* * *
***
The first thirty-six hours on Israeli soil were such a whirlwind that Raysh barely had a minute to think about water and near drownings. They disembarked from the plane and spilled like rivers of loud American twentysomethings through Ben Gurion Airport to the outer terminals, where they met up in an ocean of hundreds more loud American twentysomethings, all spending the third week in December taking advantage of the free ten-day trip to Israel that their Jewish identity (and serious philanthropic funding) gifted them. Raysh followed signs to her bus number in a far corner of the terminal, where she was surprised to see Yaron standing on a bench, waving his bus mates over.
From there, she and two dozen kids her age loaded onto a large green bus manned by a surly, chain-smoking driver. He drove them to Caesarea, a coastal site of Roman ruins two thousand years old, and as Yaron and the other counselor, a woman with red hair named Shiri, led an icebreaker introduction (“Who are you, where are you from, and what do you want to get out of this trip?”), Raysh watched the sparkling blue of the coastline grow nearer, feeling the clamminess increase with each jerk of the wheels, and felt glad to be there, forced to participate, because thinking up a good answer and the best way of phrasing it gave her something to focus on that wasn’t her memories (“Rachel Tannenbaum—Raysh—from New Brunswick. Hoping for a new stamp in my passport. And to do some swimming”). On the beach, Raysh kept her distance from her bus mates, staying as far away from the water as possible and turning her back to it, staring at the ruins like they were the most interesting thing she had ever seen. They ate dinner at a kibbutz a few hours north, where they were spending the night, and after more icebreakers and get-to-know-your-neighbor games that left Raysh feeling like an outsider watching everyone befriend everyone else, they broke off into gendered fours and retired into small rooms with two bunk beds apiece.
The next day was overloaded with activities, starting with an early-morning hike up Masada, the mountaintop fortress, where Yaron told them that in 30 BCE, the Jewish rebels who lived there committed mass suicide rather than give in to the conquering Romans. “In a way, Masada is the world’s biggest mountaintop cemetery,” he said. “It’s this whole area.” He pointed at a blue seam in the hazy brown distance. “Look, you can see the Dead Sea. That’s the story of all of Israel in a way. Death here. Death there. Death on all sides. But in the middle”—he gestured at Raysh and her bus mates and the dozens of tourists scrambling on all sides of them—“life. So much life.”
They ate lunch at the peak (turkey and lettuce on rolls, chocolate wafers, and Capri Sun–esque pouches of a medicine-y grape drink) and then boarded the bus for the Banias Nature Reserve, which had enough springs in it to make Raysh’s skin crawl. By the time the bus stopped in front of their hotel in Tiberias, Raysh felt like she might collapse; she’d spent the whole day hiking in the sun, and even though she drank bottle after bottle of water (cursing the peanut-sized bladder her father gave her), she felt like her skin and brain were fried. All she wanted was a bed.
But her bus mates had other plans. A pair of light-haired twins from Milwaukee invited her to join them for a chill in the hotel garden. “We’re thinking late-night spirits and hookah,” the girl, Orlee, said. Her brother, Oren, nodded, asked, “You in?” and before Raysh could answer, handed her a hookah pipe and a small bag of strawberry tobacco. “I’ll get the rest of the stuff.”
“So what do you think of Israel so far?” Yaron asked twenty minutes later, joining the eight of them sitting around a fire pit in the hotel’s surprisingly lush back garden.
Everyone said something positive; Raysh guessed that it was hard to focus on the negative when someone was footing a multi-thousand-dollar travel, food, and hospitality bill for you.
“Crazy. There are soldiers literally everywhere,” Oren said, taking a sip from a bottle of vodka. He chased it down with a mango fruit drink.
Yaron smiled. “We’re a small country with a lot of enemies. Protection matters. Like how having a McDonald’s on every street matters to you Americans.”
This got a round of laughter. Someone passed Yaron the vodka bottle, but he shook his finger and sent it to the next person in line.
