“Mommy?” Ahuva’s tiny voice calls, as I sigh and plod back down the hall to my little girl’s room for the fourth time tonight.
“What is it, sweetie?” I ask, trying to hide my growing impatience.
“I don’t want to go to Gan Anafa.”
I can hear the lump in her throat. There is defiance mixed with fear and a bit of sadness. Funny how our tone alone can convey so much. I take a deep breath and smooth the golden wisps from her forehead. “Oh, Ahuvaleh,” I console her, as I have every other night and morning since her new preschool started. “I know it’s hard to go to school in a new language and not understand what the morah or the other kids are saying, but it will get easier. I promise.”
Inwardly, though, I question this promise. Did it get easier for me? I ask myself, remembering with chagrin the times I have resorted to fibbing about the number of years I’ve lived here – because it gets awkward when you’ve been living in Israel for a decade and still can barely carry on a conversation with your Israeli neighbor. She’s only three, my voice of reason interjects; she’ll pick up the Hebrew in no time. I give my child one more squeeze, brush an escaped tear from her pudgy cheek, and leave the room.
I was a 16-year-old Baltimorean in an Israeli high school, a foreigner struggling to keep up academically and socially. Already then, I looked forward to living vicariously through my children, whenever I would merit being blessed with them. I hoped that they would not have to face the same challenges I did, of moving to a new land with a new language and culture. I wanted them to be the ones to help ease the transition of new olim, not be those olim themselves! What I didn’t factor in were the years between point A and point B. I know (hope!) that by Chanukah time my daughter will, G-d-willing, have picked up the Hebrew. She’s three and her mind is a sponge – and she hasn’t built the same fortress of resentment that I regrettably did 10 years ago.
One day, I’m sure, my dream will be realized, and finally there will be someone who can translate my bank statements. But every morning, when I need to tear myself away from her at the gate to her gan, her cries echoing in my ears as I walk to the car, my heart hurts even as I take solace in knowing that it’s for a good cause.
This dichotomy of pleasure and pain, relief and fear, celebration and mourning is not limited to my feelings toward my daughter’s entrance into the Israeli school system. It is interwoven into the fabric of our lives here in Eretz Yisrael. This past month, as we reveled in zman simchaseinu, the joy of countless families was cut by the sharp knife of Islamic terror. As we moved out to our sukkas for a week, trusting in G-d’s protection, two parents were shot at point-blank range and killed in their vehicle as their four children watched in horror. As we danced with and cradled the Torah, paramedics cradled a two-year-old stabbing victim, whose father succumbed to his own stab wounds shortly thereafter. The terror and devastation is rampant, and just when we think it can’t get any worse, it does. Our hearts bleed for the orphans and widows, for shattered worlds. And the ground silently absorbs this blood. But then we will go to a simchas bais hasho’eva or a wedding or hakafos, and our joy will know no bounds as well. The singing, dancing, unity, and sheer exhilaration, the smiles stretched so wide, are enough to confuse anyone.
This bittersweet quality has become the hallmark of daily life: joy and laughter with an ever-present undertone of melancholy: an inside-out sabra (prickly pear), if you will.
On Chol Hamoed Sukkos, our family took a trip to the police academy. They had opened it to the public in honor of the holiday and unveiled a beautiful and informative museum exhibit, as well as myriad of booths for kids to explore. My two daughters enjoyed trying on an entire police uniform and being photographed on a magnet, complete with “Chol Hamoed Sukkos, 2015” inscribed on it. My Ahuva used pastels to color a picture of a policewoman directing traffic. We checked out the CSI (crime scene investigation) station to see how fingerprints aid in crime detection. We saw police dogs in kennels, and watched a video about the role of police officers in law enforcement.
At one point in the tour, our eyes met a heartwarming sight: a burly police officer, in full regalia, was sitting cross-legged on the floor and reading a picture book to all the kids. We inched closer; story time is always a treat. As we arranged ourselves on the floor, I picked up on the words the officer was reading. It was none other than a book published by the police academy, entitled My Father Is a Chablan (a bomb deactivation specialist). I looked on in horror as the officer calmly and matter-of-factly narrated the tale of a young boy explaining that sometimes bad people will put bombs on your car or elsewhere, and his Abba’s job is to detonate the bombs so that everyone remains safe! The saddest part was that none of the children seemed at all perturbed. These are the same kids who are trained to run for the sealed room in record time when a siren goes off warning of an incoming rocket, the same kids who attend the funerals of their friends and neighbors, and sometimes even need to say Kaddish for their own parents, killed in cold blood.
As these morbid thoughts ran through my mind, I banished them by marveling at the way in which we continue to reconcile this duality. On the day following yet another brutal stabbing attack in Jerusalem’s Old City, hundreds of Jews joined together in dancing and singing while celebrating hakafot shniyot at the exact site of the murders. In spite of the unfathomable pain we experience – or perhaps because of it – we will never stop celebrating life.
I always did have a penchant for bittersweet chocolate – but fervently hope for the day (may it come soon) when the cries of laughter and joy are the only cries we hear.
Nechama Eisenman is the daughter of former TA rebbi, Rabbi Avrohom Leventhal and his wife Eshkie. She lives in Ramat Beit Shemesh.
