Rabbi Janet Marder

April 7, 2006

Memories from Israel

         On my way home from Israel , during some of the 14 hours we spent in flight, I flipped through the Sky Mall catalogue: page after glossy page of nifty objects you never knew you needed. There was Scooba, a round little robot that washes the floor all by itself. There was the Hairmax laser comb, which somehow, mysteriously, restores follicles to an empty scalp. (Of course I ordered one for my friend Rabbi Micha.)

         There was, for $79, a handsome mahogany box designed to hold all your remote controls, along with a copy of TV Guide. There was the shower foot pedestal, a little shelf where you put your leg while you’re shaving it. There was, for $1600, a giant popcorn dispenser that comes with its own wheeled cart. There was, for $99.95, a two foot long remote-controlled artificial shark that can swim in your pool.

         I marveled at how much richer my life could be if I owned some of these gadgets, and I thought about what the objects we own say about our lives. 

         There were 42 of us from Beth Am on this trip to Israel . I hope you’ll talk to many of those who participated to get their impressions, and sometime in the next several weeks there will be an opportunity to hear our members speak about their experiences.

         But tonight I want to speak personally about what it was like to be in Israel this spring. For me this begins by recalling some of the objects I looked at, each with its own messages about life in the Jewish state.

         Picture first a hotel buffet table spread with a vast array of salads, sliced red and yellow grapefruit, cheeses, yogurts, breads, cakes, smoked fish, vegetable platters, blintzes, eggs and lots and lots of cucumbers and tomatoes. That’s an Israeli breakfast, and it prepares you for what your tour is going to be like: colorful, intense, impossibly varied, and way too big to take in at one time.

         The object most consistently present in my consciousness, of course, was our tour bus. It was steered by our virtuoso driver, Udi, for whom we sang several choruses of “For He’s a Jolly Good Fellow,” and staffed by Gabi, our kind, funny and erudite guide. The bus brought us to the blue Mediterranean and green, flower-covered hillsides in the Golan Heights and barren Judean hills and aqua waters of the Dead Sea .

         What did I look at? I looked at displays of household objects at Qumran, where the Dead Sea Scrolls were found in several mountain caves; biblical scrolls that were buried there in the first century, just before the Romans overran the Jewish state and destroyed it.

         The Jews who lived at Qumran were a community who called themselves Yachad, which means “together.” Under a blazing desert sun they lived, ate and worked communally, with no private property. I looked at stacks of their pottery dishes and bowls and imagined their simple meals of olives, bread and water. As the last war approached I saw their scribes roll up the holy and precious words; I saw them hide away their scrolls in the caves, trusting that someday there would be Jews in the holy land who would discover and treasure their teachings.

         I looked at the tombstone of Rachel, a pioneer poet buried in a quiet cemetery in the Galilee, where she lived on an early kibbutz and wrote love songs to the land of Israel until tuberculosis took her life. Near her I saw the grave of Naomi Shemer, a modern poet who wrote hundreds of beloved songs, including Yerushalayim Shel Zahav, Jerusalem of Gold.

         I stood on the high slopes of Mt. Gilboa , where king Saul and his sons were slain by the Philistines, and looked down into the valley where, some 3000 years later, Israel ’s chalutzim drained the swamps and created a beautiful patchwork of fertile fields.

         I looked at Independence Hall – a small and modest room -- and saw the small, ordinary chair where Golda Meir sat on May 14, 1948, when David Ben-Gurion proclaimed the birth of the State of Israel. Our museum guide, an energetic young woman from Russia , described the scene. The original recording of Ben Gurion’s voice played over the loudspeaker, followed by the band playing Hatikvah, and we all stood up in respect. An elderly Israeli woman who remembered that day was with our group. As the music played, we saw tears on her cheeks.

         I looked at the display cases at Yad Vashem, and saw the simple, human objects that Jews carried with them into the ghettoes and camps – crumpled photographs, broken dolls, thimbles, forks, combs, a tiny home-made mezuzah, a child’s flag for Simchat Torah with the blue Star of David.