“Yeah, but why do they carry their guns so openly?”
Raysh knew what Oren was talking about. On the hike up Masada, in the streets of Tiberias, at a rest stop close to the Banias, she had seen the men and women in green fatigues, with huge black semiautomatic weapons strapped to their backs.
Yaron looked surprised. “For protection. Life is always worth defending.”
“Whoa, check out the stars,” someone said. Raysh turned and saw everyone crane their necks back. She looked up and was amazed by how much the heavens looked like a curtain, a great black cloth with thousands of holes in it thrown over a terribly bright beam. But the more she stared, the shakier she felt, and instead of the sky, she saw the green-and-black murk of the Hackensack River, remembered the crushing weight that had overwhelmed her lungs, and sensed the dead light of the thing that was waiting for her.
“Hey, what’s that?”
Raysh turned. Oren was staring at her jaw. She pressed her fingers to the jagged scar.
“That looks brutal. How’d you get that?”
“Don’t be a jerk!” Orlee hissed. To Raysh she said, “Ignore my brother. He gets drunk and loses his filter.”
“No, it’s okay,” Raysh said. “I was in an accident. I…I almost drowned.”
She pictured the night it happened and felt a jolt of déjà vu. Friends hanging out in a park, drinking and laughing and staring at the sky. Only that night, they decided to go swimming. “We had just finished finals,” she said, “and were feeling, I don’t know, reckless or something. So we jumped into the river.” She didn’t mention that it was her idea, or how when Matt, with his cartoonishly wide biceps and relentless sex mind, suggested they all get naked, she immediately agreed and even slipped off her pants first, which was enough for the other guys and girls to start hooting and disrobing. “It was fun,” she said, her mind on Matt’s abs and the nest of hair underneath, calling attention to his groin. “We were just splashing and spitting water at each other, but then someone suggested that we see who could hold their breath the longest, and…I mean, I won, but not really by choice.”
“What happened?” Orlee asked. Everyone else was quiet, their eyes on Raysh.
Raysh exhaled. “I heard this thing once that the trick to holding your breath underwater is to go down as far as you can and stay there, keeping your mind as blank as possible. Like, remember that it’s just your brain telling you you need air and that you’re dying. If you ignore it, you’re fine. So I did that. I dove as deep as I could and found a sunken tree. I…kind of straddled it so I wouldn’t float up, but I put my foot on this part that was rotted through, and it got stuck. And…I lost my mind. I was thrashing and pulling, trying to get out. I smacked into the tree and cut myself on a branch.” She traced her finger along her jaw.
This was where it got tricky. Raysh didn’t know how much to share. She looked at Orlee, who was smiling kindly, but with something sad in her eyes, and gestured for the bottle. “I swallowed half the lake and…died, basically. It took three people to get me out, and I had all these…death rattles in the ambulance. I learned that later, because I was unconscious at the time.”
Raysh finished speaking to a silent garden. Everyone’s eyes were on her. She lifted the bottle and took a sip. She didn’t even taste it.
Yaron cleared his throat. “Baruch atah Adonai, Eloheinu melech haolam, michayeh hamaytim. Blessed is he who revives the dead.” He paused. “We’re so glad you’re here.”
Raysh stared at him. “Thank you.” It was all she could say.
* * *
***
In fact, Raysh knew where to draw the line when it came to sharing. To tell her bus mates that t
he main reason she signed up for Birthright was to conquer the fear she felt every day since that night was a definite overshare. So was explaining that she wasn’t ready to return to the Hackensack River just yet, but there were tons of bodies of water in the Holy Land for her to use to baby-step her way back to New Jersey. She really felt like she had died under the water, and a third-year med student at the hospital where she recovered backed it up. “You were dead, clinically speaking,” he said. “Dying for a few seconds or minutes, even, and then coming back to life is common. But don’t worry. You’re not a zombie. Literally, of course.”
