|
Three days ago, as I stood in the middle of the home of a stranger 6,000 miles away, what struck me were the cribs.
We were in Kfar Azza, one of the kibbutzim near Gaza hardest hit by Hamas on October 7.
As we walked around the kibbutz, it was completely quiet—save the sounds of the bullet casings crackling beneath our feet, and the hum of an Apache helicopter hovering overhead and firing AGM-114 missiles into Gaza a few hundreds yards away. It was also eerily empty, until we ran into a young woman who was inspecting the little that was left of her family’s home and invited us in.
Next thing I knew, I was standing next to the cribs of the 10-month-old twins who’d lived there, Roi and Guy. Having spent my career as an OB/GYN in Englewood, I have always, always been drawn to babies—and that’s why I was so taken with these cribs. The woman showing us around the house, who is the twins’ aunt, told us that as terrorists attacked Kfar Azza the morning of the 7th, her sister Hadar (the twins’ mother) had slipped into the kitchen to try to grab a bottle for her boys. “This is where they found my sister’s body,” she told us as we walked through the kitchen. “And this is where the babies’ father was,” she said in the nursery, pointing to the small patch of floor where his body was found. The walls of the nursery were pierced with hundreds of bullets, and as the babies cried and screamed that day, 14 of their neighbors ran outside toward the house to try to save them. All 14 were killed. But somehow, with the way the cribs were positioned, by a mere matter of inches, these twins survived.
The babies, and their cribs, were not the only signs of life that endured.
There was the row of colorful children’s bicycles in front of a house destroyed beyond recognition.
The soaps and body creams in the window of a bathroom blown to smithereens.
The vinyl record, inscribed with the word “Harmony,” hanging untouched outside the entrance of a shattered home.
The purple sheet that an IDF soldier warned us not to step on because it was still full of blood. The pile of kites that were meant to be used that day in Kfar Azza’s annual kite festival.
And finally, a sukkah, perfectly intact, surrounded by lush and fragrant lemon trees—and hundreds of bullet holes.
There was peace juxtaposed with violence. But we saw so many tiny signs of hope; so much beauty in the darkness. And looking back on our trip, it’s clear: that is the same beauty Israel is finding in the darkness. And the same beauty that Jews around the world are finding in the darkness.
Still, I showed up at Newark last weekend with an enormous pit in my stomach, a bit anxious to go on this trip in the first place—only to then be interrogated by the El-Al attendant at check-in. “Where did you go to Hebrew school? Do you speak, read or write Hebrew? When was your Bat Mitzvah? Do you know the dates of the High Holidays this year?” For whatever reason, it was that moment when my dread dissipated and I felt immensely proud to be a Jew en route to Israel.
Our stated goal for the trip was to volunteer, to show solidarity and to bear witness. But what I’d soon learn is that what we’d accomplish and take away from this mission would far exceed that.
As we were walking out of Kfar Azza, we ran into a group of soldiers from a secret elite counterrorism unit—one of whom told us: “We all went to Poland, but we should be bringing our children here.” Their directive was clear: Don’t be tourists here; be witnesses. Give and share testimony. Make a difference by telling our story over and over and over again.
We then made our way to dinner at an army base near the Gaza border from which the IDF operates the Iron Dome. We met the small group of young women who maintain the Iron Dome battery; we broke bread with soldiers; we saw a giant menorah they constructed out of weapon shells; and finally, we cried together as we stood in a circle, arm and arm, singing Hatikvah.
After a difficult day, I felt good knowing that I’d done what we set out to do: volunteer, show solidarity and bear witness.
But then, as we were leaving, a male soldier asked me for one very simple, very easy favor: Can I have a hug?
Can I have a hug? We embraced longer than I’d ever hugged a stranger, and I knew I’d done far more than I ever could with words or donations or a retweet or a hashtag or an Instagram post.
So I just kept giving hugs. We all did. We hugged soldiers, we hugged survivors, we hugged family members of hostages, we hugged refugees as we lit candles with them on the first night of Chanukah. I even hugged a religious man who wouldn’t typically hug a woman other than his wife—and that was the first (but not the last) time I cried on the trip. Yosi, the religious man I met at a rehab facility for wounded soldiers, had been shot and left for dead, bleeding out profusely. “I spoke to Hashem and repeated the Shema,” Yosi told me. “Hashem sent me three angels, the soldiers who found me and brought me to the hospital and saved my life.” But he wasn’t grieving for himself; he was grieving for his wife and four children. He said they didn’t deserve all of this because all his wife ever did were mitzvot.
Shortly after our hug, he was getting ready to leave the rehab center to attend his daughter’s bat mitzvah.
Aside from Yosi, I didn’t even know the names of the people I was hugging, but each one felt better than the next. And that’s how I knew the trip was about so much more than I’d realized at the outset. And it wasn’t just who we came to see; it was who we came to see it with: over long bus rides and a glass of wine at the end of a challenging day, I built deep and instant bonds with members of our congregation I’ve been sitting across the aisle from for years, but who I never knew.
The people of Israel have fresh wounds in need of healing—fresh scars visible on their bodies, but invisible on their hearts and minds.
The granddaughter of Shimon Peres told us Israelis are so angry at their government. Others spoke of the “unprecedented moral dilemma” Israel faces in eliminating evil. A former head of National Public Diplomacy told us Israelis are so fearful that Jews around the world are growing too detached from their Jewish roots, demanding we all do more than simply wielding our checkbooks. And the families at the center for hostages in Tel Aviv told us: all they want us to do is show up as they continue to navigate the unthinkable.
It was there that we also met Dvir Rosenfeld, a survivor from Kfar Azza who coincidentally, is the uncle of those twin baby boys whose cribs I stumbled upon and who lost their parents. When we asked what we could do to help his family, he said: “Just come to visit us. Stay with us. Just be, and listen, and hug.”
So let’s get over there and do just that. Numerous people we met along the way told our group that we were “crazy” and “not normal” for choosing to come into a country amid a war, when everyone else was running away. If that’s what it means to be crazy or abnormal, I wouldn’t have it any other way. And to those worried that the things you may see while in Israel you “can’t unsee”—maybe that’s not such a bad thing.
To steal a line from our Rabbi: “When you pour hot oil on a Jew in Morocco, a Jew in France screams.” Well, now I’m confident it goes the same way with love as it does with pain. When Jews in Israel can feel love and find hope and see light, we all can. I certainly returned from our trip full of all three. (And thanks to David, I also returned with a stash of rugelach in my suitcase, violating U.S. laws by lying to airport security that no, I was not smuggling a smorgasbord of Jewish pastries in my bag.)
Hours before we headed to the airport to catch our flight back to New York, we made a quick stop at the Kotel—I had so many things to pray for this year, and I felt that God was listening more than any other time I’d gone. I also met up with an old friend whose five kids I’d delivered before they made Aaliyah. He showed me something special I’d never seen before: each house in the old winding alleyways of Jerusalem has little glass boxes outside their front doors, set into the Jerusalem stone. Each night of Chanukah, they put their chanukiahs outside in these boxes to shine their light on the world. In our own country, where nowadays we’re often afraid to even reveal to people that we’re Jewish, I can only hope that we can take a page out of Israel’s book to shine our Judaism loud and proud, whether it’s the third night of Chanukah or any other night of the year.
Chag sameach, and let’s burn those candles as bright as we can and use them to find beauty in the darkness.
| 
