Hineni, I am here: Not alone and not afraid
It is Shabbat morning in the Galilee, and I am out walking my dog Munchkin, in the forest. I am thinking about the war, about the situation in Israel-Palestine now. An Israeli peace activist, I am trying to remain hopeful, to hold onto my vision of Arab-Jewish partnership on this land.
My hope was this crisis would at least make our leaders realize peace is the only solution. Instead, the extremists on both sides are seeking more and more war. It is hard not to fall into despair.
More hostages and civilians in Gaza are dying; more soldiers, too. Six were killed in the past few days, including the first woman. After a year of relentless missile fire (still ongoing) from Hezbollah in Lebanon into northern Israel, causing fatalities and turning parts of the north into ghost-towns, Israel blew up thousands of pagers of Hezbollah officials.
Flights have been canceled, and now Hezbollah is saying they will invade the Galilee. The IDF is talking about invading Lebanon with ground troops.
Until now, our area has been relatively safe. There has been a steady flow of army planes flying towards Lebanon all year long, some missiles and sirens in our area. And yes, there was Iran’s attack on the whole country some months ago, when I spent the night with my family in our safe room seeing reports of drones being intercepted right above us.
But we have still been living in our homes, working, going to school. We are far from the border with Gaza in the south, and so, our kibbutz was spared on October 7th. And we are far enough from the northern border that Hezbollah’s missiles, which began on that same day, have only rarely reached us, so we have not had to evacuate.
But now, the full-on war in northern Israel I have been fearing is unfolding before my eyes, and I do not even know what that will mean.
To make matters worse, Jacob is out of the country. Will he make it back any time soon? I wonder as I walk. I do not want to go through this alone.
Jacob and I came here together, eyes open to the country’s deficits but also its benefits, and committed to being part of making it a better place. We felt it had much promise. Now it is starting to feel we joined a failing start-up that is finally going under; that is what I am thinking as I walk deeper into the forest.
So why don’t I insist we pull out while we still can? I don’t feel attached to place. I can be happy anywhere. And I certainly value life over land. I am a spiritual person, don’t feel bound by organized religion or doctrine. I am not a nationalist. I am a universalist. So why do I stay?
This summer, I could have left for a vacation from the Middle East. My parents offered to pay for my flight to visit them in the U.S. But I couldn’t pull myself away. A strong force is keeping me here. What is it? Why can’t I leave?
Suddenly, I see the remnants of a campfire on the path before me. They were not here yesterday evening, when Munchin and I walked this path last. It is unlikely people were here between then and now around a campfire.
I am disoriented. This path is overgrown with dry brambles. I am lost. But how could that be? I just turned onto the trail. I have been here hundreds of times.
I look around, trying to reorient myself. The place is familiar, but different. I know where I am, but I don’t know when. I am fully present in this historical moment, only it is a different historical moment. A war, but a different one. I must stay and fight. I am here fighting for my people, and for humanity. For the future. I feel that viscerally.
Something is flying overhead. Another army plane? No. It sounds like a helicopter. I look around. There are wounded on the ground in the distance. I must collect them, bring them to my ambulance, drive them to the hospital. I hurry through the dry brambles to reach a man lying in the thorns. Can I save him? Time is running out.
Suddenly I see the path again. Munchkin runs ahead of me. I have found my bearings again. But what just happened? I have never had an experience like this before.
As I continue walking, I feel the presence of my aunt, my father’s much older sister. She lived in this area, too, on a different kibbutz in the Jezreel Valley. She served in the 1948 Arab-Jewish War, driving an ambulance. She came from New York to Israel (only then it was called Palestine), as did I, only she came in the 1940s. I came in the 1990s.
My aunt grew up Orthodox Jewish, like me, and she went through a devout stage, but she wanted equality for women; she even wore tefillin – like me. And we both named our oldest daughters Michal (which I did not know when I chose my daughter’s name, because my cousin legally switched her first and second names).
But my aunt was in and out of mental institutions. She and her kibbutznik husband divorced – her second husband, and second divorce – while they were studying in the U.S. He went back to Israel, and she stayed in the U.S. with their two daughters. She was disillusioned about Zionism, socialism, and kibbutz life, and she felt abandoned by God and religion.