But the first few bodies of water her bus encountered were all huge and terrifying, so Raysh focused on distraction. She came up with a game called “count the soldiers” with Orlee, Oren, and a tall guy named Simon. It was simple. They counted every soldier they saw. You could only count each soldier once, so whoever spotted him or her first got the points. It was great, since you had to be focused and paying attention pretty much the whole time. Which didn’t leave much brain room for memories.
The four of them soldier-counted their way through the candle factory and DIY art galleries filled with paintings of Hebrew letters in the mystical city of Tzfat, past the ritual baths and vacant fire pits on their hike through Meron, and along the gleaming golden streets of Jerusalem, where Raysh lucked out when she and her bus mates entered a falafel shop, and she spotted three soldiers on line ahead of them wearing steel-toed boots and sucking on red cigarettes.
Just before they reached the Kotel, the holiest place in the Jewish world, Yaron stopped them. “We’re about to get our first glimpse of the wall. You’ll have plenty of time here, but first, I want to share something. For two thousand years, Jewish bodies have turned here in prayer. Your ancestors all wished for the privilege of what you’re about to see. For many, it kept them going. The thought of Jerusalem, the city of their religion and so many of the stories and prayers they heard their whole lives, being rebuilt—not at the expense of the previous tenants, I’m not getting political here—was, how you say?” He looked down at the Stars of David on his sandals. “A huge motivator in many of their personal interests and passions moving forward. All right, we ready?”
They turned the corner and saw the Kotel. Raysh felt let down. It was beautiful and swarming with people, but it looked exactly like the pictures she had seen her entire life in Hebrew school and on social media.
They walked to the plaza outside it. Shiri handed out two small notebooks. Yaron passed around a few pens. “There’s a custom to write a note and stick it in the cracks of the wall,” he said. “Take your time. Write your note. And then go to the wall, say a prayer, and find a place to put it in. Men on the left, women on the right.”
Most people took a pen, scribbled something, and waded into the sea of people, fighting to get close to the stones, but Raysh lingered. She thought about it, and when she finally found the words, she was surprised by how short her note was. As she reread it, she realized that instead of a prayer to God, she had written one to herself.
Let me go under, but this time let me come up.
She pressed her way through the women crowded around the wall and waited until an opening presented itself. When she was up against it—she saw thousands of slips of paper stuck into every conceivable crack and wondered how this towering wall could possibly fit all the notes people wrote and shoved in it, every single day—she stopped and repeated the prayer Yaron had said the night before.
“Blessed is he who revives the dead.”
She spotted a ledge full of rolled-up pieces of paper with space for one more and pressed her note into the stone.
* * *
***
The next day was the Sabbath, and they spent it in the Old City. They went to a synagogue and visited the Israel Museum, where Oren spotted a group of thirty-three soldiers and rubbed it in the rest of her bus mates’ faces. After that, they returned to their hotel, ate fatty kosher food, and spent the rest of the afternoon lounging in the lobby, basically observing the Sabbath. Raysh liked the slowed-down change of pace, but without the distraction of movement and things to look at, she felt near-drowning thoughts creeping in. She was glad when Sunday morning came around, and they boarded the bus and headed down to Ein Gedi.
But the drive was tense. A heated argument broke out after a tall boy with a yarmulke objected to Oren’s use of the word “occupation” to describe Israel’s disputed territories.
“Don’t call it that,” the boy said. “It’s an unnecessary description.”
“How is it unnecessary?” Oren asked. “It’s literally an occupation. There are people living their lives oppressed by Israeli occupiers.”
“They’re not oppressed by occupiers. They’re watched over by soldiers protecting Israeli citizens. When there are no soldiers there, they launch rockets and bombs into Israel. If they stopped doing that, the military would stop guarding them.” The boy’s face was red. He pulled out an asthma inhaler.
“If the military stopped guarding them, then they wouldn’t do any of that!”
“That’s ridiculous!” The boy took two long puffs on his inhaler. “You’re asking Israel to lay down its weapons! We’ve all seen what happens when Jews don’t defend themselves!”
