Note: This is the third article of TC Jewfolk Editor Lonny Goldsmith’s trip to Israel with UpStart and iCenter’s “A Mifgash that Matters,” which is being put on in partnership with The Jewish Education Project and in collaboration with The Jewish Agency for Israel and made possible through support from the Jim Joseph Foundation. Read more: Part 1 | Part 3
TEL AVIV – When I landed at Ben Gurion Airport 10 months ago everything felt different. That makes sense in context; life in Israel before Oct. 7 and after are different places. But it’s not just the airport and arriving in the Holy Land. Everything feels different.
The walk down the marble ramp to passport control has the names, ages and faces of hostages still held by Hamas. The posters are, rightly ubiquitous around Tel Aviv. Maybe it was a rainy Monday morning in February, but the vibes walking around the city felt off.
There’s a reason for that.
A poster of Hersh Goldberg-Polin, taken hostage by Hamas on Oct. 7, at Ben Gurion Airport in Tel Aviv. (Photo by Lonny Goldsmith/TC Jewfolk).
As one of the Israeli cohort leaders of “A Mifgash that Matters,” the program that brought me to Israel this week, put it during our opening session Monday evening: “We feel alone.” Another said: “Don’t underestimate what it took to come here and put your whole self in.”
It takes a lot of work to do that.
As we introduced ourselves to the others in the cohort, we were asked to use up to a few words to describe what we were feeling. While many of us used “grateful,” we also used “anxious,” “heavy,” and “melancholy”
We will spend the week “doubling down on building relationships with each other and the people we meet.” Artist Hanoch Piven spoke to the group before we split up and created an art project in Piven’s collage style. It was a fun, and incredibly thought-provoking exercise. Even if my attempt at art looked like something my kids made in preschool.
Piven told the group one thing that stuck out to me today: “When you hit a wall, it’s time to breathe and rethink; challenge assumptions.” That feels like a pretty good metaphor for so many of the talking points that people hold on to when it comes to the nuance-free chants and talking points that surround our post-Oct. 7 world.
Tuesday afternoon we’re going to meet with the survivors of the massacre that took place at a moshav near the Gaza border, in their temporary, relocated home at a hotel in Tel Aviv. One of the trip leaders used a quote from a friend who is a Holocaust survivor: “When you hear from a witness, you become a witness.”
Starting tomorrow, we become witnesses.
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