Quantum physics precludes particles from teleporting from one place to another, but electrons can sometimes "jump" from one energy level to another, appearing discontinuous, in what is known as an atomic transition, or quantum leap. I'm not entirely sure what I just wrote, but I think I know how it feels, having made a quantum leap of sorts myself a few weeks ago. After living in communities around Samaria for 17 years, 11 of them in the settlement of Talmon, I have now moved to Jerusalem. I am now a bona fide Jerusalemite, like the thousands of accents and shades and hues of this city. Tel Aviv can proudly wave the six colors of the Gay Pride flag, but Jerusalem's flag has six thousand colors. I am a Jerusalemite, as I was before I became a settler. I am a Jerusalemite like my parents, my four grandparents, their parents, and so on. Coming down from the mountain with our packed belongings, the television set on my knees, I cowered. I wasn't leaving defiantly. I was not trying to make a statement. Talmon is a genuine Israeli gem, where flowers grow full of innocence. Kids on bicycles, without smartphones, cross its streets; a charity sponsors gasoline for drivers; shoppers study from the Mishna at the local market; and there are three copies of a comprehensive bird guides at the local library. The people living there are a reminder of how people should be. The children have proper values and are perfectly well behaved. Playwright Joshua Sobol wrote his song "Hashir al Haaretz" ("The Song About the Land") out of pure hatred for the Jewish residents of Judea and Samaria, demanding that we return to the land we once called "tiny." But when I read the lyrics of this song, I think about the community where I lived, the far-flung corner where I found joy in simplicity, where we walked "barefoot over broken glass and returned through the sands loving the moon." There, I saw the beauty. The settlers are often seen as the successors of the early kibbutzniks. Perhaps it is something about their confidence, which comes from raising children in a public space that is everyone's home. In the settlements, "home" does not begin at the door of a house, as it does in the small Jerusalem apartment where I live now. It begins at the yellow gate at the entrance to the settlement. Everything beyond that gate is home. Wherever they are in the community, the children are confident that they are safe, and are also sure of themselves. Here in Jerusalem, I have to teach my children to lock the door when they leave, how to board a bus, how to read a traffic light. I have to remind them not to leave their bicycles unlocked outside, and that they cannot walk in the middle of the street on Shabbat. The people they see on the street are not necessarily the relatives of someone they know. Most of them are strangers. In Talmon there was always someone around to hug them if they fell. On her first Shabbat in Jerusalem, my daughter stayed to play outside the synagogue. She later told me that there was a man there who was "handing out candy." My heart sank. It is true, sexual predators exist everywhere, but in Talmon she knew everyone, and who their wives and children were, too. So why did we leave? Several months ago, I interviewed the author Zeruya Shalev. She and her husband, Eyal Megged, had decided to leave Jerusalem after many years in the city. The ostensible reason was prosaic: A large building was slated to be built in front of their house, blocking the sun. But the planned construction was just an excuse, she told me. The real reason they were leaving was over questions of identity. The symbolic "building" that blocked my sun in Talmon, prompting me to pick up and leave, was far less dramatic: In Talmon, there is no school after 1 p.m. No long school day, no after-school programs, no foundations funding extra classroom hours. In poorer cities in Israel's periphery, the state subsidizes a school day until 4 p.m. The richer municipalities subsidize longer hours themselves, or offer the parents private options. In the settlements, many of them relatively poor, there is no state or municipal aid. Some of the private foundations are not willing to operate programs beyond the Green Line, and the parents are unable to pay for programs themselves. The problem is exacerbated in the more remote settlements, where the commute to work in the cities can take at least an hour. What then? Many mothers work part time, and many older siblings are recruited to watch their younger brothers and sisters. Either that or children become latchkey kids, raising themselves independently. None of these solutions worked for me. I didn't want my third-grader to come home to an empty house. But I also don't want to turn down job opportunities because I have to leave the office at noon so I can be home at 1 p.m. when my children finish school. It is a chicken and egg situation, because the women who live in communities with such educational limitations are usually the kind of women who can live with these limitations -- child rearing is their top priority, before self actualization. I admire them for that. For them, there is no problem, so they don't demand a solution. Even women who do have full-time jobs usually wind their careers down a notch when their children begin first grade, and again, no one demands that anything change. For a time, the children had a nanny who cared for them after school, but finding someone willing to come so far for three hours of work is quite a challenge. It's silly, but I left a place that I loved because of three hours. And then, there was all the rest. Everything in Talmon is complicated. Getting an X-ray for a suspected fracture requires a day of advance planning. The bus comes only once a day; it is impossible to live without two cars per family. If the English teacher is not good enough, it is very difficult to find a suitable replacement because few teachers are willing to cross the Green Line. Doctors are few and far between. The refrigerator repairman won't come fix your refrigerator, and the store won't deliver a new one. Flower deliveries involve protracted