Whats Happening Behind Closed Doors In Israel

The Story You Cant Read In The Newspapers

• Story four - every morning before the war I woke up and watched Israeli television Channel 2. I did this because I wanted to improve my Hebrew and get a feeling of what was going on in the country. Every morning there was something like our “Today show” or “Good morning America” with these two hosts that dressed casually and engaged their guests in seemingly frivolous conversations. The programming was interrupted every 30 minutes for hard news. But as soon as the war started - those talk show people disappeared from the air. 24/6 (because they don’t air TV on Shabbat), the programming changed to full time coverage of the war. I want to share with you some of the things that happened on the news there, that we don’t see here.
• One story was of an Arab Israeli father whose two boys were killed by a ketusha rocket fired by Hezbollah. He was shouting into the television in Arabic that he wanted to his children's deaths to be counted as Lebanese casualties.
• Another time an Israeli Arab in Haifa grabbed the TV reporters microphone and said , “I want to say something to my fellow Muslims around the world - what Hezbollah is doing is a big mistake. We love living in Israel. We are Arabs, Muslims, Druz, Jews and Christians – we all live together in Haifa. This is a big mistake what you are doing.”
• One other thing that happened on the news that really affected me was how the newscasters handle the death of soldiers, and those who are captured. It reminded me a bit of what the NY Times did after 9/11 – when each person was profiled. One morning I witnessed newscasters speaking to the fathers of Shlomo Goldwasser and Noam Shalit, two of the men abducted and still missing. I was so moved by how news casters in Israel talk to the parents, how they let them express themselves, they didn’t rush them off the air, they allowed for silences, they showed pictures of their sons on the screen and asked about who they are as people, and they allowed for an outpouring of real emotion. It was very touching.
• Last story - Last Shabbat I was in Modiin, Israel visiting a friend who made aliyah, married an Israeli, and has four children. Her oldest child Maytal is 15 going on 16 and she has decided to volunteer her time to Magain David Adom (MDA), which is the Red Cross in Israel. And so what did she do this summer? She went away with other 16-year-olds going into grade 11 for a week of “camp” in Israel. And what do they do in their week of “camp”? They watched films of actual suicide bombers, and the cleanup afterwards, and the triage that took place, and how the ambulances handle the emergencies, and how the social workers handle things. Here they were, young children witnessing this kind of stuff. They learned how to do a tracheotomy, how to relieve a body of pressure by putting a hole in the side of someone’s chest cavity and how to administer an IV. And then at the end of their week they actually had a simulation of what it would be like if a pigua, a bomb, went off and they had to run to the scene to help. Maytal said that there were children whose “jobs” it was to scream at them as if it were a real pigua, others who were ambulance drivers, others who were playing the wounded and dead, trapped underneath cars. This is what our Israeli teens are doing with their volunteer time in the summer.

Maytal told us this story around the Shabbat table and I noticed that her younger siblings left the table because they were disturbed by her stories. Toward the end of our meal, she finally came to a realization. She said “Abba (dad) this war is going to end but the situation is not ever going to end.” And all the adults sat there around the table and nodded our heads, we didn’t know what to say because we all knew that she was right.

As I left Israel I felt pangs of guilt. A week ago I sat with a colleague Rabbi Rich Kischen who was ordained with me and later made aliyah with his wife and three children. He said that when he was in the States, every time things like this happened in Israel he would look at his wife Cara and say “I wish I was there.” Then he turned to me and said “Michelle now I am here and it sucks, but there is no other place I’d rather be right now than Israel.” And I thought to myself, that’s why he lives there and I don’t. And I feel badly, because it’s people half my age fighting a war on my behalf – on behalf of all of us Jews. For the sake of the Jewish homeland. But it’s not where I want to spend my life.

Given this truth, we each need to realize how much we need to support our fellow Israelis in Israel. This week, please donate your funds to The Israel Defense Forces, Magen David Adom, or the Union for Reform Judaism’s Emergency Israel Fund. It’s the least we can do here in the States. The information is on your seats.

I hope these stories brought light to what people are going through there - right now. And I hope that you make a donation immediately to help alleviate some of the pain in Israel.