When I was a kid, my aunt would call our house demanding to speak to my father, whom she loved when he was a boy but did not really know when he was an adult, as she left the house when he was young. I feared my aunt.
Only later did I hear more of my aunt’s story and wish I had known her better. We had much in common. Only her story ended tragically, with her dying in her 80s while living in a group home, never having fulfilled her life ambitions – except the legacy of her daughters and granddaughters, who were her life and joy.
My story is still ongoing. I was born with FSHD, a degenerative genetic muscular disease, which has been hard but not too debilitating so far. And it has been one of my best life teachers.
My aunt’s disease took over much of her life, made her unable to fully function or cope, and unable to see any real hope for herself or the world. At least according to what I understand.
Home now, after our walk, I consider where to protest tonight. I have been demonstrating every Saturday night since this extremist right-wing government came into power, for what will soon be the past two years. Except for the first weeks after October 7th, when all demonstrations stopped. But when they started again, so did I.
I decide on Haifa. It is one of my regular protest spots still, and I can talk to David, my Buddhist monk friend. He always stands in the same spot, so he’ll be easy to find. He can help me understand my experience in the forest. I don’t think it is about reincarnation, as my aunt was alive when I was born. But I do think it is related to Karma and matters of the eternal soul.
But after the demonstration, we only have a short time to speak, as we share a cab home with friends. The driver drops David at his apartment in Haifa first and then drives the rest of us back home to the Jezreel Valley. But I tell David the general story, and we set a time to speak on the phone a few days later.
After we drop David, the cab driver turns on the radio news: Hezbollah plans to start firing a barrage of missiles at us that night, in retaliation for Israel’s pager attack. We must stay near our safe rooms. Schools are canceled indefinitely, from Haifa northward. I am worried, especially with Jacob away.
Back at my house, I update my two youngest kids, who still live at home. I tell them I will sleep between their two bedrooms, in our safe room. I do not move quickly, because of my FSHD, and we only have one minute to get to the safe room.
After the first siren and boom, both kids decide to sleep with me in the safe room. My thirteen-year-old daughter climbs into the single bed with me, and my seventeen-year-old son puts a mattress on the floor. That night, between sirens and booms, I have this dream:
A woman and her daughter come to convert at the mikveh, the ritual immersion pool I run on my kibbutz. Her name is Netta. There are missiles and sirens, so we use a small mikveh in a kind of crawl space, like those where Jews hid in the Holocaust. There is not enough room in there for all of us, so I give them instructions from outside. It is less than ideal, not how I want it to be. But it is better than nothing. When they finish, they try to push the door open, but I hold it shut. I am not ready yet for them to emerge. When they come out I give Netta copies of my three most recent books.
I wake up, write this dream in my journal, and check my phone. There are messages from my older kids who live in Jerusalem, telling me to bring their siblings who live in Haifa and their two younger siblings who still live at home, to stay with them in Jerusalem. There are no missiles there now. We will be safer there.
But I do not want to go. Again, I feel a pull to stay put. I tell them I will consider it, but in the meantime will wait and see how the war develops. I put down my dream journal, thinking I will bring this dream to my Zoom dream group meeting the next day.
I reach out to Ori, my spiritual companion, to see if she has time to speak. I am a dream worker and a spiritual companion, in addition to my writing and my work at the mikveh, and Ori and I meet online regularly for co-companioning.
Ori feels strongly this was a visitation by my aunt, whose soul is restless; it is hanging around this realm, seeking a tikkun, a corrective to its embodied existence here, so that it can be set free and rise. She feels that tikkun will be, at least partially, through me.
Ori suggests my aunt has a message for me, too – especially now, as she went through a war herself on this same soil. Our soul-connection is symbiotic.
The next day, another day of sirens and no school, I meet with my dream group on Zoom and work my dream. This is its message:
Although I would like the situation to be different than it is, I cannot change our reality. But I can continue to do smaller acts of transformation on the grassroots level and on a personal level, creating the change I want to see in the world. When it is time to “come out”, when society is ripe for this change, it will exist in the collective social unconscious — even if I and others like me who believe in peace are a minority now. We must stay rooted (Netta means planted and seedling), even if we are just the seeds of a revolution.
