A Salvage Job, Part Two

Sam and Daniel are in Israel, circa 1969. They are on a kibbutz, learning Hebrew in the morning and working for their room and board in the afternoon. Sam follows Daniel in his effort to deepen his Jewish identity. They go to Mount Tabor, site of a battle between the Israelites and the Canaanites, spend a weekend at a Chassidic yeshiva where Daniel is ardently proselytized by a recent convert. Finally they make pilgrimage to the Western Wall, the holiest shrine in Judaism, where Sam confronts his Jewish destiny. And still the revelations are not over because the first-person narrator -- me -- discovers the real motivation behind the writing. 

It may not be what you think. It certainly wasn't what I thought at the time. "Even the outpouring of my story had been an act of cowardice. I had written what green authors so often write about, a territory so worn and worked over that it could serve only as an apprenticeship." 

Host Info
Hosted by Dr. Robert Philipson
Robert is a former professor of African-American studies with a passion for jazz and art. A published author and Harlem Renaissance historian, he has produced multiple films about the intersectionality of race, music, and sexuality.

Music

“Theme of Exodus” Ernest Gold

“He AIn’t Heavy, He’s My Brother” - The Hollies

“Jerusalem of Gold” - Ofra Haza

“I Still Haven’t Found What I’m Looking For” - U2

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Transcript

Both boys stood naked on the cool cement floor of the shower room. Sam rubbed a white towel through his hair while Daniel passed his over his chest and arms.

“Oh! a shower feels good after that sun!” Daniel said.

“It was worse in the rose hothouse,” Samuel replied. “Four hours of thorns and humidity, aiee!”

“Well, you could be at home writing a term paper.”

“That’s right. And you could be home too, finishing up a double major in Jewish studies and accounting.”

Daniel, who had bent over to dry his legs, lifted his eyes to his friend. “Sam, has anyone ever told you you’re an anti-Semite?”

“I deny it,” Sam returned stoutly. “Some of my best friends are Jews.”

“How awfully tolerant of you!”

“Isn’t it? But you have to hand it to them, they have such a gift for survival. And so interesting to talk to! I had a Jewish friend once who explained why Jews weren’t allowed to eat pork.”

Daniel was ready to be amused by Sam’s ignorance. “Cloven hoof and cud?” he asked.

“What? No. The rabbis knew all about trichinosis back then so they simply forbade everybody to eat pork.”

“There’s a specific prohibition against it in the Torah.”

“Oh that’s what you were talking about. They inserted that as a health measure. If God said it then everybody would obey. So clever! That’s how they got so rich.”

At this Daniel twisted up his towel and cracked it on Sam’s ass. 

“Owww!” the boy yelled. “Vengeance is mine!” And for the next few minutes, the large communal bathroom echoed with dodging, laughter, and wild snaps of the towel. Finally a truce was called with both boys panting and laughing. Another boy from their college group walked in to take his shower.

“Shalom,” he said. “What’s happening?”

Samuel and Daniel looked at each other in sudden brotherhood.

“Let’s get him!” Daniel said. They fell upon the newcomer with renewed energy, threw him howling into the shower, and turned on the water until all three of them were soaked. 

After re-drying and dressing to the accompaniment of their victim’s curses, Daniel and Sam left the shower room in a minty nimbus of cleanliness and virtue.

“Ah,” Sam exhaled after filling his lungs with the cooler air of the late afternoon, “there’s nothing like doing dirt to your fellow man to really top a day off.”

They walked down the flagstone path towards a row of small wooden bunkhouses where their ulpan was quartered. The houses had been painted different colors, but the years had turned them a mottled gray. The sky hung crystal blue over their fadedness. Two women worked in front of the first cabin, hanging wet clothes on a stretched piece of twine. Daniel and Sam greeted them with a shalom and walked on.

“Shall we meet after Tea and watch the sunset?” Daniel asked.

“Behind the cabins?”

“Yeah. We can take a little walk in the fields before dinner.”

“Sure,” Sam replied. “I’m game. I’ll meet you after Tea.”

Tea was a vital institution on the kibbutz. After a day of work and a shower, it was a time of relaxation for everyone. The first shades of evening blossomed in the sky, and all sank gratefully into that period when the work was done and didn’t have to be thought of until the morrow. It was a gentling time, a time to talk or to be silent as the moment held you.

I had a family, as did Daniel, with whom I shared Tea every evening. Esther was the president of the kibbutz—elected for that year—but her husband, Moshe was the talker, at least in English. My Hebrew never got good enough to converse with Esther or their son or married daughter. Mizra, a socialist-oriented kibbutz, had not founded itself on the concept of families, but full recognition was given to the biological-emotional realities during Tea. Nils  had been communally raised with his own age group, but he had Tea with his parents every day. Leta married and living in her own house, came over in the evening too. Tea was the center of family life as dinner had been in our house.