         I saw Nazi films of Jews getting on the trains, and remarkable home movies taken by American Jews in the 1930s who went to Europe to visit their relatives – a montage of film spread over an entire wall, a silent panorama of Jewish life in villages, towns and cities. The film ends with the haunting sight of men, women and children waving goodbye to their relatives from America .

         On a quiet Jerusalem street I looked at the gift shop of Yad LaKashish, which means “a helping hand to our elders,” and saw the beautiful objects made by the old men and women who work there: silk taleism and challah covers, knitted sweaters for babies, wall hangings, ceramics and metal jewelry.

         I looked at stones: blocks of pale Jerusalem stone that shines gold in the afternoon sunlight; hillsides surrounding the city studded with rocks and abandoned tanks from the 1948 war, when Jerusalem was under siege by Jordan ; piles of rock in the Old City , left by the Romans when they smashed and burned the holy temple in the year 70.

         I looked at the stones of the Western Wall, which somehow, mysteriously, has green plants growing out of it; and I looked at the recently excavated tunnel, where the Wall now extends for many hundreds of feet. I walked on the very cobblestone streets where Jewish pilgrims walked 2000 years ago; I saw the stone arches and stone steps where they climbed up to the Temple Mount to make their offerings.        

         I looked down to bedrock and saw the stone foundations of a house from the time of the First Temple , destroyed by the Babylonians in the 6^th century B.C.E. I saw the stone altar and the stones of the city gate at Tel Dan, in the north of Israel , where archeologists found an inscription from the 9^th century BCE that refers to Beit David, the dynasty of King David.

         I climbed the rocky paths of Ein Gedi, the desert oasis where David hid from Saul when he sought to take his life, and I watched a bunch of little Israeli girls play riotously in the waterfall. I saw the stony fortress of Masada – cisterns, storehouses, the pottery shards with which they cast lots before taking their own lives.

         I saw the elegant, modern stones of the new Israeli Supreme Court Building , and watched the trial of a man who had gotten into a car accident while driving with a suspended license.

         I’ve jumped back and forth in time and space because that is what it is like when you are there – a constant layering of past and present, each era existing vividly and simultaneously in your consciousness.

         You look at the beautiful, light-filled dome of Kol HaNeshama, a Reform congregation in Jerusalem; and you look at Roman and Crusader ruins on the seacoast and ancient synagogue mosaic floors in the Galilee; and you look at falafel stands and strings of Israeli bagels – very different from American ones – and you see notices on billboards advertising yeshiva students who will come to your house and clean it for Passover.

         And there are Israeli talk shows on television where everybody talks -- or shouts -- at the same time.  And there is wall graffiti that says, “remember to keep Shabbat” and “Am Yisrael Chai – the people of Israel lives.” 

         Speaking of the living reality of Israel …I can’t end without giving you a short report on the elections that happened while we were there. Likud, the party led by Bibi Netanyahu and fiercely opposed to disengagement from Gaza and the West Bank , suffered a significant defeat. Kadima, the party created by Ariel Sharon whose platform was disengagement – unilateral, if necessary -- won a victory, though a less decisive one than expected: they will have 29 seats in the 120-member Knesset. Israel will have a moderate rather than a right-wing government.

         Ehud Olmert, who now leads Kadima, addressed himself to the Palestinian people, saying: "We are prepared to compromise, give up part of our beloved land of Israel ; to remove, painfully, Jews who live there, to allow you the conditions to achieve your hopes and to live in a state in peace and quiet.  The time has come for the Palestinians...to relate to the existence of the State of Israel, to accept only part of their dream, to stop terror, to accept democracy and accept compromise and peace with us.  We are prepared for this.  We want this."

