It doesn’t take much to heave my mind back to Martha’s Vineyard, especially when there is a Jewish angle involved, as there was when I read this post on Rabbi Tzvi’s Substack:

Tzvi’s Substack

Walking Tall on Martha's Vineyard

I usually try to avoid Five Corners on Sunday afternoons…

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a year ago · 5 likes · 2 comments · Tzvi Alperowitz

Five Corners. My old neighbourhood. This unexpected trip down memory lane led me back to Cromwell Lane, fifty yards up Beach Street from Five Corners, and the first home I had on Martha’s Vineyard, the “Caleb Prouty” house. We didn’t last long at that house because it turned out to be haunted.

It’s funny, but it’s not the memory of our old house that haunts me. It’s the memory of two other houses—one at the end of Cromwell Lane, on the corner of Beach Street, across from what is now Cumberland Farms: the other across Beach Street, heading up towards Main Street, just past the old Fire Station. Those two houses, I now see, formed the twin pillars at the entrance to the temple of my life story. For fifty years I held them apart in my mind—never once connecting them. How strange that seems to me now. Those houses stood less than thirty yards apart, and the thoughts they stir are so deeply intertwined within me that I can’t fathom how I missed the link between them until now.

I, who have spent years chasing every Jewish thread on Martha’s Vineyard—hunting for a single event, a face, a moment I could crown as the origin of the path that led me here: a Zionist Orthodox Jew living in Israel.

I’ve been writing on Substack for three years, with a long queue of autobiographical drafts still waiting. Yet somehow, I found myself leaning back in my thinking chair, startled by two questions I’d never thought to ask:

Who was the first Jew I ever met?
Who was the first Jew-hater I ever met?

I expected a long, winding stroll down memory lane. Instead, I was suddenly hovering in my mind’s eye over the Caleb Prouty house—and like watching an animated Civil War map, I saw two cannonballs strike: one at the house on Cromwell Lane, the other nearby across Beach Street.

A clear and final revelation:
The first Jew I ever met lived in the house at the end of Cromwell Lane.
The first Jew-hater I ever met lived in the house on Beach Street.

We moved to Martha’s Vineyard in the summer of 1963. I was seven, about to start second grade. The moment the last moving box hit the floor of our new house on Cromwell Lane, I bolted out to explore. I was in Heaven. Main Street—its shops, its movie palace, The Capawok—was one minute away. At the head of the A&P parking lot, the Tisbury Police Station glinted like a promise of action.

I was wrong about the action. Vineyard Haven was a sleepy town: drunk drivers, shouting spouses, nothing more. Little did I know then that thirteen years later I’d be in that same station’s uniform—a “summer cop” between college semesters—waving ferries in, heart racing through a season of chaos:

• An FBI Ten Most Wanted fugitive, cuffed on the dock.

• A standoff with Hell’s Angels, engines snarling.

• A botched bank robbery, sirens screaming.

And to top off that summer in uniform, on a quiet afternoon in my final week, during a lull between boats, I noticed an elderly woman watching me from across the street. She approached me with purpose, stopped inches away, and locked eyes.
“You are going to have much to write about.”
I flushed crimson, grinned, wondering how could she know, and said: “You have no idea.”
“Yes I do,” she replied, a knowing glint in her eye.

I blushed harder because I recognized her—Lillian Hellman—and saw she was pleased I did.

Across Beach Street, as if an extension of Cromwell Lane, a narrow sidewalk led to Memorial Park. Back then, before wetlands were sacred, the park was half swamp, half miracle: two baseball diamonds, a cracked basketball court, two swings, and a wide flat field where the Regional High School played football—no bleachers, just a ring of bodies around the edge on game day.

That first summer, and every afternoon after school started, I drifted to the park. I walked the perimeter, dreaming of the day I’d be big enough to play football. At first, I wasn’t allowed at the Saturday games. I’d stand at the end of Cromwell Lane, straining to see past the crowd, catching only the thud of bodies, the roar of voices, and if the wind was right, a whiff of crushed grass and sweat.

Sports fields are for brotherhood. Here, in the all-American crucible of pads and whistles, boys were forged into men, and into that forging, the ancient hate slipped in.
Quiet.
As if inevitable.
Splicing itself into our young souls like a shadow no one could name.

This field, Memorial Park, where I imagined my future glory, became the unholy bridge between the two houses, between the house of the Jew, and the house of the Jew hater, the point where the wings of antagonistic Cherubim met.

According to my calculations, I was seven years old when I encountered my first Jew. Jews actually. As I have said, whenever I could I made my way to Memorial Park. Crossing Beach Street was a dangerous prospect. For a driver coming up Beach Street from five corners there was no way to see if someone was about to emerge from Cromwell Lane, because the hedges in front of the little house at the end of the lane obscured the point where the lane intersected Beach Street. I would come to a stop even before reaching the end of the lane, and ease up to the intersection, looking both ways, twice. Sometime in the late summer of nineteen sixty-three, I paused before crossing Beach Street and perchance looked to my left, my head peeking just above the newly trimmed hedge line. Sitting in the sun in their closed-in little yard were two old ladies. They were not looking at me, rather, they looked at each other, unsmiling and motionless. Until that day, I had only seen the hedge next to me, and my mind was always on the dangers of Beach Street. Their sudden appearance surprised me and I reacted instinctively, good boy that I was. I piped a cheerful “Hello,” with a friendly wave. In my limited experience as a child amongst adults, such a greeting had never failed to elicit a friendly response. In this case I was completely ignored. Thinking that they had not heard me I repeated my greeting, louder this time. Their heads did not move but I thought that they had moved their eyes in my direction. This signalled to me, young as I was, that their lack of reaction was born of fear. It reminded me of my younger brother playing quietly and contentedly with a new toy as I walked into the room. At that point his sole purpose in life was to make himself invisible. Anything so as not to draw my attention, and specifically not to display that he was enjoying himself. Instinctively, with my little mind churning at their unexpected fear of me, and minor bully that I was, I used the closest tool at hand to react--I stuck my tongue out at them. They did not seem to react. They still looked at me without turning towards me. Two eyes were looking at me, but from different bodies. Something in me combined the two eyes as if they belonged to a single splayed-out face, and once I imagined this flat-faced relief like some ancient Egyptian stele it was clear to me. They had noticed my impudence.

I was dumbfounded, and embarrassed. I ran home and told my mother what had happened, leaving out the part about the tongue. I was expecting some kind of fallout. A young boy does not stick his tongue out at grownups. I was preparing the stage, so that when the fallout did come my punishment might be mitigated somewhat by my confusion over their refusal to say hello back to me. I saw that I had managed to confuse my mother also, which further confused me. My mother said nothing. My father, who had been in the living room and heard what I had said, came into the kitchen, and with a knowing smile said: “Oh. So you’ve met the Mengele twins.” My mother gave him a sharp look, but he pushed on, as if enjoying the texture of the term as it rolled out of his mouth, and as such I listened closely, trying to connect. The Bobbsey Twins novels that my sister read. The Minnesota Twins of Major League Baseball. Now, the mysterious Mengele Twins.

My mother knew where this was going. “He’s too young for that,” she said.

A parent’s desire to preserve childhood innocence. My mother was all for it. My father was not. For him, if I was old enough to walk by myself to Memorial Park, I was old enough to hear about Josef Mengele. Hear I did, but what I heard made absolutely no sense to me.

“Mengele was an evil Nazi doctor who experimented on Jews before having them murdered,” he said.

That was enough for my mother, and she gave him one last look before leaving the kitchen, where I remained with my father.

I knew by then that the Nazis, along with the Japs, had been our enemies in World War Two, but to my young mind, “Doctor” was the inverse of “evil.” Doctors were supposed to operate on humans. That is how they were healed. What did he mean by experimenting on them? Who were the Jews?

“How can a doctor be evil?” I asked.

“Oh, in the same way that anyone can be evil. By doing evil things.”

I paused.

“What did he do to them?” I asked, meaning the twins on the corner, already afraid of the answer.

My father did not hesitate. “He removed muscles from their arms and legs to see if they could function without them. And from their faces. That is why they cannot make facial expressions. They were not being rude to you; they simply cannot smile.”

I had never heard anything like that before. What was this revelation? I looked at my father for comfort, but none was there. I could not hold back my tears, and I ran to my mother where she sat in the living room. She held me for a while as I sobbed. My father stood at the doorway. I could not look at him, but I knew that they wanted to talk so I climbed the stairs to my bedroom. In my bed, I could hear them talking. I heard my father make some forceful points and to my surprise, I heard my mother answering him sharply. This was not like her. But later, when I came back down for supper, the subject did not come up again. There was an agreement between them, and I was left to deal by myself with the demons that had been aroused.

My imagination could not take me far towards the reality of the Holocaust. I had those cryptic words of my father and my own real encounter with the silent and immobile twins—the Mengele Twins—with which to construct a childish framework of understanding. As a result, in my dreams they became twin wicked witches of the West. Or not. Alternately they were good witches of the East, silenced and frozen under a spell thrown upon them by the evil witch of the West, and as such, maybe there was an assignment for me to rescue them. But somehow, I knew that in my dreams as in real life that they were beyond rescuing; they were as rescued as they ever could be. They lived with that, motionless, silent, sitting in their enclosed yard with a compassionate sun on their faces, unsupported flaps of skin on their arms and faces caressed by the gentle island breeze. That was as good as it could be for them.

With this “framework of understanding” I continued with my daily walks to Memorial Park, though now not looking in the twins’ direction, only slightly raising my hand in a perfunctory welcome, not caring whether they acknowledged it or not. It was like kissing an anti-mezuza on the way out the door, a way of giving thanks for forgetfulness, instead of for remembrance. And I did forget, or at least compartmentalized: those unfortunate twins were Jews, something different from me. It would be another five years before my father took it upon himself to tell me about the Jews.

I began to spend more time with the new friends I had made at school so that my trips to the park became much less frequent, and at some point, in the late fall when the first hints of the winter chill became evident, I noticed that the twins were not in their yard. I imagined them on their broomsticks flying south for the winter but sensed that they were probably just sitting inside the house, keeping warm. I had been keeping track of them after all, scanning their yard with the corner of my eye. They were not forgotten so easily.

Now that I was relieved of their physical presence I felt a new freedom. They were not on my conscience anymore. This seemed to me proper at the time. Theirs was an issue for grown-ups. I was just a boy. The relief that I felt was reflected in those grey Sunday afternoons after the end of the football season, walking into the park where my imagination would now lay softly, flattened on that field of play as if hibernating, or resting after the big battle, the final game of the season against Nantucket.

Winter came, and I would go to the park once a week, on Sunday, after church and dinner. One Saturday night, snow began falling. I could not sleep. Finally, I went downstairs and found my father reading in the living room. I asked him if I could go outside. He smiled and said yes but told me not to go too far. As I donned my winter coat, hat and galoshes, I was in a state of wonderment, as it was clear that it had been left up to me to decide what was too far. I took my first step in the snow and stopped to stand, like Neil Armstrong on the moon later that decade. True, I was a child in the moment, enjoying the magic of fresh fallen snow, but when I began to move in the familiar direction, I felt as if I were representing something, someone. I enjoyed every step towards the twins’ house, my rubbery footdrops the only sound until I reached a perch at the corner of their lot from where I could see most of their little yard. And as I stood in the dark silence, seeing the clean white slate of their yard, I felt as if my slate had been cleaned too; I was no longer culpable. I need not hold them in my mind any longer.

The snow continued to fall that night. The next day, after Sunday dinner, I set off for the park. The trudge of my galoshes belied the lightness of my being as I traipsed along in a dance of thanks to the heavens for sending this cleansing white coat that covered my world, inside and out. I was thinking of the snowman that I would build in the park. Approaching the twins’ house I felt no need to look in their yard; the previous night-visit had purged me of that need. And free of the need, I of course looked over towards their yard. I froze where I stood.

There was a single four-paned window on the side of the house, and in the bottom two panes, facing each other as if from a folded piece of paper in art class assiduously scissored and opened to reveal a mirror image snowflake pattern, the twins were looking at me, as usual, through one eye each. My only thought, having been cleansed, was why do they not turn to look at me full faced? The answer to that question entered my mind with the force of a blizzard. There must be something, sunken, pock-marked, torn and scarred on the far sides of their faces like the unseen craters on the far side of the moon. Now I was crazed with fear and felt violated. Though it was I who had turned to look, once again, towards the unfathomable twins of Mengele, and had found them recessed within a small square portal of clarity when I had thought that they had been blurred-out forever, still, something beamed out at me through that glass like a bank of spotlights being turned-on on a playing field for a night game. My young mind could only flinch, but even so there was a basic comprehension that disturbed me and hurt me. The basic fact of the twins being there—of their being at all—was an affront to me. I stood there with a healthy and powerful anger that I had not known until then. I was so invigorated that I could have led a Crusade. Young boy that I was, my crusade could only take me on to the park. There I could play out a resolution to the twisted thoughts in my mind which I now understood to be unfairly caused by the twisted and contorted bodies of the twins.

Thus, determined to fight my righteous fight, I began to turn towards the park and as I took my first step, I detected in the corner of my eye some movement in the window. Ecstatic inertia enabled me to carry on with a few more powerful steps ignoring what I had just barely seen, but even before reaching Beach Street I had absorbed what had glanced off my left eye—me seeing it as they saw the world, through one eye. I had seen two hands raised in greeting. Now running, ploughing forward at the same time knowing that I should turn back and return the greeting, I reached the park. My carpet of certainty had been pulled out from under me and all that was left was the snow-covered expanse before me. It was a clean slate again but this time it was demanding. I spoke to myself in a whisper:

“How could I have thought such a thing? How could I have thought such a thing?”

If asked, I could not have explained the “thing” that I had been thinking. It was beyond me, but I knew that I had turned a corner and had entered a space of darkness, and I now was confounded by this totally unexpected gesture of theirs—that had been so absent a few months earlier—that had pulled me back from the abyss. A hand raised in greeting and a young boy’s heart demolished in return. Everything was upside-down and I knew that it was because I had allowed myself to be drawn into a dark space, because that had been the easy thing to do. I turned my head, looking for an escape that I knew not to be there and saw something that lifted my spirits. There was a huge snow drift against the retaining wall behind the fire station. A boy could dig a tunnel there.

Directly I was on my knees digging. I was a boy again, demanding my fun. There was no danger because the snow was light and fluffy. Had it collapsed on me I could have stood up and punched my way out. But digging down below I was surprised how dark it became so soon. I had dug a little over a yard and all I could hear was the sound of my efforts, and all I could see was an increasing darkness. Then, somewhere in the middle of the drift I changed my direction and turned to the left. If I continued in this direction I would quickly break out back into the park, but once my torso was in the new section I stopped digging. There was quiet. There was darkness. There was cold. And there was restfulness. Surprised, I lay my head sideways on the crook of my arm and enjoyed the emptiness. Had I outrun my demons, demons that had no place in the mind of a young boy? Was this all-engulfing darkness and silence a cleaner slate than a virgin field of snow? It wasn’t long before the cold began to seep in through my pants. My body began to shiver and with it the inner silence that had been so comforting departed my young soul like snow rising upwards and with that lifting the blizzard of emotions fell back upon me and I became afraid of my tunnel—my mock grave. I quickly backed out and stood up and revelled in the light, that special light that hovers over a field of snow, white, clean, and pure.

I turned to walk towards home and as soon as I did my fear disappeared. I crossed Beach Steet and though I could not bring myself to look towards the House of the Mengele Twins, I did raise up my right arm in greeting, as high as I could reach. I entered the house, removed my galoshes and winter coat and told my parents: “Those twins said ‘Hi’ to me.” I did not make eye-contact with my parents but did pause to allow them to say something. I think that my father would have had something to say but his truce with my mother was too fresh. I continued to my room, feeling some kind of victory, though I could not express over what precisely that victory was, but I had stood up to…something, I had endured a test, and had proven myself. When I reached my room, my mind was not on torture and Jews and darkness and death. Standing in my room looking out my window over the roof of the A&P where I could see the ferry slip, I knew that I would be a football player. I knew that I would pass muster. As it turned out, I was looking in the right direction for those thoughts, because ten years later our victorious high school team would return from away-games late at night on the ferry, and if it had been a significant victory, we would be met by large cheering crowds of well-wishers, and a police siren or two. After the ferry had juggled itself into the slip and the lashing chains had been cranked tight, we would walk down the loading ramp and be engulfed by the public tribute.