Moshe welcomed me into the circle without scruple or hesitation. This was facilitated by the fact that I soon looked to him as an authority on the Good Life of the kibbutz, a role that became him well. He was a big man with a shock of brilliant white hair and an emphatic speaking style. In my endless search for role models, I drank in everything thirstily.

“I can’t tell you what it was like in forty-eight. I’ve never seen it since. The company I was commanding had fifty men. A third of them had furlough at night if there was no fighting. A surprise attack started one afternoon at four o’clock. The men were already gone. The word went out, and by five every one of those men had come back from town. And the acts of personal courage! It was something I wouldn’t have believed if I hadn’t seen it with my own eyes.”

I was stirred. Israel seemed once again the center of an epic. The oppressed of the Old World had migrated to the Promised Land and had built for themselves a new life of justice and wealth. Unfortunately, the Canaanites—i.e., the Arabs—had no place in this liberating scenario, and, not being as extinguishable as the American Indians, they continued to pose great problems. But within the Jewish frame of reference, the myth was magnificent. I was completely swept away by it.

The kibbutzniks did seem to be a finer, more idealistic breed. They were trying to live according to a communal idea; they had profited from the labor of their own hands; they had made the land produce as it had never done before and created a new institution out of the Ashkenazi shards blasted from Europe. Israel was the reincarnation of the Jewish state, biblical history enacted in our time, the promise at last fulfilled. “May my right hand lose its cunning if I forget thee, O Jerusalem.” The people had remained faithful until the land was again delivered into their hands. And Israel’s deserts bloomed.

And, by god, I had seen the deserts bloom! Watermelons and lettuce growing out of the sand! The new settlers had brought with them every ounce of Western culture and technology. 

They met behind the cabins just as twilight burst into its final efflorescence. The bleeding sun swam on the ridge of the distant Carmel Mountains smearing the sky with fantastic stains of red and saffron. To Sam there was something classically tragic about these sunsets, like vast assassinations of gold and shadow. Once on Yom Kippur, the one time his parents had taken him inside a synagogue, he had heard the call of the shofar summoning the people to grieve. The wail of the ram’s horn had invoked in him a sense of desolation that touched him each evening at the setting of the sun. Sometimes a flock of sheep could be seen moving across the darkening fields, and Sam would feel the ancient power of the land. “How lovely is thy dwelling place, O Lord of hosts!”

Ha-aretz the Israelis called it. The Land. It was good to live in its beauty, to work one’s hands in the new-turned earth. But in the back of his mind, in spite of the glowing colors of the sunset and the lush romanticism of the myth, Sam felt himself to be alien. 

The two boys walked westwards over the flat, fallow fields delivering themselves to the silence of the valley. The earth crunched beneath their feet, and a bell tinkled faintly in the distance. They walked without speaking. Sam felt as if the world had paused between heartbeats.

“It’s not mine,” he finally said in a wondering tone of voice. “It’s not my home.”

“You could make it your home,” Daniel replied. “It would become yours in time.”

They were in exact tune with each other—no need of prologue or transition. 

“It could,” Sam assented, “but I have a home already.”

“L.A.?” Daniel laughed.

“Well, that’s where my family is, my parents.” Then, after a pause, “No, I couldn’t live in L.A. But it would be somewhere in America.”

“How do you know all of America wouldn’t turn into L.A?”

“Well, maybe that would be something to stay for. To see that it didn’t.”

“The lone crusader,” Daniel smiled.

“Far from it!” Sam protested. “The news reported that two million people turned out for the Peace Moratorium.”

“What does that prove?” Daniel challenged. “It’s easier to be upset about foreign policy than getting angry with relatives who are bigots and slumlords. Too close to home. And home is too comfortable. Everybody makes their accommodations eventually. You will too.”

“Where do you get off being so omniscient? You can’t predict the future!”

“I can predict human nature. America isn’t going to change. The country’s too rich and successful.”

“So you’ll abandon it to its corruption?” Sam charged. “Leave Babylon and return to the Promised Land?”

“Nicely put,” Daniel said, “and not too far from the truth.”

“You feel you owe nothing to the country you were born and raised in?”

“America doesn’t need me.”

“America needs anybody with a different set of priorities.”

“I’d lose it if I stayed,” Daniel countered. “Or my children would.”

“Why?”

“You can’t fight a successful materialism. When you’re young, yes, but as you get older, your desire for comfort increases.”

“And that wouldn’t happen here?”

“It’s not only a matter of life-styles. If I stayed in America—especially if I became a doctor!—I’d be satisfied with the comfort of a split-level home in Brentwood.”