“Why does it always come back to the Holocaust? You can be critical of Israel without saying you want to murder six million Jews!”
And so on.
Other people joined in, but Raysh didn’t care to. She just watched. Yaron was in the seat in front of her, watching too, not saying a word. At one point he turned to Raysh and shook his head. “Like everything, there are strong arguments on both sides,” he said. “But what bothers me, what’s always bothered me, is how we Jews are expected to make peace with the Palestinians when we can’t make peace with ourselves. How can there be external peace when there’s no internal peace?”
When they reached Ein Gedi, Shiri told them to bring their bathing suits so they could change before the hike, which had a few natural springs on it, including one used as a swimming hole. As they shuffled off the bus, Raysh turned to Orlee. “Can I ask a favor?”
“Sure. Whatever you want.”
“Um. Okay, so you remember my story about almost drowning, right?”
Orlee nodded.
“Well, I haven’t been in a body of water since it happened, but I feel like I really need to. You know, to prove that I can.”
“Makes sense.”
“I’m going to try to go in the spring, but can you just make sure I don’t freak out?” Code for Please make sure I don’t clinically die. Again.
Orlee smiled. “Of course. I got your back. I’m actually a certified lifeguard, so you’re super in luck.”
Raysh smiled back. “Thanks.”
The hike was easier than the other ones, just a trek up a sloping incline surrounded by short cliffs full of stubby trees and prickly flowers. It was peaceful, as long as Raysh didn’t think about what waited at the end of it. Already her breath was jagged, and her body felt clammy, which was partially because of the sun, but mostly not.
She lagged in the back, with Orlee and the bus’s security guard, who was always the last person on every hike. She started talking to him as a distraction.
“It’s beautiful here,” she said, gesturing all around them.
He nodded and pressed a cigarette to his lips. “It’s the miracle of the Jews.”
“What do you mean?”
He stopped walking. “We are in the desert. And yet there are trees and plants and perochim…how you say? Flowers. It’s the miracle of the Jews. When Herzl came it was all…mah hamilah? Swamp. The miracle of the Jews is they come to the desert and make it this. Where there is death, they made life.” He dragged on the cigarette.
Raysh walked in silence, thinking. She caught up with Orlee, and as they came closer to the
spring—the splash and roar of a waterfall was the giveaway—she realized that she believed him. She believed it in her bones. Where there was once death, she could make life.
But the sight of the spring was overwhelming. Two other buses were there, a few families, and a handful of solo hikers. About fifty people were already in the water.
Yaron led them to a spot away from the others. He gestured to a small clearing under a few trees and took off his shirt and sandals. He grinned at them and then, like Moses at the Red Sea, he led them into the water. A lot of people followed him in, and there were cries of “It’s so nice!” and “Oh my God, yes!” and “Marco!” but Raysh stayed put.
“How are you feeling?” Orlee asked.
“It’s too crowded,” she said. “If I freak out, I’d rather it be less public.”
“There’s another spring over there,” a voice behind them said. Raysh turned and saw Simon.
“I’m not stalking you or anything. I just overheard.”
“How do you know that?” Orlee asked.
“He told me.” Simon pointed at the security guard, who was leaning against a boulder, holding a cigarette in one hand and reaching into a bag of sunflower seeds with the other. “I asked if he was going in, and he said no, but if he were, he’d go to the spring behind that boulder. Want to check it out?”
“Sure,” Raysh said. She took a deep breath and, for a moment, felt like she was back on the banks of the Hackensack River. “But you guys don’t have to.”
“We don’t have to,” Orlee said. “We want to.”
“Want to what?” Oren said, joining them.
“Go swim in a private spring. For Raysh.”
Oren looked at her. “Ahh, got it. Yeah, totally. What are we waiting for?”
Raysh smiled, but it wasn’t easy. “Thanks, guys,” she said.
They walked past the security guard. He nodded at them and pointed. “Over there,” he said. “Beautiful, I tell you. Mamash yafeh.”
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