I was on my to Shaare Zedek Hospital just around the corner and with an anonymous cafeteria that’s a quiet place to write.
On the way a woman asks me if a particular parking lot staircase is a shortcut. Though it looks like it should be I happen to know it’s not because I tried it once.
“It looks like it should be but it’s not ” I say in broken American Hebrew.
She answers in perfect English “You sure?”
“It’s the long short road ” I say comfortable now that we’re landsleit.
We walk together. We start to talk about the weather how it’s always the opposite of what you plan.
“If I hang out the laundry it rains ” I say.
“Ah the human race always trying to control its fate ” she answers.
I’m a little perplexed. I thought we’d just emphasized how we’re not in control.
She goes on. “You feel like if you hang out the laundry you’re in control of the weather.”
I like her. She asks “Where you from?”
“New Jersey. You?”
“Flushing.”
When she says Flushing I know exactly where she means because I was born there and spent every visit to my grandmother looking out the window the kind you opened with a handle with two bronze fish sitting under that ledge.
“My mother’s from Flushing ” I say.
She asks how old my mother is and says she’s “the same age.”
We move on to New Jersey but she says she only knows “from Teaneck and up.”
And then we get to the “How long you here?” question.
“Twenty-three years ” I say as if it’s an opening bid.
“Fifty ” she says easily trumping me. “We came in a group ” she says. “An American group that wanted to make aliyah.”
Now she’s walking fast and I see the spark and courage of a self-appointed pioneer.
What’s the difference between the pioneers dropped here because of circumstance dragging their feet and schlepping heavy bags and those who choose to come?
She’s one of the ones who chose.
“We came to a little yishuv outside Abu Ghosh ” she says. She could have said Neve Ilan the neighboring Jewish town but she chose the Arab village to define her location as the liberal-minded do. “Fifty American families settled there. We were the fourth to come.”
I understood what it meant to come fourth and settle near an Arab village. I understood every smell and movement of her first year.
“I wish we’d come with a big group ” I say. “It would have made all the difference…” I catch myself on the fate thing and finish “but I guess we land where we land in the end anyway.”
And she says “I’m not sure.” Then she goes on: “You know at first I thought I was coming to Israel for Zionistic reasons…” She pauses and I look at her for a long moment her pants and sneakers. “But that wasn’t really it. Now I know I came to Israel so my children would marry Jews and my grandchildren would be Jewish.”
What an amazing People we are. We don’t even know why sometimes but we do it anyway. We hold on with all our might and do it.
When we almost reach the guard at the door she wishes me good health and tells me she’s on her way to visit her 103-year-old mother-in-law. I was sorry I hadn’t asked her name.
When I get home my two daughters are sitting on the couch learning the Yahadus questions for the standardized state exam reviewing this answer: “We can do nothing in This World not even move a finger unless it’s chosen from Above.”
And I stand in awe about this being the question on a state exam. And how my daughters are required to learn and know it.
And that’s what Purim says to me: “Without G-d’s help not a finger. —