“And a swimming pool in the backyard,” added Samuel who possessed happy memories of his family’s water games.”

“And a swimming pool in the backyard.”

“Well, it’s undoubtedly a function of my spiritual insensitivity, but I don’t see what’s so bad about a swimming pool in the backyard.”

“The backyard’s in L.A., isn‘t it?”

“So?”

“So it’s all part of the same mentality: Manifest Destiny, there’s-gold-in-them-thar-hills, we’re rich because we deserve to be rich, the war in Vietnam, a swimming pool in my backyard.” 

“What do you think?” Sam exploded. “That America invented the swimming pool? There were swimming pools in ancient Rome.” He stopped, realizing he’d damned himself with his own comment.

Daniel passed over it. “Swimming pools aren’t the point,” he said. “I’m just saying that I couldn’t remain part of a materialist society without becoming a materialist myself.”

“That’s a pretty gloomy self-estimate.”

“It’s a realistic one. Why should I exempt myself from the general pattern of human nature?”

“I thought Jews always exempted themselves from the general pattern.”

“As a community, yes Sam, but when individual members fall away or break away, they can’t maintain an identity that’s different from the dominant culture.”

Sam reflected on how much this was the case with his parents. Wasn’t his own presence in Israel a repudiation, or at least a questioning, of their choices? But it was not convincing to him, and he wanted nothing more than to be convinced.

“Besides,” Daniel continued, “I’m coming here because I want to be here. This is my land, my people.”

“Mine too,” Sam replied. “And yet I seem incapable of holding your noble, uplifting faith.”

“Well why don’t you work on that,” Daniel said softly, “instead of trying to put mine down?”

Sam felt as if a pane of ice had cracked in his chest. “I’m sorry,” he said in a strangled voice.

Just then a low gonging floated across the fields.

“It’s dinner time already,” Daniel said in surprise. “We’ll have to run if we want to make it back.”

“Yeah,” Sam said in relief. “Let’s run.”

So they turned and headed towards the dark settlement at a jog-trot pace. As Sam’s body settled into an even rhythm, his senses opened to the last red light of the day. His head swelled in rising, and the field tilted downwards, increasing his pace to a run. The clods and furrows turned an earthen blood-red, and he felt himself sailing over a dried sea of battle as if his upper body were ballooning and detached from the hard, regular pumping of his legs. He imagined that he could take off and stretched his arms out to try, laughing at his failure and running even faster. By the time they reached their cabins, both boys were going full tilt. A competition had been entered, which Daniel won by striking the first cabin they passed. As they slowed to a halt within the first line of kibbutz housing, Sam shouted in exhilaration.

“Wow!” he said between pants, “I felt like I was on acid!”

Daniel shot him a cold look. “Why does everything good with you have to be dragged down to the level of drugs?”

Sam’s heart raced again at the unexpectedness of his friend’s attack. Daniel steppedaway, his composure regained. Sam could only see his outline in the gathering shadows of the evening.

The voice came again, hard and judging. “You’re corrupted,” it said, “if you can’t see the things life gives you without acid. How can you expect to find anything with your mind messed up? If you can’t experience joy without your fucking drugs, then take them until your eyeball pinwheel out of your head, but leave me alone. You degrade . . .” The voice broke off. Daniel turned and strode into the kibbutz. 

In shock, Sam retreated to the open field they had just quitted. His breathing still came hard, and in wondering disbelief he placed his right hand over his heart to feel it pounding against his chest. His other arm pressed stiffly into his side, and it seemed as if he were pledging allegiance to an invisible flag. But his eyes, unseeing, were directed on the distant aerial colors paling before the night. 

At this juncture my creative writing teacher opined “insufficient cause for Daniel’s outburst.” He was right, of course. I didn’t understand Daniel when I knew him best. (I understood myself even less.) My conception of Daniel was too shallow to explain the small explosions that marred our friendship . . . or why he even consented to be my friend. 

Sam called him “noble,” turning the word into a taunt–the perfect Jew: bright, verbal, dedicated to Judaism and humanity, torn between becoming a rabbi and a physician. A searcher in his own right, perhaps, but a searcher on paths that Sam could no more follow than Icarus could the flight of the sun. “Noble,” the boy called him, and yet they were friends.

What we shared was the New York Jew thing—god knows how it got to California. I was too tendentious in my fictional introduction to Daniel. We really bonded over comedic riffing in the dining commons. I created a persona for him, Rabbi Rightoff, to whom I’d pose questions. “Rebbe,” I’d say, lowering my head humbly. “What is the correct blessing for mystery meat?” 

“Is the sauce white or red?”

“Red, rebbe!”

“Then you use the blessing for red dye number two. Mystery meat, as its name indicates, is unknowable. It is like our God.”

