MountainMornings

I was going to write about our glamping getaway with friends to Wildwood. But then I thought I’d have to start off before our Granville, TN jaunt, with our trip to the Emergency Department of the Bride’s hospital. And then Hamas attacked Israel.

At sunrise on Saturday the war began. The terrorists entered the country by land, sea and motorized paragliders – launching over 2,000 rockets and overwhelming Israel’s Iron Dome defenses. The descendants of Abraham are caught once again in a biblical battle and my heart aches for all the innocent Jewish and Arab citizens who are caught in the middle.

But make no mistake, their hatred runs deep.

Before glamping with friends last week, our whole southern family met up with my step-brother Eric at the Land Between the Lakes in Kentucky. If you recall, the Flapper married Eric’s father, her third husband Mr B, when I was in middle school. He was a distinguished judge in town, and he and Bob’s father shared the honor of being first and second presidents of the Dover Jewish Center Brotherhood.

Eric and I have been wanting our Grands to get together forever; he has three granddaughters living close by in St Louis, about the same age as our Bug and Pumpkin. Eric spoke fluent Hebrew and worked on a Kibbutz after college. When Vietnam happened he was drafted, and because he is a pacifist, he served as a med-evac Huey pilot. He introduced me to Arlo Guthrie and the fine art of passive resistance.

I was looking forward to hearing his thoughts on the politics of Israel today, on the extreme Orthodoxy that would like to turn Israel into a theocracy like Iran… before Saturday.

Many years ago I was visiting Eric and his wife Bev with the Flapper for their daughter’s Bat Mitzvah. He’d been a practicing dentist for over 30 years at that time. We were sitting in their living room with friends of theirs from Israel, one a young lawyer and judge who I’ll call Anat. I’d been complaining about Newark airport, about an Army soldier being searched before boarding our plane. It was the early 90s, long before TSA. And Anat said,

“You don’t think they would dress like a soldier?”

No, I hadn’t thought of that. Just like I didn’t think a plane hijacking meant a suicide mission. But her eyes changed, her posture changed, her essence changed before my eyes – Anat became a soldier. And so I immediately thought of Anat’s beautiful family in Ramat HaSharon, Israel on Saturday. I texted Bev to see if they were OK, and for now they are safe. I checked her facebook page but it was all in Hebrew, nothing past mid-September when the Holy Days began.

They should have been celebrating the end of Sukkot, a Jewish Thanksgiving and more. Last Saturday marked the end of reading the Torah in synagogues everywhere, and opening the book again to the first of the Five Books of Moses. It is a joyous time. Instead they are under attack from an enemy that wants to annihilate OUR people, the Jewish people. Their hatred runs deep. The British tried to draw boundaries on an area of nomadic tribes with fluid borders. But since shortly after the Holocaust, since 1948, Israel has been a sovereign state, a democracy, the size of New Jersey, surrounded by Arab states.

Make no mistake. Israelis do not slaughter Olympic athletes, or fly jets into buildings. They don’t strap bombs on themselves and walk into markets or behead journalists and children to post on Facebook live. Hamas must be stopped.

The sun is rising on part of my family in California – can you tell who is Jewish?