Ari Fuld, and Living it All on Loan

There is a Midrash on Proverbs 31:10, and it goes like this:

Beruriah was the learned and compassionate wife of Rabbi Meir. While Rabbi Meir was teaching on a Shabbat afternoon, both of his sons died from the plague that was affecting their city. When Rabbi Meir returned home, he asked his wife, “Where are our sons?” She handed him the cup for havdalah and he said the blessing. Again he asked, “Where are our sons?” She brought food for him, and he ate. When he had finished eating, Beruriah said to her husband, “My teacher, I have a question. A while ago, a man came and deposited something precious in my keeping. Now he has come back to claim what he left. Shall I return it to him or not?” Meir responded, “Is not one who holds a deposit required to return it to its owner?” So she took his hand and led him to where their two children lay. He began to weep, crying “My sons, my sons.” She comforted him, “The Lord gave, the Lord took. Y’hei sh’mei rabah mevorach, May the Name of the Lord be blessed…”

I bookmarked the discussion of this particular midrash this past Shabbat as I finished up If All the Seas Were Ink by Ilana Kurshan. It felt so powerful to me, the discussion of how all that we have is merely on loan from HaShem. 

Even further is a discussion in the sixth chapter of Berachot over the blessings over foods. At once it attempts to reconcile the fact that "the heavens are the Lord's and the fullness thereof, the earth and its inhabitants" (Psalms 24:1) and that "the heavens belong to God and the earth was given to men" (Psalms 115:16). While later Rabbi Hanina bar Papa says, "All who benefit from this world without first staying blessing are as if they are stealing from the Holy One Blessed Be He" (35b).

The reconciliation for this, Rabbi Levi explains, is that everything in the world belongs to HaShem, but the moment we make a blessing, it's on loan to us. 

This discussion was so powerful to me, so potent because I struggle intensely with making berachot. One of the things that drew me to Judaism was the level of 100-percent consciousness that is required of the Torah-observant Jew. So I marked this page, it made so real the idea that all that we have is on loan from HaShem, we only need make a bracha, a blessing, in order to take pleasure of it, to enjoy it, to truly be able to cherish something -- or someone. 

And then, this morning, I awoke exhausted after going to bed around 1:30 a.m., turned on my phone, and started looking through my news feed. The first thing I saw? A distant friend, someone who helped me greatly when I made aliyah, someone who was a Lion of Zion, someone who would lay his life down for any person who was on the right side of history ... had been murdered, viciously, by a Palestinian terrorist at the very place I used to go to buy groceries or get a coffee many times every week. My immediate reaction was that I had to be mistaken. Ari, Ari who basically spends 24/7 -- or spent -- at that place in Gush Etzion speaking with soldiers and providing them with chizuk and food and other special gifts from his fundraising -- couldn't have been murdered. He was a soldier. He knew that place inside and out. And yet, there he was. There was the video. The video of him being stabbed by a vicious animal -- not a human, not anyone I would remotely call a human -- and then chasing after him, poised, shooting at the savage, and then collapsing backwards. 

There's something about watching a friend, someone you know, someone who you watch regularly from a distance be murdered ... that just crushes every possible understanding and love you have for life. For Israel. 

And then, as the day went on, and I fought between anger and tears and confusion and the question, "Could I ever take children back to that place?" And then I thought about what I'd bookmarked on Shabbat. About how this life is just on loan from HaShem, and we have to be grateful and send out as many blessings as we can every moment of every day to keep these lives and all that are part of them on loan. For it's all we have. 

Being Jewish, Being Israeli

Six years ago, my converting rabbi sent me the official Manhattan RCA Beth Din conversion application via email. A month later, I had my first meeting, and 1.5 months after that, I had my Orthodox conversion and became a certified Jew. Now, my Reform conversion years earlier made me just as Jewish in the eyes of most of the (non-Jewish) world. Hitler wouldn't have hesitated in murdering me, and neither would anyone else out to murder, with malicious intent, the Jewish people.

Three years ago, I boarded a plane to New York and then on to Israel. After years of mulling it about in my head, I finally took the dive and became more than just a Jew, I became an Israeli. A proud member of the only nation in the world where Jews are allowed to live Jewishly, religiously, without persecution or fear of death and violence perpetrated by individuals who believe in ages-old myths and legends and religiously fueled ideas that Jews are the surge of the world, responsible for all of the world's ills economically, socially, and religiously.

Oh wait. No, no. That's not true. That was Herzl's ideal, but since its inception in the modern period, Israel has never been a safe haven for Jews. Not really. And I feel like the event of the past week make that more aggressively, depressingly obvious.

I suppose, in truth, there has never been a land in which the Jews, the Israelites, have lived in complete peace without fear of persecution. I think about other minor peoples over time, and I feel like, for the most part, threats are of the natural variety. Disease, the food chain, self-destruction. But the Jewish state, the Israelis and Jews that live there ... we could pray for our only destruction to come from disease and natural causes, but it would never be a reality.

The malicious murders and stabbings that have taken place by random Arabs and Palestinians over the past week in Israel -- not just Jerusalem but Raanana, Tel Aviv, and other "modern" areas of Israel -- have me torn. On the one side, I'm desperate to return to Israel and stand my ground as a proud Jew and Israeli, to show those who would see our -- my -- destruction as a win in the war against the Jewish people that we're not going anywhere. On the other side, I see my toddler, who was born an Israeli and who will someday be conscripted to fight and defend Israel in the IDF and I'm terrified. How I raise my child is vital. He's growing up in a terrifying world and an environment where who he is is the problem. Not what he believes or says or thinks, just who he is. And that terrifies me.

