Aliyah - From Houston to Holy Land: An Oleh's Journeys

Living with Tekhelet/חי בתכלת

Last Shabbat I actually went to the synagogue for morning prayers. I was up, and I couldn’t deny the need within me to connect with G-d in one of His dwellings here in the holy land. I had a dilemma in front of me however, and one that reached deeper than the simple color it embodied.

Some background explanation is needed. In Judaism, it is a positive mitzvah, a commandment, to wear tzitzit, ritual fringes on a piece of clothing. Many religious Jews accomplish this by wearing a four-cornered garment beneath their shirts with the tzitzit attached to them, either showing outside of their clothing or tucked into their pants, depending on their specific tradition.

In addition to tzitzit, there is a separate mitzvah mentioned in the same paragraph in the Torah, the mitzvah of tekhelet, a blue string amongst the other white strings. For centuries, the source of tekhelet was lost, with various scholars debating its source. In recent history, one organization rediscovered the source of tekhelet. Not everyone agrees on the subject, but this post is not the place to go into the debate on it. [Here is a great article on the debate if you’re interested]

I say this because for years following my “falling out” with Chabad, I started wearing tekhelet. I believed that it was real, and it also helped me identify more with the dati leumi/Modern Orthodox world that more readily accepts tekhelet as authentic. However, in the past few months, I reverted back to wearing Chabad tzitzit, without tekhelet. I did it out of a longing to be back in the Chabad velt, and my increasing desire to get back to my roots when I first became Jewish.

As I’ve written about, I’ve been doing a lot of thinking about where I fall in the bigger Jewish world here in Israel. Tekhelet, that little bit of blue string, believe it or not, plays a big part of it. I came to Israel wearing tekhelet; it made me feel more connected here. I saw other guys in knit kippot wearing tekhelet and it reaffirmed to me that I was part of their world. I saw it on guys who looked like the me I wanted to be, settling the land and being the pioneers I dreamed about being. That’s the whole reason I’m really here, because I too want to be writing Jewish history instead of just experiencing it.

So, last Shabbat, I took out my old tzitzit and tallit with tekhelet and brought them with me to the synagogue. I didn’t know a single person there. I only understood a few words of the sermon in Hebrew. I had to move several times so that the regulars could have their seats, making me feel even more like an interloper. But, when I saw the blue fringes between my fingers before I recited the Shema, something just felt right. I felt like I had given up all of the battles I was waging within myself about who I was and was just doing what felt like it was right. It felt right to be there. It felt right to be there with my tekhelet (even if I was the only guy there with it). It felt right to feel like I was fulfilling a rediscovered mitzvah in a land renewed.

So, today I bought a new pair of tzitzit with tekhelet. My old pair is too small and worn, but I felt completely different this time buying them when I bought the Chabad pairs. When I was buying the Chabad pairs, I felt like I was buying them out of a sense of obligation, and I even felt a little bit silly since my halachic observance is no where to the level that the average Lubavitcher in Israel is up to. When I was in the checkout today, it just felt right, like I was going back to who I chose to be.

I came into the Chabad world because it’s all I ever really knew, I never really had much of a choice. I fell into it, and I’m grateful for everything it gave me. I still have so much love for the Rebbe and his teachings, I learn Tanya, and I still default in my mind to the chassidic teachings I’ve learned over the years. My view of Jewish life, of Yiddishkeit, is fundamentally Chabad; but I know what I am and where I want to be.

The Chabad life isn’t for me anymore. The people that I really look up to now that I live in Israel aren’t the rabbis who struggled in Russia to preserve Judaism. I still have immense for the Rebbe’s shluchim; but I know that deep down I would trade everything I have now to be one of those first dati leumi settlers setting up religious kibbutzim. I believe in the holiness of the State of Israel, and in the sanctity of building up this land. My heroes built the settlements on the borders, they taught the Torah of Eretz Yisrael, they set up yeshivot in Judea and Samaria after the Six Day War, they were the men and women who combined service to Hashem with labor on the land. That is who I want to be like, even if I live comfortably in a Netanya suburb.

To me tekhelet symbolizes all of this. It symbolizes the idea that something so immensely holy can be found again with hard work and science, and not abandoned to messianic times. It stands for the idea that we can change reality now, that we can change the future now. Tekhelet is a mitzvah that serves to remind Jews not only of the mitzvot, which all white tzitzit do as well, they also serve to remind us to perform those commandments. They remind us that we are a people of action, not simply of remembrance and observance. I want to be a Jewish man of action, I want to change the world for the better with my actions. If that string of blue does it for me, I’m going to cling to it, and everything it stands for.

Caught Between Worlds/תקוע בין עולמות

I feel caught between worlds.

In Israel, Jewish life is not segmented into convenient boxes, dominated by one synagogue over another. Your yiddishkeit, your Jewishness, is not bound to one place, to one rabbi, or to one way of life. Things blend together here, religious life exists on a spectrum of expression. In America, my orthodoxy was so visible; here, I am just another man with a kippah in the crowd. Religious people are everywhere. They are not hidden, shuttling back and forth between the synagogue, the office, the kosher supermarket, and back home. Here, the janitor is a religious Jew, and so is the soldier, the beggar, the artist, the woman at the checkout lane, as well as the doctor and the lawyer.

Oh, how these Jews express themselves! They are trendy, they are hippies, they are classic, and they are so very fresh. They wear black suits and hats, skinny jeans, short sleeves and slacks, shorts and tee shirts, and biker jackets and boots. They are infinite in their variety, and conspicuous in how much they belong. It is impossible to define them, and impossible to contain their world to a ghetto.

It’s honestly beautiful, how something so holy and different can be so immersed and meshed with daily life here. Jewish holidays are my days off, I would be hard pressed to find a situation where I couldn’t get kosher food at almost anytime, and there are literally four synagogues within a ten minute walk of where I live (I really should go more often). The fact is, it is impossibly easy to live a religious life here, but that is where my dilemma lies.

