Atonement

Tags

Day of Atonement, High Holy Days

While I do not accept the existence of a deity, believing the concept to be a man-made device to explain what was formerly inexplicable, I can see that a system of rules and a code of ethical behaviour are a necessity so that people can live in harmony together. Taken all-in-all, the system devised by the ancient Hebrews is no worse than any other, although over the centuries it has become hidebound and fenced-in by innumerable interpretations and explanations which serve no useful purpose as far as I can see.

Furthermore, I am one of those people who seem to feel impelled to break rules (except, of course, for legal statutes and those governing driving), and my childhood and teenage years were stamped by my innate inability to toe the line, whether at home, at school, or in the youth movement I attended. For various reasons, my family and my peers in the youth movement were very tolerant of my rebellious tendencies, and I was even the proud author of a regular contribution to our monthly newsletter entitled ‘The Rebel’s Column.’

Today I can say that I am a reasonably law-abiding member of Israeli society, though far from being an observant Jew. Someone recently coined the phrase ‘Gentile Jews’ to define people like me, Israelis who do not observe the rules and regulations prescribed by the rabbis, do not adhere to the dietary restrictions, travel on the Sabbath, spurn such self-flagellation as fast-days and refraining from the pleasures of life, and generally see our task on earth as being to enjoy ourselves as much as possible without harming others. Whether we do this in Israel or anywhere else is a matter for our own personal conscience.

But when the High Holy Days come around each year as summer comes to an end, Israel’s population is bombarded on all sides by images of prayer, religious observance, tradition and inward contemplation. There is no way you can avoid them. People who seem to be otherwise intelligent wish one another ‘may you be inscribed for another year of life,’ meaning something like ‘may the great accountant in the sky keep you in his good books until next year,’ which to be quite honest I find rather insulting. It sounds a bit better in the Christian version, the Requiem for the Dead, in the section sung as ‘Liber Scriptus Proferetur,’ which is pretty much the same thing, only after you’re dead. I fail to fathom the logic of either version.

But the concept of atoning for one’s sins is quite another thing, particularly those involving other people. I’m not talking about cancelling all one’s promises and undertakings, which seems slightly suspect on ethical grounds. Trying to get out of one’s obligations is one thing, trying to make amends for past misdeeds is another. This is one aspect of the Jewish religion of which I heartily approve. It is a hard thing to do to beg someone you have harmed for forgiveness, or to try and right a wrong you may have done, but it is good to clean the metaphorical slate and set relations on a fresh footing.

I’m glad I took the opportunity that the Day of Atonement presented and wrote to someone abroad with whom I had a falling-out in the past in an attempt to get our relations back on track. To my joy and relief the response was positive, and the fact that I made the effort and reached out makes me feel more at peace with myself. Of course, it’s easier to do in writing than in person, but in this day and age of instant communication that, too, is something that is meaningful. So, for all its antiquated and hidebound concepts, I feel that there is a core element in the Jewish religion that is worth holding on to — the paramount value of good human relations.

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Finders keepers

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exercise regime, memory lapse, Uri Michaeli, wristwatch

According to the sage advice administered by the late Uri Michaeli, whose remedial exercise studio in downtown Jerusalem I attended regularly for about fifteen years, there are two tried and tested precepts for staving off the mental deterioration that accompanies old age: learn something new all the time, and keep ‘a place for everything and everything in its place.’ The first adage serves to keep the brain active and flexible, forming new connections between the grey cells, while the second will prevent one wasting an inordinate amount of time looking for one’s keys, mobile phone, or whatever the current necessity of life may be.

Oh, how true! I only wish I had enough grey cells to remember and adhere to those two concepts all the time. I do try to keep learning something new all, or most, of the time — I attend lectures on various subjects, keep up my study of French and German, try to keep abreast of current events, even make the supreme effort to read the economic section of the newspaper and follow the vicissitudes of the various financial crises that beset our world from time to time. As for the second adage, it’s all well and good to keep intending to adhere to it, but it’s sometimes easier said than done.

I must confess that I have lost more objects — some of them even quite valuable — in the course of my life than I care to remember. Keys, jewellery, items of clothing, bags, etc. have all gone the way of all flesh, and I don’t even remember where, when, or how. But that, I suppose, is in the nature of losing things. I have occasionally also found things. I once found a NIS 100 note on the pavement near a cash point. I looked around for the person who might have lost it but there was no one in sight, so I kept it. I’m sure I put it to good use at the time. I do occasionally find a coin of insignificant value lying on the ground, and am not averse to picking it up and adopting it for my own use. But the overall balance seems not to be in my favour, and I have definitely lost more things than I have found.

