Subject: Shabbat Shalom! from SDE ELIYAHU

Dear Friends, Family, Colleagues and Acquaintances:

First I wish to everyone Shabbat Shalom. I hope this day's or weekends rest provides you a time in which to enjoy the fruits of your labor and to meditate on what it means to be simultaneously a creator and created.

I am at Kibbutz Sde Eliyahu. It is a Modern Orthodox Kibbutz in Beit Shean Valley just south of Lake Kinneret or the Sea of Galilee. It has been over a month that I have been here and over a month without internet access...until now. For the first three weeks of this month I have been working in the dish-washing room of the cafeteria. The work was six days a week, very dirty and unpleasant. I am a "mitnadev" or "volunteer" until the Ulpan begins in another two weeks...which means I am on very bottom of the rank ladder. The socialist ethic of Kibbutz life corresponds to a great degree with George Orwell's famous line from Animal Farm...Everyone is created equal...but some more equal than others.

Last week I was transferred after I lost my temper with a boss who constantly yelled at me. If I didn't understand a Hebrew word (he didn't speak English) he would yell louder...as if this would miraculously help. I am used to not being in control of sentimental, poetic emotions but anger and resentment is something new. The job was really something else. We had two enormous dishwashers (one for meat, one for dairy) and after each meal whichever one we had used had to be completely dismantled, scrubbed clean with bleach and re-configured. Time was of essence so there was a great deal of pressure, the "taskmaster" shouting KADIMAH! KADIMAH! (FORWARD! FORWARD!) every few moments. I tried eighty different ways to make the work a meditation...to counsel myself against seeming another molly-coddled American and to somehow make the work fun...but it was impossible.

The Israeli mentality on so many levels seems to invite confrontation...and I surrendered. After being screamed at from six feet away to do a job differently than the way five minutes before I had been told to do it, I slammed down the tray of dishes and levelled my eyes at my boss and said something unpleasant. He invited me not to continue working with him and I accepted. In some ways it was the best thing that could have happened. Ever since, interested parties have been coming and introducing themselves to me and wanting to know the story. (Usually the die-hard kibbutzniks--over 900 of them--keep their distance from the volunteers.) It proves that even though Judaism teaches "ha'lashon ha'ra" (the evil tongue) is the only sin which cannot be atoned for, even people on a religious kibbutz enjoy gossipping.

At any rate, I was transferred to Bio-Bee. This is a Kibbutz-owned factory that mass-breeds bumble bees for pollenation and sends them all over the world. My job here is not glamorous (I place caps on containers of sugar-water and sometimes have to scrape out dead bees, their wax and egg sacks from breeding trays) but it is a step above the dishwasher! Plus, I have gained access at last to a computer.

It is interesting that in this letter which has been bubbling in my head every since I have arrived here, I chose first to dwell on the sacrifice I am making to be hear rather than the reward. The reward is very special.

What I am about to write may sound strange to many of you, indeed many of you may feel alienated by the convictions I desire to explain. You, the dearest people in the world to me, represent backgrounds from all over the world. You are Jews from accross the spectrum of observance and belief. You are devout or cultural Christians from accross the spectrum of this faith. You are Buddhists, Wiccans, Muslims and "devout Atheists". All of you are witnesses to the interaction of nature's beauty and your own moral consciousness. All of you reside in this tensioun with integrity and grace and that is why I am thankful to know you.

Among you are poets, philosophers, rabbis, teachers, businessmen/women, laborers, students, artists, scholars, etc. All of who have found, strive to find and work to maintain a connection to the mystery of being alive, not only for the sake of yourself but for the sake of your communities. The question of what "community" means in this day and age is a huge one...I certanly have no easy answer for it. However, perhaps what I am discovering now for myself...is that as much as this question is contempory, it is also eternal...and that there is a specifice guide--for myself and for other children of Israel--to follow.

I have become a Jew who observes the commandments given to him and his people by G-d through Moses at Sinai. I never thought I would say that! It surprises me that I wrote it so simply. While something in the language still tastes to me like an antiquated paradigm, in following my heart's wish to observe these commandents, my brain is learning more about human nature than ever I thought possible...the more mitzvot I follow, the more I feel am forced to be autonomous...strange. I could write books on each of the words I used in the first sentence: Jew, observes, commandments, him and his people, G-d, Moses, Sinai...but I won't, at least not yet.

Simultaneously, the principles of secular humanism with which I was raised, beliefs in cultural relativity and simply the good manners I was taught as a child (I didn't always practice) counsel me against asserting my beliefs over and above the beliefs of others. I find myself in somewhat of a Catch-22. It will be fun to work out of it.

Perhaps the best thing to do is to wish you all a wonderful Sabbath rest. I should have regular internet access from now on and I look forward to reading and writing to and from you all. I am yours with the warmest regards, B'ahava v'shalom, Philip Solomon.

Subject: A New Song

Dear Family and Friends:

Shalom Aleichem. I am in Jerusalem taking a HOFESH (vacation) from the kibbutz for a week before my second ulpan begins...looking into places to study in the fall. Its cold, wet and cloudy but ever beautiful.

I spent the morning walking around the old city wall, past the Damascus gate down into an entirely Arab section of the city. My goal was to walk to Hebrew University (which I eventually did) but reckoning only by an instinctual compass-needle, each step I took down into the valley between the Temple Mount and the Mount of Olives was a discovery.

Soon after passing the Peddler's Market, an outdoor "shuk" full of broken records, plugless toaster ovens, used shoes, black-market tobacco, etc.--all of the faces become just a shade darker and (both men and women) swathed in vivid head-scarves...most but not all. I noticed a similar tension existing in this world as in the one I have come to call "mine": The Covered-heads vs. the Uncovered-heads walking together in an ideological mine-field even as they stand one behind another in line before the same Falafel stand.

I weaved my way through the rain-drops, the veering taxis, the occasional beggar and constant sidewalk braggarts. The shops grew less clean and the buildings more damaged as I approached the valley floor. Rain began to fall harder and harder. I was hesitant to enter any of the shops, being nervous about my obvious Jewishness and embarassed to realize that I have been in this country over four months and do not know how even to say "thank-you" in Arabic.

The rain strengthened and I dodged for a doorway covered by an onning of corrugated aluminum. Just as I did, the heavens really opened.

Already having begun to climb slightly from the valley's lowest point, I could watch as the pale yellow, almost grey stone and sand of Jerusalem's old city was pelted repeatedly with sheets and sheets of winter rain. Sultan Sulayman's wall marched from forced corner to forced corner far above me in a drenched distance--inclusive of discarded trash, buckling sidewalks overtaken by sand, naked clothes-lines, mosques, synagogues, fruit stands and two peoples so pious and oppressed, it is now impossible to distinquish which characteristic--piousness or experience of oppression defines the other.

Looking at a warehouse stacked with crates of fruit and vegetables doubling as mechanics garage, watching a father and son scramble across the street to stand beneath its dry, nearly vaulted ceiling...a million misgivings swept through my mind about claiming "title" in these times. As the ululating wail and call to prayer echoed through loud-speakers over this Muslim part of the city, it was impossible not to be moved by its simultaneous longing and strength. Indeed I felt it as keenly (if not more) than the cantor's recitation of the Eighteen Benediction this morning at minyan.

I did make it at last to Hebrew University where I ferreted out the offices of the National Council of Jewish Women's Research Institute for Social Work in Israel. I met briefly with the American director of the program and entertained myself in her office by reading on all the research projects NCJW funds through the University: academic tracking of newly absorbed immigrants, studies of the pedagogic challenges with native Israelis, Russians and Ethiopians in the same classroom, early-childhood care where Palestinian and Israeli children learn and play together...

I thumbed through an article, an interview with my grandmother and father about my great-great-grandmother, founder of the Council. As I actually sat beneath a framed poster of her and her accomplishments hanging on the wall, the irony of it all was hard not to ignore. Historically narcicisstic as the sentiment may be, I felt like a strange embodiment of this age sitting there with my now slightly raggy beard, kipah and tzit-tzit--a millenial joke on all those who fled from language and deeds of Judaism believing only the values could support their identities in a pluralistic America.

When Ms. Eshet--the director of this NCJW office in Jerusalem returned, she assured my I was in "good" company. It turns out that Trotsky's grandson has long graduated from being a yeshiva bocher--and is now and I imagine has been for quite some time a full-fledged black-hatter with eight children...studying perhaps what we might call, the Eternal Manifesto.

On this note... Below I have included part of a lengthy letter written to a new friend from the dati world (who writes beautifully), responding to tensions between being a poet/artist and a newly observant Jew. I hope you find it interesting...I believe it more closely paints the interior landscape I am witnessing here in Israel than much of what I have written thus far. That said...it may be a little swollen with rhetoric. Please judge for yourselves. ******** ...

You asked in your letter what I meant by "Language" and perhaps why I feel tensions between my commitment to "language" and my comittment to observant Yiddishkeit. Are they not one? Perhaps the first thing to do is to try to explain what it means to me to be a poet; secondly, to explain what it means to me to be an observant Jew; lastly, to touch on certain tensions and agreements with the two "identities".

As a poet, I feel duty-bound (commanded afilu) to advance the subtlety, beauty and complexity of meaning...to expand and deepen my awareness of the world by striving to see and present connections between divergent identities...to not only assert the unity of our experience but also to show it. Here follows a new, old poem of mine:

ANISETTE

The challenge is to isolate

from the long robe kissed by history

a language that is congregate

but not subsurvient to its own identity:

i.e. This room is a magician's box,

stabbed by swords of sunlight.

I repeat to myself (while picking its locks):

"Fool them but don't FOOL them" and one day might.

Thus HERE is our altar.

Let us worship someting, visitor.

Let us go beyond detail...and be bold.

I have told you I am half-bird, half-diplomat.

I have asked if with coffee you take anisette.

Are not our nipples flecked with gold?

**********************************

When I sit down to write I want to use words exactly as I possibly can; however, I do not want to explain. Explanation stands outside and points. Poetry is a gesture, also, but it ultimately points to itself...it simply is. I chose the above poem, because of all mine, its gestures are perhaps the most elusive (this does not mean necessarily good...its flaws--which are many--exist in its intentional playfulness).

