On Friday (yesterday), I took time away from my group experience to go with my friend Bili to the Israel Museum in Jerusalem to see the painting, “Curving Road” by Ziva Jelin, an artist from Kibbutz Be’eri, the largest of the kibbutzim in the Gaza Envelope. Over 100 of Be’eri members were brutally murdered on October 7 and about 30 were taken hostage. You have probably seen T.V. interviews with Thomas Hand, the Irish father of 8-year-old Emily, who had been abducted from Be’eri and later released. Vivian Silver (z”l), the peace and women’s rights activist who was originally considered a hostage and later found dead, was also from Be’eri.
Adom Darom (the red south) refers to the red fields of kalaniot (anemones) that blossom in the south in January/February — in the Negev and the Gaza Envelope. There is a yearly festival to celebrate the spectacle. But this year, the festival has been cancelled because of the October massacres in the area and because of this post from a resident of the area:
So in one word ‘no’, and in two words ‘don’t come.’
And not because it’s dangerous here, even though IEDs still fall here from time to time, and not because it’s scary here (and yes, gunfire and helicopters are scary), and not because of the destroyed roads , and the scenes left by the tanks everywhere. Don’t come because of the country road. This is a region whose inhabitants are refugees in their own country, whose settlements are abandoned and burned, having a picnic here is like having a party at the house of a neighbor who is in intensive care in a hospital, it is invading a place where the hosts are not, not to mention all those who won’t hold back and just want to see the migonit, or the burnt houses in the kibbutzim, this is our house, and this time we are not inviting.
Despite this strong sentiment from some of the actual residents of the area, most Israelis we speak with have been surprised that our solidarity mission was not taking us to see those burnt houses. Visiting the devastation has been the focus of most of the solidarity missions coming from abroad.
In any case, the art gallery on Kibbutz Be’eri was mostly destroyed on October 7. This painting survived, though with bullet holes in it. The artist Ziva Jelin always did her kibbutz landscapes in red–not only because of the kalaniot that bloom in the area, but also because red, of course, conveys a sense of danger. Little did she know that the painting itself would be under attack.
“Curving Road” by Ziva Jelin, 2010, an artist from Kibbutz Be’eri.
a close-up in which you can see the white bullet holes.
The museum also had an exhibit of art created during or just after the Yom Kippur War, works that speak as powerfully to today’s war as it did then.
Photographer Moti Mizrachi, “Sacrifice of Isaac,” 1973
In Mizrachi’s “Sacrifice of Isaac,” the photographer bound himself like Isaac. In “Burying One’s Head in the Sand,” David Ginton alludes to the government’s unpreparedness for war.
Photographer David Ginton, 1974, “Burying One’s Head in the Sand”
My friend Bili, who heads the film archive at IBA TV in Israel, had just completed a big archiving of documents from the Yom Kippur War, a project she had fought for. Now it is clear how important that archiving is, as researchers try to find relevance of that war to this one.
Last night, friend and colleague Rabbi Faith Joy Dantowitz (who is on the same CCAR rabbinic mission) and I went to our rabbinical school classmate Susan Silverman’s for Shabbat dinner. Susan (sister of comedienne Sarah Silverman and wife of Yosef Abramowitz, a.k.a. Kaptain Sunshine) lives in Jerusalem and is the founder of Second Nurture (https://www.2nurture.org/).
Rabbis Susan Silverman, Faith Joy Dantowitz, and moi
But since Susan is a hostess with the mostest, we were not her only guests. The table included a Chinese Jew, an HUC student, a Korean woman here to study city planning–and planning to convert to Judaism, the comedian Israel Campbell, an older woman who had been very active in the Soviet Jewry movement, along with her Filipino caregiver, a visitor from Dallas with her son who is a tour guide, and Susan’s daughter who was home from her army service for Shabbat.
Shabbat at Susan’s
Today was my birthday. I received a beautiful birthday blessing at Congregation Har El, the founding Reform congregation in Israel. After the service, a man came over to wish me a happy birthday. “Thank you. How are you doing?” I asked him. At first he seemed resistant, but he opened up, telling me that his nephew was killed in combat in Gaza in November, that his son had just been drafted, and that he is the bureau chief for the Associated Press and is hitting road blocks trying to get his Palestinian staff out of Gaza. I also heard how disappointed he is about the Israeli t.v. coverage of the war in Israel which he considers unreflective and set on keeping the Israeli public traumatized and vengeful. It was a powerful reminder of what our tour guide had been saying–everyone here is on the front lines or only one or two degrees of separation away from the events of October 7. I was particularly moved by his ability to hold the pain of both the Israelis and the Gazans at a time of such great stress in his own family.
On the way back to the hotel, I stopped at the tents across from the prime minister’s office.
The number on the blackboard outside the tent changes everyday. Today’s is 120, indicating the number of days the hostages have been in captivity. (I’ve also seen people wearing the daily number in masking tape on their lapels.) One sign reads “We want them alive.” Another reads, “Return them home now.” And inside the tent, are posters of the hostages, which are also posted on bus stops, walls, billboards everywhere.
Families of the hostages camp outside of the prime minister’s residence
“Bring them from darkness and the valley of the shadow of death and return them quickly to the embrace of their families, and we say Amen.”
In the afternoon, we had a study session with Orly Erez-Likhovski, the director of IRAC (Israel Religious Action Center, http://www.irac.org), an important Reform institution in Israel that is dedicated to making Israel a more just nation, bringing legal cases to the courts on issues ranging from marriage equality to racial and gender discrimination to having public transportation available on Shabbat. Then we had a study session with the amazing Rabbi Michael Marmur who taught about “reshit tzmichat g’eulateinu,” the phrase from the prayer for Israel that translates as “the first flowering of our redemption.” He said, however, that Rabbi Immanuel Jakobovitz (the chief rabbi of Britain who preceded Rabbi Jonathan Sacks) had wanted the prayer to read “she’te’hi reshit tzmichat g’eulateinu” (that Israel might be the first flowering of our redemption).
He tied this to a midrash suggesting that Eretz Israel had been given conditionally and noted that Vivian Silver considered herself a conditional Zionist: “I believe in the right of the Jewish people to have a state, as long as we give the same right to the Palestinian people.”
Without regurgitating everything he said here, suffice it to say that Rabbi Marmur offered a hard-hitting teaching about redemption and hope and responsibility to make Israel a just society, not just a society that survives.
Tonight our group had our final dinner before most of the participants flew back to the US. I returned to Bili’s, where she had a delicious homemade birthday cake waiting for me. When I was here six years ago, it was strawberry, not chocolate. But only one candle each time!
Bili’s birthday cake for me this year
This is the cake Bili made me for my birthday 6 years ago when I was here last