That night, when I lay down in my bed, for the first time in my life I felt that I was the Master of Myself. I knew that I was still a boy, but I felt that I had matured in a significant manner. I felt more grown-up. The rest that I was about to have was a well-earned rest, not yet the rest of a warrior after battle, but still a deserved sleep. And on that very night, I learned that there is little correspondence between what you think you deserve and what you eventually receive.

My mother’s scream tore through the house. As if commanded, my sister, brother and I stood at attention at the threshold of our rooms, looking, listening, afraid to approach our parents’ room without permission. I, newly Master of Myself, turned out to be not a master of my bladder as I had wet my pants from fear, from the shock of hearing my mother scream. My sister, brother and I looked at each other but said nothing while holding back our tears. For years, that had been the extent of my memory of the event. The strongest memory was the embarrassment I felt at having wet my pants, and the tremendous relief I felt when I noticed that my younger brother had wet his too.

Many years later I was visiting from Israel and my mother and I sat on her porch, comfortable with each other, and the memory popped into my head.

“Mom, that time back on Cromwell Lane. Did you really see a ghost?” Here is what she told me:

She was asleep in her bed when someone leaned down next to her and whispered something in her ear. She woke up, thinking that it was her sister-in-law Twinky Carr—my father’s twin sister—who was visiting at the time. Now awake, she heard another whisper in her ear: “I have something to tell you.” At that point she knew it was not Twinky, and she looked. It was a ghost in the shape of an old grey woman. Then my mother screamed, the ghost disappeared, and my father jumped up out of bed. Instead of comforting my mother, my father was leaning over her as the ghost had done, and shouted over her screams: “What did it say? What did it say?” My mother remembered being so angry at him that the fear of the ghost faded. She shouted at my father: “She didn’t say anything! I screamed. She disappeared!” My father said: “Why didn’t you wait to hear what she said?”

At the sound of the commotion, my aunt Twinky had run to my parents’ room to be at my mother’s side to calm her, while holding her twin brother—my father—off. She was the perfect intermediary. My father stood in the corner of their room, fuming. As my mother told me this I thought of my father. I knew exactly what was in his mind. A father is like a twin, at a distance in time. He was thinking that in the rare event that a ghost wants to tell you something, it could only be about buried treasure and if you want to get to the treasure you have to let the ghost speak. It was as if my father was saying, at the moment when my mother was in her deepest distress, when she most needed comforting: “How could you be so stupid?” while believing that he was right in saying so. His thinking was that my mother would have benefited from the buried treasure too. In yelling at her he was educating her. That was it: she needed educating in the ways of ghosts. I understood my father because I too became just such an educator for a time, I am ashamed to admit.

My mother gazed off towards the tree line and repeated the quote to herself “How could you be so stupid.” She turned back to me and asked:

“What do you think? Should I have waited to hear what the ghost had to say?”

It was an innocent question, but it carried with it the weight of another, unspoken question: Would you have reacted like your father?

“No Mom. You were right to scream. If I had been by your side I would have held you tight,” I answered without hesitation, the veteran of many hugs of my shivering wife—and children—giving freely of what is sometimes the only thing that we can give. To hold another soul steady against the darkness.

My mother went silent. As for me, lost memories returned. I remembered.

We three children stood in the doorways of our rooms. We looked at each other. The hallway was not heated so we began to shiver. I was relieved to see that my younger brother had also wet his pyjamas. I was never one to leave a silent moment at peace, and I said to my brother and sister: “Mom saw a ghost.” I did not know that. My sister managed to say: “There’s no such thing as ghosts,” before she and my brother began crying loudly. At the sound of their crying Twinky burst out of my parents’ room, took a quick look at me now standing there calmly as if paring my nails, then continued down the hall to my siblings. I heard: “Billy said that Mommy saw a ghost!”

“Nonsense!” Twinky said, huddling them back to their beds. “Mommy just had a bad dream, that’s all.” I waited as she put them back to bed. I knew what was coming.

“Why did you say that? Look what you did to your brother and sister. They are terrified,” Twinky said.

“Because she did.”

“How do you know that?”

“Because I saw her too.”

Up until then, my aunt must have thought that I had heard bits and pieces of what had transpired in my parents’ bedroom. But by saying “her,” authoritatively, I had given my aunt pause. How could I have known that the ghost was a “she?” My aunt thought for a moment and then called for my father. I saw how they worked together—they seemed to be closer than my father was with my mother. Twins are like living ghosts of each other.

Alone in my room with my father, I already knew what I was going to say. I had not seen the ghost, of course, but the moment that I had told Twinky that I had, a kind of ghost did appear to me. It was the ghost of an unfinished conversation. It conjured itself up into my consciousness and there was a substance to it that was like a whispery presence on the stairwell next to my room, seen out of the corner of an eye.

“What did you see?” my father asked.

“It was one of the twins.”

My father paused and looked at me as if he were sizing me up.

“Let’s change your pyjamas and sheets.”

Somewhere in my young mind I realized that there would be few clean slates ahead in my life. Ghosts cling to you like wet pyjamas. For me the Mengele Twins were ghosts—ghosts of a life that had been torn from them with clinical preciseness. As my father tucked me in, I closed my eyes and welcomed all of my ghosts, living and dead and in between, and I dreamed of snow.

Coming Soon:

The Ghosts of Cromwell Lane.

Part two: “Your Jews”

Testimony House, Nir Galim. Reprinted with permission.

1. January 18. Eat a falafel. Stand with the Jews and Israel.

2. Print the last slide and take a selfy while holding the printout and eating a falafel.

3. Upload to social media with the tag #Am_Israel_Chai

Every year as January 18th approaches I revisit the story of David “Dugo” Leitner, of blessed memory, whose personal observance on that date became an Israeli-wide tradition. This is a rework of Against Antisemitism, an ancient-feeling post that was a response to the “Defcon 3” antisemitism that turned out to be a precursor of things to come a half year later. Dugo was still alive when I wrote this. Dugo’s is an inspiring story, and his simple commemorative act provides an opportunity to make a public stand with the Jews.

The Story of Dugo

Holocaust literature is vast and one of its main branches is survivors’ stories written by survivors’ children. It is a world of heartbreak and as much as we feel sorrow and sympathy for the survivor, we feel also for the author/child, mapping out that bleakest of landscapes out of love for a parent, while living in a world that is moving on from the European slaughterhouse. These are torn souls and in many of their books they detail the atrocities in a well-deserved gesture of “rubbing our faces” in the reality that was forced upon the Jews. That is understandable but it is a literature that is today almost unreadable for any but the connected, and more so every day that passes. I am speaking as a Jew. Even more so for Decent Gentiles. Does that mean that the story will cease to be told? In that form, yes. And with this awakening, again, of Antisemitism I called the grandfather of my daughter-in-law, David Leitner, a survivor of Auschwitz and two death marches at the ripe age of fourteen. I didn’t know what I wanted, but I felt a need to speak with him. He was happy to oblige, and I packed up my recording equipment and met him in his home. He started talking as soon as I sat down and soon enough, I abandoned the idea of recording our interview. I was not about to interrupt this voice. I had a list of questions that I also abandoned right at the start. I looked at this beautiful man talking about the ugliest subject matter imaginable and the only question that I dared ask when the opportunity presented itself was one that I had not included in my list. When and where did you see the first ray of light, feel that the worst was over, that you might survive? He looked straight at me and said: “I never lost hope. I came close near the end, when I was a breath away from dying, but I held on.”

Dugo’s daughter Zehava Leitner Kor has written a book about her father. It is readable, originally for young adults (though I at 65 read it in one sitting a couple of years ago). It will take you close enough to the black maw of the death camps but will just give you glimpses over the edge. Like I said, readable. Dugo told me a story that appears in the book, but it was different in his telling of it that day in his home. Fifteen years have passed since the book was written, and he is well into his nineties today. Listen to him.

“The hardest times, the lowest times, the times when I was closest to death were when we reached the end of the death marches. After the first one, when we had reached Mauthausen, I felt that I was at the end of the line. We had been forced to march for three days in blinding snow, rain, and…anyone who stopped along the way was shot where he fell. I was fourteen years old. After a few days, a group of Hungarian Jews who had been with the forced labor brigades arrived, starving. I went over to see if there was anyone that I knew in the group. They did not believe us when we told them about the death camp. That hurt us deeply. But miracle of miracles, my father’s brother, my uncle, was in the group. He was starving too, and weak. He looked at me and said: ‘Dugo, what happened to your pants?’ My pants were in tatters, I was completely exposed. And it was the last thing on my mind. When you are starving you are not thinking about fashion. ‘Dugo, I have tefillin (phylacteries-e.n.), come back in the morning and I will find you some pants so that you can put on tefillin.’ I could only look him in the eye and say weakly: ‘Uncle.’ I turned and left him without saying goodbye.”

“I had looked upon my uncle with disdain. He had no idea what I had been through. All he could see was that I was naked and because of that I could not don the tefillin. For me that was complete insanity. That night, I thought of him. What had he seen? He could see that I was starving; he himself was starving. So, what had he seen when he looked at me? Suddenly, like on a moon-lit night when the snow stops falling, it became clear. He had looked at me when I was at the lowest point in my life, crazy from starvation, not even one step from oblivion, and he had seen a Jew still obligated to observe the commandment of donning tefillin:

And it shall be for a sign to thee upon thy hand, and for a memorial between thy eyes, that the Lord’s Tora may be in thy mouth: for with a strong hand did the Lord bring thee out of Miżrayim.

I was not yet nothing. I was still a Jew. A Jew without pants, but still a Jew. I was not a model Jew growing up as you know but I never wanted to observe that commandment more than at that moment. I wanted to put on tefillin at once. I was tortured that I had to wait until morning, and I was overcome with regret for being disrespectful to my uncle.

The next morning? No tefillin, no uncle. It’s in the book.” I sat in silence listening to his silence. Then he continued.

“Pants. My survival came down to a pair of pants. By the time we finished the second death march I spent my days sitting in mud. I was out of my mind at this point. The closer the Allies came towards us, the deeper I sank. The approaching artillery fire, the planes overhead—it all barely registered with me. The pants I wore? Air. Nothing. I was listless, dying in the field where we sat, like all those around me, when the rumor started that the guards were going to distribute food. We pushed towards the storage huts as one, out of control, and were rewarded with being shot at. I discovered that I was still able to run. I ran back to my mud pit and this time fell into my deepest despair. To come this far, to have food dangled in front of us only to have to run from guards shooting at us. I had had enough. The new rumor was that if we stood in line without shoving, the food would be distributed the next day. I did not believe it, and even if I did, I did not care anymore. But that night, in my deepest despair, my father’s voice came to me. He didn’t tell me to be strong and of good faith. He didn’t tell me to hold on just a little more. His voice simply said: ‘Dugo, find some pants to cover yourself.’ I did, and it was incredible. I felt a little warmth. That’s it. They warmed me up a little, and that was enough to get me to the line the next day, and to get food and to get away before the inevitable mob-rush began. They did shoot at us again, but I was far out of range, eating already. That is how I survived. It’s in the book.”

For years when he had led school groups to Auschwitz to tell them about the Holocaust, the low point of his story was when he had been thrown into a gas chamber full of children, had cried like them for his parents, had said Shema Yisrael, and at the last minute the door opened and he was pulled out along with fifty other larger boys to do some work that had popped up. He was out, the door closed again, the crying began again, and then it stopped. He had been that close to going the way of all Jews in Birkenau. I had heard that story before at some public appearance of his in the past and I had read of it in his book, and it is the story I had been expecting to hear now. He was looking at me to see if I had absorbed what he was telling me.

Like he said, I had read the account in his book, but he was seeing his own story differently now. He wanted me to understand. Right then I could not see it, but I did feel a profundity.

The covering of one’s privates suggests the story of Adam and Eve.

And He said, Who told thee that thou wast naked? Hast thou eaten of the tree, of which I commanded thee that thou shouldst not eat?

Traditional Jewish commentary says that because they sinned, they were deprived of their closeness to God. Their eyes were opened to a far different reality, the reality that churns around the organs below the waist. No one had told them that they were naked as they scampered to cover themselves with fig leaves. They simply knew, as we know of ourselves today.

He wanted me to understand the significance of a pair of pants in that hell. Pants the wearing of which at his uncle’s behest would have brought him closer to his Creator, in that it he would be fit to keep the commandment of tefillin. Pants, the wearing of which at his father’s behest, would bring him that tiny measure of warmth that would keep him alive. Dugo had been speaking for a long time. He sat patiently with his wife Sara, inviting me to say something. He was asking me if I understood the significance of his Parable of the Trousers.

The interview took place during the holiday of Sukkot. (You may notice the four species on the table that Dugo had prayed with that morning). Whenever a Holocaust survivor gives testimony (and if you think about it everything they say is testimony) there is, beyond the words, a silence that is present. It is almost a physical presence, and it is the silence of those Jews who did not survive. In Jewish folklore the four species represent four categories of Jews, from the holiest represented by the citron to the lowliest represented by the willow branches. When the species are held together and waved during the morning prayers of Sukkot, it symbolizes the unification of all Jews, that the People of Israel include all types. There is a Divine Directive of Unity in Judaism that proclaims that the Divine Plan for the World will come to fruition on the condition that the People of Israel are united. The Creator’s deal is with the entire people; less than that and there is no deal. When Holocaust survivors wave the four species, they are heeding the Unity Directive, but they are also heeding the Directive of the Perished, shared only by those who were there, and invoked by the silence between and behind and beyond words, the silence of the perished, and the silence of the Holy Abode in those dark times.

Subject matter such as this takes time to sink in. I had come to Sara and Dugo that day with a self-imposed mandate to gather ammunition to fire back at the flurry of Antisemitism on the internet. I would approach Dugo’s story from a new angle and would scribble my way to clarity, and publish it here, for all the world to see, and to be convinced. I looked at Dugo and saw myself in his eyes. Stark recognition. He had seen and heard from the likes of me many times over the years. I sensed—not for the first time while speaking to a survivor—an expectancy in the air. An expectancy that the testimony of their lives will be understood and will help bring the world to a better place, a place that among other things would be safe for Jews. On that day, after all these years, a proud Jew living in the Jewish homeland, he hinted that considering the resurgence of Antisemitism in of all places the United States of America and considering the world’s complacency towards Iran’s half century of dedicating itself to Israel’s destruction, it might be possible that his optimism was finally growing old. That a darker view of mankind was more appropriate. I did what I could to be upbeat. This took place during Sukkot as I have mentioned, “The Festival of Booths,” during which the Jewish people are commanded to be happy, joyful.

And thou shalt rejoice in thy feast, thou, and thy son, and thy daughter, and thy manservant, and thy maidservant, and the Levite, the stranger, and the fatherless, and the widow, that are within thy gates. Deut. 16:14

Like the said background silence, a black wall of water hovering above a moment before the deluge, there was background activity in the Garden of Eden:

And the Lord God said, Behold, the man is become like one of Us, knowing good and evil: and now, what if he put forth his hand, and take also of the tree of life, and eating, live for ever: Genesis 3:22

The tree of life. Living forever. The negation of death. Isn’t this the tree that can hold evil at bay, that can redeem the Silence of the Perished, and not just for Jews, but for all mankind? In Proverbs, this tree is identified:

She is a tree of life to those who lay hold on her: and happy are those who hold her fast. Proverbs 3:18

This verse is said after the reading of the Torah scroll in the synagogue, before returning it to the Holy Ark. The Torah is the tree of life. The final Redemption will be mapped directly to the measure of observance of the statutes and pondering of the wisdom therein. First by the People of Israel in the Land of Israel, as a precursor to the entire world clinging to the Tree of Life. This is happening before us as we read and write. (Translation of the words appear at the end of the video).

Famine and starvation are recurring themes in the Bible. Abraham, promised the Land of Israel and offspring as numerous as the stars, was forced to travel to Egypt because of famine. Joseph solidified his position in Egypt by foreseeing and managing a seven-year famine. This is the sympathetic echo to the promise of the Garden of Eden. Eating the forbidden fruit brought us exile and sustenance hard scratched of the Earth, and sometimes famine. One of the most striking scenes in Dugo’s story was that of the morning he peeked out of the barracks at Gunskirchen camp that was situated in a forest among the trees:

“…all the trees in the forest had been stripped. People were so hungry that they ate not only the leaves that had begun to sprout after the snow melted, but the bark on the trunks as well.”

