Volunteers Wanted

Everyone has heard the familiar Israeli adage:
“Maybe means yes.
 No means maybe.”

I am giving an hour-long department seminar next week. I am mildly terrified to put it lightly after watching many of my co-workers descend into a panic the month before. And I’ve observed one or two of them sitting in front of Powerpoint weeks before crafting elaborate animations illustrating their experimental schemes. Animations so fancy that they can dance, play basketball, and oh you know, pipette and analyze data for you. In other words, robots.

Today I was sitting at my desk with my eyes staring into space, most likely drooling or foaming at the mouth (while mechanically consuming about 600 grams of peanut M&Ms – thanks Dad) when SK stopped by my desk. “You know, it’s so great that you’re so cool about this.” “Cool about what?” “Your seminar next week. I mean you seem really calm.” And I guess it’s true, being in a self-induced coma was a pretty calm thing to do. “I wouldn’t say that I am so cool, I am just … thinking,” I replied.

About an hour later RA breezed by with one of his three major pieces of advice about life: “Ohhhh bayyyy-beeee you don’t know what you’re missing!” (Sex… his second major piece of advice about life is that I should bring my graphing calculator on my next date and nonchalantly pull it from my pocket “because it is very prestigious” and his third piece of advice is that I should eat pork). 

Next it’s ST at my desk. “So I hear you volunteered to give the seminar next week. You go girl!!! When I heard I thought ‘Alissa is so awesome! She’s only been here six months and she volunteered!’” “Volunteered??? Who said I volunteered!?!?” “Oh, LO told me, she told everyone that – that you volunteered. I mean didn’t you?”

“She told me about six weeks ago that I had to present and I said, ‘Really?’ and she said ‘Yes’ so I said okay.” “Oh honey, you totally volunteered, then. You just need to become more Israeli. But don’t feel bad, you’re changing already, you really are. Now let’s practice you saying ‘no’ without laughing a few more times.”

“No. I can’t practice right now. I need to work on my seminar,” I say as I turn back to the computer screen keeping a straight face just long enough for her to slip out the door before returning to my usual self: a goofy American-Israeli consuming an inordinate number of colorful candies in front of a computer screen in a Jerusalem lab on a hot August afternoon. After all, I volunteered for this.

Happy Birthday, Gilad

Dear Gilad,

What I remember most about the day you were kidnapped, 25 June 2006, were your thick glasses. In later pictures, pictures your family got to choose and send to the press, you would be wearing more stylish frames or no glasses at all. But what I remember on that first day, the day when the summer began to unravel so quickly, the summer of my own aliyah, were your thick glasses and your shy, childish grin beaming onto the newspaper page.

I thought you looked very young and also, no offense, like a dork. The newspapers said you had a low military profile so you chose to serve in a tank unit. But you still chose a combat unit when it would have been totally acceptable for you to serve as a jobnik. I would have done that, too.

We heard that you are good at physics and math, that you are quiet and gentle, and also that you can make anyone laugh. We don’t know much more about you than that. It’s been over a year since you were kidnapped, but still, you are in the headlines here almost every day. I think that means we haven’t given up yet on your return. We may be a generally impatient people, but we are equally as stubborn.

I hope that you haven’t given up either; I hope your life is not a cruel, taunting game and that you haven’t lost your imagination and the gift of blocking out reality by getting lost inside your head. I hope that when you are sleeping, you can still dream of beautiful things. If I am lonely sometimes, I cannot imagine your loneliness. If I miss my family, I cannot imagine how much you must miss yours.

And I wonder what it is like, to have been Israel’s looking glass for the past 14 months. When we look in the mirror, we see you smiling back – your thick glasses and shy grin – and then we see our own reflection. You did not choose this and yet here you are; our country’s reaction to your plight a recording of our own blunderings, our own wavering and indecision.

First we reasoned that we would not give into extortion, that there would be no prisoner exchange. If we give in, we will pay the consequences with even more similarly heart-wrenching abductions by setting the precedent that kidnapping Israeli soldiers is an effective bargaining chip, we thought. So we said that we would exercise tough love; we would not give in. There would be no prisoner exchange.

We thought about sending in a rescue mission but we were haunted by the botched rescue attempt of Nachson Waxman and then we got distracted with the Lebanon War. Many of us thought you may have been dead all along, but then in mid-September of last year, a letter in your handwriting came.

