Well, I’m home.
When people ask me what I was doing in Israel, or how it was, there is often a reverential tone in their voices. Because, in this moment of war and heartbreak they assume I must be going as part of some sort of mission: witnessing or observing or picking fruit in the now-abandoned kibbutzim in the south.
But that wasn’t the case. My mission in Israel is always more modest. My 88- and 93-year-old in-laws live in Haifa, and I go to provide companionship and practical support. I schedule doctors’ appointments, do grocery runs, buy lightbulbs, take them out for lunch at the mall or maybe even outside the City.
Haifa, sitting on Mt. Carmel in Israel’s north, is currently out of the line of fire. Gazan missiles can’t reach it. Missiles from Lebanon could, but so far in this war, that has not unfolded. So Haifa is a place where a stranger could fool themselves into believing that no war is happening at all.
But that illusion would be temporary. Because the war is everywhere, in some way. Posters with the faces of hostages. Signage promoting unity and victory. Graffiti with slogans about bringing the hostages home, or more daringly, condemning Bibi and demanding new elections. The feel of crisis is just below the surface – everyone knows someone who knows someone who was in the October 7th attack; everyone knows someone who knows one of the hostages. And the war is oddly present in the cordial and constrained interactions between Jews and Arabs in this atypically integrated city.
There are other strange reminders of the war, too. For instance, to deflect missile attacks, the Israeli military scrambles the GPS coordinates of the major cities. So if I tried to use my GoogleMaps to get directions to my sister-in-law’s apartment, it would consistently tell me I was not in Haifa at all but in Beirut, and I was left to wander aimlessly. This was disorienting in the most literal of ways.
While in Israel I noticed a lack of discussion and media coverage about the suffering in Gaza, as if the Israeli psyche just couldn’t reach that far. But I felt that suffering in my body. It was a record cold and rainy clip in the country, and I spent numerous sleepless nights in my in-laws’ tenth floor apartment, with the wind howling and the building shaking, and cries of jackals from the wadi below. On those nights I would toss and turn in tears, feeling a sense of doom. The howling I was hearing was the pain of Gaza. In the downpours I imagined the rain falling on the displaced and wondered if any of the children of Gaza were warm. For a week the weather felt like our own human tears and human howls, projected and amplified in the heavens.
I didn’t go to Israel with a mission. But I witnessed nonetheless. I sat with a friend, someone dear to me, who had been visiting an old friend at a kibbutz in the south when it was attacked. He spent long hours barricaded in the safe room of their house, along with his friend’s wife and four children, whom he barely knew. I sat with my friend while he told me the minute-by-minute of that day – its dangers and constant decision-making and, ultimately, rescue. And he told me about the days since, back in sleepy Haifa but bearing the deep wounds of that day of terror. I put on my best pastoral, meeting his pain with my own emotional neutrality. And then it would all flood back to me during the tearful and sleepless nights of howling rain.
I didn’t go to Israel with a mission, but I did manage to attend a national meeting of Omdim B’yachad, “Standing Together,” an organization of Israeli and Palestinian leftists who come together to demand a ceasefire and to imagine a shared future. These are people who refuse to call each other “enemies” and insist on the word “partners.” There were speeches and workshops. I was moved by the words of Jewish and Palestinian activists alike. And I felt deep sadness at how little of the Israeli left is left; at how Israel’s most extreme nationalistic and religious tendencies have become policy fueling this war.
Over 1000 Jews and Palestinians attended the conference. There were longtime lefties, many of whom could sit in a seat here at Ner Shalom and you’d never guess they weren’t regulars. And there were hundreds of young people in their 20s and 30s, which was heartening. But I also had an awareness that their work is grassroots; they do not represent a political party; and other than the painfully slow work of changing hearts and minds, they do not yet have a political plan to offer. These thoughts flowed through me as I sat in the auditorium and I tried not to let them discourage me. These are people on the ground, trying to do something different, trying to offer a different vision than one of war and endless occupation, and they didn’t need my despair in the room.
