Justin H. Jacobs

On the same night Gilad Shalit was released after more than 5 years in captivity, I found myself, rather unexpectedly, in the middle of a crowd of thousands of smiling, dancing bodies — an all-night desert rave in a canyon near the Dead Sea.

It was an odd, but somehow appropriate mix of events: the salvation of one man, one man whose life kept the entire nation of Israel agonized and somber and hopeful for half a decade; and thousands of others dancing, a purely physical release of tension and stress and fear, the exorcising of negative emotion. A cause and effect, if you will, as if the rave only happened because we, as Jews, as a nation, were able to breathe easily that yes, finally, Gilad had come home.

Now I’ll return to just how I came to find myself in a canyon rave at 3 a.m. in another post; for now, I want to ponder what has just unfolded, and certainly will continue to unfold, with the freedom of Gilad.

There’s a popular opinion outside of Israel, and to a much smaller extent within Israel, that we have just walked into a death trap. New York Times contributor Walter Reich thinks so. In his Op-Ed this week, he argues that based on numbers alone, we made a mistake. And sure, based on numbers, we did. Israel traded one live soldier for over 1,000 captured Palestinians, several of whom have already — within a single day of their release — vowed to re-devote themselves back to taking more prisoners and ending more Israeli lives. So, in essence, one life was returned to us as a dauntingly uncertain number of lives may soon be taken away. As he writes, it was a head versus heart game. Our hearts were desperate for Gilad’s life; our heads should’ve told us this was not the deal to make. And as they so often do in politics and life and love, our hearts won. Netanyahu made the deal. Gilad was returned, looking gaunt and scared; 477 Palestinian prisoners were released, with the rest to follow in two months.

But, I’d argue with Reich, to simplify the situation to head/heart neglects several key factors. Will more Israelis die at the hands of Hamas’ newly freed battalion of terrorists? Maybe. Probably. And that, undeniably, will be tragic. But will Israelis decry that the decision was poor, even after a possible new shower of attacks begins? I must say no.

With Gilad’s freedom, Israelis are reminded that alongside their mandatory service in the military is the promise, ironclad, that the nation will do absolutely everything in its power to bring them home. They will not leave one soldier behind; they won’t even leave one body behind, or the remains of what once was a body. And this promise, something that seems utterly foreign to me as an American, means everything in Israel. It’s this promise that Israel was literally founded upon: we, as Jews, will never quit. We will never again let an enemy demean us. We will fight to the death for ever single life. It’s pride; it’s power. It’s love of a country, love for each other.

In America, we were in the streets this summer when we killed our greatest foe. You would never see such elation over death in Israel. As militaristic Israel may be, we celebrate life here, not death. When Gilad came home, we held our breath. We cried into our hands. We couldn’t believe it was actually happening.

I’m sitting here on Kibbutz Ketura, surrounded by Israelis, Brits and Americans. Rob, an ex-soldier from England, put it this way, bluntly: “You get your fucking boy back. And that’s it. No matter what it means. So our freed prisoners will go back to plotting against Israel. And we’ll go back to foiling their plans. But one thing means everything. That’s what Israel is all about. You get your fucking boy back.”

After 5 years and 4 months, we got him.

In the US, the beginning of September marks the beginning of the academic year, when back to school shopping sales dot every storefront and summer camp ends and families pack in the end-of-summer vacation to overcrowded beaches all before their kids stroll back into school.

In Israel, that’s not quite the case. Now I came here knowing Israel was in turns a much slower, laid back society where the phrase ‘Israeli time’ means ‘at some point within six hours of when you expected… or, well, at least by tomorrow or, no, no, probably the next day.’ But I didn’t know just how pervasive that cultural quirk was, until I experienced the chaggim here. That rushed, back-to-school feeling of America never quite shows up, because nothing happens until the end of October.

With four chaggim (Rosh Hashanah, Yom Kippur, Sukkot and Simchat Torah) breaking up every week in October, I’ve been living in a constant state of long weekends this month. I’m not complaining, exactly — I’ve been able to travel for 4 days at a time instead of two — but hell, constant vacation can be exhausting. I’m looking forward to easing back into a workweek routine, though I know I’ll eat my words mid-November when I’m dying for an extra day off.

That said, if it weren’t for Sukkot starting last weekend, I wouldn’t have found a cow skull in the woods. Let me explain.

As I’d spent the first two chaggim doing fairly chaggim-appropriate things (Rosh Hashannah in Jerusalem, Yom Kippur listening to the Grateful Dead alone in the desert), Sukkot is a harvest holiday, much less religious and perfect for a trip to the wilderness. Continue reading

Yom Kippur, as most Jews observe it, has just never been my thing.

I understand the concept — to skip food and the fun luxuries of life like electricity in order to focus on how we screwed up in the past year and hopefully, through hunger and near-constant prayer, successfully repent. If that sounds at all sarcastic, it shouldn’t; for many, if not most, Jews, this method works, and come the break fast, they feel they’ve ‘completed’ another quality Yom Kippur. If that floats your boat, so be it. It’s just never done it for me.

I’ve long been a fan of the repenting and the soul searching, sure, but in a different arena, one more suited to such activities for me. Last year, back in Pittsburgh, I spent the day hiking through a park with Tal, writing and discussing the year that we’d just finished, and how the year to come would be different. Surrounded by the reds and oranges and still-green leaves of early fall, the park was the perfect spot for me to have a meaningful Yom Kippur. Plus, we brought really good sandwiches, and you can’t go wrong with sandwiches.

Living in the desert, though, the only reds I see are the sunset over the vast stretches of rocks and sand each night and the occasional sunburn. Still, I knew the landscape of Arad would work perfectly.

For Erev Yom Kippur, I was invited to eat with a friend’s family in Arad. Her grandparents, I found out immediately upon sitting at their table, were among the first 150 or so families to move from Israel’s center to Arad in the 60’s after David Ben Gurion set out on his late-in-life quest for Jews to settle the Negev. This lady was, in so many words, a pioneer — when she moved to Arad it was a pile of stones with really clean air and some good views. She literally watched the city spring up in the desert; she saw each house erected, each new baby born, each street paved — and she still remembers when Arad didn’t exist. Her family, her kids and grandkids, grew up as her city did. Only in a young country like Israel, right? Continue reading

Photo: Sunset in Tel Aviv before a long, long night.

By the time we finished a plate of chocolate chip pancakes and home fries, paid our check and walked back home, we were beat and quickly fell asleep.

Now, I could’ve written that sentence six months ago – Tal and I would have been in Pittsburgh, and on any Friday, Saturday or Sunday morning, we would’ve gone to our favorite vegan brunch place (it’s better than it sounds), eaten breakfast, then driven home and taken a nap. Thing is, we don’t live in Pittsburgh anymore. Tal lives in Tel Aviv, and on most weekends, so do I. So that opening sentence, well, that was our Friday at 4 a.m.

It’s a played cliche to say that a ‘city never sleeps.’ In almost every case I’ve ever heard (aside from one inexplicable usage towards Columbus, Ohio), it’s applied to Manhattan, an island that is simply so overloaded with people that, statistically, someone is bound to be awake at every hour of the day. Some folks work the night shift. Tel Aviv is a different case. It’s not some huge metropolis, a Tokyo or New York or Berlin of the Middle East; it’s a small city with a huge, impressive percentage of the population that is young, beautiful and completely nocturnal. This city does sleep. It sleeps when it gets home from an after hours underground dance club at 6 a.m., then it gets up for work at 8, showers and hops on the bus. Continue reading