Shift

 I often find that I experience certain inner events or feelings that I cannot express in words. I feel that words establish boundaries and limits on my inner experience.  So I cannot neither vocalise nor write about them. With that understanding, I write the following events.

As I wrote in the previous entry, I decided to the kibbutz for Yom Kipur.  The day before I was due to arrive, my friend phoned to ask what time I would be getting there.  She also said, "bring your bathing suit."

"What pools are open on Yom Kipur?" I asked.

"The pool on the kibbutz, of course" she replied.

With those words I experienced a kind of deep and hitherto unexpressed inner movement.  

She had not been in the country on that Yom Kipur.  She was traveling around America.  Those of us on the kibbutz had gone to the swimming pool on the Yom Kipur of October 6th 1973.   At 2.00 p.m.  exactly, two Mirages screeched overhead, leaving long white tails in the clear blue sky.  We all commented on how odd this was on Yom Kipur.  A day of no radio, no news, no transport, no cars, a quiet day.  And then, just after the planes, the father of the friend who wasn't there rode toward us on his bicycle, his transistor radio in his hand.  He said to us "there is a war, Israel has been attacked from all sides, go to your rooms."  And as one body we rose and went to our room (mine and Rafi) because everyone knew where he was in the army, in the Sinai desert.  We taped the windows and put buckets of sand inside the small bathroom, and then we went to the dining room to bring back eggs, milk, and cheese, so we could make a cheese cake.

And last week, when she suggested we go to the pool,  I suddenly felt something move inside of me. Something shifted and moved, and lifted, as if on wings that spread open and upward.  I would go to the pool, and then, later in the day, just before Neilah, the closing of the gates, I would go to the cemetery to say goodbye, finally, and let us both fly free.

And so I did just that.