“You mean Jeho—” 

Daniel stretched his hand across the table to stop my mouth. “Do not say His Name!”

“And the meat, rebbe?”

“The meat is unknowable. Therefore, you choose your blessing according to the sauce.”

“Rebbe?” I continued.

“Yes, shmegegge.” That was his name for me. I didn’t understand where it came from at the time. 

“I’m confused.” 

“That is not unusual, shmegegge. How can I enlighten you?”

“You said that mystery meat is like our God and we should eat it with the proper blessing.”

“I did, shmegegge.”

“But the Christians also eat their God. So how is that different?”

“That is a good question, shmegegge. You surprise me.”

“And the answer, rebbe?”

“Christians pay retail.”

Over time we developed a whole rebbe-and-shmegegge shtick. Amid the earnest experimentation of the sixties, it was only with each other that our Jewish-born skepticism found nourishment. If we had both selected the same main dish—say, hamburgers and fries—and somebody came to the table with spaghetti and meat sauce, we’d shoo him away. “We already have consensus here!” we’d cry. “Go find your own tribe!”

When Daniel discovered that his low-key proselytizing was having an effect on me, Rabbi Rightoff began to shade into Jewish mentor. Of course, he wanted and cultivated my admiration, but my admiration was of a twisted, envious variety. I was always on the alert to chinks in the idealized armor I had fashioned for him, and I never failed to place a dart when the occasion arose. I was not an easy disciple to have around.

An example I vividly remember is a conversation in which I formulated the Landmine Theory of Pleasure. One Saturday our little group was driven to the summit of Mount Tabor, a location famous in the New Testament as the presumed site of the Transfiguration, when Jesus lit up like a battery-illuminated Santa. Its Old Testament associations were considerably bloodier, being the site where the armies called to action by the prophetess Deborah defeated the Canaanites. 

Upon learning this from our tour guide, I said to Daniel, “Now that is an example of being beat by a girl of biblical proportions.”

“Not only that,” he replied, “but when the Canaanite general escaped the battle with his life, he took refuge in a settlement that was supposedly neutral in the war between the Jews and the Canaanites. The leader’s wife welcomed him with great hospitality, then drove a tent stake through his head when he fell asleep.”

“Oooo . . . not a move that Emily Post would have sanctioned!”

Daniel laughed. “The ladies were fierce back then.”

“They’re fierce now! I know who I’d bet on in a smackdown between Golda Meir and Richard Nixon.” 

“Always helps to have God on your side.”

“How’d you know about Mount Tabor?”

“Sunday school.”

“No thanks,” I said. “Five days of regular school was plenty for me.”

“I didn’t mind it,” Daniel replied. “The stories were fun.”

Mount Tabor humped in sudden isolation from the surrounding plain. From a distance it looked like a symmetrical mound, but it was high enough once you got to its base. The view from the top was fabulous, the length and breadth of the Jezreel Valley. Its dark, time-worn hills marked the circumference of the wide plain, a quilt of brown and green. To the west, the Mediterranean sparkled in the blue haze of the horizon; facing east the land stretched away in desert hues from the green line of vegetation that hid the Jordan River. On Mount Tabor’s summit, our gaze encompassed the breadth, if not the length, of Israel.

“It’s impressive,” Daniel said, “but I thought it was more beautiful the last time I was here because we had climbed up the mountain.” 

“It’s the same view, isn’t it?” I said.

“Yes, but we made an effort to get to it. It came as a reward at the end of our climb.”

“It’s a shame you didn’t step on a landmine on your way up,” I replied, nettled that he was denigrating my experience by the comparison. “Then you would have enjoyed the view ten times as much.”

Daniel threw me an annoyed look and moved away. That was the kind of jibe I loved to lance, and he must have gotten pretty fed up with it.

But there were also times when I looked to him as my spiritual guide, and then Daniel relished playing the Jewish Pygmalion. Unfortunately, what I couldn’t understand—and what I exacerbated in my role of the doubting Thomas—was that Daniel’s faith was far from perfect. To me, who was so lost in darkness, Daniel could seem a shining beam of identity, but when he was challenged by an Orthodox Jew to declare himself, he was thrown into crisis.

It was a crisis I couldn’t begin to understand. The Orthodox Jews held so tenaciously to the commandments and beliefs of the Pentateuch that their whole lifestyle seemed an absurd denial of the modern world, an existence riddled with “thou shalt nots.” They could not watch television because representations of human images engaged in idolatry were forbidden. Sidelocks had to be grown because shaving the side of one’s head was forbidden. Driving or riding in a car on the Sabbath was forbidden because work was forbidden. Since making a fire was work, the spark of an automobile ignition turned into a transgression. If a driver dared penetrate the narrow streets of Mea Shearim Jerusalem’s Orthodox neighborhood, on a Saturday, his car would be stoned by the righteous. Women who walked through the area with bared arms would be screamed at, sometimes attacked, by Orthodox wives. There was even a sect, the Neturei Karta, who believed that Israel itself was in rebellion against God because establishing a Jewish state not founded by the Messiah was forbidden. 

