Rabbi Yoshi and Jacqueline are leading a Stephen Wise Temple solidarity mission this week in Israel. Each day Rabbi Yoshi will share reflections on the visit.
February 9, 2024 – 30 Shevat 5784
Today was about home.
We started with a painful, heart wrenching visit to the site of the music festival where 364 Israelis were brutally murdered. There were many sexual atrocities committed there as well, largely ignored by the UN and rest of the world. This visit reminded me of the communities and homes we build through our passions and hobbies. The 3,000 plus people who came to the festival created this through their shared love of music, dance, and being together. As I walked through the memorial that has been built by their friends and loved ones, I couldn’t help but feel a deep sense of home in this place with no physical structures, a place that none of the participants actually lived. But now, this place will forever link them, an eternal home of sorts.
Then, we traveled to Kfar Aza to learn about the horrific attack on October 7, 8, and 9. (Yes – it took three days to fully remove the Hamas terrorists from the kibbutz.)
Our guide was Chen Kotler, a woman who grew up in the kibbutz. She toured us through the community as she told the stories of her friends and neighbors who were traumatized, raped, kidnapped, and murdered on those fateful days. She was in Portugal at the time, visiting her sister, when she saw the alert on her phone about a massive barrage of rockets that had been fired across the border by Hamas. She phoned her father to check in and learned that her home was under attack.
From two thousand miles away, she tried to stay on top of what was unfolding, texting friends and loved ones to check in and then, in real time, forwarding the information to contacts in the IDF.
As she told us these painful stories, she pointed out the homes of the loved ones who were murdered or kidnapped. One of her closest friends and next door neighbor, Shachar Aviani, was one of the security officers of the kibbutz. She explained that the first place that was attacked that morning was the armory where they stored their weapons in the event of an attack. The terrorists were well prepared and well informed. They knew exactly where to go to cause the most destruction.
Chen asked us to tell her story to our communities and friends and to share pictures and videos of our visit broadly. Thankfully, her father and sister survived the attacks. Their homes were destroyed though and it is unlikely that they will be able to move back anytime soon. Not only were more than sixty lives lost that day, but a community that was built over seven decades has been badly damaged.
From Kfar Aza we traveled to Shokeda where we had the privilege of helping welcome back more than 100 families to their homes. Their moshav was spared on October 7. Just a few miles from Be’eri and the site of the Supernova Music Festival, Shokeda was untouched – physically. The community still had to evacuate their homes and have spent the last four months living in hotels. Today they came home. Our job was to procure 50 large Israeli flags and then hang them at the entrance. The best part of our visit was witnessing the families re-enter their community via the front gate with celebratory music, balloons, and dancing. The organizers honored me and the Stephen Wise Temple group by inviting us to plant trees and flowers. They also asked me to share a few words of blessing. I told them that my prayer was that Shokeda would be their “forever” home and that they would never, ever be forced to leave again.
Then, we drove to Jerusalem where we will be for the second half of our journey. After dropping off our bags, several of us went to the home of a fallen soldier to pay our respects. Major David Shakuri was killed in Gaza on Wednesday. In addition to being a well-respected officer, husband to another IDF officer, Daphna, and loving father to their 14 month old daughter, Shakuri was also the older brother of Yafit, one of our daughter Isa’s best friends from our time in Israel. The Shakuri home was filled with friends and family who had come to offer words of comfort and pay their respects. I watched Jacqueline hold David’s mother’s hand as they cried together. We hugged Yafit and shared words of comfort and love from Isa and our whole family.
I left the Shakuri house with a sense that home is so much more than a place. What makes a house a home are the people we love who fill that place with light and joy and meaning. A house can be destroyed but a home is eternal.
Am Yisrael Chai and Shabbat Shalom,
Rabbi Yoshi