Just yesterday, I drove north for conversation with a psychiatrist whose military unit does psychiatric PTSD interventions on the battlefield, just behind the front lines. We’ll post that interview about the treatment center of which he is a part soon. But he said something to me yesterday that put into words why I so wanted to have today’s conversation with Ilana Saks.
This doctor said to me that though he spends all his days working with people who are terribly broken, some of whom will get better and some of whom may not, this young, wounded generation of Israelis fills him with profound hope, not anguish. “How?”, I wanted to know. Because, he said, he gets to see daily the deep goodness and caring that virtually ooze from many corners of this society. There are days when that goodness actually overwhelms him.
When I first learned about the work the Ilana Saks does, and the village called Geva’ot, which was founded with the express purpose of fully integrating people with special needs with the neurotypical people who make up the rest of the community, I knew that I wanted to learn more. And I’m grateful that Ilana was willing to share her story. When a skilled and widely admired teacher of Bible decides to pivot and to make this work the center of her professional life, something very Israeli happens, and as we hear today, Ilana is hardly alone.
Her commitments and her work, especially in these challenging and painful times, are a balm for the soul, a reminder of the unique pools of devotion and acceptance that, when it is at its best, are what Israeli society can be about.
\
For more information about Geva’ot and Sadnat Shiluv, see here.
A brief video, with Hebrew and English subtitles, can be found if you scroll down the page.
Ilana Goldstein Saks is the coordinator of the bakery at Sadnat Shiluv, a special needs community in Gva’ot. She has an MA in Bible from Bar-Ilan University, has taught in a number of midrashot and schools in Israel, and has also baked and taught workshops on bread and Jewish sources at an artisanal bakery. She lives with her family in Efrat.
The link at the top of this posting will take you to the full recording of our conversation; below you will find a transcript for those who prefer to read, prepared for our paid subscribers.
These are times in Israel when I think it's super important to try to keep our eye on two different balls. One is what's happening in the country in terms of the war, and obviously, most critically, the hostages, and politics, and all the stuff that keeps the newspapers busy on a day to day basis. But there's also a soul to this country, and it's the soul of this country that is what makes many of us fall in love with it and leaves many of us, even though things are not necessarily easy here at this point, wanting to who continue to live here and hoping that our children and grandchildren will live here and wanting to see this through till the better days that I firmly believe are ahead make themselves manifest. And in order to do that, I think it's really important, and we do it periodically on Israel from the inside. Is introduce people and projects that just somehow represent the absolute utter goodness of Israeli society. And we're going to do that today with Ilana Sacks. Ilana and I mostly know each other through her husband, who is a colleague of mine, but She works in a very interesting place in Gush Etzion , which is the, I guess you call it Bedroom Community of Jerusalem, just south of Jerusalem, where is Eleazar and Efrat, Neve Daniel. We'll put a little map just so people can see where it is. Elana works at a place called Sadnat Shiluv, which we're going to learn more about in a couple of minutes. So first of all, thanks Ilana for taking the time. You made Aliyah, so let's just start at the very beginning, where you grew up, where you went to school, when you came on Aliyah, what you thought you were going to do, and what you are doing. Let's start with that.
Okay, so I'm very happy to be here. So I grew up in Riverdale in New York. I went to SAR, then Ramaz, and to Barnard College, with a year of Israel somewhere in between. And I I met Aliyah right after I graduated Barnard in 1992 and moved to Jerusalem.
Okay. And what were your plans professionally when you came? Because I think you're doing something now that's not what you expected to be doing, right?
Correct. When I first came to Israel, I was teaching Tanakh
Were you married yet at that point?
Not yet. I made Aliyah single. I was teaching Tanakh and also studying Tanakh at Bar Ilan University, where I did my master's degree in Tanakh. And I taught Tanakh for many years in various shapes and forms. And then a few years ago, I would say it's now probably around close to 10 years ago, I made a slight change. I continued teaching, but I also started working in a bakery where I worked for about three and a half years.
What in the bakery? Like a baker-baker?
I was a baker-baker. Mixing the flour, a lot of bread, a lot of rolls, baguettes, and a lot of muffins. So that was one of the main things I did. And then Corona came, and I suddenly lost my job at the bakery, and I was trying to figure out what next. And then somebody sent me a WhatsApp with a wanted, not a wanted, how do you say that?
A job opportunity.
Job opportunity to be the, the coordinator of the bakery in a place called Sadnat Shiluv, which I only knew a little bit about, although it was right down the road from me. And The person wrote, This looks like it might be good for you.
And is this still during COVID or after COVID?
This was mid-COVID, I would say.
So they were hiring people in person or it was a remote job?