But though Orthodoxy demanded an adherence to the Law that precluded a modern lifestyle, not all sects were dour guardians of fanaticism. The Hasidim, Shlomo Carlebach’s sect, stressed the joyful aspects of religious devotion. Singing and dancing were as much a part of their religion as prayer, and prayer itself was an affirmation of their happiness in God. This relationship gave their lives a meaning and strength that could be appealing to those who felt these qualities lacking modern life. Although proselytizing was never a Jewish practice, the Hasidim made an exception to bring lapsed Jews back to the Orthodox fold. “All are welcome in the house of worship, but a Jewish soul is special to God.”

Hence Daniel and I were readily accepted when we went to visit a Hasidic yeshiva outside of Tel Aviv. We were given warm welcome and a host to guide us through the dense ritual of their daily lives. Everything was subject to laws and time-hallowed usage, even washing up for meals. Water was first poured over the right hand, then the left. To do it any other way would be to transgress. The fork with which milk products were eaten could on no account touch meat. (“Thou shalt not boil a young goat in the milk of its mother.”) The Hebrew blessings intoned before each course seemed quite beautiful though I had never appreciated those of my own language.

It was a high and noble life the Orthodox lived—every action and thought evaluated with an eye to the will of God—but it was not a life I could embrace even in my wildest flights of romantic fancy. For it was the Orthodox who insisted upon the condition it was so easy to overlook in one’s search for a meaningful Jewish identity: the belief in God. And not just any God—no pantheistic, quasi-conscious entity—but Jehovah! This was purely out of the question for me, but Daniel was upset by our host’s insistence that the only way for a Jew to live was the Orthodox way. “If you believe in the Revelation of Sinai, you must follow the Law.” This ironclad logic had led Avram, our host, to join the Orthodox, but he was candid about finding the rules and strictures burdensome. He was to be married soon, particularly troubled by the fact that he had had no voice in choosing his wife. But marriage was a duty: its purpose was the creation of children, not individual happiness. It was part of the Law, Avram was told, that you had to lay with your wife once a week—on the Sabbath.

Being a convert, Avram was eager to bring Daniel (I was beyond the pale) over to his beliefs. Had I had eyes for it at the time, I would have been fascinated by the struggle for Daniel’s soul, but the battle was so incomprehensible to me that I could judge the life around me only as a tourist. Daniel’s Judaism was humanistic, fuzzily defined, bound up in a romantic conception of Jewish culture and belief. Avram asked Daniel to walk into the furnace and burn away the romanticism. What emerged, he assured, would be faith. But something in Daniel must have asked, “And if I am left with ashes?,” for he resisted Avram’s urgings to stay and study. Daniel kept telling me in our private moments that he was attracted by the idea, but we left two days later and never came back. Avram must have known that he had lost the battle in spite of Daniel’s promises to return; he was sad when we climbed on the bus. He could be eloquent, even in his heavily accented English, for these were his parting words: “An Israeli is a Jew with a machine gun, but a Jew without God is a handful of dust.”

Sam followed his friend through the Old City in wide-eyed wonder. Never had he seen such a palimpsest of cultures: Israelis, Westerners, Arabs, hookahs, silks and rosaries, the orthodox and the secular making their pilgrimages to their shrines of various worship. Enclosed within its thick Ottoman walls, testaments to God had been built by the three Peoples of the Book. In that small portion of Jerusalem, built and burnt and built again as tyrants and dominions tried to make their mark, Solomon had sung his song to Jehovah, Jesus had dragged his cross through mocking crowds, and from a rock on the site of the old Jewish temple Mohammed had ascended to heaven. And while the empires of Babylon, Rome, and the Ottomans mushroomed and crumbled, the kingdoms of these faiths had grown and endured. For them all, Jerusalem was a Holy City.

But it was a living city too, and it was its life that dazzled Sam as he followed Daniel down the steps of its narrow alleyways. On either side Arab shops drew back into cluttered, intriguing recesses. Their owners, in burnoose and flowing robes, beckoned from the entrances, caressing beads or brass platters, jewelry, silver and glass. The boys stopped at a shop or browsed here and there, but Daniel urged them onwards. It was already late afternoon. They wanted to reach their destination before nightfall, and their destination was the Wall.

As they passed out of the commercial section of the Old City, Daniel suddenly exclaimed and slapped his hand to his breast pocket. A look of relief crossed his face. “Good. I’ve got them.”

