Erev Tisha B’Av

Building a Common House
A letter from Bavat Ayin Community
in Rosh HaAyin
Rabbi Ayala Miron

Sitting in the fully loaded car on our way to Kfar Silver, we started to imagine what we would take with us if we had to leave our house with a few minutes’ notice. Would it be food? Toys? Pictures? Documents?

What’s really important for us to have with us when we are suddenly driven out of our homes?

What did the residents of the Northern towns and villages take when they knew it was time for them to leave?

The questions kept flowing.

What did my parents take with them when they left Baghdad more than fifty years ago, on short notice, fleeing the persecutions of Zionist activists by the Iraqi government?

What did their parents take with them a year later when they were finally allowed to leave Iraq with only one suitcase, seventy pounds, per person?

Kefar Silver is about an hour’s drive from Rosh HaAyin, so the drive there gave us some time to reflect. Our car was loaded with art materials and homemade cakes to bring to a group of residents of Northern cities (Carmiel, Haifa, Shlomi, Nahariya and other small villages; three hundred people altogether) that found temporary shelter in the boarding school facility of Kfar Silver, located on the outskirts of the southern city of Ashkelon, a project initiated and supported by Israel Movement for Progressive Judaism (IMPJ).

We thought that artwork would bring a little comfort to both children of all ages and their mothers, who would help out with the children in the morning and join a special adult workshop in the afternoon.

We started by creating stations for different age groups, but soon we found out that most of them wanted to also experience what the other groups were doing. They wanted to do more. So we just let them move from one station to another, and experience the full range of artwork we had to offer. Most of the children came back in the afternoon and worked on their own projects while the adults were busy coating used shoes with a mosaic of paper napkins.

The major theme we offered the children was “home” – Bayit in Hebrew.

What does it take to build a house? How does it feel to build your own house? What happens when you leave your house? Is it possible to carry a part of your house, or the feeling of home, with us?

The younger children used cardboard to build their houses. They painted the yard with lively green and insisted on many colorful flowers. When it seemed they had finished with their projects we saw them working hard trying to combine their “yards” and make them into one piece. When asked what they were trying to do the children answered very simply: we want to turn this into a common house: bayit meshutaf.

Children in Kfar Silver building a common house

Their answer expresses in a nutshell the effort of building a Kehila, a community, in general, and the special efforts that are done in these challenging times here in Israel to build a feeling of security, strength and solidarity in the larger Kehila of Am Israel, that is: the community of the people of Israel.

Building a common house could be an important ingredient of our reaction to the danger of sinat hinam, unreasoned hatred that our sages warn us from on this solemn day in the Jewish calendar, the eve of Tish