Michelle Cohen Corasanti
Follow The Almond Tree
Michelle Cohen Corasanti grew up in a Jewish home in which German cars were boycotted and Israeli bonds were plentiful. Other than the blue-and-white tin Jewish National Fund sedakah box her family kept in the kitchen and the money they would give to plant trees in Israel, all she learned growing up was that after the Holocaust, the Jews found a land without a people for a people without a land and made the desert bloom.
Until third grade, Michelle attended public school and then she transferred to the Hillel Yeshiva. The greatest lesson Michelle feels she learned at this Yeshiva was articulated by Rabbi Hillel (30BC-10AD), one of the greatest rabbis of the Talmudic era in his famous quote, “That which is hateful to you, do not unto another. This is the whole Torah. The rest is commentary.” There were two students in her sixth grade graduating class.
Michelle returned to public school for seventh grade, stopped wearing skirts with pants underneath and re-befriended her former best friend whom she had lost touch with during her yeshiva years. Her friend’s father had since died, her mother turned into a raging alcoholic and her older brothers spent most of their time in their bedrooms listening to Lucy in the Sky with Diamonds in a state Michelle still was too young to recognize. Michelle’s friend lived without rules as she had no supervision. Just what every teenage girl wants and what every parent doesn’t.
Being the oldest and the only daughter in the family, Michelle’s parents’ strictness suffocated her. She decided she wanted to study abroad in Paris in order to get distance from her parental-choke-hold. Her Zionist parents rejected that idea and sent Michelle to Israel to study Judaism and Hebrew with the Rabbi’s perfectly well-behaved and obedient daughter Miriam. Michelle was sixteen-years-old and the year was 1982.
Despite having come from Utica, New York, the transition to the Ben Shemen Boarding School was effortless for Michelle. She soon had an Israeli boyfriend. When he told her he was a Kahanist, she had no idea what he was talking about. “I believe in transfer,” he told her. “There are 21 Arab countries, the Pal
“I had no idea words could have so much power and beauty.”
“Wasn't there any balance in the world?”
“Before you judge a person, try to imagine how you would feel if the same things had happened to you.”
“People hate out of fear and ignorance. If they could just get to know the people they hate, and focus on their common interests, they could overcome that hatred.”
“The world should have stopped, but it didn't.”
“Don't allow guilt to enter your heart, because it's a disease, like cancer, that'll eat away at you until there's nothing left.”
“One cannot live on anger, my son.”
“Courage, I realised, was not the absence of fear: it was the absence of selfishness; putting someone else's interest before one's own.”
“And it suddenly occured to me that maybe peace was possible.”
“He looked me directly in the eye. 'So you live in America?''We do.' I smiled.He stopped, opened his backpack, pulled out an empty tear gas grenade and handed it to me. 'I believe it was a present from your country.' Majid smiled. 'Tell your friends thanks. We got their grenade.”
“Success is not about never falling, but about rising every time you fall”
“He who aims too high will get a sore neck”
“Hatred is self-punishment. Do you think they're feeling bad because you hate them?”
“You cannot go back and make a new start, but you can start now and make a new ending”
“Permission to buy apricots and oranges from my own trees, the ones my great grandfather planted and i kept alive in drought and war”
“The hardest part for us was watching them harvest our Shamouti oranges.Those were our favourites, thick skinned, seedless and juicy.When the wind was strong, the scent of their blossoms in the spring and their fruit in the summer still reached us.”
“Many great men can attribute their success to the fact that they didn't have the advantages other men had”
“Good things make choosing difficult.Bad things leave no choice”