In America, my observance defined me, it marked me as different, it stood me out on its own. Here, I must struggle to define myself within the melange of life here. With Judaism so wild and unrestricted, I’m struggling to find my true north. When I was back in the states, I shed many of the things that made me Chabad, although I always stayed sheltered in its world and never gave up the halachic restrictions that world gave me. One of the first things my wife and I did when we got to this new country was go before the beit din, a Jewish court headed by our local rav, and performed hatarat nedarim, the annulment of vows and restrictions, to free ourselves so that we could start fresh in our new community. Gone were the welcoming chains of the old world, and all that was that left was the uncertainty of freedom and free will. We chose customs and standards that fit our community, wanting to blend in and bind ourselves to some kind of shared social base. I went to a new synagogue, built on its variety of parishioners, and I stuck to what my fellow Anglos did. In my desperate attempt to navigate my new Jewish Israeli identity, I clung to whatever was around me.

But it left me feeling incomplete.

When I was with Chabad, and it still happens whenever I go back to a Chabad synagogue, I knew who and what I was. I may have taken off my kapota and shaved my beard, but I was still Chabad in my head. I am still a Lubavitcher in my mind, the rebbe is never far away, and his teachings and lessons are like a warm blanket on this cold journey.

When I was in the mental health hospital, I was in a really low place, lost in my mind and my soul. For the first couple of weeks, I couldn’t pray, I couldn’t hear the calling within me, I couldn’t feel G-d’s presence like I once did. When my wife brought me my tallit and tefillin, she brought me my Chabad siddur, my prayer book, as well. This prayer book was special because it was given to me by my rabbi on the day of my conversion, and the pages are stained by my fingertips from years of repeated prayer. In the recreation room of the hospital, I found my faith again, the one life raft I could cling to in the sea of mental anguish. I found myself rediscovering the words with new eyes, the longing and calling for healing found bee resonance in my heart. When King David cried I cried along with him, my tears staining the pages. The tightness of the tefillin straps kept me bound to reality, the weight of my tallit on my shoulders grounded me to this world while connecting me to the hidden world around me. So much of my life was dominated by confusion, prayer and meditation kept me tied to the truth.

Now, I am out again in the free world, but I don’t know where to turn to. Even with so many synagogues within my grasp, I pray at home rather than deal with my spiritual identity crisis. Am I Chabad? Am I Modern Orthodox? Am I dati leumi? Do I check the “other” box? Who do I turn to when I have questions beyond whether I just made a spoon not kosher? Where do I look to for inspiration? There is so much more to observance than mitzvot, there is an entire culture wrapped up in every label; and I often do not understand or feel comfortable with any of the labels?

Maybe that is the solution, to live between the lines. I had a meeting with the rabbi of one of the local synagogues, one that caters to Anglos, and he told me that I don’t have to limit myself. That I can take from each of these worlds the beautiful, the meaningful, what works for me. Maybe that’s the real test, to see how I swim in this vast ocean, building myself an edifice from the mass of materials around me. Each of us here is such a unique soul, maybe this whole place only works if it all blends together.

Part of what makes galut, exile, so harsh is the regimentation. While we were initially put into ghettoes, we internalized them and put ourselves into boxes. We had to act this way, or look this way, pray this way, eat this level of kosher, do what this rabbi said. The beauty of this new state, of this new plane of existence for Jewish consciousness is that we are building it ourselves, sometimes making up the plan as we go along. That’s why we live for today, that’s why say that it will be ok, and to take things slowly. It is a marvelous thing to build a new Jew here, combining elements from Jewish practice and tradition from around the world and through centuries of different experiences.

So maybe I can be ok in my jean shorts, tzitzit down past my knees, and a Rick and Morty tee shirt. Maybe I can still have 770 on my tallit bag even though I eat rabbanut. Maybe Hashem is just happy that I’m here trying my best, or at least maybe He’s happy that I’m happy that I’m trying my best. I always have room to grown, and thank G-d, there is so much holy space here to grow in and so much holiness to fertilize that growth. I can be me, and that’s enough. I may live between worlds, but all of the worlds are holy, so I can’t go wrong. It may be uneasy, but I will find my way here.

Am I home?

The reality is that that I am still living in-between worlds, a foot in each door, not really American, but not really fully Israeli.

In less than forty-eight hours, I will be in the air, travelling hundreds of miles per hour, over a vast ocean, to a place that I call home; or at least I did. I catch myself calling America home, and I always feel the need to correct myself; that I left the old country behind to build something in this new state in an old land. I have to say to myself that the United States is no longer my home, that I made a conscious decision to leave behind my possessions, my friends, my community, my family, my entire way of life to make a go of it here in Israel; but I still keep catching myself saying, “back home in America…” The reality is that that I am still living in-between worlds, a foot in each door, not really American, but not really fully Israeli.

Today, I was talking with someone and he said that he was Israeli and that I was American. When I corrected him and said, no I’m Israeli too, he said to me in broken English that I was still an American. There is something unbridgeable between the sabra and I, or at least while I still speak broken Hebrew. This language barrier always comes up when I am in a big group of people that are speaking Hebrew. My mind still thinks in English, so I spend so much time trying to keep up with the fast-speaking sabras and translating in my mind that by the time I finally understand what’s happening, the conversation is already on another topic. When I’m speaking one-on-one with someone in Hebrew, my mind can switch, but inevitably I run into the wall of not knowing a word, or how to translate a phrase, or conjugate a verb correctly; my mind stops working when it’s in Hebrew mode, and I can acutely feel the inability to express myself in the language of this place I desperately want to call home and speak with the people who I long to be equal with; but is more than that.

I am caught in a place where my mind is stuck between worlds, between my old home and my new one. It’s been two years since I first stepped foot on these shores and the Ministry of the Interior handed me a little laminated card that said, Status: Israeli Citizen. In those two years, I’ve slowly undergone the process of klitah, absorption, into this society. I’ve changed the way I look, the way I speak, the way I interact with people, the way I view the world, and the way I view myself. I started off surrounded by fellow olim in my Hebrew ulpan, all of us coming from different corners of the world, trying to make sense of this new citizenship and this new identity of being an [insert country of origin] Israeli. Now, I’m surrounded by natives and every day is a challenge to navigate their world, or is it mine too? Everyone says I’m doing well for how long I’ve been here, that it takes time and patience, slowly slowly; but I still feel like something is missing, that I am out of place. I do not feel like I fit in to the puzzle that is this country.

