Letters to Talia by Dov Indig, Gefen Publishing House, (c) 2012, ISBN 978-965-229-601-6; 189 pages, retail price not listed.
By Donald H. Harrison
SAN DIEGO — The correspondence in this book took place 40 years ago — not an insignificant time span in Hebrew literature–but the issues the two young correspondents tackled are timeless ones. A close reader cannot help but be impressed with how mature and well reasoned Dov is in his answers to an impudent but open-minded, secular kibbutz girl, Talia, nor by how willing Talia is to grow and to learn from a yeshiva bocher.
Ever the romantic, I found myself rooting that the two correspondents –a teenager and a young adult — would somehow transcend all their differences, fall in love and be married. But such was not to be.
Dov not only was a yeshiva student, he also served in the Israel Defense Forces on a program that allows Othodox students to spend half their three-year commitment in the service and half in the yeshiva. On the second day of the Yom Kippur War, Dov was killed in a tank battle with the Syrians on the Golan Heights. Even had he lived–despite Talia’s obvious attraction for him — he probably would have sought a wife from an Orthodox family.
The two corresponded about both the mundane and the profound and there are many sections of this book worthy of being read again and again. For the purpose of this review, I shall limit myself to two examples.
Discussing volunteer work that she did among uneducated Moroccan Jewish immigrants in Beit She’an, Talia wrote impatiently of the elderly Jews who read and recited the same psalms, yet were unable even to explain one of them. She deemed this thoughtless repetition a rote exercise, similar to a cow chewing cud. Dov reproved her. Thanks to such people, primitive though they may be, the Jewish people “strong an unswerving in their faith, held out for thousands of years against countless forms of pressure and coercion, against pogroms and expulsions, against an ocean of hatred and anti-Semitism.”
In an earlier letter, Dov, stationed with Israeli troops in the Sinai, told of hiking a bit on Mount Katrina (near Mount Sinai) and coming upon a shelf that stuck out over Wadi Piran and looking down. “Suddenly before my eyes appeared the image of Moses … Below him, in the valley, were all the Israelites, arranged in camps by tribe and family. Perhaps here, for the first time, he gave voice to the cry that has accompanied us for thousands of years: ‘Hear O Israel! The Lord is our God! The Lord is One!'”
His letter continued that for that entire week on the mountain, “I was literally drunk, drunk from the scenery, from the sights, from the ancient sounds coming to life. The verses of the Ten Commandments and of ‘Hear O Israel’ thundered in my ears all week long.
Talia was impressed. She said, “How I envy you, that you live the Bible, that you see the Exodus and hear the Ten Commandments.” She contrasted this with her own experience at Mount Sinai. “I was just plain tired and irritated over some old warts that bothered me as I walked.”
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Harrison is editor of San Diego Jewish World. He may be contacted at donald.harrison@sdjewishworld.com