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February 27, 2024
Author(s):
Parashat Tetzaveh
Reflections of Our Israel Mitzvah Mission Travelers
February 24, 2024 — 15 Adar I 5784
Temple Emanuel, Newton, MA
Sonia Saltzman
For me, the time in Israel volunteering together with Temple Emanuel, was framed by a poem that I’ve often turned to, but never has it resonated so deeply. The poem, written in1963 by Yehuda Amichai, goes as follows:
A man doesn’t have time in his life
to have time for everything.
He doesn’t have seasons enough to have
a season for every purpose. Ecclesiastes
Was wrong about that.
A man needs to love and to hate at the same moment,
to laugh and cry with the same eyes,
with the same hands to throw stones and to gather them,
to make love in war and war in love.
And to hate and forgive and remember and forget,
to arrange and confuse, to eat and to digest
what history
takes years and years to do.
These first two stanzas say it all. In just the span of one day, I felt so many conflicting emotions. At lunchtime, I was feeling so uplifted after having spent the morning -together with others, weeding rows and rows of cherry tomatoes. We left a field that looked just right – with its thinned-out vines- and moved on to a very different kind of field. At the site of the Nova Festival, we stood surrounded by posters of the young men and women who were brutally murdered. Each picture broke my heart, but I kept looking at them and reading the notes left behind by family and friends, wanting to learn their story and honor their memory…And then another emotional swing – a short bus ride away, Gilat Junction lifted my broken heart and filled it with joy. At this Junction, which operates round the clock, volunteers provide soldiers with nourishment for the body and soul – with a barbecue to eat on site and take away to the rest of the unit, with showers and washing machines, haircuts, and physical therapy – ALL of this provided by volunteers.
We were witnesses to Israel’s amazing creativity and inclusiveness. A lively musical performance at Gilat Junction was offered by soldiers with special needs – through an IDF program called Special in Uniform. Their music was truly inspiring, lifting all who were there. We danced, we sang, we rejoiced with soldiers fresh from Gaza, and who would be returning there shortly. Wanting to support this wonderful volunteer initiative and to hold on to their message, I purchased their swag -including a T-shirt that read: rak ahavah t’nazeach. Only love will prevail. Only love will win.
These words took me back to the Nova Festival and more specifically, to the ceremony we were a part of at the site. A torah scroll had been written in memory of those murdered there and we were invited to surround the sofer as he completed the scroll, as he wrote that final letter– the letter “lamed” for the word Yisrael. October 7th fell on simchat torah – when we read the last verses of Torah and immediately begin anew. Torah ends with the letter “lamed” and begins with the letter “bet” – as we read –bereishit bara Elohim. Lamed and Bet – spell lev, which means heart, which means love. A new beginning grounded in love.
Israel has come together, has found ways to love each other across political differences, in ways that would have been unimaginable only a few months ago. This is lev, this is love.
I pray that this unity endures through the many challenges that lie ahead.
And I pray that this Torah of lev, of love illuminates the path forward.
Noah Rivkin
Good Morning. I’m Noah Rivkin and I’ve been coming to Temple Emanuel since I was a small kid. My family, just over there, started bringing me to services starting age two. Growing up here, I scrambled up to the bima with a million other kids to grab shabbat Sunkist candies and studied with Dan Nessin for my Bar Mitzvah. There were hard times in life, some recent, where my whole family found support from our Rabbis, and our congregation. This congregation has been here for us. We Rivkins are lucky. That’s why, when my parents asked my sisters Ailey and Ariel, and me if we wanted to participate in Temple Emanuel’s Mitzvah Mission to Israel, our answer was an easy, unhesitating, yes.
The mission was transformative for my family. The multigenerational team assembled, comprised not just of the Temple Emanuel delegation but of Jews from Los Angeles, Washington DC, Nashville and even Omaha Nebraska, was one of the very best teams I’ve had the privilege to be a part of. Filled with a collaborative spirit, and the kind of openness and trust in one another that is rare, the work we did for the miraculous state of Israel mattered. I could tell you about working on a kibbutz to prepare it for the return of evacuated parents and children, or about pulling weeds with the tenacity of Excalibur out of onion farms by the Egyptian border, or about working on military bases to help hundreds of strong, courageous, and often times painfully young men and women fighting right now to destroy Hamas and bring home the hostages.
