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It was my children’s first time in Israel. We had been planning this family trip for nearly a year, an opportunity to allow the kids to get up close and personal with the land that they had long heard about, studied, for which they had cultivated a love from afar. Our itinerary was jam-packed with many of the typical must-do Israel experiences but also unique, intimate encounters with our Israeli friends. We chose to go during the holiday of Sukkot as we wanted the kids to taste a chag (festival) in Israel, to experience the similarities and the differences between our practice at home and the feel of the holiday in this holy place.
The first 5 days were wonderful. Rich. Bright. Colorful. Senses and minds ablaze with all that was new. Absorbing each taste with shining excitement.
And then on October 1st, the ground began to tremble beneath our feet. Eitam and Naama Henkin murdered by terrorists in front of their children. Horrifying. Senseless. Impossible to comprehend. We shielded my kids from any news of this terror, eager to preserve the beauty of their first encounter with Israel, eager to close them off from the complicated, heart-rending realities of Israeli life. If we, as adults, did not understand how to hold this pain, how could we expect them to?
That day was the beginning of a steady escalation of violence. Shootings. Stabbings. Rock-throwing attacks. West Bank, East Jerusalem, Petach Tikva, the Old City, Tel Aviv, Kiryat Gat, Afula. Our itinerary was planned to take us up north for the second week, and although I felt pained to admit it to myself, I was eager to leave Jerusalem, to look for some respite in the north of the country. But as we traveled north and then west, I quickly felt the futility of my search for a place – a makom, both physical and spiritual – that could allow me, allow us, to hide from the incomprehensibility of the conflict and pain and fear that was simmering everywhere. There was no refuge.
What to do. How to feel. My kids remained blissfully ignorant of the news. But I was not.
Where to find refuge? Where to look for shelter?
To my tradition, to the texts, to the sources of wisdom that hold me.
I tried to go back home.
I looked to the coming weekly parasha, to parshat Noach. A story that I have read and reread for years. This time, one word leapt out at me and kept repeating itself again and again in my consciousness: Tzohar. Tzohar.
Sometimes translated as an opening, a skylight, a window.
With the impending mabul- flood - approaching, God tells Noach to build an ark with a tzohar – an open skylight – in its roof. This seems utterly strange. A catastrophic flood is coming to the earth that will destroy every living thing, and this rescue vehicle that Noach is to build to shelter himself from the storm is going to have an open skylight in its roof? What about the rain, the external threats? Isn’t this window intentionally opening Noach to vulnerability?
Yes. And I believe that that is exactly the point. There are mabuls (floods) brewing all of the time – around each of us individually, around the Jewish People, around all of humanity. They can be horrifying. Painful. Sources of anxiety and manifestations of our deepest insecurities and fears. And sometimes we must retreat. We need to hide and find shelter, both spiritually and physically. Right now in Israel, for many, the human instinct may be to stay sheltered in place at home in the midst of the very real threats that are out there in the streets, on the buses, on the sidewalks of that holy place. The craziness of this period of inhuman violence is too much to bear, to face. I felt that intensely when we were there. It is a natural and reasonable response.
Perhaps God’s instruction to Noach reflects a deep attunement to the human capacity to live in this world. We need our teivot – our arks – to shelter us and give us places in which to hide and retreat at times, but we also desperately need to preserve the space for a tzohar.
A window onto hope.
A skylight that allows those small glimmers of light to shine on our heads, wherever they may appear, in small acts of courage and kindness and attempts to imagine an alternate reality.
An opening above us to hold out space for the power of vulnerability to can lead us towards new possibilities and movement towards a world that is better than this mabul.
An aperture through which we might reach our hand, upward and outward, with faith that someone or something might reach back and grasp hold.
Kavannah:
In this challenging time for the People of Israel, may we find strength both in the teivah – our arks of shelter – and in the tzohar – those openings onto light, hope, and possibility. We desperately need them both at once.
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