 I have been in love with her since I was very young.
“She” is not a person, but a place.
She is 16 years older than me, and yes, she just celebrated a significant birthday.
When I was a child, I was taught to love her, I was taken backwards and forward to visit her, to hike her different landscapes, to hear about her history and discover the tastes and smells of her present.
Getting to know her properly involved long, boiling-hot drives from one end of her to the other, in a car with no air conditioning, having to drink sickly sweet juices to avoid dehydration. I swam in her sea in her most southern point when it didn’t even have a traffic light, let alone a huge hotel zone. I learnt little snippets of her language which have since entered the deepest recesses of my soul. Her songs that I learnt have echoed through my childhood and through my heart since then. Songs that still evoke naïve joy.
Then I decided to deepen our relationship. I stayed with her for a year as an eighteen year old. My world was turned upside down by the elation of the freedom away from home coupled with a large dose of ideology. Our romance blossomed.
The more time we spent together, the deeper the connection and sense of belonging. Now it was a fully committed relationship. I built my family in her capital city, ironically named, the City of Peace. But, after a long time, she changed. I felt she had just been too intense for me at that time, too tumultuous, and I’ve distanced myself from her but I am still pulled, still in love – however passionate our relationship maybe. Now we all know that she’s not an easy character. She was born out of conflict and trauma and is still trying to recover from this, to stabilise and to start looking at herself accurately, start to face her internal conflicts – maybe she hasn’t really started addressing them properly even now.
She lives in a really difficult neighbourhood, with many neighbours who would love to evict her. But as she grows up, she has leant that not all her neighbours are the same. She has have learnt from them and some have learnt from her too and have even taken risks in their own homes to make a form of reconciliation with her. I have admired her when she has taken courageous steps to compromise with her neighbours, to retreat for the sake of better relations, often following tragically difficult disputes.
Her personality is often defined, driven even, by this tension with her neighbours, particularly, her relationship with those neighbours who live closest to her, on her back door. Anything that happens to one of her neighbours affects her too and she’s always keeping an eye out… Sometimes in proportion but sometimes excessively.
At the moment, she’s particularly watching two neighbours – one small neighbour to her south west on the sea and the other to her northern border. Neither neighbours come from a very stable family, pretty dysfunctional and fragmented families actually but it is with them that she will need to compromise. We are all affected by the stability of our neighbours - if they have structural issues, landslides or subsidence, it affects our homes and our families. It is an illusion to think that what happens the other side of a joint wall can be separated off.
We don’t choose our neighbours and we don’t choose our enemies but it is with those neighbours that we have to talk and negotiate and make peace with – however much some of them don’t want us around, however much some of their elected representatives use despicable tactics. And in the mean time, I wish she were more brave and would recognise that she has made grave mistakes and I wish she would take responsibility for these and help those in dire poverty. They really need her help – her aid.
My object of love can be breathtakingly courageous, generous, visionary – sometimes I want to shout “she’s mine! She’s good! I’m proud of her”. But sometimes, I am frustrated, disappointed and saddened by her. When I first met her, she was only in her late teens – she could get away with youthful decisions. Now she is already older, already should be more mature, more self-critical. I wish she could gather up more strength and more courage and take the risks that an adult has to take, to move into the next stage of maturity. To speak to those she would prefer to avoid.
Her name means to struggle with God and we know she has had her struggles – those of us who are in love with her, or even, are fond of her, can be critical friends, can support her by challenging her – with love, with understanding and we don’t always have to agree with her. Challenging those we love is a far more admirable form of love than just acquiescence. It enables our loved one to grow, but still to know that she is loved.
She has always been beautiful, charismatic and enticing. I know I will always be in love with her. She is Israel.
This sermon was given at North Western Reform Synagogue, Shabbat Bahar, 5768
Trackback(0)
 |
TrackBack URI for this entry
Subscribe to this comment's feed