The end of the trip.
It is the last day of our trip. In the morning, we tour the residential areas of West Jerusalem, and then walk the streets and shops of the
In the afternoon, there is a ceremony with the scribe who is completing a new Sefer Torah for
On October 23, 2003, Rabbi David Wolpe was speaking at the
He was fortunate: with family, friends and doctors among the audience, he was rushed in an ambulance to the university hospital, with large doses of intravenous drugs along the way. A doctor later told him that had he been swimming, driving or in the bath, he would likely not have survived.
A CAT scan was negative, but an MRI a week later showed he had a lesion on his brain. A week after that, he underwent brain surgery:
The morning of surgery, as my bed was wheeled out of the prep room, I said the "Shema" with the acute knowledge that it could be the last time. I felt with powerful intensity the ephemerality of everything, how life, friends, family, love, this entire world is a wisp grasped between our fingers and how a moment can take it away. . . . As I fell to sleep, I knew it was only a step away from darkness.
The operation was a success, and a week later, the doctors called with the final pathology results: it was totally benign, and he would need no further treatment for it. In the arduous weeks of recovery from the surgery, he realized how blessed he had been:
The Talmud says, "achevruta o mituta," friendship or death. That was a lesson I always thought drenched in exaggeration, but it is so. Community is life, and as one Chasidic master put it, "God speaks the language of human beings."
I felt God reach to me through the hands of the doctors and the wonderful nurses in my unit at UCLA, and then powerfully from family and friends. . . . I felt wrapped in a remarkable covering of community chesed (lovingkindness).
In response, I am taking the beautiful suggestion of one congregant to fulfill the mitzvah of writing a Sefer Torah (Torah scroll). I have commissioned a sofer (a scribe), and the congregation will be joining my family in creating a new Sefer Torah for our synagogue.
And so, eighteen months later, we have arrived in
Our scribe is an Israeli, a former soldier who became a scribe in response to his own second chance. At the ceremony, he allows each of us to place our hand on his as he completes the final letters of the Sefer Torah. Rabbi Wolpe and he speak about the moment, and we also welcome the rabbi and president of an Israeli shul to whom we are donating one of our existing Torahs.
The second chance is central to Judaism. Almost every major character in the Bible receives one: Abraham, Sarah, Isaac, Leah, Moses, Ruth, and others. Each year, at Yom Kippur, all of us receive an unmerited second chance. Every week, after Shabbat, we get a new week; every day is a blessing, another chance.
And the modern state of
That evening, we have a final dinner together, and then a speech by a woman from The People’s Voice, a private Israeli-Palestinian initiative based on a six-point plan signed by Sari Nusseibeh (President of El-Quds University) and Ami Ayalon (former head of the Israeli General Security Service).
So many plans: the Peel Commission, the U.N. Partition Plan, the Allon Plan, the Rogers Plan, the Oslo Process, the Clinton Parameters, the Mitchell Plan, the Tenet Plan, the Zinni Plan, the Geneva Accord, and (currently) the Road Map. The absence of peace in the Middle East is not the result of the absence of plans.
After the dinner and speech, we board our buses for the trip out to