Spain: Day 2

The rain in Spain falls mainly on the plain. And on Galicia.

The rainy morning began with a Juanito-Olivia Chaperone Team Tradition: waking up the kids with song and dance. We write about the trip as it takes place (An aside: John and I went to college together and sang in the choir, and we will do anything to relive our college days and sing kids into submission…). Two years ago, Juanito packed a traveling piano to “up our game,” and the kids gave us five stars. This year, we have the piano and a traveling karaoke machine. We took a gallego song we learned last night about the days of the week and customized the lyrics to include waking up and getting ready for the day. Responses ranged from groaning and going back to sleep to popping up and bobbing their heads. It worked; everyone woke up happy.

Students shuffled around the table for an authentic farm-to-table breakfast experience. Everything on the table came from ingredients, plants, and animals on the property: the bread, eggs, milk, butter, cream cheese, coffee cake, freshly squeezed orange juice, honey, and jams. I loved watching kids light up seeing the cola-cao chocolate milk. Sitting together at one long table in a three hundred-year-old house drinking cafe con leche made with milk from cows who graze just a few hundred yards away is a pretty surreal experience.

We decided to try our luck with the weather to hike with two friends of mine, Juan and Rocío Rubianes, who work in ecoturism. We stepped off the bus and within sixty seconds of walking, the sky opened up. It started sleeting hard. Multiple kids rushed to crowd under Elga’s umbrella, and next thing I knew, someone cued up their music speaker and started blaring Rhianna’s “Under my Umbrella.” We couldn’t feel our hands and our feet slipped in so much sludge, but we hiked and the view of the nearby river Eume, the spontaneous rainbow that broke up sleet and rain showers, and the stomach pains of laughter made it all worth it.

The lunch of piping hot vegetable soup, pot roast, potatoes, salad, and baskets and baskets of bread warmed our wet and tired bodies, and so did Rabbi Mayer’s end-of-lunch reflection, in which he shared about a verse he read this morning when Moses is on Mount Sinai and wants to see Go-d and G-d tells him, “There is space with Me” or “Hay espacio conmigo.” We were challenged to view the spaces around us as places to belong, and how our own selves are spaces of belonging and home for others. Rabbi Mayer strikes the perfect balance of words and actions to guide kids forward in their formation as young Jewish adults, and I am so grateful for how much he contributes to our programs.

After lunch was, of course, siesta time. Zach and Nathi kicked a soccer ball on the empty road, Lumberjack Jaren’s killer fire-making skills warmed up each house, several kids journaled, and we all enjoyed a few hours of blue sky after a deluge of gray and rain earlier. I got a huge laugh when Darren and Scott put their wet shoes on the furnace and the shoes started smoking. Darren walked barefoot into my house full of kids to explain what happened, and Stella looked down at his bare feet and says, “Darren, did you raw-dog it over here???” He defensively yelled, “My shoes melted!” These kids are having a great time (don’t worry, we will make sure everyone has shoes).

After siesta, we met up with Juan and Rocio one more time to explore a forgotten relic in Spain: the Monfero Abbey, a Cictercian monastery and colossal architectural feat. Remember: we are “en el medio de la nada” here in Galicia. A massive church and monastery don’t exactly fit into the puzzle of farm life. Why here? Why was it built in backwoods Spain in 1144? Why so far from everything? Control.

The Catholic church governed what was an otherwise pagan land full of traditions and practices that, like the Jews who faced expulsion, threatened the ideals of the Kingdom of Castile. With its construction and continuous renovation, the Monfero Abbey was partly out to oppress and convert this pagan corner of Northwest Spain. With hands cutting through the air with the passion of a conductor in an orchestra, Juan led us through a series of activities in the church: trying to hold a lance used in medieval Spain, guessing how gallegos accomplished such an architectural wonder, and standing just a few feet away from wood carvings that were a thousand years old.

Before walking from the active church to the inactive, abandoned monastery (closed off to the public except to locals like Juan), we learned of the dark history surrounding the religious structure: Monks required locals to register their children, often resulting in taking them from their families and using them for slave labor, never to be seen again by their parents. For generations, this oral history could never be proven–until the 1970’s when they went to renovate the church floor and found them: bones. Countless skeletons of children. The fireside stories of parents and grandparents finally proven in physical form. The manifestation of pain behind the wail of so many ancient mothers.

In the depths of the church floor, this unnatural cemetery plot, rests a valley of dry bones. A latticework of tragedy. Through the Jewish tradition of Havdalah and the pagan tradition of a queimada (a liquid fire ceremony), alongside our gallego brothers and sisters, we practiced the traditions of the oppressed in a building of oppression that, thank G-d is abandoned.

Daniella led Havdalah, Jordan held the braided candle, and we all held each others shoulders as we sang to remember persecuted gallegos and the Sephardic Jews murdered and displaced by the same calloused system. But my tears turned into a smile as Scott walked over and said, “If Rabbi Harwitz was here, he would be freaking out right now.” I smiled back and said, “Yes. Yes he would.”

When I did this Havdalah two years ago, I was hopeful that the darkest times were behind us. But my eyes burn as I type, less sure now. I stand with the Jewish community in a new yet deeply familiar era—another valley of dry bones for Israel. Like those mourning ancient gallego mothers who lost their daughters, the Jewish community lives surrounded by a world that doesn’t believe their story. Their evidence of injustice is buried in the ground. Their right to safe space is unrecognized.

Watching the Havdalah candle drip and saddened that it was likely my last Havdalah in that monastery, I felt simultaneously committed to always make space for the Jewish people in my life, no matter where I am. Hay espacio conmigo.

The evening ended with a small group of us standing in a field where the bones of the children found in the floor were buried over fifty years ago as unmarked graves. We marked them with the Mourner’s Kaddish, our words erecting an invisible tombstone.

I won’t easily forget today.