Rabbis’ Message: Dispatch from Israel: January 6, 2024
As you might have read, the weeks over winter break, the Ben-Shoshan family is traveling in Israel in order to achieve our second-eldest, Aidan’s, goal of becoming a b’mitzvah at a place with “Roman ruins and an epic hike”. Indeed, he was thrilled to read Torah on top of Masada during Hanukkah. While our family looks forward to celebrating with you as we head back (see below for when we are hosting Shabbat in honor of Aidan’s milestone!), this trip has also given Rabbi Lauren a chance to catch up with a few friends around the country.
Our friend, Iftach Ofir is a performance artist. As a bilingual writer, producer, and working actor, we were lucky enough to be in the audience for one of Iftach’s sold out rap-musical performances, Shmuel. Though set in Hell, the show explores the redemptive power of love and loss. His upcoming one-man show, Damn Me (available for travel), which he wrote post-October 7th, explores the nature of evil and repentance, forgiveness and personal evolution. Like Iftach, it is imaginatively, incisively raw, and hilarious. While he works as a part of the one of the most accomplished theater troupes in Jerusalem, Iftach dedicated his spare time to write, act, and produce a show that delves deeply into this aspect of recovery from tragedy. The horrific murder of his beloved cousin, who was a paramedic in Kibbutz Be’eri, on October 7th was one of motivating factors that sparked his newest exploration of how we might come to peace with painful tragedies, evil, and the outcomes of war.
Currently, as a whole, the art scene in Israel is both beautiful and heart wrenching. In addition to incredible fringe theater offerings, street art emanates emotion from almost every place we visited. Granted, street art has always been a vibrant part of Israel’s culture, from home-spun murals covering kibbutzim to large scale works by impressive and compassionate organizations like Artists4Israel. Certainly, Israelis are using public space art as an outlet to express the wide variety of reactions to and recovery from the past 18 months. Yellow, the chosen color to remember the hostages and deceased from October 7th, pops all over the country. Yellow painted cars - discarded and destroyed during the Nova Festival attack and now repurposed as remembrance sculptures - line Highway 2, stacked in surprising stops along the road. Empty yellow chairs, representing all those still missing, sit at the entrances of places like Kibbutz Yagur and the traffic circles of Kibbutz Ein Gedi, in theaters and restaurants, and other public spaces. Hand painted portraits and thoughtfully-picked photographs of the kidnapped appear on stickers and posters, dotted on cars and street-light poles and park benches. Art is everywhere; some of it explores grief, some of it, like Iftach’s play, explores forgiveness and how we can possibly construct a better future from here.
As we traveled around the country, visiting friends and exploring the safe places in this beloved land, Gerard Richter’s quote popped into my head, every time I witnessed each sticker and provocatively placed chair: “art is the highest form of hope.” Considering the amount of art that we are blessed to experience here, I certainly pray that spark of hope will return in full force sometime soon.
