Dear Friends,

  

It has been a while since I wrote to you.  Every day I came back from my intense and wonderful studies at Hartman to share with you what I have been learning and experiencing, and every day the message I would have wanted to send the previous day, or even the previous hour, seemed to have shifted.  This summer in Israel has been a version of an emotional/psychic/spiritual/political kaleidoscope. No matter how still you try to hold the moment in your hand, inevitable and confusing change explodes in front of your eyes.  And so I despaired, for a few weeks, regarding what to share with you.   How to try to say something when I feel humbled that I cant share everything, and am also feeling numbed into wanting to say nothing?  Perhaps silence has its own sanctity?

  

It is now Monday afternoon, July 21.  I will be back in LA, at TBA, in my office in a little over a week. This experience, like all experiences we have in our lives, will recede into past tense. I am committed to bringing forward some of the lessons and feelings to you, my community, as we anticipate the next year in the life of TBA, and of the Jewish people.  And I also wanted to share some of my musings while they are still raw.

  

As I wrote in my last email, I apologize in advance for the length. I will try to be as brief as possible.  If it is too much to take in during one look at the screen, may I suggest you print it out and have something to read the next time you are less than riveted during services?  :-)

  

I have so much to tell you, but I'll need to focus.   For instance, I want so much to tell you about Shu'afat.  That is where I went with over 400 other Israelis/Jews, from across the religious and political spectrum, to offer condolences to the Abu Khader family on the horrific and, yes, terroristic death of their son Mohammad at the hands of Jewish religious/political extremists.  I want to tell you what it was like to be one of the first people off the first bus, and thus to stand face to face with Mohammad's father and literally feel his broken heart, and his empty eyes asking me, and all of us, "Why?" 

 

Mr. Abu Khader; he is the man on the left.

 

 I want to tell you that in that moment I felt embarrassed and ashamed, and that a gulf of political and territorial claims disintegrated as the chasm between us was nullified in his great sorrow.  I want to tell you that at that moment, before the event became speechified and tense and awkward, I felt that I was doing a kiddush hashem, my presence a defiant and unwavering response to some who questioned why I should go identify with the enemy.  I felt that in that moment, there was nothing more Jewish or holy that I could do, for it is a Jewish value to comfort the bereaved, especially this bereaved.  I want to tell you that I felt reinforced that some of my colleagues from Hartman were there, as well as my extraordinary teacher Micha Goodman (more on him later),

 

Micha comforting the family.

 

 an exquisite mind and an exquisite humanist, whose politics and address that put him somewhere in the center-right of the spectrum (he lives in Kfar Adumim, a town east of Jerusalem where I, too, have relatives, and to which I will return at the end of this email) do not in any way conflict with his open heart and his empathic Jewish soul and his rejection of extremism.  Daniel Gordis, who is often reviled by the political left for his staunch defense of Israel and her right to defend herself, was there as well.  Some were suprised.  Gordis? That hawk?  I was not.  There was nothing political about that "shiva" call.  Or...maybe there was everything political about it, in that by being there we all were condemning murder and torture and extremism in the name of political activism and in the name of Zionism.  I want to tell you that I was glad I had that intimate moment early on, because once the first Arab speaker rose to address those gathered, the first words out of his mouth being, "The settlers are Satan.  Netanyahu is Satan.  Peres is Satan.  We would not have accepted their visits.  We accept yours because you reject them and everything they stand for..." I felt demoralized and that my holy act of hesed was hijacked and misinterpreted.  I want to tell you that even with that I am glad that I was there, for a variety of reasons, one of which was being able to tell my parents of the visit.  Why?  Because as I spoke to my mother, she reminded me that when we lived in Israel from '74 to '75 in the neighborhood of French Hill, we used to go to Shu'afat all the time to buy spices, and car parts, and because Jerusalem was just a more open city then.  The neighborhoods abut one another. 

 

Here is how one would walk from the apartment I lived in in '74 to where the mourning tent was for the Abu Khdeir family

  

And the proximity reinforces both the sadly inevitable ever-presence of conflict, as well as the need, somehow, some way, to find a way to share this strip of real estate without hate.

