The Black Sheep Son

A couple Saturdays ago Eitan and I attended the screening of a film made by a woman that is part of the synagogue community to which we belong. The film's name is "HaBen HaSorer," which, literally translated, means the black sheep son. I knew little more about the film than that it was about a family whose son decided to become more religious. Wondering how such a topic would be addressed in a documentary showed at a progressive Orthodox synagogue in North Tel Aviv, I thought it would be an interesting experience at the very least.

Eitan and I paid the 25 shekels ticket price and took our seats in the makeshift screening room that is also our synagogue's sanctuary, as well as its banquet hall, as well as its study center. With 50 other members of the community, some familiar others not, after dealing with technical difficulties, the viewing got underway.

HaBen HaSorer opened with a scene of young men, noticeably religious with their tzitzit and peis hanging down from hips and sideburns, being asked what they wanted most in life. Here the viewer was introduced to two important characters of the film, Yaakov and Itzik, the former being the film maker's cousin and the latter her brother.

After ten minutes of viewing, I suddenly realized that this story, mainly focusing on Yaakov, was following him on a spiritual journey of sorts. A quest to find himself and what was important to him. But I couldn't concentrate on this aspect because it was clear to me that the way in which he chose to do this was by joining what is known in Israel as "Noar HaHarim" (The Youth of the Hills). As bucolic and and innocuous as that title may sound, it masks what has actually become a great point of concern, contempt and frustration for those of us in Israel who would like work toward some sort of workable peace between Israelis and our neighbors the Palestinians. The Youth of the Hills, whether out of religious inspiration, zealous ideology or soul-searching, build and inhabit the outposts and far out settlements of the West Bank. These are the young men and women who believe it is their right to reclaim the biblical lands of the Hebrews by working the soil and shepherding sheep and goats on the rolling hills of what I certainly believe and hope will one day be Palestine.

Once I understood what it was that I was watching: Yaakov inhabiting a ramshackle dwelling, Yaakov scrambling himself some eggs on a makeshift stove, Yaakov sitting with his sheep out on the green and rocky hillsides of South Hebron, I started to fidget and wondered if I should have paid the 25 shekels that supported this film on that evening. Quite viscerally, I felt as though a war was going on in my brain. Mass confusion, anger, disgust, curiosity. Why had I come on this night and why hadn't I been informed that this young man becoming more religious was actually a lunatic settler boy living in proximity to the Palestinian village of Sousia, where I helped families pick their olives two years ago without fear of retribution by the nearby settlers, only to have their trees chopped down three weeks later by those very settlers? Why was I being asked to listen to this story of a quest for self-definition in internationally disputed territory, which no one in the film seemed not consider as a major problem? I thought to myself, "who makes a film about Jews in the West Bank without a political agenda?" Or something along those lines...

After about ten minutes of befuddlement, I realized that instead of fighting what I was seeing, I had been given an unique opportunity. The opportunity to see, through the eyes of Israelis and the reactions of an Israeli presumably religious audience, an internal issue and phenomenon to which people living on the outside are not privy, and probably wouldn't have the patience to witness. And furthermore, I somehow understood that if I could just turn off my brain's judgment mechanism, I might learn something about another point of view. Another truth among the many truths that battle for position of dominant reality in the conflict between Palestinians and Israelis.

From that mindset, I was able to enter the world of this family. A religious Israeli family who sought to abide by the laws and rules which they believe God commanded them to uphold. Along the way, their son felt lost, as though his life had not enough meaning and he set out on a spiritual quest appropriate for his social and religious milieu. Like many other young men and women of his community, he followed the courageous youth into the hills of Judea and Samaria. His family was not supportive, they called him all sorts of crazy. Throughout the film, in clips showing Yaakov and his mother, she would nag at him, "Why can't you just be normal? Find a wife, live in a house, why do you have to go live out there, alone?"

The documentary follows Yaakov to the Gaza Strip, in the nomenclature of his social group, Gush Katif. The family is filmed while making preparations before Shabbat, inhabiting an abandoned beach shack on the coastline of Gaza. Seemingly, this Shabbat was just before the disengagement from the Gaza Strip. From the perspective of the inhabitants of Gush Katif, the filmmaker takes the viewer there to see. Portraying a way of life that may seem idyllic for those who could relate to life there or did live there. One scene shows a young person going from shack to shack delivering a bouquet of flowers to make the Shabbat special and beautiful, a community service of sorts.

Another impressionable scene takes place is one in a synagogue, where a rabbi is imploring his congregants not to fight the soldiers who would take them out of their houses. That violence is not the answer and that everything would be fine. From the upstairs gallery a man screamed that Jews shouldn't exile Jews, that they had to raise arms, that they had kick and scream and fight to stay in their homes. The camera follows the man out into the street where he continues his tirade against the government, against the army, against the state. In all of this Yaakov is sitting by, watching with his friends the scenes unfolding -- I.D.F. soldiers carrying individuals who have refused to leave their homes to buses, babies crying, mothers with agonized faces. The Israeli Border Police dressed in heavy black uniforms with riot gear marching through the street. In the audience people were shifting their weight and sighing in their seats.