A hard scratched tree of life if you will. Eating as seminal human activity. From eating the forbidden fruit to eating the bark from trees the human hand reaches for nourishment regardless of the vast distance between the life promised and the life lived. There is a touch of Eden in picking and eating the fruit of trees. Even the thought of such nourishes our souls. The end of the Story of Dugo is testimony to this.

"… Yes, I will end this story by talking about food. After the war we learned three things very quickly: almost no one wanted to hear our stories and of those that did, most did not believe what we told them and even if someone listened with a sympathetic ear, there was no way that they could understand what they heard. Remember my Uncle who was himself starving but still did not believe what I told him about death camp Birkenau. So, we didn’t talk. We ate. Having food to eat was a miracle. And though we didn’t talk we remembered. All the time. I held close to myself the memory of those who fell by the way on the death marches. One moment marching beside me, the next moment their place taken by a puff of snow swirling in the empty space where once scuffled along a breathing Jew. I decided to have my own memorial day for those lost Jewish souls. I fixed the date to January 18th, the day that the death march from Auschwitz-Birkenau began. That would be the day, and on that day I would eat. I would eat for them and for myself until I could eat no more. But what would I eat? Did it matter? Should I eat bark from a tree? No, that was not right. I felt it would come to me and in time, it did. Since my father first commanded me, I still would say Psalm 20 “For the Conductor, A Song of David” whenever I found myself in a jam. In the third verse, “strength” or “support” comes to the supplicant from Zion. That word in Hebrew can mean sustenance, food. A suitable food for my memorial day had to be Israeli, had to come from Zion! In our home in Nyiregyhaza my dear mother of blessed memory would tell us wonderful tales of the Land of Israel. In one story she said: “You’ll never be hungry in Israel, Dugo. There is a little round muffin called bilkalach that grows on trees there and whenever you are hungry you just pick them and pop them in your mouth.” I remembered. That little round bilkalach danced in my mind during the hardest parts of the death march, when I had to close my eyes against the cold and against the silenced steps of those who fell by the way. That bilkalach, my mother’s story, sustained me.

One day I was walking through the shuk in Mahane Yehuda in Jerusalem, and I imagined I was seeing little round bilkalachs flying through the air and landing in pita bread. I then knew what a bilkalach was. It was a felafel. True, felafel doesn’t grow on trees, but they were round and tasty, and you could get felafel anywhere in Israel. My memorial day would be January 18th and on that day I would eat felafel. It didn’t hurt that I happened to like felafel and when I started I was young and could eat 3 or 4 portions. After a few years of keeping this memorial on my own my daughters asked to participate. In recent years, the young people at the Testimony House Museum in our town of Nir Galim have taken the tradition on-line, and now each January 18th thousands of Jews from Israel and around the world eat felafel and take pictures of themselves holding a sign reading: “Operation Dugo-The Jewish People Live!” and send the pictures to the Museum’s Facebook page. To end this story, I, Dugo, David Leitner, proclaim to all the world and to the Heavens:

THE JEWISH PEOPLE LIVE AND ARE EATING FELAFEL IN THE LAND OF ISRAEL AND THAT IS ENOUGH!"

May his memory be for a blessing.

Join us this January 18th to celebrate Dugo’s survival and the future of the Jewish people. Eat felafel (or not) and take a selfie holding a sign saying: “Operation Dugo—The Jewish People Live.” Upload to Facebook with hashtag #AM_ISRAEL_CHAI or copy and paste this in Hebrew: מבצע_דוגו#

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replied to a note of mine:

“I know I’m covering familiar ground, but… I’ll pack up tomorrow and make aliyah, if only you can square the circle for me: Why will 8 million Diaspora Jews coming home solve whatever it is that ails Israel and the world? …. And I’m not talking about our safety. I’m talking about the redemptive thrust of Jewish history that became visible in 1948 and even more so in 1967. » Fast forward and assume all of us out here are doomed. We all perish. But you, the Jewish remnant in Israel, survives. Then what? What’s the plan? And why not move ahead with that plan without us?

Also: If the world didn’t get the message in ‘48 and ‘67, why do you think the message becomes clearer if another 8 million Jews make the move now?”

Alan and I have a history. BP—Before Pogrom. When a rapper started spewing antisemitism to his tens of millions of followers, I saw it as a sign, and I designated myself the Zionist town crier and called vehemently for the Jews of afar to make Aliyah to Israel immediately, before it was “too late.” Alan argued me to a draw. His is a dystopian (“Fast forward and assume all of us out here are doomed…”)…err, “diasporian” view of a Jewish future in America. We continued the discussion AP—After Pogrom—, which served as a wake-up call to many Jews in the Diaspora, but at the same time strengthened the argument against Aliyah. “What’s the difference between getting shot at a Hannukah party or getting slaughtered in Israel? At least here I am amongst family and friends and still have a job.”

At this stage, I find myself full of wonder for those Jews making Aliyah, with all its difficulties. At the same time, I am sending prayers and good vibes and good wishes to the Jews not making Aliyah. Except for one group: Anti-Zionist Jews.

That is the reason I respect Alan, and and . Though not making Aliyah themselves—at least forbthe present time—they do not refute their Zionism in the hope of becoming more acceptable to the antisemitic hordes.

In the end, the only reply that I can offer to Alan’s last question is an observation:

“If the world didn’t get the message in ‘48 and ‘67, why do you think the message becomes clearer if another 8 million Jews make the move now?”

Let’s take your dates, Alan. Actually, let’s preface them, with1867, when Mark Twain visited the Holy Land, which he called a “hopeless, dreary, heart-broken land” (The Innocents Abroad). Fast forward to 1948, when Israel declared independence. There were already 650,000 Jews then. In 1967, the Jewish population had grown to roughly 2.7 million. As of 2025–2026, it stands at approximately 7.7–7.8 million.

The state of the land is a direct coefficient ofh the number of Jews in the land. From hopeless and dreary desolation to exponential growth in high tech innovation, Torah learning, and overall flourishing. If we are where we are with nearly 8 million Jews, imagine where we (and hopefully you) will be with 15-16 million.

Shabbat Shalom!

It is not realistic to expect Jews whose lives are based in the Diaspora to simply pack up and leave for Israel. Everything they know, everything that they own, even their offspring who may or may not be intermarried; everything in their lives holds them to their host country. This cannot be expected even from those Jews who proclaim “Next year in Jerusalem!” at their Passover Seder. As we know from history, there is little chance that most Jews will decide to leave the Diaspora until it is too late. It seems that it is not in the power of Zionists to change the minds of their Jewish brothers and sisters of the Diaspora.

Will it come to that? Are we looking at a situation where it will be “too late” for the Jews of the Diaspora? How bad can it get? It is hard to imagine sanctioned internment of Jews, let alone sanctioned killing of Jews, though it is not as hard to imagine as it was even a short while ago.

Today, thank God, the Jews are not without a place to turn for sanctuary. Zionist Israelis need to be understanding of the uncertain reality of our Diaspora brothers and sisters. But the fact that we may believe them to be misguided does not release us from out duty to prepare for the worst.

This can easily be done by Israel. Sustainable pre-fabricated housing can be mass produced to create networked villages, each home provided with solar panel roofing and energy efficient appliances, as well as a private yard covered with artificial grass, a fig tree and a grape vine planted by the Jewish Agency to provide prophecy-inspired shade. These can be leased to new immigrants at subsidized cost, and after 10 years of continuous occupation would become the property of the immigrant. Free modular expansions would be provided to couples for every two children after the first three that they bring into the world. Free fertility treatments would be provided when neccessary. The idea being to infuse the new immigrants with a sense of Zionist purpose by incouraging them to participate in the national project to increase the Jewish population of Israel to 50 million within 30 years.

The other, essential, thing that Israeli Zionists must do is to find a way to come together. It would seem that the fact that Israelis are all in the same boat would be enough to bring about a basic unity out of which the Redemption could continue to flourish, but we have learned that it is not enough. There needs to be more. And there is. I know of two significant grass-roots projects that are platforms for the meeting of the Zionist left and right. The reports that I have heard point less towards the appearance of new political parties and more towards the appearance of a new Israeli politics, one that must take into account the desire of a large part of the Jewish nation to be like all other nations, as it must take into account the desire of the opposing part of the nation to adhere to the traditional Jewish belief that it is the Jews’ nature to be apart from othe nations, and must continue to be so. Once we work this out, Diaspora Jewry may find it easier to make Aliya.

The uninvited dilemma facing the Jews of the Diaspora is this: If and when to jump ship. These real-life decisions are part and parcel of the Jewish psyche today, while another part of that psyche remains strangely detached and unaffected in some sort of Jewish limbo, watching and wondering: how low can this Jew-hatred go?

Our first taste of rocket bombardments came some years after the disengagement from Gaza, our home of nineteen years, where we raised our four children. We had been transported to temporary housing (double-wides), that turned out for us to be temporary for nine years. That was insult enough, but we were few, and as soon as we were thrown into these — our own refugee camps — it seemed as if the entire nation wanted to forget about us. When the rockets started to rain down upon Israel, as we had warned would happen, and as then-Prime Minister Sharon had promised would not happen, a glaring oversight was discovered. The trailer trash had no bomb shelters. The geniuses responsible for the planning of our expulsion and had succeeded in deflecting all criticism of inhumane treatment of their fellow Jews, rose to the occasion and found a creative solution: sewage pipes. That first round of rocket fire caught the entire nation off guard, including us, and at the time, though still insulted and resentful, I remember being thankful that they had found this solution.

A few years later, we had moved into our new home but still faced the threat from the south.

The young boy in the picture is the subject of my earlier post, in which I recall an executive meeting with him while I was babysitting for him:

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Eye to Eye

It has been almost ten years since the last rocket attacks on the town that I live in. Rockets launched from the place where I once prayed three times a day. That sure was a deft move, o leaders of Israel. At the time our leaders proclaimed: “If, after leaving the Gaza Strip, the Arabs lob even one mortar shell over the border, we will be free to smash …

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3 years ago · 7 likes · 5 comments · Ehud Neor

At the time, his father and his uncle, my two sons, were fighting in Gaza, the same Gaza that was their childhood home. Here is a before and after picture of our synagogue:

The nights were the worst, as my wife and I would lay awake all night staring at the ceiling, praying non-stop for our sons’ safety.

During this latest round, sitting on my back porch looking north towards Ashdod, I calmly watched the Iron Dome dealing with a missile attack towards Tel Aviv, fairly successfully in this case. The intercepts were too far to hear, so after a week of running to the shelter from close-in attacks, I relaxed to watch the light show. The single boom heard was an intercept over our area.

That first time that we were under attack we were overwhelmed by the inability of the IDF to shut the attack down, and by the fact that our warnings had been more than accurate—they were literally prophetic. Of course that was the last thing that the supporters of the expulsion of Jews from Gaza wanted to hear, from the prime minister to the leaders of the opposition in parliament to the chief of staff of the IDF, to the entire Israeli journalist herd of one-brained singularity. They had a world-view to uphold, the same world-view that now lay shattered to smithereens.

In the aftermath of the latest wholesale slaughter of Jews, the country is in a state of suspended mourning. This scenario, of rape and pillage of hundreds of innocent Jews in their homes, we truly thought that we would never see again. So now we have seen it, as has the entire world thanks to the terrorists’ live-streaming, death-cult, blood-lust celebration. And though we have suspended our national mourning, we have not closed our eyes, as we watch with astonishment the myriads denying that there was a slaughter and claiming that in case there was, then it was the Jews’ own fault, or even that it was the Jews themselves who perpetrated it.

Israel has seen and heard enough from the world, and has taken notice.

This film is a product of a Wife/Husband team. They are friends from Gush Katif and now neighbors in Nitzan. Hagit has given me permission to publish here. If you like the film, please click on “watch on YouTube” and give a like there.

You do not need to be a security expert to know that things could have been much worse on Oct.7. It’s an open secret in Israel. But it is not a secret that anyone wants to talk about. This reticence has nothing to do with the inquiry commissions or lack of them. This knowledge lay on the root level of Israeli consciousness, where it is bullshit-proof and spin-proof, and as is so much the way in Israel, there are two schools of thought regarding this knowledge. The school of thought that I champion says that only Divine intervention can explain the failure of our enemies to do such damage as to put the future of Israel in question. This school of thought remains with the unanswered question of the necessity of the damage that was done, and the role of Divine Provenance in that. The other school of thought, the secular one, is faced with the stark reality that it was the enemy who decided what would be the extent of the damage done to Israel, and that there was nothing to prevent them from causing catastrophic harm, except their own missteps. This realization is causing both schools of thought enormous stress considering the other bit of root-level knowledge in the Israeli psyche: that there is little chance that there will be a serious, impartial investigation of the security failure, and that there is little chance that blame will be apportioned to those guilty of criminal negligence, and worst of all, as a result of these first two, lessons will not be learned.

For illustration, here is a sample scenario that falls well into the realm of the possible.

1. No initial rocket barrage by either Hamas in the south or Hezbollah in the north. A quick and efficient silencing and blinding of the border security, with conquest of the border command bases (this was done successfully in the south by Hamas). No leaked information, no Go-Pro uploads. Just silence, allowing the confusion on the Israeli side to paralyze Israeli forces.

2. Ten teams of ten “technicals” (four-wheel drive Toyotas with anti-aircraft guns mounted on the back), manned by eight terrorists armed with, in addition to the main gun, thirty to forty RPG’s, ten to twenty demolition charges and enough ammunition for their assault rifles for a half-day of mayhem, set out for each of the five main Israeli air bases, twenty assault vehicles per base. There would be no stops on the way, in an effort to reach the bases before they could be locked down.

3. The golden chalice would be if a team managed to enter one of the underground bunkers storing Israeli aircraft. One bullet from an assault rifle can disable a fighter aircraft. Because of the expense of these aircraft, we must assume that security protocols are in place that would lead to a sealing of the bunkers at first warning. In this case the teams would destroy as much infrastructure as possible with an emphasis on runways and access roads to the runways. An aircraft without a usable runway is useless. The assault teams, or secondary teams that accompany them for this specific purpose, would take as many soldiers as hostages as possible and race back to the tunnels in Gaza and Lebanon.

4. Massive rocket barrage. From Gaza and Lebanon targeting the civilian areas of cities for peak terrorist impact, and essential industries such as power plants and water purification sites. Iran dedicates one hundred ballistic missiles to each Israeli air base. Israel’s Iron Dome and Arrow missile defense systems are overwhelmed. The Israeli air force is out of the fight.

5. After two hours of bombardment comes the second attack wave. Twenty thousand highly trained terrorists from Hamas in the south and thirty thousand Hezbollah terrorists from the north attack major Israeli population centers while destroying everything in their path. A few thousand of these terrorists are designated “Shahids,” or suicide bombers who are sent either on foot or by light aircraft or by land vehicle, to disrupt any attempt by Israel to organize resistance. These terrorists carry extra arms for any Israeli Arabs who would choose to join the “strong horse.” The Arabs of Judea and Samaria swarm down into Israeli population centers to join the terrorists of Hamas and Hezbollah.

6. Israeli reservists are called up but cannot get to their units. Many refuse to leave their families unprotected. The regular army begins a long, slow process of re-taking population centers, but they are evenly matched by the trained terrorists. There is heavy fighting all over Israel, amongst the civilian population.

7. Tens of thousands of Israeli Jews are murdered, scenes of the Gaza border settlements multiplied exponentially. Live streaming by thousands of terrorists ignites the imaginations of the Arabs of surrounding countries. Hundreds of thousands of Israeli Jews are taken hostage in situ, while tens of thousands of Israeli Jews are pulled into the tunnels of Gaza and Lebanon, joining the Israeli soldiers already there.

That’s enough to get the idea of the result of a single day. This could have happened. All the pieces on the Arab side were in place. A lack of coordination between Arab forces prevented a nightmare scenario for Israel. What did happen was bad enough, but it is important to make clear that things could have been much worse.

The hidden blessing here is that this root knowledge is common to all Israelis, who have been notoriously divided politically and culturally since the Likud rose to power in 1977. There have been times when Israelis pulled together temporarily during different crisis that arose since then and formed “unity governments,” that allowed Israel to present a united front against external enemies or allowed the government to take drastic measures to save the economy. Once the crisis passed, these governments fell apart and the sides ran back to their ideological caves. Now, even though on the face of it we have again retreated to our ideologies, we all have that resigned look on our faces that there is serious work to be done on our national teeth, and that it cannot be put off. That one last root canal that has defied all attempts to clean it. Our best dentists have scraped and filed that hole to death, each time claiming victory even while resealing that one untouched off-center root.

