Sorry, Just a Mistake

The solution was so simple. We will abandon the Jewish homes in that bothersome area called Gush Katif and peace will finally become a reality. Our Arab cousins will love us and we won't have to defend and police the area and all will be hunky dory.

So why do I read in newspaper after newspaper here in Israel, years down the track, how everyone is beating their breast, from Chief of Staff down, admitting to an overwhelmingly tragic mistake? Why was there a need for Operation Caste Iron and the resultant slanted and anti-Semitic Goldstone Inquiry? The answer is: self delusion is so simplistically easy. The word 'peace' has just a lovely ring about it. And anyone who speaks in the name of 'peace' must automatically be right, right? Wrong.

We have created a disaster. A disaster? That's a bit strong isn't it? Maybe a miscalculation? No it's not too strong a word. What do you call the following results?

- Thousands of Jews forcibly evicted from their hard-earned homes by Israeli troops; destruction of synagogues, schools, gardens, fruit trees, and millions of dollars of hard worked agriculture; forced eviction after repeated reassurances from Prime Minister down, of full legal rights plus written permits. Tell me, when were you last evicted from your home? Not recently? Then you have absolutely no idea! I call it a disaster.

- Families who enjoyed the fruits of their hard work and built houses with gardens and lawns and trees - all blooming from a desert sand - well, those same families were herded into temporary squalid bungalow caravans, thousands of caravan bungalows in neat symmetric alignment. And many still live in their temp housing because of a second bout of broken government promises, unconscionable bureaucracy, and no-one in authority that really cares. I call that a disaster.

- Families that were solid units of health, principle, heroism, the vanguard of Zionism, and true pioneers, have become statistics of suicides, drugs, divorce, intra family violence, and deep depression. I call that a disaster, wouldn't you?

And you would think that people would care. But no - we have moved on - that was history. And they were militants anyway weren't they - so they deserved what they got. Imagine trying to make the desert bloom? - how impractical! Believing in the right to one's country - how antiquated! And was Gursh Katif really part of Israel anyway? - interestingly, the same argument could made of Eilat! All this post modern sophistry resulted in an unmitigated disaster.

I will be accused of being political. That's just an appeal to lazy thinking. I am talking about caring for people's lives, caring for the cohesion of family life, about respecting heroism, and about endorsing the Jewish trait of compassion (somehow deeply recessed in this taboo subject). I am talking about inner strength and commitment to one's country. I am talking about laws and citizen rights. I am talking about governments defending the rights of its people. Instead we got what we deserved - human disaster.

We are approaching Yom Kippur. We have a lot to atone for. Maybe G-d will forgive us as we say vidduy (admission of our shortcomings). After all, even the most vociferous former proponents of 'disengagement' (read: tactical retreat/cowardice) admit the huge error of judgment made. And yes, we have discovered the enemy and the enemy is us. G-d may forgive us, but will our physically broken and psychologically maimed brothers and sisters forgive us? The Jewish teaching is that we need to ask mechilah (pardon) at least three times from those whom we offended. You don't have to be a blond blue eyed 'mercenary' on a German trained horse thrashing into a group of Katif teenagers, to ask for forgiveness. I need to ask for forgiveness. You need to ask for forgiveness. Because we stood by, watched, and participated through the virtual media. Maybe we tut-tutted a few times, but how much sleep did we really lose over it. How much did the destruction of families and homes, of our people in our own country really affect us? And how much does their ongoing suffering impact us on a daily basis.

We may have a long list of dishonourable behaviours to atone for on Yom Kippur. But this disaster continues to be one of them. Will we have the courage to learn from it - just as another 'tactical retreat' is in the offing: Question: What are 'settlements' - Answer: Jewish families living in the land of Israel. Really? Oh, I thought they were impediments to peace. Again, echoes of Gush Katif.

Who is Josef Kryss?

Finally, my fifth continent in as many weeks, but this time to my spiritual destination, Eretz Yisrael. The modern day pilgrimage has none of the colour, dust, richness, and discomfort of the days of old. Modern person flies enwombed in a gleaming metal eagle winging across oceans in less time than the twenty four hour pas de deux of the sun and earth's daily dance.

It's in the stones. On those stones are engraved the tread-marks of thousands of years of history. These same stones bore the boldest of history's warring armies, marching through and across this miniscule piece of earth called Israel. These stones witnessed their victory as well as their annihilation. Wars would be won yet none survived the test of time - except Jerusalem’s stones.

Jerusalem of gold gleams its spiritual radiance off the stones, reflecting a regal setting sun. I see ordinary people leading ordinary lives in a city that is anything but ordinary.

The most recent historical revival of Jewish life in Israel came on the heels of the ravages, inhumanity, and philosophical perversion of the architects of the holocaust. The Jew who finally found spiritual refuge through land ownership in one's own country was a very different Jew than the Israeli of today.