Later on when Eitan and I discussed the movie, he recalled his experiences of patrolling homes in Gaza after people were evacuated in 2005. He was in his officer's training course and his particular unit had to make sure that no one reentered and re-inhabited their homes in the middle of the night. He doesn't know what disengagement helped, for him it's difficult to see any benefits in light of everything that has happened since and everything that hasn't happened since. He remembers very clearly when he and another female soldier were on duty. He made her laugh at some joke and while enjoying the positive attention from this girl, a woman walked by and commented, "Oh yeah, laugh, really funny, I'm being taken out my home, but you, laugh..."

Eitan also remembers a commander who was religious. This guy's superior decided to make an example of him and took him to evacuate people from their homes before the soldiers. Not long after going in, this religious commander came out of a house with tears streaming down his face and was excused from the duty he was supposed to carry out.

From these stories I understand that it's all very complicated. It's your point of view. It's your upbringing. It's what you have been taught is right and wrong. It's about who you believe is in charge and what truths such faith requires you to uphold.

The issue of the army arises in the film as well. Yaakov's family insists that he enlist. They are a religious family but they are also a Zionistic one. One prominent scene with the filmmaker's grandmother, "Safta-le," as she is lovingly called by her grandkids, tells that when her family left Germany most of them went straight to the United States. But she was a Zionist, she believed in Israel and that just like all other peoples of the world, the Jews needed a country of their own as well. So she stayed to make a life for herself and raised a family and clearly cherished what had developed from nothing into a dream come true.

It is clear that Yaakov had mixed feelings about the draft. He had his ideas of roaming the hills with his sheep, living the simple life. And all his mother wanted him to do was get married already.

Another interesting scene was one in which Yaakov's father was working on his farm with a few cows. One can assume that the place is near to Jerusalem but it is unclear if it is a settlement of the Jerusalem area or what. Nevertheless, it becomes more evident when Mahmoud and Khalil enter the scene. Two Arab men who work with Yaakov's father. It is clear that these men are on good terms. Mahmoud's wife and her children are filmed visiting with Yaakov's family. It is difficult not to see the similarities between these two families, one Arab and Muslim, the other Israeli and Jewish. Both women have their hair covered, their tasks are to care for children and to serve the food. The men also have the tops of their heads covered and they talk about God and the similarities of their traditions. I wondered if I was meant to understand that not all settler families hate Arabs and vice versa. Or if it was just a fact of these two families lives, that they work, live, eat and play together.

Toward the end of the film Yaakov does join the army, but a scene of him walking along a road between the grassy hills, once again, only this time in full army gear, gun and rucksack, seemed foreboding and ominous. My fear was that the next scene would show how Yaakov had been attacked by Palestinians in the West Bank, walking alone in soldier's uniform, alone, in the land that he felt belonged to him.

Surprisingly, it is the filmmaker's brother whose funeral the viewers are unprepared to witness. Itzik, the brother who wanted to see his wife smile in the beginning of the film, had fallen in battle in the Second Lebanon War.

The film ended shortly after and I still felt a little confused. On the one hand, I felt like I had just watched an extremely intimate family home video. The stories depicted were of a boy coming of age, of a grandmother aging gracefully and happily , basking in the love of her children and grandchildren, the life cycle process as Itzik's wedding and the brit milah of his first child were filmed as well. But I couldn't get out of my mind the backdrop upon which all of these colorful life stories were developing. Settlements, outposts, Gaza, disengagement, the Second Lebanon War. The interplay of religion and nationalism, Zionism and idealism. And as the viewer, I was being asked to identify with all of these story lines as a fellow human being, as a member of a family who could relate to general themes, even though the specifics did not fit.

I think that if I knew Yaakov in his days as a youth of the hills, I would have insisted that he take his flock to the wide empty spaces between Herzilya and Netanya, and that he get the hell out of the hills of South or North Hebron. If I could sit down with his mother and father, I would ask if they knew that the biggest issues on their hands with regard to Yaakov living in the hills shouldn't have been whether or not he would get married or join the army, but rather that his youthful journey quest, and those of however many other youth of the hills there are roaming around the West Bank, directly contribute to the continuing deterioration of my safety and security in Israel proper. And if I could sit down with Safta, I would ask her if we could talk to her kids and grandkids about the wonder and miracle of Zionism and how we all have to get on the same page if we want to keep living here enjoying our state of the Jews.

I tried to turn off my political mind. But after this film, I think I became reacquainted with that awareness that how we live our lives does matter. What we believe to be our God-given rights, or, exercising our conception of entitlement, can contribute to another's enduring of an infernal hell. And our ignorance to the effect that our lives can have on another's, eventually leads to the destruction of us all. Because in the context of Israel and Palestine, the hills in which one may choose to go and find themselves, time and again, only too quickly turn into bloody battlefields.