“F—king hell, Sarah,” she whispered—since I became orthodox and stopped cursing, she’s taken a special joy in profanity, a joy I once shared. “The security guard who used to let your father go in without ID when he had his cast didn’t make it out. Your father’s been to his house twice now to visit his wife. He used to see the man every day, but he only just learned his name, Samba. Yes, he was North African, Muslim. He was a twelve-dollar-an-hour employee with a green card who everyone resented because he wouldn’t let them in without their IDs and he stayed until the whole shithouse caved in and all you can think about is reprisals, and right and wrong, and bombing people.” Eema wasn’t whispering anymore. “And I have to think about what the hell I would do if I lost your father and there you are, self-righteously advocating a genocide of what was a pastoral shepherd folk until we, yes us, the never-can-do-wrong, always-the-victim Jews radicalized them. And you use the Holocaust to justify it. My grandparents died in the Holocaust; don’t you ever bring that up to me as a basis for your twisted manifest destiny. They would not have wanted others to die because they died; and while I’m at it, I might as well say that I can’t stand the pathetic way you call it the Shoah. Or call me, Eema! God it makes me angry. Call it what it is, the Holocaust. Not everything needs a name assigned by some smarmy, bearded self-righteous wisp of a man in a black coat, in a shtetl.”
I had to refrain from nervously giggling at her last comment about yeshivah boys naming the Shoah. Nothing I could say would turn the tide at that point, so I delicately set the receiver back down in its cradle on my desk while she continued talking, gaining volume. There just wasn’t any point staying on the phone. I was the first one in the office by a matter of hours, gray streaks of cold December light barely beginning to part the buildings ringing Ben Yehudah Square, all so that I’d be early enough that it would be late enough but early enough back there. I couldn’t listen; I didn’t have to. I would give an awful lot to hear you launch into a righteous tirade, right or wrong, at this moment, Eema. I’d really give an awful lot. I miss you. Despite everything, your misgivings about Eretz Yisroel, about flying, about me, you came to Yerushalaim. Despite all of my belief, despite knowing that everything fits into Hashem’s plan, I wish that you hadn’t.
But what choice is there but to go on? They seem cliché, the sayings: Changing your life lets them win; the best defense is your daily routine; never bow to terrorism; never again; an eye for an eye; to fear is to lose. But the world rotates on a combination of obstinacy and faith. If you don’t believe that you’ll die the moment Hashem decides, no sooner, no later, you go insane. You can’t survive. There are teenage women in bulky coats dressed up like orthodox women, like me, walking into university cafeterias and devolving into a ground level Fourth-of-July display. Legs and hands and feet and bone and bolts and nails. I shouldn’t have told my father what the Rosh Yeshivah where I learned with the women’s group in the evening in Kiriat Yoel said about the Jews that died in the Shoah. Of course my father told my mother. Of course she called me outraged. “They deserved it, Sarah? Is that what he told you? That they deserved it? That motherf—r said that my grandparents deserved to be yanked out of their tiny Czech ghetto, out of their shtetl shul, and taken out into the woods where they dug their own graves? Or did the f—t b—d mean that my father deserved to go to the children’s labor camp where the commandant used him to teach his son how to strike body blows? Or did he not realize that my father’s family was practicing, was orthodox, was devout?” What could I say back to her, to my mother? I answered the way the rabbi answered when the question of the many Orthodox Jews who died was raised, probably not the right answer.
“Eema, it’s very hard to accept that we might have deserved it, and it in no way negates any of the Nazis’ guilt. They are Amalek, who we were supposed to have killed off in the time of the first temple. But the fact is that all Jews are interconnected and responsible for each other, and if the Jew in Russia (I didn’t want to say Czechoslovakia, I didn’t want to indict my own great-grandparents, my own grandfather) if the Jew in Russia says Tehillim without kovanah, then there’s that much less righteousness in the world, and then the Jew in Germany will break Shabbos, the Jew in France eat pork, the Jew in America intermarry.”
That time, she hung up on me, but only after first repeatedly banging the receiver against something hard, the kitchen countertop maybe. I thought I might have heard silverware jangling as it hit. I hung on, listened until she hung up. I thought about my grandfather, how he was lucky that he got to stand all day while a little Nazi solar-plexed him. I was thinking about how it felt putting body weight behind a blow during training with punching bags when I did my tour with the Israeli Defense Forces, the way your shoulder wants to blow out the back of your moving body, and imagining my fourteen-year-old grandfather bearing that impact again and again, glad that his special role as a punching bag made him unique, kept him alive while all other children persished. The least I could do was listen while she slammed the phone and cursed, though the call wasn’t cheap. I was in my apartment that time, upstairs from the cafe.
Well the sun isn’t going to go down. That’s just part of the deal. But there’s a lot that I need to do, will do tomorrow. I’ll wake up early, and if not totally reverse the lost time, at least begin the reversal. For each of the next four days, I, Sara bat Shmeenah, Sarah Frankel, will wake up half an hour earlier. And that means that I have to go to bed soon, with or without the help of dark.
I don’t know if I can go back to that apartment. It’s right over the cafe; my windows blew out too. Perhaps I can make this compromise: I’ll return to Yerushalaim, but to a new apartment. Ok. That makes me feel better. I can go to bed now. Good-night, Sun, sweet dreams.
July 21
I see amazing things and I see nothing to talk about. I saw a herd of musk-oxen today. I understand that they’re actually a kind of primeval goat. Whales are also a type of goat. Speaking of which, I’m really surprised that I haven’t seen whales. I thought I saw blowhole spray in the distance the other day, but it was nothing. In fact, in many ways this trip is tame and it worries me that I am running from Jerusalem. That I do have whole days to meditate, to reflect, that I am not consumed by the trip my father planned is not ideal. The whole idea was to face concrete fears in an environment where I could grapple with them and win. Plus, it leaves too much time for thought.
It makes me lax at times, the seeming casual nature of rowing peaceably through this eerie, unending autumn late-afternoon, because that is what the July here is: an autumn late afternoon, all the time. The light has a red quality to it from passing through so much of the earth’s atmosphere and casts long strong warm shadows. The foothills reaching out to the tundra are like high desert, rived by occasional violent water into deeply creased folds of land stretching out like roots or fingers, a combination of dirt and green. On their north, seeming flat absorbs them, and the flat is split by rivers only noticeable at their outlets. Because the flat is deep tundra, it hides the river banks in its expanse, disappearing them the way tall grasses do a meadow stream. To the foothills’ south, great grey mountains rise straight up to snow covered tops. And in fact the flat isn’t nearly so flat as it seems, but its expanse is so broad and unbroken that my mind averages its rolling nature into a perpetual plane.
I don’t want to stay up as late as I did last night. I said that I would wake up half an hour earlier and I only woke up twenty-five minutes earlier, which I would count as close enough except that I was so sluggish that it took me nearly twice as long as usual to break down my tent, cook breakfast, pack everything back into the boat and cast off.
I was in such a rush that I almost set sail without the pontoons. No, Abba, I wasn’t so foolish as to almost forget them. Instead, I looked at the wind’s constancy, at the water’s pacific ease, and almost chose to risk it. I know, no risks when you’re going solo. Risk tolerance is zero. But losing time is also a risk, and I’d promised myself to make up what I’d lost.