Many Colored Mirrors

What is Israel?

Is it that place on the news, that Iz-reel country torn by war and scattered with brown, screaming faces? That place everyone brings up when they want to seem sophisticated, where all those strong-men in green (you know, with the big guns), are all over, glaring and beating up women right there on your TV screen?

Sounds like an ugly country.

Or is it a location of historical interest- that place where and myth and moral and blind belief blur so black that even logic struggles to pierce the morass? So much of society roots itself there- how fascinating for you! Even a walk in the streets is a history lesson. See here, the remainders of Roman architecture- over there, the Crusaders' battleground. So much to see, and photograph, and place in albums, and forget... wonderful.

Or rather dull. I think, anyway.

Well then, maybe for you Israel is modern. A thriving state of metropolis and shopping malls, of neon lights and stereos and crashing trains. People are rich, people are rude, people are pretty, people live! Just like anywhere else, right? Different language, of course, but hey- even the street signs are written in English. Oh right, they have that army thing. Great souvenirs, much better than Greece.

Bewildering.

So maybe it's the religious place. That place you want, mostly, and people want for you. And maybe you don't know why you want it, or what it is, or why you are really going there. And, maybe, it's not even something you feel- not when you land in Ben-Gurion, or when you walk around Haifa, or meet your first taxi driver.

And maybe you'll feel it at the Wall- maybe not. Maybe Tzfat will reach you, or at the foot of a mountain in the Negev. But maybe not.

But you'll feel it some time. So is that what Israel is for you?

Maybe. Anyway, it's a lot closer.

Never a Dull Moment... Yet

I'm afraid I've gotten used to being busy. I am decidedly ill equipped to cope with this difficulty.

You see, I've just spent approximately nine months steeped in a Cuisinart marinade composed primarily of study and haste. When I was not in class, I was going to class, or else I was leaving class and rushing to a meal. Baring this, I was hurrying to a supermarket, or trying to make it to the Kotel with daylight left, or rushing to catch the last precious minutes of hot water supplied to our dorm.

It was hard and fantastic, and more consuming than anything I had done before. Therefore now that I have returned to my lovely, comfortable abode, in which there is always hot water, and there is always food, and there nothing to do, I find myself in a quandary of boredom which appears entirely unfamiliar to me. Do to this (I suspect? I hope??) I am also sustaining a decided lack of literary inspiration.

Well. Life will pick up.

It always does.

Life as I Know It

Dear World;

You have changed over the past year. Changed rather a lot.

I know you might disagree- "So I'm a little older," you might protest. "Does that mean I'm any different?"

Yes, my dear world, you are different. You are a little bit smaller from the last time I really looked at you. (Are you appeased?) You are also more transparent, and somehow infinitely more colorful. Most of your lines are sharper, though many seemed to have blurred beyond scrutiny. You are more cruel than I can comprehend; you are sweeter than I can imagine.

Dear World, change is frightening, I know. That moment when you gaze into your mirror of cosmos, when you turn back the pages of the diary written in stars, and you do not recognize yourself... Is there a greater pain or terror in existence?

But look close, my friend- Read between your careful lines. Oh, how you have grown! Pure, living reality has sprung from rote facsimile. You have learned to breathe on your own, to take your careful steps around the Universe all on your own. You can see for yourself, for now you can truly see.

The World that was was wonderful. The World that is is real.

And there is ever work to be done.

The Prayer

"Yaldah," they said

"Ah yaldah, a shekel!"

Their hands, soft and old

As they grope for my coins.

 

She asks me for twenty

A bill, in exchange

My wallet is open and

then

 

"Yaldah!"

"Yaldah!" 

How many?

How many?

The coins clicking

dubious

and cool

in my palm.

 

Another face,

Another bag,

They thank me

the recievers...

"Chassunah! Marry!"

They bless me

again.

 

"Slicha," 

I whisper,

My voice stunned

to silence.

"Ratzah l'hitpallel..."

I guesture at the Wall.

 

The hands leave mine

they are gone

when I leave.

What Stays With You

Someone in front of me rifles through a rattling plastic package. "Oh!" she says, thick annoyance souring her voice, "We're out of the cherry flavor."

So spoiled?

Pulling on a thick sweater (it's seventy one degrees!) but I'm still cold.

So selfish?

Eating, cake and fruit, snacking in frustration. "There's nothing here to eat", I say.

So pampered! Don't you know, don't you know how many those crumbs would feed??

And standing in the train station, packed in the crush of traffic, so uncomfortable. But there is space to breathe, I think. And they could push us tighter, and harder, until my legs are lifted off the ground, and I can't move, not at ALL, and I'm so, so scared, because I don't want to die...

But the crowd moves on, beacuse we are not in a gas chamber. And I must move on as well, wading through these modern luxuries, trying to preserve my new sensitivity while never forgetting to live.

Breathing in Majdanek

The black sign smiles down from the black building, friendly and benign. The letters are white and curvaceous, winking sweetly at us, as we pass beneath it's hungry, seductive gaze.

The sign reads "Bad und Desinfektion I."

Bath and disinfection. We file inside.

Numbly, I wonder how I have come here, how I am so arrogant as to think I could survive where hundreds of thousands of my sisters and brothers have perished. We walk slowly through chambers designed to quiet the condemned, watching our surroundings and drinking them in as if these were to be our last living sights as well. The entranceway, where our hair would have been cut. The bath room, where rusty showers suspend like a sprinkler system from the cement ceiling. We walk in the footsteps of so many, and I feel their quiet eyes upon us as our shod feet fall where their bare soles had shuffled. I swallow, and whisper Tehillim, and pray we do not disturb their rest.

In the last room, the gas chamber, the stench of chemicals pervades. The walls are streaked and stained with green residue, which clings to the cement like some morbid facsimile of living moss. Fingernail scratches scar the confines, following final moments scrabbling for life as the vices of death took hold. The scars grow fainter as they draw closer to the floor.

I begin to shudder as my mind struggles to encompass my surroundings. Tears swell my vision, and my very being is racked with a silent hacking I realize are sobs. The screams of the past echo around me, billowing in a deafening final protest. My feet stand on a wooden pathway raised above the floor. Step down, some terrible force commands me. Stand where they stood, die where they died. Step down! Not for several minutes can I bare to leave the "comfort" of my pathway, but I do. I step down, and join my sisters, for the few moments my sanity can sustain it.

Reality is thin in the gas chamber. There is a sense, somehow, of both terrible pressure and a vast, inescapable emptiness. The fabric of the world is frayed and weak, there where so many souls were choked from their bodies. Time is slower, and existence seems to float, very gently, in the currents of Eternity like some ancient cobweb. I continue to tremble as we mouth the Shema together, and as we leave the chamber of death. Alive, I wonder, as we shuffle out. A miracle. You do not walk out of a gas chamber.

I breathe deeply as we stand finally outside, reveling as the cold April air enters my lungs. I breathe as if I am breathing for the first time.

Perhaps I am.

Gift of Life

If I could count each flake of ash
If I could breathe for every soul
If I could cry for every tear
How long until I fill the hole?

The hole undug for every grave
The lives unlived, the days unsaved
The freedom snatched from every slave...
The payment for the gift they gave.

But though in their valley of death I do walk
Lo irah rah, ki Atah imadi,
Peace for the dove, and blood for the hawk;
From the nights in the fires
Are reborn the free.