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August 29, 2008
Hear O’ Israel
Ellen Friedman
Special to the Jewish Times
As travelers to Israel, we spend so much of our time peering through the viewfinder of a camera, trying to record every visual image to carry home and keep in our scrapbooks or hard drives. On my most recent trip (my sixth) with colleagues from the Krieger Schechter Day School, I tried to listen to Israel.
I still stopped to take in the blue of the sky over Ein Ovdat and the vivid colors of the vegetables at Machanei Yehuda, and the pictures are in my album on Facebook, but this trip I will remember in sound bites.
From this trip, I brought home the familiar accent of our wonderful tour guide Esti, a Brooklyn girl who now makes her home in Ma’alei Adumim with her husband and five children.
Over and over, whether pointing out thriving development towns in the Negev or lush green vineyards on the Golan, Esti’s boundless pride in and love for Eretz Yisrael was revealed in her words. “Look what we’ve done with this land! This land was always here, but no one else loved it enough to do what we’ve done!”
Then there’s the staccato, Arabic-accented Hebrew of our host in the Druze village of Daliat-el-Carmel, who, over sweet tea and baklawa, expressed his own enthusiastic Zionism, his pride in being part of Israeli democracy. I’ll remember the sound of joyous trilling at the Kotel on a Thursday morning as a Mizrachi family escorted a bar mitzvah to the Torah, and on the evening of the same day, in the same location, the spine-tingling sensation as a troop of new IDF recruits were sworn in with shouts of their oath, “Ani nishba! Ani nishba! Ani nishba!”
I’ll remember listening to the hauntingly beautiful songs of the poetess Rachel on the shores of the Kinneret, where she pioneered and lived and loved before her untimely death. And in the background, there’s the sound of the lake lapping at its ever-receding shoreline, dangerously close to the “red line” that signifies a water crisis for all of Israel.
There’s the laughter of Aviv, a young Israeli with a guitar who passed the time waiting for the plane to Eilat by composing an impromptu serenade to embarrass the beautiful “gingie” behind the Israir counter at Sde Dov Airport, and who turned out to be the cousin of one of my fellow teachers back in Baltimore.
And at Sde Dov, and Eilat and Ben Gurion Airports, the rhythmic refrain of the security questions heard every time one boards a plane in Israel: “Where did you learn your Hebrew? What is the name of your synagogue? Nobody gave you anything to put in your luggage –– a package, a present perhaps? Do you know why I ask you these questions?”
On this trip, the sounds and music and voices of Israel blended together in a pastiche that was mostly harmonious, but sometimes jarringly discordant.
The sound that rises above the others and stands out most sharply in my memory, however, is one of the most beautiful, and also the most troubling.
It is the voice of the muezzin at the Al-Aqsa Mosque, in tones like drops of liquid gold, calling the faithful to prayer with the traditional chant, “Allah hu akbar.” Listening to this call to prayer, as compelling as the pealing of church bells or the blast of a shofar, I was overcome with tears.
What is wrong with a world where the cry, “God is great!” evokes a response of fear, and images of crashing planes, roadside bombs and exploding pizza parlors?
That call to prayer will stay with me, and my prayer is that the time will come soon and in our days that Israelis and Americans, Muslims and non-Muslims everywhere can hear the words “Allah hu akbar,” and respond simply, without fear, “Amen.”
Ellen Friedman, a Middle School Judaics teacher at Krieger Schechter Day School, visited Israel this summer on a trip with 25 teachers and eight spouses.