Bruce H. Bernstein, A “Listening Tour,” # 6

Jonathan Gershovitz, Dartmouth ’62 showed up at our hotel an hour early, just as we returned from our afternoon with Rabbi Ofer Sabath Beit Halachmi. Dan Tompkins, Dartmouth ’62 had put us in touch with him. Jonathan was our guest for the evening. Since he was early, I got to talk with him for a while before the rest of the group joined us. He is a delightful man, smart, interesting and interested, thoughtful. At one point he apologized for the shaking in one of his hands as a result of Parkinson’s, but it really did not interfere with either his presentation or our getting to know one another. He showed me some of the charming children’s books that he has both written and illustrated. As he said, the Parkinson’s might limit him in the future so that he’ll have someone else illustrate while he does the writing.

I had all kinds of fantasies about what might have brought him to live in a small village in Israel not far from Gaza. None were on target. He got an MSW at Columbia after Dartmouth, married, and was living in California when one day his wife said she was concerned that they would be stuck in the same place for the rest of their lives. She wanted to travel. He asked: “Where?” and she answered: “Israel!” He said, “OK,” so they went. He got a job teaching group work on the college level in Tel Aviv. After six years he moved into other areas of social work rather than have to obtain the PhD required to remain on the college level. His wife died in her 40’s from lung cancer. His present wife is Yehudith Bar-Yesha-Gershovitz. Her father became ill, so they moved to his town to help take care of him. They have remained there ever since.

The town is close enough to Gaza to receive rocket fire. He has a bomb shelter in the basement of his house, and received a warning signal just a few days ago that sent him and his wife running downstairs. Apparently Israeli radar can pick up a rocket about ten minutes before it hits. While he believes in retaliation by the Israeli Air Force, he seems quite philosophical about the situation, realizing the deep frustration of Palestinians living under the occupation and having limited ways to express what they feel.

Jonathan left me the preface and part of the first chapter of a book of his wife’s that he is translating from Hebrew into English. I don’t know the title, but it’s a book of Hasidic stories accompanied by discussion and elaboration. He writes:

“They say
That telling stories
Puts you to sleep

And I say
That telling stories
Is the way
To wake people up
From their slumber

He writes: “The book is meant for those who love stories, and who allow themselves to awaken to their real world from every story they hear or read, and to give it meaning every moment of their lives.” Having the preface and part of the first chapter makes me look forward to the rest.

As I reported earlier, this morning we went to Yad Vashem, the Holocaust Museum in Jerusalem. I had been there several times, was emotionally not up for the visit, and while the rest of the group toured the Museum, I sat in the cafeteria writing on this iPad. We then drove South to the Ein Gedi Kibbutz overlooking the Dead Sea.

I wish I could describe the beauty of this place, high in the desert above the water. The Dead Sea is the lowest spot on earth. The last time she was here, Lita met a 60-year-old man who had survived cancer and just married for the first time. He said that he had no interest in climbing the peaks, he and his wife were touring the world to explore its lowest spots. This was his first stop.

Wally and Chick and Carol decided to make the climb to Masada. Tom and Alice went off to try the Dead Sea. Lita, Judy, Hanny and I just hung out, some of us at the huge pool swimming with an incredible view of the area at sunset. We had dinner at the Kibbutz and somehow the discussion turned to drinking Scotch, with Tom buying for our curious Palestinian driver, Tamer. I heard lots of laughter while I was writing in the other room.

Tuesday was our longest drive, from the Dead Sea to an Arab Christian village in the North. Along the way we stopped for lunch at the spot on the Jordan River where John baptized Jesus. Hundreds of people were there repeating that ceremony. We all stuck to lunch.

We were then off to the home of Seeds of Peace educator Nora Faran and her husband Caesar. Nora and Caesar’s Catholic family came to Israel from Lebanon over two hundred years ago. We met them in the midst of their olive grove and helped with the picking. It is high on a hill overlooking the border with Lebanon. We managed to fill about ten large sacks of olives that they would take later that night to have pressed into olive oil. Caesar is a construction worker and moves energetically into picking, sorting, and stuffing the bags. Somehow Wally managed to keep right up with him.

The Faran’s then invited us to their home for dinner. They had intended to have a barbecue in the groves, but it was too cold. Within a few minutes, Nora put out an amazing spread of stuffed grape leaves, humus, several salads, some kind of brown rice dish, and pita bread. Almost everything they eat is fresh and homemade. We ended the meal with several pastries, coffee, and Caesar’s homemade, very powerful liquor.

You know you are in an Arab village by the roads. I’ve yet to be in an Arab village in which the roads are paved. It’s quite clear that the Israeli government treats the Arab infrastructure different from the Jewish sections, even though they pay the same taxes.

I brought Kim Chernin’s Everywhere a Guest, Nowhere at Home with me on this trip. Chernin is a red-diaper baby, sympathetic to Zionism, who gradually came to see the side effects of the Zionist dream on the people who were already living in the region. Chernin says that her strong wish to find a place that Jews could call home, caused her to ignore other consequences of that desire. In a chapter entitled: “The Gift of Not Looking Away” she relates the following facts from the Israeli Information Center for Human Rights in the Occupied Territories between Sept., 2000 and Feb. 2009:

Palestinians killed, 6348; Israelis killed, 1072
Palestinian children killed, 1487; Israeli children killed, 123
Palestinian political prisoners, 10,756; Israeli political prisoners, 1
Palestinian homes demolished, 18,147; Israeli homes demolished, 0
Palestinian water allotment, 93 liters/day; Israeli, 280 liters/day

Just before we left there was an op-ed in the New York Times by Richard Goldstone in which he was very critical of those who compare conditions in the region to apartheid. Agreed: apartheid was a particular kind of horror. But it’s hard for me to believe that he really explored conditions of Arabs in the region, and the Occupied Territories in particular. Those are only numbers above, but try to imagine what life is like if you need to survive on 93 liters/day. Much of the water for Jerusalem comes from under the West Bank, but the Israeli government controls the water.

Bruce H. Bernstein is a 75-year-old psychologist/psychoanalyst in private practice and on the faculty of the NYU Postdoctoral Program. He has had a long-time interest in the peaceful resolution of conflict, and in recent years made connections among his Dartmouth Class of 1957, Seeds of Peace, and the Dickey Center for International Understanding. The class now sponsors two interns who spend a summer at the Seeds of Peace camp in Maine, followed by a term in Israel/Palestine.