The dream also reminds me my three most recent books all feature my aunt in some way. She has been with me all these years, working her tikkun through me and supporting my journey. And now she has appeared to me in my time of need, to show me she is with me, and to encourage me to stay and continue on my path. We are in this together. The war will escalate, she is warning me; nevertheless, I must continue on my path. That is her message. “Do not be afraid. Focus on the here and now; that is your role now. You are not alone,” she is telling me.
The next night, I speak with David, my Buddhist monk friend. “You are your aunt’s tikkun, he says. On many levels. She wants you to stay, to not become disillusioned,” he says. “Don’t give up hope. At least not yet.”
When we hang up, I remember I have a transcript of an interview my aunt’s daughter, my cousin, conducted with her mother. I have not read it in years. I read the interview now, again. My aunt speaks of her time driving an ambulance in the war, of a soldier dying in her arms. I think of that soldier I saw on the ground in the forest, my feeling of urgency trying to save him.
When I get to a section about the Arabs in Palestine before the state was established, I am stunned by her words. I did not remember reading this part before.
The ideology of the movement, she says, was that the Jews should live with the Arabs in peace. She and her comrades did want to live in peace with the local Arabs. But history played out differently.
I read on. My aunt talks about what made her want to leave the U.S. The injustices to the African Americans were hard for her to witness and accept. She wanted to live in a place with total equality for all, and felt this was what she and her comrades were building in Israel. That was her hope for this place, her vision, her dream. Like mine.
My aunt was disillusioned by the treatment of the Sephardi Jews and the Arabs but came to the conclusion that Zionism at that stage in Jewish history was the most important ideal, for reasons of survival of the Jewish people, even if it meant compromising other values. The other values could be addressed later, once there was a safe place for Jews to live. They were literally fighting for their lives. But this reality, among others, broke her spirit.
My aunt was a complex human. A strong Zionist, she left home on her own to live in Israel and work as a farmer on a kibbutz, after having grown up in Brooklyn in a bookish family. She felt caught between two worlds, not totally fitting in either. She believed in a Jewish homeland less out of nationalism and more out of a utopian socialist ideal where all could be free, safe, and secure.
My aunt believed in the ideal of Jews building this utopia, but not out of chauvinism, rather out of the Jewish value of pursuing justice and peace. But the realities of the moment prevented that utopia from being actualized – a fact of life in general, which I think was hard for her to accept.
My aunt had high standards for the world. I do, too. But I have worked on accepting things as they are, while still trying to make them better – and not giving up hope they can be, even if not in my lifetime.
I am part of my aunt’s tikkun — even if her ideal utopia, our ideal utopia, won’t manifest now, like my dream is telling me. Even if I have to wait to see it happen, or maybe not see it happen at all. Even if our leaders on both sides are making peace impossible, I must continue my work on the grassroots level, building partnership among Jewish and Palestinian Israelis to fight for a better life here for all of us; to be part of the transformation I want to see happen in the world.
Another message, however, I hear from my aunt, is that if it becomes necessary, I can give myself permission to leave. That is a lesson I can learn from her life. We can teach each other.
The next morning, I am walking with Munchkin again in the forest. I visit that same spot where I saw the campfire remnants a few days before. They are nowhere to be found. I send a photo to Ori. Her answer: “This pathway looks old and well-trodden.”
“Indeed,” I write back.
A few siren-and-missile-filled days later, Jacob manages to get back. The next day, we are woken by a siren, and another goes off while we are in the safe room. When it is safe to come out, I decide to take Munchkin for a walk in the forest. I figure there won’t be more sirens that morning. Jacob joins me, reluctantly, prefers I not be in the forest alone if there is missile fire.
When we reach the spot where I had my visitation experience, I decide to share it with Jacob. Just as I am telling him the part where I am on a battle field, trying to save a fallen soldier, a siren goes off.
This is my first time being away from the house when there is a siren. None of us know what to do. I sit down next to a tree, hoping the tree can shelter us from falling missile debris. Jacob and Munchkin join me. I hear a loud boom, look up to the sky, and see a missile above us. It is intercepted by the Iron Dome, breaks up into smokey pieces which begin to fall. But I feel surprisingly calm.
I am not alone. I am not afraid. I am here. Hineni.