It took a little while until I actually got there for an interview, but by the time I was there, it was easing up. Still mess a lot of the time, but not all the time. It wasn't at the height, but let's put it that way. And to make long story short, so I started working at Sadnat Shiluv.
Coordinating the bakery.
Coordinating the bakery.
Let's start in and then zoom out. Tell us what this bakery is, and then we'll go out from there to what Sadnat Shiluv is in its whole story and why it's called Sadnat Shiluv. You can explain what a Sadnat is and what Shiluv is, and then we'll put the two together.
I'll start with my bakery. The bakery is a small part of Sadnat Shiluv. I work with adults with special needs. The youngest of the people in the bakery who I work with is 23, I believe, and the oldest is 40. So there's an age range. And basically, we are a bakery, a real bakery. We pride ourselves that it's real work. We actually have deadlines, and we have to get stuff done on a daily basis. We provide, for the most part, we bake for two different things. There's the apartments, which I'll explain in a moment, where the people live. And there's a Beit Kafe [café] in Gva'ot, where Sadnat Shiluv is. And so some of the stuff we bake for the apartment, and some of the stuff we bake for the Beit Kafe.
Beit Kafe means café. And how many people live in Gva'ot?
Okay, so now I guess I should explain a little bit about Gva'ot. Gva'ot is a small Yeshuv, a settlement in Gush Etzion. From its founding was an integrated Yeshuv, meaning integrated with people with special needs. At the heart of Gva'ot is the program where I work, Sadnat Shiluv.
When was it founded?
So it was founded approximately 13 years ago.
2010-ish.
Right. But Sadnat Shiluv was around before that. When Gva'ot was started, it then moved to Gva'ot with the founding of the issue.
What's the profile of the people who founded Gva'ot? Israelis, Olim, religious, secular? What's their story?
It's religious, although I would say it's religious of a very interesting, out-of-the-box range. It's some people who look like your typical dati leumi, and some people less so. But the atmosphere of the Yeshuv is a religious Yeshuv.
Who founded it? What was their profile?
I would say it's mostly born and bred Israeli. So there are some people there who are Olim. In other words, because it was founded as an integrated Yeshuv, so I don't know the names of every single person who was involved with founding of the yeshuv. But two main names, certainly on the Sadnat Shiluv end of things, are Noa Mandelbaum, who is, I call her the prophetess, but she's the main founder of Sadnat Shiluv, and Tamar Heksher, both of whom live in Gva'ot and are the people basically who run Sadnat Shiluv.
Have they been doing this work before they founded Gva'ot?
So the story of the backstory, the legend of how Sadnat Shiluv began is actually, I think it's a very sweet story. It starts with Noa Mandelbaum, who was a ganenet in a nearby yeshuv.
Like a nursery school teacher.
And there was a boy, Hanan, who at the time was actually nine. He was bigger, older than most kids who are in gan in kindergarten. And he has down syndrome, but he was in the gan. And he, let's say, wasn't doing terribly well in fitting in, which is how he got into the gan in the first place, because every other place they tried to have him go was not working out so well. But she worked with him, and he went from being a very disruptive, somewhat violent, maybe not an extreme, but to some degree, violent, the way that little kids can sometimes be, and not very verbal. And by the time the year was done, she had managed to get him to function very well. His verbal capabilities were much better and his functioning level was much better. But you can't keep a nine-year-old in gan forever. So she basically decided that she wanted to figure out something new, that clearly the educational system, the way that it exists, doesn't always have a place for everybody. The way she tells the story is she looks at him and says, Okay, Hanan, let's go find a place that will take both of us. And she basically was trying to find some place where she could create some program for people like Hanan, and that would work for them. It was for a short while in Bat Ayin, which is also in Gush Etzion.
Which is also a different It was just a free spirit place.
Exactly. Not a very out of the box place. Then for a while after that, it was in Rosh Tzurim, which is a kibbutz nearby. But in the very beginning, it was this one boy, Hanan, and a couple of others who joined him. And Sadnat Shiluv grew from there, meaning when they were these little kids, so they had classes for the appropriate age. And then when they needed a high school, so they went on and created the high school. And then when they aged out of high school, so that's when the taasuka, the employment section of Sadnat Shiluv, which is where I work, was started. And so they're always thinking ahead, like what's the next stage? Because the whole idea of Sadnat Shiluv is that it is somewhere for them to be for life. It's not like a program that they outgrow or something that's meant to be for a year or two. It's something that if they choose and their families choose, they could be there for the rest of their lives. So Sadnat Shiluv actually has three components. There's the high school for special needs.
How many kids are there now? Young people?
I'm not actually sure.
I mean, dozens, tens, 100?