Uri Michaeli’s adage struck me with renewed intensity a few days ago, when I was unable to find my watch one morning. Each evening I take it off, together with my rings, and put them on the designated shelf in my bedroom. Each morning, when I get up, one of my first actions is to put the watch and rings back on. On the day when I realised my watch wasn’t on my wrist I was suddenly paralysed. I was unable to go down to the basement to start my exercise regime, I was unable to go to my study to check my e-mails, I was obliged to start searching the house, hunting high and low, to try and find my watch. Yes, I know I have a spare watch, but that wasn’t the point. I remembered putting my watch on in the morning, but it was no longer on my wrist. That could mean only that somehow it had slipped off during the course of the morning. I retraced my steps, checking the floor, the carpet, every available surface, but it wasn’t anywhere to be found. I checked all the places where I generally put my watch when I do cooking or wash dishes, as I had the previous evening. But there was nothing there.

Eventually, after alerting my poor, long-suffering husband to the gravity of the situation, I finally gave up, dug out my spare watch, and resigned myself to the inevitability of my loss. I decided it was time to get on with my life. It was too late to start my daily exercises, so I decided to get dressed and start the day. As I donned my trousers (pants to anyone in America) I put my hand in my pocket and found a strange, hard object there resting among the used tissues which are always to be found there. Yes, it was my watch. That is not its place. I never put my watch in my pocket! But there it was. I must have put it there the previous evening in a fit of absent-mindedness when I was working in the kitchen.

So how to explain my ‘clear memory’ of having put the watch on earlier that morning? Obviously, a trick of the mind, a memory lapse, or another grey cell gone to perdition. Obviously, it hadn’t happened. Or at least not on that particular day.

So from now on I’m going to try and keep to Uri’s valuable lesson. That way, at least, I won’t waste half my life hunting for the things I need in order to manage my life in a reasonable fashion. At any rate, I hope so.

Becky Guttin

Don Harrison, the editor of the San Diego Jewish World website (sdjewishworld.com), whose motto is ‘There’s a Jewish story everywhere,’ mailed me some time ago and asked me to contact a woman called Becky Guttin who would be coming to Israel in order to prepare a sculpture in Jerusalem. Don’s site reproduces the monthly column I write for the AJR Journal in London under the heading ‘Letter from Israel’ (www.ajr.org.uk) and thought it would be a good idea if I interviewed the lady concerned and wrote a piece about her. I was in France at the time and the lady in San Diego. We e-mailed one another a few times and agreed to try and meet once we were both in Jerusalem. Believe me, getting together was no simple matter, as she had a busy schedule, and was subject to the timetables dictated by other people who are also involved in setting up the sculpture (architect, engineer, contractor, etc.), and I’m not always available either.

We finally arranged to meet while I was on volunteering duty at the Israel Museum. I’m allowed a coffee break during my weekly 4-hour stint, and I decided to make use of it to meet Becky. Thus it was that on a Sunday afternoon I walked into the Museum’s café wondering how I would identify the person I was supposed to interview. i hadn’t needed to worry. A petite lady with short dark hair and amazing green eyes called out my name as I entered the cAafé, even though we had never set eyes on one another before. “You just looked like someone who would be called Dorothea,” she said to me, and won my heart in an instant. That was how I met Becky Guttin who had come to Israel to supervise the construction of her latest sculpture, a structure which she defines as a ‘mini-amphitheater.’ It will join several other of her pieces, which are to be found in the towns of Carmiel, Rishon Letzion, Afikim, and Ma’a lot Tarshiha in Israel.

Becky, who was born in Mexico City, now lives in San Diego, and her sculptures are to be found in towns and cities all over the world. Thus, countries such as Italy, France, Israel, India, Seoul, Spain and Luxembourg, amongst others, all boast pieces that are her work. The mini-amphitheater that is currently being built in Jerusalem’s Nayot neighborhood constitutes the culmination of six years of bureaucratic procedures and delays caused by political events (wars in Lebanon and Gaza), following the Jerusalem Municipality’s initial acceptance of one of the three projects proposed by Becky, at their request, in 2006.