 

I want to tell you all that...but it would take too much time.  And by the time I started thinking how to share it, I heard my first siren/azakah.  I want to tell you about that, too.  About the terror of hearing a siren announcing that a missile is on its way to where you are standing, a terror which for me had been dormant since '91 when I lived through the first Gulf War and spent many nights in a sealed room with a gas mask on my head.  I want to share with you how your emotional and physical system, which in some ways is always, behind the scenes, operating in a self-preservational mode so that you don't do something that would jeopardize your life, suddenly jumpstarts into first gear when you hear that siren.  I was standing with my friend and colleague Rabbi Howie Stecker.  We were 10 feet from my apartment in Jerusalem and about to walk to dinner.  I heard the siren. At least I thought I did. I asked him, "Is that a siren?"  He shrugged his shoulders, and time was in slo-mo.  After a few seconds it became clear that it was, indeed, Jerusalem's first siren since Hamas began hurling hundreds towards Israel.  I want to tell you what it was like to run back into our building, and to see my neighbors, most of whom I had yet to meet, gathering in the stairwell because our building, quaint and old, had no formal shelter.  I want to tell you that I didn't feel that my life was in danger because in that moment, my mathematical brain took over and my quick statistical analysis talked/duped me into concluding that the chances were infinitesimal that the first rocket lobbed towards Jerusalem that happened to evade the Iron Dome missile-defense system would land on the corner of Ruth and Rahel Imenu.  I want to tell you that I was calm, but also that I knew this wasn't a game, and that the siren wasn't a bluff, and that the four twenty-something Israeli women who shared an apartment one floor beneath me, who were out in the stairwell with us in sweats and tee-shirts, crying, shaking and nervous...mirrored to me that, my statistical analysis notwithstanding, this was a moment of war, an act of war.  I want to tell you that at that moment my rage at Hamas became uber-personal, because they were aiming at me (as opposed to "just" my friends, colleagues, cousins, people).  I want to tell you that during each of the two subsequent siren alerts I experienced in Jerusalem (in addition to the thousands of times my iPhone buzzed with the Red Alert app telling me that, somewhere in Israel, a missile was on its way) the experience became, somehow, more and more normative, and therefore less and less chilling...and that that very realization is, itself, chilling. 

  

I wanted to share that with you, but I don't know that I have the words to do it justice.  And by the time I started writing it, the kaleidoscope had shifted.  And there was something else to share with you.  I want to tell you about Iftar and Ramadan and the 17th of Tammuz, and a glimmer of hope and true religious brotherhood on Mt. Zion, just a couple of yards away from the tomb of King David.  This was a gathering which, if I am being honest with myself and with you, I would not have felt called to attend in previous years and during previous trips and previous iterations of self.  I had, perhaps unfairly, thrown these sorts of humanistic gatherings of Jews and Muslims, Israelis and Arabs, under the bus of presumed naivet�.  But this time, the associations were so poignant.  Jews were fasting to remember the moment when the walls of Jerusalem were breached, leading to destruction three weeks later on Tisha B'Av.  And Jews of conscience were also fasting for how hatred had infected Jewish thinking and political activity, as witnessed by the murder of the teenager Mohammad Abu Khader.  And Jews with broken hearts were also fasting for Eyal and Gil-Ad and Naftali, the murdered teenagers whose lives the murderers of Mohammed were ostensibly trying to avenge.  We were fasting for all those hurts, and more. And Muslims were fasting for Ramadan, a month of prayer and self-restraint which journeys through the solar calendar from year to year, since Islam does not have the calendrical fix-it that the Judaism does which keeps Jewish holidays generally in the same time of the solar year, each year.  This year, by happenstance, Jews and Muslims found themselves fasting at the same time.  Why not use that accident to link us, since so much has been dividing us?  I want to tell you that I thought that I couldn't look in the mirror and feel proud of my own Jewish values, tinged with both proud particularism and proud universalism, if I couldn't convince myself that this gathering, this shared break-fast, was holy, and required. A mitzvah in its own right.  I want to tell you that five of us endured an unnecessarily harrowing ride to Mt. Zion when a "short-cut" turned into a wrong turn into Silwan, an Arab neighborhood immediately south and east of the Old City. Not just into Silwan, but into the very bottom of Silwan where an unexpected barricade in the rode prevented us from driving out the other side and forced us to make a 9-point turn in an exceedingly crowded street, before making our way up to the gathering. In that moment, I felt as if our car were streaked with Israeli flags, announcing our Jewishness and Israeli-ness to the Arabs who were watching.  I felt profiled even as I was profiling.  And I was scared.  I want to tell you that we emerged from Silwan completely untroubled and then had a mini-revelatory experience as we sat with Jews and Muslims, rabbis and imams and sheiks (and a few Christians for some extra diversity), Zionists and Arabs, all there to express that they/we love and champion peace and brotherhood, and that we found ourselves religiously obligated to be there, in that very moment and space, to share stories, and hearts...and food!  A particularly lovely and light-hearted moment occurred when the Jews and Muslims realized that we have different "halakha."  For Muslims, the fast was over a few minutes into dusk.  For Jews, the fast was over when three stars emerged.  We were still going around introducing ourselves when one of the Muslims present pointed out that it was time to eat.  A rabbi responded by saying that Jews needed to wait a few more minutes.  Could we delay and then break the fast together?  The Muslims agreed.  The introductions continued.  And some very Jew-y looking Jews and rabbis taught some Torah. And some very passionate and religious Muslims and sheikhs shared words of wisdom.  

