Absorb identity: do the walls separate us from our story?

When I sat down to write “Scarred Stone”, the story of my mother’s life, I discovered a surprising thing: I didn’t need to interview her. I didn’t prepare a list of questions and I didn’t turn on a recording device. I found that her story just lived inside of me.

He didn’t get there because we sat down for spontaneous “conversations”, but because I was there, on the periphery of her life. I absorbed her world through “overhearing”, from her conversations with her friends, from the arguments and laughter around the beaver ceremony. Her story was not conveyed to me in deliberate words; He is simple Absorbed in memory.

Life is on the edge of the circle

Imagine the bona ceremony in Ethiopia: the smell of the roasted coffee beans, the woman who pours the thin stream into the small cups, and the human circle formed around her. In Ethiopia, the spaces were open. There were no thick walls or doors that closed. As children, we were always there – playing in the corner, helping with something small, or just staying on the outskirts.

We were not the center of the ceremony, no one tried to ‘make the conversation accessible’ to us or engage us. Precisely from this place, on the edge of the circle, we could absorb things as they really are: the nuances, the values, what makes the big ones laugh or scares them. The emotional map of the community was transferred to us simply because we were allowed to be present in the space, hear and assimilate. This is non-verbal knowledge, a memory that is assimilated into the body without even intending to learn it.

The hidden price of the walls

In Israel, the physics of the home has changed. We moved to divided spaces: walls, corridors, rooms and doors. The modern apartment gives us something valuable – privacy and quiet – but alongside this achievement, it is important to recognize the price that has been charged to us in return: we have lost the ability to convey identity by “osmosis”.

Once the space is crossed, the hidden “feed pipe” is cut off. The family memory, which once passed in a continuous “sonic flow”, becomes something mediated, artificial and forced. We find ourselves “reading” a child to tell him a story, “sitting” him down to hear a legacy, or hoping that the education system will do the work for us. But can a “lesson” on tradition really replace what was once simply absorbed into memory while life happened? The result is that we won privacy, but we got a fragmented memory – legacy lessons instead of a pulsing legacy.

look for the complementary mechanism

The question is not whether we should tear down the walls and go back to living in an open yard, but how we create a complementary mechanism within the existing reality. If the physics of the house no longer allows the story to “spill” between the rooms, we need to consciously create opportunities for co-existence – not one where the child is the center and is activated, but one where he is simply present on the periphery while the adults’ lives are happening.

Leaving an “acoustic door open” is not a technical matter, but a decision to allow our lives to “flow” into them. This means allowing them to hear us having a deep conversation with a friend, arguing about values, laughing about memories or simply walking within our culture, without trying to “make it accessible” to them.

We need to find a way to bring this circularity back into the modern apartment. Maybe it won’t happen every day, but it has to happen enough so that they don’t have to “learn” who they are from the books, but just breathe it in from the air, just like I breathed in My mother’s story Without her telling me it even once officially.

Is it time to examine our home not only according to comfort and design, but according to its ability to be a sounding board for the story we want to pass on?