Home on a High Wire
A few days before our flight, while still in Borneo, we had
just arrived at our hotel room in Cuching where we had an air conditioner and a
TV to keep us company for a brief time, before heading out on our next
adventure into the darkly beautiful, chaotic world that we found ourselves
within. On the TV were digital-rags, like Al Jazera, the BBC, and even CNN.
They were all bashing Israel and promoting Hamas’s agenda by exploiting the
civilian shield casualties for gain and profit. Yes, this is my own philosophy
poking its head out from under the rubble of confusion, but they were speaking
of MY home and MY children, so I do have a vested interest in the matter.
Before we turned the TV off with disgust, however, we briefly watched a report
about how at least six to eight masked gunmen wearing black T-shirts and
camouflage pants had attacked a popular tourist resort in… Borneo, taking
someone hostage and killing another. I took a moment to contemplate; whether we were in danger or not; WE were in Borneo!
So, you can imagine that returning to Israel, where my own
children are trained in the IDF to protect my country against tyranny, terror,
and chaos, and to do it with the utmost of moral and ethical fiber, continuing
their education where I left off, it would have been likely that I could have
been so relieved to have landed that I might have had an almost irresistible
urge to actually kiss the ground. It was weird, the idea of putting my lips
where feet, tires, and the refuse of living had fallen. As I walked out of the
plane and down the ramp into the airport, I kept thinking that there would be a
place where I could put my lips down and press them, even intimately, satiating
this strange emotional desire. We entered the terminal building, pushed our way
through passport control, collected our travel loot, and made it outside to the
escalator that led to the train. As it turned out, the refuse-stained ground
was not so very appealing as to accommodate a kiss, but it did feel good on my feet, so good in fact
that I couldn’t stop smiling; we were HOME.
Before we flew to Malaysia, we spent two weeks in Bali,
Indonesia, where the view on Israel is also tainted by politics and mass media.
Bali is a Hindu island surrounded by a Muslim world view. The Balinese are
fierce in their belief, as they would have to be in order to stop the tide of
Muslim influence across their land, but even they couldn’t access truth in
terms of the current geo-political goings-on. We told almost nobody throughout
our trip that we were from Israel, including our guides, but we did ask our
driver and guide once about Israel and what he thought about it. I had
conversed with him on many occasions about religious philosophy, spiritual
healing, and the cultural / historical underpinnings of Balinese society, and
he had a lot of things to share on the subjects. I reaffirmed my understanding
that in Hinduism there are many gods, three of which are at the top of the
echelon, and that they each share equal status, like a trinity, or something, but that it was only important to choose one for
certain things, like success in business, success in procreation, success in
correcting karma, etc., etc., etc. Our driver, Augusto, said that he didn’t
understand why the media said what it did about Israel. He didn’t understand
how a people, a whole country, could be so savage, so completely ruthless and
totalitarian. He talked about Israelis as Jews, that they did illegal things,
and that they had a lot of money; we then changed the subject.
In Borneo, we got close enough to one of our guides to ask
him about Israel. He was our kayak guide, and it seems that being stuck on a
jungle river surrounded by bizarre creatures, evidently, allows for more
intimacy. He had grown up in the jungle with a native family. His father was
still an Animist (to our guide a pagan, since he had converted to Anglicanism).
Our guide converted, he explained, because he couldn’t stand the way the dead
were treated by his father’s tradition. Evidently, they were left to rot for a
period of time until someone had the necessity to move the body, then taken to
a makeshift cemetery where an often times partial cremation would take place,
followed by wild animals finishing the job of decomposition. When we asked him
about Israel, and whether he had heard of it, he replied that it was always in
the news. He didn’t trust the media, but had no other source of information
about it. He then went on to say that he didn’t understand how a people, a nation, could be so depraved,
so unjust, so completely out of touch; we changed the subject again.
Slowly, we began to acclimate to the seemingly chaotic
cacophony around us once we arrived home, in Israel, but were traumatized each
time that a siren would go off after Hamas broke the latest ceasefire; or when
a bright young man protecting us while in service with the IDF, a young man
very much like my own two boys, would be killed and/or captured for ransom; or
somewhere in the West, where Israel was inexplicably made out to be a totalitarian
regime of racists stealing land and lives from an indigenous population,
in-turn sparking rampant anti-Semitism and racial violence across Europe and
even the US. Acclimating, it seems, had to do with where we sat while
processing the insanity that the world was spewing forth. We weren’t flying
over the Ukraine with impeccable timing. We weren’t wandering through terraced
rice fields and waterfalls in Indonesia. We weren’t going down river rapids in
a kayak on the island of Borneo. We weren’t sitting behind locked doors in a tiny overly air conditioned room in
Malaysia. We weren’t having to hide our Jewishness in Europe. We weren’t even
having to hide our Israeliness, or to defend our country’s right to protect
itself to friends and strangers in the States. We were
protected and safe from uncertainty and chaos in the world, with our loved
ones, within the ancient Jewish homeland of Israel; we were home.
Shabbat Shalom!