 

Jewish and Muslim religious leaders share words of wisdom

 

And we didn't talk about borders.  Or missiles.  Or Iron Dome.  Or "who started it."  Or 1948. Or 1967.  Or the Hebron riots.  Or Barukh Goldstein. Or Intifada 1 or 2.  Maybe that's what made the gathering so seemingly easy, so doable.  I want to tell you that as we sat and ate and shared, I heard a voice in my consciousness, yammering away within my center-right political mind, reminding me "this is pleasant, but useless.  This is agreeable, but accomplishes nothing."  And I want to tell you that I told that voice, in no uncertain terms, to shut up.  At least for a while. And I let myself fully inhabit the fullness and beauty of that moment.  When those who could be enemies broke bread together.  And though peace treaties were not signed...if ever they are to be, these moments, multiplied thousands of times over, will have made such treaties possible.

  

I want to tell you about that Iftar break-fast, but its exquisiteness faded.  Because the rockets kept on falling.  And because Israel suffered its first death of this war, as a volunteer who traveled south to support the targeted communities was killed by a missile strike.  And because Israel initiated a ground war to root out Hamas, and their wickedness.  Because Israel's government and military decided that the looming threat was too great to ignore, and that those terror tunnels that Hamas had been building, slowly and surely over the last few years since the previous conflict ended in a cease-fire that ceased very little of Hamas's activities, were now complete and complex, and were perfect conduits to use for sending terrorists through them, in order to pop up in exit holes within Israel proper with the intent of killing Israeli civilians.  I want to tell you that I don't know the first thing about military strategy, or what number of civilian casualties ought to be expected when fighting asymmetric war against an enemy intentionally embedded among civilians, who defiantly tell their own civilians not to evacuate after Israeli warnings, so that they will be there when the missiles come, and they will be killed in the bombing, and so that they will become the next martyrs to be used in Hamas's PR war against the State of Israel (which, I think, is a far more treacherous war than the missiles themselves threaten.  It is that war that stokes the fires of vicious anti-Israel and anti-Semitic rallies around the world, in Paris, in Frankfurt, in London, in Brussels, in Boston, in LA....).  I want to tell you that it hurts deep in my soul to see the human cost of Israel's defending its borders and Israelis' lives, and that as a father and a human and a Jew I have no solace in knowing that the deaths of most of the Gazan civilians are due to Hamas's villainy and fecklessness, since a dead child is a dead child.  But I also want you to know that I support Israel's leaders in their resoluteness, and that I firmly believe that were we to convince ourselves out of this battle, the civilian deaths would continue...they would just be Israelis murdered by the terrorists who infiltrate the border using the tunnels that this ground offensive is attempting to destroy.  And I want you to know that all of this theory and value-based thinking and balancing became utterly intimate yesterday afternoon.  We came into our classroom after lunch, excited to learn with and from Micha Goodman, mentioned above.  He was to teach us philosophical texts of the Rambam/Maimonides.  And he walked into class.  And said, "in my right hand I am holding Rambam's Guide for the Perplexed.  And in my left hand I am holding an iPhone communicating my Tzav Shmoneh."  We all knew instantly what he meant.  Tzav Shmoneh is the term used when reservists are called into military duty.  Micha, 40 years old, towards the end of his required reserve duty as an Israeli citizen, a brilliant and nimble thinker and teacher who had come to Hartman that day to teach us philosophy, to enlighten the confused, had just been called to duty. His unit was to assemble, as early as the next day.  He was about to go fight a war.  We all thought about the verses from Deuteronomy that give "outs" to conscripted soldiers who had built a house but never lived in it, or who had engaged a wife but never had the chance to enjoy marriage.  Wasn't there an out for an enlightened teacher of Torah who had students hungry to hear every word he had to share?  No.  Micha jumped from humor to horror, both hearing our pleas that he cancel class so that he could get home early enough to pick up his kids from camp and spend those hours with them that day, and then having the presence of mind to crack this joke: He said, "I'm being called.  But probably not into Gaza itself. In fact, if I am being asked to go to Gaza...you should all leave Israel!  Because if the army is so desperate as to be relying on my fighting skills, then Israel is really in trouble!"  Laughs.  Tears.  Disbelief.  But then utter belief, because this is Israel, and philosophers go to war, and fathers kiss their children goodbye, without being overly sentimental, knowing that, well, you just never know.  We were both horrified and somehow uplifted that among the fighters of Israel this week, there would be at least one man in green who had just spent the last two weeks teaching rabbis about ethics and war and peace and love and peoplehood.  (Upon finishing and editing this letter, Micha updated us that, for now, his call-up has actually been cancelled.  However, it does not change the pathos of that moment.  And, of course, he could be called in at any moment. And though he is not being called to reserves, about 40,000 other Israelis are.)

