Blessings from Yemen

I had to take a taxi last week to get home from visiting someone at the hospital in Rehovot. Friendly driver at the hospital taxi rank quoted me a fair price and off we went when he had a phone call.

Over the bluetooth connection I could hear someone saying that had food ready to take to a shiva house.

The driver turned to me apologetically "I wouldn't usually do this, but I need to take this food to a mourner's home. If you give me permission we'll take a detour so I can pick-up the food, then after I drop you off at your destination I'll be ready with the food in my car to go on to the family sitting shiva in Ramle"

Of course I said yes, how could I say no to the chance to be a shaliah mitzva (an emissary for a good deed)?

So off we went on a detour to a street of slightly dilapidated buildings in the old centre of town, a neighbourhood where there are still some of the original red roofed little single-storey houses from the early years of the yishuv, the last relics of a simpler and much poorer time before high rises and high tech.

As we drove my driver told me stories of fateful meetings, the hand of destiny and his family history.

He arrived as a small baby from Yemen just after Israel's War of Independence. His family were sent to live in a tent in a maabara (transit camp for immigrants during the severe housing shortage Israel suffered from during the massive influx of olim in the late 40s to early 60s).

"It was the middle of nowhere, even today it isn't really somewhere, but back then we truly were in the middle of nowhere, a cluster of tents and immigrants from Yemen mixed with Holocaust survivors and Maghrebim (North Africans). But we managed.

You know I was almost one of the kidnapped Yemeni babies (a long running controversy in Israel, whether immigrant babies were taken from large families to be raised by childless couples). My mother though was concerned by the stories she heard from other women, so she assigned my older sisters to watch my 24/7"

The family were eventually housed in the central Israeli town of Ramle, in a neighbourhood where one side of the street were all Yemeni immigrants, while the other was new arrivals from eastern Europe, including many Holocaust survivors.

"When I was growing up I learned to speak really good Yiddish, and the Ashkenazi new olim learnt Hebrew with a gutteral Yemeni accent. We were all religious in that neighbourhood, and we shared everything, any kind of help and support you can imagine. Our parents' generation, wow, what a generation, what people, such devotion, such dedication."

He told me that back in Yemen, in their small town in the mountains, his family were quite comfortably off. His father used his comparative wealth to support local Torah scholars, providing food and books for them. This was why his father merited to live to the ripe old age of 105, in good health and with a sharp, clear mind.

"Once he rode on a donkey for three days straight, all the way to Sanaa (the Yemeni capital and a major Jewish centre) just to buy the works of the Rambam for our local rabbis to teach their students.

How did you know if you were rich in Yemen? If you could afford books.

Books were such a precious and expensive commodity that the community usually didn't have enough for each child to learn from their own book, they would gather around one book and some specialised in reading it from the side, some specialised in reading upside down, some backwards, and that is how they enabled the maximum number of pupils to learn"

When his father passed away Yemeni rabbis and their descendants came to the shiva from all over Israel to honour his memory and to tell him that it was because of his father's generosity that they were able to dedicate their lives to Torah and to become rabbinical leaders in the community.

Now I think (and hope) this personal history would have been fascinating to most people, my writing doesn't to justice to his wonderful story telling style. For me though, well, I already knew a lot of the dry historical facts because it just so happens that my major for my masters degree was Jews of the Islamic world, and one of my special areas of study was about the Jews of Yemen.

He told me many other stories too, far too many to add here, like the time a friend asked him to do a favour, to pick up a visiting rabbi from a small moshav and after deciding the young man looked familiar it turned out that his passenger had the same name as him and was the son of his long lost cousin from Nahariya he hadn't seen in 35 years who'd moved to the US to teach. The rabbi had flown all the way to Israel to help free an aguna (a "chained" woman who's husband refuses to give her a Jewish divorce).

"Driving a taxi I am so grateful that I get the chance to be a shaliah mitzva"

With that we had arrived at my destination. He turned around and asked for my name. "Madame it was a pleasure to have you in my taxi, I have so enjoyed swapping stories. Thank you so much for helping me to by a shaliah mitzva for this mourning family."

And as we parted he heaped a pile of blessings on me and my family, that we should always be a party to good deeds, that we should be rewarded for our mitzvot, that we should always merit to be among the compassionate, both as givers and receivers, that we should be blessed with health and long life, just like his father of blessed memory, amen ve-amen.

Faith that the desert will yet bloom

מה רבו מעשיך!!
One of the most amazing things about living in Eretz Yisrael is the living Torah, metaphors that are real and not just stories, the land as peirush, living commentary. A rainy winter like this is what the second paragraph of the Shema is about, is the embodiment of so many images described in the Tanakh.

If you lived in exile in lands where there is no desert and no rainy season then the Tanakh remains just a story, you will not have experienced the real meaning of the prayers for rain, the heartfelt prayer each autumn that there will be enough rain, that you will get to experience this miracle of seeing the desert transformed not by technology or human intervention, amazing as irrigation might be, but by the divine act of bringing rain at its appointed time.

In exile the idea of the wilderness turning fertile seems like a miracle that must be outside of nature. Living in the Land of Israel you see the miracles Hashem has created as part of the natural cycle of the Land, how at a stroke the land languishes in drought, even the hardy acacias whithering with thirst, how one extra rainy season brings the desert to life, moshivi akeret habayit em habanim semeha, Halleluyah. Shabbat shalom!

Yehehzkel's vision of the dry bones - the desert in bloom gives faith that a nation beaten down by the might of Babylon can yet rise again

Faith from the experience of the climate and nature of the Land itself, anyone who has lived here has a faith derived from experiencing the cycle of drought and rebirth, that just as the desert can flood and bloom, so the biblical prophets promises of redemption can be realised.

A belief that miracles can occur naturally as part of the natural order of the world, not as some kind of outside supernatural intervention, a faith that the inconceivable is not the impossible, that it can become real, that dreams and yearnings for returning to Zion can happen. In this sense the restoration of Jewish sovereignty in Israel is a miracle within nature, just because it seemed like an impossible dream did not mean it could not be done, miraculous things happen all the time through the natural order that Hashem created, miracles don't necessarily mean magic.