When I write a poem, I try to avoid expressions that come easily. If the expression comes easily, it is probably not mine...it may be a dead metaphor. If I did not really work for it, so to speak, to pull it from the depths of my own heart, then that language is already used-up (perhaps not for the sake of an essay) but for a poem, which is where new language is born, I feel it won't do.

Every poem also has an audience, sometimes specific, sometimes not. The audience for my poetry is usually larger than the Jewish people. If I rely too heavily on Jewish religious conventions, I break two of my own rules: first, I am unoriginal and two, I alienate a large part of my audience, a global community with--I hope--a global consciousness.

However, I have learned over these last few months that I need (at least right now and I suspect for the rest of my life) religious conventions. I have learned that I need them not only as connections with Am Yisrael but also in order to make and commit to moral realizations about myself.

Additionally, I have learned that it is only by being fully a member of the family of Israel that I become a member of the world family. I become truly myself, a man who knows that his individual identity cannot be separated from a familial, collective identity (human first, Jew second...and third, both).

And finally (for now), I have learned that by acknowledging the binding authority of mitzvot, by submitting to the Infinite's Will, my own will strengthens. I enter into the most noble arena of all--the wrestling with oneself, the constant struggle to become a more morally conscious human being.

The question remains, however, is it possible to be both priest and poet? As a poet, what is my relationship to the religious conventions within commanded communal prayer, liturgical poems with which many of you will be familiar: Ashrei, Lecha Dodi, Yedid Nefesh, Adon Olam, Yigdal...afilu Sh'mona Esrei. What does it mean to create poetry meant to be uttered by a congregation together?

The idea is not foreign to me...but in a contemporary sense it makes me uncomfortable. If someone were to assign me the task of putting together a series of English/American poems to be read ritually each morning, afternoon and evening...I would pale at the suggestion. Who writes "we" anymore? Our "we"s are too various, too multifarious to be enveloped by the embrace of one man or woman's rhyme.

To be sure, I know poets who have done it, who strive to continue do it, who have cried with our collective mouth...but loath I would imagine them to be if we turned their words into talismans.

In reference to communal prayer, I would almost say that we have approached a different age of sacrifice. In the days of the Temple, our people lured from their flocks the plumpest she-goat, the most tender-eyed calf, and slaughtered them with careful and precise devotion. Our people collected the flowing blood from their sacrifice and painted each corner of the altar with this vital rust, afterwards mixing sweet oil and incense with the animals' entrails to be burned slowly over a sacred fire. It remains to be said that WE DO NOT DO SO ANYMORE.

For two thousand years, we have brought gifts of study and recitation to the rainbow altar of the air. Without the Temple, by recounting a description of the sacrifice, we performed it as if in truth...or is it not taught so by our sages? Our concept of sacrifice evolved as our civilization evolved (given that that evolution was rather forced as our Temple was destroyed). Where once we killed of our beasts and kine because our primitive minds needed to see, taste and smell its own diminution made for the sake of the Allmighty, now we sacrifice our time and tongues.

Is it perhaps time to evolve again, to recognize that a fuller, more intimate sacrifice can be made? But how?

The impulse is true and ancient. I imagine any beginning in this direction will be clumsy but were not also Abraham's first attempts clumsy...as we might imagine them to be, sitting around his fire and tent singing of an Infinite and Beneficent Other he sensed just beyond his very skin (perhaps even within)...the Master of all gods.

I certainly am not yet educated enough to know where to begin this discussion...but I know that I am much more moved, feel closer and more connected to secular poetry--English and Hebrew. Whereas just as I honor Shakespeare but do not try keep him as a constant conversation partner, similary I feel about the language in our Siddur (presently my constant conversation partner). Its priceless antiquity is simultaneously my greatest treasure and greatest burden.

I don't know how to answer this question...all I can say is that the concept of sacrifice must stay. The self must give of its self, must acknowledge its littleness, its limitations. Our prayers today will lead us to identify with the G-dhead but at the same time recognize human imperfection.

One last issue comes to mind. I cannot help but think that in the hazy dawn of our civilization, learning and the idleness it existence necessitated were hard-won. Those who knew to read and write were mostly melancholic men hidden from wind, earth and commerce by the walls of a royal library.

Conversely, ours was a family of shepherds and our legends progressed from ear to ear, probably like in Native American tribes, from the wise cripples in our lineage whose tribal value lay in what honey, what various and terrifying mysteries they could seduce for G-d from the olive trees and pregnant moon.

These images remain powerful for us. (Come to Israel and see.) And to be sure, the olives still ripen. The moon yet grows pregnant. However, as do the neon lights!

What psalm will be sung for the bent re-bar in the broken concrete pillar? Or the family van flashing its backward reflection through the mirrored squares of the banks on main street? Or of grocery lines? Of power lines?

Subject: Jerusalem Report

Dear Family and Friends: Hello to all.

As this is my last day in Jerusalem...and I have much news to relate...and though I have many personal messages to return...I am first going to write one of these "public letters" and then try to answer notes individually. I will try to say hello in person to all...but if you do not receive an immediate response, please don't worry you are at the top of the list. Know that I am absolutely grateful for your messages. Travelling such as this, an expatriate of sorts who changes environments (it seems) often as I change my clothes--at the same time radically building a new relationship to Judaism and human history--its very comforting and important to know there is a continuity that links the person I am becoming with the person I have been. So thank you. To say it simply, your words are very important to me.

The first news I have to relate concerns my plans for the coming year. As I believe I wrote in the letter of a few days ago, I came to Jerusalem for a break from the monotony of kibbutz life and to search for alternatives/opportunities for more advanced study...either now or in the fall. Well, I have found it.

The yeshiva (academy dedicated to the study of Torah) I plan to apply to in the coming year is called PARDES. (If you are interested in learning more aside from what I will write, you can look on the web at www.pardes.org.il.) PARDES means "orchard" in Hebrew and from the mystical equivalence it gained in pre- and post-Mishnaic literature with the Garden of Eden...we have gained the word we know in English as PARADISE. While the Pardes Institute is not the Garden of Eden, upon entering its thirds floor apartments in the outskirts of the New City...I felt nothing but joy.

PARDES is a non-affiliated but absolutely halakhic institution. Halakha is its back-bone, teaching Torah from the perspective that it is the Jews' responsibility to accept the yoke of Heaven and--to extend the metaphor--thus lead the Presence of G-d into the awareness of all humanity. With that said (and indeed that is a lot), their philosophy is to be entirely non-coercive.

What does this mean, to be entirely non-coercive? First, women and men study together. Secondly, the entire Jewsih family is represented: orthodox, conservative, reconstructionist and reform (in its student body, not in its teaching staff). Because of this, Rabbinic and pre-rabbinic students come from all over the world (and every "movement") to study with some of its foremost Torah scholars in the traditional "hevruta" (paired-study) style.

Additionally, and perhaps which was the clincher for me, the teachers at PARDES value the contributions in modern Jewish thought made by thinkers who completely oppose their stance. Yesterday, for instance, I sat in on a seminar on the writings of Mordecai Kaplan and Martin Buber--two men (from very different perspective themselves) who have made an enormous impact on my religious, sociological and philosophic sensibility.

The problem with both thinkers is that they make it very easy--Buber perhaps even mandatory--to abandon any sense of obligation to mitzvot. Rather than being attacked, these men, their lives and their struggles were really reverenced the rabbi leading the class. Their arguments were taken very seriously...and no pronouncement was given as to why exactly there were or were not wrong. It was the students responsibility to argue it out among themselves. I was enthralled.

The instituion is also for beginners...which I am certainly one. Most probably, unless I make leaps and bounds in my studies at Sde Eliyahu, I will enter at a beginner/intermediate track, focusing more on Chumash (the Pentateuch), the K'tuvim (Writings) and Neviim (the Prophets). I will also study Mishna and Gemarra (the two biggest elements of Talmud and the real meat of Jewish study) but somewhat less so. The above are morning classes and make up the biggest part of the curriculum.

In the afternoon, I will study Midrash and Aggadah (interpretations, legends, lore, etc.), Tfilah (prayer) and Modern Jewish Thought. Not only this, but in the evening I have the opportunity to learn trope (chanting the Torah and Tfilah) and--get this--the scribal arts! A mamish sofer comes in once each week to instruct students in the arts of using the stylus to write Sifrei-Torah and Mezzuzot.

I have really fallen in love...and now it only remains to apply, be accepted and find an apartment in Jerusalem come the fall. All of these things I have been told will be more or less--B'Ezrat HaShem--easy to accomplish with a little groundwork and elbow-grease. So that's my news. I apologize if I have gone on at length...but I am very, very thankful and joyous...and thus overflowing.

Aside from this news, my stay in Jerusalem has been really on the whole incredibly fun and uplifting (davka, this was not my experience in the past). I walked all over the New City exploring streets and quarters I had not yet seen. Yesterday, in the Jewish market off of Jaffa, the feeling of huddling from the damp, cold and being alternately smushed and graceful, as I weaved my way through customer and stall-keepers shouting the names and prices of fruit, vegetables, bread, underwear (you name it) back and forth at each other. Simultaneously, I felt completely a part of the bright colors and ruckus and utterly separate, a simple, smiling observer (it helped that after I bought a neck-scarf and two pair of boxer shorts, I hadn't a shekel left in my pocket).

After studying at Pardes yesterday, I visited Yitzchok and Sarah Engel in the Ezrat Torah neighborhood. Many of you will remember from an earlier letter about these cousins, back in my first week in Jerusalem. They are two very aging and very holy "black-hatters" who welcomed a beardless, completely khaki boy into their home and synagogue last Simchat Torah. Back at that time, as Abba Yitchok (Father Isaac as Sarah calls her husband) and Sarah speak a very few words of English but as I did not speak Hebrew, Yiddish or German--we sometimes had a tough time of it.

Well, I had supper with them last night and talked and listened to a blue-stream of stories about family, about coming to Israel, about differences between the secular and religious here, about Torah and the absolute miracle that a people can be restored to their homeland after two millenia of exile. Again, I was warmly and graciously accepted by them--although I still wear khakis--so warmly, that it was difficult not be overwhelmed by their kindnesses. And its not just their kindness either.

I remember that after the feast of Simchat Torah, Abba Yitzchok gave me the mitzvah of saying the blessing that comes after the meal. I remember very well his sadness, his shaking head and disappointment with my learning as I struggled painstakingly through the several paragraphs of Hebrew. Indeed, after a time both he and Sarah left the table to let me wrestle through pronouncing the words alone. On this occasion, as I sung them loudly, seeing his smile and hearing Sarah's even louder "Amen"s...it was powerful.