  

I would have wanted to share that with you, but maybe the stories and images just don't translate.  I would have wanted to share with you that our group of 27 rabbis is bonded and united, and also frayed and weary.  That one of my colleagues is bleary-eyed because his toddler now has nightmares and is waking up in his Jerusalem apartment 4-5 times a night.  I would have wanted to share that each study session burrowing into texts that deal with the Jewish poetry, morals and aspirations regarding war and peace is too achingly relevant, and that the texts both draw us all together as teachers of Torah, and also, like an overly sharp blade, cut rivulets of distinction between us regarding how we think, feel and teach about Israel.  And it can get personal.  And we are wounded, even though we know that it is somewhat obscene to use that word, this week, to describe the soft breakdown of social glue. I would have wanted to share all that, but maybe the inner group dynamics of the Hartman Rabbinic Leadership Initiative, Cohort 5, are not the most important things on the table. 

  

So now that you know what I would have liked to share with you, but have chosen not to, let me hone in on a moment that will stay with me for the rest of my life. And will continue to inform how I teach my children, and preach to my congregation, and think about the situation that Israelis are in that does seem truly unfathomable in its complexity.  I was spending last Shabbat in one of my favorite places on earth.  In fact, if I ever unexpectedly don't show up at shul for a few weeks, and you're wondering where I am, check Kfar Adumim, as it just may be that I have started my retirement early!  It would take a book to explain my connections to this little settlement (a term which I use, without a capital "S", as a loving and yet also totally benign and merely descriptive word to mean "a place where people live" as opposed to the overly politicized way the term is now used as a pejorative, denoting a violent and fanatic hilltop of "settlers" whose very presence and choice to live "there" is the real obstacle to Middle East peace.), but let me do it in a few sentences.  My maternal grandmother's first cousin was a brilliant philosopher and ideologue named Israel Eldad, who became the ideological voice for the far-right in Israeli politics.  His positions were clear and unwavering; he was a disciple of Ze'ev Jabotinsky and Uri Tzvi Greenberg, the inspiration and the poet of the Revisionist Movement.  He was also a gentle and wise and nuanced man, with great humor and softness. I learned so much from him. I loved him.  And I miss him.  His son, Arieh, was a brilliant and world-renowned burn surgeon who gave up a shining career in medicine (he served as the Surgeon General for the IDF as well as the head of the Burn Center at Hadassah hospital, which put him at the surgical center of some of the worst burns that emerged from the era of bus bombings during the 2nd Intifada) in order to serve Israel in the political sphere.  He served as a member of Knesset for a number of years before losing his seat in the previous election.  He inherited his father's extreme right politics, as well as his wit and humanity.  Since the early '80s he has lived in Kfar Adumim, which is about 10 miles north-east of Jerusalem, on the road to Jericho, Ein Gedi and Masada.  It is impossible to describe the natural and historical beauty of this place.  His backyard is the Judean desert, and one does not need to have an overly fertile imagination to conjure young David, before he was king, exploring the caves and wadis with his friend Jonathan, just off of the Eldad's porch.  Kfar Adumim is in Judea, and as such is over the Green Line.  Jews did not live in this part of Israel for nearly 2000.  Now it has grown from a small collection of caravans to a thriving town with its own suburbs.  It is also considered part of the Jerusalem "bloc" which would unlikely become part of any future Palestinian state were a treaty to be signed.  I should also note that it was the first settlement in Judea/Samaria that was intentionally founded as mixed, with both religious and non-religious residents.  It has been a highly successful experiment that has been replicated in other settlements both within and beyond the Green Line.  I have spent probably 30 Shabbatot with my family there, and it pulls me in a profound way. 