But what I want to focus on is why we were there doing all that in the first place. The site of the NOVA festival, on the outskirts of Kibbutz Re’im has a horrifically dreamy quality. Tall green grass and spindly Israeli trees sway calmly in the wind, punctuated by the vivid glow of a carpet of poppies, illuminating your conscience with red. And when we saw it for ourselves, everywhere there was a quiet, disrupted only once, by explosions of projectiles impacting four miles away in Gaza that you could feel in your chest. The Nova Site was terrible. October 7th didn’t just happen to Israelis. It happened to us. Our worst nightmare has actually happened: we now know that in today’s world, 1200 of our people can still be murdered in a matter of hours. What do you say, when for the first time in your life, you are standing in a cemetery filled solely with the bodies of murdered innocent people? What do you do when people you thought were your friends on Erev Shabbat have abandoned you by Shabbos morning? What do you do when nothing makes sense anymore?
It occurred to me that a few years back on Yom Kippur, Rabbi Gardenswartz gave us a possible answer. He said then that, to persevere in hard times, you need to turn to your core. That when you strengthen your core, your core strengthens you. In times like these, I’m reminded of what my core is: our God, my family, my congregation (you all), and the state of Israel. What do we do in response to October 7th? We turn to our core. We take care of our people in Israel, who need us as much as we need them. We take care of one another, just as the Mitzvah Mission team did, with more vigilance and humanity and love than we ever have deployed before. Right now, we feel overwhelming pain. These are painful days. But in time, with God’s help, and with each other, we will rise, stronger than before, with a new dedication to repairing the world.
Rhiannon Thomas
My name is Rhiannon Thomas, and I am the office manager here at Temple Emanuel. Over the past 2 years I have had the privilege of working with exceptional colleagues and with many of you, my beloved congregants.
Another privilege recently afforded me was the opportunity to go to Israel with the temple mission trip. As you may know, I am a Christian, but that just heightened my enthusiasm about visiting. As we all know, Jesus was a Jew. This was a chance to learn more about your beloved homeland I hear so much about. The dire situation in Israel did not deter me: rather, I felt that this could be a way of expressing my friendship with the Jewish people, as well as having the chance to see a country about which I knew very little.
I will not give you a blow-by-blow account of our time in Jerusalem, our brief visit to Tel Aviv, or our work in the Gaza Envelope. Instead, as the Rabbi would say, I want to double-click on my own experiences and emotions. The war, of course, was the threatening and constant backdrop to our visit. We saw so many soldiers, in the cities and all over the south. I am from a country with very few guns, and to walk alongside people barely older than my highschooler, carrying machine guns, was painful and frightening. The only conclusion to be drawn from seeing that many soldiers and weapons is that there is something very, very wrong, and the tension was palpable, everywhere.
Working with people who have been directly affected by was sobering. It’s easy, and even fun, to weed tomato vines for a couple of hours whilst chatting with companions, but remembering that we were trying to fill in for an entire workforce which had to flee made for a jolting reality check. Similarly, I enjoyed weeding (apparently my lot in life) at the playground in Sderot, but we always had the thought of the children who are obliged to play in an indoor facility in the back of our minds.
We spent an afternoon at the Nova music festival site. Looking at the pictures and reading the dates of birth and death of those killed was, quite literally, heartbreaking. And yet there I got to be part of a wonderful thing: a scribe writing the last words of a Torah. Rabbi Gardenswartz talked afterwards about the Jewish people having agency to choose the final word, even if the first word is already written, and I love that message for myself.
My ultimate takeaway from visiting Israel was that the Jewish people are as one: totally committed to the country and to each other. The solidarity and depth of feeling expressed by my fellow travelers was forceful. There are so many ogres towering over Jews at the moment: in America, in Israel, and in other parts of the world, but my small window into your lives shines a bright light on the resolution and connection which seem both life sustaining and inextinguishable. I am so proud and honored to be your friend, and am so grateful I was given the gift of visiting your beloved homeland.