Home
I don't think I could innovate for anyone, certainly not for myself, if I tried to define some personal definition for the house.
It is impossible to write about a home in the spiritual sense when so many people currently have no home.
People without a home can never rest.
Only when you return home can you rest.
I think and feel the tens of thousands of people here and the hundreds of thousands of people in Gaza who were left without a home.
How many desires and beliefs and dreams do people have only after they have a house.
When you have somewhere to return to, you might as well have somewhere to go.
People without a home are ghosts, and it seems to me that we are not built to be ghosts.
The sweet illusion is that I have a corner from which I exit and enter the world.
that I have a place
That's how we were born, people need space.
In three to four months, hundreds of thousands of people were left without a place.
Hundreds of thousands of lonely and sad spirits search and miss the place.
"The sweet illusion is that I have a corner from which I exit and enter the world."
At home in Kalil, photo: Eric Sultan
Galilee
I live in the Galilee, and the Galilee is beautiful now.
Green as Wales.
The primroses are already out, the red anemones are starting to bloom, but the days are gray and the mornings are freezing and I can't find rest for my soul.
Too many amounts of grief.
Songs may help for a moment, revenge does not last even a moment.
And victory is probably for the weak.
Only people and hugs and talks and closeness and care and unconditional help, with unconditional love.
In the Galilee, even if you don't know each other, when you pass in front of each other and meet your eyes, you shake your head in this kind of peace.
Sometimes I think that this peace with the head is instead of saying "here is another one like me, human being".
This morning we went to our eldest daughter, who lives near Haifa, to give her one of the young dogs we raised.
We drove through the olive groves, entered Kfar Yasif, and there, in front of the Maccabi Health Fund, there is a pita bakery.
The only reason these pitas have a wonderful taste and that they are finished at two o'clock, the only reason for this is that they are baked with love.
I know Sansen, the woman who makes them.
I got out of the car, I was about to cross the road to the bakery, and the car that was driving stopped and signaled for me to pass.
I thought that I must look neglected, unshaven, a sweater with holes and shapeless jeans.
The beautiful car beeped as I passed and followed me into the bakery parking lot.
A beautiful and beloved man from the village came out of her, who somewhere is always with me.
We haven't met in two years and he's older, but he still got out of the car and we hugged and kissed.
Each of us knew without words how sad and broken the other was, and both of us, with shining eyes, did not say a word.
We just drowned in each other's eyes.
Another hug and kiss.
"I'll be back soon," I said.
"I'm waiting," he replied.
And then for a few hours today was another day.
Creation
I never connected with the word creation.
I feel a father, a friend, a lover, but between myself I never felt a creator.
The only words I have written since the beginning of the war are the words you are reading now, because what can be created.
My pain should not be written.
Everyone is hurting now, some are in excruciating pain, what does it even matter to me what I feel?
I wish the silence would make room for thoughts that we haven't thought about yet about longing for human love, or even for the understanding that after every war we return to exactly the same place, only with bereavement and with longing for those who will not return.
With thoughts of horror for those who suffered, the only creation at this time is silence.
The Israeli Andalusian Orchestra Ashdod
The Israeli Andalusian Orchestra Ashdod, photo: Mike Adri
Music that comes from here and belongs to everyone who lives in the Middle East is almost like a landscape.
If I manage to bring her spirit or even a bit of her in the concerts with the Andalusian Orchestra (February 5 at the new Barbie in the Jaffa port), I will feel that it was worth it.
And if we manage to be a little like the sun and the mountains and the sea and the smells, the landscape and the flavors, the sun and the desert, and even if it's for one easy hour in Barbie, I'll thank God.
God
With the help of Jesus, with the help of Allah, with the help of God, these are terms that have always scared me.
Music and love are my place for spirit.
I don't have a problem with religion, with believing, with being religious, but taking God with you to war turns the war into a lifelong war.
When I say God, I am referring to what probably directed me to work overtime in a mattress factory in my youth, despite the prohibition to breathe the oil fumes and rope fibers for more than eight hours straight.
Eventually my lungs became clogged with oil fumes and rope fibers that we used to place on the springs before closing them with cloth, and I found myself attached to machines at Wolfson Hospital.
There I thought for the first time what I was actually doing with myself, and I didn't know that I was starting to build myself up so that I would be ready, six years later, for the situation where I would meet the love of my life - and there would be something in me that she would want.
once in a lifetime
His name was Shay.
He was tall, broad shoulders, large palms with long fingers, and as strong as he was, he was gentle.
He noticed how I looked at him when he played, maybe I was the first devoted audience he met.
