Life Happens

By Rabbi Elyse Winick
Associate Director for KOACH
USCJ Department of Youth and Young Adult Services

This year I hit the trifecta. I traveled to Israel with our Taglit-Birthright Israel group for participants with Asperger's Syndrome in December. In March I spent Purim with USY's Nativ Collegiate Leadership Program in Jerusalem and visited the groups at their bases. In May I'll travel to Israel with Brandeis University's Taglit-Birthright Israel group. Three trips in five months is a record for me and despite the jetlag and the living out of suitcases, I couldn't be happier.

KOACH sent our first special needs trip in December of 2008. Late in the trip, I was walking down Ben Yehudah Street in Jerusalem with one of the participants. Typical of many with Asperger's Syndrome, this young man had a flat emotional affect and while he was exceptionally smart, it was exceptionally difficult to have a conversation with him. "Do you do this three times a year?" he asked. "No," I responded, "just twice," hearing his question as one of numbers and details. I paused and decided to try something. "Does that sound good to you?" A broad smile expanded over his entire face, the first smile I had seen on him in eight days. "Yes," he said, "that sounds wonderful." We both basked in the glow of what he was feeling.

Rather than getting used to it, each trip to Israel heightens my sense of connection, draws out my yearning and makes me wonder why my life is unfolding here and not there.

Just before Pesah, my youngest daughter was commenting on the way life is disrupted by the hagim, how she thinks she understands the people who don't take off work and observe the way we do, because it's so difficult. I asked her if she could think of a way it wouldn't be disruptive, where the holidays would just be a normal extension of day to day life. After a few long minutes, she was still drawing a blank. We've spent two summers in Israel and I asked her to think about those, about whether or not that would be different. Her eyes lit up when she started to talk about Friday morning in Israel, how all the shopkeepers wished us Shabbat Shalom, how the energy of the streets was all caught up in preparing for Shabbat, even for people who weren't going to observe it, how quiet the streets were on Friday night and Saturday.

I pointed out to her that when I was in Israel in December, the supermarket endcaps, in place of ingredients for Christmas cookies, had dried fruits and advertising promoting Hag HaIlanot (Tu Bishevat, the Holiday of the Trees). When I returned in March, the station identification advertising on TV was embellished with pictures of masks and graggers. On Purim itself, people walked in and out of office buildings in costumes and crazy hats. She knows that on Yom HaZikaron (Memorial Day), cars across Israel will stop in their tracks, on highways and local streets, and drivers and passengers will step out for a moment of silence. "Oh," she said. "In Israel, the way Jews live is just everyday."

In that moment I wondered again, as I wonder almost every day, why we have asked our children (and ourselves) to swim upstream.

It is, of course, because life happens. Because the more time that passes, the more we become caught up in the familiar and the comfortable and the harder it becomes to tear ourselves away.

If you've spent time in Israel, these feelings are probably familiar to you. If you haven't, make sure you take the first opportunity you have to take your first trip – and then make every effort to ensure that it isn't your last.

Like any family, our relationship with Israel is deep and complex. Sometimes we disagree with the choices it makes; sometimes when we are together, we can't wait to get away. But Israel's magnetic pull releases us only for so long. Abraham Joshua Heschel wrote of Israel that it is the ‘land where the Bible is at home.' The Bible and us as well. No matter how foreign the tongue or the foods, the rowdy pushing onto the bus or waiting in line for falafel, we are, inexplicably, called home.

That constant yearning is an ongoing reminder that there is something more out there, something which draws us nearer, something which should be the subtext to every step we take that's not on sacred ground. We may never take the plunge and disconnect ourselves from the lives we know to pick up the mantle of a life we only imagine. But we should carry that question with us always, watching for the moment when the glimmer of the answer might be ‘Yes!' In the meantime, we should fill our lives with sweet reminders, patience for imperfection, and a willingness to stand up and be counted for that in which we believe.

And hovering in our hearts should be the words of the poet, ‘Libi bamizrah, va'ani basof ma'arav, "My heart is in the East, and I am at the ends of the West." (Yehudah HaLevi)

[Posted 5/4/11]