Seeking Solace in Small Things

I’m feeling the weight of it all these days. I suppose most of you are too. Israel seems to have ended up in a Vietnam-style quagmire in Gaza, one that that feels increasingly insoluble with each passing day. All 136 hostages remain hidden away in Gaza, without it even being known with certainty which or how many are still alive. The weight of world opinion, briefly with Israel in the wake of the October 7 pogrom and its bestial brutality aimed at innocents, has long since turned away; each day seems to bring reports of more world leaders promoting the idea of another lopsided “prisoner exchange” to deal with the situation, but without noting that none of the captives in Gaza is being incarcerated after having been found guilty of a crime whereas all of the Palestinians who would be released in such a deal are precisely that: terrorists sentenced to prison for having committed crimes, including murder. Each day seems to bring another reason to be distressed. The debacle connected with the storming of that convey of aid trucks in Gaza City last week that led to the deaths of 112 Palestinians is a good example: regardless of how many precisely were killed by the stampeding crowd itself, how many were run over by the trucks carrying the aid (and driven by Palestinian drivers), and how many were shot by Israeli soldiers when some in the crowd foolishly attempted to storm IDF positions set in place precisely to watch over the aid distribution, the death of hungry people attempting to procure food for themselves and their families is tragic regardless of how precisely it may have come about.

Paired with the rising tide of anti-Semitic incidents, including ones featuring violence and death threats, directed against Jewish personalities, Jewish students, and individual Jews targeted solely because of their Jewishness, it’s no wonder my mood has been grim in the course of these last few weeks. How could it not have been? In that way (and also in so many others), we’re all in the same boat.

And so I’ve found myself seeking solace in small things, in the kind of thing I would normally look past quickly without dwelling on much or even at all. It doesn’t always work, this technique. But I thought I would offer my readers this week the comfort that can come from contemplating three tiny things, each in its own way a reminder of the unbreakable link that ties the Jewish people to the Land of Israel, thus—in that peculiar Jewish way I’ve written about many times—a symbol of hope in the future rooted wholly in the past. Each is a thing of beauty. And each is a reminder that Israel has faced far worse enemies than Hamas in the past and survived.

The first is, of all things, an earring. And a tiny one at that, albeit a tiny one made of solid gold. And its story, antique though it may be, is heartening, perhaps even a bit encouraging. There was a time when Israel and its neighbor to the north, then called Phoenicia, got along famously. King Hiram of Tyre, for example, was one of King David’s closest allies: when David conquered Jerusalem and made it his capital, Hiram sent carpenters and stonemasons south to help build David’s new palace in the northern part of the city. Nor did the alliance end with David’s death: when Solomon, David’s son, built the Temple in Jerusalem, Hiram sent along cedar wood—a local specialty and still today the tree emblazoned on the Lebanese flag—to be used in the building effort and also workers (and probably thousands of them) to assist in the construction of Solomon’s new royal quarter in the Ophel, the part of the city south of the Temple Mount and north of the City of David area. Were some of those workers women? Or did the workers actually move to Israel and bring their families along with them? Or did Phoenician men wear earrings? Regardless, it’s a thing of true beauty and someone dropped it in the sand about three thousand years ago—or took it off and put it in a jewelry box that has long since disintegrated or put in the pocket of a robe when heading into the bath unaware that it would be part of the world long after the bathhouse itself would turn to dust. The world has change in countless ways since King Solomon’s time. Almost no artifacts from his day have survived. But ten years ago, an Israeli archeologist, the late Dr. Eilat Mazar, found the earring while sifting through what literally must have been tons of dust and mud in the Ophel. For a decade, the earring languished in the collection of things unearthed but not fully gone through. And then, just recently, the earring was discovered.