I confess I did have one mission while in Israel – a happy one. To go to Jerusalem and pick up the hand-scribed megillah that Ner Shalom purchased. People said, “Don’t drive; take the train.” But I had reached a point where I just needed to be away from people, and a few hours of intercity driving felt like a good refuge. But the driving was awful. A half hour out of Haifa, the traffic slowed to a stop. Did it have to do with the GPS scrambling, so that no one could foresee if there would be traffic? Maybe. I don’t know. But by the time I reached the town of Netanya, I pulled off. I always prefer creeping along on surface streets than sitting still on a freeway. Meanwhile, Rinat, who is in Israel taking care of her father, decided that he was in a good enough place that she could come with me to Jerusalem. This thrilled me. My going alone was an errand, but with Rinat it was a true mission, the two of us a delegation representing all of you. She texted me her address in Herzliya, and I plunked it into GoogleMaps.
The app predicted it would take an hour and a half to get just to Rinat, when Herzliya should normally have only been 20 minutes away. I continued following the GPS voice on the surface streets. It commanded me to turn onto streets that were blocked to car traffic and would have to recalculate when I had no choice but to decline. I could see in the distance that the freeway traffic was moving again, but she didn’t direct me onto the freeway. She sent me on backroads, and then through a construction site where I had to negotiate my way around cement mixers. Then onto a gravel road which became a dirt road which then became a gully under a bridge and into a vineyard. Finally I was driving on something that didn’t resemble a road in any way; the rocks were banging on the bottom of the Toyota. But the transition from urban streets to this had been gradual, and despite my doubt, I wanted to believe. I was curious where this was going to lead. Maybe the disaster ahead was too attractive to resist.
I finally stopped, perhaps 20 minutes after any of you would have stopped. I stopped because I knew I would eventually wreck the car, and then have to embarrasedly explain to some towtruck driver and to my in-laws why I had believed the GPS when she told me to go on paths that were obviously not in my self-interest. It was the anticipation of shame that finally stopped me.
I carefully backed down the gully. I paused under the bridge to get out of the car and breathe and break the spell that the GPS somehow had cast over me. If I’d had a cigarette on me I’d have taken up smoking in that moment. I got back in the car and tried to follow the map out, but again it was leading me places where cars couldn’t traverse. So I turned it off and just drove and drove until I saw the promise of coffee and a table. I sat down and sipped my kafeh hafukh, trying to breathe through the tears of frustration, and all the underlying layers of sorrow that those tears were tapping into.
Eventually I picked up the phone to look at the GPS and see if I could diagnose the problem. And sure enough, I saw that when I had entered Rinat’s address, my clumsy thumb had grazed the bicycle icon. GoogleMaps thought I was out for a day of mountain biking, and was keeping me as far from speeding cars and highways as possible.
I was too exhausted to laugh. And the sadness in my body wouldn’t let go of the experience. Instead it demanded that this turn of events not be relegated to the realm of anecdote but instead be read as parable. Because in looking back on that drive, I could only ask the question of how it is that we can listen to a voice in our ear, directing us on paths that we know will lead to disaster, and still not question. This is the moment we’re in. A voice of rightwing nationalism, disguising itself as a voice of benign Jewish fulfillment, has been whispering in our ears, guiding us on paths that are ever more treacherous, more damaging, and more difficult to pull back from. We have abandoned our compass and yielded to the reassurances and guidance of a voice that experience should tell us not to trust. The Parable of the Toyota in the Gully reminds us that we each have a moral compass. We cannot afford to abandon it.
* * *
So in case you’re curious, I got to Rinat’s in 20 minutes. Together we went to Jerusalem to take possession of the megillah and found ourselves deeply moved in the process. We had lunch in the Arab town of Abu Ghosh, where Rinat insistently drew Palestinian storekeepers into conversation about the situation, as only she can do.
Back in Haifa, I had five more domestic days with my in-laws. Cooking. Doctor appointments. Short walks on Mt. Carmel for air.
At last, I am on the train from Haifa to the airport, bound for home. The hills and fields are bright green after the unusual rains. It’s easy to see the biblical here – the hills traversed by kings and prophets or apostles of Jesus. It’s easy to picture hundreds of years of Ottoman rule, a land filled with Arab farmers and their Jewish neighbors. This is a land formed by romantic ideas and terrible destructions, not unlike our own country, and there is no going back. The road only extends forward.
I lean back in my train seat, exhausted, wrung out, and try to imagine a future that is gentler than the present. As the train rocks me to sleep, I offer my tattered prayers for all who are suffering, who are trapped, who are angry, who are hungry. How many tears have watered this land? When may we all reap in joy?