The Lake of Galilee

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, and...