I would say dozens, although I don't remember the exact numbers for the school. And then there's the taasuka, the employment for those who are beyond the age of high school, which starts at 22 and above. And so once you're in the taasuka, the employment part of Sadnat Shiluv. That's when you move into the apartments of Sadnat Shiluv. Sadnat Shiluv has 10 apartments, seven of which are in Gva'ot, and three which are in nearby Yeshuvim. And those apartments are a part and parcel of being in Sadnant Shiluv, although there are a few individuals who, for one reason or another, live at home with their families who live somewhere nearby.
And everybody who lives in the apartments is part of Sadnat Shiluv.
Correct. But these apartments are interspersed, mainly in Gva'ot, like I said, and some of them are nearby yeshuvim, very much part of the ideology that it's Shiluv. Shiluv means integration.
So Sadnat Shiluv would mean like an integration project or an integration workshop or something like that.
Exactly. Right. So the special needs people who live in these apartments are very much integrated into the yeshuvim. One of the loveliest things that I've been there now for years, but certainly when I first got there, I was so taken by it. And to this day, I think it's just beautiful, is that the interaction with them is completely and totally natural. You see the kids of the issue of interacting with the special needs, people who live there, and they don't blink, they don't think twice. It's completely, completely natural. On Shabbatot, when they're in their apartment, sometimes they do go home for Shabbat, But when they're in their apartments, they go to families for meals. The family sometimes come to them for Kiddush and Shabbat. And as I've heard a lot of the people who live there say, Okay, so I have a family living on the right side of me, and I have an apartment with special needs, people living on the other side of me, and sometimes I go to them for a cup of flour, and sometimes I go to them for a cup of flour, and there's really no difference. Everybody just works together.
How many of them live in an apartment?
It's not exactly the same with each apartment. The apartment is also very in size. I'd say it's somewhere between 4 to 8 in an apartment, depending.
They live on their own, or is there somebody living with them who helps them out?
Most of the apartments have both what they call a rakaz, which is a coordinator of the apartment, and also madrichim, like counselors for the apartments. The rakaz oversees the apartment, and the madrichim, which there tend to be a a few of them for each apartment, they're the ones who are with them on the day to day.
So there's always a madrich, like sleeping there at night or during the day.
Correct. For most of the apartments. And depending on their level of functioning, so the madrichim do more or less, depending on what they need. In some of the apartments, they have the madrichim, but they're capable of making dinner for themselves. And the madrichim are just there to be there and help them and whatever. There are, I think, two apartments where they're more are independent, where there's a rakaz who oversees things, but there's no day to day madrich. So that if there's an emergency, so they can be in touch with the rakaz, but their functioning level is high enough that they're able to manage even without a madrich, there's nobody sleeping within there at night, et cetera. Obviously, people are checking in and making sure that everything's fine, but their functioning level is that much higher, so they're able to function more independently.
So given the era in which we're having this conversation, I can't help but ask. I mean, Gush Etzion didn't have as many sirens as we had here in Jerusalem, but you had your share of sirens, and some of them, I imagine, I don't remember anymore who was what, where, but I imagine some of them were in the middle of the night. So these apartments where there's nobody living with them, how did they function? Do they have in their apartment? Do they have in their buildings? How did they handle it? I mean, it's very frightening if you don't understand exactly what's going on. Right.
So first of all, everything is explained to them ahead of time and explained and explained again. So clearly, Those apartments where there are lower functioning, and there's a madrich, so the madrich, obviously, is going to be there to help out more. Not every apartment has a mamad. Some of them do. Whatever didn't have a mamad has something else, like a, like a other shelter, a little shelter. Right, nearby. When the war with Iran began and things were that much more intense and that much more scary, so they actually had to improve the shelters because they realized that they weren't, because the missiles from Iran were somewhat more substantial. And also during the more intense periods, at the beginning of the war, almost two years ago, and during the weeks of the Iran war. So then there was more, for example, at least in one of the apartments where they're usually independent. So they moved in with the nearby other apartment so they could be together with them and not have to deal with the stuff while on their own.
How did they fare, these people who are struggling to be independent and probably taking great pride, I would imagine, in being independent and the accomplishments that that entails and requires to a situation that none of us really understood. And we were all a little bit scared at the very minimum, and we didn't know what was happening. And we had grandchildren thrown into our laundry room because that's also our safe room. It was scary for them, even though they had their parents with them. Do you see any residual? It wasn't that long ago, right? It was just a few weeks ago, they were on war. How do they feel? How do their parents, I guess, worry about them a lot and feel very comforted? I would guess that they're at Sadnat Shiluv. How did they feel? And what do you see in the aftermath?