“Got what?” Sam asked.

“Petitions my grandparents gave me to put in the Wall. I thought I might have left them back at the hostel.”

“What petitions?”

“Petitions to God. If a Jew can’t visit the Wall himself, he can have a written petition put in one of its cracks.”

“They must be pretty small then.”

Daniel fished two tightly rolled scrolls from out of his pocket. “Here,” he said handing them to Sam. They were the size of short pencils. Sam unrolled one.

“It’s in Hebrew,” he said disappointedly.

“Naturally it’s in Hebrew.”

“Why ‘naturally’? God can’t read English?”

“Hebrew is the language of the Torah.”

“So? Latin is the language of the Caesars, but the Italians haven’t tried to bring it back. Why did Israel resuscitate a language that’s been dead for three thousand years? English or German would have been more useful.”

Daniel stopped and placed his hand on Sam’s shoulder stopping him as well. “German?” he asked mockingly.

Sam slapped his forehead. “Sorry. Wasn’t thinking.”

“That’s a luxury only American Jews can have.” 

“I’m sorry! But you see my point.”

“Hebrew is the language of the Jews.”

“Hebrew hasn’t been the language of the Jews since the Babylonian Exile.”

The two boys had stopped in the middle of a narrow street. Daniel placed his hand on his friend’s shoulder again and drew him out of the way of passing pedestrians. 

“What does your name mean, Samu-el?” he asked, stressing the final syllable.

“What do you mean?”

“Where does it come from? Why do you have the name that you have?”

“My mother’s father, my grandfather.”

“Yes, okay, but do you know where the name itself comes from?”

The younger boy shook his head. “It’s Hebrew. El is one of the names of God. Any name ending with –el is a reference to God. My name means ‘God is my judge.’ What does your name mean?”

A look of frustration crossed Sam’s features. He licked the forefinger of his right hand and made an imaginary mark in the air. “You get a point for that one.”

Daniel smiled. 

But Sam couldn’t let it go. “But why not Yiddish then? Yiddish was the language of the Jews too. And it was a living language.”

“Israel is for all Jews. The Sephardic Jews from North Africa and the Middle East didn’t speak Yiddish.”

“Well, nobody spoke Hebrew.”

“Can’t you see that Hebrew is a reinforcement of Israeli identity?”

“No, I can’t. Hebrew was a liturgical language before Israel adopted it, but the modern Israeli state isn’t religious. The ‘new breed’ of Israelis that this country’s so proud of . . . I’ve talked to sabras who’ve denied they were Jews!”

“They’re wrong,” Daniel said flatly. “And the ones whose parents fled Europe or who survived the Holocaust should know better.”

“That’s the basis of our identity? We’d be killed by Nazis?”

“Is that all you see?” Daniel returned hotly. “Nothing positive? 5000 years? Exile and oppression at every turn? What we pulled off here was a miracle! It doesn’t matter whether you believe in God or not.”

Sam recoiled inwardly at his friend’s rising tone. “Am I part of that ‘we,’ Daniel?” he asked almost pleadingly. “I’m trying. I really am.”

Daniel softened. “Stay open,” he said. “You can’t build anything on skepticism.” He began walking again.

True enough, Sam thought and followed in tow.

They were going to the Wall, the holiest shrine in Judaism, the last remnant of the Second Temple, Roman-destroyed when the Jewish state itself had been destroyed and its inhabitants scattered. But one wall remained, stubborn in the face of loss and change, a wall that supported no building and yet called to itself the tears and prayers of the world’s Jewry. Encircled by the medieval Old City, itself surrounded by the traffic and streetlights of new Jerusalem, the Wall had merely endured, and by enduring had grown sacred.

On either side of the two boys the long stone walls narrowed the paling vistas of sky. Though the street appeared empty as they descended its steps, Sam could hear the city’s ambient hum. The silence they walked through seemed unnatural. It magnified every random noise: the bang of a street door closing, the scrape from a hidden courtyard. 

They never would have found their way through the maze had it not been for the trilingual signs that guided their steps. Finally, after turning into yet another unpromising alleyway, an expanse of light showed them to be coming upon an open area. They approached with quickening pace and emerged upon a sudden terrace. The Wall rose before them across a large plaza of shiny modern paving stones. Coming upon it from the cramped quarters of the Old City, it seemed big, 60 feet high and ten times as long at the base. The stones of the Wall were brothers to those that comprised the peripheral arches and passageways leading into the plaza: worn, ancient, and . . . full of green weeds growing from the cracks! Sam was shocked out of the mood of reverence he’d been trying to create. Near the top of the Wall huge plants stuck out like hairy fists.