  

Arieh has five children, and as of now 3 of them have themselves settled in Kfar Adumim.  In fact this past weekend I was able to visit the home of Avigael, the 2nd oldest, who just two days before had moved into her new home which she, an architect, had designed.  Her home is on the other side of the village, and so instead of overlooking the beautiful Wadi Kelt, she peers out over the Dead Sea, and the hills of Jordan beyond it. 

 

Here is a picture of Avigael's unfinished porch.

 

Arieh's only son Uriel also lives on the Kfar.  Of all the Eldad children of that generation, he is the most like his father and grandfather.  He is incisively smart, and indefatigable, and ideological, and funny to the bone, and as committed a Zionist as can be.  And he is an impeccable mentsch.  At 32, he is mature and accomplished, with four children of his own and a budding, inspired career.  What does he do?  He has founded two "mechinot," which are year-long army preparatory programs to help young soldiers-to-be better understand what it means to serve the Jewish people and the Jewish state.  He is working on a 3rd one, and he was just recently in LA to do some fundraising for it.  He is particularly focused on a segment of the Israeli population that gets neglected and helping to turn them into motivated and principled soldiers and patriots.  I am telling you, with as much objectivity as possible, that spending 10 minutes with this guy is an eye- and heart-opener.  I went to Uriel's home for Shabbat lunch. It was supposed to be us, his children, his wife Tirzah (the daughter of the rabbi of Kfar Adumim) and two of his wife's friends from art school.  But four extra guests showed up.  Who?  These were four graduates of one of Uriel's "mechinot," young, beautiful, baby-faced, strapping Jewish soldiers.  They had arrived at his mechinot as partial mis-fits, and without a strong Jewish or Zionist identity.  Now these four were serving in some of the most elite segments of the Israeli military.  And they looked like they could have been in USY.  Why were they there?  Because they were literally the only four from their graduating class at Uriel's "mechina" who were not in Gaza.  Every single one of their co-graduates was, that Shabbat, somewhere within the Gaza Strip.  These four weren't for some reason having to do with the complicated decisions regarding which unit serves when and where.  They had this Shabbat off from the army.  And they felt the need to be together, and to be with Uriel.  So they came from different bases and showed up for Shabbat lunch.  I sat and ate delicious home-made tekhina and Israeli salad and some of Uriel's super-sweet challah, and felt the ancient/modern Judean desert breeze try to cool me down even as the sun tried to bake me, and watched the surreal scene as Uriel balanced his children (ages 2, 4, 6 and 8) on his knees without shooing them away even as he bantered with "his soldiers" about life and stories from the mechina, and about Gaza, and war, and the craziness of it all.  There was no compartmentalizing going on; the children and the breeze, the soldiers present and the soldiers absent, the secular art-school friends and the rabbi's daughter; the cousin from America and the zealot/patriot/leader/youngster/father named Uriel...the all mixed mellifluously.

  

