2002.01.D.31 A Grapevine Grows In Tzfat - A Message Of Hope Created by James3 on 8/8/2019 8:07:47 PM A Grapevine Grows In Tzfat - A Message Of Hope
By Avi Davis September 17, 2001
As we head into the Jewish New Year, many of us, no matter where we live, bear a sense that the world we have known is gone.
It was a world, which was a stable, vital, and protected pocket of civilization, a world of certainties built on the assumption of American hegemony and invulnerability. Those of us who grew up as children in the 60s and have never known the devastation of an attack on a city, can now only look back sadly on our innocence as something out of a dream.
The questions that force themselves upon us, fog our worldview: How can we have imagined that we were immune? What kind of complacency gave us the right to consider ourselves outside the current of history?
Indeed, life now seems to be divided into the pre-bombing and post-bombing eras, much as an earlier generation had their lives divided between Pearl Harbor and everything thereafter. Perhaps it is unfair to repeat, but the terrorist incursion into our lives did not end with the assaults on Washington and New York. The terrorist arsenals are, in fact, loaded with far more deadly forms of attack, responses for which we may be woefully unprepared.
But while we may all harbor fears for the future, it is worthwhile to remember that it is not always weaponry or even deterrence that protects a population or wins wars. During the Blitz of London, as the city looked likely to be pulverized into dust, CBS announcer Edward Murrow asked one of the residents of a heavily bombed area of East London how he kept going. The Londoner answered with typical cockney buoyance: "I look out the window and there's still flowers growin' in me backyard."
I couldn't help thinking of those words during my recent visit to Israel.
On a stopover in the Old City of Tzfat, where we own a home, I looked into our courtyard and noticed something I never thought I would see again. Four years earlier, a grapevine that had stood in that courtyard for five hundred years and had produced some of the city's sweetest grapes, had been inadvertently uprooted and cemented over during renovations.
When I found out, I was furious but there was nothing I could do. It was gone. The next year I returned to Tzfat and noticed what looked like a small weed sprouting from within cracks where the grapevine had once stood. As I bent down to uproot it, a friend stayed my hand and said: "Don't. You are being given a message."
He was right. A year later, I returned to see that a new shoot of the grapevine had emerged. A year after that, the stalk had turned into a trunk. At the end of August this year, we harvested one of the most bounteous crops of grapes ever seen in the Old City.
On that night, I shared Shabbat with old friends and their seven children. I had admired them for years and they had become something of role models.
Thirty years before, the father had bought a ruin in the Old City and rebuilt it with his own hands. Through doggedness and commitment he had raised a family and in the process introduced hundreds of young Jews to the beauty of their heritage. But two years earlier this family had been in crisis. The two oldest boys, teenagers who had been raised in a national religious household, had dropped out of school, and seemed to be uninterested in further education, Judaism or military training. The third boy was showing signs of following the same pattern. I could see the hurt in my friend's eyes, but in his typically resourceful way, he carried on with life.
I was therefore surprised, upon my arrival, to find the two younger boys, bronzed and full of strength and vitality, helping their father to add a new story to the house. As I climbed down from the roof, I met the oldest boy who was now married, wearing a kippa and a sergeant in one of the IDF's most elite units. His brother was training to be a navy seal.
That night, as we sat around the Shabbat table, I thought about the quiet coincidences that interlock to form our experiences. We shared the grapes from my courtyard and I remembered the vital young men sitting across from me as little boys, clambering on stools and ladders to help me harvest. When I tasted the sweetness of the grapes, I wondered how many other times would I have the opportunity to witness such powerful examples of hope and renewal.
Last week's terrorist bombings coincided exactly with the 30th anniversary of my own bar-mitzvah. When I remember that day I still feel a pang of sadness since my grandfather, who had dreamed of the day his oldest grandson would be called to the Torah, had died suddenly before it took place. Now as I sat before the television screen and watched the collapse of not just buildings but part of my own world, I recalled some of the rabbi's words spoken to me on that day:
"Don't think that anyone has taken away your grandfather's dreams. Live to fulfill them through Judaism and the words Chadesh Yameinu Kekedem - 'Renew us, as in days of old' - will guide you through life."
May we all merit such renewal and live to see our own shoots cracking through the concrete - reclaiming for us the tree of life that is our privilege and our heritage.
Shana Tovah.
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