Faculty “From Nearby Faraway”: Jerusalem, June 20 2025
Rebbeca Solnit borrowed the title of her book The Faraway Nearby from the painter Georgia O’Keeffe–a phrase that has trailed me ever since. This is how O’Keeffe signed many of her letters to friends back in New York, whom she had left behind upon moving to New Mexico to paint her haunting images of skulls in the desert–“from the faraway nearby”. With this unique signature she marked a sense of intimacy in letter writing despite the geographical distance.
An adaptation of that feeling is warranted for me not just since October 7th, but really since the onset of Covid. Like O’Keeffe, I feel “nearby” my friends and my family, despite the distance over continents and time zones (that gap collapsed in an illusory way with instant messaging, emails, facetime, and zoom). Yet, I feel so very far because “the view from here is not the view from there”. In that spirit, I write this as a bridge, an offering of perspective, but reverse O’Keeffe’s order. I want to convey, from my little corner, what we are going through in this tiny country the size of Rhode Island that seems to take up so much air-time in the international news.
I am living in Jerusalem for the summer, around the block from my beloved apartment, which is rented out long-term to one of the families displaced from the North (since that “Black Sabbath” on October 7th). I arrived on Monday, June 9th, just “in time” for the drones and missiles, and the skies to close to international travel. But I don’t feel “stuck”. There is no place I would rather be, even after a week of bad nights (after just recovering from jet lag) and the real anxiety about ballistic missiles from Iran carrying enough explosives in their warheads to wipe out whole city blocks. The truth is: I live “far away” from their targets, too close to Al-Aqsa, that holy mosque that marks “the farthest” place from which Muhammad arose to Heaven on his Night Journey. The proximity to Muslim Holy sites keeps us relatively safe. It is, rather, the “faraway nearby” population centers like Tel Aviv, Haifa, and Beer Sheba, they aim for. The other thing that protects all of Israel is the “Iron Dome”, anti-aircraft missiles that blow up the ballistic ones traveling through the stratosphere.
I imagine this Dome to be like the raqi’a (“dome” or “firmament”) that God placed in the Heavens on the Second Day of Creation to separate between the Upper and Lower Waters. Yet this dome is fire-against-fire, metal-against-metal, and from your balcony you can see the trajectory of the missile, burning white against the night, and a rocket ascending to intercept it, a flash of blue heat, and BOOM. Often there are several BOOMS in a row. (Around ninety percent of missiles and drones are intercepted by Iron Dome). Any time during the day or night, there might be sounds of jets breaking the sound barrier. Sometimes I can’t distinguish them from the sound of the early morning garbage truck. It’s kind of a slow unsettling rumble—eerie. But the sequence of BOOMS means we are safe. I am amazed and grateful. Thousands of lives are saved every day. Still one must stay away from the windows, even when the siren does not sound in your area, because the falling shrapnel can do damage, shatter glass.
On nights when the ten-minute warning* has shaken us awake on our cell phones and no siren follows, and we realize no missiles will fall here, we can go out and watch the sound-and-light show. Here is a video my neighbor took of the missiles on Monday around midnight, June 16th: They are saying: “Why was there no siren?” “Because they are not for us.”
I don’t bother to take videos or venture out to the balcony. If there is no siren that follows the RED ALERT ten-minute warning that buzzes on all cell phones, I just try to go back to sleep. On occasion, I can subdue my racing heart by deep breathing. My daughter, Ariella and son-in-law, David, have to descend three-flights of stairs with their three girls and their dog Enkidu. They do not wait for the siren, but go down, whether at midnight or 4 am, sometimes twice in the night, to their bomb shelter in the building where families and older couples from 17 apartments gather with sleepy children and their pets. There are three old dusty faux-leather couches in a U, and old kitchen chairs, and pillows. Even running water and two urinals. No mattresses. Nobody yet chooses to sleep there; they need only stay, at most, for twenty minutes. Though some of my friends in smaller buildings have set themselves up for the night in their bomb shelters to avoid a disrupted night’s sleep.