Where did it all begin, this feeling of never having a place feel completely whole, of never feeling completely whole in a single place?

My parents got divorced when I was a small child, and I think that’s when I lost the real concept of what it meant to have a home. Shuttling back and forth between my parents, having two houses, two rooms, two places filled with “my” things, I learned to never put down roots. Every day could bring about a new change in where I slept at night, and that makes a kid think that nothing has permanence. I think that the old euphemism for my situation was that I came from a “broken home,” but my therapist said something different today. She said that really, I learned what it was like to be homeless, to never feel settled in a place, to have a place where I could crash and sleep, but never call home in the way that all of my friends spoke about the places they lived with their families. I would always envy my friends who went to summer camps, or went on trips together, or just always knew where they were going to be for holidays. I was jealous that they could just go to the same little building every day, go to their own designated quarters, and have a place they felt was theirs. It’s hard to sleep in a bed when you know that you have another one a thousand miles away that you’re also supposed to think of as yours. It’s hard to attach yourself to things when you also have treasures hidden away in another state. It’s hard when a parent has to tell a child, like a guest, that they’re always welcome in a place that’s supposed to be their home.

So, I spent most of the time after I left home at eighteen thinking exactly like this, thinking that no place was really home. Every year in college I moved: from my dorms, to my fraternity house, to an apartment with friends, to living with my girlfriend, to my first apartment after college, to my next apartment after that, until I finally got married and shared a space with someone again for the first time in years. I built what you could call a home, or at least a decent apartment. I bought furniture, decorations, bathroom furnishings, all the little things that make it yours. In five years of marriage, we moved three times. I never felt completely at home in any of them, or at least, I was already for the next move. I never felt so connected to any one place that I knew that this would be my home. It was always home for now, until we got something better, or felt like doing something new. Even with the best of intentions, I sowed the seeds of my own rootlessness.

Then, a little over two years ago, my wife and I made the ultimate decision to really cut off our roots and transplant ourselves to a place that we had only ever known on brief excursions. It was fun and exhilarating, but I’m only now beginning to understand how traumatic and stressful it all really was. I’ve always had mental health problems, and I feel like they were just bubbling beneath the surface in America, with occasional flareups making me get help. When we came here, everything that I had that kept all of those dark thoughts and problems under the surface just disappeared. I lost my support group, my habits, my routines; I lost the ability to just blend in and hide the problems away. Eventually, things got to a breaking point, and after a year here I was hospitalized in a mental institution, and my world literally shattered. I had gotten so used to changing places that I felt at home in a psych ward more than I did in the outside world. I got used to the cotton pajama clothing and sharing a room with a stranger, I got used to it all so quickly that when I tried to leave for a couple of days I completely lost my connection with reality and had to be readmitted.

Thankfully, things are better now. I’ve been in my outpatient program for a while, and things are finally starting to feel better. I still have bad days, but I can deal with them. What I still haven’t been able to get over, and this is one of the things that keeps me up at night, is still feeling like I’m an alien here. That as much I answer people that question, why I would choose the challenges of Israel over the comforts of America, with my love of this place and feeling connected here more than I did in America, I still feel disconnected from society; and if that’s the case, what does that say about how connected I ever felt to anything back in America?

I think it all comes back to what I think home means, or at least what it means to have a home or feel at home. It’s hard for me to define, such a simple concept. It’s a building, a place, but that word means so much more than any physical structure. It means having a place where you feel comfortable, more than just a place you can rest your head. It means feeling like you have a place to call your own, and not just a place that you feel like you can stay at. It means feeling like you have a sanctuary, and not just shelter. It means even more than anything you attach to the place, it is a feeling you have with the life that is connected to that physical location. The home is what you base your life on, the foundation for everything else. All of the other places in your life are in relation to home, and in relation to yourself. You may be a worker at your place of employment, a congregant at your place of worship, a patron of your favorite bar or restaurant; but your home has to be the one place where you can feel like you can be completely yourself. The rest of the world could be going to hell or feel like an alien world, but your home is the one place you’re supposed to feel safe enough to be in your own skin.

When I close my eyes and imagine the home I want, I see experiences and not things. I see myself watering the plants in my garden. I see myself sharing a meal with my wife and laughing. I wish that my home would be a place where I can take off my shell and let myself feel comfortable in being exposed. I want it to be a place where I can sit and write to my heart’s content. I want it to be a place where I can curl up and just feel relaxed reading a book. I want to look around at then things on the walls and see expressions of what I hold dear in life. I want my bed to feel like the safest place in the world, and not just where I go when life’s troubles have me to exhausted to keep on going.

I don’t have that yet. Besides the physical things, I still struggle to feel like this place is my home. The food in my fridge has labels that I still sometimes struggle to decipher. When I get a phone call and have to speak in Hebrew, that outside feeling of alienation comes into my home. I don’t want my home to feel like a bastion or a fortress, I want it to feel like a hidden garden. I want to feel like life flourishes just for me, and that I am privileged to see it. Everyone brings their problems home with them, but it still feels like my home is dominated more by them than the refuge from them. I want to feel like a part of the rest of the world outside, but I want it to be my part of the world. I want to feel comfortable with not being comfortable all of the time, and I think that leaving America forced me to really do that for the first time. I’ve had hardships before, but there is nothing that compares to this immigrant experience.

Still, I have hope. When I lay my head down at night, it doesn’t feel like a hotel room, I feel like it’s my pillow underneath my head. When I pick up the phone and struggle to speak, I know that it’s ok, and that I am better now than I was when I finished my formal Hebrew education. I have more confidence, and part of that comes from knowing that I am different, and that the differentness might last forever. I look at my government and see people that were not born here, and I feel hope that I might one day make it here on my own terms. So many Hebrew phrases all boil down to the same idea, that things are going to be ok, and that someone upstairs is watching out for us.

