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       #Post#: 151--------------------------------------------------
       The Holy Land
   DIR By: StoryGod
       Date: February 17, 2020, 9:09 am
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       Tikvah went over the political map of Asia in her social studies
       class. Geography had stopped being more like math and more
       like...well geography. Tikvah had not studied geography in
       either New Square or Brooklyn. Corianne, who had fiddled with
       road maps and a puzzle of US States and a globe, found it
       fascinating. Tikvah, however, knew there was something missing.
       She raised her hand not-so-timidly. Ms. Godfried, the Team Six,
       fifth grade social studies teacher, said "yes?" "I don't see
       Israel on any of these maps."
       "Israel is in the Middle East."
       "And where is that?"
       "Western Asia. You need a good size map. There's an atlas on the
       bookshelf in the back of the room. The bookshelf was for
       reference and some free reading to do later in the year."
       "Go get the atlas and look it up," Ms. Gottfried was impatient
       and maybe just a bit angry. It was hard to guess school
       discipline anywhere, and Tikvah was definitely going to avoid
       "the shitter" as Suri called it when you got in bad trouble. Bad
       trouble meant after school detention or worse, and Lianne had
       gotten in trouble on Tuesday for mouthing off in geography.
       True, the teacher was not Ms. Gottfried, who could never pass
       for a proper mora. Ms. Gottfried had round shoulders, yellowed
       uneven teeth, and dirty golden blond hair that hung straight to
       her shoulders. She also had an expressive, wind burned face.
       Tikvah found the atlas. She looked for middle east. She also
       looked for Asia. She found Israel, a tiny sliver of land, tucked
       under Turkey which stuck out like a horse's head into the
       Mediterranean. For a few seconds Tikvah wondered if anti-Semites
       made the maps. Why else would Israel be so small.
       Or maybe Israel was really small like some US states were small,
       but teaching that fact could be used against Jews everywhere
       when one thought about it. Of course Jordan, Syria, and Lebanon,
       Arab countries, some of which were Israel's enemies were small
       too. Iran which was a real enemy and Egypt, where the Jewish
       people had endured slavery until Moses rescued them were large.
       Of course away from the Nile, Egypt was all desert, so maybe
       land was sometimes just so much sand.
       There seemed something oddly profane about comparing Israel's
       physical size to other countries two days before Rosh HaShanna,
       but in a secular school, the holiday did not exist at all. They
       had had one day off for it in Brooklyn, and her grandparents and
       mother took her to the American Museum of Natural History in
       Manhattan. In New Square, religion (about half the classes in a
       day though they had only one mora for everything) dealt with the
       upcoming holiday. At Kotiah-Yovanovitch, there were one to two
       days off, but the holiday did not exist. It was something for
       which one got a pass and a nonOrthodox rabbi came to campus for
       the kids who could live with that kind of service.
       Tikvah had new tights, polished her shoes, asked for cookies to
       keep her from starving and prepared to walk and walk and walk,
       because she still believed. Being able to walk and walk was free
       will and autonomy according to the mora, Albina. Albina was half
       right. She could not be all right, because all that walking was
       awful, though there were way more awful things. It was awful in
       the way of after school detention for Lianne. She could get her
       homework done early and be none the worse for wear. Tikvah could
       get to an Orthodox synagogue if she shut up and put one foot in
       front of the other, and maybe ten year old girls were not so
       delicate after all.
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