Fields of Exile

Background to this excerpt: It’s 2002. Judith, who is 33 years old, lived in Israel for ten years and came back to Toronto last year to care for her dying father. On his deathbed three months ago, he asked her to promise that she wouldn’t return to Israel immediately after he died, but that she’d stay in Toronto and get a one-year Master’s degree, so she could “stand on her own two feet.” Judith agreed, even though she longed to return to Israel as soon as possible. Today was her first day of school (Orientation Day), and she is now in her father’s old car, driving home from Dunhill University.

Judith puts in her favourite tape, Israel at Forty. She listens to a line or two of “The Honey and the Bee Sting,” and then starts singing along, loudly, whole-heartedly, in Hebrew, in the privacy of her car. She knows every word of this song and of every song on this tape — she has sung them year after year with her friends at Yechiel and Miri’s annual Independence Day sing-song — and when it comes to the chorus of this one,

Please, good Lord,

Preserve all these.

The honey and the bee sting,

The bitter and the sweet,

she feels like she’s singing it together with them, no longer alone in her car in Canada, in exile (in galut).

But then the song ends, the car is silent while she flips the tape, and maybe because she is alone, and in galut, the words of this song now strike her as odd. She wonders who would want to preserve the bitter parts of life along with the sweet? Who would pray to God asking for that? And why, if you want a bit of honey in your tea, should you first have to suffer the pain of a bee sting? Is this what we in Israel have come to believe now? That we only deserve to be happy, or to live, if first we count out x number of pain tokens per year, like poker chips, to pay to God? That’s sick. It’s like domestic violence — like letting someone beat you so you can have his “love.”

She does understand, though, all those battered women who stay with their men. Because her love for Israel is something like that. Unconditional. The way many people love their family members. You know all their faults, but still you love them. There are things about Israel she...