negotiations, ending in a compromise to come meet the messenger at the border crossing. Ever since moving to Jerusalem, I am shocked every morning anew by how easy my life has become. I give the phone repair service my name and address and a technician is already on his way. I don't hear "But we only have an armored car on Wednesdays." The gas provider comes right away, without asking a million questions about whether it is safe. The pizza delivery man startled me when I suddenly saw him at my door. Everything I need is within walking distance, and everything else is a short drive away. The other day we crossed the street to get to a hardware store and came back with a sandwich, schoolbooks and batteries. It's like magic. When I lived in Talmon, my dream was to order a taxi by phone, as they do in the movies. We had a secret list of taxi drivers willing to come to Talmon, with whom we had to negotiate two weeks in advance before any trip to the airport, and even then, they refused to come at night. And let's not mention the exorbitant fee. In Jerusalem, I ordered a taxi and it arrived after a minute. I took a picture and sent it to my settler friends. "Unbelievable," they sent back. But half a million people still live in those communities -- without taxis, without ATMs, without food deliveries -- and they are very happy about their lives and their neighbors. But for me, personally, the cons list was bigger than the pros. I was very scared on the roads, a fear that only increased every time a Jewish family was murdered by Palestinian terrorists. This fear kept me up at night and kept me holed up in my house on the weekends. With time, everyone started looking the same to me. It was as though there were two groups in the town, me and them. That is not a good sign. The fact that the available education, formal or informal, segregated girls and boys bothered me more and more as the children grew older. And the distance was the worst. My husband had to drive three hours to work and back every day, and there were very few opportunities for the children. On top of that, there was no exchange of ideas. Everything remained as it was, and will continue to be that way. I'm not sure that I will take part in egalitarian Orthodox ceremonies that Jerusalem offers, but I know that they are there, just a short walk away. In Talmon there were no annoying feminists to argue with. There simply was never any argument. While women's status in synagogues across the country shifts with meteoric speed, in most settlements it remains steady. You will not see a woman giving a sermon to a mixed audience in the next 20 years in Talmon, even though this is becoming more prevalent everywhere else. I want my daughter to see a woman giving a sermon. Not because her mother is that way, but because I want to expose her to other options. And then there is the fact that the Jews in those areas live under military rule -- the IDF's GOC Central Command decides whether a clinic can or cannot be built, or whether a day care center can open. I have a notebook full of examples suggesting that settlers are clearly second-class citizens. The media is no better, portraying settlers as enemies of the state. They are ugly. Every time I listen to the news it is as if a spring tightens in the pit of my stomach. How long are we expected to tolerate this? How can I keep accepting the sour aftertaste every time a stranger discovers that I'm a "settler"- Not everyone is built to take it. To live like this. I am weak. I am running away, into the bounds of legitimacy, into comfort, into proximity to a hospital, into the likelihood that the stranger at the bus stop is not a murderer. * * * I started the process of leaving about a year ago. I was in Manhattan and acquired a new perspective on the tiny place where I live. About six months ago, as I watched the final scene of the film "Room," I realized that my life, much like that of the film's heroine, was lived in the confines of a small room that I am terrified to leave. This wonderful, warm, innocent place had become stagnant. True, we had just finished building our dream home, doing the work ourselves and paying attention to every tiny detail. But a beautiful home can either expand one's consciousness or restrict it. Living in our spacious, gorgeous apartment, I felt that my consciousness was being stifled. The view from our living room and from our kitchen was breathtaking. We could see much of Israel panoramically from our balcony. If the kids were to kick a ball off the balcony, it would have rolled all the way to Tel Aviv. But the silence that came with the view (ostensibly a dream for a writer like me) made me crazy. In the hustle and bustle of Manhattan, I felt the kind of peace that I never felt in the silence of Talmon, overlooking the hills. For me, noise generates calm and silence generates noise. In addition, I grew tired of representing. I've had enough. I don't want my calling card, personally or professionally, to be my address. I never felt that I represented anyone, or was any kind of emissary. I am an emissary of an idea, and that I will continue to be. I will continue to be in awe of the third return to Zion (the first being Ezra's, then 1948, and then 1967). I will continue to believe in Greater Israel. I will continue to fight for the right of Jews to inhabit their land. This week I attended a wedding and watched the guests dancing in a massive circle comprised entirely of people belonging to our particular sector -- religious Zionism -- and I said to myself: You can do it without me. None of the responsibility rests on my shoulders. A sweet woman I don't know apparently read my mind and asked me never to stop writing in "our voice." "You express so beautifully what we are all thinking," she added. She spoke in the plural, as though she was the collective. This is not 1999, I wanted to say to her. Today there are plenty of voices saying that the land of Israel belongs to the people of Israel. There is a whole, fresh generation of writers who want to express what everyone is thinking. I wanted to tell her, but I didn't. I never expected any