I don't know exactly if one can call my cousins "contemporary" people but neither are they simply the xenophobic echo of Eastern Europe. They are thinking people who follow Israeli and world news carefully and are very concious of their place in its commentary on society. Nevertheless, hearing the voice and seeing the smile of Yitzchok and Sara was similar to being affirmed by every generation that came before the mixed blessing of our American freedom. They simply said, "Thank you for remembering...thank you for redeeming."

One last little story and I will let everyone go for a while... This morning as I walked down to daven at the Western Wall, everybody was being held back by the police far above the court. As more and more people gathered--groups of camera-laden tourists and the pious with their bags of Tallis and Tefillin (thank you, Yossi)--we kept staring into the huge expanse before the "Kotel" wondering what was happening.

Eventually, a six-wheeled, bright yellow, remote-controlled robot with a long arm extending from its top crept slowly out onto the stone. I followed the invisible line of its trajectory and saw, far below, a hand-bag or back-pack hung over one of the fences before the Kotel. All held their breath as the robot approached the bag and after several attempts, hooked on its closing claw one of its straps.

The "tik" as they are called in Hebrew was lifted off of the fence and set down on the stone. After some length of time (perhaps the claw, was changing places with another tool) a long barrell extended from the robot's arm. Suddenly, the entire area echoed with a sharp but deep blast as from a shot-gun...again, again and then again as the robot attempted to pre-detonate any bomb left in the bag.

Baruch HaShem, no bomb blew up. On the last blast, only, shreds of of what seemed American money went fluttering like confetti at a wedding in a big cloud trough the air. It certainly was no wedding. I was reminded again of the drastic dual nature of this place. I remember a teaching (I have no recollection from which text it comes, but I believe it is Kabbalistic--perhaps Sefer Yetzirah) concerning the fact that as somethings potential for good, for holiness or for a special power increases in the world...as does its potential for evil, for venom and hatred increase. The greater the opportunity, the more we stand to lose from not accepting its responsibility. This is the lesson of Jerusalem...it is one that I pray we all learn soon.

I send love to all and look forward to reading your words. I am yours

Warmly B'shalom, P I N H A S - S H L O M O (philip solomon)

Subject: Baobob

Dear Friends and Family:

It a rather cool night tonight in Emek Beit Shean...but not cold. I am sitting in the office of the ulpan director. As in most offices everything is beige and plastic. Except for the bright photographs of Israeli orchids. These are huge blow-ups: pale pink and dark purple, yellow-tongued, whose petals' delicate veins are high-lighted by a tight sun whose ghost still shines from somewhere outside of their cheap, beige frames.

There are also clusters of pictures of past ulpanists. Their smiles are frozen in awkward attitudes of comradery, leaning on all manner of desert ruins...mostly broken beige columns surrounded by broken, beige stone before dry, treeless mountains under a dusty blue sky. It may sound a little bleak but it is in fact stunning and beautiful.

Outside of the office door, I imagine the kibbutz is beginning to sleep. Small roads lead to larger roads or alternatively to paved paths that meander and peter out before the doors and gardens of the different houses on kibbutz. I imagine the different paths I take during my day. There is a section of the kibbutz I have longed for quite a time to try with my tongue, or rather, typing fingers.

This is the baobob forest--a lush, mysterious place on kibbutz, somewhat out of place, verdant, shaded and cool at all times of the day. The forest is a sanctuary of great-boled trees whose branches not only reach out into the air but also dangle slender tubers to the earth. The tips of these tubers look like grotesque, flattended hands. When the tuber finally finds the soils, it reaches in and grabs its way down to further sourches of water.

An old baobob tree has a main trunk around which three men could encircle by joining hands but the myriad "branch-roots" expand the vertical mass of the tree exponentially. This barky harp of sinews, of tree tissue is beautiful but unsettling. Everytime I pass by, walking hurriedly not to miss morning prayers or leisurely on my way the dining facility (I never seem to have a problem being late for meals) the trees almost accost me. They seem very naked...or rather their vital need is so radically exposed, their unsatiable thirst.

No grass, no other plant nor tree grows in this small forest. All the ground-water is pulled up and channeled up and off through the grey branches to the green, eye-shaped leaves. Though it is the tree's nature to do so, I am always made uneasy by this massive efficiency, what seems to me greed. No other plant can establish itself under the cool shade of the baobobs. Thus, the ground is unadorned and barren. The dark earth is empty beaten flat by the constant traffic of people like me.

Sometimes, as I do with all trees (when I am confident that no one is looking) I stop to lay my hands on the bark. I carress the knots and shape of its striving, trying to teach my hands the words for the texture of the trees' elephant skin. With the baobobs I always come away shuddering, shaking my hands out in the air, hoping the superstitious tingle will leave them. Then I hurry out of the forest...whether I am late to pray or not.

Love to all,

Philip Solomon

Subject: Tmarim

Dear All:

I have not much time to write...a long line and alotted time, etcetera. Purim has just ended for those of us whose cities were walled in the days when Joshua lead Israel into Canaan. For those of you keeping in the states I wish you an easy fast and a Purim Hag Sameach and to everybody, my warmest regards.

I have changed jobs again and am incredibly happy. Tomorrow morning I will wake up at 4:30am, hurry off to the dawn minyan and pray. Knock back a cup of coffee and jump in the van headed for the date orchards.

My job right now is to climb onto a giant metal platform that is lifted 15 meters into the air hydraulically by a machine that looks like a cross between a monster truck and a fork-lift. Equipped with the tools of the trade: a denim sack filled with bottles of pollen, a saw-toothed sickle knife strapped to my elbow (so I can grab, use and then let go), rubberbands around my wrist and a leather glove on my left hand to protect against thorns--I climb from the platform into the palm fronds of the date tree, swaying in the slight wind of Beit Shean Valley.

My job is to cut open the fruit-pods of the female trees and pollenate the young branches. The knife bites into a brown, tongue-shaped protrusion growing from the center of the date-palm. The brown "klipa" or skin cracks away and a moist, pale yellow bouquet of stems springs free. The knife is dropped and with a squeeze bottle of pollen-talc mix, we dust the little nubs which in a few weeks time will begin to swell with the sun and sugar to become dates. A rubber band snapped around the bundle finishes the job...then on to the next (from five to fifteen per tree).

The job is made more interesting by two more factors: First, the process takes place forty-five feet in the air. I have to climp from the "cherry-picker" into the the tree itself and work my way through the fronds to where the pods are ready to be popped. Often one has to climb out completely away from the platform; when a wind starts up and the tree begins to sway...so does the stomach. The other caution-flag are the thorns which are sharp and tipped with a natural poison that leads to slight paralysis and inflammation--not serious but uncomfortable to say the least.

Succinctly put...I LOVE IT!

I hope everyone is happy and healthy.

I am yours b'shalom

Philip

Subject: I am the FOO-man

Dear Family and Friends,

I am writing from a youth hostel in Tel Aviv whereat I have availed myself of their internet services. I journeyed early this morning from the Beit Shean Valley in order to visit the passport office at the U.S. Embassy. (My regular passport is stuck on a clerk's desk somewhere in the Offices of the Ministry of the Interior in Afula...who happen to have gone on strike just after I sent them my passport in order to renew the visa!) I was able to get a new passport in a relatively short amount of bureacratic time and so am left with a YOM KEIF, a fun day, to spend in Tel Aviv. I plan to walk up Rechov Allenby and poke around in the used bookstores for a few hours this afternoon. I've already had some great Thai-food for lunch and am on the look out for a small adventure before returning to Kibbutz.

It is hard to believe that I have been in Israel for just over six months...and will be bound for WV via Brooklyn in just a few days. Funnily, it is just now that I'm feeling quite "assimilated" and comfortable with Israeli culture and my place within it. My Hebrew, though far from excellent, allows me to converse with most anybody I meet; my religious practice has become quite solid (in the sense that I am at last somewhat comfortable with how much I have yet to learn and however fluent I become in fulfilling the mitzvot, 100 times that fluency is what I infinitely still stand to gain); my work in the T'marim (dates) continues to be exhausting and exhilerating; and I am building true and lasting friendships with the Haverim of Kibbutz Sde Eliyahu.

Within the Kibbutz community, the dates has seemed to attract several American intellectuals who were disenchanted with big city life, for one, and with the uncomfortability of being an observant Jew in a country where one feels a stranger. At work I do a fair amount of listening, a lot of joking and even more sweating. It is an incredible enterprise to work within a community whose religious ideology demands more than a moral commitment to people but also to the earth. As I have written before Sde Eliyahu is virtually an entirely organic-farming operation; in addition, all of its industry (bee-breeding, the spice factory, organic pest-control) is related to agriculture. It is a profound recognition for humanity's responsibility to the earth and vice-versa--informed completely by Jewish law--that makes Sde Eliyahu such a rare, special and...well, sane place.

I am learning that each species of dates that the kibbutz grows is sensitive to pollen in various ways. Aside from the method of pollenation that I described in my last e-mail, I have recently been indocrtinated in something called "FOO". FOO calls for a two man team, one to drive a tractor and the second to be strapped into a harness fastened to the platform mentioned in the previous message. The man in the harnass is lifted to the height of the trees or a little above and as the tractor proceeds at a good clip (d**n fast if you ask me) he must pollenate emerging brances by using the FOO.

Unlike the FORCE, the FOO is quite limited by space and time...but perhaps it may be as difficult to master. The FOO is a very slender, light-weight aluminum gun powered by air pressure from the tractors engine. The gun is connected to a large bucket of pollen-talc-creosite mix that is likewise fastened to the harnass. The FOO-man chews his lip with nervousness as he looks down to the tractor driver ten meters below and blows the okay-horn with two short blasts...then the team is off, bent for broke on a race with Spring.

