A Wall of Light - Edeet Ravel [73]
How is this night different from all other nights?
That on this night we, Jewish youth from America, celebrate Passover in Eldar in the Galilee.
That we have the night [Hebrew version: right] to celebrate our holiday in a conquered Arab village? [Hebrew: no question mark]
That we prophesy about our future.
Why are we celebrating our holiday in an Arab village?
One year ago, the fields we tend today were tended by others. And when we came, the desolation of their lives cried out to us through the ruins they left behind. Cried to us and reached our hearts, coloured our everyday lives. One day they were here and the next they were gone. Victims of war. So we search for justification for the right to be here.
It isn’t difficult to imagine how life must have been. Here a slipper, there a mirror, here a sack of grain, there a family portrait, a broken toy, a student’s English textbook.
Daily I walk the familiar paths
With open eyes that see not
Not only bitter but rank
Is our once-hallowed ground
And blood too stains our hands
Who said “might is right”
And “our cause is just”?
Babies’ shoes need no explaining
A civilization gone in one blow
To dream perhaps will heal the wounds
And so with shame seeing nought
We go on building.
What gives us the right to reap the fruit of trees we have not planted? On what moral grounds shall we stand when we take ourselves to court?
Because we have taken upon ourselves the task of Pioneers and because Pioneering is more than the romantic notion of coming to a clean, untouched land and planting one’s own clean, fresh seeds. Because building a homeland requires more than physical sacrifice, dirty hands and a bent back—it requires a spiritual struggle and a spiritual sacrifice. Because we must learn to translate our final ideology into the reality of a nation’s fight for existence, and if that reality should require the accomplishments of tasks which are painful to us, all the more will it strengthen us. And only we can camp on the borders.
Because once a Jewish community stood here and a Jewish community will again arise. (Indeed can it be said that Eldar itself belongs to any one nation throughout the ages of men’s existence?) For those who died in the concentration camps and the battles bequeath to us our life here.
Let the nation remember those who were cut down in Exile and did not live to see the glory of Israel—
Let the nation remember the brave sons who fell among the ghetto walls—
Let the nation remember the sons and daughters who died on the cruel waves and thorny roads on the way to their homeland—
Let the nation remember the best of its children, strong of heart and pure of vision, who bore arms in defence of the life of Israel, its independence and its freedom.
36. In the 1967 diary I recount a small sequel to these events:
In the middle of my nap, I heard someone walking around. I opened my eyes and sat up in bed.
Elan, I said. Shoshana untied you?
Oh yes, he answered, a long time ago.
Probably a guilty conscience.
37. From the memoirs of Yehuda Polani, quoted in Yuval Dror, The History of Kibbutz Education.
38. The image originated in an illustration of mythological figures in Ancient Greece.
39. This would be the Chubby Checkers version, currently available on YouTube.
40. The Hebrew for “horse” is sus.
41. Hebrew for cyclamen.
42. Anokhi is a biblical term for the first person pronoun “I”; it is obsolete in Modern Hebrew, other than in poetry. For the painting Dori associates with Anokhi see The Wanderer by George Grosz (1893–1959). The original hangs at the University of Rochester Memorial Art Gallery.
43.
Novelist55:
I read that girls automatically and universally
demand separate showers when they’re 12.
Nissim73:
Yes, I think that’s right.
Novelist55:
But in the documentary, one woman remem-
bered that