When I pack my bags tomorrow, I know that I am not really leaving one home for another. Those days in my life are long gone, I do not have to bifurcate my existence between two worlds. I can be complicated, I can be nuanced, I can live life in a way that is not always one way or the other. There is even beauty in living this complex life, always learning and adapting to new situations. When the first pioneers came to this land, they came speaking a foreign tongue, and even the stilted Hebrew of our founding fathers betrays the fact that so many still spoke in their mother tongues in private. They learned to live and adapt to this world, but they also built it into something new, each generation of immigrants adding another layer to this beautiful Zionist project in the holy land. I may not always feel like it, but I am part of that too. To be alienated here is to also be essentially Israeli, to be a pioneer, to step outside your comfort zone and try and build something amazing even when you don’t always understand everything.

I will always be an American, but I will always be an Israeli; and that is something that I chose. I never got a say in where I was born, but I have a say in my future, and that future is here. I may not be where I want to be, but I will be one day. For now, I might still be between worlds, but I know where my home is. This land, these people, this country, they are mine. This is where I belong. This is where I am building my home, and G-d willing, I will have the home I’ve always dreamed of.

I will make it here. Israelis are resilient like that.

Another Sleepless Night While My Country Burns

I write this to you as I sit in my apartment’s safe room for the second night in a row, afraid that any moment might bring the siren’s call and the ninety seconds we all have to try and get packed into this sealed-off tiny room to avoid the incoming missiles, and pray that the iron dome or fate saves us from losing our homes, our bodies, or our lives. For the second night in a row I sit with frayed nerves, every sound a possible alert, every clinking plate is a siren, every plane overhead could be a drone, every foot stepped outside is another second less I have of safety if that ninety second window starts closing. I look around me and notice, for the first time, how small this room is, after having tried to jam three adults, three children, and two dogs in it as we wait for the other shoe to drop. I see the blast shields (who would have ever thought I would have said such a real thing in real life) covering the windows, blocking the light out and turning this into a place truly disconnected from the outside world save the device I am typing on now.

If by now you don’t know what I’m talking about, I’ll make it abundantly clear and tell you exactly what happened to me last night.

The day before yesterday, my landlord’s wife had shown her children how to get inside my apartment from their home and to the safe room in case they weren’t there. If there’s one piece of advice that has stuck with me, it’s this: when the sabras, the natives, start getting worried, that’s when you should get worried.

At about 9:00 p.m. IST yesterday, I experienced my first real rocket attack; siren, running, fear-filled night and all. I was about to take a shower, and was already starting to get undressed. I immediately heard the siren and started throwing on my clothes, knowing that within seconds my landlord’s family was going to be rushing down the stairs to the door that joins our apartment to their home to get into the safe room that I am typing from. I ran into it and saw my terror-stricken wife running towards me as I saw the family from upstairs come through the door. We all ran into the room, my wife yelling that she couldn’t get our dog to go with her. I took a second to calculate whether I had enough time to risk my life to possibly save my dog and I ran out, picked her up, and ran back. We shut the door behind us as the siren was still going off.

Not long afterwards my landlord’s son heard the boom of an explosion far away. It could have been the iron dome itself, the iron dome intercepting the missile, or the missile exploding nearby in an empty area.

We waited and sat trying to stay calm.

It’s crazy to see how children react to situations like this, the mix of excitement, fear, and curiosity.

It’s crazy that children have to grow up like this.

We heard another siren and waited longer. My landlord spoke with his wife who was in the shelter with us, he was away at work in Ramat Gan and also in a shelter.

After about thirty minutes, we all thought it was safe to get out. My apartment was still there, but whatever naivete or innocence I had about rocket attacks was gone.

As so many of my friends have pointed out, this is the first time in over six years since a siren has gone off in Netanya. Many of them joked that this is what makes them Israeli now, part of the collective identity of living life where any place and any time can become a mini war-zone. I thought getting through the hassle at the post office was good enough, but I guess maybe I am a little more Israeli after all of this.

In the moment, all I felt was a feeling of being completely on edge. I was going over everything in my head of what I had in the safe room in case we were trapped here. Did I have enough water? Enough snacks/food for everyone? Did I have food for the dogs? Were my medications here?

About an hour after the attack, all of the adrenaline left my body, and the panic set in. I could feel my heart racing and my chest tightening. Everything in my mind wanted to reject everything, that this couldn’t have just happened, that this wasn’t real. This happens near Gaza. This happens in the south. This happens maybe to Tel Aviv and Jerusalem. This doesn’t happen to me. This can’t happen here. I’m safe.

But it did, and I wasn’t.

I had to take a couple of SOS pills.

Seven people are dead from the rockets, including a five-year-old boy, a father and daughter, a soldier, a grandmother, and an Indian national who was a caregiver and whose senior charge was seriously injured.

Lod and many mixed Arab-Jewish cities are seeing riots as I type this, with Arabs burning schools, synagogues, and Jewish residents hunkered down in their homes for fear of a pogrom. There was a stabbing of a Jew in Beersheva, and the suspect is a fellow (Arab) Israeli.

I don’t have the time and patience to tell you how we got to this point, but this article from the Times of Israel does a pretty good job of showing how blocking people from sitting at one of the gates to the Old City of Jerusalem and a real estate case in East Jerusalem led up to this.

The first comment, the very first comment, I got when I posted to social media to tell people that my wife and I were safe after a missile attack was from a family member telling me to get out of there as soon as I could. I told her the same message I would tell the people that sent the rocket careening towards my home:

I am not going anywhere. No one is going to scare me away from my home. No one is going to stop me from being a Jew, living a Jewish life, in a Jewish state, in the Jewish homeland.

I will brave anything to be in this place. I will face every fear I have. I will let my nerves burn with panic and dread, but I will not allow them to make my legs walk anywhere but within the lines that carve out this little place in the desert that we have built up and can call our own.

To those that support Israel, to those that support the idea that terrorism is wrong, to those that believe that democracy and dialogue are always better than war, I ask you to join me in praying for an end to this fighting so that we can face the hard questions of how we make this a better place for everyone. The other side wants to shut down the talks with violence, they want to silence opposition with many masks, talking radical Islam from one side of the mouth while speaking to the left’s identity politics from another (with the latter all too willing to disregard what life would be like under the law of Gaza for them personally).