It is this open secret of willful neglect haphazardly plastered over that is what feeds the decay itself, and is what gives it agency over the Jewish people. Exposure to light will be the harbinger of the cleansing of the collective Jewish psyche. We have a gathering spot. It is not at the demonstrations on Kaplan Street. It is not in a settlement in Samaria. It is not on the Temple Mount. It is not in the halls of the Israeli Supreme Court. It is facing the decay. That is our gathering spot. The future true and legitimate leaders of the Jewish people must gather, long before their political selves, long before their religious and ideological selves, and meet, and agree together to do the hard work that needs to be done. And that is to peel back the stop-gap layers of self-deception and look upon the decayed source-root truth and expose the source of our deepest shame: that we are vulnerable. We are vulnerable because we are a house divided. The Jews of Israel and the Diaspora are vulnerable. This is a hard statement for a Zionist to make, but it is no less true for that.

Who will be at the gathering? None of the present-day security experts or ex-generals, none of the present-day politicians, and none of the faceless bureaucrats pulling the levers and pushing the buttons. No-one over the age of fifty, the cut-off age above which all culpability lays. The governments of the next ten years should concern themselves with a holding action, until the present culpable generation of leadership can be eased out to pasture and the new leadership can develop and grow into the responsibility that it must seize. We, the culpable generation, can only pass on our plea, our prayer, for wisdom for the new generation. We cannot pass on how to communicate because that has been impossible for us for too long now. They do not need that from us anyway, as they have learned the hard way to communicate, in the trenches. Left and right, liberal and messianic, gay and straight, they communicated because they had to communicate to prevail. That is the root knowledge of the new generation: that first comes the shared word. Nothing can touch that. Nothing can weaken that. This convergence of Jewish souls will create a strong epoxy that will give us the strength to acknowledge that what we have concealed is what stains us, and that this cleansing will be what sustains us.

How so? We have stained our fellow Jew in the service of the Jew hater. We thought we were fighting each other, and this fighting was amplified from without by the Jew hater, encouraged and supported with funding and applause. Our worst habit has been, upon discovering leakage from our stockpile of bile, to scoop up handfuls and fling it upon our ideological opponents like jailed primates throwing feces at visitors to the zoo. The Jews have a knack for blaming other Jews for the problems of the Jews. “You are filth” we say to each other, marking each other, as if to identify proper targets for our own ire, and for the ire of the Jew haters. In our haughtiness, we weaken ourselves. We must reach up with a cleansing hand to clear the foreign stain that we now realize, with great clarity, has no place in our home. The true and legitimate leaders of the Jewish people will soon stand together, ideological opponents still true to their beliefs and declare:

“Not like this!”

Still opponents, fierce even, the Jew must reach out with a warm moist towel and clean the face of the Jew standing across the aisle, that once hated face, that face that must now be loved. That face that our generation dirtied, and to our great shame, the face that another, better generation must now clean. Face to face we must stand, like modern Cherubim, in the Holy of Holies that is this gift of the Land of Israel.

When there has been a conscious decision—or unconscious decision for that matter—not to provide security for civilians when it is obvious that security is sorely lacking, the solution can only be a cosmetic one, though, when the situation is far gone, even empty gestures can offer some improvement. That is, until the next terrorist attack. There was a sigh of relief when a bridge was built that precluded the need to travel along the shared stretch of road with Gazan Arabs until the turn into Gush Katif at the White House intersection. That hot point was cancelled, and we could now zip over the Arab traffic on our way to and from Gush Katif just as the Arabs zipped under Jewish traffic on their way to and from Rafah. That’s the way it seemed, at first.

The level of betrayal felt by the Jewish settlers of Gush Katif when Arik Sharon announced his intention to abandon Jewish settlement in Gaza cannot be overstated. This was because Sharon had a rightfully earned reputation as a friend of the settlers. This friendship was expressed in many ways over the years, but never more so than on the eve of the Peres/Rabin government of the Oslo Follies. Sharon told the settlers of Judah and Samaria “to run and take the hills. What you grab now will remain Jewish in any future arrangement.” In Gush Katif, he used all his power as outgoing Minister of Housing to construct additional housing in each of the Gush Katif settlements in record time, so that we could absorb additional Jewish settlers. This at least provided a dim ray of hope in the dark abyss that we could clearly see approaching. I remember blessing him in my heart for doing what he could at the time.

Time flies when Jews are having fun, playing as peacemakers using semantic games. Such as delineating victims of terrorist attacks “sacrifices of the peace process,” inadvertently recalling the dark past of human sacrifice in primitive societies. The Arab terrorists of course interpreted this verbal hallway-pass as a declaration of open season on Jews. And what good hunting it was for the Arab terrorists. Buses blowing up, restaurants blowing up. Limbs of Jews flying in all directions. “Sacrifices of the Peace Process!”

Near the end of the Jewish presence in Gush Katif, Sharon, facing pressure from within his own Likud party, announced that the Likud would hold a referendum of its delegates and that he would accept the results of the referendum whatever it may be. The settler movement saw an opportunity to forestall the expulsion and called on all settlers and their supporters to take to the streets and to visit the Likud delegates to convince them to vote against their leader’s plan. It was a wildly successful effort, and Sharon lost the referendum by a large margin. So, he did what democratically elected leaders of Israel have done more than once and ignored the democratic will of his own party and reneged on his pledge to honor the referendum and continued with his plan as if nothing had happened. He knew that he had the support of the Israeli intelligentsia and the media, and that was enough.

One of the settlers of Gush Katif who was on her way to join the effort against the expulsion was the pregnant Tali Hatuel, along with her four daughters. She had just crossed the bridge when two terrorists, after emerging from the same hiding spot as the two terrorists who had attacked my daughter Naama and myself a few years earlier, and after walking undisturbed towards the road while remaining observable from at least two military positions, calmly opened fire on Tali’s car, which came to a stop on the side of the road. The two then calmly approached the car and pumped additional bullets into Tali and her girls, and into Tali’s unborn fetus.

A new reality was upon us. One mile from the place of the incident was a military camp with a company of combat-trained soldiers. From the watch tower at the north-west corner of the camp, with standard binoculars, the terrorists could have easily been observed, the warning could have gone out and Tali could have been stopped at the Gush Katif end of the road. And if not, then a rapid reaction team could have been on site at least in time to prevent the terrorists from taking the final kill shots. The army would vehemently deny it, as would the rest of the Israeli security apparatus, but we knew: with the end of the Jewish presence in Gaza in sight, no commander wanted to risk the lives of his soldiers unnecessarily. The order of the day for that company of soldiers changed from protecting the lives of Israeli civilians driving on the road, to making sure that all of the soldiers returned home in one piece. They had been trained for combat, but now they had been conditioned to avoid combat. In order to avoid combat, there is a need to redefine the enemy. And slowly, but steadily, with the enthusiastic support of the main stream media, religious Zionist settlers became the enemy, with their messianic, religious right-wing fervor.

Surely, we thought at the time, the murder of Tali and her daughters would open the eyes of every Israeli and they would finally see what we had been seeing: the absolute and unredeemable depravity of the Arab enemy. Remember, these were not the rock-throwers of the First Intifada; these were professionally trained terrorists, receiving military instruction from the finest special forces in the world, including those of the US and Great Britain, among others. This was the hard end of the stick, whose other end floated in the mirage of the “New Middle East” of Shimon Peres and his minions, who spoke of the importance of respecting Arab “Honor.” That’s all they want, Peres would say, just some good looking uniforms and shiny assault rifles. Oh, and a state with Jerusalem as its capitol. There was one small catch. This insistence on respecting “Arab Honor” always ended up with some poor Jew bleeding to death on the side of the road.

By then we had already borne witness to the most absurd clown show of the modern Jewish State. After each terrorist attack, acolytes of the Beilinite persuasion, or Pundakists, would figuratively make a pilgrimage to the high temple of terrorism in Ramallah, and implore the “Reis” to condemn the latest attack. He would answer: “Sure. OK. It was horrible,” and the acolytes would shout in victory: “He condemned it! He condemned it! There is a partner for peace!” as they passed Ramallah’s “Martyrs Square,” and streets named after terrorists who had blown up buses and supermarkets and restaurants, the families of those same “martyrs” receiving reward money to this day in thanks for the terrorists’ service to the cause.

To his credit, Sharon put an end to this clown show. He had the almost unanimous support of the religious right when he ran against the hilarious-but-for-the-dead-Jews Ehud Barak. He vowed to take the battle to the terrorists, and he did, successfully, and he built the much-maligned security fence which put an end to the large-scale terrorist attacks. Then, as in an unplausible plot-twist in a bad play, Sharon’s sons got involved in some shady deals, as allegedly Sharon did himself, and with a “wink wink, hint hint,” recommendation from his leftist opponents to get with the two-state program or go to jail, Sharon twisted his bull-like body and character around 180 degrees like a ballerina from hell and turned on the settlers of Gush Katif. At the time the mayor of Gush Katif, Zvi Hendel, said: “As extensive the investigations, so will extend the expulsions.”

As it turned out, eyes were not opened and the murder of Tali and her girls was presented as further proof of the necessity of making Gaza Judenrein. The residents of Gush Katif, traumatized and in disbelief, decided to hold a memorial service for Tali and her girls at the site of the murder, about a week later. The army prepared for the event and when I arrived to participate I was pleased to see a tank parked off to the side, just in case.

The memorial service was not to be, but what did transpire that day was an accurate reflection of reality for Jews at that time and in that place, and further, was an accurate precursor of what was in store for the Jews down the line. As a puff of wind off the west coast of Africa becomes a mighty hurricane by the time it encounters the land mass of the Americas, so too did the Hatuel family murders and the intended memorial track directly to the October 7 massacre, and so too did the mind-set back then track to the mind-set that led to the massacre, a mind-set that not only allowed the massacre to happen, but invited it to happen. This mind-set was a mass subconscious mania wherein a certain level of aggression against the Jewish State was entertained with forbearance. Kill some Jews, we understand that you must, just not too many too fast. Shoot some rockets, just not more than our Iron Dome can handle. Don’t be greedy; don’t overdo it.

I was among the first to arrive for the demonstration. Soon tens of cars arrived, some carrying entire families. How sad we were as we milled around. I remember feeling that it was good and proper to hold a memorial service for the Hatuels right there were they were slaughtered. It was important to show the other side that we were not intimidated, and it was also important, if unsaid, that we her neighbors begin the healing that seemed so impossible at that time. It was true that the Arabs did not intimidate us, but we were intimidated by our own government, by Jews who were willing and able to uproot fellow Jews from their hard-earned settlements in the Holy Land. These types of impotent thoughts were running through my head when the shooting started.

As we dove for cover my mind simply continued its inner dialogue of disgust. What were we thinking? This was so obviously meant to happen that we could not pretend to be surprised. This was widely acknowledged after the fact. But in real time, we were under attack. Heads cleared quickly, including mine, and within moments many of us were returning ineffective fire against the assault rifles of the enemy with our 9mm peashooters. We had one or two security people with rifles, and they too returned fire, but the enemy fire from somewhere in the bushes about eighty yards away did not stop. Within a couple of minutes, the women and children and unarmed men had found effective shelter. The rest of us, “holding the line,” began wondering after a long ten minutes of this improbable stand-off: where the hell was the army?

Our attention turned towards the tank that was parked fifty yards to the east of the action. It was silent, parked, and locked down. The dust in my face and mouth combined with a nauseous thought that the crew was asleep. Another long five minutes passed while I heard our security people contacting the base holding a company of combat trained soldiers a mile from the action. They could be on site within a minute. But the tank! It could put an end to this nonsense in a second. I thought to shoot at the tank and ping it just to make sure the crew was awake. Later, many of my friends told me that they had had similar thoughts.

Just then the tank started up. I was thinking now the enemy will know the full wrath of the God of Israel. They will pay for their audacity. And again, what was I thinking? I watched in disbelief as the tank, instead of blowing right through the bushes and crushing the enemy, rode to-and-fro churning up dust with its tracks and releasing some smoke, all in an attempt to conceal the targets—us—from the attackers. This was how low we had fallen. A tank full of sound and fury, while terrorists continued to shoot at us from behind it. After a half hour the shooting stopped. The terrorists must have run out of bullets. I was thinking, morbidly, that they had just gotten bored of pinning the Jews down and had gone home to play video games. They certainly were not chased off by the dancing tank of the Israeli Defense Forces. Then again, they may have succumbed to laughter at the grotesque theatre of Jewish ineptitude playing out before them.

This is what a policy of well-meaning nonsense wrought when it reached the lower levels of society and encountered reality. Once the world bought into the Oslo illusion, and Arafat paid lip service, the was no room for second thoughts. Any shouting back up the ladder that these ideas were not working out so well in the trenches was drowned out by the original media echo chamber. There were many “original sins” during the Oslo follies, each one superseding its predecessor in inanity and arrogance. The relevant sin here was the most pitiable. It was clear to all, Oslo supporters included, that the true nature of our enemy or “partner for peace” was murderous and bloodthirsty. No one believed that they would cease to be so after the Jews were driven out of Gaza. There was an immediate need for a covering fiction that would calm the peasants.

Thus, was born the grand fiction that allayed the fears of normative Israelis and allowed the Oslo illusion to continue. “They will be there (in Gaza), and we will be here, and if they dare to even throw one stone over the border, we will be free to blast them to smithereens.” That is the genius of echo chamber public relations. The sound bites are perfect. Unarguable. And those of us living the life of Tali Hatuel and her daughters were left saying: “You are wrong. And we will all pay the price.” That message did not travel up the ladder to the Israeli leadership, among other reasons because it received little airtime in the mainstream media, but it did reach our neighbors in the kibbutz settlements surrounding the Gaza Strip who were our fiercest ideological opponents, and who tragically answered: “That’s fine, because we know how to get along with our Arab neighbors.”

This is not to say that we foresaw Oct.7. No, but we did foresee what transpired for the eighteen years until the massacre. Though not in all its glory. We knew that the kibbutz and moshav settlements surrounding the Gaza Strip would be on the receiving end of the recently discovered “perfect weapon” of the Gazan Arabs: mortar fire. When this weapon was introduced, there was no way of warning those on the receiving end. Later, the genius of Israeli High-Tech did develop an early warning system, and the children playing in the sand boxes of their kindergartens had a full four to five seconds to run for cover. Once there was a warning system in place, and later, after the Gazan Arabs developed more advanced missiles and in response Israeli High-Tech developed the Iron Dome system to shoot down those missiles, then the bombardment from Gaza became accepted and normative. No more talk of the freedom to blast the terrorists to smithereens now that the Jews were no longer in Gaza. No, at most, usually when a rocket succeeded in breaking through the iron dome system and in killing a Jew or two, the mighty IDF would tippy toe into Gaza and “mow the grass,” until the next time. While the IDF was mowing the grass the Gazan terrorists were digging an underground fortress beneath the tanks and infantry.

Slowly but surely, the policy that had allowed for limited Jewish bloodletting in Gush Katif transmogrified over the years into a policy that allowed for significant daily bombings as far as Ashdod and Beer-Sheva. We suffered from a double dose of illusion. The Gazan terrorist magician misdirected our attention by waving his projectiles and telling us to keep our eyes on the missiles, while we dazzled ourselves with the fantastic technology of the Iron Dome. And all the while in the Gaza Border communities and in the town of Sderot a generation of bed-wetters grew into young adulthood, an entire generation suffering TSD—not PTSD—because there was no “Post” involved; it was, and is, an ongoing trauma that has been criminally neglected.

Make no mistake: none of this comes to explain the surprise attack on Oct.7. That, as a military commentator on one of my earlier pieces said, comes with warfare. There are surprises. The extent of the surprise is evidence of a major failure of the Israeli Intelligence apparatus, but that too happens in armed conflicts. The question that I am trying to address here (and in previous posts—links below) is this: What explains the absence of the Israeli Army and the Israeli Air Force for twelve hours after the attack? And what explains that even then, only small units arrived that conducted piecemeal counterattacks? The only resistance in those first hours were by the front-line soldiers who were understaffed and un-warned, but who still fought bravely, and the security personnel of the surrounding villages, especially the few who knew what dwelled on the other side of the fence and had trained for just such an attack, and many individuals who on their own initiative raced towards the danger from all over Israel, and in Sderot, a magnificent station of standard policemen who fought like lions and in so doing prevented a huge slaughter in that town. All this proved that the Jewish fighting spirit was alive and well.

