Israel: A Journey Making Meaning
JULIAN RESNICK writes from Israel
I love guiding in Israel. I love teaching about Israel when I travel abroad and, more recently, a post-Corona addition to my teaching repertoire, I love teaching online about Israel. I love my 15 minutes about twice a month on Radio Chai FM, around 7.45 in the morning when Howard (Feldman) and I talk about Israel. I love writing for the Cape Jewish Chronicle about Israel.
But there is a struggle involved, especially when writing about Israel for a publication which does not come out every day, especially in dynamic times like these in which the reality changes within hours, sometimes even within minutes. Just yesterday morning, I woke up just before 6 am, as I always do, to find out that one of the bodies that Hamas had returned to us was not of Shiri Bibas, but of an unknown Gazan woman. So, when the lovely Sena of Chai FM called an hour and a half later, I obviously had to change a lot of what I was going to say about the return of Shiri, Ariel and Kfir. About the scene of the coffins of a loving mother and her two sons, being brought together, home, to Israel.
News is one thing, writing something which has value beyond a few hours is another.
So, I am not going to share an opinion about the news with you as, when you read this, the news will be something else… and at this moment that I write this to you, none of us knows what tomorrow will bring. And I mean none of us.
Instead of the news, I want to describe a few moments on the kibbutz with two of my grandchildren on Thursday morning and then at the preschool of one of my other grandchildren in Tel Aviv on Friday morning. (I have eight grandchildren between the ages of ten months and 10 years old.)
On Thursday morning I went to pick up two of my grandchildren, as part of my and their daily routine. I am one of the luckiest grandparents in the world as some of my grandchildren live about 300 meters from my home, on my kibbutz, Tzora. This means that I can see them every day, which I do when I am not travelling abroad for work. They are two little boys, one 10 months old and the other 3 ½. I had never thought of this until Thursday but, because of what was happening on this particular Thursday, when I held them in my arms, when I hugged them good morning, when I rained kisses on their oh-so-sweet faces, all I could think of was another scene of two children aged approximately the same ages as my darling little ones, with their mother holding on to them as tightly as she could with terror in her eyes.
On Friday morning, just a few hours after the Medical Forensic laboratories in Israel had officially confirmed that the coffins returned from Gaza had in them the remains of Kfir and Ariel Bibas (of Blessed Memory), I was at an event for grandparents in the Tel Aviv pre-school of another of my grandchildren, this time a two-year-old. We participated in a wonderful meeting of grandparents and staff during which people shared lovely stories about their grandchildren.
People often ask me what life is like in Israel right now. These next few sentences are offered as a glimpse into part of what it means to live in Israel right now. A grandmother asked for permission to speak. She shared with all of us what a blessing it was to be the grandmother of the little girl she was talking about. Without missing a beat, she shared with us all that the little girl was two years old and her daughter’s child, and in fact had been born on the day they got up from the Shiva for her son, the little girl’s uncle, who had died fighting in Gaza.
How does one continue a conversation after that type of sharing? How? You breathe very deeply and then …
For me, Israel has always been an extraordinary place to live in, in so many ways, over the very different times I have lived through here.
It continues to be extraordinary – at times extraordinarily hard – but I would never leave it for anywhere else.
Never.
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