Catching the wave

HaGal Sheli in Tel Aviv and Bat Yam teaches at-risk youth how to surf.

APRIL 27, 2015 14:01

It’s that time of year again; that awful, wonderful, crazy, only-in-Israel time when Holocaust Remembrance Day segues into Remembrance Day For Fallen Soldiers, which then jerks into the festivities of Yom Ha’atzmaut. The Holocaust testimonies seem to get more terrible each year, the list of soldiers gets impossibly, brutally longer, and by the time Independence Day judders around, it’s not surprising that a national pastime is hitting each other over the head with plastic hammers.

It’s a tough neighborhood we live in, that’s for sure. I don’t know about you, but sometimes at this particular juncture I get these feelings that niggle around for a bit, questioning whether it’s all been worth it. Are we quite insane to choose to live in a place where, when a boy is born, our knee-jerk reaction is “Oy. The army.” Then we breathe deeply and sigh, “Who knows? Maybe we’ll give peace a chance by the time he’s 18.”

But what are we gonna do? This is where God plunked us, and this is where we will stay. Why? Because there is something about actually living in this ancient, brand-new land that sort of grips you in the place where your breath stands on tiptoe as it leaves your lungs – and makes you gasp with astonishment that you’re involved in the miracle. You don’t gasp every day, of course; you don’t gasp on the roads when irate drivers get stuck on their horns and refuse – refuse dramatically! – to let you into their lane. For sure you don’t gasp when people push you aside as they board the bus, especially not after you waited at the stop for half an hour longer than they did.

But still. There is something ineluctable here, something hard to define.

This is part of it: In the run-up to Independence Day, a DJ broke from spinning his discs to proclaim that he’s collecting stories about Yisraelim Yafim.

That doesn’t mean the literally beautiful people, although there are many of those. What the radio announcer was looking for was that special brand of remarkable human being who grows up here under the Mediterranean sun, despite all the madness in our sliver of the world. Or perhaps because of it. The hi-tech moguls who distribute food, the grocers who teach math to the handicapped, the hot-shot journalists who drive ambulances in their spare time – the list goes on and on.

As a lecturer, I feel privileged to work with some of these beautiful people; universities and colleges here brim with stunning students who could fill 10 radio programs. These young adults – hardly more than kids, really, in their early 20s – have often already fought in wars and seen things that no one should ever see. They study and work and do reserve duty and miraculously still find time to volunteer. Israel is full of them. Take Ido Galili, for example, with whom I just happened to have a tutorial minutes after the appeal for stories started me thinking.

Ido grew up in the beach town of Ashdod and graduated from a navystyle boarding school in Michmoret, also on the coast. He is a surfer – young and tanned and tall and lovely. In any other country, he would spend his summers catching waves and being cool. Here he’s an officer in a crack army unit; he spent last summer in Gaza. It was not cool. Yet Ido, who is a second year government student at the IDC in Herzliya, chose to do his final research paper not on the Iranian threat or counter-terrorism but on state aid to sports programs geared to youth at risk.

He has a special interest in the subject. He is an instructor at HaGal Sheli (My Wave), which takes youth at risk and teaches them to surf. Paddling and planing across the water is part of it; standing perpendicular to the board and cutting into the swell of the water is important, too; but the lessons go far beyond the mechanics of catching a wave.

“We talk, for example, about how to negotiate currents in the sea,” Ido explains, “and then we take the kids into the ocean and let them practice.

After the session, we discuss how in life, too, there are currents and tides, and we try to teach the youngsters how to deal with them.”

Omer Tulchinsky and Yaron Waksman, the co-founders and directors of the program, combined their passion for both surfing and education to dream up this framework.

“We believe that by coping with the challenges of the sea, by persisting and eventually achieving success, troubled teens can turn their lives around,” they maintain.

From the glowing testimonies of those teens, it seems to be a winning formula. Avi, for example, aged 16, says that HaGal Sheli changed his life: “I went from being totally messed up to pulling it together. My grades are up, my teachers can’t believe how well I’m doing. I’m riding a wave!” Graduates can come to the Bat Yam beach and grab a surfboard and a wet suit for free, whenever they’re in the mood to hit the waves.

Everything in Israel seems “more so.” Because we are squooshed right in the middle of several climate types and bang in the center of the world, more birds seem to migrate through our borders than anywhere else – 500 million of them, twice a year. We have more than 2,500 species of wildflowers that blossom for our pleasure. And we seem to have more than our fair share of “beautiful Israelis,” too, making the world a better place.

So, yes, we still have a way to go. Yes, we still leave inordinate amounts of trash lying around after we’ve traipsed through our national parks; yes, we scream at each other too much, and our driving is downright pathetic. And oh dear, oh dear, we have voted ourselves an interesting bunch of politicians set to guide us into our 70s. But that’s okay.

We’ll grow older, and we’ll grow wiser, and we’ll keep improving all the time.

Here’s to us all: To peace, to harmony and letiferet medinat Yisrael – to the glory of the State of Israel.

For more details on HaGal Sheli, visit http://www.HaGalsheli.co.il/enindex.php
The writer lectures at IDC and Beit Berl.peledpam@gmail.com