To those on the fence, I ask you simply to read reliable news and form your own opinion. I am not here to make you a Zionist, I am merely telling you what happened to me, your friend, and what my life is like because of the people a rocket’s reach away from me that want to see me marched into the ocean.

And to those who believe now in BDS, who call Israel an apartheid state, who say the IDF is a war criminal organization, who say that we are killers and murders: unfollow me. You obviously have hardened beliefs that fly in the face of what real life is like, or how history has unfolded. If you cannot see that those statements do not fit in the same world as calling someone who is a proud Israeli, someone who chose to move to this “apartheid” state, a friend, than you need to figure out what is more important. My life was on the line, and the people cheering with you in America might seem nice, but the ones here have their fingers on missile control buttons, and mortar rounds, and incendiary balloons, and anti-tank missiles that are used to kill people just like me.

It could have easily been me.

Maybe I am more Israeli after all of this, but not because I know this new fear. I am more Israeli because I know more where I stand. I stand with my friends. I stand with my brothers and sisters. I stand with my fellow citizens, regardless of religion or background. I stand for peace with security.

I stand (or type) here and say that I am a proud Israeli. No caveats, no apologies, and without reservations. This place is my home, and it will be for the rest of my days. I hope they are long here, and that my death comes surrounded by family and in old age and not by the finger of some terrorist in Gaza; but either way so be it. There is no place I would rather call my home.

Israel will always be where my heart is.

Sending beleaguered love from the Holy Land, hope you send some our way; everybody here could use a little extra these days.

You cannot eat Zionism, but you can make miracles with it

I love it only more when I see everyone together, sharing what we can get from this hard place, like when I see the guys from my neighborhood gather at the local minimarket to just talk and drink beer together. Their birthplaces span thousands of miles, but they are all here making life flourish in the holiest spot in the world.

If there’s one question I am constantly asked by Israelis, the most common by far is why I am here. Depending on the person on the other end of the question, I usually cater the answer to inspire/explain/just-get-someone-to-stop-asking-me-questions. The answer is always a variation of Zionism, religion, loving the land, and all the other platitudes that all of us olim can gush on about if given the chance in the right setting and the right mood.

But sometimes it’s not enough.

Zionism does not put money into my bank account. My faith does not help me navigate a world where I only barely understand the language. Loving this beautiful place does not replace the longing I feel for the family, friends, and the home I left behind. None of those helped me when I was in the hospital trying to regain my sanity. On the tough nights, the nights where my I can’t stop the rush of negative thoughts and emotions, I wonder if coming here was the right decision. I ask myself if leaving all of the support that I had back in the states was the smart move. If living in this place is really worth putting up with at least one problem a day because you’re an immigrant. If the isolation, the frustration, the sadness, the anger, and the desperation were worth moving across an ocean to a place where the only thing that ties me to it are ethereal and abstract.

It’s Hanukkah, and I’ve been struggling to really internalize the holiday. I light the hannukiah (menorah for my American friends), eat some donuts, and sit on my couch for half an hour near the flames to fulfill my obligations; but I haven’t felt anything. The Maccabees, the holy oil, the miracles, none of it has hit me like it usually does. I sit a few feet away from the hanukkiah, reading a book, just trying to get through another day.

Then I read an articles like this and I get reminded of why I’m here and why this holiday, and now, is so important. I think about the men, women, and children just like me. I think of the olim who fought to get here, and of those still coming to put their money where their mouths are.

I think about all of the people who gave up everything to come here, who risked it all, their lives included, to try and reach this holy soil. People from around the world with varying degrees of attachment to their Jewishness. People who had never heard the aleph-bet until their twenties to people who had been detached from world Jewry for centuries. People who fled with just a suitcase. People came from DP camps, numbers tattooed on their arms. I gave up my western comforts, but I never had someone pushing me away; and I always had a place to call home besides Israel.

I think about a man named Ziv, who I met at the local minimarket drinking beer with his friends and neighbors. He is an oleh like me, he’s from Ethiopia, and he asked me the why-are-you-here question. I told him that I came here because I am a Zionist, that I am religious, and that I believe. He just said an “ah” with the shared knowledge we both have of what it means to believe in a place like this. Later on, where he found out that I lived in the Krayot, a cluster of towns north of Haifa, he asked me what I thought about Netanya compared to the Krayot. I said to him, Netanya is a beautiful place with nice people, but that the people of the Krayot, which is known a bastion of immigrants from the former Soviet Union and Ethiopia, were emiti, they were real. He loved that response and couldn’t stop saying how right I was.

To me, those people felt so real because they knew what it meant to take action to come to this place. This is not meant to denigrate the good people that live here in this city, especially the French, Russian, and Ethiopian olim here, but something about the working-class vibe of the Krayot emphasized that we olim are doing things here; that we are helping build this country in a way that no one else can. The people there work hard and live in hard places, working everyday jobs and hard labor, living in buildings built around the founding of the state. They exemplify that aliyah is not an easy thing, but that it is amazingly beautiful in the truth that the land here flourishes when we are here. Even more, this country’s culture, faith, character, everything about it has changed because we continue to come here and make an impact. I get my greatest joys seeing Ethiopian grandmothers smiling and laughing with each other in the bus, Russian men sitting on benches and arguing politics, French bakeries giving me a taste of another world, and my fellow Anglos getting together just to share a beer. I love it only more when I see everyone together, sharing what we can get from this hard place, like when I see the guys from my neighborhood gather at the local minimarket to just talk and drink beer together. Their birthplaces span thousands of miles, but they are all here making life flourish in the holiest spot in the world.

I was not privileged to be born in the days of the first kibbutzim, to be one of the first settlers of the land; but I feel like I am still accomplishing the great mitzvah of yishuv haaretz, settling the land of Israel. My apartment existed long before I ever came here, but every day I spend here is another day that this place grows in Jewish pride and in its faith. When I pray here, I pray where G-d wants me to be and wants all of his people to be. When I put down roots here, I am making myself another tree in the forest of souls that make up the collective whole of this beautiful nation.

