A Triple Spring in July

This story percolated within me for two years, until I was able to complete its writing.

In the strange world of synchronicity, I had multiple experiences the week of July 17th, 2020. The Hebrew date was the 24th of Tammuz, which this year falls on July 24.

On the 24th of Tammuz, 2020, our daughter-in-law and son gave birth to their third child, a little girl. The next day, on a Shabbat in which we bless the new month, our son was called up to the Torah, blessed his wife and new daughter with good health, and announced her name – “Aviv,” Hebrew for “Spring.” (This is also a name given to boys.) They said that they chose a name of hope during a raging pandemic.

Three days later, while going through a folder of my old poetry and stories, organizing them according to decades (a project I started during COVID lockdown), I came across a poem I had written 35 years earlier, in Hebrew. The name of the poem? “Aviv.”

This preceded two additional synchronistic experiences (stories for another time) that led me to reach out to a healer whose services I’ve used in the past, who sent me a voice message in reply, the short version of which was, “You are blessed.” Indeed.

I wrote the poem “Aviv” on April 4 of 1975, and it speaks of hope after tragedy, death and battles, so I Googled “terror attacks in Israel” to see what happened in that time frame that could have inspired it. 

I saw that the terror attack on the Savoy Hotel in Tel Aviv, in which five Israelis hostages were murdered by PLO terrorists, and one officer was killed in the rescue operation, occurred exactly one month earlier. It was also almost a year after the horrific attack in Maalot, on May 15, 1974, in which 25 hostages, including 22 children from Safed, were murdered by the Democratic Front for the Liberation of Palestine (DFLP), while on a school trip. 

I’ll always remember the number of children, as, for reasons connected to other coincidences, until then I had thought of 22 as my lucky number. 

Before Maalot, on April 11, 1974, a related terror group, the PFLP, had carried out an attack in Kiryat Shmona, in which 18 Israelis were murdered, eight of them children.

I saw from the date at the end of the poem that I had written it while working as a counsellor for the Institute of Jewish-Zionist Education, at their Nir Etzion location. Nir Etzion is a beautiful Torah-observant collective moshav in the Carmel area, near Haifa, founded, in 1950, by – among others — some of the survivors of the original Kfar Etzion, one of the four Etzion Bloc kibbutzim that fell to the Jordanian Legion and thousands of local Arabs in the War of Independence in 1948. 

As counselors, we received solemn briefings on security arrangements, as we were among those who oversaw the safety of about a hundred high school students for each three-day seminar, and the country and its educators were still reeling from the traumas of Kiryat Shmona and Maalot. 

The following year I did the same job in Safed, for the Institute and for Gesher. We took weapons with us when we went out on hikes with the students, and, as counselors, slept with rifles under our beds, prepared, should there be a terror attack in the middle of the night.

One day a week I also taught drama to Safed middle school children, some of whom had survived the terror attack in Maalot. One of them still limped, injured from having jumped out of a window to escape the terrorists.

The third “Spring”

In the process of lockdown-organizing, I also took a look at those who had offered me Facebook “friendship” to whom I had not responded. One of them was Balfour Hakak, an Israeli poet who had sent me a Friend request a year earlier. Balfour, along with his twin brother-poet, Herzl, used to visit the fledgling Jewish community in Hebron in the late ‘60s, where I was often a Shabbat volunteer. I accepted his friend request and took a look at his page.

His most recent post was about a famous Tel Aviv rockstar, known for his strong left-wing and anti-religious views, who during COVID performed live in an empty amphitheater in a concert that was accessed via the internet. In a video interview, the singer described how, when he finished his performance, he walked down the steps and stopped for a moment when he saw he had 420 messages waiting for him, including many from people in B’nei Brak. He wiped away tears as he said, “They believe in God, I believe in Google … For years we learned to hate ‘the other’ … ’He’s religious,’ ‘He’s secular’… and I was also a ‘soldier’ in this game…and then I saw them [in my mind’s eye] …If you asked how I changed during COVID? That’s how I changed. I’ll do everything now to unite … I learned to respect them. It lit in me a flame of love…it burns in me and I cannot express it in words, only in tears.” 

Since then, he has gone on to perform with Avraham Fried, whom he now considers a good friend, and has spoken repeatedly about the need of the different communities of people in Israel to be tolerant and to love each other. In an interview with journalist Eden Abitbol of Makor Rishon, in April of this year, the rockstar said that he had considered going into politics and furthering this agenda in that way, but he decided, for now, to do it through his art. Abitbol asked how the singer could explain that even some religious people, including yeshiva students (remembering his own admiration of him in his youth), admire his work. He replied, “Yeshiva students are always researching the truth … I am also like that, except that my God is music.”

Viewers were probably shocked at the change in him.

I actually was not, as my husband, Yaakov, had told me another story about this singer, one that occurred almost two decades earlier.

A melody in an airport

In the year 2002, Yaakov had been one of the teachers to accompany his class from Hartman’s High School for boys, in Jerusalem, on a trip to Poland. Among the places they visited was a synagogue in the village of Lantzut where Rabbi Yaakov Yitzhak Horowitz, known as the “Chozeh” (Seer, or Visionary) of Lublin, an 18th-19th Hassidic rebbe, used to pray. While they were in the synagogue, Yaakov pulled out his flute and played the melody “Hishtapchut Hanefesh” – “Pouring out of the Soul,” attributed to Rabbi Menachem Mendel of Vitebsk. 

He played it again while they were in the Warsaw airport a few days later, awaiting their plane back to Israel. And as he played, and the boys began to slowly dance and sing, Yaakov noticed someone nearby. 

It was that Israeli rockstar, who had just performed in Eastern Europe, and was waiting with his entourage for the plane back to Israel. In addition to a repertoire dealing with love, peace, death, suicide, and politics, and in addition to his controversial exemption from army service (though later it was said that he was excused for medical reasons), the singer was known to have a fear of flying. 

He had been pacing back and forth nervously. After Yaakov began to play, he saw the singer stop his pacing and stand still, appearing mesmerized by the haunting melody. His nervous persona softened and calmed as he drank in the rebbe’s niggun.

We never know what chords are touched in a person.

Ah, the name of the singer? 

Aviv Geffen (“grapevine” in Hebrew). 

He told Eden Abitbol that his great-great-grandfather was Rav Shem-Tov Geffen, a philosopher and kabbalist, who had died almost a hundred years earlier.

Aviv Horesh (“forest grove,” a Hebraization of “Greenwald”) is our 22nd grandchild.

Happy birthday, little Aviv. May you and Aviv, the rockstar, through your metaphorically flourishing vines and trees, be part of the movement to help the people of Israel grow closer together in love.

Spring

Written and translated from the Hebrew by Toby Klein Greenwald

Slumber of optimism
of gentle dust
wind that pauses among the trees
still
teasing, tempting
sleep of a relaxing spirit
slowly awakes
to a world of chattering birds
a yearning sun
and whispering grasses…

A quiet-soft world
and all the tears are distant
and all the pain – is past
fields as far as the eye can see
rich-deep green
where slender russet arms
stretch upwards
to awaken serenity, slowly
with the sun-washed
dawn.

The blood is gone from their canals
The blood-drenched earth
Is done.
The battle.
Is over.

Morning of a laughing heart
Light-eyed magic
Anticipation
A world of almost…

The author is an award-winning theater director, a recipient of several American Jewish Press Association awards for Excellence in Jewish Journalism, and editor-in-chief of WholeFamily.com.