By Susan Levin, Member of Congregation Shir Hadash and Congregation Sinai
My reasons for joining this trip were completely emotional: I wanted to experience what Israeli
Jews were living through first hand. I wanted to smell, feel, see, touch and hear what was going
on with them. I didn’t want their truths to be mediated by reporters from the NYTimes or CNN.
There are times in our lives when we are taught about the power of presence...We ALL
stood at Sinai; We ALL were delivered from Egypt. I felt that this was one of these moments.
As soon as I got off the plane, I felt “at home”. This was not a time when every expression of
pain for what we were going through had to be countered by an expression of sympathy for
Palestinians. It was enough to just take in the experiences of my people and to sit with what
they were feeling. Blessings and gratitude for the organizers of the trip for trying to open us to
the stories of people with divergent backgrounds and opinions. From my good friend who
refuses to listen to the news to the people who spend their entire days and nights working on a
project, my soul is full to the brim with their emotions.
Overall, it seemed to me that I felt a heaviness. People were out and about in Tel Aviv, yes, but
I didn’t sense that care-free joie de vivre that characterizes this wonderful city. People seemed
to be living in a space where their energy was directed to surviving the present moment. But at
the back of their brains was the knowledge that the future was uncertain and that a day of
reckoning was coming.
So we grasp at the stories of heroism, and rejoice in the rescue of hostages. But we don’t know
if the State will continue to exist, or what it will look like, in the future.
This was supposed to be a Mission. But I don’t feel like a missionary. I am not a prophet and I
can’t preach about a vision for my people. All I can do now is to bear witness for what I saw and
felt during my time with my Israeli people.
I just learned an Israeli expression: “Standing under the Stretcher”. When you are in basic
training, you take a stretcher hike. Four of you carry a stretcher and run great distances. You
are practicing carrying out the wounded or dead. You are accompanied by four others who do a
hand-off every two minutes. It is very hard and you are never allowed to drop the stretcher. It
has become a metaphor that has entered Israeli slang. For example, when Benny Grantz
entered the government, he justified it by saying...we are in a war and I am putting my shoulder
under the stretcher. The metaphor says that you can’t do it alone, that it takes all of us working
together.
That is an expression of the most powerful experience of my trip. The feeling of solidarity and
togetherness that I observed was as real as the tears and bullet holes. How beautiful that we
could mobilize our resources so quickly and competently. For me, who despairs about the way
America seems to be thriving on hate and the glorification of personal power, seeing my Israeli
family “under the stretcher” was especially uplifting.
Am Yisrael Chai
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