An archeological excavation rendered half the Wall’s base unapproachable, and the part that remained was itself divided by a low iron railing separating the areas of worship for the covered women and the black-garbed men. Sam heard the chanting from the worshippers. They seemed to hum and buzz like black bugs. The Wall reared above them and then Sam saw the fairy golden dome of the Mosque of Omar glinting in the rays of the dying sun. The Wall itself was tinted yellow by the light of the late afternoon. A line floated through Sam’s mind: “A slumber did my spirit seal.” Why Wordsworth? Why now? Something about rocks and stones. He continued to gaze at the Wall, its worshippers swaying in the vesper light.

“How does it make you feel?” he asked Daniel.

His friend shrugged and remained silent for a moment. “I can’t answer that, Sam. This is the first time I’ve been here. I’m the first one in my family. My grandmother was crying when I left. I can’t talk about it now.”

Inwardly Sam blanched. He determined not to overstep his bounds again. 

They stood on by the terrace railing in silence until Daniel broke out, “I’m going to the Wall.”

“I’ll watch you from here,” Sam replied.

As Daniel descended the steps to the plaza and strode across the shining pavers, Sam suddenly flashed to a picture of himself lying under an orange tree, sucking a stem of sour grass. The memory made the juices flow in his mouth. Daniel stopped in his progress toward the Wall and placed a dark blue skullcap on his hair.

The orange groves had disappeared by the time he was in junior high. The sour grass and mustard plants had gone the way of all open space near the city: paved over and built upon. Always it seemed that change signaled loss, and that was in line with traditional wisdom. But his society proclaimed that change meant gain–bigger, better, richer, shinier–and he had grown up believing that too. Did change merely mean change? In order to have any meaning, life had to be more than a random series of events.

Daniel had reached the Wall and stood before it. Sam could not see whether his friend was praying or not.

Was that the choice? Shopping malls and freeways or churches and synagogues? God or Mammon? Optimism or despair?

Sam saw Daniel reach into his shirt pocket and place the two scrolls of his grandmother into the Wall. He then turned and walked halfway back to the terrace where he motioned for Sam to join him. The boy complied, feeling more drawn down the steps than propelled by his own will. His mind turned leaden as he scraped across the plaza.

“Now it’s your turn,” Daniel said.

How am I supposed to feel? Sam wanted to ask but said instead, “I have no skullcap.” 

“You can rent one from the vendor,” Daniel replied, pointing to a man in modern dress sitting next to a table piled with plain black yarmulkes.

Sam walked over. “Achat, bevakasha.”

“Fifty agarot,” the man replied in English. He looked at Sam through bored gray eyes. Sam handed him a coin, and the vendor unceremoniously plucked a small, rumpled skullcap from the pile. “Do you need a pin?” he asked.

Sam nodded and fastened the cap to his bushy hair with the proffered pin. He returned to his friend.

“Here, let me fix that for you,” Daniel said gently. He readjusted the yarmulke and stepped back to judge the improvement. “Yes,” he said.

Sam felt even smaller and more dependent. “Now what?” he asked.

His friend regarded him critically. “Would you like to lay tefillin

“Lay what?”

“Tefillin. Small leather boxes with slips from the Torah inside. During prayer one is fastened to the forehead and the other to the left arm.”

“Another commandment, I suppose.”

Daniel smiled. “Not necessarily. For the Orthodox, yes, but I don’t wear them.”

“And why should I?”

“There’s no ‘should,’ Samuel. It’s just a suggestion.”

The boy noted the unusual use of his full name. “In for a shekel, in for a pound?”

“It’s your choice.”

Sam considered the proposition. “Sure,” he said. “Whatever brings me closer to God.”

Daniel took him to another table set up by the dividing rail. Standing next to the second table an ancient Orthodox Jew wore a smile that reminded Sam of the illustration of a Chinese soothsayer in a book of fairy tales he’d grown up with. He was wearing a long black gown with a blue and white prayer shawl around his shoulders. Perched on his head an enormous fur cap brought his height up to Sam’s. When Daniel addressed some words to him in Hebrew his smile broadened. Sam transferred his gaze to the table upon which lay a row of black leather boxes on black leather straps.

On Daniel’s instruction, Sam offered his left arm to the old man who began to fasten the straps with deft circular movements. His jaundiced features were uncomfortably close. The old eyes glittered, and Sam had to make an effort not to draw away. He unconsciously held his breath as his head was encircled with the Word of God. When the Jew had finished, he stepped back and uttered a blessing. It mingled with the chanting of the worshippers rising up the Wall.

“Don’t I pay him something?” Sam asked Daniel.

“No, it’s a mitzvah.”

“Well, well!” said Sam, genuinely impressed. He looked at the tefillin on his arm. “So at last I’m ready.”

“Yes, you’re ready.”

