In the over 600 days since the war began (I can hardly believe that I can write such a sentence as the opening of a piece I am writing… and then continue, with words, more words, and even more words) I have managed to keep my head above water, emotionally speaking, by doing a number of things.
First, by guiding my Journeys Making Meaning groups in different parts of the world, telling our stories, the stories of the Jewish People. This has become the major part of what I do professionally as guiding in Israel has fallen away dramatically.
Second, by teaching, mainly online, but sometimes in person in my home kibbutz, Tzora, where I love to teach groups of older members and parents of members whose mother tongue is English, and they come together once a week to learn.
I always prepare well for teaching and for guiding. Even though I have guided certain sites hundreds of times, I always prepare as if it is the first time, because in many ways there are always things which are different every time I go back to a site. A different group of people, times have changed – and times are changing rapidly right now – and, I have always changed in some way. (This coming week I am going to be standing on the Haas Promenade in East Talpiot in Jerusalem with a group for the first time in a year. I will read with them, as I always do, my favourite lines from the Torah, from the Akedah, the Binding of Isaac. When I get to the line in which a voice says, “Lay not thy hand upon the lad,” my voice will tremble with emotion, as it always does, but this time it will be different as I will be seeing in my mind’s eye, the scenes of October 7th, and murderous hands being laid upon our brothers and sisters, and I will say to my group, very much as Wilfred Owen said in his poem written in the trenches during WWI, “The Parable of the Old Man and the Young”:
When lo! an angel called him out of heaven,
Saying, Lay not thy hand upon the lad,
Neither do anything to him, thy son.
Behold! Caught in a thicket by its horns,
A Ram. Offer the Ram of Pride instead.
But the old man would not so, but slew his son,
And half the seed of Europe, one by one.
And I will say to my group, we have learned nothing. We are still killing in wars and being killed in wars.
I thought that I was ready to teach the session I had decided to call “The Burdens We Carry With us”. And I thought that I would begin by sharing some of the poetry which has been my companion over the years, and which I took with me from my degree in English Literature from UCT. (I know, my parents could not believe it either, a BA in Literature. Why not an MBChB, or a BA LLB, or a B Com? Is this a sensible path for a Jewish Boy?) I was going to start by sharing two passages, one from John Donne and the other from
T S Eliot. You know, all of you who have English degrees from UCT:
“No man is an island, entire of itself; every man is a piece of the continent, a part of the main. If a clod be washed away by the sea, Europe is the less, as well as if a promontory were, as well as if a manor of thy friend’s or of thine own were: any man’s death diminishes me, because I am involved in mankind, and therefore never send to know for whom the bells tolls; it tolls for thee.”
And
“We shall not cease from exploration
And the end of all our exploring
Will be to arrive where we started
And know the place for the first time.”
I love these two pieces of poetry, and, in many ways, they have been the anchors for my Journeys, for my attempts to take people with me on Journeys to special places. But not only to see the places and understand how they fit into our stories or to marvel at their beauty, but also to use them as places where our encounters can help us grow, intellectually and emotionally, and possibly spiritually, and to encourage us to see the other, those who share our common humanity, but express it in different ways.
But then I had a conversation with a Nova Festival survivor from that awful early morning, 6.29 am on October 7th. A friend had recommended I invite him to talk to a group of mine. Five minutes into the conversation I realised that this was no ordinary conversation. As the conversation progressed I realised that I was standing on ground hard to define. Both a place of great profanity and possibly the Holy of Holies.
How does one discuss logistics, time, place and costs, with someone who has been to hell and back?
With someone who has survived a cataclysmic moment.
With someone who has seen the most depraved side of the human species.
I need to end this with another piece of poetry, this time from Yehudah Amichai, my favourite modern Israeli poet:
And how does one stand in a Memorial Ceremony? Erect or bent,
rigid like a tent or limp as in mourning,
head humbled like the guilty or raised in defiance against death,
eyes wild or frozen like the eyes of the dead,
or shut, to view the stars within?
And what is the best time to remember? Noon
when the shadows are hidden beneath our feet, or dusk
when the shadows grow long like longings
with no beginning and no end,
like God? ●
NOTE: This was written before the start of the war with Iran.
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