Rebbetzen Tziporah

Dear friends,

Two weeks ago, Bnos Avigail spent Shabbos in Bnei Brak. I couldn’t help recalling my early days in Israel. Every year a few girls from Bais Yaakov in Brooklyn (which was the only show in town at the time) travelled to Eretz Yisrael for seminary. In my time there were 4 girls from my school, BY of Crown Heights, who let their strong nascent longing for E”Y bring them here. 

Three of us went to Bnei Brak, and one to Yerushalaim. We all were in Hebrew speaking seminaries and had to swim or sink. One of the regulars, Ester Hass, originally came from Argentina and spoke good English. She was our interpreter in our early days.

The airport was much smaller, I now know that the day I arrived was a Hamsin (a believe it or not day with winds that leave you feeling that you are in a convection oven on low). As I walked down the steps, the first thought that entered my mind was that this is it. It is hot, dry, and the sun is blinding. I will come to love it on its own terms. 

Ester was there waiting for me. She helped me through the unchanging Israeli bureaucracy and offered to buy me a drink before we headed out to the taxi that would take us to Bnei Brak. I expected Coke, Sprite or Pepsi. I got black beer, which was a favorite drink in Old Israel. The drive was arduous, and the scenery that we passed was unending beige. As soon as I hit the streets of Bnei Brak, my feelings changed. I was not in foreign territory. I was home.

The taxi drivers, street cleaners, storekeepers all looked like rabbi wannabees. Beards. Tzitzis. And inarticulate self-statement –“We are Jews. We are here because we are Jews. All of us.” I was and still am thirsty for more and more Israel... During the year I travelled as much as possible in order to drink in as much as I could. There were no organized trips, and to get anywhere outside of Bnei Brak you had to travel to Tel Aviv. On my very first day I had two adventures that affected the rest of my life.

The first one was my one and only meeting with Rav Shach zatzal. Because the banking system wasn’t attuned to foreign money transfers, I was carrying all of the money that I would need for the year including tuition. I asked the housemother to put it in her safe. She didn’t have one. As a matter of fact, there wasn’t even a police station in Bnei Brak – there were no thieves. I

 was still both uneasy and insistent. She sent me across the street with instructions to go to the bookkeeper and to give him the cash overnight, until he could put it in the safe. I misunder-stood her directions. I ended up knocking on Rav Shach’s door and making a rather bizarre speech in my fractured Biblical Hebrew. 

“Behold! Here is my parent’s treasure. Accept it as security.” He stopped me mid idiocy. He walked out of his apartment, showed me the floor below, and said, “I am Shach. Deutch lives there," pointing at the apartment below. It was only later that I found out that I had barged in on the gadol hador.

The second one was my interview with Rav Wolf, the principal. Given the travel realities of the times, no interviews ever took place. My grades were good, and my acceptance was self-understood. The purpose of the interview was to assign me to one of the two parallel classes.

At the time, I was in the process of self-discovery, and self-definition. I was frum enough for two people, but had a certain sort of inner restlessness. He spoke to me in Yiddish, which was kind, given that I had been in the Promised Land less than 24 hours. I refused to answer in Yiddish (which was the spoken language in Bais Yaakov in America in those days, so he knew that I could communicate and understand the lingo). 

I would only answer in Ivrit. Yiddish belongs to the golah (diaspora), I told the rabbi who needed this sort of attitude like a hole in the head. He figured me out immediately. He grasped that I was charting my own path, reading what I read, thinking what I think, and exploring what I explore. He told me I could read whatever I want, go wherever I want to go (as long as I do well in my schoolwork and could justify the time). 

There was only one condition. I was not to take anyone else with me in any of my exploits. I agreed. I got to know the British library in Tel Aviv, travelled the country via Egged from north to south. I only got a reprimand once. When I went north, and pointed out that I had visited the tomb of Eliyahu, he pointed out that Eliyahu had not died…. He also let me go to classes in selected pieces of classes on machshava that were not generally opened to the sem students, introducing me to Maharal the Chazon Ish and others. He made me feel at home, and no longer in a continual state of unrest. 

What all of this stuff has in common, is that the people I met in these first days and later is that they confirmed the feeling that I had from the first moment. I was home; not only geographically, not only historically, not even just ideologically. I was home in ways that words don’t begin to express.

Avraham called the place of the Bais HaMikdash, “Har”, a mountain that you have to climb if you want to get to its peak.

Yitzchak called it “sadeh”, a field that you have to work if you want to see its fruition.

Yaakov called it “House” – the kind of house that can also be called the Gate of Heaven.

Only we Jews, Yaakov’s descendants, not the descendants of either Yishmael or Eisov will ever discover what it means for this land to be Home.

May Hashem open our hearts to see what Yaakov saw. He saw angels going up the ladder and going down. May our tefillos go up, and true returns come down.

 

Love,

Tziporah