The missing ingredient was a fighting spirit in the ranks of the high officers. Many of our best fighting units were ordered not to proceed to the area of the fighting, and when individual soldiers protested, some were threatened with court-marshal. There was a need to follow strict military protocol and prevent anarchy on the battlefield, these officers claimed. This while Israeli civilians were being gang-raped and burned and beheaded by the Gazan savages. When every second counted.

These officers were acting as they were programmed since the beginning of the Oslo folly. Every young officer at the time, including the company commander overlooking the site of the Hatuel murders and the subsequent disgrace at the demonstration with the dancing tank and its clouds of dust and smoke, knew that to advance in the officer’s corps, they had to toe the Oslo line faithfully. Those who didn’t were kicked out. Ironically, the kicked-out officers, now in the reserves, and because their advancement had been stalled, remained field commanders, and led the untainted young soldiers in the impressive fighting that followed the initial attack.

The officers who toed the Oslo line were the ones responsible for institutionalizing the madness of Oslo in every facet of the Israeli Security apparatus, from the army to the air force to the internal security service and finally, to the lower officers who they had the responsibility to appoint. To replace these poisoned ranks will take ten years, under the condition that the poisoned ones do not do the appointing. There is no precedent for this, unless we take to shooting those who were personally responsible for the fiasco and those who appointed them and those underlings who were appointed by them and supported them. That is not going to happen in Israel, so the only remedy will have to be a sea-change in the souls of the present officer corps.

And this is not going to happen in Israel if it is left up to the machinations of men. Everyone feels it, and that is why there seems to be a national state of depression, even when for the first time in two thousand years the Jewish nation is not under an existential threat. This is a stiff-necked people, and a stiff-necked officers’ corps, and a stiff-necked political leadership. There is a general lack of humility, and a great need for the people of Israel to return to their God in Heaven and pray for final deliverance.

Some previous posts for additional reading from last year:

The story of my narrow escape with my daughter near where the Hatuels were murdered:

We could see the problem even before reaching the gate of Kfar Darom. There was a bumper-to-bumper traffic jam of Arab vehicles moving south in the direction of Khan Yunis and Rafah. It was not normal at this time of day. I was in Kfar Darom in my capacity as coordinator for foreign agricultural workers from Thailand. In the car with me was my translator. We had just spent an hour with Oz Kadmon1 and his workers on his farm that was located at the original site of Kfar Darom from the time of Israel’s War of Independence, a five-minute drive from where we were now, the rebuilt Kfar Darom. I was parked just inside the entrance, waiting for traffic to begin moving again. Just then to my left Oz shot out from the security road and turned left and began driving on the wrong side of the road south towards the Gush Katif intersection. Without thinking twice, I followed him. I should have thought twice. He did not know that I was behind him. I sped up to catch him and finally did about three hundred yards into the drive. There, we were met with a truck that had seen us coming and decided to block our way. We stopped, deer in headlights, and then the rocks came flying. They were not golf-ball-sized rocks, rather, they were softball-sized rocks. These had to be heaved high in an arc, and they were heaved, all at once, and I insist to this day that there is a certain beauty in seeing those missiles fly through the sky. Before they land on the car, that is. At this stage, Oz was the main focus of their attention, as he was mine. This was his territory, and I intended to follow his lead.

Except that his lead led to a territory where I could not follow. I could only watch as he cut sharply with his four-wheel drive vehicle and entered the ditch by the side of the road before climbing the berm that was the remnant of the Haifa-El Kantara railroad. In an instant he was gone. Like me, the Arabs who had been focused on Oz stood quietly watching his unlikely, but successful escape. It took a few seconds, during which I checked my rear-view mirror to see if I could back out of this mess, only to discover that another truck about fifty yards back had blocked the road. I was pinned in on three sides by Arab trucks and Arabs with rocks in their hands who now had a single focus for their attention, and on the fourth side by an impassable ditch.

As if that were not enough, my translator and I were at the end of a long afternoon’s work, and I had in my possession close to one hundred thousand dollars in cash, the Thai worker’s salaries that we had collected to be sent home to their families. That was on my mind as the rocks made their way towards us. My translator had healthy instincts and had squirreled his way down under the dashboard. For my part, I did not plan to go down without a fight. I had my pistol stashed between the two front seats—big mistake—and as I was getting out of the car I reached for it and, under all the pressure, I raised it and pressed on the magazine release. I was still moving to exit the car, and I watched the magazine disappear somewhere under my translator. “Oh, just perfect,” I was thinking. I turned back into the car to go dig for the magazine, knowing that I had lost the initiative and that we were now in big trouble. To my surprise, the translator, without unravelling himself, shot out his hand behind his back holding the magazine. The relief I felt, as the rocks were impacting the car, was immense.

I didn’t have a plan except to not go down without a fight. The Arabs had reloaded with rocks, and I calmly aimed at the farthest one who was standing in front of me and pulled the trigger. At the very last second, he dove to the ground, and I moved to the next rock-thrower and pulled the trigger, and he too dove to the ground. I shot six more times, and six more rock-throwers dove to the ground. I stood there confounded. I was known as a crack shot, always the best on the practice range. And I had not hit a single target. Did my gun malfunction? That thought passed quickly, as I used the most reliable gun for working conditions in the world, a CZ 75. It was not the most expensive gun, but if you needed a gun that works after falling in the sand or mud, that Czech sidearm was the one. The sobering truth, immediately and horribly evident to me, was that expertise on the practice range did not translate into expertise in real time, when it counted.

With all this noise in my head I hadn’t noticed that the surrounding noise had subsided. Not only were rocks not impacting on my car anymore, but all the Arabs had run behind their trucks. And not only that, but the lead truck blocking me started to pull back. This was their way of letting me know that I was free to go. I jumped back into the car and hit the gas. After about fifty yards we were clear of the traffic jam. My translator must have sensed it because he began to sit up in his seat.

There was a soldier up ahead waving frantically at us to get away from the danger. Before I could begin to feel relief, I looked at the soldier’s firearm and my eyes bugged out of their sockets. It was a Kalashnikov. Of course it was. He was a member of the infamous “joint patrols,” another genius product of the Oslo mind-set. The idea was that there would be a shared responsibility for protecting citizens. It was a two-jeep patrol, one was of the Israeli Border Patrol, and the other was of the Palestinian Authority, i.e., terrorists in uniforms. The establishment of these patrols was the event that demarcated the final and absolute detachment of the Oslo Accords from reality. No one in their right mind could believe that these patrols could function in the real world. It was just a matter of time before one of the Arabs cocked his gun and kill his Jewish counterpart. The first time it happened, both sides rushed to explain that the Arab soldier had mental issues. As Mark Steyn famously said after the Charlie Hebdo murders: “If it’s between jihad and crazy, they’ll call it crazy every time.” The second time it happened it was obvious to everyone that the joint patrols could not continue. But they did, until the whole Oslo hallucination blew up in our faces.

At the time of this confrontation, I was the crazy one. For a moment I had thought that I was home free, then, looking at the Arab waving at me like an impatient traffic cop, I was seeing a trap. In a moment he was going to put me in his gunsight and shoot. I was back to my “not going down without a fight mode,” and held my gun at the ready. If he raised his, I would aim my car at him and shoot at him through the front windshield, aiming correctly for center-of-mass this time. My gun was cocked and I was cocked and my translator was back on the floor.

As it turned out, that terrorist-in-a-uniform was just waving me on. He understood that I had been in a dangerous situation. As I looked at him in my rear-view mirror, still expecting him to shoot me, I realized that by blocking the road in front of me, that Arab truck driver had hidden my shootout at the OK corral from this “policeman.” Had he seen me taking pot shots at his cousins, he might not have been so helpful in helping me get away.

Just like that, we found ourselves caught up in the middle of the reason for the traffic jam. It was a demonstration by the Jews of Gush Katif against the deteriorating security situation at the Gush Katif intersection. I could tell them about deteriorating security. As we crawled through the crowd some of my friends approached me to tell me where to park the car so that I could join the demonstration. I begged off, saying that my translator was tired, but I really didn’t want to be jostling around with 100 K in cash.

We finally got through the crowd, and all I could think on the way home was: “Something’s not right here.”

Worse was to come.

The road to Gush Katif once ran straight through Gaza City. By the time we moved to Gan Or, a bypass road skirted Gaza to the east, making the drive from Ashkelon to Gan Or about forty minutes. As security worsened, the route changed. Jews heading to Gush Katif had to turn left at Yad Mordechai, right at Sderot, then south to Kibbutz Kissufim. For a year, we drove through Kissufim’s fields, passing the agricultural area of the rebuilt Kfar Darom, a settlement reborn after its pre-1948 origins. Later, a new main road to Gush Katif eliminated the need for agricultural access roads, though it remained a significant detour. This road shared a half mile stretch with Gazan Arabs at the Gaza City-Rafah Road. This stretch ended at the Gush Katif intersection, marked by a white-painted building, known as the White House. Early on, someone tried to set up a rest stop there, selling popsicles, cold drinks, and beer. But as security deteriorated, the army took over, establishing an observation post on the roof.

I welcomed the army’s presence. The drive to and from Gush Katif, especially along that shared highway, could be harrowing. From the observation post, soldiers could monitor the entire shared section. Still, heavy Arab traffic heightened the danger, and avoiding those times wasn’t always possible.

My daughter Naama and I felt cheated. We’d expected a thrilling Spielberg sequel, but Jurassic Park 3—not directed by him—was a letdown. A trip to the movies was no small feat for us, requiring travel along that perilous road. Naama, our eldest, had just completed her national service. She shared my love for American culture and a good action movie. That late afternoon, after a disappointing matinee, we drove back toward Gush Katif. Jewish traffic—those returning from work outside the Gush—was usually heavy then, but as we reached the Gaza Strip entrance, we were oddly alone. I waited fifteen minutes for another vehicle to join us, but none appeared.

Reluctantly, I drove on. The road was empty until we neared the White House intersection. Prefabricated concrete slabs lined the left side, spaced apart earlier to account for a vehicle’s speed, theoretically creating a protective barrier against gunfire. Closer to the intersection, the slabs formed a solid wall. Those slabs carried a heavy memory: eight months earlier, Itamar Yefet, a young man Naama’s age from Netzer Hazzani, was killed there. Itamar and his girlfriend had been Naama’s childhood friends. For me, Itamar stood out as a natural athlete during my years coaching Gan Or’s youth basketball team. Netzer Hazzani was a powerhouse, often facing Neve Dekelim in the championship. Itamar’s calm confidence, his knack for tough rebounds and gentle assists, made him unforgettable. His death hit hard—fathers like me could easily imagine our own children in his place.

As I approached the White House, danger appeared. Two terrorists in full combat gear emerged from an orchard near the closest houses, heading for a gap in the concrete wall. I sped forward, glancing at the observation post. To my shock, it was unmanned. I leaned on the horn as we reached the slabs, and the terrorists opened fire. Bullets struck the spaced slabs, chipping concrete that flew toward us. I hugged the car against the solid wall section, waiting for the soldiers to respond from the now-active rooftop post. The gunfire grew closer, and to my horror, the soldiers aimed their machine gun at us. I leaned forward, hoping my yarmulke would signal we were not the threat. It didn’t. I waved frantically, pointing toward the terrorists, who were closing in but not running. They couldn’t know I’d stopped, but they’d soon reach the gap and find us.

With no response from the soldiers, I floored the Renault Megane toward the intersection. The soldiers, mistaking us for the threat, prepared to fire. I screeched around the corner, accelerating to escape. Bullets hit the asphalt ahead, looking like hail in the summer heat—a surreal thought under stress. As we neared the Gefen checkpoint, the last checkpoint until Gush Katif, I eased off the gas, fearing they’d see us as a threat too. An officer stood in the road, hands raised to stop us, his weapon slung across his waist. Breathless, I said, “Terrorists.”

He smiled. “They thought you were terrorists at first. Are you both okay?”

Naama and I exchanged disbelieving glances. She whispered, “Aba, they don’t know what’s happening.” She was right. The Gefen soldiers were relaxed, unaware of the danger. I tried again: “Sir, two armed terrorists are near the White House, behind the concrete slabs.”

He gave me a skeptical look, as if I were an overanxious civilian. Then, Kalashnikov bursts rang out—measured, professional, likely from terrorists trained by US or UK special forces in Jordan, with Israel’s approval. The officer’s expression shifted. He had no time to reflect—his men at the White House, caught off guard, were now under fire. They’d been asleep on duty, woken by the terrorists’ shots at us, and in their confusion, they’d fired at us. The “hail” was their bullets. They radioed Gefen to check on us but failed to mention the real threat. The terrorists, meanwhile, were testing our forces’ alertness, using Naama and me as an opportunity for “Jew-kills.” They retreated methodically into the orchard, firing at the White House to taunt our troops.

Their mission was reconnaissance, and they succeeded. Our forces’ failure to learn from this incident would later prove costly, as deadly attacks from the same direction followed. Naama and I were in shock. At home we found a small hole in the back windshield and followed the path through the back seat. The bullet was sitting on the floor, twisted out of shape, but still recognizable as a bullet from an M-16, used by our forces.

I was livid. Rumors of corruption at the flower shipping center near Netivot had been swirling, but I didn’t believe them until my best flowers, at their peak, were disqualified as unfit for export. A trusted friend urged me to act. “Get over there now and check for your flowers,” he said, noting that disqualified blooms were slated for destruction. I raced to the center and spotted my baby’s breath on a pallet—gorgeous cones of soft white petals, like popcorn, unmistakably mine. The thieves hadn’t even bothered to remove my farmer’s sticker with my name and grower number; they just slapped their own alongside it.

Noticing me, someone in the office stirred. I stormed upstairs, recalling my friend’s advice, and confronted the secretary. “I’m here to take my flowers,” I said.

“They’ve been destroyed,” she replied coolly.

“Destroyed? They arrived less than thirty minutes ago,” I shot back.

“Yes.”

“Then show me.”

“Why?”

“I spent three months growing them. I want to say goodbye.”

Her tone shifted, betraying unease. “Let me call the floor manager.”

“No need,” I said. “I’ll show you my flowers.”

She followed me silently to the pallet, where I pointed to my sticker. My glare met her chutzpah. “Oh, there must be a mistake,” she stammered. “I’ll fix it.”

Just like that, three months’ worth of income hit my bank account. I had no more issues that season, though I had to let go of two smaller shipments previously “disqualified.” As a second-year farmer, I was relieved to resolve the issue, but the corruption persisted, targeting others. Private investigators eventually uncovered overwhelming evidence, yet the guilty parties fought back. It took over twenty years for a class-action suit to bring us partial compensation.

Driving back to Gan Or, I was consumed with rage. The culprits, farmers themselves, knew the harm they caused—stealing food from my children’s mouths to buy luxuries for their own. I pounded the steering wheel with each bitter thought. Arriving at Gan Or, I pulled into the main parking lot by the settlement offices to check the mail. I sat in my car, trying to calm down, unfit to face anyone.

A small tourist van parked beside me. Several elderly couples stepped out, likely heading to the synagogue or restrooms. One man, tall and robust despite his age, helped his wife down with tender care. He noticed me watching and smiled. I didn’t return it. His wife stepped onto the sidewalk, looked around, raised her hands, and proclaimed:

How goodly are thy tents, O, Ya῾aqov, and thy tabernacles, O Yisra᾽el! Like the winding brooks, like gardens by the river’s side, like aloes which the Lord has planted, and cedar trees beside the waters. (Numbers 24:5-6)

Still fuming, I nearly snapped, “What’s so damn good about them?” But her husband’s subtle gesture stopped me—a raised hand, calloused like mine but etched with decades of farming. His brief, knowing look spoke volumes: You think you’re the only farmer to face hardship? That’s farming. The measure of a farmer is how he handles the rough patches. If you can’t, find another trade. My greenhorn hands paled beside his weathered ones. He nodded toward his wife, as if to say, “Listen to her.”

My perspective shifted instantly. I stood, eager to hear more. She didn’t disappoint.

“The light! The quality of the light! The breeze on my face! The impossible greenery on this sand!” she exclaimed, twirling like a ballerina. “All of this is good. This is a good place.”

“You’re like a priestess blessing Gan Or,” I said, half-laughing.