Finally we were ready to consider the prisoner exchange and then there was the constant back-and-forth, newspaper headlines assuring of your release any day, any hour, any minute, really. The negotiations stopped and started undulating with the back-and-forth of quiet and trouble in the region and again we saw our country’s own reflection in your plight.

Then on the one year anniversary of your capture, the audio tape was delivered. In it you read a message, its content probably dictated to you by your abductors. You implored us to accept a prisoner exchange and you said that your health was deteriorating; that you needed to be hospitalized. But soon after, the talks all but ended with the Hamas coup in Gaza. Now we hear of renewed talks, but are we more cautious this time? Or are we still convinced that it could be any day, any hour, any minute?

Where did we go wrong in this whole mess – what should we have done differently? I am not sure, but I am humbled by my inability to answer these questions. As we enter a new Jewish year, I hope the government will pick up its pace. I hope that we stay stubborn and defiant and continue to pray for and believe in your safe return. And I hope this year will be the one that marks the end of your nightmare.

I am haunted by knowing that you exist and think and breathe only a few kilometers away from where I type and yet you live in a parallel universe that may as well be on a different planet. But mostly I am haunted by your thick, dorky glasses and your wide, shy grin staring back through our nation’s looking glass, recording our rise and fall, our triumphs and failures, like a seismograph.

Happy 21st birthday, Gilad. I hope that for your 22nd birthday, you’ll be home.

List of Israel’s Missing Soldiers
Prayer for Missing Israeli Soldiers

moshe, of beer sheva st.

Rabbi Eliezer said: Let the honor of your fellow person be as dear to you as your own. -Pirkei Avot 2:15 

Moshe is a wanderer. This is partially why we become quick friends, because I like to wander, too. Moshe sits at the Y Café on Nissim Behar the whole day and reads newspapers and talks to the customers. I sit at the Y Café with my laptop to work on my editing, so Moshe and I spend many hours a week in each other’s company. Moshe spends the rest of the day either wandering or learning at Kol Rina, the shul on Beer Sheva St.

He walks me to the framing store to pick up a newly framed print to drop off at his apartment. His hands and fingernails are dirty from newsprint. He struggles a bit to get around at his age, but there is a jolliness in his stride and he walks with a sense of purpose in his wanderings. He is happy to be going wherever it is that he is going.

When I am at the laundromat Moshe sits in a white plastic chair beside the television and tells me about the news and about his shul and his classes or he watches me play anagrams, cross-legged on the hard floor with Elka and Jess. For weeks he tells Jess and I that he wants to take us out for a nice lunch. This is his big plan. We hesitate because we don’t want him to spend his money on us. We have no idea how much or how little he has and we don’t want to chance him spending too much of it. But he keeps persisting; he really wants this date.

Finally we schedule a day and a time. We meet him after his class at the shul. He announces we’re not going to go to the café on Nissim Behar. He has big plans for us. He wants to take us to a nice place on Bezalel, a change of scenery for all three of us he says. It takes forever for our entourage to reach the restaurant, all the while Jess and I thinking he’s going to fall and break a hip any second.

To him, everything we say, everything we do is wonderful. I love him for his unconditional acceptance and his unconditional approval. To him we are young and smart and happening. We can do no wrong. We sit for hours talking. I am thirsty for his stories but really, he is more interested in hearing about our plans and telling us how wonderful we are. That is the treat for him. He insists on getting us extra brownies to go.

In a few weeks, Jess will return to America and I will move to Beit Hakerem with Elka. As we part ways at the corner of Nissim Behar and Beer Sheva he scribbles down his mailing address. “You tell your roommate Elka, I want to bring her some ice cream. Once you leave here I don’t think I’ll ever see you again. I don’t think you’ll come here to visit me anymore. But, please, come back sometimes and visit me,” he pleads.

Weeks pass by and I never go back to Nachlaot to visit. A few months later, I walk through the neighborhood to see a friend. It is nighttime. Through the window of Y Café, I see Moshe at his usual spot. He is drinking tea, his grubby fingers smudged with newsprint, clasped loosely around the cup. I can’t tell for sure, but I think he is arguing with the waitstaff. Probably about something he saw on the news. I hesitate for a moment and keep on walking; I do not see Moshe again.

I still don’t understand why I don’t go back to visit him. My only explanation is that, sometimes, I am not a very good person. For this I have no answer: how I can make a person so happy just by being there and yet instead I seek the approval and praise of those who cannot or do not want to love me.