One day he brought me some small guitar that his sister played in the beginning, and taught me some chords a few times.
He knew it would make me happy, but he didn't know that I play five or six hours a day.
After a few months he noticed.
We would play his songs together, he was a deep guitarist who understood the guitar and I had a passion to play and be excited.
We rolled into the dream, brought a drummer and a keyboardist and a bassist, and we would play for hours.
His father allowed us to practice in some factory he had in the industrial area.
Everyone around us lived modestly, each child had two, maximum three jeans, and if you got a new pair of jeans, everyone would notice.
It would take time to get used to new jeans.
"Music and love are my place for the spirit."
At the concert, photo: Koko
We all lived in apartments in buildings, our parents all worked late, and none of us had ever been abroad. We would smoke cigarettes and play music two or three times a week all night, flying and forgetting about life. He sang in his gentle voice, wrote songs that everyone who was He was excited to hear them.
Some of his songs went from one to the other, and there were already quite a few people he didn't know who would listen to his songs at home.
He told me he wanted to perform, sing the songs, once to see people and sing to them.
"I dream of singing for 50 or 60 people, it's a huge thing," he said.
"I wish it would happen."
We were about to enlist, we found a lot in Holon, we brought electricity, we fenced it off with sheets, we advertised.
When the evening came we went up on a stage that we had assembled from pallets, and Shay began his song called "The World is Falling".
I think there were about 100 people there, and everyone was singing with him, everyone knew the words, and he was floating.
At the end of the night, when we dismantled the stage, he carried away with a smile.
Then we mobilized.
A few months later he was killed in Lebanon.
It will be good
Everyone who was around me after the army flew to South America.
I didn't want to fly.
I told my friends that I might come, but I felt that I should stay in Jerusalem.
I stayed alone in the city and worked at the Avis car rental agency, delivering and returning cars, traveling to Eilat by bus and returning a car from there to the agency in Jerusalem, or taking one car to the airport and returning in another.
Every time I would meet someone while working, a thought would cross my mind that this was the highlight of the trip.
Let's say like in South America, to move from place to place and then meet someone you didn't know and spend a day or two hours or a period with them.
Actually it doesn't matter where I am, if life happens.
I had a special conversation with one tourist, a German journalist who caught a ride with me to Jerusalem from the Sheda.
I downloaded it in the old city.
The next day, in the morning, I met her at Avis in the office, by chance.
In the evening she took me with her to Ramallah, which was then a center of foreign press with pubs and restaurants and bars.
English is spoken in a world within a world.
I continued to go to Ramallah to hang out and return with friends in a yellow taxi.
Everything flowed.
I connected with the bartenders and waiters.
They liked to spend time in Jerusalem and I in Ramallah.
Right in the middle of all this goodness, one of the friends who was traveling called and offered me to come to Bangkok.
"You must come," he said.
"It's amazing here, take a flight and come."
I was young, I saved a little, I flew.
The friend was with me for a few days and then announced that he wanted to come back.
I didn't find myself neither in Bangkok nor in the islands nor in the north, everything was nice only in the first moments.
Motorcycle climbs, full moon parties, people on opium.
One day I found myself waking up on the ground to the licks of a pig.
It was hard for me to be a tourist.
All the time I realized that I was living on the side.
I went to India, I was depressed, I arrived in New Delhi, I walked down the main street smelling of sewage and there was someone there, Grandma Keshet Yom, who was excited that I had hair on my hands.
She just had to touch, and I felt that everything was getting worse.
Suddenly, from a building made of cardboard boxes of televisions, someone came out and invited me in.
She took me by the hand, and there, inside the hut, her four daughters sat upright and silent.
You can choose, she told me, even two if you want.
I left there while saying to myself in Hebrew and out loud "I have reached hell. This is hell."
I bought a plane ticket to Amsterdam, which was the cheapest and fastest to fly from India, and I waited three days, during which I did not leave the hotel until the flight.
In Amsterdam I got stuck in a field with 20 other people in an elevator, I realized that I was in the wrong direction and in the wrong place.
A day later I already landed in Israel and straight from the field I went to Jerusalem.
I slept in some Scottish guesthouse on the Prophets Street.
I was told a room with roommates, but there was only one bag.
I left my bag there and in the evening I went to Ramallah.
There is no one left there that I know.
I returned to the guesthouse, I entered the room and I see the owner of the case there, it was the German journalist.
She poured wine for her and me, handed it to me and asked "so what do you say?".
I told her I was sure it would be fine.
were we wrong
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