My Journey Into the Deserts of Israel
The Story of Sheilagh, Part 2
Editor’s Note: Click here for Part 1 from Sunday in this ongoing autobiographical series.
Sometime in middle school it occurred to me that writing stories was something you could do, and so I did. I never finished one of those early attempts, and I don’t remember now what they were about, which is for the best. I have no idea what my parents or brothers thought I was doing when I, at fifteen, would sneak down to the basement to type out my fevered prose on the family computer, frantically hiding the screen when anyone approached. But for the record, I was writing my first “novel,” a historical romance that is now lost to oblivion, proving that God is merciful.
I moved to Washington DC for college, studying history and Jewish civilization. I visited Israel for the first time on an interfaith trip, and loved it so much I returned a year later to spend six months in the desert. For years I had daydreamed about where I would go and what I would do during my semester abroad. I didn’t anticipate shivering through the night on the bare desert ground, getting lost in Jerusalem’s Old City at questionable hours, and waking up to sirens announcing incoming rockets.
The first of these rocket sirens came memorably at 5:30 in the morning. My Israeli roommate and I stumbled outside and downstairs, only to find that the shelter door was locked. Bleary-eyed Israeli and foreign students huddled in the open-air stairwell of the apartment complex, waiting to hear the sound of the rocket making impact and hoping it wouldn’t be on us. The next siren was a few hours later. At that point I had to acknowledge that the right thing to do would be to inform my parents, who were at that very moment heading for Israel to visit me, about that morning’s developments.
The conversation went something like this:
“Hey Mom, you guys are on your way, right?”
“We’re on our way to the airport now!”
“Ok, well… I don’t want to worry you, but just in case you hear anything, there were a couple of rockets shot at Beer Sheva this morning.”
“Oh.” Long pause. “Should I bring a hard hat?”
We learned to feign bravado about those rocket sirens, but they were a stark reminder of the hostility that that tiny nation has faced since before its modern rebirth in 1948. I spent my time exploring, studying, and enjoying countless coffees and occasional beers with friends, but every once in a while something would make me stop, look around, breathe, and actually remember where I was. This was the setting for those Bible stories that had fired my imagination as a child, the place generations of exiled Jews had longed for, the country that had been rebuilt by dreamers with strength and grit I could hardly imagine.
I had sensed it on my first trip, but I saw firsthand during that semester that Israel was a remarkable country full of remarkable people, and I knew that whatever was to come in my life, it would always be special to me.
See the concluding Part 3 of this series on Saturday!
