A Very Good Memory: "The IDF soldier I fell for."

This memory implies something complicated, like so many of the memories I’ve gathered into my basket from time spent in Israel. Somewhere on the continuum between bitter and sweet; heady and transcendent, which is a statement that could be made of any experience where love is the beginning, middle, and end. The protagonist and the playwright itself…

He was young. Younger than me at 20. The soldiers didn’t join our group until the second or third day into a 14-day trip, leaving me with a week and four days to grapple with the impression this boy of 19 would leave upon my consciousness; watching him when he wasn’t looking, every chance I got; memorizing the way he stood, the way he walked, the look he’d wear on his face—like concealing a circus of curiosity behind silent, serious eyes.

And though I can’t recall with accuracy the very moment when we met, for those hectic days are blurred in a wild streak of cities and vistas gazed out of a bus window, the details come to me like dreamy snapshots: the night we snuck down to the banks of Lake Kineret and it felt like New Year’s Eve; the thorny path with blooming cacti; the snakes in the River Jordan and the young people camped on its embankment; the never-ending steps of Sefat; the limestone walls in Jerusalem. His face is a snapshot, too. That defiant expression he wore but rarely ever spoke. Curls shorn short as a requirement of active duty. The intensity of his gaze.

My own intensity of feeling beget the experience of stepping, for the first time in my young life, without a net. No one before me had done what I felt compelled to do. No one I had ever known or observed, that is. No one I had ever known had been so bold, so courageous, as to love a stranger from a strange place. A place so unlike my home, with customs and manners so unlike the ones I had been reared to carry, it was almost unthinkable, what I wanted to do.

And then there was the fact of him, this boy, about whom I knew so little. So much like me, it seemed, and yet, so very different. Both of us artists. Both of us shy and searching. Both of us ill content with society’s expectations—ill content with expectations in general.

Because we did not exchange many words, my feelings began and ended with his face. He had one of those faces which recall the Bible and the Patriarchs. Desert wandering and prostrated prayer. The Psalms of King David and the battles at the Temple Mount. Blood stained swords and fountains of gold coins; the Exodus and the Homecoming and the Covenant.

For 11 days on a journey through Israel, it was as if I could hear his beating heart from the back of the bus where he always sat, sandwiched between two hopeful and flirtatious girls yet rarely showing his affection, except for this one time when he sat next to me.

When you’re painfully shy and you’ve fallen hard for someone else who is equally as shy, it’s little moments like sitting side by side on a bus that assume monumental stature in the memory bank of love. It may seem inconsequential, for the assignment of great meaning seems to be reserved only for BIG moments—moments that broadcast their big-ness for all to see. This was not a moment like that, but for me, it could have uprooted the olive trees and eclipsed the sun that had punished us so brutally that summer.

I don’t recall the circumstances exactly. Only that the seat beside me was empty and, to my amazement, there he suddenly sat. It was our last day on the bus. We must have been in the north, for the road curved through the mountains, lush and green and towering.

Gazing out the window, I nervously remarked at the beauty of the view. Upon his silence, I turned my face from the vista to his, when he locked eyes with mine and said, “Very beautiful.” 

.מאוד יפה 

My tender heart burst open wide in that moment, seared in my consciousness as one of the most romantic, most heart wrenching memories of my life—like standing on the epic brink but being too scared to jump.

Our lives never had cause to cross paths again, and that’s okay. Every person we meet, every circumstance we come through can have the effect of guiding us back to ourselves. In hindsight, I can see how admired I was. And that is so very good.

And if you sit and think about it, it’s actually a miracle that, after 15 years, I can visit with this very good memory—this boy who has grown into a man and whose life flashed across mine and mine, his, for a fraction of a moment—and how it still resonates.

And when you sit and think of such things, it can make you want to stand up taller than you’ve ever stood before, and crash through all the ceilings you’ve constructed around yourself and wipe clean all the lies that hover in the air around you. It's been moments in life like this that have taught me how not to be shy. How not to hold back.

And to always make the leap from the edge of that wild, epic precipice.