The FOO-man stands like a first-mate on the bow of an orchard schooner, his pollen-harpoon held aloft, ready to aim and fire. Not only must he be vigilant for any pod that has even slightly cracked to expose the pale, nubbed-branchlets but also for the great, poison-spiked palm-fronds that are slapping by him, above, below and to the side. On more than one occasion, FOO-man has silently congratulated himself on a right perfectly aimed "FOO" (this is the sound made when the pollen exits the aluminum-tube and hence the name) when upon turning round, he is slapped just as perfectly, full-in-the face by a big, green, painful hand of humility. Combine this with the fact that the orchard's floor is by no means flat and as the bumps are taken, the platform bucks like a robotic bull in a Texas steak-house. On more than one occasion, FOO-man has been mightily glad for rope and harness. ...

I see the hostel attendant motioning that my time is up and I have much on my list today so...

My love and blessings to all, I look forward to seeing all of those who I will be G-d willing seeing soon. I am yours,

With Greath Warmth,

Philip Solomon

Independence Day

Dear All,

It feels like it has been some months since I last lifted my fingers to type to you. Truth be told, I have amassed a few drafts of letters written along the way to the United States and back to Israel. I passed through Brooklyn, WV and Canada...back to WV and again through Brooklyn before touching down at Ben Gurion Airport. This writing it seems is going to stay filed but not forgotten...lending itself to be chopped and pieced as I get closer to "a larger endeavor".

It's going on 7:30am right now...already late in the morning by kibbutz standards. I am sitting at an old dinosaur of a p.c. by a screened window through which I see the accumulated detritus that lurks behind and between kibbutz buildings: metal pipes, broken playground equipment, concrete tiles--everything brown, grey or rusty-red...enveloped by yellow weeds, Queen Anne's Lace and the low-slung branches of a flowering tree. It's June and getting hot.

The last few weeks have seen a parade of experience and reflection marching through my head. As a religious quest as it were becomes more settled, as I feel more comfortable and fluent in communal prayer and the practice of mitzvot, the larger--perhaps more darkly lurking questions concerning the State of Israel rise to the surface.

My plane touched down on the hot runways of Ben Gurion (halfway between Jerusalem and Tel Aviv) exactly on Yom Ha'Atzmaut, Independence Day. As I lugged my bags and tools-of-the-trade toward the bus-stop headed towards the Central Bus Station in T.A. I began to flags see flying everwhere. The entire country from right to left was representing. Moved, I too fixed one in my heart--the blue and white, six-pointed star and bars that to some represent communal salvation and to others a racist and oppressive military regime. The hardest part about being here is that realizing both are true. No, what's harder is realizing the responsibilites of both, the flag flutters deep in your chest, a kind of manifest destiny (bad analogy) for the Jewish People and at the same time an almost manifest horror-pride for the way that fate is being made. To be cont.

way to setting in another few hours and a kibbutz day is behind me. At breakfast this morning, I said goodbye to my friend "Chops" who returned to the Tank Corps in the Golan. He will be on maneuvers for the next three weeks until which time with the help of G-d he will return to kibbutz. During Shabbat we finished a bottle of sweet wine together with several of the other kibbutznikim...singing niggunim, Israeli songs and even some American tunes (I suppose they snuck into my luggage).

Chops didn't want to get up from his soft-boiled eggs and cucumber salad this morning. He still has a year and a half left to go...of an experience thats probably the closest thing to hell I can imagine. I would trade these three weeks with him though...just to see. When I make Alliyah (when I become a citizen of Israel) I will do two or three months with some middle-aged Russian men and be handed a slack reserve duty for the rest of my life. Cleaning latrines, packing rations, etc. Some would say that I am lucky this way...but luck and honor do not necessarily go hand in hand.

Last week, Yom Shishi (Friday) was Jerusalem Day. The day in 1967 during the Six Day War that the Jewish Quarter in the Old City and the Kotel or Wailing Wall, was recaptured and liberated by Israel's army. During break-time in our Hebrew classes, both the Director of our Ulpan and one of our teachers told us their stories of this war. At some point I would like to try to reproduce these narratives for you; they deepened my understanding of the Israeli mind in way I am still discovering.

Suffice it to say, howver, that as I listened to these stories (in Hebrew) of hiding for days on end in bomb shelters in Jerusalem as planes tore through the sky and machine gun fire ripped into metal, flesh and stone, of old men lifting up shovels to dig trenches on far-away kibbutzim...polishing their old rifles from the pioneer days, of the entire Western Alliance turning their backs from Israel and leaving her to fend for herself alone against Egypt, Jordan and Syria all at once...I felt overwhelmed by feelings that I still haven't quite sorted out.

First, that despite my efforts to imagine myself into this situation I can't begin to claim that I know what it means to the Israeli psyche. To be sure, I can guess and approach closer but it is so far from my experience. I feel an initial gratitude for my family's being spared the violence and fear and the inherent moral contradictions of this identity...but also, I nurse a sense of guilt for having come from a quiet, undisturbed life in America wherein culture is found on a cereal box, Jewish identity something expressed in English, the Hebrew hummed-over.

If their remains any bitterness in these words, its because I miss America very much. My an intense nuclear arsenal it preserves for those who live within her borders an innocence and wealth that is delicious. How many houses there have a private garden? Just a little space among green trees where a family can collect and cull from soft memories funny stories. Yet even there, the edges are breaking down--ghetto-guns suddenly appearing in the pine-canopied driveway; children wearing clothes eight sizes two big unaware that they are communicating to the world their complete fear of growing into an adult role. "With what I know, you want me to pretend to be what?!"

I return to Israel...but for another time. Perhaps the next e-mail will be a little more picturesque. Love to all. Personal messages to follow shortly.

B'shalom,

Philip Solomon

Between Branches

Family and Friends:

Over a month has passed since I have returned from the U.S. to Israel and except for the self-interrupting letter I sent out a couple weeks ago, I have been hiding from you in the blinding sun of the Beit Shean Valley. As June ages, the heat of summer is maturing and our bodies with it. I take every advantage to drink cold glasses of water one after another like the addict chain-smokes cigarettes, overcome with a lust for whose satisfaction is a painful pleasure.

For the last few days I have been working in the pre-school with two-and-a-half-year-olds. My assignment comes either as punishment for tarrying around Jerusalem an extra day of my leave, out of sheer need on the part of the kibbutz or in response to some Australian volunteers' charge of sexism in work-assignment. I imagine all three are moreorless true...and I am assured that the date-palms still await me. In the meanwhile I am playing with blocks and wiping butts.

From just twelve months of age, kibbutz children play in elaborate jungle-gyms constructed of giant trash: rusty frames of automobiles, sectioned barrels painted in primary colors and propped on wooden pylons riddled with nails, computer monitors broken in half and missing their innards, cracked plastic pipe-line and other irrigatory fixtures whose colors and shape are so peculiar one can only imagine their proper home--fifty bezillion bright-red domes that look like the over-sized tops of city fire hydrants scattered in piles and towers all over the play-yard, twice as many small cones of the same color but a shade lighter, the size of an adult's hand and distinguished in their point by an s-shaped hood whose original use lays beyond a question that is never asked.

I am explained that the purpose of these playgrounds, of which there are dozens on an otherwise immacluately manicured kibbutz, is to facilitate the imagination. As I wander through the yard during nap-time collecting adult-sized rubber boots, electric tea-kettles missing their cords, dolls whose hair is matted with desert dirt, tattered plastic tarpaulins and "organizing" the detritus into manageable piles which the children destroy in another couple hours, I can imagine only the parade of law-suits that would be leveled back across the sea on behalf of each metal corner, protruding nail and jagged edge. I pick up a rock and begin to hammer back some of the worst culprits in attempt to blunt the danger I foresee but the teacher in charge wags her finger at me and warmly scolds me in Israeli fashion, a quick "tzuh-tzuh-tzuh"-clucking made with the tip of the tounge and the roof of the mouth. I explain my concerns in broken Hebrew and she says, "Al ti-daag, Phee-leep, tit-gaber!"-- "Don't worry, Philip...you'll get over it!"

****

Shabbat has just ended and I've returned to my room to finish this letter, save it to disk and search out a computer upon which to mail it. It is strange how my trip to America has so dastrically interrupted the stream of "epistles" that I have so enjoyed sending to all. I am far behind on my correspondence and I apologize for seeming to ignore your presence which I assure you I carry close to my heart. I believe the realization is slowly dawning over me that my intentions to live in Israel are more than a passing fancy. Thus--and the letter I last sent is testimony--my heart is painfully pulled between the United States and Israel. It is probably true to say that I have avoided reaching out with my words across the ocean because it is a sharp reminder of the love frustrated by such an immense distance. I can only hope that whatever my future role in the world, it will be necessary to travel extensively between the two lands.

There is another reason why I have not been writing letters as before and that is because the literary aspiration I have long imagined to realize is slowly bearing fruit. Perhaps it is the clarity of the air on kibbutz, the way the sun sets ablaze every visual precipice on this communal farm that makes it so easy for my stories to come alive. The blades of grass, the rusty concrete-filled barrels, the tractors of various size and color parked at random like sleeping dinosaurs--they are all so vivid and undeniable.

I watch a snow-white egret take to flight over the kibbutz fish-ponds before a background of orange-red mountains. Leaning palm-trees' new green leaves resist the wind while those that are old and browned blow ragged and rustled. The egret lands on a yellowing branch somehere between the old and new and stays utterly still. All about her, far above my own hair tousled by the wind, the branches and leaves of the palm-trees bat and flutter.

In this arid panorma I am finding my voice. Scenes from my childhood in the deciduous jungles of Jackson County, WV combine with images of chemical-leaking factories whose sprawling pipes and lights stand like insane, miniature cities along the Kanawha River. Add the genius graffiti scrawled on walls flashing by the yellow windows on the Harlem-line train to Bronxville and the swans and black gowns and flowers for dead princesses in a boat filled with Freudian dreams on the Thames. These are are the elements of my fiction. The measured focus shifts back in forth between time and perspective...between rural and urban affinities, between Europe, The United States and Israel, between three centuries and four generations. I hope the finished product to be like a narrative kaleidoscope: colors and shapes of my memories rotating in a geometry that is far from recognizablly me. Indeed it is not my life but the life of Alexander A.Godshalk that I am now slowly writing.

I have no desire to jinx this process and will limit my comments to the above. I am far from being out of the harbor; however, I since the impending voyage and with the help of my G-d I will succeed in describing it. In other news, I hope to remain on kibbutz through the High Holy Days and then go to study in Jerusalem or Arad. Two programs are vying for my participation, both of whose descriptions I will save for a later letter.