After the four soldiers left, I witnessed this interaction, the one that will stay with me forever.  We were still out on the porch, and Uriel's oldest son, Michael, was asking questions that 8 yr-olds shouldn't even have the vocabulary for, let alone the maturity and composure to ask about.  About missiles.  And the Iron Dome.  And the difference between the "Dubd'van [Cherry]" unit in the army and the "Shayetet" [some version of Navy Seals].  And then came this, un-staged and unscripted.  "Abba?  If they want to kill all of us, why can't we kill all of them?"  He wasn't asking menacingly.  Just curiously.  He was sort of anticipating the Talmudic dictum which taught that "if one comes to kill you, then rise up and kill him first."  Simple math, right?  Simple ethics, right?  Abba...can't we just kill all of them to defend all of us?  Uriel didn't flinch. Or hesitate.  As if he had been preparing for this moment his whole life.  There were no microphones in front of his face.  There would be no record of this moment, except for the one imprinted on his son's soul.  And while his son was asking this question, his students/graduates were in Gaza, very much in harm's way.  And he said this, "Michael.  If you stop acting like a ben-adam, like a person...then you stop being a ben-adam."  He then said much more, along the same lines.  It was exquisite, a short but well-crafted and age-appropriate (at least age-appropriate given the forced maturity of Israeli children) sermonette on how to balance warfare with ethics, patriotism with morality, self-defense of the body/border with self-defense of the spirit.  Jews quibble regarding whether Jewish or Israeli exceptionalism is a myth, a haughty tidbit of triumphalism that makes us feel better about ourselves.  Well, this moment was exceptional.  Because it would have been so easy to nudge this little boy towards extremism, to nourish hate and vengeance rather than nuance and balance.  Because given what Israel in general, and Uriel's soldiers in particular, were facing in that very moment, Uriel could have eschewed quoting Pirkei Avot, which exhorts us to think of ourselves but not only of ourselves, and instead could have quoted overly pithy aphorisms that simplified an insanely complex situation in order craft the perfectly particularist Zionist.  I told Uriel later that I was proud of him, and amazed by him, and that his children and his soldiers were blessed to have his influence in their lives.

  

Are you still with me?  If you are, and you are waiting for a quotable at the end of this megillah that will wrap up everything nicely, I will disappoint you.  No single idea can tie up this package.  And I still have two more days in Israel, one of them in which I will travel with a Rabbinical Assembly mission to visit beleaguered and besieged communities in Sderot, Ashkelon and other towns and villages close by Gaza.  The kaleidoscope will inevitably shift again before I return home, but I just don't know how. 

  

So let me end, with art.  Tonight our group was treated to an aesthetic and artistic feast, gathering in the home of Andi Arnowitz, an absolutely incredible artist, originally from Kansas City, who gave us a private tour of her studio and her work.  Her artistry, which ranges in form/style from paper-cuts to silkscreens to large-scale installations to modern sculpture, and which aggressively and meaningfully takes on subjects as diverse as the Arab-Israeli conflict and the religious war against women, both within Judaism and without, and issues of infertility, and other morally complex topics, is so moving that I am hereby making a commitment that the next TBA shul Israel trip (any takers?) will have an audience with her to witness her extraordinary home and her extraordinary art.  At the end of our visit she showed us a movie about her installation at the Eyn Harod art museum, entitled "A Delicate Balance."  You can get a taste of it here: http://www.andiarnovitz.com/item.php?postid=316#a-delicate-balance.  It hangs in the museum in a corridor that must be traversed to move from one gallery to another.  And by traversing it, you literally are in it, clanging into these metal scrolls hanging wildly in a mobile-like suspension.  The scrolls are couplets; on one of them are engraved the words from an ancient Jewish text dealing with a particular topic, and on the other are engraved words from a modern article or description of that very topic as it plays out in Israeli society.  So, for instance, one hanging couplet has a scroll with ancient teachings regarding the obligation to redeem prisoners and a scroll with clippings from the ordeal of Gilad Schalit, who spent over five years in captivity in Gaza before being released in an amazing, and controversial, prisoner exchange.  What is most amazing to me about this piece of art is that it will not remain intact in its installation.  Think of most works of art in most museums you have been to. Don't get too close or an alarm will go off.  You dare not get a fingerprint on a Monet or nudge a Hellenic bust at the Getty Villa. But this piece of art one must enter.  And by entering it you will disturb it. And by disturbing it, the iron/clay pieces will knock into one another.  And chip and break.  And fall to the ground.  Her artwork actually lives and tells its story by allowing itself to be broken and incomplete.  When asked how she could stomach watching her exquisite creation be destroyed by those experiencing it, she replied, "That is Israel.  My description of it, and my vision for it.  Honest and bracing and also hopeful."  What I think she meant was that life here is delicate.  And always shifting.  And it binds the ancient to the modern in sometimes delicious and sometimes dastardly ways.  And things will break.  And the person who lives in and with Israel must walk through, and forward.  Delicately.  But always forward. 

  

But be delicate. But step forward.  But not too fast. But forward.  But there is brokenness around you.  But forward.  Always forward.

  

With great love and affection for you.  And with prayers for strength for the defenders of Israel. And for peace.