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Eden Biton ’17

Posted on April 12, 2024

Eden currently serves as Group Coordinator for Amitei Bronfman.

On October 7th, I slept at my partner Shaked’s home in Haifa. Shaked serves in an elite army unit, and in October he had just several more months until he would be finished with the army. In short – we could feel the end coming, that soon he would finish his long, difficult three-year service. We did not know then how far we were from that moment we had been so eagerly waiting for.

Shaked keeps Shabbat, so he does not normally carry a cell phone then. However, because of his job in the army, he needs to be available all the time, so at 7:30am on the morning of Simchat Torah, half an hour before he would usually wake up to go to synagogue, his cell phone vibrated.

Only I heard it, and at first, I thought it was probably a mistake and I ignored it. The vibrating continued for several minutes, so I finally looked at the phone and I saw that someone from his team in the army was calling him. He woke up, and I told him, and at the same time his mother knocked on the door and told us there is a war.

We still had no clue what was going on, but Shaked jumped up from the bed without hesitating, spoke on the phone with whomever was necessary to understand where he needed to go, got dressed, and left right away with his father, who drove him to the army base.

In the background was the news – videos from people in Sderot whose security cameras showed terrorists with Kalashnikovs at the entrance to their homes. It was unbelievable, and still is. I was at home all day, glued to the news and, unfortunately, to the videos as well, in an effort to get a hold on reality and to understand what was happening.

I could not communicate with Shaked at all, and I had no idea what he was going through. Later, I found out that Shaked was part of rescuing the residents of Nir Oz and returning control to the kibbutz.

I was supposed to begin my academic studies a few days later, at the Shalem Center in Jerusalem. I was excited and very much looking forward to it. Of course, my studies were put on hold, and I found myself at home, in Haifa, with nothing to do, just worried and stressed – for our nation as a whole, but also for my love. This was even before I knew he would go into Gaza, which had always been my fear, even before the war, when there was no real reason to think he would or any plan like that.

I was looking for something to do, so, like everyone on the home front, I volunteered. I facilitated activities and art projects for children who had been evacuated from their homes and were temporarily staying in Haifa. I also volunteered a bit in a war room that helped people who had left their homes because of the missiles find a place to stay.

After two weeks like this, I had a different idea – to ask the principal of the high school where I studied if they needed substitute teachers. In the army, I taught soldiers for their matriculation exams, and since then I have often given private lessons to children. I really liked high school, so going back was a good thing for me; it meant going to a place that was familiar and safe.

Luckily for me, it turned out that they needed Tanakh (Bible) teachers. Tanakh was not the first subject I would have thought to teach, because I never connected to the way it was taught in school to me. But I grabbed the opportunity with both hands, and perhaps also liked the challenge of making it a good, interesting class.

Because so many teachers were absent serving in the army reserves, I was assigned a large number of classes – six, to be exact. These were my regular classes for the two months I was there. It was a very meaningful experience, and it gave me additional educational experience that was very different than my experience in the army – a different target audience, a younger age group, and an entirely different subject. And of course, all this was in the complex larger context of what was going on in the country.

It was important to me that my students would see the Tanakh as relevant to them, and, most importantly, as belonging to them, as students at a secular high school. I tried very hard to connect the material to their lives, to the soul, to ideas that are beyond time and place. In any case, even if I had not wanted it to, the situation and the war jumped out at us from the pages of the Tanakh, which, as we know, is full of wars and difficult stories of heroism. It would have been impossible to ignore it, and I did not want to.

I felt like I wanted more, to take advantage of this opportunity to plant seeds of curiosity in my students, and I saw that there were students who really wanted it. I gathered a number of students from each class who I saw had that spark of curiosity, and we began to meet together one afternoon a week for learning that was beyond what we were doing in school. We read great texts, from Rabbi Nachman of Breslov to Plato, and we also touched on issues of Jewish tradition and what it means to be Israeli.

This group was healing for me. I felt like the only thing I could do that would be helpful for me and for those around me was to plant these roots in the ground. To see what the great and ancient texts had to say to me, and to draw from them fresh air to breathe. It also felt a bit like a mending of my own experience in school, which, though it was very good and rich, lacked Jewish content in particular and philosophy in general. I was also happy to create personal relationships with my students, and to be another pair of eyes that, I hope, saw them as they are.

Of course, my worry for Shaked and missing him so much was in the background all the time. Every phone call from an unidentified caller would make me jump, and I would leave class to answer the phone with great anticipation hoping to hear his voice on the other side, disappointed to discover it was only someone trying to sell me insurance. It was very difficult for me not to be able to share with him, to speak with him about what he was going through, or just to laugh together on the phone. I was only able to cope and continue to function thanks to the routine that I built for myself.

Several months have passed, and eventually I did begin my studies at the Shalem Center on January 28th, after they had been pushed off for so long. It was strange then, and it is still strange, that in the background the war is still, unfortunately, continuing. Nonetheless, the opportunity to deal with big ideas, with foundational texts, and with content that I love, does enable me to somewhat disconnect from reality. At the same time, even here, the war of course always comes up, whether we are learning about the war of Troy, or a biblical story, or, in general, the entire history of humanity, which is full of power struggles.

I am grateful for my routine, and I hope that gradually I will be able to fully dedicate myself to it and become absorbed in it, always while looking out the window, with the knowledge that things are still happening. Even though Shaked will soon be released from the army,(please God!), there are still people in Gaza, and I know Shaked will also be called to reserve service soon. This is not the end.