Israel Part 10: Eshchar

(Apologies that this text is the wrong color. I'll take any advice on how to fix it.)

Sometimes I wonder if Joel Rothschild and I are cosmic cousins. Even before we ever met, we were breathing the same Pacific Northwest air. When I was a pre-teen getting my summer camp Jewish education at Camp Solomon Schechter, they were apparently living on the other side of those Olympia Washington woods. This wouldn’t matter a lot if not for the fact that I don’t know a single other person from Olympia.

Joel and I actually met at Oberlin and certainly were friends in the Kosher co-op, but I never expected it to be a continuing friendship. Nevertheless, our paths have crossed again and again, in Portland, for a full year on Vancouver, BC, in Englewood and in Washington DC. The last time I saw them was, I believe, an entire decade ago and then except as distant Facebook friends, we fell out of touch.

When my Facebook account was hacked and I started a second account, many people I re-friended reached out to me privately to see whether or not I was the real me. Joel was one of these people, on October 11, as a side communication we somehow mastered while the world was crashing down around each of us in our own ways.

It was in this exchange that I learned Joel had made Aliyah. What?!

And so began a long dialogue of me turning to Joel with questions about things I was hearing from other people. Joel is crazy smart. They are incredibly informed, articulate and does not get sucked into other people’s world views. 

This has made life very hard work for Joel. While I’m spending this stage of my life feeling fairly settled and stable, Joel takes nothing for granted and is still working very hard to create the intentional life they believe in. 

All this makes Joel into an incredibly valuable resource. I have been turning to them for guidance not only in our private text exchanges but also in the contributions they make on Facebook. I HIGHLY recommend you look for them there. You can say I sent you.

So after my visit with Ofra, I embarked on the first part of this trip I would need to do by myself — take a train to Karmiel. This would involve asking for and paying for a ticket and following directions to change trains. The entire trip would be around three hours. 

Yes, it was scary. Not from fear of things that might happen along the way and more from not having a comfortable grasp on Hebrew or the procedures around trains. For example, at one point the train car got very very crowded. A woman asked me to leave my suitcase in the aisle and scoot over so there was another seat available. I had no idea what she was saying or that she was talking to me, or that suitcases were even allowed to be in the aisle. A man nearby figured it out and just kind of pushed my case into the aisle for me so now I couldn’t even reach it when people walked by. I was a good sport and waited patiently for the train to empty again. It did. Karmiel was end of the line and we had a very empty car by then. By the last stop the only person in the car with me was an Arabic speaking soldier (and his very large gun) who was obviously exhausted. I wanted to give him a pillow or a hug or something.

By the time I arrived and Joel picked me up I think it was about 7:30 at night and quite dark out. As Joel drove us up to Eshchar I could just barely see the silhouettes of the mountains around us and looked forward to the full day that awaited us.

One of the things that makes Joel Joel is that they give long and thorough answers to my questions. I had a lot of questions so I went ahead and asked them all at once. What is Eshchar? What is the “movement” or kibbutz you keep talking about? You made Aliyah when?! How long have you been teaching? Is your kid still in France right now? (long story) How are you doing? We agreed that we might get to some of those, but not all tonight or even tomorrow and — by the way — in planning for this trip we had discussed my co-teaching his English class the next day so we’d better prioritize that.

And with that we started to plan.

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The next morning we headed back down the hill to the school in Karmiel. 

I was a bit nervous, as in any new situation that involves other people, but also because I don’t teach high school. Then again, I had shared with Joel the basics of everything I use in my odd classroom that I thought might come in handy. Joel’s class is an English as a second language class. We decided together that I could introduce paragraph structure with an example and that he could then practice with the kids using the general unit content of “irony” and to create with them a paragraph on a familiar topic they’d discussed previously. The topic sentence was something I never would have considered using: Jonathan Larson’s death was deeply ironic.

The class was a complete success. The kids were very curious about me, testing whether I actually knew any Hebrew or not and were extremely curious about the oddity of my name and its origin. We had some technical problems while discovering we might have to change rooms and waiting for all the kids to arrive. I used the time to learn there names and get a feel for their personalities. 

One of those personalities was rather enormous. This child interrupted almost constantly. It was a little unclear to me whether the other kids minded or not. At one point when Joel was engaging with him I leaned over to another child and asked a question so they’d have a chance to engage instead. They gestured towards the other child and said to me, “not until N- is done.” So even though it seemed like there were no rules around this, this other child respected N-‘s turn. 

After I finished my introduction and Joel took over, I used one of my favorite classroom management tools: proximity. N- continued to interrupt and, with he had nothing left to say, started humming. I went and sat next to him. I didn’t say anything. I wasn’t upset. I didn’t actively try to stop him, but just by sitting next to him as calmly as I could, he actually settled a little and the humming got a bit quieter.

I often enjoy watching other people teach, especially when they clearly are enjoying themselves. I was perfectly happy to take a backseat at that point, but when Joel started to wrap up the lesson I looked at my watch.

“Don’t we have five more minutes?”

I had to race a bit, but I was fired up. I can do a lot in five minutes. I circled the word “but” each time it appeared in the paragraph —which was several because the paragraph was about irony. I defined transition words and named the differences between the words "but," "because" and "so." Then I told everyone that before class was dismissed they would each have to construct a sentence using one of those words. They could use the sentence starter “It is raining” as a starter or they could make up a sentence from scratch. They ate it up, easily thinking of sentences and, I hoped, getting could practice on the differences between these approaches. When we got to the last student she said in Hebrew that she didn’t think she could do it and didn’t want to try.

“I’ll leaving this to you,” I whispered to Joel, not knowing the child well enough to make my isn’t judgment call.

Joel thought for a moment, sat down at her level, and then brilliantly said, “that’s fine, but right now you’re the one with the power to let us end class.”

With help from a friend she constructed parts of a sentence. I fed it back to her, just a few words at a time so she could repeat them sequentially. She smiled shyly and, with that, we were done.

******

We’d earned a good hearty brunch and went out to eat in some ancient tiny town I don’t know the name of. “Old like Safed” Joel said. I geeked out on the gorgeous view and we settled in just in time for a downpour.

I’ve been training recently as a teaching coach and, with Joel’s permission, exercised some of those skills while we ate. Then conversation dipped back into the questions I’d asked the night along with many more. We talked, went back to his apartment where I took a nap. Then we talked again, talked while we took a nice long walk around Eshchar, rustled together dinner and talked some more until evening, gradually getting deeper and deeper into the hard stuff. By the time evening came,I actually reached the point where I couldn’t hear or say another word. It was utterly exhausting and it was wonderful.

It’s not often I have that kind of time with people. It’s also not often that we have that much conversation content to share. Would we have had as much to say if we weren’t struggling so much right now? Maybe, but I’m not sure if I would have been able to maintain it if there wasn’t this emotional need right more. We talked about many things besides the war, and yet everything was related to it too. It was very hard to say goodbye the next morning. I hope we speak again a little sooner than another decade.