Yom Kippur

Yom Kippur marks two sharply different scales of time in the novel: the political aftermath of the Yom Kippur War and a night of observance at Boaz Brandstetter’s communal home, where Ilana Sommo looks through a telescope at the moon. The holiday’s most intimate appearance joins religious time to the settlement’s material reconstruction, while its wartime name locates political activity within a national crisis.

Sacred Time at the Settlement

On the night of Yom Kippur, Ilana is invited to climb onto the roof and look through a telescope. She sees what she describes as the dead seas extending across the moon’s surface. The scene is brief, but its timing distinguishes it from the settlement’s ordinary work: the telescope and rooftop offer a moment of looking outward amid a life organized around repairing the house and sustaining the community.

The passage places this observance within a concrete account of the settlement’s renewal. Boaz and his friends bake bread, make yogurt and goat-milk cheeses, and prepare to make wine. The house has been repaired, and the surrounding stores hold seeds, fertilizer, fuel, and irrigation supplies. The Yom Kippur night does not interrupt that practical world so much as open a different register within it: the communal labor continues, while the telescope turns attention toward a distant, apparently lifeless landscape.

Political and Historical Time

The novel also invokes the Yom Kippur War as a reference point in the political history of the Jewish Fellowship Movement. After the war, the organization took part in demonstrations against troop disengagements in the Sinai and the Golan Heights, and in attempts to purchase land in the Bethlehem area. Michel Sommo was active in the movement and was interviewed by police twice in connection with its activities, though he was not charged.

This political reference differs from the rooftop scene in scale and consequence. Yom Kippur there is a night within the life of a household and commune; in the movement’s history, the war named after the holiday marks a period of territorial dispute and political mobilization. The two appearances place religiously charged time alongside the novel’s account of competing projects for land and collective life.

Significance in the Narrative

The holiday’s clearest personal significance comes through the contrast between the telescope’s view and the work below it. The communal home is being made habitable through repairs, food production, and stored provisions; on Yom Kippur, Ilana is invited to look beyond that immediate labor. The scene does not explain the vision or turn it into a doctrinal statement. It gives the observance a quiet, distinctive place within the settlement’s routine, while the separate reference to the Yom Kippur War keeps the holiday’s name tied to the novel’s political history.