The waves of the holy Galilee Lake in Israel rhythmically leave and return to my veiny old ankles that are sunk into its shallow waters, as if their attachment to my feet is as ambivalent as the Jews’ attachment to Israel. And now we are also thinking of leaving Israel. We have to decide this weekend while at the Jacob’s Ladder Irish folk music festival. We are old but we have been offered one more job in Europe; it will be our last chance to leave here, before the final leaving.
There is a fleeting cloud above my head that makes the lake momentarily modulate into Irish gentleness, but we are in Israel, our own troubled land, and the cloud moves on and the Israeli sun re-conquers the lake, shattering it into violent broken-glass blues. My old husband sits next to me, but with his shoes on. He is scrolling through his phone—there has been another terrorist attack. We check that the children are okay. He gets up to go in to the kibbutz hotel to get ready for supper and the music, but I sit a little longer on the receding beach mesmerized by the rustle of the last spindly birds soaring above the eucalyptus trees on their way somewhere else—Africa, or Europe, I don’t know. The trees whisper back to them in the sorrow of departure. On the beach, an old Israeli woman in a muted hippie dress sits by me and starts to strum a gentle Irish folk tune into the sunset. She is a little familiar, older than me even,...
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