Independence
By Judy Labensohn

I came to Israel because I had to get away from my father. I needed, for starters, an ocean and a continent between us so I could grow up to be who I wanted to be. This is to admit that I did not come to Israel because I cared about the survival of the Jewish People.

At 21, I cared only about my own survival. By chance, my survival coincided with the goals of Zionism, so I entered the -ism of Zion through the side door.

Later, when people asked me, "When did you make aliya?" I fumbled for words, because I never really made it. Rather, it, the big "A" made me.

If my domineering father was the push, then a college roommate's stories provided the pull. Originally from Chicago, Joanie had spent her adolescent summers at a faraway place called Kibbutz Negba. In 1963, against the backdrop of a girls' dormitory in St. Louis, Missouri - on snowy, winter evenings - Joanie told me idyllic tales of hot afternoons when she roamed rocky hillsides with a herd of sheep and swarthy, lean shepherds, one of whom was her cousin.

In Joanie's tableau, graceful young men leapt upon mountains and skipped upon hills, steering sheep to green pastures. Joanie led me on with hyperbole. Through her telling, I saw biblical vistas, where each man was a hero, sandy beaches where each grain stood for one Jew. Her stories, full of romance, daring and heroism, offered a pleasing alternative for the forging of a Jewish identity that was being exposed to gruesome stories of ghettos and death camps, stories that were just beginning to creep out of closets and onto college campuses. Why choose the Holocaust, I wondered, as a basis for an identity, if you can roam ancient hills with a staff in your hand, in search of underground springs?

When it came time to decide where to go after college, the pull of the lowlands won out over the comfortable security of a graduate school. I knew what it was like to sit and read books about the American Revolution. I had done that for four years. But playing shepherdess in Israel, eating cucumbers and tomatoes and throwing the peels into a kolboinik, joining a real revolution, that fired my imagination. And it was also farther from my father, who wanted nothing more from his daughter than to become a schoolteacher and earn a steady, respectable income.

Before I set foot on the tarmac, Israel was the land of transformative miracles.

For preparation, I read the Song of Songs and was not drawn to hermeneutics. To me, a young woman raised on Walt Whitman and Emily Dickinson, a kiss was a kiss, and if it tasted of wine, so much the better.

What was this nonsense spewed by the Jewish Agency about new-immigrant rights? How could one compare an apartment or car to a "bundle of myrrh," and "a cluster of henna flowers" in the vineyards of Ein Gedi? My theme song was not "It is good to die for your country," or "We came to build and to be rebuilt." My call was, "Rise up, my love, my fair one, and come away, the time of singing is come."

I came. You came. He, she, it came; we came, you came, they came. While I learned to say those phrases in Hebrew, a whole country wanted to know if I was staying. "Are you staying?" every sherut driver I encountered asked. "Are you staying?" the man who sold me melons asked. It was as if they were all in cahoots to get me to give up my return ticket, as if they knew my father and our difficult relationship, as if they had all been on my side all along, without my knowing it, and now they wanted me on theirs. "Are you staying?" the ulpan teacher asked. How could I say no? "Are you staying?" chirped the woman who cut my hair, the car salesman, the travel agent, the kibbutznik, the first employer.

With each question, I started feeling guilty whenever I entertained thoughts about graduate school. "I'll stay, I'll stay," I started replying. "Just stop asking."

Last month, I met a young American woman, a college graduate who arrived in Jerusalem recently. She told me that these days people look at her as if she is crazy and ask her with disbelief, "Are you staying?" Same words; different message.

When I came in the Sixties, Israel and I were at the height of our romantic periods. Songs sung themselves on the dusty streets after the Six Day War. Possibilities lay at every corner, the Israeli version of manifest destiny. Slowly, and with much pain, we grew out of our romantic periods, though we never gave up the dream totally.

We juggle our plots, invent new stories, delete and edit what no longer fits, rewrite our histories to jibe with new perceptions. The challenge, I suppose, is to stay limber, flexible like the reed, not rigid like the cedar, and to continue seeing the process as adventure.

Every year in the spring, a song runs through my mind, but it is no longer the song of Solomon. I first heard this song on a 1974 Remembrance Day program, six months after the Yom Kippur War. An Air Force entertainment troupe sang it softly on a black-and- white TV screen, while names of fallen soldiers were being read off, the list seeming endless. The tune, as well as the words, come to haunt me or comfort me, I'm not sure which, every spring. These are the words:

This melody cannot be stopped.
This melody cannot be stopped.
We must continue to play the song,
Continue to play the song,
Because this melody cannot be stopped.

This song makes me feel like I am part of some undefined melody that is much larger than how to cope with a menacing father; larger than a Chicago adolescent's summer vacation as a shepherdess; larger than any one story of a ghetto uprising or concentration-camp candles; larger still than any one battle, win or lose.

It puts all the disparate parts of our history into one coherent image and that image echoes another one from chapter 35 of the Book of Isaiah, in which God's people return to Zion, singing. There, in Zion, "they shall obtain joy and gladness and sorrow and sighing shall flee."

Every spring, when Independence Day comes around, new songs are sung along with the old ones. Our attitude towards and understanding of our origins here may change, but one thing remains clear over the years: We cannot stop singing. Maybe it is only through singing, which is to say, only in the song, that sorrow and sighing shall flee.