The Maccabees lived in a time where everything that Judaism stood for was under threat, and they decided to act. The few decided to fight the many. They lit the menorah to see it in its grandeur. knowing they didn’t have enough for tomorrow. Their actions found miracles, as I hope mine will. I think every oleh and olah that comes here knows that they are going to have rely on miracles to get by; but that’s what this land does. It is hard, and life is not easy, but you can see the miracles if you pause and look hard. They are obvious in the sight of a scattered people returned and a nation reborn, but they exist in the sparkle of the children running and speaking Hebrew in the first Jewish country in two millennia. They exist in the smiles of peoples from people who treat each other more like family than just fellow citizens. They exist in hearing that a great miracle happened here as children play. They exist in men standing for the Prayer for the State of Israel and for the IDF. They exist for me, that despite everything, I finally feel like I’m in a place that I never want to leave.

You cannot eat Zionism, you cannot pay your bills with faith, and you cannot save for the future simply by loving a piece of the earth, but you can build something with all of those. As an oleh, it may be harder, but I know that home I build will stand the test of time. May I be standing in it one day with the great menorah in a rebuilt Beit HaMikdash, and we can all celebrate this holiday together knowing our hard work and sacrifice made it happen.

A dream and a minimarket

Let me tell you about a dream I had last night.

I was with people, I can’t remember their faces. We were talking, laughing even. I was wearing my grey suit, the one that doesn’t fit anymore; and at some point in the conversation I left, just turned and walked away. I started walking alone when I saw her. I saw my mother, who passed away over eight years ago. Her hair was long, like before she had cancer, and her face was glowing with the smile that lit up every room she ever graced. Before she opened her mouth to speak the voice I’ve long since forgotten the sound of, every one of my family members started walking towards me. Cousins, aunts and uncles, everyone on my mother’s side of the family decked out for some formal event. Shocked by seeing them all, I asked them what they were doing there, they told me don’t you remember, your cousin had another baby. I looked over to my cousin, hearing her voice introducing me to the newborn, and in my dream, I remembered feeling the envelope but ignoring an invitation to the event. I never showed up. They were all together, and I was alone.

It’s been over six hundred and eight days since I last saw a member of my family in person. It’s been over eight years since I last heard my mother’s voice in real life. Six hundred days since I’ve seen my old friends from high school, friends from my old community, and the entire network of people you gain as you build a life in a place. I chose to come here, to this country, knowing I was going to give that all up; but I didn’t know how much it would hurt to not be able just be in the same room as someone you share blood with, someone you share history with, someone that you’ve made memories with. I spent nights sleepless with regret about the choices I’ve made, and the time I wasted not spending it with family and friends. I live with the choice that I made to put myself halfway across the world, and especially in these times, never knowing when, or if, I will ever see my family and friends again. It’s great to see someone over video or get an encouraging message; but there is nothing that can replace the feeling of embracing and being with people you love.

It’s hard to be so alone here.

One of the questions I’m constantly asked by sabras, native Israelis, after they find out I’m an oleh is if I have any family here. Other olim ask the same thing, having lived lives where families made aliyah together, either out of ideology, faith, or the million other reasons people come here. It’s always a little disheartening to say no, it’s just us here, plus our dog. We have no one to invite us for holidays, no place to sleep over for Shabbat, or no family in another city to visit just to get a change of scenery. In a country where the birth rate is high, and big families are not unusual, to be a lone couple with only distant relatives in the country is an oddity. We must rely on making friends to have anything compared to a family; and even that can change. One move, one lost job, one pandemic, one release from the hospital and the people you relied on to make up that hole in your heart are gone.

It’s hard to be so alone here.

But the thing is, as much as I miss every one of my family and friends, no matter how hard life has gotten here, and it definitely has, I can still never see myself moving back to America. I love this place too much, I love the people here, I love everything it stands for; I believe in this place with all of my heart and soul.

Let me tell you a story about a minimarket.

A ten-minute bike ride away from us is another neighborhood in our section of Netanya. Whereas my neighborhood is filled with green spaces and big houses (of which I live in the basement of one), this one is what would be called more “working-class.” There are more religious people, more immigrants from Ethiopia and Russia, and the houses are older and closer together. Today, I had to go to a minimarket to pick up a package (don’t get me started on our crazy postal system). I’ve been there several times, and I had looked at renting the very bad apartment behind it when we were looking to move here. It’s got your standard little market, but out front is a covered area with a TV where guys from the neighborhood are always sitting, drinking beer, and talking about every subject under the sun. I had been biking around for a while, so I decided to sit on a seat a little further from the main circle, thinking I could just drink my drink and people watch a little. This being Israel, that’s impossible; and soon I was being half-interrogated/half-drawn into the conversation. I ended up getting another drink and staying there way past when I should have left. When I got up to leave, two of the guys made sure to come up to me and give me their names and told me to come back. I had never met either of them, but here was a Dutchman and an Ethiopian guy asking me to join them for drinks again. Before I left, I looked around the circle, and most were olim like me. I wished them a good night and a happy holiday before Hanukkah, and they did the same to me.

It is moments like that get me through the loneliness of missing my own family. I know that I moved to a country that is one big family, just you sometimes you haven’t met one another yet. People look out for each other, people embrace one another with warmth and not suspicion, and they laugh and live together like family, whether they were born in France, the Netherlands, Ethiopia, Russia, or all the way in the United States. This is a country founded by people who envisioned a homeland for a people, a refuge for the displaced, and a home for the sons and daughters of their forefathers and foremothers. Israel is a fitting name, because his children fill this land, related by blood and by faith. The people walking the streets, manning the buses, even the guys sharing beers in a minimarket are all one family, one people.

It’s hard to be so alone here but having a country as my family helps.

This place will change you

My Zionism has changed in 280 days. My worldview has changed, my reality has changed, the cells in my eyes have opened in a way that I never thought possible. This place has a magic that allows you to see the layers of the most complex and multilayered tale ever written by man. Every moment here is like looking through a kaleidoscope of history, faith, reality, imagination, G-d, and the intimate souls of each man and woman you encounter.

