This morning, I awoke with the story below in my mind. As I rummaged among my old computer files to find it, I wondered if my remembering was connected with some time alert. It was. Yesterday's anniversary of Rabin's assassination in Tel Aviv. I try to pay attention to such synchronicities, and so I am posting this today with a prayer for the transition of death. May we all face it and treat it with honor and grace.
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"Where were you when you heard the news?" My friend asks me the infamous question. "Well, I'd just come back from a swim at the Queen Mother's Sports Centre and was about to eat breakfast when I turned on the TV - suddenly alone in a strange Westminster flat I am racked with uncontrollable sobs. This spontaneous reaction to the news of Princess Diana's death in late August 1997 kept me from cynicism as, through the following week, an astonishing public response was reported. It is now October 1997: I am reminded of another equally tragic autumn day I will never forget. The day my father died aged just 57 from cancer.
Memorable events tend to be strongly linked to the places we are in when they occur, and vice versa. If something powerful happens when you are travelling, it may connect you with a 'foreign' place in irrevocable ways. Two years ago, in need of some radical change, I found myself setting off for travels of no fixed agenda or timescale in Israel and then South Africa. Looking back, I suspect it was no accident that I chose those two rapidly changing countries as backdrop for my own personal crises - landscapes and cultures that would provide many a metaphor for transformation.
So it was that on 4 November 1995, I was sitting with my Israeli hosts, in Tel Aviv, watching Crocodile Dundee, when bright ribbons of Hebrew lettering flashed across the top of the screen. My hosts said nothing, but soon grim stillness filled the room, flattening the rowdy pace of the film. Eventually, the confused scenes that accompany any tragedy were broadcast. "Rabin has been shot dead," and the nation, like our room, is silent with stunned pain. The handsomely stoic face of my host's grandfather, reference to the 'father of the nation', and the still sharp pain of my own father's untimely death, all gathered behind the tears that welled up in me.
In the days that followed, political naivity not withstanding, I felt a part of the sad emotion that made one country seem as one family. In the fateful city square, everyone felt their private bereavements as they lit public candles. Like the flowers for Diana, now on every London street corner, the condolence candles burned everywhere. Sweetness and light pours over wounds that run deeper than anyone could admit until those two separate tragic moments. Diane was a children's princess. In Israel, the most visible and vocal mourners were the youth, singing all night and writing poems on the walls.
But, after the soft-centred grief, came days of increasingly dark revelations about the deep divides between Jews secular and Jews religious. Sleeping on the floor of a Tel Aviv hostel when an earthquake made its way up the Rift Valley, I remember grumbling at my companion to stop shaking the mattress. Then stormy days and wild seas hit the city's beach promenade. Natural, political and personal upheavals came together in disturbing unison.
Israel seemed indeed to be built on shifting sands - a top layer of American glitz-and-tech over profound layers of ancient spirit mystery, all moving and mixing with disturbing vibrancy. Not understanding Hebrew, I was caught in the confusion of unsubstantiable impressions. Wandering unconsciously through Old Cities that are jumbles of ancient history, or Big Orange Tel Aviv with its garish players strutting a dusty concrete stage, I wondered at the tolerant muddle of races that seemed to characterize Israel.
I wrote my mother back in England to stay away from the winter's blizzards and the IRA bombs there, while Sky News fed me reports on devastating oil slicks, dirty divorces, doomed trees. So, bombs in Paris, London and Jerusalem. I noted that Israelis were expert at the controlled explosion of suspicious objects, and found in that a tough metaphor for my own inner challenges.
Israel became the perfect training ground for an English girl turning suppressed anger into positive fierceness. Walking the length of the beach front when you're female with fair locks is no mean feat. People are straightforward there: they do not hesitate to ask if I am Jewish (I am not), but there's no judgement in it. I think they are like those toughest of plants that can colonize barren ground and still produce brilliant blooms. Whereas, I feel more like a creeper, clingy and smiling at the same time.
It's spring and Purim, the Jewish children's holiday of Masquerade. I read that it is an excuse for carnival that has more murderous origins, now obscured by a complexity of religions and traditions. Feeling homesick, I have booked an immediate return flight. When the news comes over the radio, I am in the dance studio lost in the movement.
Everyone stops for a brief moment to listen, that same stunned stillness, and the class continues in silence. Back at the apartment, with my bags packed, I am again watching tragic TV. The rescue services are clearing glass and picking up body parts from the crowded mall where families were shopping for holiday fare. When I get on that plane, I am sick with anguish and within a month I am drawn irresistably to return to Israel.
Perhaps the country represents to me the challenge of maturity - how to deal with the deaths of parents, to accept compromises and responsibilities, to lead lives of selfless dignity, all without losing a childlike sense of joy and hope. Later, employed at a new spa up on the beautiful heights of a kibbutz in the Judean hills, I was immersed in another aspect of Israeli community.
Then, a helicopter carrying young soldiers back from the battle zone on the Lebanon border crashed and the whole country went into the deepest mourning I have ever witnessed. Mothers of soldiers not killed came to me for massage and the emotions spilled out of otherwise stalwart hearts. It was almost more than I could stand but for that irrevocable, inexplicable connection. Being in Westminster for the fortnight of our very British tragedy may have bound me back with my own culture. Yet, I still feel drawn to the desert country; and South Africa, well that's another soul story.
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