Nothing remained. Sam turned and moved slowly towards the rough stones. At such close quarters the Wall dominated everything. His eyes sought the plane of sky above. Had the sun set? Darkness seemed to be gathering quickly. I feel nothing, he thought to himself as he moved forward. He found a space between two black-garbed Jews and stepped into it. On his left an old man kneaded wrinkled, liver-spotted hands. A fresh-faced pale-skinned boy stood to the right, no older than Sam himself. Both prayed in soft unceasing murmurs, rocking on their heels, nodding their heads, repeating the old, old formulas

Baruch atah, adonai elohenu

Melech ha olam . . .

Sam let himself be eddied into the gentling motions of prayer. A feeling seeped into his chest, and the boy tried to hold himself loose. He put his hand up to one of the yellowing stones. It was rough to the touch but still effused the warmth of the departing sun’s radiance. As he pressed his hand against the Wall a tremor fluttered inside him. The seepage continued but now built up behind a barrier. The boy sensed himself going stiff. From the Mosque of Omar the muezzin’s wail called his faithful to prayer. The world seemed bathed in the crepuscular light of worship. Still the constriction in Sam’s chest blocked the flow, and the boy just stood, his fingers lightly conscious of the Wall. He struggled to remain open.

Suddenly his mind was cut with the shocking clarity of words:

HERE AM I.

I don’t want to be here.

SAMUEL!

I don’t want to be here.

I WILL DO A THING IN ISRAEL . . . 

The boy stopped his ears with his hands. His stomach knotted, lips quivered and rottenness entered his bones. The barrier in his chest broke, and a flood pushed into his throat. Sam fought to keep it down, but a thin strangled cry pierced the murmuring twilight. The young Jew next to him threw the American a startled glance; the old remained oblivious to all but his davening. Trembling, Sam lowered his hands and moved his arm across his chest. The touch of his right hand against the black leather box made his body jump. The boy closed his eyes and held himself tight. A tepid trickle issued from his lips.

“Damn . . . damn . . . damn . . . damn . . . damn.”

I turned to look for Daniel, but he had blended into the milling throng of Jews before the Wall. By the time I found him again, I had divested myself of the skullcap and phylacteries. The moment had passed and my quest, such as I had conceived it, had ended. I said nothing of this to Daniel; I wasn’t sure myself. When he asked me about my experience, I retreated to my safely ironic mode. “I didn’t wail,” I said, and Daniel pressed me no further. 

Before my non-Revelation at the Wall there had been sweet days of abandon when I fantasized a decision not to go back. “Stay with us!” the kibbutzniks had urged. “You’re a Jew. Help us build our homeland.” During that summer the Americans had landed on the moon, and even the Israelis were impressed. “But there are Jew-haters there as well,” they said. “You’ll never be safe.” When I joined the sabras dancing the hora on a Sabbath evening, when I listened to Moshe extol the miraculous victory of the War of ’48 surrounded by his family in the waning light of Tea, even when I was swept into the joyous celebration of the Orthodox at a small synagogue celebrating Simchat Torah in the holy town of Safed, I could see myself making Aliyah, returning to the land of my fathers. But the Wall had cured me of all that. I was once again open to the call of my generation. The task before us seemed clear: the first great antiwar moratoriums had been called, Woodstock nation had come to birth, and the world so desperately needed saving!

Shortly after our Jerusalem pilgrimage, our group of ulpanists scattered to the winds before returning to complete the academic year. Whatever bond we had forged was swamped by coursework, pursuit of the bourgeoning counterculture, and the all-consuming student strike against the Cambodian expansion of the Vietnam War. Daniel had never been political in that way, and our paths split. Neither one of us lived on campus anymore. By the time he graduated in spring of 1971 to enter medical school, I was in Berkeley writing the story of our friendship. I don’t even remember if we said goodbye. There were no hard feelings. It had been a companionship of a season, or so I told myself. I had again been swept up by the excitement and morality of the Movement, convinced, after my brief brush with religion, that I had passed the perilous crossroads and that my feet trod determinedly, along with those of my peers, upon the road to universal salvation.

But that too was an illusion, and the day I was pepper-gassed in Berkeley signaled the beginning of another end. I was politically active as long as it was safe. The following spring, 1972, the war had predictably ground onward, the students had predictably marched in protest. Only this time the Santa Cruz police started seriously cracking heads. I was still living in town but heard about it only later. I had elected not to go. The previous May’s protest march against the destruction of People’s Park was my last demonstration. 

Even the outpouring of my story had been an act of cowardice. I had written what green authors so often write about, a territory so worn and worked over that it could serve only as an apprenticeship. And yet that subject held for me such terror that I was completely unaware—had not allowed myself to be aware—that my search for Jewish identity had been inextricably bound to that most destabilizing of human emotions: my first love.