There is little room in today’s news coverage for ten-year-old memories. The instant, the current, the now is what we want. We want to read about events as they happen, described by witnesses who are there, and as we read we scan the page hoping that the words aren’t all there is; we want video of whatever has exploded or broken or happened.
There is a lesser, but still respected, place for the legitimate past — childhood remembrances of times gone by, fading recollections of worlds lost. What’s in between is untouchable: too old to be relevant, but too new to have accumulated the patina of authenticity that real history requires.
And yet, as rockets rained down on southern Israel recently, I found myself in between. The town names that filled my Twitter feed and the images on TV brought me back exactly 10 years, to the months I spent in those same war-weary, war-expectant places.
Eilat, where I celebrated my 26th birthday exalting in unknown November warmth, was briefly thought to be a target four days after my 36th birthday, but it turned out the resort town had been spared.
To protect has always seemed to me to be the first duty of the parent. Living in Ann Arbor, Michigan, with my husband and three young children, I knew what it was I wanted to shield my children from: violence, fear, social disorder so profound that it would unsettle their very sense of safety in the world.
Last year, when I began to volunteer in an inner-city school in Detroit, my challenge was not to explain to my own children the violence the Detroit kids faced on a daily basis — that did not even occur to me to discuss; it was way too scary. Instead, I had to confront the unbearable injustice of limited opportunity, as well as the effects of an inheritance of racism. It was painful to me to talk with my eight-year-old daughter about the fact that the Civil Rights movement, which she had studied, had left some problems unsolved. “Til today?,” she asked, in disbelief.
In late August, my husband, Ori, and I took our children to Israel, where we planned to spend a sabbatical year. Both of us had lived there previously, Ori for eight years, serving a full-term in the army in the early 1990s, and myself for two years in the same era, with many summers spent in Israel since. I was also born in Israel to American parents who lived here at the time, and my grandparents and paternal aunt and her family all made their lives here. My children have all visited before, too. They speak and understand Hebrew to varying degrees, and when we were still living in Ann Arbor, they attended schools that were replete with Israel-activities and study.
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