From Hilltop to Hilltop

LET’S SEE. This makes sense. I’m going to live in Israel. Therefore, I will go to Rwanda. Israel has a lot of hills. Rwanda has a lot of hills. In fact, it’s called the “land of a thousand [green] hills.” Perfect preparation for Israel.

Not only that. Rwandan villages need help with public health. If I can improve public health in a Rwandan village, I can make sure it happen in Israel, too.

Still more. I am idealistic. I’ll be the only white and Western woman in a village of black Africans for two years. The culture shock will be instructive. I’ll learn how to adjust to radical new circumstances. Perfect preparation for switching out of the American mode into the  Israeli mode.

Plus, I’ll have to learn a new language, Kinyarwanda, the language of Rwanda. What better preparation for Hebrew?

OK, so I know I’ll be an oddball in Rwanda, and not only because I’ll be the only white, Western person in the village. I’ll also keep certain habits, such as jogging a few miles in the morning. Nobody does that in Mukoma, Rwanda. But I’ll also figure out this culture and how to convince women to come to the local clinic to make sure their babies get basic medical care. I’ll figure out how to fit into a new land, a new place.

Perfect preparation for Israel.

THIS TONGUE-in-cheek caricature of the unique journey of Heather Streltzer Gelb is, in truth, only partially a caricature. Gelb has published a memoir, From Hilltop to Hilltop: My Path from Rwanda to Israel (2015). The green hilltops of Rwanda I have already referenced. The other hilltop in the book title is the West Bank of Israel, where Gelb now lives, on the outskirts of Gush Etzion.

The hilltop=hilltop equation is not farfetched once one understands that those who originally settled the West Bank of the Jordan River did so out of idealism.

Gelb went to Rwanda out of idealism as a Peace Corps volunteer. She spent nearly two years there. It was pure idealism. How she got to Israel is, of course, more complicated than the simplistic cause-and-effect I’ve outlined above. The main additional factor was . . . Joe. Joe Gelb, now Heather’s husband. They had met briefly before she went to Rwanda and corresponded while she was there. Joe held out the idealism of living in Israel, of actualizing one’s Jewish identity, and of, in the words of Song of Songs in the epigraph to this memoir, “Rise up my love, my fair one, and come away” (2:10).

Come away to Israel.

Be an idealist — there.

There’s an image of the Jews who came to the West Bank after 1967 as intending to displace Palestinians, to live out a colonialist dream. That’s the Palestinian narrative since before there was a Jewish state, even before there were more than a few thousand Jews living in the Holy Land.

The Jewish narrative is this: Let us return to our ancient land, whose allure has never left our prayers, our sacred texts, our being. Let us return to that part of our land which is empty, uninhabited, where no one, including Arabs, live. Let us return even though the going will be tough, the public health crude, the amenities of civilization, such as electricity, shoe strings, vegetables and roads, absent. We shall make them all happen. We are idealists. We will bring the ancient Jewish home, which has lain dormant, dead, desert, for centuries, back to life.

So it really is not so farfetched to see a Peace Corps journey in the hilltops of Rwanda as a natural link to the hilltops of Gush Etzion.

Heather Streltzer Gelb certainly saw it that way, and this book is her story.

WHERE SHE lives now, there is an Arab-owned field right across from her front door. This field, checkerboard-like, is right in the middle of the surrounding patchwork of Jewish-owned fields and homes. This Arab-owned field is undisturbed by these Jewish ” whose image is that of displacers. This field wasn’t displaced; the empty fields around it were settled. In fact, the Arab owners of their field leave over some of the fruits grown there for their Jewish neighbors.

This live-and-let-live on the West Bank derived from one of Joe’s last letters from Israel to Rwanda:

“I am committed to living my life and building a family in Israel. I am committed to being a traditionally religious Jew in an active and thoughtful way: a Jew who reads and internalizes and battles with philosophical and moral problems in order to find truth, and incorporate it into my everyday life, in order to be worthy of being called a human being.”

THE JEWISH reality on the West Bank has differentiated since 1967 in ways both innocent and dangerous.

Many of the Jews who live there now came for economic reasons; housing is significantly less expensive than on the other side of the Green Line (the pre-June 5, 1967 armistice line).

A small but strident minority of the Jews there now advocate the displacement of the Palestinians, and a still smaller and more strident minority have turned to violence.

These are the images that dominate the discourse, especially the anti-Israel discourse, today. Yet, it is critical to resummon the idealism that still animates the original, post-1967 settlers of the West Bank, and their children. This is still the Land of Israel, the ancient patrimony of the Jewish people, covenanted by G-d to Abraham and his descendants, as we read this very week’s Torah portion.

It is that religious passion that drove Joe and Heather Gelb to move to Gush Eztion. Heather’s journey was bumpy indeed.

ABRUPTLY, HER idealism in Rwanda hit a wall. A storm was gathering around her village and all the villages of Rwanda. One night, men with machetes struggled outside her window, which by local custom had bars. Her life was saved. The lives of her friends were only beginning to face the threat.

Abruptly, the Peace Corps pulled all of its volunteers out of Rwanda.

Heather was given one day’s notice to pack up her belongings and appear in the capital, Kigali, the next day.

Whereupon, the Rwandan genocide.

In poetic injustice, this terrible scourge in 1994 finds its potential peril where Heather and Joe live and raise their family now. Idealism, ultimately, must face more than a lack of public health or amenities. It must face evil.

Which is what Heather and Joe’s idealism, this time on the hilltops of the Holy Land, face now.

Except that there, they’re not called machetes. They’re called knives.

And yet, the eternal call of idealism pours forth from an adjacent verse in Song of Songs, also in the epigraph of From Hilltop to Hilltop:

“For lo, the winter is past, the rain is over and gone; the flowers appear on the earth; the time of the singing bird is come, and the voice of the turtle-dove is heard in our land; the fig tree puts forth her green figs, and the vines in blossom give their scent” (2:9-12).

Copyright © 2015 by the Intermountain Jewish News