a time for miracles

When dreidels began appearing in shops in the days leading up to Chanuukah, I thought for a short time that all of them had suffered a serious typo at the dreidel factory: instead of the נגהש letters I was familiar with, all the dreidels had נגהפ (note the last letter is a pey פ not a shin ש). But soon enough I learned the reason for the funky dreidels. The letters on the dreidel are an acronym for the sentence “nes gadol haiyah sham” (nun-gimel-hey-shin) which means “a great miracle happened there.” But that “there” of Channukah legend is here, so the acronymized sentence on Israeli dreidels read “nes gadol haiyah po” – “ a great miracle happened here.”

 

The miracle did happen here, though time and the hyperbole of folklore has perhaps blurred the truth surrounding the reasons we celebrate Channukah today (say the skeptics). One interesting tidbit I’ve learned is that the Maccabis were residents of my town, Modiin, and there is even a cave nearby the farm in which the Maccabi men apparently took shelter during their struggle with the Greeks in Temple times. And luckily for all of us, miracles of all sizes continue to happen here these days, too.

 

For example, I found myself on 25^th of December (the fifth night of Channukah) in a dome on farm with the Prime Minister of Israel, Ehud Olmert, among a gaggle of security guards, politicians, other MASA participants, and us mud-booted farmers. While the candle-lighting ceremony was one big, ridiculously silly, organizationally nightmarish photo-op, to have Prime Minister sitting in our dome was a bit of an awe in itself. (Thank goodness his security forces ripped up the floors, combed our passionfruit vines, and swabbed our hands for explosives: all was safe for his 30 minute visit.) Here’s the real kicker – I got to give a speech at the ceremony, right alongside the PM himself (his message: make aliyah), the mayor of Modiin, head of the Jewish Agency, and Itzik, the man who manages the farm. Here’s the abbreviated gist of my speech:

 

The miracle that we’re celebrating now is the miracle of getting something from nothing (there was no oil, and then there was some, hallelujah!) – in Hebrew this concept is called

יש מאין, yesh m’ain (literally “there is from there is not”). Examples of yesh m’ain exist in our lives, from the very mundane to the very extraordinary; one example is the really awesome channukiah (menorah) I helped build out of wood and clay. Last week, the channukiah had been a pile of sticks and dirt, but with a little love and a little artistic talent from Gali, we’d turned those bits of nothing into a beautiful thing over whose light we said the prayer of miracles. That’s something from (almost) nothing, I think. And if you think about it, if you believe that you really can create something form nothing then really anything is possible, because every nothing is an opportunity to create something great. How can we see this concept in our everyday life? Let’s take the bal egan (craziness) of the Middle East peace process; so often I hear that it is simply too complicated a situation to solve presently, that there are too many contradicting opinions, too much at stake, that violence is too deeply ingrained in social identities to tease them apart into, well, peaces. I hear too often, “Where do we start? We have nothing to work with …” But if we believe that truly anything is possible, that we can create something from nothing, then peace among neighbors is not impossible. The nothingness with which we have to work is as good a place as any to start making peace. If something as complicated and beautiful as this world was created in the idea of yesh m’ain, then with compassion and cooperation, love and sacrifice, we can bring peace to this region, and we can build channukiah out of sticks and mud. That’s the belief we need to carry with us not only during Channukah, but every day, too; and then, we’ll see, miracles will happen.

 

I noticed, while talking, a few rolled eyes and looks of exasperation; I’m sure the politicians in the room thought me grossly naïve – and maybe I am, but at least I am optimistic. A few days later, Israel launched a huge air strike against Gaza, and we later learned that the Prime Minister had authorized the attack before coming to our farm, that he sat there smiling pleasantly and cracking jokes with the forsight of these current events in his mind. Many people gave me “kol hakavods” (all the respects) for my talk (mostly young people who told me I’m totally right, and the PM needs to hear more words of our wisdom).

 

But despite my optimism and metaphors, I find myself in a war zone, where fear and distrust, rumors and propaganda are flying in and out of the Gaza Strip alongside the rockets. The farm continues to be a safe place for all of us – we are relatively far away from the violence, and the necessary chores of farm life insure that our days have remained mostly the same, with the addition of news briefings. Yesterday, for example, we heard on the radio of the rockets hitting northern Israel (launched from Lebanon, which poses a potentially large problem, but the fact that they came from Palestinians and not Hezbollah is source of  relief); a small group of us were in the greenhouse seeding a second round of winter crops and early summer crops (cabbages, cauliflower, zucchini, heirloom tomatoes, and eggplants), discussing the repercussions of this act, the senselessness of this conflict, the unfairnesses perpetrated every day by both sides. Petra (a biodynamic farmer) forbade us from passing our negative energies to the new plants, so we weren’t allowed to talk about Gaza while putting the seeds in the soil – but the second a tray was done being seeded, our conversation erupted into new angles on the same argument. It’s not humane, and we want it to end amicably. Soon.

 

There are ten Israelis on the farm doing a year of service before the army, and several who are doing national service instead of the army. So it is their friends who are currently fighting in Gaza and working in a state whose security is deteriorating daily. For us (Americans) this conflict is a war fought by friends of friends; last night, Roni learned that her high school classmate was killed in Gaza a few days ago. We wonder which members of our farm community might get called into reserves. We are safe here, but we are not unaffected. We worry about others, we worry about ourselves (though we are taking great precautions to keep ourselves safe), and we worry what sort of future the world is moving towards.

 

But we do what we can to retain the relatively carefree lives we were so used to only a few weeks ago. We continue to hope for resolution and harmony, and to cultivate peace within our own community.

 

Thank you all for your thoughts and concern.

בשלום

in peace,

Ele

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~ by travelinshoes on January 9, 2009.