By Toby Klein Greenwald
JERUSALEM–A little while ago, as we broke our fast at the end of the mournful day of Tisha B’Av, I was suddenly overcome with this strong sentimental thought – perhaps prompted also by a friend who wrote in a Facebook message that when he drives on Begin Highway and sees new community centers going up in Jerusalem, it doesn’t feel like destruction.
The thought was one of thankfulness. Here we are, 2000 years after the destruction of the Second Temple, a destruction that the sages tell us resulted from baseless hatred among our people, yet if I look at my own tiny microcosm, this is what I see: I’m married to an Israeli teacher whose parents survived the Holocaust, and our six children are scattered throughout Israel, from Haifa in the north to the deepest Negev. Between our children and children-in-law, we have two army officers, a journalist, a university lecturer, a DJ, a reflexologist who also worked in archeology (and made an important discovery), a nutritionist, an owner of an expanding printing company, a graphic artist and more…They are all doing things that are meaningful and productive, most of them are raising young families, and some of them are living in the periphery, real idealists.
As for me? I get to teach literature to the brightest young minds in the country, to write and direct plays based on the Tanach (Bible), to conduct improvisational theater and to write about Israel. We live in a beautiful little home in Efrat, in the Etzion Bloc, where our forefathers and foremothers walked.
So on the personal level, I feel only thankfulness, ovewhelming thankfulness, to live where I do and to raise children here and to see my grandchildren running through the sands and forests of the land of Israel. Baruch Hashem.
On the national level, Israel is building and thriving and inventing and growing exponentially day by day.
But that friend did post something else on Facebook – a short video by a Rabbi Refael Rubin — that speaks about the importance of loving each other, in spite of all our differences.
In that respect, I guess we still have a way to go.
Last week, as I was working on one of the songs for our newest biblical musical for Raise Your Spirits Theatre, called SISTERS! The Daughters of Tzlofchad (See Numbers, Chapter 27), I thought a lot about the fact that the children of Israel are composed of twelve tribes. The song is about the census that takes place in the desert (Numbers, Chapter 26). I had originally planned it as just a lively song with three actresses representing each tribe (for a total of 36 on stage), marching with colorful flags, bearing the tribes’ symbols…and then the deeper question of “Why tribes at all?” began to plague me. I had a long philosophical discussion about it with our composer, and he came up with a wonderful melody that is regal, but not too heavy, rather – uplifting.
I ran my question about the tribal thing by another friend, who quoted the known metaphor of an orchestra – each instrument is needed to create the whole. So I sat down and wrote these concluding lyrics (still in process) to the song that notes the tribal family names and numbers. (Preview! You saw it here first.) :
The envy must end
Or the future is bleak
We must comprehend
We are one, yet unique.
Like a band of minstrels
With cacophony of sound
Like the opulence of flora
Rising from the ground
Like a flock of eagles
Like a colony of sheep
Like a train of camels
Crossing mountains steep
Like the stars on high
Like the sand below
Each of us is separate
Yet we’re not alone.*
That is one of my main messages in this play: Each of us is separate, yet we’re not alone. It’s already the message in the essence of the play – Sisters. For there are commentators who explain that the daughters of Tzlofchad, who “drew close” to Moshe, to request their father’s portion of land (he had died and left no sons, who usually inherit – read the chapter!), also “drew close” to each other, and therein lay their strength.
Recognizing our differences, yet the need to be there always, for one another, is what I believe will bring the final redemption and the building of the Third Temple.
May it be speedily in our day.
*© Toby Klein Greenwald, 2015