I start my post today by comparing my achingly beautiful surroundings in our awesome Florida jungle with the ache of ugliness I perceive in this world
It is drippingly humid. The birds are so happy and the sounds are muffled by the pervasive dampness. You can smell the plants and soil as a spring morning melts into a blazing summer day.
This the next season already here?
Sam left for Israel yesterday morning and landed while it was deep night here. He had a job to do when he first got off the plane. Back in Florida he was asked by a friend of ours who we met at a recent “Run for their lives” march, commemorating the more than 100 hostages (including many American citizens!!) who are still being held by the evil hamas, to drop something off for one of her sons.
Jacob is in the IDF and needed ammo magazines, something he could order but which are prohibitively expensive to have shipped to Israel. Sam met Jacob’s older brother Tim, who gave him an even weirder thank you gift in exchange: a bullet Jacob had recently used to kill a hamas terrorist in Gaza. Macabre isn’t it?
Don’t know how quite how to respond to the bullet exchange but I can tell you how mad it makes me that hamas has forced our beautiful young people to have these awful experiences.
It is like living in in world of that is tainted. The tainted touches and creates its invisible psychological filth. It is like being engulfed in a world of “traif” (non-kosher).
These young people have had to harden their hearts to do the tasks that are necessary for personal survival as well as the survival of Israel. It is just paradoxical to be forced into this situation. I “pray” for the spirit of each soldier who has to fight off this unbelievable malevolent enemy. It is an unbelievable burden that each soldier faces.
This whole experience may be helping me to finally start understanding what is prayer.
Speaking of hostages, if you are not familiar with Jewish liturgy, the phrase “(G-d) Who frees the captives” is repeated several times a day during our prayer cycle. These words mean something!
My first response when I hear about the experiences of the IDF soldiers is to hope for/pray for the souls/spirits. I hope for them that it is still possible for them to come through this time emotionally intact. What an incredible almost impossible burden they bear.
Yesterday at the Holocaust museum my group of high school students from Williston was a cavalcade of diversity. When we looked at the display of the ill fated journey of the St Louis and pondered how it could have felt I asked the group who had family that fought in the revolutionary war and whose family came to this country at other times. One hand was raised for the rev. war and everyone one else was from diverse heritages ( many Spanish speaking regions), Afro Americans, Asians.
I encouraged them to each ask their families about their “ origin” stories of coming to America. I encouraged them to learn these stories because through that understanding I believe we can be better neighbors with the others and others become humanized and not a threat. But that is a separate thread.
At the end of the tour the kids in my group wanted to write personal messages/prayers to place in the wall that is set up to resemble The Kotel. To my amazement these kids at the end of a long day hunkered down to write their messages. One boy was trying to translate his message from Spanish into English and was feeling frustrated. I noticed his difficulty and encouraged him to write in Spanish. This is a place where the messages transcend constraints of language. He got so happy. His face lit up. He then completed his message, carefully selected the crevice in the sandstone wall to place his prayer and then went outside the meditation room to beckon his fellow classmates to come in and write their own,
“Come on man, write your message.”
Moments like this give me hope that education and communication can nurture.
One of the teachers shared that someone questioned her about why was she motivated to take the students in this trip asking, “why go there if you are not Jewish?”
Wisely the always educator explained, how can we know anything if we do not learn about people other than ourselves? How can we stop hatred if we do not learn?
It is a huge challenge and yet I was surrounded by teens and their teachers who bravely want to ask the hard questions and to learn.
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