First Jew, then Israeli, and now? Now I'm just a target. All Jews are, from England to France to Dubai to Israel to New York and beyond. We're all just someone's target.

When I stepped out of the mikvah five and a half years ago, I didn't know that this would be the reality. But like a marriage, I took it all -- the good, the bad, the ugly, the absolutely terrifying.

Aliyah: It Just Got Real.

Reasons to get married: I don't want to go through another air raid siren alone. 

Where Were You on 9/11?

Everyone's doing it -- the obligatory "Where Were You on 9/11?" blog post. What were you thinking, feeling, eating, saying. Were you asleep? Standing up? Waiting in line at the grocery store? Maybe you were taking your kids to school or in the hospital mourning a passing relative. Were you burying someone? Were you giving birth? What were you doing? Who were you? Ten years have passed, and the defining moment of my generation is September 11, 2001. The moments when we found out are clear, and the rest of the day is a blur.

Essex County (NJ) 9/11 Memorial (My Photo)

I was in Citizenship Issues course -- the bane of all of our existences, it was a required course for all seniors to discuss and learn about our country and its branches of government, policies, and procedures. I can't remember how we found out, but the school immediately shut down academic operations and turned on emotional operations. TVs and radios were on in every classroom. We stopped learning and started watching, breathing, doing whatever was necessary to swallow reality without spitting it back up.

Then I went on to Calculus, where I grabbed the hand of my then-boyfriend Kevin and just stared at the TV screen, watching everything unfold. Kevin and I broke up less than a month later, shortly before my 18th birthday. I entered adulthood with images of falling bodies and ash.

In choir class, all we could say was, "We were just there." And we had been. My junior year, Concert Choir took a big trip to New York. It was my first time out of the midwest, my first time to a city bigger than Kansas City or Tulsa. We soaked everything up -- the food, the music, Broadway, the buildings. The buildings. In our pictures, there they are! Just months before, the Twin Towers, standing tall behind us. Did we know what they were? Did we care? Or did we just miss them when they were gone, a hole in the skyline, a gap in time.

The rest of the day was a blur. I don't remember classes or going home or what our parents must have tried to say to us to calm us down. My little brother was just a kid, I was almost an adult. We were so far away from it in Nebraska, but what most of this country doesn't know is that Middle America is called the Heartland for a reason -- we feel everything that happens in this country, and we feel it harder and louder. When any part of the U.S. bleeds, Middle America dies a little more.

The past 10 years have seen much in my life change.

• I have two degrees and am working on two more.
• I have lived in Nebraska, Colorado, Washington (D.C.), Illinois, Connecticut, and New Jersey.
• I have dated countless folk, become engaged, and married. 
• I have visited Israel four times.
• I have learned a new language (Hebrew).
• I have converted, twice, within Judaism.
• I have legally changed my name from Amanda Jo Edwards to Chaviva Jo Galatz.
• I have watched friends come and go and come and go.
• I have become the proud aunt of four boys.
• I have grown up.

Ten years has flown by. Just like August -- zip, and it's gone. Will we continue to remember? It's embedded in my early adulthood, it colored my senior year of high school in more ways than one. I won't forget, will you?

From the Just Call Me Chaviva archives on 9/11:

• Mentions of 9/11 (of which there are quite a few, actually)
• 2006: On this day in History
• 2003 (from my retired LiveJournal): "Two years ago right now, I was done with lunch and sitting in CI, if I remember correctly. Or maybe I was in Science. I was at school. And regardless of where I was, every TV was on in Northeast High School with the station tuned in to the news showing the planes crashing, and crashing, and it was like a tape on repeat. And that, is where I was. Now, it's raining. I don't have a television to watch what's going on. I can't see what the news has to say in rememberance. I just know it's sunny in New York City, and it's cloudy here. And I don't mind. Give them all the sunshine they need. I had mine."

The Road to Destruction

The Jewish blogosphere exploded with posts about the slayings of Mishpachat Fogel in Itamar more than a week ago. I say slayings because these weren't simply killings. It wasn't murder. Humans kill, humans commit murder. Slayings are committed by monsters, inhuman creatures that are not of the same dust as the rest of us.

The weird thing about this horrible event -- and that's a really weird statement to make -- is my initial reaction to reading about the slayings. In the deepest, most anguished parts of my guts, the depths of my everything, I had a feeling. A sensation. A yearning.

In that moment, I wanted to move to Israel, to the settlements, to set up shop, to plant my feet in the ground and have children. To say to the world "I am here!" In that moment my neshama was there, in Israel, screaming at the top of my lungs for the loss of precious, young life.

It was a bizarre feeling to have, largely because after three trips to Israel, my pull to Israel has waned. Birthright left me hungry, my second trip in 2009 pushed me further, and I began pleading with Tuvia to consider aliyah, and then, out of nowhere, on our trip in 2010 ... I felt funny. I didn't feel that spark. I even wrote about it here on the blog.

So where does that leave me? Frustrated. Angry. Watching footage from the earthquake and tsunami in Japan and consider the destruction in the Middle East and the slayings of an innocent family, I'm frustrated. I don't know where we're going, where we've been, or how we'll pull ourselves out of the mess we've put ourselves in. What I do know is that Mother Nature conquers all and that when we're done destroying each other with our man-made weapons and hatred, HaShem will know what to do with us.

And maybe, just maybe, I'll be in Israel to see what HaShem has in store.

You can donate to the Victims of Terrorism Fund on the OU website. May the Fogel family and all Israel be comforted among the mourners of Zion and Jerusalem.