I Don't Know What to Believe by Ben Kamin

I Don't Know What to Believe by Ben Kamin

Author:Ben Kamin
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 9781942094050
Publisher: Central Recovery Press, LLC
Published: 2016-01-19T16:00:00+00:00


THE SEARCH FOR GOD in that unpretentious time and place did not lead us to synagogues or to rabbis. It invariably directed us to shattered souls whom God had abandoned. Breathing the same air as such people, we found ourselves in heaven’s schoolhouse. There was another gentleman in the village, much like Mr. Steiner, but unlike him in important ways. My buddies and I dubbed him “the sweet old man with the funny sun hat.”

He was always there, in the clay house just beyond the trees. These were the trees of the forested field across the way from my grandmother’s house—we looked out upon them across Jerusalem Street. Shrubs and wildflowers danced among the Lebanese cedars, oaks, and acacias. He was always there, the “elderly” man (he was but forty!), sweet as the oranges in his own tiny patch, with his yearning eyes and lonesome smile.

The thicket of saplings and shrubbery across the street was a favorite haunt of my friends, Roni, Yossi, and me. On carefree days, the Sabbath, or during the hot, muggy summer vacation, we’d often visit “the forest” and play in-between long shafts of sunlight. We had no iPads, no cellular phones, no Game Boys. Those gadgets were as far away as the celestials. We had each other, and the foliage of the Holy Land, and the feeling of being carefree and natural under the clouds. The trees gave shade and made us feel safe and special.

One of our favorite pastimes was to visit the forest after a matinee at the little cinema not far away on Jabotinsky Street. Almost always, we saw Tarzan movies—the exploits of the exotic and muscular “King of the Jungle” who flew through the jungles on vines, defeated alligators in the rivers, and always outsmarted the foreign and greedy hunters who came to Africa to kill wildlife and oppress the natives. The Tarzan movies, starring Johnny Weissmuller, were subtitled in Hebrew but the dialogue hardly mattered anyway. We just lived for Tarzan’s trademark yell, as he swung through the African tropics and brought justice to wildlife and innocent people. Yossi was a specialist in mimicking the Tarzan howl. He would climb a mighty oak and belt out the call, with his Russian accent. We were happy and free, and we always knew of the nice neighbor who lived at the other end of the forest.

The sweet old man lived in a simple frame house that stood in a clearing and in-between clumps of forest. A dirt road wound its way from his home back to the main boulevard of our village. He had no wife and lived alone. The grown-ups spoke quietly about him, saying something about “the camps” and a daughter, and other things we did not understand then. When we saw him from a perch in the forest, we could sometimes see a strange tattoo of numbers on his forearm. I asked my grandmother about that, but strangely, she simply replied: “It’s not time to tell you yet. But just be sure you are nice to him.



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