The Ground That They Walk On

Sarah Roth 

Head of School, Kehilla High School and Jewish Middle School of Nashville 

Two weeks ago, I had a last-minute opportunity to travel to Israel with “A Mifgash That Matters,” bringing American Jewish educators together with Israeli counterparts to learn about how the terrain of our teaching has shifted since the events of October 7. Of course, I had to go: after all, the war in Gaza literally shifted my terrain. After watching universities where I had studied and taught become dangerous places, my husband and I decided to move our three children, ages 9, 12, and 15, to Nashville, where they could receive an ecumenical, but still unabashedly Jewish, education (at Akiva, JMS, and Kehilla, respectively).  

On the first morning, our group of camp directors and Jerusalem tour guides, rabbis and philanthropists, Hebrew school teachers and emergency management specialists, arrived at Kibbutz Kfar Aza, whose farm fields lie in the 2000 meters between its homes and the Gaza fence. Near the entrance, all looked idyllic and peaceful, a heimish, nicely landscaped little neighborhood bathed in sunshine. But it sounded like silence. In a movie, a tumbleweed would have rolled by. No kids came running and calling to pick up the bicycles propped against the walls, ready to ride. The only sound was the voice of our guide, Shalom, who has lived here for 22 years. He returned to Kfar Aza in December and has no intention of leaving again; he and his wife are two of only a handful of residents now. Walking deeper into the kibbutz, Shalom led us from a place of uneasy peace to a place of war. The “juvenile neighborhood,” where children of the kibbutz in their late teens and early twenties who have completed national service are assigned compact cement-block starter homes, is destroyed. Some of the houses look exploded, some melted; some have their fronts sheared away, revealing the haphazard bathrooms and kitchens of young people newly on their own. There are flip-flops and forks and curling irons scattered among the rubble, and walls once white are gray with the pockmarked spray of automatic weapons, every splash of exposed cement the shadow of a bullet. Outside every door army spray paint tallies those who are safe and those who are dead. 

Kfar Aza still felt like an open wound, or even a reopened wound: walking tearily back to our bus, many of us murmured that what it looked like was Poland,1939. As Jewish educators we are all of us wary of too-easy Holocaust metaphors, but our hearts insisted on recognizing the scatter of daily life across broken ground, and as our bus made the return journey from the Gaza Envelope to Tel Aviv and then Jerusalem, it was clear that we were tracing the half-healed scars of this latest attack across the face of the land. In the central cities, we met with collective artists who revive crumbling buildings with new collaborative art, and peacemakers who work to find ways to build dialogue across barriers both literal and metaphorical, and spouses of IDF reservists who have found themselves suddenly raising children alone on the home front, often struggling to make ends meet and sometimes unable to perform their own highly skilled reserve duties. Each speaker prefaced their amazing, can-do, hopeful, start-up nation story with the one that weighs their days now: where they were on 10/7. When they knew. What they heard. Who they lost. Yosef, a heavily muscled Bedouin bus driver who rescued more than 40 people by blazing a trail away from the Nova music festival with his 14-passenger minibus loaded to bursting with the fleeing and wounded, wept openly for those he saved, for those he couldn’t, for the country he loves and that still won’t allow him a gun permit even after hailing him publicly as a hero and a model Israeli Arab.  

I carried all these stories back with me, but the voice that rang, and still rings, loudest is that of Ayelet, a high school teacher at Shaar HaNegev, the high school that serves many of the kibbutzim of the Gaza Envelope, including those among the hardest hit like Kfar Aza, Nir Oz, and Be’eri. Her students are trickling back to school this fall after months as evacuees elsewhere, she told us. Some are commuting two hours each way from kibbutzim further from the border in which they have been living since the massacre. They are too afraid to come back but they want to be with their friends, peers, and teachers, many of whom are kibbutzniks too. As she spoke, she was a little breathless and wild-eyed, in a way that is recognizable to teachers as the face of the first weeks of school. But there was something deeper here, of course. Ayelet lives in Kibbutz Saad, between Be’eri and Kfar Aza, and she begins her story with the events of that morning: someone called a friend at Kfar Aza, only 700 meters away, early in the morning about another matter and so luckily they got the message to lock down Saad in time to keep Hamas fighters out. And then they waited in their safe rooms and called friends and relatives, letting the phones ring on the other end, slowly realizing the scale of what was happening and what it meant when no one answered.  

“We don’t know what to do for our students,” Ayelet said. “They come back wild – they cannot focus or learn.They are all b’trauma. But we the faculty are all b’trauma too. We don’t even know what to do for ourselves. We just come to school each day and try to help them.” How do you do it? one of us asked. How can you bear this when you aren’t even stable yourself? Ayelet, who had been almost vibrating, half laughing, half crying, throughout her description of the situation at Shaar HaNegev, suddenly stilled and looked at us. Shoulders pulling straight, she said, “We are the ground they walk on. To be still for them and let them walk through it is what we have to do.”  

Back in Music City today, I feel deeply grateful to the iCenter for Israel Education for this opportunity – and also sobered by the real urgency of my role as a teacher of the next generation of Jews and Jewish allies. Never have I felt it so profoundly. The ground beneath our children’s feet has shifted in the last year. Students in Nashville and around the US have lost friends, been called genocidal Jew pigs, been forced to go to battle with school administrators over an identity that may have seemed safe, even privileged, to them all along. But we cannot and will not shift. Whatever growing they have done or will do this year and in the uncertain time to come, we as their teachers, their parents, their chaverim are the ground they walk on.