Small steps
Yesterday I cried. I’m not someone who cries everyday. But yesterday I did, watching Akiva’s new music video, Tze’adim, ‘Steps.’ The video begins with a blonde girl in her late 20s or 30s playing with her dog. There’s a grainy flashback to her as a child. Then the video flashes to a Haredi man with kind eyes in a long black cloak. He’s leaning over an ancient text, learning the second chapter of Bava Metzia— “Elu metziot” - ‘These are the things one finds,’ about the rules for lost and found objects. He opens to an old picture depicting him with a young girl, his daughter, and you understand that they are parent and child, estranged. He writes her a letter, she reads it, and then they reunite.
When I first watched the video, I understood the story to be an analogy for the bitter hatred and internal division we are experiencing right now in Am Yisrael. Ultimately, when religious father and secular daughter reunite, I took that as a call to action: Return to your fellow family members — our fellow Jews — and reunite!
But then I learned that the father and daughter in the video were not actors, but real people who reunited after more than a decade of tragic estrangement. In fact, their story was depicted on an show called Still, We Will Meet (you can watch a clip with unbelievably raw honesty here with English subtitles).
Still, I think my original understanding stands. This is not just an uplifting feel-good story, but a profound argument for taking small steps towards one another in pursuit of peace…something desperately needed by Am Yisrael at the moment.