She chuckled. “No, my husband’s the priest. He does the blessings. Come closer—he’ll bless you.”

Embarrassed, I glanced at her husband, expecting reluctance. Instead, he beckoned me forward. I bowed my head as he intoned:

The Lord bless thee, and keep thee:

the Lord make his face shine upon thee, and be gracious to thee:

the Lord lift up his countenance to thee, and give thee peace.

And they shall put my name upon the children of Yisra᾽el; and I will bless them (Numbers 6:24-27)

“Amen,” I murmured, thanking them hastily before heading to check the mail. Flipping through bills, I regretted my abrupt departure. I jogged back to say a proper goodbye, but their van was gone.

Standing there, blessed in a blessed place, I thought: Gan Or is good. Jews living in Gan Or is good. Jews living in Gaza is good.

My brother told me a story today that I can’t believe I hadn’t heard before.

“Did I ever tell you about the time when Stephen Spielberg got pissed off at me?” he asked.

I, who have so far written three articles on “Jaws,” was stunned. How could there be a story this close to home without me knowing about it?

“No,” I answered.

“Ok, it goes like this. You remember that Becky and I were in the band, sitting in the gazebo. Spielberg came over and gave us simple directions. He told us that when a certain extra stands up and yells ‘Shark,’ we were to set our instruments down and run to the water’s edge and help the fleeing swimmers get out.”

I could already see where this was heading. My brother was his father’s son, a born showboat.

“So, Spielberg shouts out ‘Action,” the extra shouted ‘Shark,’ and we put down our instruments and started to run towards the water. Just as I was stepping out of the gazebo I paused and raised my hand to shield my eyes from the sun, looked out to sea, and shouted ‘Where?’”

“Cut!” Spielberg said.

“This was in early May, and the water was freezing. Those poor kids were turning blue. Four hundred extras were looking at me. Spielberg took a few steps towards me, stopped, raised his megaphone, and shouted: ‘The extras in the gazebo shall do as they are told!’”

On the next take I got it right.

“What possessed you to do that?” I asked.

“Look. I was sixteen. I didn’t have a girlfriend. I sensed possibilities but the competition was intense. I needed a way to stand out in the crowd, to get noticed by the girls.”

I didn’t know what to say.

“Actually, my plan worked after a fashion.” he said.

“How’s that?” I said.

“One of those shivering girls that I helped out of the water became my wife twelve years later,” he said.

Now that’s a Vineyard story.

This is the first article I wrote about Jaws. I am promoting it as I did last year before the fast of Tisha B’Av. This year is also the fiftieth anniversary of Jaws.

After having written the above, I googled Richard Dreyfus and was surprised.

I wrote this a couple of weeks ago. One of my favorite readers let me have it and told me that I had gone a bit too far with this satire. He may be right.

As far as reserve duty went, this was the ideal kind—the type where, upon receiving our posting, we kept poker faces and nodded seriously during the initial briefing. It didn’t get much better than this. There were six of us on this assignment. Four were from Neve Dekalim, the main town in Gush Katif, and the other two, my friend Haim and myself, were from Gan Or, an agricultural settlement. The first four preferred the day and evening shifts, so that they could be with their families at night. Haim and I preferred the night shift, so that we could look after our farms during the day.

It was an unlikely posting. We were to guard a base at one end of a horseshoe complex in Khan Yunis. The other end of the horseshoe was the military government building and connecting the ends were one or two smaller compounds that housed what we guessed were the secret services. This was during the First Intifada, and the base we were guarding belonged to the Border Patrol—the spearhead against rock-throwers and occasional firebombers at the time. This was before the 'Geniuses of Oslo,' Rabin and Peres, decided to arm the terrorists with assault rifles and have US and UK special forces train them, effectively turning them into actual soldiers. Still, things were heating up.

There we were, supporting troops guarding the sanctuary of the fighting troops. We couldn't drive directly to or from the base because we were in uniform, and traveling through the refugee camp on Khan Yunis's western side was already too dangerous. We drove north on the main Gush Katif road, cut east for a mile and a half, and then turned right, south, on the Gaza-Rafah Road, reaching the base in the center of Khan Yunis after a further short drive of three miles. On our first drive to the base, Haim and I finally let ourselves enjoy the situation. We couldn't believe our luck—we were already shipping produce overseas, so it wasn't a great time for reserve duty. Not that the army ever considers that when calling us up.

At one time, we did have it better. We were assigned to guard the gates at our own settlements. That was the best. Close to home and close to family, even when on duty. That didn’t last long. We were left to governing ourselves, just so long as the entrance to the settlement had two guards at all times. There are various levels of conscientiousness, even among friends. Guard duty so close to home came with a built-in temptation: attending to household and farm affairs as if you weren't on duty. Being late always came at the expense of a friend, even if that friend understood the explanation, having similar concerns himself. Eventually, relationships became frayed under a flurry of tit-for-tat retaliations, until the district commander swooped in and put a flaming stop to the infighting.

With our common history, the one unspoken agreement between Haim and myself was that we were not going to screw this assignment up. We would be on time, always alert, and pro-active in opening and closing the gate at the coming and going of the patrol jeeps. We arrived at the entrance to the base. The perimeter wall was about four meters tall, made of concrete. The gate consisted of two green, hinged sheet-metal doors, both needing to swing open for vehicles to pass. As we waited to enter the base we saw in a flash what our duties would be. Obviously, one of us would be on the other side of the doors, waiting for a patrol to leave or for a patrol to return, notifying us with the jeep’s horn from about a hundred yards away, so that the door would be open for them when they reached it. The other one would man the guard tower, which rose up above the wall at the corner of the base to the left of the entrance. We received a lazy look from the reservist manning the tower, who we would be replacing. It was easy to see that he was at the end of his twenty-two days of yearly duty. As the other reservist opened the gate Haim and I looked at each other with resolve; we would not tire like these two. We would remain fresh and alert. We would not endanger our good fortune.

It was a mini base. There was a central paved courtyard where the two off-duty jeeps were parked ready for action and a designated area at the far end for reservist’s cars. Around that courtyard were several buildings with their backs abutting the perimeter wall. On one side there were barracks housing the two off-duty crews, and on the opposite side a small mess-hall and communal area, and, connecting the two sides, another building the size of the barracks divided into three rooms, a radio room and command post, the officer’s quarters, and at the far end a room for the Bedouin trackers. We were surprised to be given our orientation by the commanding officer himself, who turned out to be a Druze. The Border Patrol, an equal opportunity employer.

“This should be the easiest duty you’ve ever had,” he said. “All you need to do is keep alert.” I could sense that Haim was feeling what I was feeling: that our initial assessment was being confirmed. He continued: “I know you are all religious, so I have some news for you. You do not need to be here on the Sabbath.” This was met with total silence from our side. Six of us standing there, already feeling lucky, now hearing words that could never be expected to come out of an officer’s lips. We were all thinking the same thing. He’s a Druze. A Jewish officer, especially a religious one, would never allow a benefit like that. On principle. A principle understood and acceptable to us: two to be released on the Sabbath, with the remaining four covering for them eight hours on eight hours off until they returned on Saturday night at the end of the Sabbath. If there were a Geiger counter for warm feelings it would have been clicking off the scale like Chernobyl with our feelings for this officer, and for the Druze people in general, and for the simple foot soldiers manning the base because the onus of the guard duty would be falling on them, at the expense of their down-time. Then the officer said: “Two days ago someone threw a grenade over the gate. Luckily, it didn’t explode. Both guards were asleep at their posts and didn’t notice it. The morning patrol saw it as they were heading out. If it had exploded, the guard at the gate would have died—shrapnel tearing through the quiet night.”

That got our attention. There is never a free ride that is free. However, we were not overly concerned because we were going to be alert one hundred percent of the time. That was our intention. And easier intended than done. The guard tower was doable. There were things to see. Khan Yunis in all its morning glory. Things to admire, things to ridicule. All sorts of things. The problem was guarding the gate. Being on the inside, there was nothing to see. Nothing. Haim and I logically divided our duty into two. Four hours in the tower and four hours in the pit. I volunteered to guard the gate first and within fifteen minutes I was feeling tired. All enlisted, past present and future, know whereof I speak. We could all do four hours guard duty standing on our heads unless we were tired or bored out of our brains in the first second of duty. Usually, on guard duty you are paired, and that way there is someone to talk with to relieve the boredom. In our case, we were paired after a fashion, in that we were physically close to each other, but there was no line-of-sight connection between us, and we could not converse.

I quickly fell into my time-honored solution to ward off sleep: marching solo on parade along a four-by-four-meter square on the asphalt under my feet. I could do it for hours, but I usually only needed to employ the tactic near the end of a stretch of duty. Using it within the first half-hour of my first guard duty was not a good omen. Finally, when it came time for us to exchange places, Haim saw the look on my face and asked: “That bad?” I just shook my head and climbed up the ladder of my new post on the tower. Before disappearing inside I stopped climbing and turned to look at Haim and said: “Good luck.” Inside the booth I climbed up to my perch, checked the mechanism of the machine gun, and sat back to take in this corner of Khan Yunis.

Contrary to popular thought, not all of Khan Yunis is a refugee camp of tin-sheet walls and roofs. We were in a gentrified section, probably made up of merchants and landowners. Directly in front of the tower was the access road that led to another neighborhood farther down. Beyond the road was an enclosed property, with a main building serving as a residence, a courtyard turned into a citrus grove. During the hot afternoons the owner would walk slowly amidst his lemon trees. Sometimes he would look up at me. If I waved, he would wave back, but no smiles were exchanged— a silent acknowledgment in tense times. I mention that because during the three weeks that I manned that tower, not one of the other residents going about their business looked up at me. We were invisible.

As it happened, on the side opposite this private compound was the local mosque. We would later learn that it was a main recruiting and indoctrination center for the Muslim Brotherhood. It served us as an alarm clock. Some minutes after four in the morning the speaker in the minaret would give an echoing pop and we knew that the call to prayer would soon follow. For non-Muslims, it is a torture to sit through this charming aspect of Islamic culture. You can get used to it, like you can get used to anything, but sitting in the guard tower I was at the level of the speaker in the minaret and though it was not pointed directly at me, it was damn loud. Sometimes I was of a mind to swing the machine gun around and blast that amplifier to smithereens, yelling: “Shut up!” but common sense prevailed. Still, I would think: “So you get up early to go to prayer. Big deal!” Later, after sunrise, I admit that I had some admiration for this example of Islamic devotion. Making that early morning prayer every day meant that one was in bed by at the latest nine or ten at night, meaning that one was not having one’s mind polluted by the low level of television programming that was broadcast during those hours.

But beyond the cultural quirks, something about the tower's setup bothered me after a few days. This is no surprise, as during the long hours of guard duty you have time to wonder about anything you want to wonder about. Here, though, even to my lightly trained military eye, there was a problem. Normally, a machine gun is set up to face the direction of threats. In our case that would be in the direction of the access road to the base. That would mean that it could also cover the entrance to the mosque off to the left of the access road. That would make sense. Instead, the gun was fixed to swivel through a field of fire that covered the entire expanse of the compound of the friendly man in the lemon grove. The machine gun was useless in case of a frontal attack from, say, a suicide driver, or a teenager wanting to prove his mettle by lobbing a grenade over the wall after hearing some radicalizing sermon in the mosque. The solution was to have our personal weapon, an M-16, loaded and ready and within an arm’s reach. After a few more days of wondering, I had a moment of enlightenment. I knew why. It was set up that way in consideration of the feelings of the Arabs walking to and from prayer. Prayer was a peaceful endeavor, and why would we want to shove our unwanted presence in their faces by pointing a machine gun at them? We were foolish to the point of idiocy back then. For whatever reason, we were pointing our guns in the wrong direction.

Near the end of the three weeks of our reserve duty, we concentrated on one single important thing: getting through the last few days. We were tired. After our midnight to eight shift, we rushed back to Gan Or to hurry through morning prayers and see the children and wife before they left for school and then straight on up to the greenhouses for a full day of work on the farm. On paper, we should have been able to get enough sleep, but as I mentioned, we were at the height of picking season and there was always something more to do on the farm, and of course we had to spend time with the family, so by the end of our reserve duty, we were sometimes arriving to take our posts with just two or three hours sleep.

On the last night of guard duty, I arrived after not having slept at all. I figured I could hold out just this once. I began my shift on the tower and managed to stay awake, but when Haim and I exchanged positions at four o’clock, I knew that I was in trouble. I figured that it would be hard going for about an hour and a half until first light, then, as the sun rose it would be easier. I hadn’t figured that I would be questioning my ability to keep awake even for five minutes. I paced back and forth, I parade marched, I ran in place, I ran in circles, and at about four-thirty, I nodded off, while standing at my post. It’s not as hard as it sounds, sleeping while standing up. You tighten your webbing and ammunition belt and kind of slouch down into that support. It’s not a deep sleep because you must be awake enough to keep standing, but it is sleep, and I was well into a dream when I heard the cryptic message: “So. Are you coming to Gan Or?” At the mention of my settlement, I jumped. Had I dreamt it? There was no reply forthcoming on the radio, so I was starting to think that it had been part of a dream. I called to Haim up in the tower, but he didn’t answer. I called his name again and when I saw his eyes peeking back down at me I realized that he had been sleeping too.

I was wide awake. At least that. I had convinced myself that the whole episode had been a dream and we finished our last duty without incident and drove home. Neither of us mentioned the fact that we had fallen asleep on duty. We were both thinking of our predecessors who had a grenade thrown at them. They were obviously sleeping at the time. We felt so superior to them when we first arrived. Now we were simply happy that no-one had caught us, even more than we were happy not to have had a grenade thrown at us. We drove home in silence. By the time we made the final turn towards Gan Or I had forgotten about the mysterious transmission.

As we approached the main gate, we were surprised to see an endless line of military vehicles parked on the side of the road leading to the center of the settlement, and then on to the perimeter road to the left. Something had happened. The line probably extended until the greenhouses, we thought, where most of our security problems occurred. However, as we reached the turn to the greenhouses I was surprised to see that the line did not turn there, rather, it continued to my street and turned in there. As we approached my home, I saw that the line stopped there. My heart fell. What I had thought might be a dream was turning into a nightmare. As soon as I reached my home, I felt relief. There was my wife Dvora, holding our baby son, talking with the district commander. I parked in the middle of the street because of all the military vehicles and jumped out and ran to Dvora. She saw the worry in my eyes and said “It’s all right. It’s all right.”

I ignored the commander because off to the side I saw our settlement’s security coordinator, and he was giving me a look that I did not like at all. I held Nissim Serusi in high esteem, so I approached and stood by him. I did not initiate a conversation. He would give me an update when he was ready. After a few minutes I looked at him and asked: “That bad?” He said: “Worse.” He told me that at first the army claimed that they had not brought a tracker with them and that if they called for him now by the time he reached Gan Or the intruders would be sipping tea in Khan Yunis. Nissim insisted. They called for the tracker. That is what I had heard on guard duty. The request had been transmitted on the wrong frequency. That was the frequency that I had been listening on. They immediately corrected on their end when they didn’t receive a reply, and that is the reason I didn’t hear a follow-up on that initial transmission and could allow myself to think that I had been dreaming. Nissim continued, and as he relayed further details, I began to grow as angry as he was. The tracker arrived about an hour later and grumbled that there was no sense in tracking, as the intruders were by now already back in Khan Yunis. Nissim was furious. He did not back down and forced the issue. They found the intruders lounging under a tree about two hundred yards beyond the perimeter of Gan Or’s greenhouses, resting before continuing to Khan Yunis. They were a couple of teenagers who had been high on hashish and were trying to steal a car.

Now, next to my house, I looked in the back of the jeep that held the blindfolded and handcuffed culprits. Nissim and I, and our neighbors who had gathered, were all thinking the same thing: if a couple of drugged-up losers could casually enter our settlement and move from car to car trying to jack one, what would have happened if they had been motivated terrorists with a different purpose? All of the IDF’s horses and all of the IDF’s men couldn’t put a slaughtered Jew back together again.

It was all wrong, the whole attitude of the Israeli army at the time. A great threat was looming on the horizon like storm clouds, and the only thing facing it was a Jewish woman holding her infant. The guards were posted in all the wrong places. I approached my wife Dvora, seeing instantly that she was more collected than the district commander, whose job here it was to project confidence. It was all wrong. Backwards. Upside-down. This feeling of dread was only intensified by the presence of the district commander and the rest of the high brass in attendance. We felt a total lack of confidence in the army. True, we were religious Jews who never put our complete trust in flesh and blood no matter what the rank, rather, that trust was always in our Father in Heaven, but still, flesh and blood had an important part to play in confrontation with enemies.