I’ve been here in Israel for 280 days, trying to make a new life in a place that is intimately familiar and wonderfully foreign and strange. Every day, I encounter the things so common and integral to my life on a scale that I could have never imagined in the states, but I also find myself in countless situations that never could have happened back in America. It’s in an indescribable feeling, seeing your Judaism everywhere and yet expressed in a million ways foreign to you in a plethora of languages which you understand to varying degrees. I am no less Israeli than the haredi man with his kosher phone, than the Ethiopian woman with a small child in a cloth bundle on her back, than the Russian-speaking elderly woman looking for the right eggplant in the supermarket, from the Moroccan whose Hebrew still sounds more like Arabic than the American-tinged Hebrew I heard for years. I am as Israeli as the Druze man in the hospital waiting room, his moustache expertly dressed in his distinct billowy pants and shirt. I am as Israeli as my Arab doctor, who lives a half-hour away from me in a city that might as well be in a different world. They all express the same idea of why I came here, to build this state into a miracle in the desert.

I came to this place with certain preconceptions about life. More than that, I came here thinking that certain of my beliefs were those uppercase-T truths of life, things that were supposed to shine past all of the mirages and illusions of a lifestyle I was supposed to reject.

But then you really see the Truth.

You see G-d in the people around you, and it’s not wearing a kippah. It’s not wearing a headscarf. You see the Master of the Universe in the Russian who had two Jewish grandparents, but not the right ones, making a beautiful life here, one that enriches my own. You make friends with the people that a year ago you didn’t want in the country. You cannot help but look at the man whose Jewish documents were lost after nearly a century of Soviet attempts to erase everything Jewish come here and face the horrible reality of being too Jewish for Russia but too Russian to be an Israeli, let alone a Jewish Israeli. You make friends with the people “fleeing” South America, Asia, Europe, and the rest of the places where just a single Jewish relative marks you for hatred. What kind of Zionism can exist without taking in these people? What kind of return of the exiles can there be without the people that are bound to us by fate, and who have chosen to live a life amongst us, with us, for our collective progress as a Jewish state?

Then, there’s the Arabs. So much hatred comes their way from every aspect of Jewish life around the world. Of course, I’m not so ignorant as to ignore who the ones committing terrorist attacks are; but I’m also not so blinded by anger as not to see the humanity of my doctors, my neighbors, the people walking down the same streets as me. Am I to say to someone whose family has been in this city for eight generations that I, with all of my 280 days, has anymore claim to this city than them? I listen everyday to diatribes against the same people that share this amazing city, as if they live in a parallel dimension than we currently inhabit, unable to see the fact that we are all beautifully intertwined in a story that will determine the future of the world? How can their smiles, their precocious children, their laughter, their warmth, and their willingness to speak with me be any less beautiful than anyone else’s?

My Zionism has changed in 280 days. My worldview has changed, my reality has changed, the cells in my eyes have opened in a way that I never thought possible. This place has a magic that allows you to see the layers of the most complex and multilayered tale ever written by man and G-d in a partnership since Abraham first walked this same soil. Every moment here is like looking through a kaleidoscope filled with glass pieces of history, faith, reality, imagination, G-d, and the intimate souls of each man and woman you encounter.

I’ve had the chance to meet people visiting from America, and each time they ask me how it’s been, it’s been nearly impossible to express what has happened to me here. Every moment is transcendental, every day transformative, every Shabbat culminating a week of complete self-discovery. This place is more powerful than I could ever describe. Maybe it’s the fact that we’re in the holy land, that G-d’s presence in this land somehow blurs the lines between worlds and heightens the perceptivity of everyone and everything around you.

All I can say is that you have to get here soon, and you need to be transformed by this place. There is nothing like it in the world, and all I can hope is that I can keep holding on while the ride keeps going. Life, love, faith, and the connections between people here are on a completely different level, and there’s no way I could ever go back to seeing life in a different way. My eyes, my mind, and my soul are forever changed and constantly transfixed with the eternal and complex beauty of this country. I will never go back; this new reality, and this new me, are too sublime to ever stop living on the dividing line between the sacred and the profane.

I’m back in it, and I’m not going anywhere. I promise to keep you all posted on how this place changes everything. I’m in for life, living this dream as long as the One Above allows me to walk the path.

Getting through the loneliness of Thanksgiving after America

Someone once wrote about making Aliyah that you feel simultaneously at home and homesick at the same time. Living in that strange in between space of feeling like you belong and missing everything you left behind. When you move here, you come to the place you’re meant to be; but being home could never change the years of life you spent making something outside the land.

Tomorrow it’s Thanksgiving in America, and I can’t help but feel the loneliest I’ve ever felt in this country. Thanksgiving was my favorite holiday on the secular calendar. I remember every Thanksgiving I got to spend with my family, making food with my mom, eating a Filipino Thanksgiving in San Francisco, and frying turkeys to feed my friends. I asked my wife to marry me after coming home from one of those family dinners. I loved posting videos and pictures of my turkey escapades, making a few converts to the fried life along the way; but now those memories popping up on my notifications only to serve to remind me of the people and the life I left behind. They remind me of the people I love that are now several thousand miles away, friendships and relationships stretched over an ocean and time zones that shift days and nights.

After my mom died, I felt like I had lost everything. I felt completely alone in the ruins of our lives. I remember sleeping in my room in her old place, just me, and crying myself until I was numb enough to sleep into restless sleep. I had people around me, my family and friends, but I felt like I was caught in a haze that shielded me from every source of light around me.

Slowly, I made friends and rebuilt my life. I found a community that accepted me, madness and all, and friends that gave me everything they had and more. People that I love, shoulders that I cried on, ears that listened as I howled and screamed out against everything above and below the heavens. I made myself a pillar of the community. One of the rabbis at my synagogue actually told me that I was the conscience of our community, that I spoke truth bravely and bared my heart and soul to others. I felt like I had made it.

And then I left it all to come here.

I don’t have any regrets about coming here, at least not yet; but I definitely feel tonight what I’m missing, what I gave up, what I sacrificed, and what I abandoned. It’s nights like this that someone like me could easily lose sleep to a night of despair and the nonstop reel of regrets that plays in my mind when I feel the downward swing coming.

There’s something though that gives me some kind of strength. Yesterday was Sigd, the Jewish holiday brought to Israel by the Ethiopian Jews after their Aliyah. It’s a holiday that celebrates commitment to the Torah and unity as one people. It’s a unique holiday, now officially a State holiday, that more and more Israelis of non-Ethiopian background are beginning to mark.