kind of red carpet treatment from my neighbors. I didn't expect bouquets or tokens of appreciation. For 15 years, I fought the mainstream media just to sound our voice, paying a hefty personal price along the way. I've had people refuse to have a picture taken with "someone like her." I didn't do it for a standing ovation, I did it because I believe it is right and just. Still, I thought that my work was at least recognized. Instead, I received the following message from one of the women in Talmon, which she posted on an internal community forum, to the sound of the residents' thundering silence: "Much like your family, you can't choose your neighbors. When a person is accepted into the community, it is impossible to foretell that they plan to be a Trojan horse. That they have come to us in bad faith, with the aim of gathering information on their neighbors and changing our reality in such a way that can serve as a springboard for their career, selling out the community to get famous." The message continued that I was "willing to sell our home for a fistful of prestige. All she cares about is having her fellow bohemians nod their heads at her next time they see her at a party or a product launch." It's not this specific community. It's a reflection of the entire sector, which knows how to softly kill every one of its messengers. I won't go into the internal challenges I faced with my beloved religious Zionist community over the years. The bottom line is that I was overtly targeted, and I went home to my armored tank. * * * We now live in Kiryat Menachem, an old-time Jerusalem neighborhood where people sit on balconies in their undershirts and music can be heard from the windows. Unfortunately, the neighborhood is currently changing, and developing what some people may call a "scene." Young people are discovering the low rent prices and the cosmopolitan atmosphere, and soon it will become a bourgeois upscale neighborhood with colorful flower pots on every balcony. Meanwhile, my children are playing in the neighborhood playground with Ethiopian and Arab and ultra-Orthodox playmates, and kids named Joy and Roy. This is the Israeli melting pot. It needs us and we need it. My younger children have already asked me why that man wears ripped jeans (I had to explain that jeans cost more when they're ripped), but I think that the questions they don't ask -- their eyes open wide with wonder, carefully studying -- are the most important lessons of their lives. And a paragraph on bringing up children: The small, acceptable price of living in a homogenous community without any secular people around, in a religious environment, is that the children receive a shallow education. In order for children to develop backbones and personalities based on questions rather than commands, their parents must, above all else, carefully expose them to the temptations of other lifestyles. They must be faced with the popular, even if it is devoid of Torah and good measures. They need to be able to confront what the world has to offer. When a parent creates a sterilized environment for children, absent of any pathogens or questions, they risk weakening the child's immunity. Scientifically, children who eat dirt and cat hair are healthier than children who grow up in a bubble. In Talmon, people may have had varying hairstyles and clothes, but they were all of the same tribe. The only differences were minor, in the ways they tied their hair coverings or wore their hats. I realized that for my children to grow up to be wise and to bring light unto the world with Torah and good deeds, I have to make them understand that it is their choice to do so. So we live in an apartment building next to all kinds of people, making our way through our new life. We lock our doors, learn how to cross streets carefully, and listen to fascinating stories being told at the lottery booth across from our house. We have emerged from the country and burst into the city. We dramatically changed our living space -- reducing from a 5,000-square-foot plot and a house with four bathrooms to a small apartment where everyone must fight over the single toilet and single kitchen sink. I'm hoping this will encourage increased sensitivity for the needs of others. The apartment is a sea shell. When the windows are open, music and conversations from other places penetrate. We smell other people's laundry as well as their cooking. We hear the footsteps of the upstairs neighbors, and we don't even know them. We don't know any of our neighbors. The religious community in the city runs almost like a settlement. What is a community? My conversations with the neighbor over laundry may have more significance than my conversations with the women at my synagogue. When there is a circle and mutual commitment, it is like an extended family. Challenges are distributed in a wiser way. In a city community, I've noticed, the responsibility of child rearing lies mainly on the parent. In a communal settlement, child rearing is more of a community effort than an individual endeavor: If you're not sure what kind of upbringing you can provide your children, your environment will support you and help shape your child. In Talmon, the children went from school to the library to hanging out with friends, and their presence was barely palpable on weekends. In the city, it's different. The main responsibility shifts onto you. There is no one formula that works for everyone. Some people are better suited to life in the country and some for life in the city. Some people are suited for neither. In the city, there is a constant buzz. There is tension and alienation. Our small enclosed community was paradise for the children, and it cultivated secure and happy little people. But we have given up being neighbors with people who are just like us. We have given up the privilege of settling our land. When I first married and moved to Samaria, there were only 200,000 Jews in Judea and Samaria. Today that number has more than doubled. And it will continue to grow, because the horses currently pulling this important cart are stronger, and worthier than me.
