TEL AVIV—My older daughter Sari and I were walking along a side street here, headed for the city’s lustrous promenade of towering hotels, swanky eateries, bike rental stands, and public docks. The corner road, buttressed between two busy boulevards, momentarily softened the big city din of construction drills, emergency sirens, and the general bustle of Israel’s notorious traffic.
Suddenly we heard, from behind but approaching, the voice of an angry man coming from some indiscernible source, although evidently via some kind of speaker. Another man was also audible, though not enhanced electronically, responding and interrupting the voice with irritation and impatience. As the small car passed us, with its windows down on this sunny day, the whole thing became apparent: the driver was arguing with another man, all on a cell phone and being broadcast to the world on a blaring Bluetooth sound box. The driver was gesticulating and rocking with passion; his hands were not even on the steering wheel as his vehicle rolled by the generally indifferent pedestrian traffic.
“Only in Israel,” Sari and I said to each other at the same time. Yes, I thought. In fact, it was Israel—a land in constant, anguished motion, shouting and brimming with conflicting points of view, with the disputation unfiltered and public and unapologetic. All of this, in a vehicle headed somewhere with nobody’s hands on the control. Israel is a land of noise and nationalism.
And then there are the deep silences. In between the blue-green sea that kisses this redemptive land, this uncannily successful response to the European genocide, and the verdant fields of the basin that roll up to the Jordanian mountains, there are many, many graves and correspondingly deep pools of silence. Most of the silences are in tandem with the human condition; many are linked to Israel’s aching destiny as the fountainhead of Jewish hope and the reservoir of the world’s anti-Semitism.
Also yesterday, Sari was again the young witness to the aging realities of her father’s generations. We visited my mother, who, like my departed father, was born here in the years prior to World War II. My mother has declined and shriveled in recent months; the grandmother Sari once knew is weak and dependent though still of sharp edges and trademark bluntness. She seems, however, to be cleansing her soul a bit as she draws people near with more tenderness and even an occasional burst of contrition and outreach.
Sari and I were joined by my cousin Amir, whose two parents lie in the nearby cemetery just adjacent to my father. As little boys, Amir and I frolicked along the seashore and took field trips to the Sea of Galilee and to the graves of the Maccabees. Our four parents were both family and best friends, around the Sabbath tables and in the fields of battle. There are four graves in the cemetery; 3 of the 4 are filled even as the last waits for my mother.
A misty rain fell from the sky as Amir, Sari, and I visited the cemetery. He and I donned baseball caps in place of yarmulkes as the rains lightened and the sun broke through, exposing the two of us leaning and silently praying over the graves of our parents. One, two, three—and the still empty number four. Sari stood by with outstretched hands and a sweet, empathetic look of biological wistfulness. She embraced the melancholy and touched both of our paternal shoulders.
We middle-aged men dried our eyes and Sari exhorted us to notice the full arc of the rainbow that now linked all of us to the noise and to the stillness of human life. And to the sullen mysticism of Israel.
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Rabbi Kamin is a freelance writer based in Encinitas, California. He may be contacted at ben.kamin@sdjewishworld.com