Dear friends,

Imagine really being there. Under the mountain, hearing the VoIce. Feeling like you and the other people around you are part of one body. It isn’t an easy image to conjure up. Is reality so different today than it was then? Maybe it’s that the outside world feels so loud and so present. Even picturing the absolute quiet that your great-greats heard is far from your experience or mine.
Some people live with those moments.

One of my favorite Oldies But Goodies passed away. Her funeral was yesterday. I kept thinking that she was one of the rare people who from my vantage point really lived under the mountain, feeling absolutely included and inclusive of the rest of us.

Her name was Chana Shofnes.

When she came to Neve over thirty years ago she was already able to respond to whatever Hashem wanted of her as though she heard Him address himself to her personally. She had polio as a child, and as a result she walked with crutches. She was a slender redhead, always focused and cheerful, and always wearing what was the uniform of the times, jeans and a shirt. She learned more about what being a woman is about in Jewish law. The tznius laws are rarely a favorite, but she embraced the laws with the same mixture of taking orders from the Boss, and being in love with the Boss that was her unspoken motto. There was one thing that made it painfully hard. Under her jeans were steel braces. They marked her as one of a minority group, the disabled. When she was sitting down in jeans, she looked exactly like everyone else. Once she had a skirt on there was no possibility for even momentary invisibility. She did it. Almost as a direct repayment (not that anyone sees the entire picture from here), she found her shidduch easily. When her future husband described the kind of woman he wanted, idealistic but practical, fun but sincere and serious, grounded but creative, it sounded at first like Mission Impossible. Then I thought of Chana. As soon as I told him about her, he wanted to meet her. The braces and crutches didn’t take up much of his inner space.
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I saw her at irregular intervals over the years, and spoke to her on the phone relatively frequently. Her consistent refrain in our conversations wasn’t “What does Hashem want of me, why is my life so hard”, but “What does Hashem want of me, how can I serve Him better”. She had no need or desire to justify Him. She wanted to validate the fact that He had given her life, brought her to Torah, made her the mother of children. When she asked me to study Rav Moshe Cordovero’s Tomer Dvorah on the phone, I was somewhat surprised. It’s not a light read, and the place that it takes you to is very spiritually demanding. This was exactly what she wanted. She wanted to meet those demands. She wanted to see other people with a touch of the compassion that Hashem mirrors to us when He made us in His image. 
 
Like everyone, she periodically encountered people who committed the little acts of emotional insensitivity... She didn’t pretend to enjoy being ignored or patronized, but she wanted to move further than that. She didn’t sit in judgment on the people who related to her in this way. After all, they were on her team, the team called The Jews, and she wanted to recognize this with greater sincerity and intensity.
Her early life may have toughened her and ultimately given her the emotional resources to deal with both pain and what many other people would have described as betrayal. When she was a child the therapeutic community believed that children with polio have to be in a hospital like environment, and to separate from their parents as possible in order to devote themselves fully to their rehab programs. They had no way of grasping how much a child longs for mommy, or how torn between love and duty the mothers were. Somehow she accepted herself and others, which to me is a Herculean feat.

Tonight is Yom Yerushalaim. That means that it is the anniversary of the reunification of Yerushalaim that took place during the 6 day war. When I first came to Israel, if you wanted to see the Old City, you could go to the roof of the King David. You really couldn’t see much, but the longing to see something beyond the range of your vision made it possible to convince yourself that you did. My first encounter with the Kotel was something like being under the mountain, hearing the Voice, and being totally one with all of the indescribable variety of fellow Jews who were there. When people ask me what I do on Yom Yerushalaim, I usually don’t have much of an answer. The wonder is there, and the praise. This year, I want to do something different. I want to have the matter of fact relationship to being at the Mountain and hearing the Voice that  Chana had. Less trimming and more substance. More ability to see the Wholeness of things, which is what Yerushalaim really means.

Like Chana.
A place that is whole
Partly vision
Partly substance
The Kotel is decorated with the countless shades of the prisms
Of its gems
Our people
Who are
Fragmented and whole simultaneously
Gorgeous resplendent
In its shadow.

