Arik, Adi and the Children of Israel Attaining their Independence at Gilgal
Every year Adi brings her two children on a visit to her homeland. This time it was different. Arik came to celebrate his Bar-Mitzvah with his loving family. The Torah reading for the week was the story of Moses striking the rock to bring forth water and being punished by God not to bring the Children of Israel into the Promised Land.
Besides his love of his family and of tennis, Adi told us in the preliminary talks that Arik was very proud that his mother had been an IDF soldier… We asked her where she had served, and she said that in the 70's she had been in Gilgal, a border settlement in the Jordan Valley, with her Nachal group. That was the moment we knew what our trip would look like – we would start at Masada and make our way north through the Jordan Valley.
At Kibbutz Gilgal there were no former members of Adi's group, but they were still glad to provide an escort. "You see that mountain," he said to Arik as we were entering the well-kept kibbutz, "that is Mount Nebo where Moses viewed the Promised Land from afar and then died. Here we are, on a trip celebrating your coming of age, at a place where your mother became an adult, very close to where the Children of Israel anxiously crossed the Jordan River without their aged leader, on their way to becoming an independent nation."
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