Dvora was about to state the obvious—obvious to everyone except those whose job it was to protect civilians.

“Those two creeps are heroes now,” she said.

The officers laughed with a hint of friendly ridicule.

“They are,” she continued. These men were not aware that Dvora had a military background. “You are going to release them before sundown, and half an hour later they will be reporting to their handlers that they just took a walk in the park inside a Jewish settlement and almost had to jump and shout to be caught.” That got the officers’ attention, and mine, as I hadn’t thought of it either.

This was not the first time that the words of my wife rang true, like the words of her namesake the prophetess Dvora:

The inhabitants of the villages ceased, they ceased in Yisra᾽el, until I Devora arose, I arose a mother in Yisra᾽el.

They chose new gods; then was war in the gates: Was there a shield or spear seen among forty thousand in Yisra᾽el? (Judges 5:7-8)

Nissim’s “prophesy” may have been more pertinent. It was to get worse, much worse. We were guarding the wrong gate, indeed, pointing our vigilance in all the wrong directions.

I’ve been saying it for fifty damn years. Ain’t I been saying it Miguel? Nobody listened then—someone will listen now. What’s so infuriating to me is that the truth has been obvious from the very beginning. How can it be that I am the only one who sees it? Go ahead. Laugh. I’m immune to laughter. But I can promise you this: once you see it, you will be unable to un-see it. You are one letter—one vowel—away from the truth, and Spielberg dangled that vowel like a participle in front of our faces right from the start.

“E” before “A,” except after…How does that old rule of grammar go? In this case forget the rules. All you need to do to understand the popularity of the movie “Jaws,” is to replace the “a” with an “e.” Go ahead, say it out loud. Let it sink in. I’ll wait.

Martha’s Vineyard was once (alas) a working man’s tourist destination. I mean, really, tours were given in school buses, the most uncomfortable means of transportation ever devised by man. Without air-conditioning. You were lucky if your window opened. Three hours of sweat and body odor from forty-or-so passengers, with a few nice views in between. You were expected to tip the driver and say thank you as you left the bus. That is a working man’s vacation. That was the lifeblood of Martha’s Vineyard. Those tourists would be dropped off near restaurants at mealtimes and souvenir shops at other times where they would leave their hard-earned money. Not big bucks, but enough to keep the low-key island economy going for the long off-season months. It was, and possibly still is, a mayfly economy; you make your living during the hectic three months of tourist season or else. Anything that would endanger those three months would threaten the island’s livelihood.

A man-eating great white shark would fit the bill. On the surface, that is what the film Jaws is about. But beneath the surface terror lies something far more insidious. The unseen menace in the depths of the ocean preys on a fun-loving young woman swimming after dark, and later, on an unsuspecting, innocent young boy enjoying a summer day at the beach. It is all so believable, and terrifying, but for all that, eerily familiar. It is not really the shark, as great and as white as it is, that frightens us, rather it is something more sinister. Something unknowable, but no, we know it! Jaws are The Jews.

That covert, unseen menace is the International Jew—the Zionist— of the Protocols of the Elders of Zion, and Jaws is Spielberg’s answer to the madness of the Protocols. To combat that dark bloodthirsty menace of every Gentile’s nightmare, Spielberg posits, you guessed it, a new type of Jew, a Jew-less Jew, disguised as a New England prep-school WASP. As if. There’s not a viewer of the movie that did not see through that hilarious masquerade and identify “Matt Hooper” for what he was: through and through a New York Jew. For a sidekick Spielberg gives us Brody, a good-hearted, attractive Gentile who would eventually ride in to save the day.

Spielberg’s genius—and it is true dramatic genius—now appears in the greatest foil since the days of Shakespeare. Quint. Quint meets Hooper and gives him the look that seems—how uncomfortable to the audience—so in place, so accurate. It is the look that says to Hooper: “You may fool the others, because they are fools, but you do not fool me.” That look. Hooper had seen it before. So unfair! Quint was suggesting, with a wry knowing smile, that there was no difference between the killer shark and Hooper himself. For Quint, the shark was a loan shark, and Hooper was a lone Jew, destined to be apart, regardless of adopted dress and academic credentials, different, unaccepted in polite society. As it had always been, up until and including the reported bad behavior of Robert Shaw towards Richard Dreyfus.

Hooper, the New Jew without a Jewish name, without kosher food, and with science as his sword, er... harpoon, sets off on his double quest: to vanquish the monster of the depths—the Old Jew of the Protocols—and to win Quint over, to prove that the New Jew can drink beer with the best of them. Hooper’s double quest, in a nutshell, is the story of modern Zionism. A New Jew, in a land of Jews, not alone, ready to be accepted into the fraternity of nations. Quint’s nightmare finally consumed him, literally, and Spielberg may be suggesting that Quint received his just deserts. Or the shark did, anyway. As for the New Jew, the fraternity of nations, with few exceptions, has not been fraternal.

Quint’s story line can be seen as superseding the Protocols. For Quint, the Protocols do not go far enough. The Jews do not just want to take over the world, they want to eat you or emasculate you as they do it (see: The Beepers of Beirut, et al). The Protocols of Zion, Matt Hooper, the Iranian atomic bomb, these are all Zionist false foreskin er… false flag operations.

Quint is one who knows, and that knowledge, that there is a Jew behind every tragedy, informed his understanding of the seminal event in his life, the sinking of the Indianapolis and the loss of his sea mates. How so? It could not have been easy at first. What did the Indianapolis have to do with Jews? Indeed, pertaining to all of Indiana itself, outside of the universities, one of the rarest of utterances that can be heard is: “Hi. I’m from Indiana, and I’m Jewish.”

The Indianapolis is the great Jew-less ship fighting in a war against a people of four letters starting with “J” and ending in “s.” Ok, it’s Japs, but that’s close enough. For a fevered, infested mind, it is close enough. Somewhere, there is a Jewish angle. Yes, the powers that be, the Rothschilds, somehow orchestrated this burnt offering of Gentile flesh.

The musical score carries a hint. That sinister two-note tuba motif? It resembles nothing more than the opening notes of "Hava Nagila." That’s the evil genius of the Zionists, Quint knows. It is not enough to have them go down with the ship. There must be a prolonged, excruciating bloodletting for the International Zionist cause. Just so, it was orchestrated. Small circles of men in the shark-infested water, arms locked in brotherhood, facing outwards towards the approaching menace. Yes! Just this! The Jew puppet master has these doomed Gentiles flapping their legs, dancing a submerged Hora. Hava Nagila!

After hours upon agonizing hours of friends being torn away, the dance circle ever dwindling, nothing is left but the chill in the bones of the storyteller and the chill in the bones of the listener.

Quint’s hatred has metastasized through the shark jaws he is bleaching and hanging on the walls of his sanctuary into a full-blown belief system. It would seem that each jawbone hanging on the wall was a guilt offering by the survivor for each of his sea mates eaten. There, that one that he is boiling now, is it for a gone but not forgotten sea mate, or is it for someone not yet devoured? Into this walks the guileless Hooperstein, er… Hooper. It’s fine with Quint if the innocent Hooper feels a chill down his spine. We all should feel that chill, but none more than the Jew. For the Jew has a genetic disposition to face the unknowable with equanimity: who is for life, who is for death. Who knows untimely and unseemly death like the Jews?

Quint finally makes his peace with Hooper, and with the Angel of Death. He will go the way of his sea mates. Someone else will hang the jawbone of the shark that eats him. The Indianapolis had delivered the atomic bomb to Tinian Island. In the end, Quint must have seen the Jewish angle. Who developed the bomb? A significant portion of the scientific leadership in the Manhattan Project were Jews—many of them Hungarian Jews, the so-called "Martians" who helped America win the race. For good or for worse.

Spielberg’s revenge was in having Quint devoured by the monster of his own making. The fevered mind engendered by the Protocols of the Elders of Zion was of one with all forms of Jew hatred, was of one with those who danced a different dance, the Cossack dance—arms locked, facing out, legs shooting up and out—one that they may have danced before, or during, or after ransacking a Jewish shtetl, raping and murdering the Jewish inhabitants. The bloodletting of those dances was of Jews, and Spielberg will not let you forget that. Through this movie, Jaws, he has forever infused this knowledge in the viewer’s DNA.

That is not the best of it. Spielberg had his own Hungarian-Jewish ties. Jaws is considered the original summer “blockbuster” movie. Endless lines stood for hours to buy tickets to the movie, as if saying: “Scare the bejeebies out of me and take my money too.” Now that is a sweet revenge: taking a real bite below the belt. And it gets even better. What did Spielberg do with those movie-goers’ hard earned money? He built an army of documenters. To record the stories of Holocaust survivors. He did all that. He could have done much less, and his name would have been inscribed for an eternal blessing on the Gates of Heaven.

Fifty years. Fifty years since I sauntered down the aisle of the Capawock Theatre in Vineyard Haven, play-acting with my friends—many who had parts as extras in the movie, as did my sister and brother—feigning loudly that we were so afraid of what we were about to see. We sat giggling like ten-year-olds in the front row—until that first chomp echoed through the theater. That shut us up right quick. The bloodletting hasn’t let up since.

Fifty years for Jaws. On a mystic kabbalistic note, fifty is represented by the Hebrew letter “nun.” In ancient Hebrew, “nun” means “big fish.” I kid you not. And in that big fish's belly? A tale of revenge that still bites.

With our new upgraded warning system, we receive an initial warning when ballistic launches are detected from Iran. It’s a fifteen-minute lob from Iran to Israel, so ten minutes later when trajectories are determined, localized warnings are sounded for the areas under attack. At the first warning, Israelis are to position themselves close to a bomb shelter so that if their area is under attack, they can secure themselves inside the shelter within one minute. This early warning system was developed when the Houties started shooting missiles at Israel from Yemen. It’s a fifteen-minute missile ride from Yemen too, and very quickly Israel realized that you cannot have an entire nation ready to rush to the shelters at three in the morning every time there was what was at the time single-missile attacks from Yemen. In that way an Iranian proxy helped us develop a very efficient warning system that has proved to be valuable against the hundreds of missiles being launched against Israel from Iran.

These systems, like all technological marvels, have a running-in period while the technicians work out the bugs. One such bug occurred this last Shabbat evening (Friday night). We tried to organize a neighborhood Shabbat evening prayer since the synagogues were closed. We were stretching the no-crowds directive but since we were all within a minute of our bomb shelters, we felt that we were acting responsibly. We felt comfortable, remembering the years of neighborhood “Corona quorums,” this time lacking only the face masks. We were about ten minutes into the prayer when the pre-alarm sounded. Relaxed, happy for the early warning, we dispersed and went to our shelters. We never received a localized warning, and I managed to finish my prayers and say the evening Kiddush with my wife. We ate, and after the blessing after the meal, went outside for some fresh air and discovered that our neighbors had the same idea. There we stood, looking skyward, not knowing then that the night was to be a long one.

It was not new to us. Here is an example from 2012, when we were still in our temporary housing after having been evicted from Gush Katif in Gaza. The government belatedly realized that in their rush to expel us, they had forgotten to provide adequate bomb shelters and hurriedly solved the problem by dropping huge sewage pipes in each neighborhood:

After all these years of missile attacks, Israelis, especially those on the younger side, want to demonstrate a measure of nonchalance, even while following the directives of the Home Command.

We were standing in our back yards all nonchalant when the bug in the system appeared. Looking up at the night sky we saw rockets launch from all around seemingly pointing to a spot right above us. It didn’t make sense at first. Why are these defensive rockets launching so closely when there hasn’t been a pre-warning or a local warning? We were transfixed, but not for long. Our younger neighbors gathered their children and ran to the bomb shelters. My wife and I made our way to our shelter but before turning the corner I took one last look and to my surprise I saw two mighty missiles launched like twins, which were different from all the missiles we had just seen launched that had converged over us coming from the North and East. For these came from the West, and to the West there was only the Mediterranean Sea. Those rockets were not Israeli. They belonged to the true ally of Israel. Quietly, without fanfare, and without participating in attacks on Iran, the United States of America showed up when it mattered, and took station off the coast of Israel, ready to help in Israel’s defense. Those rockets rose together, torches of flame, creating two great columns, a Boaz and Yachin of a heavenly temple now consecrated in the skies over the Holy Land. Two great pillars standing tall in true friendship, against all comers.

God bless the Israel and God bless the United States of America.

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And the Lord met Bil῾am, and put a word in his mouth, and said, Go back to Balaq, and say thus.

And when he came to him, behold, he stood by his burnt offering, and the princes of Mo᾽av with him. And Balaq said to him, What has the Lord spoken?

And he took up his discourse, and said, Rise up, Balaq and hear; hearken to me, thou son of Żippor:

God is not a man, that he should lie; nor the son of man, that he should repent: has he said, and shall he not perform? or has he spoken, and shall he not make it good?

Behold, I am bidden to bless: and he has blessed; and I cannot reverse it.

He has not beheld iniquity in Ya῾aqov nor has he seen perverseness in Yisra᾽el: the Lord his God is with him, and the trumpet blast of a king is among them.

God who brought them out of Miżrayim; he has as it were the strength of a wild ox.

Surely there is no enchantment in Ya῾aqov, nor is there any divination in Yisra᾽el: in due time Ya῾aqov and Yisra᾽el are told what God has performed.

Behold, the people shall rise up as a great lion, and lift up himself as a young lion: he shall not lie down until he eat of the prey, and drink the blood of the slain.

(Numbers 23:16-24)

This is the source of the operational name given to Israel’s attack on Iran. This mercenary prophet, Bil’am, was hired to curse Israel. He tried, but his curses were converted to blessings by divine intervention. On his next attempt, Bil’am’s prophecy resonates with contemporary significance:

And he took up his discourse, and said, The speech of Bil῾am the son Be῾or, and the speech of the man whose eyes are open:

the saying of him who hears the words of God, who sees the vision of the Almighty, falling down, but having his eyes open:

how goodly are thy tents, O, Ya῾aqov, and thy tabernacles, O Yisra᾽el!

like the winding brooks, like gardens by the river’s side, like aloes which the Lord has planted, and cedar trees beside the waters.

He shall pour the water out of his buckets, moistening his seed plentifully, and his king shall be higher than Agag, and his kingdom shall be exalted.

God brought him out of Miżrayim: he has as it were the strength of a wild ox: he shall eat up the nations his enemies, and shall break their bones, and pierce them through with his arrows.

He couched, he lay down like a lion, and like a great lion: who shall stir him up? Blessed is he that blesses thee, and cursed is he that curses thee. (Numbers 24:3-9)

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For the sake of Żiyyon I will not hold my peace, and for the sake of Yeru­shalayim, I will not be still, until her righteousness goes forth like radiance, and her salvation like a burning torch. (Isaiah 62:1)

The burning torch is lit.

Now, on the cusp of victory, is the time for us to convene amongst ourselves. Let there be no more attempts to convince those who are still sitting on the fence. If they are not for Zion by now, they will never be for Zion. Not when it counts anyway, which is right at this moment.

This is the time to convene amongst ourselves, to extend support to the families of the soldiers fighting on the fronts and to the hostages and their families, and to extend encouragement to the Jews of the Diaspora who are experiencing what might be called “pre-trauma disorder syndrome.”

My Jewish friends, you know by now that I have little sympathy for Jewish talking heads during war. Now, though, I call upon you to talk amongst yourselves. Jews of the world unite! Be talking heads! These things that are happening at this moment, as I write, are momentous. Talk, communicate; be there for one another.

Christian supporters of Israel…well, no sense in preaching to the choir. You know what is happening. Dear souls, do not hold your peace! Make this your finest hour!

Secular or non-affiliated or multi-affiliated, my heart goes out to you most of all. There is no logical reason for you to support Israel and the Jews in today’s climate, yet you do. There is something deep inside you that refuses to turn its back on the truth. You have earned your place at the table of the Friends of Zion. I salute you.

An offer of a lifetime

Take Iwo Jima. But this time, give the combatants twenty years and billions of dollars in “humanitarian aid” to construct an immense underground complex of attack tunnels, retreat tunnels, supply tunnels, staging areas, missile factories, missile launch pads, hospitals, command centers, what have you. Now let’s cover the entire island with civilian infrastructure and populate it. We’ll attach a few lines to some outcrops and begin the lengthy process of towing the whole layered confection to the west coast of the United States.