I send my love to all and best wishes for the shortening days of summer. A good week, a happy week, a week of peace. Let gladness reign and joy increase.

Shavuah Tov. I am yours

B'shalom,

Philip Solomon/Pinhas Shlomoh

Milk and Honey

(Great greetings to all; the following was written in the middle of last week and left unsent, the "present voice will return in a moment.)

Family and Friends:

The heat has been incredible today. I walked out from my room, kept cool by thick stone walls, an air conditioner and tightly woven curtains and suddenly, it is was as if an extra skin had been stripped off the world. All was ablaze, blindingly on fire in the same color-scheme of which I have written so often before: the light beige buildings, red-orange-ish mountains, green's entire spectrum shone out from the great feathery palm-fronds, towering pines and sprawling banyon trees and a pale blue sky stretched over white cars and red tractors speeding past on dirt-roads churning up funnels of golden, sun-lit dust. Shielding my eyes from the initial glare, the heat hit me--punched me more like, ganging up from all sides...and then the body adjusts.

On my way around kibbutz, I often pass a mural painted on the windy side of an otherwise drab grainary barn. The barn is surrounded by cinder-block sheds and tractors waiting repair and stands near the yellow entrance gate of the kibbutz. In the mural, two colorfully bearded gentleman carry on a shouldered-pole between them a man-sized cluster of grapes. Each deeply purple globe is the size of the same men's heads. Emblazoned over-top, in huge pointed prayer-book letters (letters that themselves look like dancing, black flames) I read, ERETZ ZVAT IM CHALAV U'DVASH. A land that flows with milk and honey.

The theme is taken from parashat ha'Torah/Torah portion "Shelach L'cha" (BA'MIDBAR/Numbers 13:24-27) which we read a few weeks ago in beit-k'nesset/schul/synogogue in its proper place in the yearly cycle. One finds the same picture many places in Israel, it being one of the first descriptions brought back to the Children of Israel after their forty years of wandering in the desert. These glorious accounts of the "promised land" are accompanied by an equally powerful description of the might of the land's inhabitants: We were like grasshoppers in our own eyes, and so we were in their eyes (13:33).

Interesting whose estimation precedes whose, is it not?

---------------------------------------to be continued

The land is still a hot one flowing with milk and honey (my thanks to the Holy One of Blessing) and also still one in which obstacles often seem insurmountable but it is now night and several days after I wrote the above words. I am sitting in my new room. In many ways it is my first room in Israel. Although I have a room-mate and although I may be moved as time goes along, this roof, these shelves, this desk and this phone line are "mine". There is no fixed time for them to be quit.

Ulpan has finished and the kibbutz has invited me to stay and work throughout the summer. In the fall, when I plan to go to Machon Meir (the yeshivah in Jerusalem at which I have chosen to begin learning Torah), this room will remain for me. I will return during vacation and every few shabbatot to kibbutz in order to work and fulfill my toranut--kitchen chores. In short, I have been invited by the kibbutz to think about living here more permanently. I accepted their offer (to think seriously about a life on kibbutz) with alacrity and without reservation. To become a member of a kibbutz is not a decision immediately made. For those who are concerned, I am not hurrying myself nor being hurried...simply exploring and taking advantage of a priceless opportunity for housing and employment!

The other big news I have concerns Alliyah.

Hopefully, by the time many of you receive this message I will have already changed my status and be awaiting an identity card. I travelled to the Ministry of the Interior today in order hand in all the proper forms...but the window I needed was closed. Tomorrow we shall try again. On that note (and as its getting late) I am signing off this letter.

Thank you for all your letters. Now that I have my own phone line and hopefully, internet access whenever I so desire I have a lot more freedom to answer personal letters...so send them! My best and my love to all,

Philip Solomon/Pinchas Shlomo

P.S. New Telephone # from U.S. 011.972.658.0934

Donkey Food

Sunday, 9:00 pm in the Beit Shean valley, the entrance to the Garden of Eden as our oral history maintains. (If Gan Eden--according to the Midrash--was located in the Land of Israel its entrance would likely have been in Beit Shean.) So...I possibly live by the Gates of Eden. Yofi. Bob Dylan has a biting song by the same title. There is something a little bloody about the song I remember, a little slithering and venomous...morally inspired but bitter...perhaps quite appropriate to the city today, even to our world.

I have returned to work in the date plantation am in my second full week of work. The Hebrew studies have finished for the summer (to be continued in a month and more's time in Jerusalem), that is, in WV parlance, "if G-d's willing and the criks don't rise." After a week of straight work (missing a fast day in the middle) I already feel my body adusting to the load. I wake before dawn, bend and bind all day long forty-pound eshkolim full of ripening dates. This week we have also begun to plant saplings and lay new irrigation pipes. I return each afternoon burnt by the sun, my muscles singing with cathartic pain. I shower and collapse into a two-hour, absolutely dreamless sleep that is one of the sweetest pleasures I have ever tasted...two hours that pass like two seconds.

Last night on a walk with a friend, passing by the dates, I said, "It was here that I fell in love with Israel."

Of course she answered, "And what is it that you love?"

After some moments pause I answered, "Here, working this land--my land, our land--I have never felt more powerful. I have learned here that my cultural consciousness is inextricably related to my spiritual consciousness. Perhaps it is no wonder...Jewish culture has always identified the individual with the collective."

"It sounds like your family was always involved with American politcs, committed to the country. Didn't you feel like a part of that collective?"

"In America, I was a third generation Jewish immigrant from Eastern Europe...more than that...but always this way in my mind, marginalized. Politcally, I lived in a multicultural democracy and yes I partipated enthusiastically; but culturally I lived in a Christian country whose basic spiritual assumption was foreign and contrary to my own."

"Don't you miss America?" she asked me, "I mean, you speak constantly of West Virginia."

"I do miss it. But I feel more loyal to WV than to the United States in total. It is a wonderful land to be sure with wonderful people...those who are closest in the world to my heart. I don't know that I won't return...but only by carrying my Israeli passport next to my American. I need to feel like someone whose power and identity proceed from a cultural center, physical not abstract...not from the margins. Because somewhere in the world, my culture is sovereign, my people are sovereign, my Torah is sovereign, my G-d is (publicly acknowledged) as sovereign...I am sovereign.

" * * * * *

Friday, 6:40 pm. Shabbat the Queen enters in thirty minutes. I have just scrubbed floors and bathrooms, cleaned and organized, tried to tie up all loose ends before the sonic boom that signals we have broken through the barrier between kodesh and chol (between the consecrated and the unconsecrated).

The work has been wonderful this week. Gradually, all of our date-palms' fruit is being secured to surrounding branches so that as the juicy globules ripen and gain weight, the eshkolim will not shiver and the dates go crashing to the plantation floor to become donkey-food. A youth group from South Africa is volunteering for the next several weeks; I am superivising a crew of very bright girls and so have the added entertainment of teaching the work we are doing while discussing Israeli politics, cultural identity, Jewish spirituality and politcal inequality in our various "homes". The conversation, to be certain is not always so serious. The week has been one of laughter beneath an incredibly boiling sun.

I originally wanted to include some comment in this weeks e-mail about Camp David...but I am a loss for an opinion. I have feelings...very strong ones on both sides of the issue...but I am not confident in any objective drasha of mine. I will write, however, that I am glad no agreement was reached...simply too soon. I have very mixed feelings about partitioning Jerusalem and am absolutey adamant about preserving access to the Kotel, the Wailing Wall. Anything that to me seems like a step backward from eventually rebuilding Beit Ha'Mikdash, the Temple (though perhaps necessary), I find painful.

I wish a Shabbat Shalom u'Mevorach (a peaceful and blessed day of rest) to all. Please write and I will do the same. Much love,

Philip Solomon/Pinhas Shlomoh

Of Closures and Beginnings, Of Harvests

My Dearest Family and Friends,

Greetings. Below you will find two letters. The first I wrote two weeks ago before leaving for yeshiva and apparently, it did not "go through". I have been away from my computer for the entire time in Jerusalem as I don't feel quite safe bringing it along. I live with three other young men in a very small room, in a dusty, concrete building filled with thirty other rooms, 120 other "bocherim" like me.

The students are from all over the world and for many (not for all) I believe the walls of this Torah academy are a kind of asylum...a very interesting place, this, but more on that later. I have been occupied with establishing a routine in my studies and thus have been out of touch. The notes you have sent me in the meanwhile (I will return them individually soon) have been wonderful...thank you for missing me. Anyway, my present voice will return in the second letter. Until then.

LETTER THE FIRST:

Dear All,

Warm greetings. I hope these words find everyone in good spirits, saying goodbye to summer and hello to autumn. Quite some time has passed since my last letter. The last time I sat to touch my fingers to this endeavor (and did not succeed) it was two weeks ago, Tisha B'Av, the fast day in which the destruction of the First Temple, the beginning of the Babylonian exile is mourned. I was filled with quite a bit of "lofty sentiment" and yet did not succeed in transmitting it to words. Rather than try to communicate to you from around the giant stone standing in my way, I decided to remain silent.

Now seems the time...but in somewhat of an abbreviated form. The Fast of Tisha B'Av occurs roughly a week before my mother's "yorzheit" or the anniversary of her death. As most of you know, my return to observant Judaism was prompted greatly by a search for the proper theatre in which to grieve, to understand mortality through the lens of the Jewish heritage, my heritage. However, the gradual return to accepting the Authority of this heritage, that is discovering that what measure of true authority I gain for myself proceeds necessarily from wrestling with Torah--has not been an easy road.

Since first seeing at eleven years old how half the names of the Engel Family tree ceased completely during mid-century, I have been acutely aware of the persecution and political marginalization that has defined the experience of the Jewish people for the last 2000 years. At the same time, I grew up thankful that the generations that preceded me saw an opportunity in America, in its statues of religious freedom and embrace of diverse cultural streams as an opportunity to participate in a more enlightened society. To be sure they saw correctly; however (with 20/20 hindsight) I can see that the economic and political freedom they succeeded to acquire and have bequeathed upon my generation has lacked at its center a Jewish education. I inheireted, thank G-d, a legacy of large-hearted committment to the commonweal, a very good American, public language but not so good of a Jewish, private language.

The temple of Jewish identity, spiritual and otherwise is Hebrew--read, recited, studied and sung. By perhaps a too wide embrace of modernity and "the American dream" I and many like myself have been seperated from this temple. When my mother died of cancer in 1993, amidst then largely inarticulable grief, I suddenly sensed an intimate relationship with what Martin Heidegger called "the widest orbit". However this "widest orbit" I felt also seperated from...for the simple and certainly not exclusive reason that having been separated by death from the physical presence of my mother, I found it too painful to explore the regions where my heart did feel her presence, without some kind of guide.

The temporary guides of Zen Buddhism and psychological therapy taught me a great deal about myself, the world and community; however, after time I found myself yearning for something their languages did not, could not include. It was first participating in the public catharsis which is Tisha B'Av--sitting as if in shiva on the floor of the synagogue and weeping out the chant Eicha (The Book of Lamentations)--that I first understood what Judaism in specific and "religion" in general is capable of affecting.

The Fast of Tisha B'Av is a very significant, triple-exposure of that from which I had found myself most in exile: Jerusalem (the focal point for Jewish cultural and political autonomy), Hebrew/Torah (the language of communal prayer and study) and the memory of my mother, Florette Angel, alah ha'shalom, (the central example of a how a person can conduct a life of moral excellence and love). This public fast-day is followed a week later by the private but publicly witnessed duty/opportunity to recite "The Mourner's Kaddish" in presence of a minyan, a prayer quorum of at least ten men.

It was four years ago, at "Eilat Chaim: The Jewish Center for Healing and Renewal" in Woodstock, NY that these experiences began a commentary upon each other which continues to form some of the biggest kernels of my religious experience today. We are now entering the month of Ellul, a month of preparation for Rosh HaShanah, Yom Kippur and the Chagim. It is a time of "Teshuva" or of deep personal reflection and self-reckoning before the days of judgement and pardon. Thus it also appropriate that this story seeks to tell itself...by sharing it with you, I hope I have not presumed an uncomfortable intimacy. I would hope rather that you too are prompted to reflect on the stories both of joy and sorrow that inform your deepest relationship with your G-d and community.

...More contemporarily, there is much in the air on kibbutz. This week the gadid or date harvest began. It is very satisfactory to patrol through the groves checking on the progress of all nine species of dates grown here. Sliding a date off its pit, pausing a moment to watch amber juices glisten in the sun, making the bracha/blessing over "fruit from the tree" and then slipping the date between my lips is a sweet experience. The experience is made sweeter by the knowledge of where my own participation in this fruit's growth meets in thanksgiving with the participation of a Creator we both have in common.

The date harvest is beginning but will precede mostly without me. Other than to participate on the sidelines this week, a little bit again in a few weeks time in the special night-harvest of the Hiyani variety and what work remains left to do during the coming holidays, my work has finished for the year. Starting Sunday I will be in the beit-midrash at Machon Meir in Jerusalem. Then begins what I plan to be a year of intensive learning at a traditional, and yet modern academy of Torah study. My classes will be both in English and Hebrew and I look forward to writing many e-mails to come as I mature into my studies.

I have been thinking a lot about this transition lately, from kibbutz to Jerusalem and not without a little excitement and apprehension. Last night, after returning from an all-day kayaking field-trip with fifteen-year olds from the kibbutz, I sat on a concrete stoop near the club-house of my neighborhood--a bomb shelter equipped with a television and VCR. I sat beneath the stars and reflected for perhaps the hundredth time (but no less significantly) on the station to which life has brought me. Suddenly the power in my neighborhood went out and with the disappointed groans from downstairs of those engrossed in a movie, the stars, already brilliant, leapt forward from the night sky with a vigor I had almost forgotten. I thought, reminded myself more like, how it is this same sky that inspired the wrestling of our forefathers as they struggled to probe with their hearts the Mind of the Most High...or perhaps it is better and more truly rendered in the reverse: that the Most Hight sought an opening in their hearts, minds and mouths to express Itself.

Looking upward, I became conscious how a word like"heavens" can become its own infinity, sprawled accross the page of a prayer-book; it can begin to smell like old bearded men, wooden benches, leather tefillin straps and dusty, embroidered-velvet tallit bags...echoes of song and laughter, of tears. It is impossible not to acknowledge that most all religious languages are charged with the stuff of this world, that they are like beasts of burden--oxen, camels and donkeys--carrying what our hearts thrust in the bags slung across their backs. Sometimes however, a word is given to much to carry and sometimes also even if it carries little we forget what he have placed in its trust and even its intended destination.

I stood beneath the disappearing vault of the firmament imagining that I felt the same awe that was felt by our forefathers. I questioned my Infinite "You" as to whether it is not imperative for us all to at least try to stand in similar shoes as the patriarchs and great teachers wore. Silence. I expanded the question and asked how to balance being humble before their greatness and at the same time acknowledging that the culture-bearing messages they were chosen to be themselves the bearers of, need to be challenged and expanded. Still silence. I talked on but soon had nothing left to ask...my heart became silent and as such, heard.

Time, the distance of history, does makes a difference. Our Father Avraham was perhaps not the only among us for whom the rejection of a world of idolatry meant also a rejection of the tradition he was raised in...but he was perhaps the first who did so and at a time and to an extent and in such a manner that evinces it was his duty to make the Unity of G-d present to all of humanity...as something completely unrerpesentable by human artifice and yet completely demanding of human attention.

As humans we are obligated to forge a connection between the individual will and its perception, reverance of the Integral Creative Whole from which it springs and which extends far beyond the boundaries of individual experience. Avraham's language is eternally valid. There is no larger language to which we can arrive...unless one considers the Buddhist "no lanuage" more fitting but which I believe can be taken to say the same thing except by way of negative exposure.

Avraham's "Most High" cannot be crowned with words to show its limit. His G-d, my G-d has no limit: for how can we ascend higher than the "Most High"? And yet, we sense that language and religious language must evolove, that we must participate in that evolution. According to some contemporary schools of thought, we must collapse language, bend it inward and demonstrate its historic inability to represent the real. I wonder is this not what Avraham instructed? And yet, we know that the modern poet cannot imitate Shakespeare and be considered as one "speaking with a true voice". He/she must strive for originality, not novelty, but for a language that is truly his/hers. We learn from Avraham in doing so not to make our images into idols, to be wary of a statue that distracts from the sky.

The Jew's memory however precedes Shakespeare by thousands of years; it is long...and legend has it, Eternal. This is his blessed burden. His duty it to reawake voices within the tradition and speak with them as from beyond the lens of time. He must take it for granted that in matters of Eternity, all voices are contemporary. And in that sense, the religion that he receives, even its dogma, is not a statue factory to be destroyed and left for new lands in the hands of a new promise (as some thought and did in the last few generations). On the contrary, he must struggle to contemporize the Eternal while measuring his success by the extent to which it sings in concert with the past.

Needless to say, as you can tell from the above enthusisam. I am excited for this coming year in Jerusalem as the first of what I hope many "official" opportunities to step into the awesome continuum of my tradtion. On another note, this year promises to be one in which I continue to evaluate where and how I decide to make my "home". I have grown so much at Sde Eliyahu. Although I am not "leaving" per se, I am filled with bittersweet feeling as I pass from this station to another. I know that if I choose not to remain as a kibbutznik here, it forever will be the place where I stepped fully into the embrace of my destiny. Here I have acknowledged myself as to one whose soul's center is a distinctly Hebrew consciousness--whose knowledge of self-authority is derived from the study and practice of Torah. It is here too where I learned how such a religious commitment does not preclude an equal commitment to art...rather that they are one and the same.

Thus I have real reason to recite the "Shehechianu": Baruch Ata Ha'Shem, Elokeinu Melech Ha'Olam, Shehechianu, V'Kiyamanu, V'Higiyanu La'Zman Ha'Zeh. Blessed areYou, My G-d, Our G-d, The Sovereign of Eternity, Who has kept us alive, sustained us and brought us to this season.

Shabbat Shalom u'Mevorach,

May all have a sabbath rest of peace and rejuvenation,

Philip Solomon/Pinhas Shlomoh

*******************************************************

LETTER THE SECOND

Shalom again. I don't want to add too much to the above epistle. Rereading it, I want to apologize for my tendency to sermonize...I hope someone is the better for it besides myself. It is mid-Sunday morning and I am in my room on kibbutz, dawdling a bit before heading back to Jerusalem. The past two weeks have been incredibly intense with equals shares of postive and negative experience. Concerning my studies, I cannot complain. There is so much opportunity to learn, discuss, listen, practice, etc. that if anything I need to work on saying "when". My schedule of classes, lectures and HAVRUTA (this is the traditional form of paired learning and argument) goes from 7:00 AM until 10:00 PM each day.

The quarters and food on the other hand are very spartan and there is almost no privacy whatsoever. Luckily, I am situated in a nice residential section of Jerusalem within walking distance of several parks, forests and museums. Finding time to take advantage of their proximity is another issue. Though the enthusiasm found in the above letter is certainly being challenged by the difficulty of my present endeavor, I know that it is precisely those "muscles" of faith and self-discipline now strained which I wish to build.

Having returned to kibbutz and recharged on the mountains, warm wind, and silence of the sky, I hope to ready to return to Jerusalem and learn. Hopefully, I will work out internet access this week and make the opportunity to write to you more personally and give you more of the details of the yeshiva experience. For now, I hope all are well and have resting/are resting this Shabbat/weekend. I look very much forward to your letters. I am yours

With love and blessing,

PSA

If We Only Had To Pray For Rain

Dear Family and Friends:

Happy New Year! Hag Sameach! Shabbat Shalom and a wonderful Simchat Torah! Thank you for your letters of concern. I am sorry I have not written sooner to let everyone know that I am safe and share with you my impressions both of the current politcal crisis and of the festivals that this crisis has found us within: Rosh HaShana, Yom Kippur, Sukkot and Simchat Torah (tomorrow). Shortly before Yom Kippur, I left yeshiva to return to kibbutz.

My time at Machon Meir was very intense, a challenge of proportions I had never expected but for which I am grateful. I look forward to returning within a week and sticking through the experience until December when, G-d willing, I will return to America for an extended visit before returning again to Israel...but this time as a permanent citizen and kibbutznik.

I hope the New Year has found all inscribed for a year of health, happiness and blessing in the Book of Life. I hope all, those Jewish as well those not, have been taking the opportunity as the seasons change to reasess your relationships between yourself and G-d and between yourself and your fellow, and to feel rejuvenated, with "storehouses full" as we enter into the time the earth's hibernation and latency.

Jewish tradition teaches that it is not until tomorrow, Simchat Torah/Shemini Atzeret that as we dance with the Torah and linger an extra day over the usual seven in festival period to rejoice with our Father and King, the Living G-d of Israel, that the final verdict for our year to come is reached. We learn that G-d can forgive and will readily forgive transgessions against him (breaking dietary rules, Shabbat, etc) but only the individual who has been transgressed can forgive his/her transgressor. So...I am sorry if in the past year if I have said/not said or acted/not acted in ways that have hurt you or made your lives difficult and I humbly ask to your forgiveness.

With that said, below follow some observations I have (stopping and starting) written to you over the past several days:

* * * * * *

This afternoon I woke up to the sound of raindrops slapping on the window. I had slid back the glass and cracked open the slatted blinds on the window beside my bed to air out the room. When I woke, I woke to see the earth-colored, tie-dyed tapestry I use for a window curtain roll slowly inward with the rising, rain-stirred air. The pit-pats grew louder and more frequent; swells in the fabric and their sudden descensions grew more dramatic. I heard thunder. Released into my room was that particular full smell of wet earth, mineral sweet with rotting tubers and insects. Rising bleary and checking the ticking clock, 3:00, I opened my front door and stood (fogetting to cover my head) half-way outside.

In the southwest, the sun's disc lit a light and clear sky: blue shot through with afternoon's pink and orange but directly above and to the east the grey swollen stomachs of high rainclouds crowded each other like businessmen in a subway station. The rain came down in sharp diagonal lines sparkling on the sides before the sun. Above the lawn and courtyard between the tan stucco apartments in this the singles and students neighborhood on kibbutz, towering fan-palms bowed and flapped in the wind.

Since Shabbat which was the first day of Sukkot, the Festival of Booths, it has rained in the Beit Shean Valley a little each day...but today was a storm, wind and thunder...the first real rain I have seen in six months. A sudden chill is ushered into this air that I knew all summer as an oven. Flocks of storks returning from/to? Africa "V" across the sky and egrets sit on opportune corners to survey and reintroduce themselves to their winter home station. The landscape laughs.

Here now, beginning this New Year's Letter to you, my family and firends, I wish I had only to write about rain, birds or the funny old people of my kibbutz...eating their meals in palm-thatched booths at this time when the harvest is almost over and the observant Jew leaves his solid house for a temporary structure. I wish just rain-prayers and health-prayers for my loved ones far and near were the only plaints that mixed with my detailed praise of dancing grass riddled by falling raindrops. I wish the description of a bird stretching his wings as if to catch the wind, then deciding against it and folding them in again was all the world needed to know of "prayer".

The phrase "futility of futilities" so often mentioned in Kohellet/Ecclesiastes (recently read as part of the Sukkot Rite) comes to mind when I compare the peaceful and pleasant path of noting natural beauty with those details less pleasant but no less important to relate: the dead body of a middle-aged Israeli reservist hanging from a stucco window in a police station in Ramallah, the young Palestinian Arab in the next window lifting his blood-covered hands to a cheering mob; the venomous rage of my friend M. as he related a story of a--now jailed--rabbi who emptied a clip into a Palestinian terrorist who had been found and arrested by civilians in the settlements (they were awaiting the police to arrive when the rabbi decided to take matters into his own hands); how as M. and I sped back to kibbutz through the West Bank last Thursday at the beginning of all this craziness--after selling palm branches for the holiday all week in Mea Sharim--the lights of every building in the Arab villages that we passed were extinguished, utterly shuttered-up and without a sign of life except for patrolling Israeli police jeeps; the way we were both half-expecting on this journey for a child to step into our headlights and hurl a stone at our windshield.

I feel like I have has so much to write about in this matter and an awesome responsibility to clarify for you (especially those family and friends outside of Israel) what this global situation means to a religious, Zionist Jew living on a kibbutz in the West Bank. But there is no clarity. Or rather the only clarity I can hold onto is the knowledge that what I feel and think are often at odds. I want there to be a solution...a solution of peace, of sharing, of reparation and mutual strength. I want this B'COL TOKEF, with all my being...but I don't know if its realistic.

Israeli history has been one of wars, five in as many decades, constantly defending the Jew's right to return to the land of his heritage. No Israeli wants to have to defend that right anymore; rather we want it be accepted. Nobody wants another war. The fact that Barak was largely supported in nearly giving away half of this crowded country's primest land in additon to large parts of Jerusalem should be evidence that Israel is ready to live with an independent Palestinian neighbor. But it seems that the Palestinians are still not, will they ever be?, prepared to live with us.

Most Israelis want to settle down in a Tel Aviv apartment, write computer programs, earn American dollars and watch American television. They also want to be safe. How can Israel insure its citizens' safety while at the same time trying to heal a conflict that has been festering and erupting since the mid 1800s? How can we avoid starting another war?

I want to continue to write...but as usual I need to shower and change before Shabbat comes in. Maybe those of you with an outside persepective could write your observations and ideas. Until next time..I wish everybody a wonderful Shabbat Shalom, Simchat Torah and G'mar Hatimah Tovah!

Praying for rain AND peace,

Philip Solomon/Pinhas Shlomoh

Steering the Ship

Monday, 13 November, 2000

Begun Friday, 11.11.00 finished Monday, 13.11.00

Family and Friends,

I woke this morning after arriving late last night back to kibbutz and going almost directly to sleep to see Chops (my room-mate) also had returned for Shabbat with two other soldiers who were crashed out on the floor: E. and D. All are English-speaking Israelis, 18-22: Chops is from South Africa, E. from England and D. from the States. I slightly remember being stirred early in the morning by their stumbling in through the door after a night of revelry at a nearby kibbutz's disco and E.'s Manchester, crisp, nasal syllables:

"Awright, soon as Phil's off to work, I call his bed."

"Sucks for you, mate," said Chops, "Its all about the floor...he's only just back from yeshivah and probl'y not going to work tomorrow."

E. muttered something in response but I turned over on my side and fell back into one of the dreams which have filled my nights the last few weeks:

I am a ship captain transporting a precious remedy for an illness that breeds paranoia and violence in all those that contract it. There are two islands seperated by a great sea where the same sickness is rampant. I am equidistant from both.

On the first island, within whose culture I was raised, the remedy will be received with enthusiasm and it is likely that I will attain great wealth and honor for being its conveyor. On the other island, to which I am bound by distant ties of heritage, the sickness is greater. It has spread so that even the land's wisest leaders suffer in an advanced state of infection.

Reports from this second island indicate that its inhabitants meet new-comers in one of two distinct ways: either with an incredibly generous, almost obsequious embrace or with a guarded congeniality hinted with suspicion and reproach. In both forms the sickness is very contagious.

To travel to the second island it will demanded of me to perfect the beautiful, though guttural language of my ancestry and don the traditional costume--a monumental and humbling undertaking--before its--my people will accept any treatment I come to offer.

Though the severity of the sickness on both islands is great, my intuition tells me that the disease may only be treated topically on one island while on the other the remedy will influence the health of the entire world. Unfortunately, I am unsure as to which island is which. I am not the only bearer of this particular remedy (though my strain is especially strong); others may come after me and it may be more wise to distribute my cargo where it is most readily assimilated...or on the other hand, to make inroads where it is not.

The wheel is firm and comfortable in my hands and the weather is favorable. Casting my eyes about the ocean's slow-swelling emptiness and noting the horizon-line that separates the two seas, the two skies (or with concentration, the sea from the sky) I turn decisively to...

The telephone rang and I sat up in bed. I had forgotten all about the early morning disturbance and the three bodies sprawled out about the room gave me a start. Three rifles were tucked in two various corners and under one bed. Chops' helmet and flack jacket were laid out beneath the make-shift desk that supports his computer. Olive duffles crowded what was left of the floor space. I could see the foot of D.'s sleeping bag sticking out from our small kitchen and E. was twisted up in his own bag beside my bed.

I pushed back the covers and answered the phone with as much clarity as I could manage: it was for Chops, his commander checking-in. I nudged him awake and handed over the phone. I then showered and dressed, picking my way through the snoring bodies and grabbed my siddur, tallit- and tefillin-bags before heading out to pray and see about breakfast.

The walk from the student room's to the Beit K'nesset on kibbutz is the perfect amount of time for making the morning "tikkun", "repair/fixing" in English. Through a series of recited passages excerpted from Scripture and Oral Law, preceded and followed by a precise order of blessings, the son of Israel restores in his mind and heart the structure of Creation.

Upon first waking he has proclaimed gratitude for finding his breath and consciousness returned once again to a worldly body. Secondly, he has washed his hands to return them to a state of raised freshness and purity, to symbolize among other meanings the clear potential of his day's deeds. He has relieved himself of his body's waste and thanked his Creator for having a body created in wisdom, "for if one vessel was closed that should remain open or one vessel was opened that should remain closed, it would be impossible to stand before You for a single hour."

As I stepped quickly down the pavement before my apartment, yawning and shivering slightly from the autumn chill that lingers now even until late in the morning, my lips moved with the words that are now so familiar to me, it as if I have said them for lifetimes (according to kabbalists, this would be so). I foudn the Hebrew words, more replete and compact with meaning than English, solid in my mouth as food and my mind moved slowly and systematically in their digestion. As my eyes passed over the small stucco buildings, the banana plants, the towering cacti and tautly muscled eucalyptus trees that spring upward from the green, fertile ground, I reminded myself of the role for which I have been chosen and which I have chosen.

...These are the fruits from which man eats in this world but for which the principal exists in the world to come: honor due father and mother; acts of loving-kindness; early arrival to the house of study morning and evening; hospitality shown to guests; visits to the sick; attendance of a bride; bearing the deceased; absorption in prayer; bringing peace between a man and his fellow, a man and his wife; and the study of Torah is equal to them all.

As I recited this excerpt of the "Mishna"--the central element of Jewish Oral Law, written down at the beginning of the common era--I bothered it (as I usually do) with my doubt and difficulty:

What indeed is the difference between this world and the next? How can an action whose benefit I enjoy presently collect for a future, super-natural use? Are we speaking of a cloudy paradise, a "heaven" where a parchment--perhaps palimpsest (according to the kabbalists)--ledger of each person's good and bad deeds is being kept in angelic calligraphy? A place where awaiting us are white satin robes, gold harps and the opportunity to join in that chorused praise sung for eternity: Holy, Holy, Holy is the L-rd of Hosts?

I cannot think so. I answered myself as I expect to answer the same challenge tomorrow and tomorrow and tomorrow. I reminded myself that the Hebrew for "world to come", "olam ha'ba" does not lend itself well to English translantion. "Olam" or "world" means in one sense exactly this, the world: the body, land, planet and universe in which we are now found. It is the world which we know through our senses, our reflection and feeling; it is the world of birth and death, of love and detest, of peace and war.

This is the world where newspapers show pictures of blown-up cars, charred bodies and twisted metal. It is the world where we yell and cry and wring our hands in anger and remorse. But it is also the world where bride and groom meet beneath a bright, joyful canopy, a sanctuary supported by the love they find within themselves and in the community that surrounds them. It is the world where just as people are murdered, a child is born and a young man and a young woman suddenly become father and mother. It is the world where clowns balance flaming, newspaper cones on their chins and dance while smiling bystanders clap with laughter.

When preceded by a preposition, "olam" comes to means "eternity", i.e. "ad olam" or "l'olam"--"until eternity" and "for-ever", respectively. Has this term developed linguistically as an abbreviation for "until-the-world (to come)" or "for-the-world (to come)"? Or is it more likely that we find "Eternity" when we are directed by prepostion, literally "to this world"? That is, when we are directed to approach this world of physicality, of violent becoming, of constant gain and loss, with our full attention and intention, do we meet Eternity residing within...beyond it?

My second response is that the Hebrew for the word "coming", "ha'ba" is found in the active present tense. In this sense, the expression, "ha'olam ha'ba" could be read simply, "the world, the one which is coming NOW". Why is this significant? Because by connecting the "world-to-come" quite literally to the very next moment, to an eternal tomorrow, our Salvation ceases to be supernatural.

The reward for acting justly, with compassion and righteousness becomes not an eternal bliss populated by singing angels to be expected by miracle or death. We will find no eternal season of spring where flowers never fade and the hair of those whom we love ceases to gray. Perhaps a Great Light does absorb the energy of our consciousness upon physical death, a Light in which all opposites are finally reconciled; however, as "I-you-we" are not dead yet (and may we not be for long to come), that is not yet our concern. Our concern is this world, the same one THAT IS COMING from the choices that are made each moment responding to its challenge.

I know that there are those in the world of Torah and the world of religion-at-large who will shy away from this statement. They will point to the promised Resurrection of the Dead, prophesied to occur in the End of Days and charge me with heresy. Conversely, those who separate themselves from Torah/organized religion may maintain that such interpretation does not redeem religion from focusing on the "pie-in-the-sky-when-you-die" rather than the here and now.

I am not a prophet nor a son of a prophet (neither am I an apologist) but in regards to both perspectives, I certainly do observe death's CONSTANT resurrection: I am drawn to the present with a perfect faith to mind the flower who dying deposits a seed that will grow another. By "pre-position" I am directed to the immanence of my G-d in this world. "Olam" is world, "L'olam" is forever.

I believe that acts of justice and righteousness need no other reward than their performance, that by their performance we shall live in a society in which more justice and righteousness exist. This is the principal collecting in the world-to-come of those fruits or righteousness we eat in this world.

Our salvation resides in each decision we make to embody a perfect balance of judgment with compassion. Our salvation is the very freedom to build the foundation of a future society. To think otherwise, it seems, is the greater heresy.

However, a great question presents itself: do I believe that this salvation is tied for the son of Israel directly to the Land of Israel, to the State of Israel, to exclusive religious practice? I feel myself saying yes and no all at once...without any emotional clarity.

* * *

Flled with thought and feeling, by the time I reached the Beit K'nesset the morning's chill made the idea of wrapping myself in my tallit more welcoming than on most mornings. I washed my hands again before entering the echoing, wooden-benched building and began the next series of blessings and recitations. I wrapped myself in my tallit, bound my left arm and head with tefillin and embarked upon a sometimes quiet, sometimes loud, whispered, sung and spoken tapestry of verse and petition. I have come to depend each day on these prayers to focus the meaning and purpose which I sense is incumbent upon my life. I sense that each movement of Jewish, communal prayer is part of a symphony of value, filled with so much depth (and more awaiting me always) that it will take lifetimes, if even then, before I feel I have really penetrated it.

Awe and thanksgiving before tradition and before my G-d, however, does not mean that doubt and difficulty go away.

I returned to my room after prayers and after procuring oranges, sliced bread and jam from the kibbutz cafeteria, settled down to this computer and cast my eyes about the room. My country's soldiers--I wondered if they even open a prayer-book from one Sabbath to the next?--snored and turned in their sleep. My roommate's job is to load artillery shells into the cannon of a high-speed tank; E. is in training to be a paratrooper, to operate far beyond the front-line of duty; D. trains dogs for missions of search, rescue and pursuit.

A picture formed in my mind of the last time18-year-old D. came to visit: I found him with sleeves rolled up to his shoulders and grasping an M-16 rifle in both hands. I found him in a crouch, facing the full-length mirror mounted on Chop's and my dresser. D. was barking and bearing his teeth at the mean, lean figure he found in the reflection. When I opened the door to the room, he showed no notice of my presence; he did not become self-conscious in the least respect. If anything, he began to crouch lower and growl louder, laughing.

I remembered not knowing whether to thank my G-d that such Jews as D. are hungry to defend this country, the pride and joy of my people as such or to reprimand him harshly for this utter stupidity...or both. I remembered shaking my head and sighing, praying that if he ever does have to kill somebody, he should do so knowing that that somebody is really not separate from the same figure he now was facing in the mirror.

How often have I reminded myself that in light of the impossible ideals Torah sets, it is easy to slip into a dark, doubting pessimissm? When I got back from davenning with breakfast, I also found two copies of the Jerusalem Post under my desk: that day's and one of almost two weeks ago. Both showed the wreckage of bombed cars. The older paper had a picture of thecar Islamic Jihad exploded in Mahane Yehuda, killing two young Jerusalemites. The current paper showed a picture of a car that had driven by a Palestinian guerilla commander which the IDF exploded with two "Hellfire" rockets, fired from an American-made Apache helicopter; in the resulting explosion two innocent Palestinian women were killed.

Simple words. A simple news story. Tit for tat. It is written in Kohellet/Ecclesiaste that there is a time for peace and a time for war. If the coming world is the very next moment and a person can find in the cycle of birth and death, as described above, the constant resurrection of death, perhaps too in the cycle of peace and war, one can see the establishment of eternal peace.

I try for this equanimity. However, even if that statement stands to reason, my heart won't let itself be comforted. I cannot choose but to die. I can certainly choose not to kill.

* * *

I have always been a flag-waver, always secretly desirous to find a flag to believe in unconditionally, with perfect faith. I have always wanted to find or bring a coming, Messianic world to this world--a world of more perfect freedom, peace and justice. As it is written in the closing prayer of all three morning, afternoon and evening Jewish rites: "We long for the day when G-d and Its Name will be One." In this sense, I have always longed for the day when the language we humans use to praise and understand an infinite Moral Force is not only true to that Moral Force but true to our actions. I long for a time when we are able to practice what we preach.

I am challenged by reality. The flag of Torah I often see waved in Israel is being marched in hatred...but try as I might, I cannot condemn the feelings of those religious Jews who wave it. Actions, yes; but feelings, no.

Every religion claims absolute authority. Every religion has once had that absolute authority, however, within a relative socio-political sphere. Frequently this authority comes at the expense of other religions and peoples "scape-goated" within that same sphere.

Judaism, the religion of a people milleneally marginilized, built its original idea of salvation, a just, earthly kindgom, into a spiritual world-to-come, an alternative paradise to the ghetto-ized powerlessness of the material world. The father of Reconstructionist Judaism, Rabbi Mordecai Kaplan quotes from the autobiography of R. Solomon Maimon, a talmud scholar, philosopher and infamous Jewish apostate of the Enlightenment period (I paraphrase):

When a young slavic duchess rode through his Eastern European shtetl in her family's gilt carriage led by fine, white horses, the child Maimon exclaimed to his father of the young girl's incredible beauty. The elderly rabbi, in a tattered coat and split shoes, responded by slapping the boy's head and saying, "Fool, don't you know that little shiksa will be polishing your boots in-the-world-to-come?" (Kaplan, Judaism & Civilization pp.?).

It is here evident how aspects of theology are influenced by socio-economy. The shtetl idea of salvation is to differentiate the spiritual as opposed to the material. For the Eastern-European Jew at this time in history, everything earthly was characterized by poverty and disenfranchisment. To a coming spiritual paradise the elderly Jew could not help but project his desire for political equality. He imagined the young duchess, she who symbolized earthly power and glory, in servile relation to his son, to whom in material terms he could bequest only a legacy of poverty. In spiritual terms, he could becquest absolute sovereignty.

Today, in an emergent global community, Israel is a sovereign state. In material reality, the Jewish people has an opportunity to bring heaven down to earth. Every ideal we have ever lifted to supernatural status, the Jewish people now has an opportunity to build its reflection in this world. Unfortunately, we still are looking for someone to polish our boots. We are looking for retribution rather than creating justice.

The current political crisis with the Palestinian is not simple as that. No side is blameless and in the short term, Israel has no other choice but to respond to violence with more violence. However, what is necessary in the short-term is not a long-term solution.

As a Light to the Nations, Israel is not a sovereign in the world that the nations should polish its shoes. Rather, it is our duty to forge within our heart desire for revenge into the creation of justice. We, like the eldest brother among many siblings, are to be an example and leader. In the wars which have torn this country apart since its birth, Israel fought not only against Arab aggressors. Israel was fighting and killing a two thousand year-old legacy of powerlessness.

It is still true that insecurity and anger, the inheireted memory of centuries of marginilization both among Sephardim and Ashkenazim--and especially the horror of the Holocaust--inform the heaven for which we long, the heaven which we are bound to bring to earth. However if the human heart wants revenge; the Jew's heart must want justice. The path to the next world leads from this.

B'brachot l'shalom ul'olam tov yoter,

In blessing for peace and a better world,

Philip Solomon/Pinhas Shlomo