Okay, I'll start with the last. In the aftermath, I feel like we slip back into whatever normal is these days pretty quickly. During that time period, so I guess there was a certain amount of keeping an eye on them a little bit more, which I think helped them feel more secure. I wasn't present with every group, but with the ones that I spent time with during that time period, because part of the time, we actually weren't doing our usual work. We were with them in their apartments because of the the rules, the security rules at the time. So they were okay. I mean, they were concerned, and they would talk about it, but it's a very open environment. Things are spoken about very openly. So if you're nervous about something, you don't have to hide it. You talk about it. And obviously, we're able to tell if somebody looks like they're not in a good place. So things are dealt with pretty openly and pretty quickly, at least in with the group that I was with. I didn't see anything dramatically that anybody was having a really hard time dealing with the situation.
And the families of these young people, are they all from the Gush or Jerusalem area, or do they come to Sadnat Shiluv from all over the country.
In this school, which are still high school-age, and they're not living in the apartment, so I would say, I don't know where every single one of them is from, but they're all easy commuting distance. For the ones who live in the apartments who are in the in the employment, so they come from all over. I mean, a lot of them just by the virtue of the fact that it's local and people know about it, so a lot of them are from this school.
A lot of them came through the high school, I would guess, right?
Yeah. So there is a certain percentage that are from local families, but there are also plenty who come from other places.
So I know that this isn't your field, specifically what I'm about to ask you, but still probably by hearsay and being part of this community. What's the story in Israel in general? I'll give you an example. We have friends who live in the States who had a few kids, but one of them was born with down syndrome. Sounds a little bit like this Hanan boy. And they had him. He was He was pretty low functioning. These are extraordinary people, his parents, but he was pretty low functioning. And for a while, they had him in a place where he lived and that helped educate him and care for him and so on and so forth. And then he aged out of it. I think at 22, if I'm not mistaken. And he couldn't in the state that they live in, age, quote unquote, back in until he was 40. He's in his early 40s now. So there was a period of 18 years where he moved back into the house, which was obviously very hard on the parents, very disruptive. But there are two people with two careers, and he's a young man who needed tremendous amount of support and oversight.
And I always felt whenever I hear their story, that's just crazy. I mean, we were talking about the United States of America, and there's a lot of down syndrome people. There's a lot of people with special needs. And the idea that somebody can age out of a program, and these are very sophisticated, educated people who know how to use the system and find resources. There was just nothing for this young man for 18 years, and he lived at home. And now they're living a life again because he's in his early 40s, and he's in an incredible place for him. How is Israel on this score? I'm sure you hear by hearsay. If Sadnat Shiluv didn't exist, for example, what else is there out there for these kinds of kids.
Okay. So I'm not an expert as you pointed out. I mostly know what I know, again, because I work this, so I hear about other things. I don't know everything. I do know that there are other places that are similar. For example, there was someone who was in the bakery with me who his parents decided that he would move to this other place, mostly because his sister is there, and it was just easier for them to have everybody in one place. I know that it's not exactly the same. It doesn't run exactly the same way, but it's a similar type of idea. I do actually know of another place. I'm not sure what level of, I believe it's up and running, although I'm not sure. It was actually a nice story that there was a soldier who was doing part of her army service as a guard of the front gate of Sadnat Shiluv. This was like years ago before I was there. And she was very, very left wing and was extremely unhappy that she was placed over the Green Line.
In a settlement.
In a settlement, right. This was very against her political worldview. But she so fell in love with Sadnat Shiluv. So how did I hear about her? Again, this was before I worked there. My boss said to me, See that woman over there? I was like, Yeah, she brought a group of people. She said she so fell in love with Sadnat Shiluv that she decided to study after her army service special education. And she was now there with this group of people because they wanted to make another place like Sadnat Shiluv, based on her experience and what she saw, which I thought was just such a nice way, a way that a person was able to see beyond something which she saw as other.
Other and of an objectionable other.
Exactly. And to see beyond that and all the good that's there and to want to recreate it. I just thought that was so nice. I'm not exactly sure where her place is, but apparently there's opening up. I don't know the statistics in terms of, is there enough places like this for everybody who wants it, I don't know. There are other programs that I've heard of also beyond these type of yeshuv-based places. I heard of another place on Kibbutz Yavne, I think. I don't think it's as big a program, but it's also like they integrate people into various workplaces, which seems to be a natural, like a kibbutz seems to be a natural place that you could do that. But again, I don't know the statistics. I do know that I'm asked a lot about Sadnat Shiluv by people, friends of friends of friends who have a child with special needs, and they're interested in hearing about it. And my gut feeling is there isn't enough room in Sadnat Shiluv for everybody who needs it, although there's some spaces, but not a ton. So again, I'm not sure about the greater statistics of it all.
You said the youngest person who works with you in the employment part, and the bakery is one of how many parts of the employment?
There's a bunch of different branches. I'd have to count on my fingers.
Just give us a sense of what are the other ones.
