My Birth Right

I found myself walking the streets of Tzfat a few weeks ago, trying my best to taste the spirituality I had been promised; looking for shadows of lost prophecies, promises of the path Messiah will one day walk, faded footprints of rabbis whose teachings I’ve long studied.

Instead there was blended iced coffee, thick summer heat and smoke drifting over from a nearby cigarette. First and foremost, though, were the artists that lined the cobblestone streets and the scents of oil paints from the back corners of the studios turned galleries. “Your paintings smell like something out of my childhood,” I told one artist. She smiled back as the weathered wrinkles in her face creased. I’m still not sure she understood my English.

I spent ten days of June on a YC-Stern Birthright trip visiting Israel for the first time. The majority of the participants attend or just graduated from Yeshiva University or are friends with the YU participants. The rest were supplemented from NYU, Brooklyn College, Touro, and Harvard, and a few others were assigned based on personal requests and connections.

The ten days were spent on hikes that promised to build muscles in my calves, my character, and an intensified bond with the other participants. We toured historical landmarks in Tel Aviv and sat in circles up north in Nahariya discussing the politics and history that surrounded us. We had been promised when we accepted the trip that these ten days would turn us into a family. I had smiled and internally rolled my eyes but was genuinely surprised to find myself crying during the goodbyes at the airport on the way home.

It wasn’t until the day before we left back to America that we made it to the Kotel, warnings to dress modestly ringing in our ears as we got ready that morning. We spent some time in the city of David, touring tunnels that date back to the Second Temple Era, slowly making our way into the heart of Jerusalem.

When we arrived, I found myself living the photographs I had seen for years and wishing I had paper and a pen to start documenting. It was a moving experience, finding myself finally whispering Psalms with one hand against the Western Wall, the other clutching my siddur close. I stood there and prayed surrounded by women, some so different from me. After we’d finished we were given free time and my friends and I sat eating pizza and drinking coffee in a brightly lit cafe.

A young boy stood hovering beside our table, a tall mop in hand and a small smile on his face. We used our broken Hebrew to offer him pizza and we were rewarded with a vigorous nod. We sat him down, gave him a slice and offered to buy him a Coke. He sat with us for the better part of our lunch break, telling us that he was four-and-a-half and that he was walking home from school alone. We spoke around him in English as he inhaled his lunch, murmurs of, “only in Israel” coming up more than once. We had never seen a boy of that age take food from strangers as easily as he would from his own mother.

That night I lit candles under the open skies and our group made our way to the Kotel for Friday night davening. We joined the slowly moving line that snaked down the stairs into the entranceway and found ourselves surrounded by soldiers. I wonder now which of these boys fought on the frontlines a week later when war broke out; if any of them trained for combat with the soldiers we’ve already lost.

Our group divided at the bottom, with the boys leading a minyan on one side of the mechitza and the girls finding common tunes to Friday night prayers on the other. Afterwards, we watched a circle of soldiers singing and dancing together. My brothers, I kept thinking.

I think back to that day now and note that nowhere else in the world have I found a culture of strangers feeding children. Yehuda, our little hungry friend, won us over with his big brown eyes and soft voice. I saw my younger brother in him, my newborn niece, and my future children, G-d willing. In my ten days in Israel, I learned that the culture there is predominantly one of familiarity. I saw myself and my family reflected one thousand times in every soldier, every child, every new mother and every shop owner. I found my childhood in the not-yet-dried oil paintings in those studios in Tzfat.

That day in Tzfat I swallowed the cigarette smoke and lost prophecies and I fell in love with a painting there. It reminded me of a piece that hangs in my grandmother’s living room and I asked the gallery owner who the artist was. “I’ll write his name down for you,” she told me, “And take my business card. Take a picture of the painting and when you get married, send me the photo. I’m sure your parents will buy it for your new home.” She spoke as if she knew me, as if she knew the future, as if we were family.