When we were in the
US, we always dreamt about going back to Israel so that our daughters would
grow up there. When they were in second and first grade respectively it finally
happened. My husband got a position in Ben Gurion University in the southern city
of Beer Sheva, and I got a job teaching English in a public high school.
We arrived to Beer
Sheva late in August few days prior to the start of the school year. Our
daughters spoke Hebrew, but they needed extra help with their reading and
writing.
I started teaching at the high school, but as I have never
taught before, I was not at all ready for what
happened in class. Instead of teaching my students the wonders of the
English language, like I had planned, the noise in the class forced me to
constantly discipline them. I had no experience and had no idea on how to make
the students sit quietly and listen to
me, and as a result I could not engage them. I felt uprepared and helpless.
At the end of an
especially exhausting day, some ten days after the beginning of the year, I
realized that I was not up to the job.
Moreover, I felt that I would not have
the needed energy to help my own girls with their Hebrew if I kept on struggling with the
students to teach them English. When my husband came home that afternoon I
told him that I decided to quit, he understood.
I went down to the
public phone to call my supervisor; it
was simply not done to quit after the beginning of the year, and I
expected that she would be furious with
me. But instead she listened and said that she understood, she told me that she
would come to visit me the following day.
When she came over
she was most sympathetic and shared with
me the difficulties she encountered
after she immigrated to Israel some fifteen years earlier. She arrived here as a young woman
and started teaching right away, it was hard but she got used to it.
Like her, we were young when we moved to tohe US and faced
some challenges in our new country, but we too managed. However, moving back
home we were sure that since we knew the place it would be easy and familiar to
adapt to Israel again. My failure as a teacher came as a shock.
As it was several days before the High Holidays, my new
friend invited our family to her home for dinner. Our families got along well
and it was a beginning of a lifelong friendship. Although in quitting my job at
the high school, I obviously created a
problem, she recommended me for another job. About two months later when we wanted to buy a
house, she and her husband had known, even before we did, that we needed someone to cosign for the mortgage loan. At a
great financial risk if we defaulted on the loan, they offered their help and
cosigned our loan.
Although this is not
a Christmas story, the kindness of my former boss is surely in the spirit of
the season. We were strangers, but she and her husband were never suspicious
toward us, quite the contrary: they were generous and made us welcome. This experience has changed not only our
reality at the time, but it also affected the way we viewed the world: it
inspired us to become more accepting and in a way made us better people.
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