A Shelter for Peace

The Golan has always been a land of refuge. The old cities, the caves, the high places where people came to be safe. It is in the bones of this ground.

My farm sits on that ground, and its name is Havat HaChaim. The Farm of Life. For years it has been a quiet place. Animals, trees, the wind coming up off the valley, a table where people sit and eat slowly. Nothing grand. Just life, going on.

And then came October. You know what that morning did to this country. You may not know what it has done since, to the ones who lived through it, in their bodies, in their sleep, in the hours when everyone else has gone home and the quiet is the hardest thing of all.

So the farm became something it was always quietly meant to be.

They come for a day, sometimes for a weekend. Among them are young people who walked out of the Nova festival alive and have been carrying that morning ever since, along with soldiers, and others across this land who cannot find quiet anymore.

And they are not alone when they come. Therapists volunteer their gifts and arrive from all over, every kind of healing work you can think of, and they give their weekend to tend the ones who are hurting. No one is sent a bill. It is given the way mercy is supposed to be given, freely, because it was freely received.

What heals them is not only the therapy. It is the land. The animals that ask nothing of you. The simple work of your hands in the soil. A shared meal under the open sky of the Golan. Birdsong where there was once only noise. The field of music that became a field of horror, and a field of living earth that hands the music back, a little at a time, until a person can breathe again.

That is the promise the prophet made, and I am watching it happen on my own soil. The same letters that spell ashes become the letters that spell beauty. Nothing is added. The pieces are only turned, gently, by a patient hand, until what was ruin becomes something that can be worn like a crown.

I will not tell you their names. I will not show you their faces or repeat what they survived. They came here to rest, not to be a story. But I will tell you the one word I keep hearing, from the ones who come and the ones who serve them.

Miracle.

They use that word plainly, the way you would say the sun came up. And I have stopped arguing with it. I have seen people arrive unable to sit still and leave able to sleep. In the simplest terms there are, this land is saving lives.

This is what your prayers are holding up. When you pray for this land from wherever you are in the world, you are praying for a young woman who could not close her eyes, sitting now in the morning sun, in the quiet of the land, beginning to breathe again. You are part of this. You always were.