if I forget thee Jerusalem

Of all the fractured fairytales that comprise the journey of my life, the first and last that would be rewritten is leaving eretz yisrael. Being there at 18, a year after my father's death, with only $80 to my name, no Hebrew on a dati kibbutz that tolerated no English so we would be forced to learn the language...it was too much too soon. That I have one daughter who braved all of this, found the courage and skills to make her life, that she survives in the only place for Jews to live, is remarkable and says more about her as a person than I could ever write. The brief year I lived there, was on a kibbutz in Beit Shean and every time I daven, I return to a small place where the kibbutz kept a tiny shack. It was a snack store run by a young woman, and it wasnt the shack but something in that spot that brings me back over and over. I can see the darker earth, the dense vegetation surrounding, protecting the existence of the shack, the long road leading to the main dining room from that isolated quiet spot that was closer to the work fields than anyplace else. I was never comfortable in the dining hall where everyone was a stranger except everyone who lived there and knew one another, the language might have been Chinese for I understood nothing as speaker after speaker went to the mic to make announcements about events or important news for everyone to know about that I never knew about. There was supposed to be an ulpan, but since it was '73 they cancelled ulpan as all hands were needed in the fields or kitchen. Language for me, since childhood, since being able to read and write was the purest most reliable Truth. I could tell what was real when I saw how one parent would say the opposite of what was the truth right in front of us-since my family lived down a rabbit hole in a twight zone, being able to decipher language and find the Truth was essential. Being without language for me, meant being completely lost and defenseless. Using language has meant my survival, whether to pray, to think, to read, write, go to school, to reason and ultimately to make a mess of my life because after a time the mind cannot trust anything but what it thinks it sees, hears and understands, even after initial traumas have passed and the senses continue using fractured interpretative skills stuck in the same groove, like a scratched record that cant skip over itself, then experience is misread, misinterpreted, misunderstood and finally in hindsight if one is lucky as I seem to be one realizes, how totally false one's gestures have been and so, a life not quite lived. Can a person live so many lives as I have and yet be like a dead person, I realize that this is possible as I mentally wander back to that tiny piece of dark moist earth in beit shean and feel an inexplicable peace that is only attainable by being back there. ...may my right hand forget and while lute playing is the literal translation, if the lute player is known by this skill and it defines his life, the loss of his right hand equals spiritual death. As being a Jew is a gift from the same Creator that gifted him with a right hand to create a language of gratitude and recognition of G-d through playing music, not be unable to do so, removes the defining essence from the player, the spark, the Life. Maybe this is the reason we struggle in one location and succeed in another.