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Authors: Bruce Feiler
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we could live in Israel. A Jew belongs in Israel.’ It was like Chinese water torture. He just wore me down.”
The following year they sold their house, their two cars, their real-estate business, and moved back. “At first it was very hard,” she said. “We had to learn how to put on gas masks. My oldest son sat in school for a year unable to understand anything. I kept saying, ‘What did I do to my kids?’ It was hard for me, too. I missed my friends. I missed my house. I missed my central air-conditioning. I lay on my bed at night, saying, ‘I can’t do this. I can’t do this.’ My father thought Abby had brainwashed me.”
Worse, their money soon ran out and they had to flee the highprices of Jerusalem. “We drew a circle with a half-hour radius,” she said, “and started looking at communities. We knew it had to be religious. We wanted something established enough to have teenagers. We wanted a place new enough to have young children. We wanted diversity. This place just fit the bill.”
“There’s one thing you didn’t mention,” I said.
“I know,” she said. “The Bible is not the reason we came to Bethel, but once we were living here, every time Bethel was mentioned in the weekly Torah portion, only then did I feel part of the community. Part of the extended Jewish people. I remember the first time they read the part where Abraham builds an altar in Bethel, and I thought, That’s where I live !”
The feeling only grew, she said, once they realized the grave political situation. “Until they had the bypass road, there wasn’t a day we would drive without being stoned. It was extremely unpleasant. Once, when my sister-in-law was here, somebody dropped a cinder block on the car. Not a rock, a cinder block. The whole ceiling on the passenger side caved in. I had been sitting in the back with my sister-in-law, who fell to the floor, shaking. If I had been sitting in the passenger seat I’d probably be dead.”
I suggested that she seemed remarkably free of anger.
“I don’t hold the anger,” she said. “You can’t live that way. You have to live a normal life. I just don’t want to give up any more land. I don’t want to give up my home.”
“Do you feel living here has brought you closer to God?”
“Yes. Because I see purpose in our living here. If I didn’t, it would be very hard. I wonder how anybody who’s Israeli and not religious can stand it. If they don’t have that connection to God, with all the aggravation and hardship, why stay here?”
“Why do you stay here?”
“I stay here because Jews belong in the land of Israel. God gave us this land, and it’s not up to us to give it back. When we stood at Sinai as a Jewish people and said, ‘We accept the Torah,’ we didn’t just do it for that generation in the desert. We did it for all future generations.”
“Tell me about the land. Do you have a different relationship with it?”
“There are many things about living in Israel that are wonderful. One of those is the land. When my kids used to go on field trips in America they went to a museum, to the Empire State Building. Here when you go on a field trip they drop you off in the middle of nowhere and you walk, for hours and hours and hours. A field trip is seeing the land, connecting to the land. You don’t have to see a thing. There’s an expression, ‘To walk in the land of Israel is a holy thing to do.’ ”
We pulled out our Bibles and began to discuss the sections that take place in Bethel. After Abraham leaves Shechem, he travels south to the hill country “east of Bethel,” where he once again builds an altar to the Lord. Later Abraham revisits the place on his return from Egypt. After that, Bethel only grows in importance, becoming, after Jerusalem, the most frequently mentioned place in the Bible. Jacob, during his flight from Beer-sheba to Harran, sleeps there and has his famous nocturnal vision of angels ascending and descending on a
The following year they sold their house, their two cars, their real-estate business, and moved back. “At first it was very hard,” she said. “We had to learn how to put on gas masks. My oldest son sat in school for a year unable to understand anything. I kept saying, ‘What did I do to my kids?’ It was hard for me, too. I missed my friends. I missed my house. I missed my central air-conditioning. I lay on my bed at night, saying, ‘I can’t do this. I can’t do this.’ My father thought Abby had brainwashed me.”
Worse, their money soon ran out and they had to flee the highprices of Jerusalem. “We drew a circle with a half-hour radius,” she said, “and started looking at communities. We knew it had to be religious. We wanted something established enough to have teenagers. We wanted a place new enough to have young children. We wanted diversity. This place just fit the bill.”
“There’s one thing you didn’t mention,” I said.
“I know,” she said. “The Bible is not the reason we came to Bethel, but once we were living here, every time Bethel was mentioned in the weekly Torah portion, only then did I feel part of the community. Part of the extended Jewish people. I remember the first time they read the part where Abraham builds an altar in Bethel, and I thought, That’s where I live !”
The feeling only grew, she said, once they realized the grave political situation. “Until they had the bypass road, there wasn’t a day we would drive without being stoned. It was extremely unpleasant. Once, when my sister-in-law was here, somebody dropped a cinder block on the car. Not a rock, a cinder block. The whole ceiling on the passenger side caved in. I had been sitting in the back with my sister-in-law, who fell to the floor, shaking. If I had been sitting in the passenger seat I’d probably be dead.”
I suggested that she seemed remarkably free of anger.
“I don’t hold the anger,” she said. “You can’t live that way. You have to live a normal life. I just don’t want to give up any more land. I don’t want to give up my home.”
“Do you feel living here has brought you closer to God?”
“Yes. Because I see purpose in our living here. If I didn’t, it would be very hard. I wonder how anybody who’s Israeli and not religious can stand it. If they don’t have that connection to God, with all the aggravation and hardship, why stay here?”
“Why do you stay here?”
“I stay here because Jews belong in the land of Israel. God gave us this land, and it’s not up to us to give it back. When we stood at Sinai as a Jewish people and said, ‘We accept the Torah,’ we didn’t just do it for that generation in the desert. We did it for all future generations.”
“Tell me about the land. Do you have a different relationship with it?”
“There are many things about living in Israel that are wonderful. One of those is the land. When my kids used to go on field trips in America they went to a museum, to the Empire State Building. Here when you go on a field trip they drop you off in the middle of nowhere and you walk, for hours and hours and hours. A field trip is seeing the land, connecting to the land. You don’t have to see a thing. There’s an expression, ‘To walk in the land of Israel is a holy thing to do.’ ”
We pulled out our Bibles and began to discuss the sections that take place in Bethel. After Abraham leaves Shechem, he travels south to the hill country “east of Bethel,” where he once again builds an altar to the Lord. Later Abraham revisits the place on his return from Egypt. After that, Bethel only grows in importance, becoming, after Jerusalem, the most frequently mentioned place in the Bible. Jacob, during his flight from Beer-sheba to Harran, sleeps there and has his famous nocturnal vision of angels ascending and descending on a
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