Leon's No News Bulletin 98 Thur 5th Feb 09

Shalom everyone,

I wonder if other people are as mesmerized by the thought of the town where they grew up as I am at the thought of Krugersdorp.

About two weeks have past since Shirley, one of my youth leaders of about 50 years ago called to invite me to a reunion of people from Krugersdorp in Ranaana on the 21st March 2009 and I’m still having visions of the places in Krugersdorp where I grew up.

How is it possible, I ask myself, today, 60 years after I left Krugersdorp, in my study on Mt. Scopus in the holy city of Jerusalem to see each tree, each house alongside each street where I walked in Krugersdorp as a child as clearly as if I was right there, right now and at the same time be in Jerusalem 2009?

I conclude that one can’t escape from the places and people that surrounded one in childhood. One also can’t escape from the places and people that one dreamt about in one’s childhood.

Most people are, in fact, always in at least three places at one and the same time; the place we are, the place we dream of going to and the place we dream of returning to.

I don’t feel like that, however; I can easily imagine Krugersdorp but I don’t long to return there. Perhaps that’s what Jerusalem does to a person or perhaps it’s the way one feels when one is happy.

During my childhood in Krugersdorp I dreamt of Jerusalem. In my old age in Jerusalem I don’t dream of going back to Krugersorp.

Krugersdorp is only real to me because it is the place where I had my dreams.

Every Jew who ever dreamt of Jerusalem dreamed his dream during his childhood in a town or place just like Krugersdorp.

Even father Abraham dreamt of going to Jerusalem when he lived in Hebron. He eventually went up to Mt. Moriah and the place where he sacrificed the ram became the place of the altar of the temple.

Obviously my parents chose to settle in Krugersdorp because of the prospects of making a living there. Their activities were quite successful and thanks to that choice one could say we had a good life there.

Although my parents made a living for us by running a business I always had the feeling that they regretted not having achieved more education.

This left me with the feeling that my main task in life was to acquire the education which they didn’t have the opportunity to achieve because of the exigencies of earning a living.

I always had the feeling that they were working so that I should have the opportunity which they didn’t have.

I felt that if I didn’t succeed at school I was somehow betraying the sacrifice they had made for me.

Not succeeding in school made me feel guilty. This feeling became so unbearable that often it had the opposite effect it was meant to have.

All my childhood activities were divided into two; those considered education and those which were frivolity or worse, impeded education.

Music, for example didn’t qualify as education, some of it even fell into the category of impeding education. Studying to accumulate information or to acquire a skill ranked high on the scale of education. But activities like listening to music which didn’t appear to fit this category ranked very low.

To this day “just” listening to music feels to me like doing nothing but studying the Bible or history qualifies as doing “something” and studying math or a language like English ranked very high as doing “something”.

Studying Judaism ranked high but studying pure philosophy was quite low in the list.

Nobody ever made an official list of these rankings in our home, I made my own list.

Sport was just “okay”; it promoted health and sociability.

Movies were mostly downright bad but the theatre was tolerated.

It was just downright impossible to have good, plain fun without a feeling of guilt.

The Habonim meetings conducted by Shirley however offered the one fun opportunity which my parents approved of, probably because they thought we were getting educated there.

Naturally sometimes when the Habonim meetings clashed with school there were inevitable clashes with my parents.

The meetings were conducted in a room in an old hotel. This was the kind of place one saw in movies about the Wild West.

Climbing the rickety, green linoleum covered stairs (torn and full of holes of course, so that one could see the plain wood underneath) I felt like Roy Rogers making his way to his room where one of the bar girls would be waiting to give him pleasure.

Outside it had a beautiful veranda made of cast iron, supported by delicate cast iron, Corinthian pillars with ornate lace like cast iron trimmings around the top edges.

Eventually those pillars and floor boards ended up in my father’s second hand timber yard; he was also a demolisher of old buildings on the side.

This hotel consisted of three floors of long passages with creaky floor boards and empty hotel rooms on either side.

Sometimes our meetings were at night and the walk down the corridor was a really scary experience.

I was highly amused that my friend Morris believed that ghosts inhabited the rooms and humored him by making as if I was scared one night when he took me there to prove his claim.

I confess I did scream as if I really saw a ghost but that was just to humor him and let him think he’d proved his point. I’m sure he still quotes the story to convince others of this ridiculous idea.

These meetings offered a legitimate escape from the serious matters of life which our parents and teachers at school envisioned for us.

Here, all of sudden, it was okay to listen to music, to sing and to dance. We got the idea that there was lots of that in Israel and it was this which motivated our immigration to Israel more than the serious ideas of religion, Zionism and socialism.

Habonim taught me that my parents were wrong; it isn’t the dry information in history or language books which is important in life. Things that stir up the soul are important; music, poetry, cinema.

The details of Jerusalem’s history aren’t as important as the feeling of suffering and joy which has been experienced by the Jewish People here for thousands of years.

The words of Psalms aren’t important. It’s the music and the poetry which lies behind the words which is important because that’s what inspires us.

In this sense I’ve gone very far from Krugersdorp but Krugersdorp is the base where we must start to dream. It’s not enough to stay in Krugersdorp, however. One must reach out for the dream.

When we do that we become like father Abraham and the place where we realize our dream becomes the centre of our world, just as the place where Abraham sacrificed the ram instead of his son Isaac became the centre of the world.

Jerusalem is the dream. Krugersdorp is the place to dream.

Wishing you a great no news day

Yours truly

Leon

If you happen to be from Krugersdorp and are in Israel at that time you are also invited. Just send a RSVP to Shirley shirley@gmail.com