MICHELE MARR -- SOUL FOOD

“New.”

It can mean “fresh” or “appearing for the first time,” like the brand

new format of the Huntington Beach Independent you’re holding. Or this

column, for instance.

As I thought about things new and about what I wanted to say in this

first column, I thought about what I was doing 13 years ago today. I was

sitting in the window seat of a Lufthansa airliner next to my husband

Michael. We were about to land at Ben Gurion Airport, on the outer edge

of Tel Aviv, our new home.

After we made our way through customs, we hauled our luggage to a curb

and tried to hail a cab. The air was hot, dusty and loud. I thought of

the Israelites wandering 40 years in the wilderness, weary, hungry and

hot. But that was in Egypt, right?

This was a summer’s day in Israel, the Promised Land, the Holy Land,

the home of God’s Chosen People. It was also a day during the early weeks

of the Intifada and nothing looked like I expected it to.

My husband’s employer had asked him to take the assignment. No one

else in the company was really too eager to spend a year in Israel. In

most ways, neither were we. The Intifada -- an uprising in the

Palestinian-occupied territories from 1987 to 1993, in protest against

the Israeli occupation and politics -- was on and we were told times

could be dangerous.

Our liaison in Tel Aviv gave us instructions to call the police if we

saw anything unusual. The trouble for strangers like us was everything

looked unusual.

People everywhere walked the streets with walkie-talkies. Men who

looked like boys and women who looked like girls, soldiers, rode the city

buses wearing shorts, sandals and machine guns. My purse was searched

before I entered stores to shop. An abandoned shopping bag or piece of

pipe was suspect.

Before coming to Israel, we lived in Southern Germany for several

years. On the morning Michael and I boarded our plane in Munich, bound

for Tel Aviv, the fields of Bavaria were quilted with hops, barley,

wildflowers and corn. My heart broke while I watched them disappear below

me. But with a chance to spend a year in the Holy Land, neither of us

could finally say no. I had been looking for God for a long, long time.

Now if I were ever going to find him at all, I would find him here,

among his Chosen People in their Promised Land. I was raised in a

religious family. I was baptized when I was only a few months old. In

Sunday School and Vacation Bible School I learned that God is good,

all-knowing and all-powerful. That each of us is made in his image.

But all I learned just didn’t stick.

The suffering and bitterness, the simple unfairness I saw in the world

made me wonder if there was a God at all. Maybe, in the end, it was like

some said, religion was man-made, a comfort to the weak.

But what comfort can be found in something that is not true? If there

were a God, I had to know. That, more than anything else, drew us to

Israel. I was convinced that these people whom God had chosen could show

me the way.

What I found were people full of bitterness. They would point to the

long history of their suffering and say, “God? What God? God is dead or

he has ceased to care about us.”

I would pace the apartment, looking up at the ceiling, toward the sky,

toward heaven, and shout: “Look at these people, these people you chose.

Look what they say.

“They are full of bitterness,” I roared. “They don’t trust you at

all!”

Finally I was quiet. There was no more to say. The silence welled up

around me and in it I heard something like a sigh, something like a

whisper: “Ah, yes. Bitter. Ungrateful. Skeptical. Ah, yes, they are. And

you? What about you?”

Whether I found God or he found me, I don’t really know. Whichever way

it was, he gave me something new and lasting, a life full of faith and

hope. Heaven knows.

* MICHELE MARR is a freelance writer and graphic designer from

Huntington Beach. She has been interested in religion and ethics for as

long as she can remember. She can be reached at o7 mishalee@aol.comf7 .