The English sent their children to the countryside to avoid the BLITZ in London—but I can’t imagine Israeli parents ever separating from their children. Who would carry them down the stairs?
I know how Ariella tumbles down the stairs with her sleepy brood because I went through it with them back in December, when the Houthis (an Iranian proxy) fired missiles the night I arrived. Miriam (five years old) told me not to bother looking for my clogs, “no time”, and then flung herself into my arms. (She commandeers going-to-the-shelter protocol). I did not sing the “One-two-buckle-my-shoe” rhyme, with which we normally take the three flights of stairs. As we all clomped down, gathering neighbors, children, and pets along the way, my heart was beating. I did not know whether I was carrying Miriam or she was carrying me. It was not fear for myself that I felt, but for them. my need to comfort them, to assure them, assured me that I could be courageous, for them. It makes me maudlin to think that these children “get used to this”, “know this fear”, hold it in their body as reactive memory, searching for the primal arms that will hold them (Ima, Abba or Bubby) as you are propelled by the 90-second-warning-siren to take to the stairs. The English sent their children to the countryside to avoid the BLITZ in London—but I can’t imagine Israeli parents ever separating from their children. Who would carry them down the stairs?
The shelter in my building is more minimal. There is one desk lamp on the floor. No Wi-Fi. Nor running water. a cubicle with a toilet; 3 large jerry cans of water one could use if forced to stay there for hours. Not so comfortable. We receive news through a little transistor radio that cackles awake as my neighbor puts in double AA batteries each time. That’s how we found out, early Thursday morning, that Beer Sheba’s Soroka hospital had been hit. Where could they evacuate the sick? (Later, I read, that an old wing of the hospital took most of the hit and no one was severely wounded or killed. It all feels like a miracle).
Because of the 2-star quality of my bomb shelter, after the first 10-minute RED ALERT, I wait for the sirens, which give me 90-seconds; these have really died down in the last few days.
My students live in the big apartment blocks in Katamon, near Ben Zakkai.
They share the bomb shelter with a hundred other apartment units and the shelter takes up half-a-block. It was probably built after the Six Day war, and then it was turned into a Boxing Studio, replete with wifi and showers. They have set up a permanent spot for themselves, where they leave pillows and night reading. they often fall asleep for the night there. They, like Ariella, do not wait for the sirens to run for their shelter. There’s something very Israeli about a bomb-shelter-turned-boxing-studio reverting to bomb shelter. Ingenuity? Adaptability?
On Tuesday night, I slept at Ariella’s with no incident except the usual “musical beds” they play all night; David often ends up on the couch in the living room when the music stops. I fell asleep with Naomi (who is almost eight) in the guest bedroom, reading. at 5:30 am, I woke up to find him on the couch with the blanket pulled over his head—still as a mummy—and groggy Ariella sitting up, leaning on his feet, while Yona (three years old) tried climbing into her lap to alert them to Dawn-Rising-with-Hope-of-a-New-Day in the east.
I sighed, used the toilet, and went back to sleep until 8. (It’s a blessing to be a Bubby, and have selective responsibility).
There is NO ROUTINE now. No school. No library. No pool. We cannot really work, except for an hour or two here and there. So we plan “special occasions”. Like “chocolate milk for breakfast”; a trip to the toy store with Bubby to buy presents for the cousins on kibbutz, whom we are visiting this weekend. I spent the entire day with the kids on Wednesday. It was sheer delight.
At 11 am, we all tumbled down to the park behind Ariella’s home, where the families connected to Miriam’s kindergarten all gathered—bringing melon and cookies and popsicles to share. The kids ran free. The parents sat in circles, offering each other friendship, company, support. Some are single parenting — one woman, mother of four and an ob-gyn, whose husband is an academic in China; another man, teacher and father of three, whose wife went to New York to visit her mother, undergoing treatment for cancer. They are all exhausted. And also grateful for one another. It feels like the craziness of Covid, but without the isolation. We do not talk politics, but there is a sense of solidarity here that we will grin-and-bear-it until their missiles all run out and/or we have wiped out the threat of “the-bomb-in-the-making” and the missile launchers.
