60 38
OCTOBER 15, 2020 | The Jewish Home OCTOBER 29, 2015 | The Jewish Home
Israel Today
In Search of a Reason to Believe By Rafi Sackville
I
’ve encountered some interesting students over the years. Many have left an indelible impression on me, whereas others I’m content to forget. This year I have a student in the eleventh grade who, were I handing out awards for a displaced sense of reality, would take first prize. Yosef lives in a world of illusion. He believes he is smart, that he is always correct, and he demands his right to everything he fancies. What makes him worthy of citation is the unfortunate fact that he lives behind a facade of poses that he has acquired from watching too much television. He walks like a cowboy, postures with his arms, and attempts to be threatening, which is quite funny because he’s skinny and short. After convincing himself of his genius, he failed most of his exams only to demand the right to do them again. He has a good head for learning, but cannot see that a little self-honesty and hard work are all
he needs to progress through the obstacle of life. I am always catching him out in lies. How I wish he were telling the truth. How I wish I could believe him. His last lie backfired on him badly. It was a Wednesday and Yosef told me he couldn’t come to my noon class because he was traveling to Tiberias to the Army Conscription Office. After the class he missed I saw him cruising by me on the street. I flagged him down and asked him why he wasn’t in Tiberias. Without hesitation, he said he’d been there earlier in the day. “But you couldn’t have been there earlier. We spoke. You wouldn’t have had time to get there,” I told him. “Rafi, don’t worry about a thing. I’m going to ace that test,” he shouted as he drove off. As I stood on the road watching him drive away, I saw my neighbor David, whom I acknowledged with a wave. David has bright, orange hair which is impossible to miss.
Watching Yosef drive away and then seeing David suddenly reminded me of my first job in Israel in Old Beit Shemesh and an encounter with a student called Eli Baruch. It was my first year of teaching in 1985. At the time, I was holding down two jobs. After my first job in Jerusalem, I’d take a bus down to Beit Shemesh on Tuesdays and Wednesdays to work at a small yeshiva. As a freshman teacher, I found the work difficult but fulfilling. During the entire month of November, Eli Baruch was conspicuously missing from Tuesday’s classes. Eli was a stocky ninth grader with bright orange hair and a face scattered with freckles. His orange hair made Eli instantly recognizable. Upon seeing him on the subsequent four Wednesdays he gave me a list of excuses that were too good to be true. On the first Wednesday, he told me he’d been absent because one of
his sisters had given birth. The second week, his parents celebrated their anniversary and there had been a family gathering. By the third week, I was rolling my eyes in disbelief. Eli’s other sister had celebrated her engagement the previous day. The icing on the cake came the following week when he claimed his grandparents had, only the day before, celebrated 50 years of marriage. In each instance, Eli showed nothing less than sincerity and respect. It was too much for me. How could he retain such equanimity? I told him I was prepared to forgive him once, maybe twice, but four weeks in a row! His absence would be marked as unjustified. The following week – it was Monday, the 2nd of December – we held teacher-parent conferences. I still recall the date and the mad scramble I had to make from my first job in Bayit Vegan to Beit Shemesh. I missed one bus and by the time I
