of “The Honey and the Bee Sting,” and then starts singing along, loudly, whole-heartedly, in Hebrew, in the privacy of her car. She knows every word of this song and of every song on this tape — she has sung them year after year with her friends at Yechiel and Miri’s annual Independence Day sing-song — and when it comes to the chorus of this one,
Please, good Lord,
Preserve all these.
The honey and the bee sting,
The bitter and the sweet,
she feels like she’s singing it together with them, no longer alone in her car in Canada, in galut.
But then the song ends, the car is silent while she flips the tape, and maybe because she is alone, and in galut, the words of this song now strike her as odd. She wonders who would want to preserve the bitter parts of life along with the sweet? Who would pray to God asking for that? And why, if you want a bit of honey in your tea, should you first have to suffer the pain of a bee sting? Is this what we in Israel have come to believe now? That we only deserve to be happy, or to live, if first we count out x number of pain tokens per year, like poker chips, to pay to God? That’s sick. It’s like domestic violence — like letting someone beat you so you can have his “love.”
She does understand, though, all those battered women who stay with their men. Because her love for Israel is something like that. Unconditional. The way many people love their family members. You know all their faults, but still you love them. There are things about Israel she can’t stand. At the top of the list, the occupation, and this government’s treatment of Palestinians. (Another definition of domestic violence: domestic policies that are violent.) But it doesn’t matter: Israel is her love. I am my beloved’s, and my beloved is mine.
One of her boyfriends in Israel, Micah, once joked that Israel was the only real love in her life. Recalling this now, she knows it is basically true. She has loved various men, just as she currently loves Bobby. But nothing has ever come close to her passion for Israel. Israel was her first love, and it’s the love of her life. Only there has she ever felt fully alive or at home. She never felt at home in her parents’ house. It wasn’t a “bad” home, or anything like that. There was nothing particularly wrong with her family. Her parents loved her. But they were both busy running their little dry goods store, and for as long as she could remember she’d let herself into a silent, empty house after school. When her parents finally did come home at seven-thirty, they were tired after being on their feet for twelve hours, serving customers. There was a quick supper, and she did homework while her mother did housework and her father paid bills. Her parents always had more to do than there was time for. And her mother was short-tempered and given to moods.
But then Judith found Israel. The summer she was twelve she went to a Zionist summer camp, and after that she never felt that loneliness again. She was part of something larger than herself. Her life had meaning and purpose. But not in just a dutiful way. Rather in the way that life has meaning and purpose when you’re in love. She fell in love with Israel. With its soul, but also — a few years later, on her first visit — with its body. She loved this country’s red earth, its mountain-deserts, streams, forests, birds, fish, and flowers. She loved the star-studded night sky, with its sliver of moon lying horizontally on the bottom like a cradle, instead of standing vertically, like in Canada. She even loved the air in Israel and the water — including the salt-heavy water of the Dead Sea, the lowest point on earth. In Canada she’d always found geography and history boring, scoring low on her high-school leaving exams in both these subjects. But in Israel she was fascinated by every mountain range, by every excavated tell or Biblical battlefield. Because it was hers. It was about her people, and it told the story of what had happened to them, and therefore to her.
One morning, on one of the many nature-and-archaeology trips she took with the Israeli Nature Protection Society, she awakened in her sleeping bag on the cold desert sand near Timna, the location of King Solomon’s mines, and also a modern reconstruction of the Israelites’ tabernacle during their forty-year desert journey. Everyone else in the group was still asleep, their sleeping bags dotting the desert floor like multicoloured rocks, and she watched the mountains gradually turn visible in the early morning light, until the whole valley was bathed in a strange grey-yellow haze. Nothing else seemed awake, or even alive, except her and an ibex, its horn arced backwards, staring at her. She followed it. After ten minutes, she abruptly stopped walking. The sun, a brilliant orange, illuminated the mountain before her, making it radiate in the sun, and the whole world was perfectly silent and still. Suspended, as if waiting for something. Feeling rather foolish, she said, “I promise.” She didn’t know exactly what she was promising, she couldn’t have articulated it if you’d asked her. But she had promised herself to this land.
Of course, she’s never told anyone about this. It would have sounded too corny — ridiculous even. Who wouldn’t laugh at a too-earnest pretty young woman swearing herself to a desert at dawn? No one, she thinks now as she drives. But from that point on, her life — as if with a will of its own — bent in a new direction. That glowing throbbing orange of a vow sat in the centre of her like a hot coal she had swallowed, burning and transforming her all the way down. Nothing mattered to her anymore except taking her place in Jewish history and on Jewish geography. Coincidentally, her cousin wrote her around then that history and geography were now being taught together in Canadian high schools under the heading Social Sciences, which felt exactly right to Judith. All she wanted to do at this point was to help realize the Zionist dream. To come home again after two thousand years of exile — of galut, which she noticed laughingly back then, rhymed with dissolute and pollute. To rebuild the land, and on it to reunite all the Jews scattered and in exile from every corner of the globe. As soon as she knew this was what she wanted, she found herself in a circle of young people like herself — Zionist dreamers, new immigrants from everywhere: the United States, England, Australia, Argentina, Chile, Russia, France, Switzerland, Italy, Finland, Holland, Algeria, Morocco, India, Ethiopia, even China. She learned scraps of a dozen new languages, heard music and tasted foods she’d never encountered in Canada. It’s ironic, she wrote then to her father, newly a widower. I was afraid living in a Jewish state would seem culturally narrow and parochial after Canada. But here I’m for the first time living a truly multicultural life.
She swerves — something dark and furry darted onto the highway — a cat? a groundhog? — and she’s missed running over it by mere inches. Lucky there were no cars near her on the road. She looks around and gets her bearings: she’s only about fifteen minutes away from Bobby’s house. The traffic is thickening again now, but so far so good. That’s Bruria’s expression, “so far so good,” and Judith smiles thinking of her. But quickly the smile fades. Yesterday she got a long email from Bruria, and things in Israel are terrible now. Economically, politically, every way. At least, though, all their mutual friends are okay — “okay” meaning none of them were hurt in the latest suicide bombing three days ago at a café where some of them hang out. Five people were blown to bits and eight more lost arms, legs, parts of their faces. But her friends, who that day chose to meet elsewhere, were mercifully untouched.
Bruria’s email also gave Judith an update on their friends. Yechiel and Miri, she wrote, are doing all right, still demonstrating against the occupation every Friday afternoon in front of the prime minister’s residence, as Judith sometimes used to do with them. Usually they’d get a turnout of about forty people, but last week there were just fifteen because of the nearby bombing that morning. Still, that’s not too bad, wrote Bruria, for a moribund peace movement gasping its final breaths. Rina and Michel were there, too, and so was Yaacov, who’s starting his Ph.D. in archaeology next month, and is excited but nervous. Sammy didn’t come — he had pneumonia but is feeling better now. Then on Saturday Tamar and Benny went with some friends in their broken-down van to visit a Palestinian family whose house had been demolished by the army, to help them rebuild it. Yonina usually goes with them, but this time she declined. She’s fed up with politics, and says she doesn’t believe anymore that these
