over. Why destroy the bridges and all?
During my time here so far, some of the Israelis I met through the Jewish Agency, which is famous for being all about PR for Israel, were pretty hopeless about the future. Who could blame them when terrorists terrorize and their own citizens are so divided? They’re not like us, who are divided by a taste for gun control or not, or by race, or by gender presentation panic. They’re divided by who gets to study Jewish texts all day and not serve in the army and other more nuanced divisions.
These are morning musings of someone who has had far less sleep over the past week than usual. Is it excitement and over-stimulation at the whirlwind of what’s happening here or hypervigilance? Yes. Both.
I’ve had conversations with a Nova survivor, a Gaza combat soldier, with parents of both, with a dental surgeon, who keeps helping identify bodies, now of dead hostages, with an Orthodox woman whose husband just wrote a book, What If God Had a Job? (The book is designed to do mass-mentoring of businesspeople, connected to the ways of the Torah.) I’ve talked with immigrants from Long Island and London, Buenos Aires and Pittsburgh.
It’s tempting to romanticize existence here: If I lived here, it would be better for my writing. Everything’s so vivid. It would be like that R&B song, “Just in Case” every day. I’m disabused of my fantasy, though by conversations with people who’ve been living “vividly” non-stop, before October 7th due to government protests – whether protesting it or feeling victimized by the protests – and then since October 7th, wondering, mamash/really this time, if Jews have a future in this part of the world.
They are exhausted. And yet…they take a trip to Italy and forget their troubles for a week, or they write macabre comic bits that fill a Tel Aviv comedy club every Monday night, or teach somatic dance for healing, or study Chasidic mystics' writings at a female seminary, or they appear to be six years old, tops, and knock on the door, where you’re having a meeting because they’re eager for their upcoming chess lesson in the same location, which is at the top of the hour, and you must make way for them then, though sooner than 4 o’clock would also be fine with them. Or you see a soldier lying on a hillside in Jerusalem and you figure he’s resting, when you see it’s actually two people as his apparent beloved leans up from his face after a long kiss. Life will go on here until it doesn’t, just like my own life.
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