The process of finding exactly the right location for the sculpture also took time, Becky told me. She visited Israel several times, checked various locations that were proposed for the project, but was not satisfied with any until she was shown the park in the Nayot neighborhood, abutting the Valley of the Cross. She claims that she immediately fell in love with the place. The time involved in obtaining the necessary building permit as well as personnel changes in the Jerusalem municipality also contributed to the six-year delay between inception and execution of the project, which, according to Becky, combines the Mexican, Jewish and American elements of her life and background. An aerial view of the amphitheater shows a series of pyramid-shaped colored triangles which combine to form a Star of David.

The most important aspect of the amphitheater, according to Becky, is that there are no gates or locks, and it is open to everyone. Becky hopes that it will become a popular site where people can come and congregate, hold poetry readings, perform music, hold family celebrations, or simply sit and enjoy the place.

Becky has an engaging personality and conveys a sense of youthful vitality that belies her age (she has three grown-up children). Her father, Rafael Mareyna, who accompanied her on this trip, is himself a painter, and Becky maintains that she grew up in his studio and that it was there that she learned about art. After starting out as a teacher of Hebrew and Yiddish in Mexico City, she took a sabbatical, rented a studio, and began to produce sculptures. One exhibition led to another, and one invitation to another, so that by now Becky has acquired an international reputation and is inundated with requests for her sculptures from every corner of the world.

Today Becky has her own studio in San Diego, an extensive website (beckyguttin.com) and produces jewelry and pictures as well as sculptures. She hopes that the official opening of the sculpture will take place early in 2013, and, like her, I’m looking forward to attending that event.

Coming home

Tags

abu ghosh, customs officials, family, Israel, rural France, Tel Aviv

From the plane we could see the line marking the bright sands of the Tel-Aviv coast beneath us and knew that we were nearly home. For once we were returning in daylight so that it was not the myriad lights of the city that twinkled to welcome us back. The green-brown-yellow patchwork of fields, houses, buildings several storeys high and flat-roofed village houses all looked serene in the afternoon sunshine. It’s a far cry from the lush, leafy landscape of rural France but it’s home.

Coming back to Israel is a mixture of sounds, sights, scents and emotions. Do passengers anywhere else in the world applaud a pilot’s smooth landing? Even on an Easyjet flight? Do customs officials anywhere else consider it perfectly acceptable to examine your documents, then hand them back to you without saying a word? Do airports anywhere else in the world have large signs welcoming you to their country? Is it perfectly normal to hear people around you speaking in at least four different languages, sometimes in the same conversation?

I think not. Anyway, it’s good to be back on familiar ground after an absence of two months. A short ride home to Mevasseret (with a stop at the famous Caravan restaurant in Abu Ghosh, where we’re greeted like old friends, to scoop up some humus with freshly-baked pitta) and it soon seemed as if we had never been away. Forget courtesy on the road, forget acting as if you have all the time in the world, this is Israel where you take your life in your hands every time you get in a car. But one soon gets used to the different pace of life, and as we drove down our long, narrow street, made even narrower by the cars parked on either side, it felt good to enter the familiar portal of our house and breathe in the familiar scent of jasmine in the garden.

Whenever I ask anyone in Israel how their summer was they reply ‘hot, unbearably hot.’ The temps were in the high 30s for about eight consecutive weeks, and everyone suffered. In France we had about ten days of it, and the radio was constantly broadcasting warnings, saying ‘Attention. Canicule!’ and telling people to drink a lot of water and stay out of the sun. In Israel even though it’s taken for granted that you know that you should drink a lot (not alcohol) and stay out of the sun, the long spell of excessive heat did get quite a lot of media attention.

It’s nice to be able to go to the supermarket and not be confronted by a bewildering array of foods. Not that there isn’t a considerable range of options of all kinds – even cheeses – in our local supermarket, but at least I more or less know what the various names mean. It’s particularly nice, too, to be able to understand every word of the news on the radio, and when it comes to the classical music programme there’s a distinct advantage in having one that contains more music than verbiage. And of course, there are the concerts that await us – the Israel Philharmonic with four Mahler symphonies, the Jerusalem Symphony Orchestra with a rich and varied programme, etc., etc.

But the main thing about being back in Israel is being reunited with our family and friends. It’s a delight to be together with our children and grandchildren again, even if it means cooking for fifteen people instead of two. It’s great to be able to pick up the phone and speak to siblings and friends and relations whenever the fancy takes one (well, almost). And it’s especially handy to be able to consult one of my sons whenever a computer problem crops up – as it invariably does.

If only we could bring some of France’s cool summer weather to Israel our life here would be perfect.