Well, I guess I'm Israeli now...

THE COMPLETION OF A PROCESS

            Well, I guess I’m Israeli now.

            I mean, becoming part of a group always requires some sort of initiation. To gain the respect of your teammates, you may find yourself running ten extra laps after every practice, while the veterans pelt you with rancid gym socks from last month’s scrimmage. To gain entrance to a certain collegiate social club, you might have to guzzle five beers in less than twenty minutes while standing outside in your underwear – in January.

            To become a full-blown, sandal-wearing, seed-spitting, Hebrew-mumbling, line-circumventing, Hatikvah-yodeling, bus-surfing Israeli citizen, you have to experience an episode of intense national trauma. Only then does the guttural verbalizing of falafel peddlers stop functioning as an “endearing cultural quirk” and start sounding like your mother calling you inside for dinner.

            In the wake of the kidnapping and subsequent murder of three Israeli teenagers, who – let’s be brutally honest – could have easily been my older brother or myself, cyberspace has exploded with opinions and analysis and insights and conclusions and encouragement from everybody and their rabbi. And after reading articles, essays, and rants for three weeks, I was left with a single question: what does this tragedy mean for me?

            It sounds kind of insensitive, presumptuous even, to put a personal twist on a national tragedy. After all, as we all were told countless times, these were “our boys.” Yet, I can’t help but feel like this is the most important question that gets the least attention. Military responses and political posturing, policy revision and religious discussion – all of these are required. But I felt like in order to feel that sense of closure that every loss demands, I personally needed to understand why Eyal, Naftali, and Gilad will stay in my heart forever, and why their murders made me simultaneously shiver and roll up my sleeves.

            The answer, my answer, is that the frenzy of empathy surrounding the abduction of these three boys was so incredibly mind-boggling, that it bordered on the supernatural. All of sudden, everyone is reciting Psalms. Like, EVERYONE. Even the hard-core sabra on the bus next to you clutching his prayer book in one hand and a pack of cigarettes in the other. These Israelis are not normal. They care about three kids they never met more than you care about your neighbor. And suddenly, I do too.

            My study partner at night was a good friend of Eyal Yifrach, the 19-year-old from Elad who was murdered in the kidnapping. I’m not sure how he’s holding up (haven’t seen him since the news of their death became public after which he got on the next bus home), but I can’t even fathom the heroic effort he must have put in every night to focus on helping me understand another perplexing passage of Talmud.

            The thing is, when your friend’s friend is brutally kidnapped and his whereabouts remain unknown, it’s hard to not feel like someone is repeatedly punching you in the pelvis, trying to knock all the soul out of your lungs. It kinda makes you shiver.

            But the cold chill doesn’t last for too long. You see, the Jewish People are like the human body; we too have built in mechanisms to respond to pain. And our response, when the heart skips a beat and the mind freezes and shock petrifies the senses, is to produce an incredible amount of warmth, and keep the body functioning. Perhaps it wasn’t a coincidence that the search for the teens coincided with an intense heat wave; after all, the outpouring of caring and support catalyzed the social equivalent of nuclear fusion, as the Jews continued to unite as one. And nuclear fusion releases A LOT of heat.

            We created so much warmth, in fact, that the Jewish People had to roll up its sleeves. Rallies, fundraisers, protests, songs, davening, studying – we went to work. And then, just like that, the project was over. We didn’t end up saving our boys this time, but Lord knows it was not for lack of trying.

            Thus ended my initiation. I concede that drinking a few cold ones would’ve been easier on the soul, but that’s just not how this club works.

            And so where does this latest tragic chapter in Jewish history leave me, this heart wrenching tale of the wave of love and adhesive heat generated by Eyal, Gilad, and Naftali, three teenagers most of us had never met? It leaves me fused to the Jewish People, melded into the firm fabric of our homeland, my homeland, my home.

            And there I intend to stay.

Chazak ve'Ematz.