There's a kitchen which prepares food, both for us eat for lunch. If there's special programs, they help with that. There's a stables with horses where they give lessons to both.
What do you call that? What's the word in English when you say therapy, occupational therapy or writing therapy, that thing. I used to know English.
Also regular lessons.
There's a stable, there's a kitchen, there's a bakery.
There's a bakery. There's the café, the café where they work as waiters and also in the back, helping to prepare food. There's a ceramic studio. There's a gan, the local gan for Gva'ot. It's not a major branch of the employment, but there's one or two women who work there. I'm probably forgetting something.
Okay, but that gives us an idea. You said that the youngest person who works with you is 23 and the oldest person is 40. By the way, how old is this young boy, Hanan? Just to give us a sense of help, how time has passed.
Now, I don't know exactly how old he is. He must be in his mid to upper 30s.
Okay, so this is like a 20-something-year-old program since this woman, who's obviously extraordinary, took him under her wing and decided to really save his life in a real kind of way. These people, you said the older ones were, let's say, late 30s. There's one who's as old as 40.
As people think-There are older ones that don't work with me, but work in this.
But let's say in their 40s, is there anybody over 50?
I don't think so. I think the oldest is in his upper 40s.
Okay, but the plan, I guess, and I know you're not sitting out all the time talking about this, but you invariably think out loud with your colleagues. The plan is these people should be able to live their whole lives there.
Correct.
So they could live into their 80s or beyond or whatever. And people are going to take care. They're going to have a home that they're not going to have to move for in one place to another place or third place. That's their home for life, basically. And their parents can live to 120, but also know that when they're no longer here, that somebody is going to be caring for their kids, emotionally, physically, medically, in every single way.
Correct. One of the things which I always found interesting since joining Sadnat Shiluv is that they're always really thinking ahead. Right now, everybody's able to work, but eventually, people are going to get older and not be able to work as well. Or either we'll have to slow down or we'll have to not be able to work at all. And so they're already thinking, what do we do about that? So for example, right now, they're building actually a new, in Hebrew, they call it a mercaz yom, day center, day treatment center. Right. So now there is a mercaz yom now, but it's much smaller. That's usually where the lowest functioning of the Sadnat Shiluv people are, where it's not a full day work, but they have some jobs that they do, and they also have more like activities that they do. But in this new day center, so it would be for those activities, but also for people who might have, let's say, aged out, or let's say Let's put it this way. The mercaz yom would have to get bigger because there'll be more people who won't be able to do a full day's work like they do now. And it's also going to have a place for treatments that people need, I don't know, physical therapy or whatever.
As they get older, they're going to need more medical care.
Exactly.
Is this government-funded? How does this whole thing work? In other words, government funding, private funding, funded by the families of the people who live there. What's the story there?
I'm not super expert on the financial side of it. There is the government funding, and there's also a lot of fundraising that goes on. Some people out there in your podcast world might have heard of Swim for Sadna, which is a yearly fundraiser.
That's the fundraiser for this?
It's a fundraiser for this.
Where do they swim?
They I've done a swim across the Kinneret every spring.
That's a heck of a swim. How long?
They don't do actually in the mid of the Kinneret. It's like to the side. But still. There's one, one that's two kilometers and one is four kilometers. They're two different.
Still a heck of a swim.
That's a pretty well-known thing. For women only, sorry.
That's okay. Although it's a big Kinneret, you could have one for men on the other side of the Kinneret.
That is true. Actually, my guys in the bakery always say, How come there's no one for the men?
People come from abroad. There's the Aline bike ride that everybody's probably heard of that does this. An amazing orthopedic hospital in Jerusalem. It does literally miraculous work. People literally come from all over the world to ride their bikes in this bike ride for Aline, and they raise a lot of money. People come from abroad for the swim for Sadana?
There might be some people. I think most people are local. Most are with Israeli. But it's a yearly thing.
When is it? In the spring?
During the spring, usually sometime a little bit after Shavuot.
We should make a point of remembering to do that. We can send out a link so people can sign up if they want to either swim to Israel and then swim in the swim or just fly to Israel. Although these days with Cyprus, a lot of people are boating also. But in any event, okay. So there's private fundraising, there's government money, and the families of the people who are being cared for there don't pay?
No. As far as I understand, they do not. That it's all through. And then, right. Yeah.
And are the families involved? I mean, families on a typical day, are they coming to visit on a week? Do they come on? And there's not really any weekends in Israel, but especially if Shabbat. But by the way, are all the kids expected to observe Shabbat in some meaningful way? It's a Shabbat environment?
Yeah. I mean, it's a religious program.
Would they take somebody who wasn't religious?
I think they would take someone who's not religious, who's willing to play the game.
Part of the community, play the game. Okay.
