Expressing love for two nations

You can participate in the Walk for Israel and still be a proud Canadian.

ESTHER TAUBY

I lace up my running shoes and jump five times in place. My whole body bounces with anticipation. My eight-year-old feet are eager to get started on the 22-mile walk that will occupy the rest of the day.

I smile at my friend Shoshana. We are at the YWHA on Bathurst Street where we come for swimming and gymnastics lessons. We're surrounded by our classmates, friends, brothers, sisters, parents, teachers, rabbis, principals and neighbors. It seems that the entire Jewish community of Toronto has turned out to show support for Israel at the annual UJA Walkathon early this Sunday morning in May.

It is my first one and I can't wait to go. Although I have not yet been to Israel, I know that I want to so badly and that one day I will get to see, touch and smell all the holy places, foods and people in our homeland. In the meantime, I can help Israel out by the pledges I collected over the past weeks from the many people I asked to sponsor me per mile. Some people even gave me $1a mile!

The sky is the color of a robin's egg and there is not a cloud in sight. The excitement mounts as more and more people of all ages get into place behind the masking tape on the ground. I notice a few dogs waiting patiently beside their owners. I go over to pet one of them and we're both startled by the megaphone announcing that it's time to sing "O Canada" and "Hatikvah" before we start walking. I run back quicky to my family and I sing my lungs out with everyone before starting the walk with what seems to me like a sea of blue and white people. "I'm so excited!" I say to my family members next to me. They just nod or laugh.

Throughout the day, as we parade through the streets of Toronto, making our way carefully through areas I've never been to and even downtown with its huge buildings, cars honk their horns at us and we wave back at the people hanging out of car windows, buses, on apartment balconies and porches of their houses. At stops along the way, we get cookies and juice and even baby powder to put in our shoes. At some of the checkpoints, many people have to stop and rest or give up altogether. Not me! I just keep saying, "No, thank you" to the nice volunteers as I urge the rest of my family on.

As we descend the steep hill past Sheppard on our final approach to the Y, I can't wait to be handed my certificate saying that I completed the walk for Israel this year, my first. I can't wait for tomorrow to go around my neighborhood with my stamped certificate and prove to everyone that I walked the whole way and to collect on those pledges for Israel. I can't stop grinning. I made it! I don't remember how much money I raised that first year, as it was over more than 30 years ago. It's irrelevant. What matters as I recall that special day is the feeling of pride I got because I knew I was contributing too. I was only a child and I knew that the money wasn't going to build any buildings or anything, but to me it was a huge accomplishment. Sure, my feet hurt for a few days afterwards, but it was well worth it.

I did that walk year after year, until our family moved to Florida when I was a teenager. Over the years, I raised quite a bit of money for Israel and it felt good every time I crossed the finish line, but nothing could compare to that first time. Since its inception, I have participated in the Walk for Israel in Vancouver every year, rain or shine, with as many of my children as I could gather for the occasion.

Although it is not nearly the same distance it was in Toronto, I still enjoy the feeling of walking up and down the hill on Oak Street with family and friends and their dogs wearing Walk for Israel T-shirts. I like stopping along the way at the Louis Brier Home and Hospital to visit with our elders waiting to greet us on the lawn of their home and share juice, cookies and encouragement.

I also welcome the opportunity to salute our proud veterans in their decorated uniforms who stand at the intersections to make sure we cross safely. I humbly thank them for sacrificing so much so that we can have the freedom to walk proudly along a main thoroughfare in a major city in Western Canada waving Israeli and Canadian flags, holding our banners high. I instruct my children and students with me to do the same. I try to instil in my children and students that same feeling of pride I had as a child walking with my community in support of my beloved Israel.

My nine-year-old son was almost as disappointed as I was when I explained to him that there wouldn't be a walk with Israel this year.

"Oh well, Ma," he said, "we'll just have to wait for next year - and besides, we still have Canada Day to look forward to."

I wasn't sure that the message had gotten through, and I was feeling a bit let down, until he told me that he decided that this year, because there was no walkathon, he'd like to send some of his allowance money to an organization in Israel that helps child victims of terror attacks.

I think the message came through loud and clear after all.

Esther Tauby is a Vancouver freelance writer.