I recall my first visit to Israel in 1967. The Jew was lean in appearance, a working class Jew. He possessed a coarse sabra exterior but in whose breast beat warmth, courage, and conviction. These Jews rode Egged buses with egalitarian ease, their eyes reflecting purpose and significance.

Today's Israeli seems different: loud, honking, impatient, living for the moment, and maybe less certain of the raison d'etre of his country. But the holy stones of Jerusalem are also trodden by our heroes. The country stands on the shoulders of those who leave their families regularly to stand at the borders, defending life, property, and history - steadfastness in the face of world pressure and neighborly enmity.

At this moment I am sitting on a street bench in a busy Rechov Yaffo where the noisy impatience is sublimated into the cacophony of trumpet horns heralding a permanent roadway log-jam. But I read these metallic blasts as the call of the Shofar. Israel needs soul. It has demonstrated heart and might. Now it seeks its national Neshama - a quest that seems quixotic in the face of political horse-trading that seeks to carve up the proud Biblical horse into an awkward Obama-ed giraffe, Netanya-ed on a grill and served up on a Hezbollic Iranian platter.

Is this what the heroes who stumbled out of the camps, dazed and skeletal, had in mind when they spent night and day tilling the soil of a country that for two thousand years had been a faded painting on a bare wall?

Josef Kryss survived Hitler against all odds. His son Leo tills the soil of many a Jewish community, especially in the Holy Land. Our center, Spiritgrow, bears the name of Josef Kryss, his father. Who is Josef Kryss? To many his name remains a mystery but the informed know that he possessed the hero's courage, conviction, principles and vision that now breathe the breath of Jewish life into communities where it might have otherwise faltered and died an ignoble death.

Josef Kryss was a survivor, and he passed on survival skills to family and world.

On this Rosh HaShannah, I acknowledge this man of mystery whose vision eventually led to the planting of the flower of Spiritgrow in a distant land of Australia. Such motivation contains the inner spirit of the Land of Israel, a spirit that beat in the heart of this man. And the renewed Ohr (creative energy) that will course into the world on this Rosh HaShannah will find its way to the most distant of communities, via the Land of Israel, Israel being the gateway for the new energy that will characterize the year 5770, as taught by the Kabbalists. This mystical energy of recreation emerges from the Ein Sof (infinite Source) and flows through the 'Land of Israel' that is also within the Neshama of each person. It is the isseruso d'l'eyla (response from Above) to the initiatives from below (isseruso d'l'tata) initiated by the heroes of our day - those few who died so that many could live.

Do you display serenity on your face?

Four continents in four weeks. A bird's eye view of the world. A kaleidoscope of the human condition. From the quietude and vastness of Alaska, to the variegated cultural ancestry of Africa. From the lay-back lifestyle of Australia into the teeming struggle for survival that is Asia. At this moment I am in Bangkok.

With the thrust of a Divine wrist the seeds of world's populations were planted thousands of years ago. These sprouts of humanity were empowered with free choice and a capacity to succeed despite terrain, weather, personality or predisposition. Some rose and overcame their conditions and many more failed. None were sustainable. Except the seeming anachronism of the Jewish people.

As I watch the desperation in the night-streets of Bangkok, garishly lit up in a cacophony of lights, albeit behind a facade of smiling salesmanship and assertive hawking, the desperate quest for survival is vivid and heart rending. This is city life at its worst. Compare it to the serenity and peacefulness written on the faces of Buddhist Thais in the hinterland, on the islands - the 'simple folk' that I have met over the years in their much more natural habitat.

And I ask myself: we Jews - how we have moved away from the inner serenity that comes from simple faith and sense of cosmic conviction. How we city Jews have become so estranged from the core of our inner wisdoms and life practices. How we city Jews have become so enmeshed in the vicissitudes of 'machen a leben' and the self doubt and insecurity that arises from the inevitable western thrust towards materialism and technologica.

I don't doubt for a moment that belief and discipline can transcend urban living. Despite the vastness and 'sophistication' of metropolitan life, we do have the survival kit to be the innately gentle humane and caring human beings that is at the core of Jewish nature and character. But this requires deliberateness, consciousness, discipline and will power. In our mad unthinking drive to escape fear we reinforce all that is negative and then model it to the next generation.

The westernization of Bangkok has not served it well. The westernization of the Jew may take a similar toll - perhaps already has. It is in our hands to change the future. Do we have the courage to make a leap of faith - faith in modesty, simplicity, and inner truth?

The Frierdicker Rebbe pointed out that when a train is travelling in open country the driver has little to confuse him. Either he drives forward or backwards. Ironically, the closer the train approaches the destination, the more the tracks proliferate and become more confusing. We are approaching the station.

Faces

Jaffa Rd. A disarray of man-size concrete pipes lying idly amidst deep man-made crevices and earth-moving tractors - empty and aimless. This was once Jerusalem's busiest vehicular thoroughfare. Today - traffic nightmare. Each day Egged bus routes and schedules change to accommodate road works that will one day, when Moshiach comes, morph into an intra-Jerusalem rail.