Love,
Tziporah

Dear Friends,

Most years I send out a letter to you after Lag B’Omer. The reason for the timing is that once I am safely back in Har Nof, it is so cathartic to share the craziness of Meiron. You have to be nuts to go there (together with the rest of the quarter of a million people who share the experience) and even crazier to skip it and miss the spiritual high that stays with you till next time. This year I am writing you way before I get on the bus. The reason is that it seems to me that the desire to be there is also significant, and is something that I want to share with you.

If we are not prophets, we are the sons of prophets, the Talmud tells us. There is a spark of awareness of what Hashem wants from us that is part of the collective consciousness of on Jewish people. Arguably it is for this reason that many heretical attempts to redefine who we are and what we are meant to do as a people flower and then fade. No one today thinks about the Kararites, Frankists, or Shabbteans. Most of you don’t know who they are, but they shook the Jewish world to their core in their time. In fact, I imagine that the only heresy that most of you have heard of is one centering on the life of the Nazarene. The most recent heresies, Reform and Conservative Judaism are becoming less and less relevant as they morph (at least to young people according to the Pew stats) into a more generalized admixture of religion and liberalism.

Lag B’Omer has sticking power. It somehow has made it as a minor festivity that touches so many people.
 
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In spite of my intentions, Lag B’Omer has come and gone. I am finishing the letter that I started last week on the day after Lag B’Omer. It was, as always a riotous moving mosaic of people, free food and unending music and intense prayer. There are always changes. This year, one of the chessed organizations that take care of, Shimon’s guests had two tents set up in Megiddo where the Egged busses stop to give the passengers a break. There were bins of almost any kind of soft drink you can imagine, another bin of water bottles, six very large tables set with boxes of cookies, crackers, in a huge array of flavors and sizes. Needless to say there was music. Before I knew it, the assigned ten minute break was over, and the bus took us onward to Meiron. The feeling was a mixture of being in another world and at the same time on the way to a place that is very much a parcel of this world with all its spectrum of human nobility and fragility on display simultaneously. The pushing and crowding could easily take up the screen as could the residue of a quarter of a million people having lunch/supper and fast food in a limited area in which no one seems to have had much of a plan for garbage disposal.
Alternatively you could focus on the volunteers giving our endless portions of food (one of my daughters in laws is with Yad Ezra and could get a doctorate in kindness. Her desire is to make the people who want to come to Meiron happy. They are there to celebrate Rabi Shimon’s next elevation, and to relate to his statement “Come to me on my hilulah (festival or wedding-in this case his return to Hashem), just come with joy”. You can then turn your inner eye to the passion of the tefillos that you see wherever you look.
The way back (as always) was an experience. Everyone wants to get home, and it takes time for the buses to get the thousands of people on in an orderly way. I have to really commend Egged this year. They divided the parking area into 6 clearly marked terminals, each one servicing a particular area of the country. Yerushalaim and Bnei Brak shared a terminal. For reasons that I can’t figure, the Bnei Brakers got on the bus in a fairly civilized manner, while the Yerushalaim folks treated each bus like it was the last chopper out of Hanoi (for those of you who don’t know what I am talking about, there was an iconic shot of someone holding desperately on to the helicopters blades as it rose into the air). There was a particular lady in her thirties with long flowing hair and a voice that would guarantee her a career in the opera. She kept on threatening the security guards with mayhem and legal action…It was especially ironic because I did notice that between the busses (which came at intervals of about two minutes apart) one of the security guards subtly opened the gate a trifle for the elderly and people with young babies, and everyone understood. He got the brunt of her fury, and didn’t answer or look particularly disturbed. It was clearly all part of the job.
The nachas Rabi Shimon must have from all of us can been understood when you read one of his famous sayings: “The Jews are the children of kings”. You can be an awful child, an unfaithful child, a destructive child, but you will always be your parent’s child….There is something in us that Hashem had in mind when He called us His children. This never changes. You can’t “divorce” a child. Even a Jew who is so alienated that you can’t drink his wine, or use it for Kiddush, is still Hashem’s child.
Love,
Tziporah