Discovering Beauty and Truth

On a Trip to Tuscany

Last week, I had the pleasure of visiting Tuscany with my daughter as part of her post-army travels. It was a deluge of delights. We marveled at sophisticated, effortless, Italian style, savored daily scoops of velvety gelato, and bathed in emollient light. Whether in glorious Florence, earthy Siena, piazzas, parks, or trains, we were inundated with beauty.

But there were moments that were not pretty, too. Palestinian flags flapping out upper-story windows pierced our gaze at Brunelleshi’s majestic cathedral dome—the very symbol of Florence, Renaissance culture, and humanism. Stolpersteine, the brass plaques that mark homes throughout Europe from which Jews were deported by the Nazis, grabbed us when we glanced at sidewalks. Attending Shabbat services in Florence’s grand, Moorish-style synagogue required preregistration, a security check, and the scrutiny of armed, camouflage-uniformed soldiers we saw nowhere else.

The graffiti, a word derived from the Italian graffiato (scratched), was similarly disturbing. “Free Gaza” and “Free Palestine” slogans marred facades in immigrant neighborhoods, and benches and lampposts in more unexpected places. On Florence and Milan’s elegant shopping streets, those misleading messages (Free Gaza from whom?) were especially jarring.

But on Shabbat, I was reminded of what matters more than surface beauty. On a stroll through narrow streets near the synagogue, I noticed two, small, familiar words scrawled in black marker on the front door of an apartment building: “Forever Hersh.” Those words, which have been scribbled and spray-painted all over Israel in memory of murdered hostage Hersh Goldberg-Polin, had been exported to Italy. Those words, which make no demand or political statement, signify that the Jewish people and the Jewish values of tolerance and unity by which Hersh lived are enduring. Those words, whose absence of grammar lends them an almost mystical power, helped me look past the hate—and even the beauty—of Italy to discover truth.