One of the ancient Jewish traditions is to host guests on the Passover meal, The Seder. Before and after the meal we sit and read the Hagada, the liberation story of the Jewish nation from Egypt. For me, this is a beautifully written dreadful piece of text. It combines very well written religious poems, or Piutim, together with a never-ending national inheritance of victimhood. It says: “We were slaves to Pharaoh in Egypt, and the L-rd, our G‑d, took us out from there with a strong hand and with an outstretched arm. If the Holy One, blessed be He, had not taken our fathers out of Egypt, then we, our children and our children’s children would have remained enslaved to Pharaoh in Egypt. Even if all of us were wise, all of us understanding, all of us knowing the Torah, we would still be obligated to discuss the exodus from Egypt; and everyone who discusses the exodus from Egypt at length is praiseworthy.”
Those words sound like hypocrisy while tomorrow, a day after the Seder, 40,000 Eritrean and Sudanese refugees are to be expelled from Israel, according to a government decision. It is currently delayed only due to an interim order that was issued by the Supreme Court of Israel, but no one knows what will happen next. Meanwhile, the state of Israel closed the Holot facility for refugees and evacuated 800 young men to the south of Tel Aviv, with a restriction order, according to which they are not allowed to live or work in major seven cities, but with no solution for them to sustain.
I was sitting in my brother’s beautiful house, reading this text, which has no relevance for Israel as a nation of victims but as a nation of victimizers of those refugees. We had a wonderful meal, which my sister in law Michal cooked, but happily enough, I set side to side with another writer, a friend of my sister in law, Mrs. Johanna Hershon, her husband painter Derek Buckner, their two twin sons and Joann’s parents, our Passover guests from the U.S.
.It was a real gain to have them with us. Joanna is the author of four novels: Swimming, The Outside of August, The German Bride and A Dual Inheritance (May 2013, Ballantine). Her writing has appeared in (among other places)The New York Times, One Story, The Virginia Quarterly Review, the literary anthologies Brooklyn Was Mine and Freud’s Blind Spot, and was shortlisted for the 2007 O. Henry Prize Stories. She’s an adjunct assistant professor in the Creative Writing department at Columbia University and lives in Brooklyn with her husband, painter Derek Buckner, and their twin sons. And as you know, I am a writer of 24 books, from which five are novels, “Only You,” “Shedletse'” “A Tale of a Ring'” “When the Dead Came Back” and “The Wife of a Jewish Pirate” and a single father of twins.
We had a lot to share, Joanna and me. Our writing, our mutual experience in teaching of creative writing, and our similar parenthood of twins. We also both live with painters. My first boy friend was Saar Efroni, an Israeli figurative painter, who died when he was 28 years old. I am happy Derek is fully alive and higly creative. I love his art.
But we could hardly talk, because of the reading of the Hagadone, and because there where many children around the table, thank God. But we had some moments together, talking about my deeds to stop the expel of the refugees from Israel, and the irrelevance of the Hagada for today’s Israeli experience, the Trump regime and more.
I even had the time to look into her site and her husband’s beautiful paintings.
During that, her sons taught my six years old sons to play baseball in the garden, so now it seems I will have to buy them two baseball bats for farther training. But I hope that our friendship only began.
I drove all the way back to the Galilee yesterday’s night so that we will wake up at home. And we did, and because we had few rainy days here, I went out to my kitchen garden with Michael and Daniel, and we spent four hours in weeding until I got exhausted, and my hands became Painful cracked and filled with dirt. But I love it. This is the best way to spend a holiday in our house: preparing the garden for farther Sowing and planting, experiencing life.
I am sorry I do not write her often as before. My hands are full – I have five new workshops of creative writing, a new novel in writing, two books I edit for other writers, not to mention parenting, householding and taking care of our pets. Be well, and let’s meet here again soon.
Ilan.
thegaymomdad 
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