I write now from Kibbutz Ketura, where my son Eitan and his wife, Ella, live with their kids, my beautiful grandchildren, Naveh (now seven) and Gal (five). Ariella and David and the girls have joined us. All the cousins pile on top of each other like a deck of cards. Ketura has become a “country club”, says Eitan, for all the extended-family members seeking sanctuary from the cities in the center. The pool is open and crowded. But the cafeteria hours are limited, lest there is a siren with only 90-seconds to get to the communal shelter. Not feasible with a crowd of more than fifty. In fact, an hour after Ariella and David arrived, there was a siren. we all piled into the “mamad”** (safe room), and stretched out on the bed in the air conditioning, kids watching the Disney channel while we joked and waited it out. They had not had a siren all week. So the city-mouse brings the country-mouse the threat of missiles?
My friends, Bruce Weinstock and Lisa Kempler, who are “stuck” here for the interim because their flight back to Boston on Sunday was cancelled, have it best of all because they have a mamad in their short stay apartment, and when the sirens sound, they just roll over and go back to sleep.
Bruce said something moving to me the other evening. TEven he declares there is nowhere else he’d rather be; he and Lisa do not feel “stuck” (she can do her job online).
“Why?” I asked.
“Because you feel this great surge of care, of communal belonging when crisis strikes, and people are just absolutely present for one another. In the States, society is built around every one for him or herself. People are essentially socially isolated. That cuts both ways. More freedom; here there is more pressure to conform.”
Conform? I ask. The Israelis I know are singularly non-conformist.
“I mean in the groups in which one does choose to affiliate.” Muslim or religious Jew; liberal left or right.
Yes, there is a fundamental communitarianism here. It is what I love about being here; and I know that the choice to belong to a nation-state founded on an ethno-religious collective identity (the Jewish people) has its problems. (I exercise the arguments for and against, internally, on a daily basis, but ultimately it is my kishkas that draws me to be here, to call this home). It was just amazing to hear this from Bruce, my friend from Boston. He just “gets it”.
I pray there will be some rest this Shabbat. A full night’s sleep at least.
And ultimately I pray for a lasting peace, an end to all war.
Bend our warheads into ploughshares.
Missile launchers into roller coasters.
And the lion will lie down with the lamb,
…And a little child (like Miriam) will lead us!
(riffing on Isaiah).
*The ten-minute warning comes from the Homefront command” [Heb. Piqqud ha-‘Oref, literally orders-of-the-back-of-neck]. ALL cell phones get this RED ALERT, even on a US number (as I have). How can the Homefront Command have access to ALL cell phones in Israel? you might ask. I dunno! The first warning is followed by sirens if there are indeed missiles headed towards your town/neighborhood. You then have 90 seconds to get to a shelter. These are most often intercepted by Iron Dome. But you have to wait for another message before you emerge from the shelter–up to half an hour, sometimes longer.
**Mamad, in Hebrew, is an acronym for merchav mugan dirati, a safe-apartment-space, which is a room with thick concrete walls, a heavy iron sealed door and windows, part of the building-code after the Gulf War, when we feared chemical weapons from Iraq. Our different shelters tell Israel’s history.
Rav Rachel Adelman (PhD, the Hebrew University of Jerusalem) is Associate Professor of Hebrew Bible at Hebrew College, where she recently earned rabbinic ordination (2021). She is the author of several academic and popular articles in Jewish studies, as well as two books: The Return of the Repressed: Pirqe de-Rabbi Eliezer and the Pseudepigrapha (Brill, 2009) and The Female Ruse: Women’s Deception and Divine Sanction in the Hebrew Bible (Sheffield Press, 2015), She just completed a new monograph: Daughters in Danger, from the Hebrew Bible to Modern Midrash (forthcoming, Sheffield). When not writing books, papers, or divrei Torah, it is poetry that flows from her pen.
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