they're home

Today has been a very strange day.

On the whole, it’s been a good day. It was our first full day of orientation, which consisted of a series of talks on things like security, ulpan, expectations of the year, and the political/cultural state of Israel right now. It also is the first day of structure, which has been really nice against the last few days of unstructured activities. Tonight, I met up with my friend Abby, who I met at Rothberg three years ago. She’s since then made Aliyah and is not working at the Jewish Agency in their education department. It was great to see her after so much time (I briefly saw her in DC about two years ago) and I’m looking forward to spending lots of time with her and her roommate Carrie, who is also a friend from Rothberg.

And I think the HUC group is gelling really nicely. There’s definitely an element of “grouping” forming, some based on demography (read: age), some based on program, other based on roommate collectives etc. But as a whole there’s a lot of fluidity, chattiness, hanging outness, etc. I’ve been floating around various different clumps of people, trying to spend time (meals, afternoons, evenings) with as many different combinations of people as possible. And we’ve just started to really, in orientation, talk about our selves and “our journey.” As one rabbinical girl said today, “We all hang out, but we don’t know each other yet.” That’s very true.

On the other hand, there was a very eerie quality to the air outside today. Today can, I think, be considered the end of the Second Lebanon War. Today, Ehud Goldwasser and Eldad Regev, whose kidnapping and subsequent captivity by Hezbollah was a main catalyst for the war, were returned to their families today. In coffins.

Until this morning, when the remains were exchanged for Lebanese prisoners, nobody knew whether the soldiers were alive or dead. These soldiers, along with Gilad Shalit who is alive and being held by Hamas in Gaza, have, for the past two years, been larger-than-life symbols of the hope and the tragedy of the summer of 2006. Their names and faces have become ubiquitous in Jewish communities across the world. Their return has ceased to be a demand, and has become a necessity, a prerequisite before this country can move forward.

And now they have come home. They will be given a military funeral tomorrow (Thursday) as their own lives are etched into the cultural memory of Israel. It is a huge tragedy. I don’t want to understate that. And I can feel the trepidation, the uncertainty, the sorrow Israelis are feeling today. At the same time, there has been so much staked on the return of these three boys, now that two are back and the third’s return seems to be imminent, I wonder where Israel where go from here? Who will be their next mascot, their next symbol, the next driving force for vengeance or peace?