Our Family in Israel
April 24, 2020
Congregation B’nai B’rith, Santa Barbara CA
Shabbat Shalom everyone
Tonight, as we approach Yom HaAtzmaut, Israel Independence Day, I would like to share with you three short videos, each of them from Israel. They were all made within the past month, and so they all are in one way or another about the Coronavirus pandemic, and how we human beings are coping with this completely new reality.
Each one of the videos is utterly unlike the other two; they come from very different places and very different people, but they are all from Israel. Each one of them touched me and cheered me up. And each one of them felt to me like a revelation of something important that I need to know as we live further and further into this pandemic story. So I thought I’d like to share them with you this evening.
The first made by a young couple living in their apartment in Tel Aviv, together with their new baby. The mother is from London, where her parents still live and her father’s family live on a Moshav down near the border of Gaza. Right now, just at the moment in their lives when these young parents would have been spending time with the baby’s grandparents and extended family, they are quarantined in their apartment in Tel Aviv. They have… time. And their own creativity. To our knowledge neither of them had ever done animation before, but out of their deep need and desire to connect to their families, they created this. https://youtu.be/WWOZRLAlBNk.
This baby’s grandfather told me that this video was the best birthday present he has ever received, and that it even included a veiled reference to the PhD thesis he wrote many decades ago about Gulliver’s Travels.
The video makes me think of the adaptive powers of the human sensory and nervous systems. We all know that when a person suffers the loss of one of their senses, the other senses grow stronger, to compensate for the loss. A blind person hears and smells and touches the word around them. A young couple in quarantine, far from their families, look around their apartment and gather what they see, and turn it into a work of love and beauty humor that overcomes all the distance between them.
The second video was created by an Israeli singer song-writer named Yishai Ribo, who like the rest of us is isolated in his home. Ribo is a religious Jew and he began by playing in his mind with the meaning of Corona….meaning crown, an image with deep resonance in Judaism as a symbol of majesty, of power, and of transcendence. Yishai Ribo’s song tells the unfolding story of the past two months, tracking events as they unfolded in Jewish time. As we were reading the last portions of Exodus, back in February, what was happening? What did we hear, what changes in the world came about as we came to Purim, and then to Passover? Ribo’s song expresses the deepening mystery all around us, as cities and streets and airports and markets all became quiet and empty. Our faces disappeared behind masks. And ancient religious questions all came powerfully to life: What do You want us to learn from this? What do you want us to understand? How should we distance ourselves from each other, and how shall we come close? How can we unify in the midst of this separation? Here is his song: Keter Melukha—The Royal Crown. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=5ZXK3Q7DpCk
One thing I love about that song is that it is all questions and only questions. Faces and empty spaces and questions. Yishay Ribo does not attempt to provide any answers in Keter Melukha. No pronouncements regarding the meaning of this enormous event. How could we possibly know or understand at this early moment? But we do have questions: Dear God, what do You want us to understand from this?
We will eventually come back together, but how will we have changed? What will we have learned?
The final video is really just a snippet, and it just came in this morning. I sent an email to a few friends in Israel asking them to send us short clips for us to show on Israel Independence Day next week, little messages from a Jewish family quarantined in Israel to our Jewish family quarantined here in Santa Barbara. Among those I asked was Amos Davidowitz, our wonderful guide who led our CBB Israel trip a year and a half ago. Not more than five minutes after I sent the email, Amos had sent me a number of photos and little video clips from his kibbutz, Kibbutz Gezer, where we spent a beautiful Friday night with the members.
Here is one of his clips, of teenage girls on the kibbutz handing out popsicles to the children on a hot corona day. As Amos said to me, it has everything you need: babies, popsicles, smiles, and so forth. Here it is: VIDEO-2020-04-24-09-03-09[1].mp4.
This is our family, in Israel, living through the coronavirus. The tiny baby in her flat in Tel Aviv, dreaming and her parents longing for their families. Yishay Ribo, singing for us to the entire world, ancient questions out of our tradition that have come back to life, in our day. What is God teaching us? How do we come back together, and when? And the children of Kibbutz Gezer, singing and dancing with their popsicles on a hot corona day.
This was a hot corona week here in Santa Barbara, but it is cooling down now. Let us turn to each other, and reach out as best we can, with our voices and our faces and our music and our hearts.
Ad sheh yafuah hayom v’nasu hatz’lalim…The wind is blowing, the day is breathing. The shadows are growing long. And here comes God…leaping like a gazelle or a young stag on the distant mountains. Shabbat Shalom.