It begins slowly. From the hidden launch pads a few mortars lob their bombs at random. The bombs land where they land, with no warning. Slowly, the terrorists refine their product and are soon sending all the citizens of Sacramento scurrying to bomb shelters. Sometimes it gets so bad that the Marines are sent in, but they meet with little resistance and end up facing civilians with their tanks. Things cool down for a while, the tanks retreat, and after a week or so the rockets fly again, just enough to irritate, but not enough to bring the Marines back in. Wash. Rinse. Repeat.

Then the inevitable happens and a rocket explodes on a kindergarten and kills children. Oh boy, the terrorists really did it this time. Are they going to get it! The Marines storm the beaches ready to wreak vengeance. But…where are the terrorists? There is nothing but hospitals, schools, and babies. There’s a terrorist! But before the Marines can react the terrorist has shot a rocket and disappeared under the ground again. You never know when or where they will pop up. An entire guerrilla strategy based on whack-a-mole. The Marines, bleeding, make a tactical retreat to regroup, and call in WWII veterans as consultants. They soon had the solution: they will burn the bastards out with flame-throwers.

But no. While the Marines were trying to figure it out the moles stormed Pasadena and raped and pillaged and withdrew into their tunnels with hundreds, thousands of hostages. Burn them, you burn your own. And there the Marines stood. With no option but to grunt it out hole by hole, sustaining casualties that the brave Marines understand is the price to be paid. All the while the nations of the world are calling on America to cease fire and save the babies.

Naw, that would not happen. No one would call out America on that.

But Israel is called out.

In the past, Israel has bent over backwards to appease world opinion.

This time, World, whoever takes a stance against Israel, we Zionists piss on your faces. Back off. Stand clear. The Zionists are doing what must be done and we will see it through to the end. Afterwards, we will deal with you.

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Somehow word got out that I was a “space enthusiast,” and the young teenage boys of Gan Or began asking me questions about space, the stars, space flight, and of course, the main reason for this eruption of interest in the subject, the meaning of Ilan Ramon’s mission on the space shuttle. I threw out answers in a way that would make them hungry for more, just like my father had done to me when I was their age, a young teenager following the space race between the USA and the USSR. Except that by now, half a world away from Cape Canaveral and immersed in raising a family in the middle of the Gaza Strip during the so-called “Second Intifada,” it was an effort to stir up my own interest again.

I had never completely lost interest in space, but at that time in my life this interest consisted of star gazing and satellite tracking thanks to the groundbreaking website Heavens Above. These young men, who would gather in my yard after evening prayers, were a captive audience. From the start I felt a heavy sense of responsibility towards them. I was surprised at how little they knew. When I pointed to a particular star and told them that the light from that star started its journey to our eyes thousands of years ago, they stood unbelieving. This unbelief was not just because a potential conflict between Torah time and Physics time, a conflict I eased by beginning each session with a Bible quote pertaining to the heavens followed by a brief discussion. No, their unbelief stemmed from the fact that the heavens above are unbelievable. Dots of light in the night sky being giant fusion balls of gas—that is an unbelievable reality, and it is a fascinating one. Space truly is a Holy Abode.

The shuttle Columbia launched, and we followed closely all the news coming down from the heavens. I was swept up in the excitement and fueled it with the meager tools that I had on hand, meaning my own first-hand experience with Nasa’s space program. So, the boys received the story of the time my father revved up our Ford Country Sedan and drove my brother and I all the way from Martha’s Vineyard to Cape Canaveral to see the launch of Apollo 8. We set up station on the wide unpaved lot to the south of the jetty of the inlet leading into Port Canaveral, together with thousands of other spectators. We were eighteen miles from the Saturn 5 rocket and could only barely make it out if we squinted our eyes towards the launch gantry.

I told this story towards the end of Columbia’s mission, and I used the disappointment that my brother and I had felt being so far away from the launch pad to lower the expectations of my young audience. They needed to be brought down to earth before I sent them soaring skyward again. By then I realized that the wide eyes with which they had looked into the night sky were now focused on me as I told these stories. It was good that the mission was nearing its end as I was finding it difficult to meet the expectations of my listeners, and for that matter, I was finding it difficult to meet my expectations of myself. We had been meeting sporadically during the weeks while Columbia was orbiting the Earth, and I had discovered that my vat of space knowledge was quicky running dry. As was my captive audience. What had been a crowd of about ten youths had become by this time a small group of five true believers. I had grown addicted to those wide eyes looking to me for knowledge. A little grandstanding was called for. My plan all along had been to end our sessions with the return of the Columbia to Earth, my storytelling reaching a crescendo with the description of the launch of Apollo 8 followed by a description of the difficulties of re-entering the atmosphere and slowing spacecraft down enough so that they could land safely. That would work.

Columbia was scheduled to land just before the end of Shabbat Israeli time. Two things converged that would potentially contribute to the crescendo of my story as being worthy of the Israeli Philharmonic. The first was that in the act of recalling my memories of Apollo 8, a new memory appeared as if ordered by express mail. I had already once in my life held a captive audience, and with that audience I had learned the basics of grandstanding.

One of the hobbies that is available to those interested in space is model rocketry. One of the best hobbies ever. The rockets come through the mail in kits. You needed to cut the fins out of balsa wood and glue them—properly aligned—to the hardened paper tube body of the rocket. Then you assembled the recovery parachute, nose cone, and engine mount. Lastly, you painted the rocket. By the time of Apollo 8 I was an advanced hobbyist and my collection of rockets was my pride and joy. My father told me that I could bring one rocket on the trip, so I chose the largest one in my collection: Big Bertha.

While preparing this article imagine my surprise that this model is still being sold 55 years later!

We arrived at Cape Canaveral late the night before the launch and my brother and I were asleep. When we awakened on the morning of the launch, there was already a large crowd. Most people were positioning themselves on the jetty. That was as close as one could get to the launch pad. My father had positioned our car on a small rise so that by sitting on the hood we had a direct line of sight to the launch pad.

My father said to me: “It’s time to launch your rocket.”

I had forgotten. The crowd, the pin-prick Saturn V way off in the distance, being exhausted from the trip and the expectation in the air had all overwhelmed me. I ran to open the back of the station wagon to use as my workbench and to prepare my rocket and then I froze. I looked around. There were thousands of people, all waiting for the launch of the giant Saturn V. They were a ready audience and if they heard a countdown behind them, they would turn around and direct their attention to me. I had not thought of that.

Standing next to me was my younger brother, Mark Luce. In general, I lorded it over him, sometimes bullying him, and he knew not to touch any of my gear. But now, with the crowd pressure, he was a welcome ally. My father was standing off to the side but just when I was changing my attitude towards my little brother I looked over at him and saw him make a slight nod of encouragement and agreement. He knew what was going through my mind. Of course he did. In my best military voice I spoke to my brother without looking at him. “We need a down-range safety officer.” He remained silent. I turned to him and said: “Do you think you can handle it?”

“I think so,” he said.

He was in minor shock. I had never allowed him to participate before this. We would now learn together how to be brothers. And just like that it was time for the show to begin.

“Ok, we need to find a good flat spot for the launch pad. Then we need to check the wind speed and direction for you to place yourself to catch the rocket.” I looked straight into his eyes to make sure he understood the significance of what I had just said. I was going to let him try to capture the rocket parachuting back before it hit the ground. The balsa wood fins had a habit of breaking on landing. I gathered my gear and he looked at me.

“What about the rocket?” he asked.

“You bring it. Just be careful.”

As we walked away from the car I wondered how we might be able to attract the attention of the crowd. I needn’t have worried. Mark was holding the rocket high in the air like a trophy. The children were the first to notice.

“They’ve got a rocket!” My brother’s natural sense of marketing was on display. This was new to my father and myself. As we walked towards a clear area, he began turning in circles with the rocket held high, getting the crowd involved. For my part I was shivering in fear, afraid to fail. As we crouched down to set up the launching rig, there wasn’t much for Mark to do. He was back on his haunches, not looking at what I was doing. He was looking at me. He looked directly into my eyes with complete and calm confidence. He trusted his big brother to succeed. That was all I needed. I gave him a nod. He stood up—unnecessary—and raised the rocket high one more time. The crowd, many hundreds, reacted with excited applause. He slid the guidance tube on the side of the rocket onto the launch rail, and I connected the alligator clips to the filament leads. I whispered to him: “Wait here and follow my commands.”

I followed the wire back to my launch control box. All eyes were upon us; NASA and Apollo 8 would have to wait their turn. My head raced trying to extend the drama.

“Range Safety Officer! Clear the range of civilians!” I said to my brother.

It was mostly children who had been drifting closer. The parents were not about to abandon their hard-earned spots on the jetty, but they helped my brother by calling their children to return to the jetty.

“Range Safety Officer! Confirm down-range clear!”

“Down range clear!” my brother answered.

“Recovery crew to positions!”

My brother hesitated for a moment, then remembered my instructions. He ran to the spot we had determined where the rocket would land.

“Confirm recovery crew ready!” I said.

“Recovery crew ready!” my brother answered.

Taking my cue from my brother’s earlier brilliant crowd-pleasing instinct, I held the launch control box up high. I now started to give myself commands, but I directed them in a breaking voice towards the crowd on the jetty.

“Insert launch safety key!” I took the key held high in one hand and brought it towards my other hand holding the launch control box and inserted the key.

“Turn launch safety key!” I turned the key with exaggerated movements of my arm and elbows so that the distant crowd could see that the command was executed properly.

Then, for no good reason but for a newfound sense of grandstanding, I paused. I slowly turned towards the crowd and shouted as loud as I could:

“Begin countdown.”

And they did. That crowd gave a countdown for the ages.

“Ten! Nine! Eight! Seven! Six! Five! Four! Three! Two! One! …Liftoff!”

Big Bertha did not disappoint. The rocket shot up with a loud whoosh! Hundreds of heads turned upwards following its trajectory. With the engine spent after a few seconds the rocket continued to coast until the small secondary charge ignited and popped the nosecone off and ejected the parachute. The rocket began to float down, towards my brother. I looked at him and he was doing what looked like some sort of Polynesian dance, crouched, waving his arms back and forth in a smooth semi-circle, all the while adjusting his position towards the descending rocket. I sensed a disaster in the making and was about to yell to him to get himself together when my father said:

“Wait. He’s figuring it out by himself.”

As soon as my father said that, I saw. My brother did not have the hands of a ball player. It took maximum effort from him to catch a fly ball. If he grabbed wildly at this elongated toilet tube model with its balsa wood fins, he could cause more damage than would a hard landing. He knew that about himself, so he took a different approach. He would avoid the model itself and sweep his hands through the air trying to entangle them with the parachute cords. It was an amazing idea, and I realized that he must have thought of it while standing and waiting for the launch. While all the crowd’s attention was on the launch, he realized that it would soon be upon him. He did not freeze. He thought of a solution, and here he was practicing it for the first time while the rocket was returning to Earth. His little spider-dance, his arms weaving a soft imaginary web to catch the rocket, was…beautiful. The rocket approached him and he came out of his crouch with his legs together and twisted his body with his arms wide one last time, like a ballet dancer, or a bullfighter on a close pass, and he snagged the parachute out of the air. A perfect recovery, on his first attempt. The crowd, which had gone silent as the rocket descended, burst into applause. My brother held the rocket high, and it was at that point that I understood that my little brother, with an elegance not seen until that point, had stolen the show from me.

He had stolen the show, but it was a better show by far because of it. As I was telling this story to the boys in Gan Or on the Thursday night two days before the return of Columbia, I realized that this story was not a prelude to the main story of the launch of Apollo 8. This was the main story. The eyes looking at me with trust, and thirst for knowledge, were looking at me differently now. These were the eyes of older brothers, surprised but not surprised to have such an exotic tale from far away turn into a lesson in morality, now seeing their younger brothers in a different light. I had not intended to make of my tale a “teachable moment” —or had I? I had observed these boys as they grew, and some of them were excellent older brothers, and in others I painfully saw shades of myself, making my own brother’s life more difficult than it needed to be.

For this commandment which I command thee this day, it is not hidden from thee, neither is it far off.

It is not in heaven, that thou shouldst say, Who shall go up for us to heaven, and bring it to us, that we may hear it, and do it?

Nor is it beyond the sea, that thou shouldst say, Who shall go over the sea for us, and bring it to us, that we may hear it, and do it?

But the word is very near to thee, in thy mouth, and in thy heart, that thou mayst do it. (Deuteronomy 30:11-14)

There is no need to look up to the heavens or to call across the seas, or to tell of humanity’s first venture beyond the cradle of Earth. To tell the essential stories, the ones that need to be passed from generation to generation, one needs to look no farther than into the expectant eyes of our youth. They will tell you what is needed. The “prep” story became the main story, and I saw no point in continuing that night. The original story could wait until the next evening, with the onset of Shabbat, when I had planned a special surprise for the boys, which would also bring an end to my series of lectures.

We gathered as planned. For the first time, some fathers joined us. I checked my watch and began describing the launch of Apollo 8. How we could barely see the rocket from where we stood. How everyone had their car radios tuned in to the countdown. How the thousands joined in with the countdown. How my brother and I felt as if we were going to launch into space right along with the rocket. Then when the countdown reached zero two huge plumes of smoke shot out from both sides of the rocket, and there was a strange quiet all around. Slowly, the little white toothpick started to rise and then we saw the flame. What a flame! As long as the rising rocket itself. Longer! Then came the heavenly jolt. The sound of the rocket finally reached us, and we were not prepared. In Gan Or, telling this story, I crouched down, yes, as I had learned from my brother all those years ago, and with arms spread and a low gurgling rumble in my throat I slowly rose up, increasing the volume of the sound from my throat, checking my watch one more time and then, on the second, thrust my right arm skyward with finger pointing to a spot above our ficus trees and right then, surprising even myself, the shuttle Columbia appeared exactly where I was pointing. As it shot across the night sky I said:

“Ilan Ramon is now reciting the kiddush in space!" I said the beginning of the kiddush (in Hebrew of course):

The heaven and the earth were finished, and all their array.

On the seventh day God finished the work that had been undertaken: [God] ceased on the seventh day from doing any of the work.

And God blessed the seventh day and declared it holy—having ceased on it from all the work of creation that God had done. (Genesis 2:1-3)

As I was describing the seventh day of rest, Columbia re-entered the Earth’s shadow. My audience was speechless. I admit that I wanted more than anything to turn and slowly walk back to my house without saying a word. Exit, stage right. The boys would have appreciated the theatre, knowing that I would explain all in good time. The problem was with the fathers. I knew that they were thinking voodoo, that they had entrusted their boys with a latter-day star worshipper. I gathered them in, these my neighbors through thick and thin, and explained how I knew when and where the shuttle would appear. To my surprise my explanation did not achieve the intended purpose. They were college-educated men (at a time when that meant something) and they understood the facts, but the build-up of my story and the precise timing of it was too magical to process logically. I thought of Mark Twain and his “stretchers.” I had based my little production on the most solid foundation of orbital mechanics, but by composing it out of a story from my past that connected seamlessly with a celestial event, I had told the biggest stretcher of all. This was not the way the world works. A vocal delirium from a smooth-talking mouth conjuring an event in the heavens? That could be nothing other than idol worship of the worst kind.

What had I been thinking? My friends returned to their homes, saying “Shabbat Shalom,” under their breaths, and I stood there, alone, thinking why hadn’t I left off with the story-telling the day before? I could have gone out a winner. It was not the first time in my life that my perfect timing was anything but perfect and I knew then, like a prophet of old, that it would not be the last time. I was too smart for my own britches, as my grandmother used to say.

The next day at morning prayers, mine were under subdued breath. It was my way of saying a sheepish “Shabbat Shalom” to the Universe, to the Creation, to the Creator.

what is man that You have been mindful of him,
mortal man that You have taken note of him (Psalms 8:5)

There would be no shaking-off of that feeling of impending doom that engulfed me that entire day, up until the moment, returning home from evening prayers at the end of Shabbat, when my neighbor’s son, my biggest enthusiast who himself would be in flight school a few years later, training in the same type of plane that Ilan Ramon flew in the famous raid on the Iraqi nuclear reactor, ran towards me with tears in his eyes, stopping in the road, spreading his arms palms forward slightly to his sides as if to say: “You raised your arms to command the heavens, and now we have received heaven’s answer.”

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Here is Big Bertha in action: