“I’VE GOT TO TAKE CARE OF TALIA. I NEED TALIA."

I’m sitting on the low, concrete base of a long flower bed, maybe a foot off the ground, just a stone’s throw from the front doors of the Tel Aviv Art museum, sharing a joint and talking with a woman I just met. 

My guess is she’s in her late 30s, though neither of our ages comes up in conversation. She’s remarkably attractive. There’s a toughness about her, but also a startling fragility—that’s what she tells me, without using those exact words, and I believe her.

For the sake of her privacy, I’ll call her Talia, though I wish I could use her real name, since it’s Israeli, sweet, and fits her.

It’s a little past four thirty, and the warmth of the sun on this bright, blue-sky day will soon be fading behind the high-rise buildings just south and west of us. She’s wearing black Ray-Ban knockoffs, with dark black lenses.

We’re talking about life and death and sanity.

A typical conversation in Israel these days.

But this time it’s different.

Talia, her husband and their teenage children and their dog are living in a hotel by the Dead Sea, about a two hour drive from where we’re smoking. They’re housed there because their home on the kibbutz where she was born and grew up, and was married and raised her family, no longer exists. It was destroyed by Hamas terrorists on October 7. Many—many—of her friends and her children's friends were murdered, mutilated, raped, or abducted and taken hostage. They also had their dogs shot—just because. Talia doesn’t tell me the numbers. And my guess is that she’s never thought of counting. Her father was murdered, but somehow she and her family, and her siblings' families survived. She doesn't offer up any details of her nightmare that day, and I don’t ask.

She drives in from the Dead Sea once or twice a week to go to Hostage Square, on the museum’s expansive plaza.

Early in our conversation, as she was rolling her smoke, I’d ask her if she was smoking a cigarette or—“Tabak ve yarok,” she tells me. (Tobacco and weed.) English is definitely her second language.

She lights it up and I take a long drag. I’ve never smoked tobacco before, so I have a coughing fit. She offers up her bottled water and even though I’m a borderline germaphobe, I take it to put out the fire in my throat.

We’re sitting side by side, both looking straight ahead, watching people walking home. They’re winding down their Friday. Many of them heading home for Sabbath dinner.

“How’s the hotel? Do you all have separate rooms?”

“We got lucky, we got a suite.”

Four months and counting, for who knows how much longer, in a two-bedroom hotel suite with four kids and a large dog.

“Is it a nice hotel?”

“Yes, nice, very nice. They wouldn’t let us have a dog in that hotel. I mean, it’s not the sort of hotel where they let you have a dog. Before. Now, they’re nice. It’s nice.”

“But it’s a hotel,” I add.

“Actually, everything is okay,” Talia says. “But nothing is okay.”

So Israeli.

“So Israeli,” I tell her.

“I need to stop smoking weed,” she says. Her nails are short and at the edges look like they’ve seen a lot of tabak ve yarok these past five months.

“It’s medical marijuana. The government lets us get it. I smoke to make the bad dreams go away,” she tells me. “They don’t.”

“It’s better than drinking,” I say.

“My best friend drinks.” She takes another drag and then without looking over, hands her joint to me, along with her bottle of water. “I need to stop smoking.”

“This is safer than drinking,” I say.

“I know.” 

We talk about her being a mother of teens. I ask her about the pressure of taking care of them.

“I’ve got to take care of Talia. I need Talia.”

Toughness, but also a startling fragility.

Even when people are fucked up here they’re amazingly strong. And honest. And caring. She tells me—and not because she thinks I’m going to write it, ‘cause we’re just having a conversation like you would with an old college friend—after all of the incomprehensible shit she’s survived, this child and mother and wife of the kibbutz tells me:

“I believe in human beings, you know. It's very simple—it’s good life, the sun shining and, you know, being in big woods.

“I believe in—when the other person have a good life, my life is better, it's good. I believe in community, communication, in—how do you say it, collaborism?”

“Collaboration,” I tell her.

“Collaboration,” she says. “I believe in collaboration. I believe in people.”

Talia’s DNA is pure kibbutznik. She’s one hundred percent secular, and atheist, and she has an authentic (not Marin County) humanistic, kibbutz-hippie mentality. She’s dressed in jeans and a baggy, lime green sweater with an Easter Egg Blue trim. It looks like it came from an East Village or Venice California thrift shop.

“And really simple: Be good. Be good. Really simple.”

I start to cry a little. Not once does she speak with even a hint of hatred or an ounce of revenge in her voice. It breaks my heart how wrong the world is about this place and the people of Israel.

We talk a bit more. And we end by saying that we hope we meet again at Hostage Square.

The next day, as promised, I send Talia a playlist that I made for my daughters more than ten years ago, when they were in high school. She messages me back:

“I will play this for the girls and update on the comments. Thank you for being there, meeting people who care these days is a necessity and for that I thank you from the bottom of my heart.”

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