         On the same day he gave that speech an 18 year old Palestinian boy was captured crossing the border into Israel with explosives strapped to his body. And Hamas’ newly-appointed Minister of Information, Youssef Rizka, told a cheering crowd in Gaza : “We cannot recognize Israel . The land of Palestine is ours and not for the Jews.”

         Pehaps because the security situation seems frozen – most Israelis have little hope of negotiating with Hamas or gaining a final peace settlement – their concerns turned inward in this election. Most analysts see the repudiation of Likud as a call for economic justice and a protest against rising social inequality in Israel , resulting in part from painful budget cuts some years ago under Netanyahu.

         Unemployment now stands at 9%, and 34% of Israeli children live in poverty, with the heaviest concentration among Arab and Ultra-Orthodox families.  A new Bank of Israel report shows that Israeli pensions paid to senior citizens rank 19^th out of 23 countries surveyed – a finding that helps explain the surprising showing of Gil, the “Pensioners’ Party,” which for the first time sent 8 members to the Knesset, thanks to the support of thousands of young Israeli voters who wanted to do something positive for their grandparents.

         It’s not clear how the give-and-take of forming a governing coalition will affect Prime Minister Olmert’s announced intention to withdraw from large portions of the West Bank and define the final borders of Israel . What is clear is that he has a mandate to address crucial internal issues of social welfare.

         As Ari Shavit wrote in Ha’Aretz:  “The decision made by the referendum for a more just distribution of the wealth is much clearer than the referendum's decision on the political future. Starting this week in Israel, there is an absolute majority committed to restraining social Darwinism….After a long period of moral coma, the Israeli nation is once again demanding justice” [March 30, 2006].

         One image, one object from Israel , stays in my mind now that I am back in Los Altos Hills. I have the picture in front of me as I write these words. It is a small silver amulet, about a half-inch wide and one and a half inches long. It was found, encrusted with dirt, in a burial cave in Ketef Hinnom, overlooking the valley in Jerusalem where pagans long ago sacrificed their children to Moloch.

         Archeologists excavating there after the 1967 war unearthed a family tomb that dated to the time of the First Temple , about 600 B.C.E. It was full of the stuff of ordinary life: ancient bronze arrowheads, needles and pins, gold earrings, glass bottles, artifacts of ivory and bone. But the most important find they made was this tiny strip of silver, together with a smaller companion piece, found next to it.

         To their amazement, they realized it was a miniature scroll, probably intended to be worn on a string around the neck. It took three years of delicate work to unroll the scroll without causing it to shatter. There they found, inscribed in ancient Hebrew characters, the following words:

         Yevarechecha Adonai v’yishmerecha…May God bless you and keep you.

         Ya’er Adonai panav elecha vihuneka…May the light of God shine upon you and be gracious to you.

         Yisa Adonai panav elecha, v’yasem lecha Shalom…May God show you favor and give you shalom, peace.

         Words that would not be shattered.

          They are verses from the Book of Numbers chapter 6, known as Birkat Kohanim – words once spoken by the priests in the Temple when they blessed the Israelite people.

         This silver amulet is the oldest piece of Biblical text ever discovered – it pre-dates the Dead Sea Scrolls found at Qumran by some 500 years. These ancient words, coiled like a message in a bottle, were preserved for two and a half millennia, buried deep in the stony soil of Jerusalem , until they saw the light of day in 1979.

         Who would have dreamed that those words, tenderly unrolled and deciphered, would still be alive and known and loved in our own time; that we would continue to speak them aloud in blessing; that we would find this link -- so astonishing, so fragile but so very real – to our own distant beginnings in the land of Israel? 

         From long ago and far away, it is a message about who we are and who we have tried to be. Found on the edge of a valley where dark and frightening deeds once occurred, the scrolls speak to us powerfully of Jewish faith and hope and the longing for peace.

            To me, they say most of all what the falafel stands say, and the noisy, chaotic talk shows, and the election posters, and the stubborn, indestructible graffiti on the walls of stone: Am Yisrael Chai. The people of Israel lives.