Watching Eliyahu’s lush wide angle lens
capture the homes and landscape
The empty, silent buildings
The green shrubbery and hills surrounding
The cold water gushing into the Mikveh
I used to take my sons to, before the Holy Days
I am filled with shame,
Having never questioned the silent witnesses
The dilapidated stonework and arched rooms
The emptiness of what once was
Merely accepting the fact as part of history
Never asking who lived here?
Are they still alive?
Where?
Now watching the human rights groups visiting
The screen focuses on the single survivor
Who eloquently points to where he once lived
He speaks of Lifta with emotional warmth
Some 3000 souls living in peace
In hundreds of stone walled homes
Now vacant and rotting.
The detritus of iron beds still sticking out of the earth growing
Inexorably on the floors.
I would walk here often
Across the valley from my home
Never questioning the dotted stone homes
Zigzagged along the side of the hills
Hugging the landscape, seemingly haphazardly
Like small toy box houses when seen from my garden across the valley.
Then came the highway that divided the valley in half
And walking the dog became more difficult
And the noise made the sweet smelling valley
Less inviting, as did the diesel fumes.
Back then the mist filled the valley early int he morning
And the deer frolicked carefully
Always wary of possible threats
The dump on the top of the hill was filled with rainwater
And Gilbert loved to jump into the cool refreshing water
Albeit emerging muddy and filthy.
The heather in April and the perfumed moss
The wetness and fructification of the spring valley flora
Supported and formed the sustaining natural backdrop to this village.
Now memories are darkened by the history brought to my consciousness
Having read of Allenby reaching Lifta
Seeing the photos of the British army
And the capitulation of the Turks
And the realization that Jerusalem was theirs on reaching…Lifta!
A fateful place, a turn in the fighting 1919
Allenby dismounting off his horse out of respect for the old city
The Rabbis and Imams and Mullahs there to greet him
A new dawn
The realization of a millennial dream
Allenby, Balfour, Weitzmann, making this happen.
Lifta, the place triggering this new change
The place of no resistance
Of capitulation to Empire, once Turk, then British now Israeli.
A place of forgotten memories
Of lost dreams
Where families lived generation after generation
Now denied their collective story even
In the rubble of what once was.
Lifta looms large in my memory
Times of bonding with my sons
The climbing and talking
The jumping into the clean waters
The questioning of tradition’s claim as to its association
With Joshua bin Nun
And our participation in, yet critical discussion of tradition
This Lifta as the trigger of our approach to tradition, culture, and religion.
It’s almost as if Lifta was the very blind spot I am now forced to see
The lacuna, my son, himself so attached to,
Now had to demythologize,
In exploding the gentle leafy green family myth
Embodying the good times
The family times
The conversations we engaged and broke our intellectual teeth on;
Now shattered by the light focused ont he very retina that gazed unawares.
The ethical lacuna
In not questioning
In not seeing these homes
These families
This village
As an open moral wound.
Too much time
To allow it to fester in memory
He focuses his wide angled lens over the valley
And the zigzag of homes form a jagged knife
That cuts deep into my heart.
Lifta captures the imagination for many:
Now neo-Hasidic groups
Squat in hovels
And the night air is interrupted by the wails of Breslover Chassidim
Pouring their hearts out to the Almight silent One
Now nature groups pass through the valley with middle-aged folk
Sun capped and binoculars suspended
Chatting and jovial
Unawares of the history of this place
Beyond the flora and fauna
Now horses carrying school girls wearing their riding gear with arrogance
And pride, walking carefully along the path
Anxious to avoid the rocks.
I think back in shame
My time here
My assumptions
My appropriation of the Zionist idea
My acceding to the reigning powerful myth
Not questioning more
Not asking who lived here and why they were absent
The silent spaces
This once thriving village
Souls living and dying
Generations passing down stories
Now skeletal structures
Chimeric shadows of the past
This story of Lifta
Points an accusing finger…At me.
