Composing a Further Life

sixteen, having joined an Israeli youth movement hike into the Sinai Desert, which was under Israeli occupation following the Suez campaign.
    That feeling—of being supported on either side—came vividly back to me on a trip to Poland more than half a century later. I was sixty-eight, still busy professionally but working out new forms of engagement after retiring from teaching. I was in Poznán to attend and speak at a conference on conflicts between cultures, which would start the next day, but I had arrived on a holiday, the Feast of Corpus Christi. Corpus Christi is celebrated in spring, often with processions that move from one outdoor altar to another, suggesting a sort of pilgrimage as the consecrated Host is lifted up and prayers are said at every stopping place. Knowing that this would be the perfect day to get a sense of what it meant to the Polish people to have regained the right to public devotion—the feast is now an official holiday—after half a century of Communism, I had asked the conference organizers to arrange my pickup from the airport so that I could go to Mass and join a procession.
    They had already been warned that, when it came time for me to speak at the conference, I would need to do so sitting down, so when we set out from the church in a great crowd of people, I found myself supported by a tall Polish nun who cares for congenitally disabled children on one side and one of the conference organizers on the other. I’m okay walking, but standing in one place gives me difficulty now, and there was as much standing to be done as walking. They had accompanied me expecting to help—it was part of their welcome and their thanks for my willingness to come to the conference. I learned a lot about the new Poland from being in that crowd, taking in its holiday mood, a relaxed but focused attention to the readings and homilies, a sustained blend of gaiety and reverence.
    Back in 1956, hiking with the Israeli youth movement, I was learning a new way of thinking about what it means to be a part of a community, a new understanding of both dependence and independence. I have told the story before, but like many remembered events of youth, it turns out to have new meanings with the passage of the years. I had gone to Israel the previous summer for a two-week visit, accompanying my mother, who was acting as a consultant on the assimilation of immigrants from around the world, immigrants who combined a sense of unity as Jews with sharply different appearances and cultural backgrounds. I had quickly become fascinated by the idealism of the young Israelis I met and their sense of living simultaneously in the present and in ancient history. So, two days before we were supposed to return to New York, I had announced to my mother that I wanted to stay in Israel, learn Hebrew, enter an Israeli school, and complete my senior year of high school there. She had agreed, and friends had found a teacher of intensive Hebrew for me and a household in Jerusalem where I could stay, with a daughter my age and two younger children. I had promised my mother that, if war broke out, I would return to the United States, but when the Suez campaign began, I cabled to her my wish to stay and finish, and again she agreed. I had taken on the most challenging intellectual effort of my life and “declared my independence.” I was competent by then in Hebrew, the school year had begun, and I had moved on and rented a room on my own.
    Most of my classmates belonged to youth movements, so after the fighting was over, I joined a large group from several cities on a trip into Sinai during the Hanukkah vacation. The main portion of the trip was a three-day hike, away from the trucks, on which we would carry all our own food and water, the kind of challenge that was familiar to members of the youth movements and totally new for me. But it also had the flavor of a pilgrimage, a visit to the desert described in the biblical Book of Exodus, where the Jewish people wandered for forty years and were fed manna from the skies. By the time we went, it was clear that Israel would soon withdraw from its brief occupation of the Sinai Peninsula and return it to Egypt, so this seemed to my companions to be a single chance in a lifetime. We had celebrated Hanukkah by lighting kerosene-soaked rags in tin cans instead of candles, sitting in a wide circle and singing the traditional songs.
    Before we set out, we had been warned that the trek would be