An Israel Journal

First Installment, December 27-28, 2023

Dear Friends,

I am very grateful to be in Israel. I have decided to keep a diary of my visit as what I hope will be a good way of sharing my experiences and impressions with you readers. Thank you for your interest. Here is the first installment.

Shabbat Shalom,

Rabbi Jonathan Kligler

December 27, 2023

Arrival

I arrived today after a pleasantly uneventful flight on El Al. I am accustomed to a long wait at passport control in Ben Gurion Airport, but I was one of only a few people with a foreign passport. There was no wait at all. Nor was there anyone else in sight at the car rental counter. Tourism is not happening here right now. Many hotels have been housing displaced residents from the Gaza region and from the northern border for months now.

I drove up to Jerusalem and my ever-gracious host Melila welcomed me into her apartment. Clearly, the war weighs incredibly heavily on her as it does on everyone in this little country. As with our 9/11 more than 20 years ago, October 7 and its aftermath have shattered any sense of safety or normalcy, however tenuous, that Israelis once possessed. The war that is happening now is terrifying and debilitating. Melila explained that during the first weeks after the attacks there was a sense of selflessness and togetherness throughout Israel that helped carry everyone forward despite the collective trauma they had all just experienced. But now, as the war grinds on without an end or an exit strategy in sight, it becomes difficult to hold off exhaustion and despair.

And, Melila pointed out to me, if Israelis feel this way it becomes almost impossible to imagine how Palestinians are feeling. Most Israelis do not have the emotional “bandwidth” right now to even care about how Palestinians might be feeling. But some do, and Melila and her Jewish friends in the Sulha Peace Project are among them. As I have written previously, Sulha is a grassroots network of Israelis and Palestinians who are determined to be in each other’s lives and to actively care for one another. (I donate all revenue from paid subscriptions to my Substack account to Sulha.) We paused our conversation so that Melila could join a planning meeting over Zoom with the leadership of Sulha. (Because Melila’s Palestinian counterparts on the West Bank cannot even travel into Israel right now, all their meetings are currently over Zoom.) The Palestinians in the West Bank that Melila knows are absolutely terrified. They have even less freedom of movement than usual, and it is almost impossible for them to pursue their livelihoods. Battles are taking place regularly between the Israeli military and Palestinian militants on the West bank, radical Jewish settler vigilantes are harassing and murdering Palestinians, and the death toll rises every day. And this is on the West Bank, not the hellscape of Gaza.

I listened in on the zoom meeting as the group planned their next activity: it will be a larger zoom gathering this Sunday focused on the experience of the Palestinians. The Israelis would ask and then listen. Melila expressed to me after the meeting ended that this is by no means an easy lift for her or any other Israeli in the group. But her care for her Palestinian friends demands it of her, and she would rise to the task, this small gesture of concern that might keep human connection alive while so much is being destroyed.

December 28, 2023

A Google Maps Adventure

I started the day with a walk. Melila had told me about a group of teenage marchers who were on their way to the Knesset to demand the return of the hostages being held in Gaza. I will write about that experience below. But first I had a mishap in finding the group, which led to a little adventure that merits a digression. I thought I would find the group in Motza, a suburb near Jerusalem, so I asked Google Maps to direct me. I enjoy Google Maps’ walking routes, as they often take me places that I would not usually think of or even know about. Today’s route first led me through the ultra-Orthodox neighborhood of Giv’at Shaul. It then took me into the somewhat sketchy land of auto repair shops and junkyards that dwell on the edges of town, and I began to descend on a partially paved road that switchbacked down a steep valley. The rear side of a hospital loomed high above to my right. I was walking “backstage,” as it were, where the sewage pipes and the construction debris, the retaining walls and the service entrances prop up the gleaming facades that face the public thoroughfare. I find walking in these nether regions to be both fascinating and disturbing: nature is everywhere dug up, paved over, and sullied, yet the remaining parcels of greenery still please me, and birds still catch my eye and ear.

A bit further along my descent through this shattered landscape I approached the bone-jarring sounds of heavy construction equipment. The pace of building in Israel is insane and constant, so construction noise is never far away. I looked up the steep hillside at what I first think is the concrete skeleton of a new apartment complex, or maybe a parking garage. But no, wait...it’s a cemetery! A high-rise cemetery! I am walking along the backside of Har Hamenuchot cemetery (Mountain of Repose – there is a cemetery in Kingston, New York also called Montrepose.) Har Hamenuchot is the biggest cemetery in Jerusalem, and it appears that it has run out of room. To my astonishment and dismay, the solution is to invest millions and millions of dollars, chop up an entire mountainside, and use colossal quantities of steel and concrete all so that people can bury their loved ones above ground in a multi-level parking garage! It is an ancient and cherished Jewish custom to bury our dead, rather than consign them to cremation or other fates. Our tradition teaches that we are formed from the earth, and we therefore should be returned to it when our time comes. But what do we do when we run out of room? I’m not sure of the best answer to that question, but Har Hamenuchot seems to me to have chosen about the worst, the weirdest, and the ugliest solution imaginable.

Just meters beyond this massive site I passed another high-rise under construction, but this was clearly going to be a very nice residence for the living. But what a depressing view they would have. I studied the building’s signage and just had to laugh – when completed this would become a new residence for seniors. I guess the juxtaposition of these adjacent high-rises gives a whole new meaning to “continuing care.”

Tza’adat Hanoar – the Youth March to Free the Hostages

I reached the Motza interchange, and my little adventure with Google Maps was now over. But there was not a marcher in sight. Recognizing my mistake, I took a quick bus ride back up to the Jerusalem central bus station to try to find them. Fortunately, I immediately spotted a huge crowd of teenagers, many wearing their scouting and youth movement uniforms, collecting under the dramatic suspension bridge that marks the official entry to Jerusalem.

The march had been initiated by the high school students of Kibbutz K’far Aza, one of the communities adjacent to the Gaza Strip that had been decimated by Hamas invaders on October 7. With their school administrators’ and their parents’ permission, the teens were now completing a five-day march from Tel Aviv. They would conclude later today with a rally in front of the Knesset. They were coming to plead and demand that the government bring the hostages home.

These teens are no longer living in their homes in Kibbutz Kfar Aza. No one is. This once beautiful kibbutz is currently not habitable. It is important to remember what took place there on October 7: Hamas terrorists brutally slaughtered every resident they could find with astonishing and gratuitous violence, abducted 20 more, and burned and destroyed everything in their path. 7 kibbutz members are still captive in Gaza. The majority of the surviving kibbutz members are being housed at the hotel on Kibbutz Shefayim, just north of Tel Aviv, where they are doing their best to maintain a semblance of their community’s life. (You can read more about that here.)

Thousands of other teens from around Israel joined the K’far Aza group on their march. I walked over to observe and sat down on a patch of grass nearby. I looked over these fresh-faced, beautiful young people, enthusiastically chanting, chatting with their friends, taking selfies. I couldn’t help but cry, not only for the trauma that had brought them here, which I can barely comprehend, but also for the vibrant resilience of young people, so filled as they are with irrepressible life. As they headed off toward the Knesset waving their signs and flags, I prayed for their well-being.