Wednesday, August 1, 2007 Returning To Chomesh The following is Menora Hazani’s July 15 address at the screening of her film, “Hitna’ari”(Awaken). The film explores the ramifications of the 2005 expulsion as per the relationship of the national religious public to Israeli society and the State of Israel.

My dear parents, honored guests, dear residents of Chomesh:

I remember full well the memorial ceremony for our friend from the community of Chomesh in Northern Samaria, Shuli Har-Melech, may G-d avenge his death. He was murdered on his way to Chomesh while his pregnant wife, Limor, was seriously wounded. His story was not told here this evening but, with G-d’s help, it will yet be told. Less than two weeks after the expulsion at Northern Samaria, when we were physically and psychologically battered and broken down, we gathered together for a memorial ceremony in the beit midrash of Elon Moreh. I didn’t know how we would be able to go to that ceremony. The destruction and mourning together were unbearable. Then Ro’i Har-Melech, Shuli’s brother, got up to speak. His words reverberated loudly in the beit midrash, and he started to bring an idea from Rabbi Avraham Yitzchak Kook in his book, Orot.

He said, “We’ve started to express a profound idea, both privately amongst ourselves and for the eyes of the entire world, and we haven’t finished expressing it yet. It’s like we’re standing in the middle of our speech. We don’t want to stop and we can’t… And even if we stammer a great deal – in a foreign accent – as we express this idea that is so precious to us, the shortcoming is not in the clarity of our idea or in its truth. That truth is very strong within us. Yet it is so rich and so overpowering that we are still incapable of explaining it clearly.

Hence we mustn’t retreat.

We must talk and explain, however much our power of articulation allows us. Then, in the course of time, even our speech will emerge from the heavy exile in which it finds itself.

A nation can only descend from the stage of history when it has finished what it started…”

Many times I have felt as though I am stammering. I have had trouble saying what is in my heart, [and] expressing the stream of thoughts and emotions that have awoken in me following the expulsion.

Many times I have felt paralyzed. From one side an entire public is watching me, full of hope that someone will make himself heard and cry out their pain. From the other side is the broadcaster expecting me to speak the modern language of television, a language that is not mine.

Sometimes, when I watch my friends from the “Chomesh First” group who are waging the struggle today to return to Chomesh, I see how few (and with little means) we are. Then I think to myself, “What stammerers we are!”

Yet at such times I take comfort in the words spoken by Ro’i at that memorial ceremony. He said that we must not be silent until we finish saying what we have started to say. Even if Jewish creativity stammers, is still searching to find itself, still has no home and no stage, and sets out to graze in strange fields, we must not be silent!

Because we have started to say something profound.

This evening, we took a big step forward toward saying it.

This entry was posted on Sunday, August 12th, 2007 and is filed under opinion. You can leave a response.