I was going to do that in a more positive spin, but okay. Meaning I assume that that would be okay as long as they're willing to keep Shabbat, which probably would work or not work better or worse, depending a little bit how independently thinking they are. But within the guys who are there, I would say that they do have various opinions about it, but they all keep Shabbat.
And they're sophisticated enough to understand. Because there's people at all different levels of cognitive ability.
That's great. I think I would pretty sure that they're all have some, some of them completely understand Shabbat. They go to Tefilot on Shabbat, they understand everything completely. And there's some who certainly all of them have some sense of what Shabbat is for sure.
How about their families today. There's no real weekend because the families are working on Sunday and Shabbat is Shabbat. But are families part of the experience? Is it typical to see their parents come, their siblings come? Do they go back to their families periodically? How does that whole thing work?
Most of them go back every other Shabbat.
Oh, okay. So there's a lot of contact with their families.
There's at least one more independent apartment where it's like two in, one out because they want it. They want it In other words, it's actually something that I enjoy hearing them talk about. This one guy in the bakery, for example, who's in this independent apartment. He's 30 years old, and he's like, This is my home. I love going back to visit my family, but This is my home. This is the yeshuv. He lives in Kfar Tzion. This is where I live now. This is my community. And I think to myself, okay, that's normal. I would want my 30-year-old son to do the same thing. So that's what he wants.
And he could go take a bus? How does he get home?
So he's independent enough, as is anybody who lives in that apartment. And even some who live in the somewhat less independent apartments, some of them do take public transportation, a little bit less so these days, because it's certainly during, let's say, the Iran thing. So They were not taking public transportation. But for the most part, those people are capable of taking public transportation, and they go back and forth on their own.
There's a lot of contact with their families, and their families are involved.
For sure. In terms of parents coming, there's always a couple of times a year where officially they come. Otherwise, the families are always welcome to come. There's nobody keeping them out. I don't think they would want them showing up every day, but certainly the place is open and people are allowed to come and visit. We actually encourage people to come and visit both families and other people just to come and see the place. I can't say that I see tons of parents coming all the time. A lot of it has to do with how far away they live.
And they're busy people, too. They have careers and jobs.
If they live down the block in Alon Yeshuv, you'll tend to see them more than if they live in high five. Netanya or whatever. As would be logical.
So I just want to ask you, it's fascinating to me, and it's very moving. So many of the stories of this, first of all, you're talking about Shiluv, of integration. So the whole Gva'ot community was built with this integration in mind. How many people build a town with this as the core idea of the town? You could say the idea of the town is going to be agricultural, it's going to be religious, or it's going to be artistic, or it's going to be whatever. But this is at the the core of the founding of the idea of a town. I think that just needs to sit out there on its own pedestal for a second. People can get in their heads. Somebody built like a city, a little city, but a city with this idea at its core. That's the first thing that I just think is really amazing. The other thing is this meeting of different groups. Just yesterday, I was actually in the Negev at a high school, also a high school that you're talking about, but a very different one. It's a high school in which Jews and Bedouins teach side by side, and they're teaching Bedouin teenagers and trying to give them Hebrew and integrate them into Israeli society so they can go on to university and whatever.
But the whole idea there is also Shiluv. It's also integration. And as the person who I interviewed yesterday made a point of saying, it's not always simple. So for example, Most of these Bedouin kids have family in Gaza. And not my brothers and sisters in Gaza thing, but like my aunt and uncle. These people are not there all that many generations ago. So their grandparents, siblings could very well be alive and be living there. And all of their Jewish faculty went off to war. And as far as these students are concerned, went off to war to basically shoot their family, and then came back and said, now let's keep studying together. Very complicated. But these are people whose lives have been devoted to Shiluv, to integration. And then you have other communities which were founded specifically for the purpose of religious and secular integration. There's lots of those communities, and there's Mechinot, pre-army programs. There's ones that are religious, and there's ones that are agricultural, and there's ones like Hashomer HaHadash, which are about guarding farmlands, and there's ones for religious and secular people together. So I just want to, for our listeners, take this idea of integration.