It's a tiny thing. It’s beautiful. Whoever lost it, assuming it was lost, must have had a fit! But this tiny golden thing survived—I speak here fancifully, but also hopefully—it survived for a reason: to remind us today, as all our spirits are flagging, that there was a time when Lebanon and Israel were close allies, friend, and trading partners. In the earliest days of the Jewish kingdom, Jerusalem was filled with workers building new things. (Some things don’t change.) And one of them, a man or a woman, a wealthy person who owned lots of golden things or someone of more modest means for whom a single pair of gold earrings (assuming the recovered one had an ancient mate) constituted a major percentage of that person’s wealth—someone lost an earring that survived to remind us that both the past (which is gone) and the future (which doesn’t exist) are mere reflections of the present. And that the troubles we experience in that present are not ours alone, but ones shared—magically but truly—with both our ancestors and our descendants. We are not in this alone, despite how we so often feel. And that is what this tiny golden thing from ancient times reminded me of, and in doing so brought me comfort and some level of relief from the ill ease I seem to be unable to shake off.

My second small thing is even tinier than the first. An off-duty IDF officer, one Erez Avrahamov, was hiking in the Lower Galilee a few weeks ago in the Nahal Tabor Nature Reserve, one of Israel’s most beautiful places. And there he stumbled across the coolest thing: a tiny scarab made of carnelian stone and probably about 2,800 years old. Where the thing came from, who can say? Probably it was made in ancient Iraq, either in Babylonia or Assyria. Featuring a beetle on one side and a winged horse on the other, the scarab was probably lost by someone in the 7^th or 6^th century BCE, when a visitor from the East—or possibly a citizen of Judah who had recently been in what is today called Iraq—inadvertently dropped it when preparing to enter the huge bathing facility that once stood on the spot, perhaps as a prelude to dining in one of the giant buildings than then also existed in that place.

Or perhaps it wasn’t lost at all and is simply all that is left of the person who wore it, perhaps as a pendant (the bezel is long gone, of course) or in a ring? In looking at this truly super-cool looking thing, I find comfort—in remembering that the history of Israel is charted not in centuries but in millennia, and that thousands of years ago, my 40x-great grandfather may well have been on his way home from a business trip to Assyria with a lovely present for my 40x-great grandmother when he stopped off for a much-needed bath before returning home and clumsily dropped the present on the floor of the locker room. Or in the woods. Or on the path itself that led from the east. The living of his day have long since turned to dust. But this beautiful thing, this tiny artifact, remains and has its own lesson to teach: mostly, the things of the world and its peoples are fragile, brittle things that don’t last all that long. But something always remains. All is never lost, or not fully lost. There’s always something left behind to remind future generations to look ahead by looking back. And by remembering.

And my third small thing is, of all things, a box. It’s made of limestone and isn’t itself all that tiny—but I include it today because it was made to hold small things. Found along the great commercial street leading up from the Siloam Pool to the Temple Mount directly through the City of David and the Ophel, the shop in which a shopkeeper displayed his or her wares in this specific box has been gone for millennia. So has the shopkeeper and all of his or her customers. But once that street was a major commercial thoroughfare along which pilgrims and tourists made their slow ascent to the Temple. Stopping off for refreshments or souvenirs to bring home must have been par for the course, just as it is today in the streets leading to the Kotel. And in one of those shops, this box was filled with…with what? Jewels or scarabs? Candies or nuts? “I ❤️ Jerusalem” pins? Who can say? But the thought of Jerusalem in ancient times filled with tourists, pilgrims, visitors, Jewish and non-Jewish people from all over the world, all intent on seeing for themselves the glories of the most glorious of all Jewish cities—that gives me comfort as well. I imagine myself among them too, one among many, a single man strolling along the wide avenue, wondering if Joan would like an Assyrian scarab or a Phoenician gold earring or an ““I ❤️ Jerusalem” pin, an ancient version of modern me feeling fully connected to the Land of Israel and to its eternal capital, to its citizens and to its soldiers, its kings and its priests and its prophets. When I contemplate little things like this, I remember that our present dilemmas and challenges are no different than the ones faced by our forebears or the ones our descendants too will have to face. It’s always something! And, that being the case, you can spend your days submerged beneath the weight of it all. Or you can seek comfort in small things. Will someone thousands of years from now somehow find the earring Joan lost at a wedding we attended ten years ago at the Westbury Jewish Center and find comfort in knowing we were here in this place and survived to bequeath our Jewishness to our descendants? None of us reading (or writing) this will know. But knowing that it could happen—that too brings me solace in troubled times.