Yet, every seeming adversity is laden with opportunities and gifts. This afternoon I received the gift of faces. Swept up in a bustling throng along Jaffa Rd through to Davidka circle in Jerusalem, I discovered a rich tapestry of expressions, postures, movement, gesture and sounds - Jerusalem personified.

The face - a projection of the heart and mind. The eyes - a reflection of the soul. The hands - a message of goal and motivation.

Her face was soft, angular, belying the gentleness and wisdom of a Yemenite countenance. I watch this middle-aged matron grasping three fully laden Supersol plastic bags. And in an instant my student's memory teleported me to Operation Magic Carpet, the early fifties, eager faces of youngsters spirited out of Yemen on the wings of engined eagles - gently deposited, finally, into their own country. Gentle as it is that face is etched with determination, conviction, and loyalty to the ways of mothers, fathers and generations. Supersol bags may change colour and size. But not the heart and mind of a Teymani Jew. Nor that face.

He may be brash, but the Moroccan zaggag (glazier) parks his van in the middle of Davidka. As he deftly blends chutzpa and humor, blocking a long single line of traffic inching forward, horns blare in a cacophony of frustration and anger. Israeli drivers are not noted practitioners of delayed gratification. Instead drivers and pedestrians orchestrate a spontaneous parody of the Boston tea party - kleszmer style: wild gesticulations, frenzied arms waving pointedly at our zaggag coupled with colourful Hebrew epithets hurled from a place that is a curious admixture of righteous indignation and aspirations to stand-up comedy. And the face of our Moroccan zaggag? Full of feigned astonishment and surprise. Wordlessly the face says it all: 'What's your problem? Just need to deliver this piece of glass. Lighten up.'

In predictable response, the storm and tempest moves up a notch or two to nine on the Jerusalem drivers' 'Richter scale' of ten. And then, as suddenly as it erupted, it instantly subsides, the glass has been unloaded, and our hero flashes the most charming smile as if to acknowledge the fictional consideration and courtesy that the Israeli drivers had extended to him. And Davidka returns to normal. Normal?- an Israeli version of relativism.

She leads a hive of children ranging in age from five who surround the aging pusher that bears the one who aspires to soprano. She is decked out in modest black, from head to foot, sheitel-ed as well as 'bee-hatted' - a precarious head structure that denotes membership in one of many dozens of Geula sub groups. This schooner and flotilla of youngsters navigate through the human slipstream of a crowded rechov Malchei Yisrael. Deftly maneuvering through throngs of Chassidim, tourists and beggars, her strong face and concerned eyes belie a soft and maternal concern, as she chatters to each of her charges in flawless Yiddish. Her face is not one of poise, but of single-mindedness - the spiritual and material welfare of her children, the next generation. The face belongs to another era, to Europe, to Galicia. It's a face that has stared down the 'outside world' and outlived hundreds of thousands of Jews who simply disappeared into the fabric of a majority society - the hordes of Jews who lacked this fortitude and couldn't withstand scorn and mockery of traditional dress, traditional life, and the face of ages. This face will survive. The faces that are adorned by dread-locks and sophisticated coiffures will not.

His face was a blend of soft cream and putty. As he approached from the opposite direction along Rechov Malchei Yisrael, the knitted yarmelka juxtaposed a contrasting pair of side locks (pe'os). He wore a colourfully-edged linen smock-shirt and off white loose cotton pants brushing against green crocks. This is a new Jew. Born of the defiant 'hilltop teenagers', but now coming of age, creating Israel's 'third way'. The face of an angel, the heart of a lion, and the mind of a yeshiva student. The eyes reveal a soul close to the surface of consciousness - he wears his beliefs on his sleeve. The face reveal more than hope. It expresses the very dynamics of an evolving future. His is the face of the precursor to Moshiach. Adult babes who understand a truth better than many of their elders. A face of simple, uncomplicated, deep commitment to the land of Israel.

So many wonderful faces. So many eyes. All telling stories, volumes, tomes of Jewish lives and history. So many souls that radiate wondrous energies that dynamically configure a spiritual template of Israel today. Look at that white bearded Jew, a gnarled Sefardi face, a portrait of what was, is, and no doubt will be. Permanence amidst a sea of impermanence. The eyes are the deep blue of once full water cisterns, the face depicts the ruggedness of the Judean hills.

The faces of Jerusalem are often jagged and Picassoesque, sometimes tortured and Van Gophic, yet always colourful with flashes of Renoir - faces that momentarily reveal another time and another place, juxtaposed against a fleeting modernity. The faces arise from the spiritual deep - a profound and infinite ocean of genetics and Sefirot echoing thousands of years of continuity and existential defiance.

I look at the shop window. The sun's angle plays a trick on me. The glass reflects my face. And mine is all those faces and theirs are mine. We are One.