We think of Israel as such a separated society. You think of the Kaplanites, the protesters, versus the Ben Gvir people or whatever. And there is that, of course. But there's so much about this society where so many people have actually devoted their lives to breaking down those barriers, to breaking down those walls, to not pretend that everybody's the same, to not pretend that we're all going to be power of and put in a blender and come out identical, but that we're going to learn to live together. And obviously, the Gva'ot thing and the Sadnat Shiluv is a little bit different because it's not political, religious or anything of the sort. It's just needs. But it's really unbelievably moving. I will knowledge that I have heard via the grapevine that you're not just a good Tanakh teacher, but you're a fabulous Tanakh teacher. I never had the privilege, but I've heard that you're amazing. I just want to begin to wrap up by asking you, this is such not the way that you thought it was going to be. If I had stopped you on Broadway when you were in Barnard College and said, when you're in whatever decade of life you're in now and you're working in a bakery, 116th Street in Broadway, you probably would have chuckled and said, I think you have the wrong woman here. That is not my path. And here it is. And you're unbelievably You're talented, you're gifted, you know the educational world inside. Now, you can be doing a lot of different things, and you're doing this. I'm just at this very critical time, a painful time. I think even an exhausted time in Israeli society, just as they say, that time when you put your head on your pillow before you go to La La land. What's all this do for you? What's it done for your soul, for your family, for your kids?
You have another hour?
Yeah, I have plenty of tape.
Okay. There are a few thoughts that come through my mind. First of all, when I was sent that WhatsApp by my friend, this might interest you. I think that friend was thinking and I think that it's correct, that this job is in some ways a very nice, in a different way, integration of education and baking. Now, it's not teaching Tanakh. Sometimes we discuss Prashat Shavua over lunch, but there is that educational aspect. So that, first of all, is there. But in terms of what it gives me, well, there are so many things. So one thing, for example, is I've had a lot of jobs, and a lot of them I've enjoyed back when I was in the teaching world, some more, some less, like any range of jobs. One of the things that I found hard, if I'm going to be honest, when I was in the teaching world was that I felt that there was a lot of constant competition. Can you be a superstar? Can you be that dazzling bright whatever that somehow everyone is going to to hire? That was hard for me, I have to admit. I felt that sometimes I just couldn't come up with it.
Sometimes you have to be more a performer than a teacher, and you end up doing with your time what you don't want to really be doing.
Exactly. It was a lot of, can I outshine that person? That was not something I enjoyed so much. That was an aspect of I did not enjoy so much. In Sadnat Shiluv, you have amazing, amazing human beings working there. I mean, I sometimes feel like, what the heck am I doing there? Like, truly amazing people. And there is no aspect of I'm doing this because I want to get credit. I'm doing this because I want to outshine somebody else. It just doesn't exist. I'll give you an example. My husband was looking at a pamphlet that somebody made. We had the It was pictures of the wild flowers around the Gva'ot. And it was used as an educational tool. So when we're doing little hikes and things, we'll see a flower, and we know the name of the flowers. And he looked at it and he said, do you know who made this? I'm like, I think I might know. I can guess, but I'm not sure. And he said, It's remarkable. You would never see this somewhere else where it didn't have the name of the person who made it. There wouldn't be information about Sadnat Shiluv on the back. And I'm like, Yeah, that's Sadnat Shiluv. Someone did it because there was a need for it, but they're not there because they need to have their name on it. And that's a lovely place to work, right? Where you just do, there are people doing amazing things, and people recognize that you're doing good things also. But there's no need to be constantly talking about that all the time. And that's something that I find is very good for my soul.
This is a competitive society. I mean, our kids see this from an early age. Certainly getting in certain army units literally rips their souls out and hurts their bodies. But they will do crazy things to get into these army units. And then certain university programs are very competitive. The high tech world is very competitive, and medicine is very competitive. I mean, it's a competitive society with a very capitalist side to it. And you're talking about a bomb for the soul, which is completely the opposite of that. It's very moving, I have to say.
And another thing, which might be a couple of things I have to think this through, which I think was very good for me and speaks a lot about what Sadnat Shiluv is. It's basically a place that's based on two ideas. I'm not saying that this is in their official description, but this is what I find. Number one is that you have to meet the person as they are, which would seem obvious, I guess, when you're working with special needs people. But I'll explain a little bit of the process that I went through in order to explain this. So first of all, when I first worked there, when I first showed up the first day of work, one of the things that amazed me from day one was how automatically they turn into people like everybody else, meaning what do I mean by that? So when you see people in the outside world who obviously have special needs, sometimes you don't know how to talk to them, to deal with them. I'm sure there are some people who do, but unless you have a reason
It can be awkward.
Right. And if you don't necessarily have a context in which to interact with them, you don't. So right away, these people became people. And sometimes, for example, people with special needs also have physical characteristics that look a little different. You might even say they look a little strange in some cases. So in the first day, I walked in and I would see she looks a little bit strange, or in my mind, I would think about these physical characteristics. I look at them now, and it's not as if I don't know that they look different, but I don't think about that anymore.
You don't notice it anymore.
