The Human Spirit: Rooftop Youth
Sept 01, 2005
"He's in prison," she said. "He was on the synagogue roof in Kfar Darom."
Her son, H., was refusing to give his name, concerned he'd be accused of violating his bail conditions from a previous arrest for blocking roads (hence my use of initials). I wondered how this soft-spoken and ebullient woman - someone so moved by the death of a heroic soldier as to name her son after him - had come to have a son who blocked roads and took part in the most reviled moment of disengagement.
My friend P. grew up in an American small town with few Jews. "I didn't know anything about Zionism, and nothing about Jews except that I was supposed to marry one."
She met her future husband at a campus Hillel mixer. After graduating, she went to a famous teachers' college, he to cantorial college. With their two small children, they made aliya to a northern development town, and sent the children to religious public schools. P. had trouble mastering Hebrew and money was always scarce, so her husband did home renovations on the side; she gave private English lessons. They had two more children.
They applied but were rejected by the committees of at least two settlements, yet despite the many bumps, P. maintained an unsullied idealism and optimism. "I saw a cartoon where a glass of wine asks a psychologist: am I half empty or half full? I always see the half full."
They became more observant. She started covering her hair; her husband grew a beard. They still sought a home in Judea and Samaria, primarily to reduce their ongoing financial strain. "It's no big deal there if your kid is wearing his brother's sandals, or you can't afford summer camp. A lot of people are like that."
At last, they were accepted by one of the settlements that had previously rejected them and allowed to rent one of the caravans used by earlier settlers. They added a living room which houses their piano, and recycled a discarded picture window removed from a home P.'s husband had remodeled. The vista of the sublime wilderness landscape through the picture window gives P. a lot of pleasure and compensates for the inconvenience of a leaky roof and a sinking floor.
"WILD WEEDS," National Religious Party Knesset member Shaul Yahalom dubbed the activists on the roof, saying they shamed religious Zionism and the kippot on their heads. Prime Minister Ariel Sharon spoke of their "criminal acts." Watching the drama of the disengagement on television, I, too, recoiled from the images of the belligerent rooftop resisters.
Hence the "Welcome Home Hero" sign on P.'s caravan door startles me. Likewise, I'm expecting to dislike H., who is home between investigations. But H. turns out to be articulate and thoughtful, a friendly boy who plays music and wants to be a teacher when he grows up.
He's the kind of kid you'd find in a school debating club. He wanted to be part of the struggle, and slept on the Kfar Darom synagogue roof to make sure he wouldn't miss the event which - word on the street said - would be the most vigorous point of resistance. In his eyes, Gush Katif folded too easily, and had there been more resistance the army would think twice before evacuating the West Bank, including his own home.
He claims not to have thrown objects or epithets, but doesn't deny being part of the crowd where others did. "The acid libel was invented by the press, and the eggs and water couldn't hurt anyone. Most of us left peacefully, and had been promised we wouldn't be arrested. But we were immediately handcuffed."
When he quotes a Kfar Darom mother who wanted her children to undergo a trauma so that they would always remember "what the army and what the state did to them when they left Gush Katif," I'm painfully aware that H. is a vulnerable teenager himself.
Many arrested along with him were high-school buddies. "Being behind bars isn't so bad," he says with a hitherto absent toughness, "but the worst part is knowing your parents are suffering."
P. is worried about him, but, looking back, she doesn't feel she could have prevented him from going. Nor did the leadership on the ground send the teens home.
We need national consensus on this: potentially violent civil disobedience isn't for kids.
H. recognizes that he's been through a trauma, and feels painfully distanced from the IDF he's still hoping to join, and from the state where he expects to live the rest of his life.
"I haven't been able to put it all into perspective," he says at last. "One rabbi says one thing, another says something else."
And why should he have it all figured out?
Who of us at age 17 did?