That's so and so, and that's her. I think of them in terms of being people like everybody else. And to me, that's just a wonderful thing. We joke a lot at work that everybody has special needs, including us. Which I think is true. But I really think there is a lot of truth to it. You see, okay, their needs might be more extreme, but it's really the same. So that's one thing. And I think that when I first started working with them, and I realized this, so then I said, okay, this is cool. I can talk to them and work with them like I would work with anybody else. And my expectations will be, obviously within their capabilities, but would also be like that. And that worked very well for a while. And then I found myself at a certain point, I would get certain frustrations because you would try to explain something to one of them, and they just weren't getting it. And I'm not talking about technicalities, what they have to do in the baker is more in terms of, let's say, behavioral things or whatever, or how they were treating one another. And then a certain point, you realize, okay, They just can't get it. There's something there that isn't going to click. And that's when you realize, okay, meeting someone where they're, shiluv, it doesn't necessarily mean treating them like everybody else. It means meeting them where they are, basically. Meeting them where they are, treating them like a person as they are. And once I made that switch, it was much easier to deal with those things that were getting very frustrating because I was like, okay, I just can't use that approach because it's just not going to work. It's not going to be banging my head against the wall.
You have to do a different approach. And once you do that, it really is accepting them for what they are. And then you're able to get back into your routine of working with them. So that's one thing that I think is, if you're talking about a broader Israeli society, we all talk about we want people to We're one big Am Israel, and that's something that's extremely important to me. But that doesn't mean that everybody else is going to start being like me. It means that I have to accept them for what they are. Some of the things are going to overlap, but not everything is. So I think about that a lot, that what we go through at Sadant Shiluv in terms of acceptance could be true about accepting anybody who's different than you, right? You're not going to become me. That's not why I enjoy working with you. I enjoy working with you because I understand you now, and we can figure this out. We can work together, even if your way of thinking about something isn't exactly the way I think about something. And the other thing which I think is part of our daily work, which I think is it's good for my soul, and I think it could be good for anybody's soul, is in a lot of other jobs, and I found this in teaching, and I'm sure it's even more so in more high pressure professions. There's that constant pressure of, I've got to get it perfect. And even if you're accepted for a job where they say, Oh, there's a learning curve, and we don't expect to get it perfectly right away, they don't always mean that. They say it, but they don't really mean it. But here they really mean it because the entire job is, Okay, perfect is off the table. We're doing our best. If we don't get to our best today, well, there's always another loaf of bread tomorrow. And that also is very, I find healthy. I don't need everything to work out perfectly. And beyond the baking, every activity I do with them, if we're putting on a little play, I don't know for Jerusalem Day, but what it might be, it doesn't have to come out perfectly. That doesn't matter. What matters is that they learned something, that we enjoyed something together, and maybe next time we could take it up a notch. But that, I feel, is a healthy thing, which you don't find in every other type of work.
Yeah, it would actually, I think, be incredibly beautiful if we could clone this and spread it throughout Israeli society, some mist you'd spray from a plane. Okay, so what's the word we need, to meet each other where are, to understand that we don't have to make them into us, and we're not going to become them. We have to learn to make this work together. As I started out by saying at the very beginning of this conversation, which I really learned a lot from, so I'm very grateful. It's a tough time here, and there's a lot of ugliness in the air. There's a lot of ugliness in the news. There's a lot of ugliness on the streets. There's certainly horror going on across the border. Horror. My wife and I were just yesterday down near the Otef, and the sounds of the explosions, you forget. You and I were sitting in Baca, or at my dining room table or having a nice little chat. Can't actually hear it. Yeah, you could hear it in the Gush. The ground was shaking. So these were enormous explosions. And you just forget. There's a real life, real war going on there and tragedy on both sides of the divide. And it's a painful time.
And to hear about these pockets, and they're much more than pockets. There's so many of them that it's more than a pocket, but nuclei of just pure goodness, of wanting to help other people, building a yeshuv around this idea. Somebody like you who had a really amazing career in education and teaching Bible and so forth, going ahead and actually doing this with her life. It's really, I think, what makes Israel Israel. And it's the thing that is very hard for me to imagine happening in a lot of other places, maybe any other place. And it's just one of those things that gives for me, at least, hope and a sense of belief in Am Israel and what the people of this country can actually do. And for telling us about it, I'm sure that 99% of the people who listened to you today didn't even know this place existed and had no idea that these kinds of things happened in Israel.
Everybody's welcome to come to visit.
And we'll put up links how they can find it and find out information. But they're going to probably whatever time of the day they listen to this, they're going to spend the rest of the day thinking, there's some really great things. And it's a relief from the normal, is the government going to fall? Are the hostages coming home? Please God, they do, et cetera, et cetera, et cetera. It's a breath of fresh air, and it's a dose of much-needed oxygen. So Ilana Sacks, thank you very, very much for taking the time.
My pleasure.
I wish you continued hatzlaha and success in your work. And hopefully, the model that you represent come to represent more and more and more of the society that we love and care about.
Amen.