I can’t go a day living in Haifa, in the Krayot especially, without seeing Ethiopian Jews. I know that anyone old enough to have a grown child came on one of the missions to save the community and bring them home to Israel. Along that journey, countless lives were lost in the long marches and treks to get to a place where an airlift was possible. Many more died waiting to be brought home. I look at those older men and women and wonder what they saw on their way here, whether they lost someone along the way. While I’ll never know their stories, or at least until my Hebrew gets better, I always see something that makes the Ethiopian Jews here stand apart from everyone else, both sabras and other olim: the smiles. Whenever I see Ethiopian women on the bus greet each other it’s always with a smile. Every chance encounter with someone they know brings out this amazingly deep and beautiful smile.

I look at those smiling women and hope that I have half their strength. That as much as I feel alone, away from my friends and family back in the states, at least I had an easy time getting here. If that woman could survive getting here, and still be able to have a smile that I struggle to have on a good day, then maybe I can make it too. Maybe it’s fate that these two holidays fall back to back this year, my first year in the land, to give me the strength to persevere through the loneliness. I didn’t do anything to mark the day, but I feel it’s effects. I am here because I believe that the same Torah that G-d gave us to bring light into the world is the same one that tells me to be here, and the same one that brings everyone in this land together. This country is filled with men, women, and children from every corner of the globe, a homeland for a people dispersed, a home for a family spread apart.

So tomorrow, I’ll still host my Thanksgiving dinner. I’ll hang my Stars and Stripes, and serve the best damned smoked turkey this side of the Atlantic. I’ll be outnumbered by three South Africans and a Russian, but that’s what both Sigd and Thanksgiving would want me to do. Remember who I am, why I committed to come here, why I believe that I must be here, and to be thankful that I am in this place at this time. G-d blessed my journey here, and I hope that His continued blessings will help my family flourish here. Life is just starting for me here, and I’m going to make the most of it. Tomorrow, before I carve the turkey, I plan on saying a l’chaim just to the fact that I am here, that I am making friends, and that I’ve rejoined the Jewish family here in our own country; but I’ll make one more too. That as much as I will grow here, I will never forget the family and friends I have around the world that made this all possible for me. Without them, and their love and support, I never would have even made it to the plane.

Happy Thanksgiving y’all, sending love to all of my family and friends, wherever you may be.

Am I Israeli now?

I didn’t hear the sirens. I was praying at the synagogue close to our hotel in Tel Aviv when they went off. My wife and her father were walking on their way to get coffee when they heard them warning us of an incoming missile. My mother-in-law saw the smoke and the explosion from a missile launched by the iron dome from her balcony. The only thing I felt was the constant buzzing of the red alert app on my phone going off, but I only saw the alerts for the communities to the south, close to Gaza. I didn’t know that it would get so close.

It’s a weird experience, to know that for a few moments there was the chance of a rocket haphazardly landing in the middle of our street, on a home, or a hotel, or a synagogue, or a school. I always thought of the rockets as something that plagued the towns next to Gaza and the cities south of Tel Aviv, I never expected to be in a place where the iron dome was needed.

My immediate thoughts were to pack and get the hell back north (at least Hezbollah isn’t firing at the moment). Then, I asked some of my more veteran olim friends about what to do. One friend in particular said something that stuck out at me. After he calmly texted me what was going on and what I could or couldn’t do, he simply said that maybe we should take a trip to Jerusalem and make a day there, show my wife’s family that this is not something that will deter us from living our lives.

We ended up staying in Tel Aviv, toured Jaffa, and frantically searched for a kosher restaurant that was open since non-essential businesses had been closed earlier, and only later allowed to reopen if they were near a bomb shelter.

Other than the delayed lunch, it was a relatively normal day. I had Mexican food. I almost bought something at the market I didn’t need. I walked around the city without being afraid, but knowing that at any moment things could drastically change. I knew that my brothers and sisters in the South were really hurting, and over 150 rockets have been launched from Gaza today. My Facebook feed is filled with images of children hunched down in buses, people looking at gaping holes in their roofs from a rocket falling on their home, and with people huddled close to buildings because they couldn’t get to a shelter in time.

But there was one video that I saw that summed up life here so much that I cannot help but feel hope in the midst of the anxiety and fear. An older woman in Sderot waved down a TV crew reporting what was happening to offer them homemade food. Some pastries, some stew, freshly baked bread. Life here goes on, despite the people that seek to end it.

I’ve seen a lot of things in my seven months here, and now I can say that I’ve been through a red alert. Thank G-d, we are ok, but many people in my country are injured and even more go to bed tonight not knowing whether they will have to run with their loved ones in the middle of the night to a shelter. I cannot say that I know what that is like, and I hope I never have to; but I feel like I understand now a little more of what it means to live in this country. We are always a target, but that cannot stop us from living our lives. Rockets cannot stop us from praying, mortar shells cannot stop us from opening our homes to one another, and terror will never stop us from living life to the fullest at every moment.

Safe here in Haifa again, praying for calm in the South, and hoping that if you’re reading this, you’ll know that Israelis are under attack, but that we will meet anything thrown at us with all of our strength, all while living our lives without compromising our love of life and this land. Much love from Israel, please send some back, we could all use it.

Why am I here?

Tomorrow is election day here in Israel. It’s a legal holiday, so government buildings are closed, public transport is free, and there is a general vibe of enjoying the day off after exercising your civic duty; but this election day is different. For the first time in Israeli history (which admittedly is only 71 years long), there will be a second election in the span of just a year after Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu failed to form a government and dissolved the last Knesset. Since then, a temporary government holds the country together, but no major legislation has passed and nothing has really happened for months here as we grapple with the political deadlock. Polls indicate that tomorrow may not fare any better than last time, and we will have to wrestle again with neither the left or the right having enough mandates to hobble together to form a coalition. Two major political parties, Blue and White and Yisrael Beiteinu, are pushing for a secular unity government, the haredi (Ultra-Orthodox) parties Shas and United Torah Judaism are prophesying that this may be the end of religious life here in Israel, some going so far as to call members of the left Amalek, the people that G-d commanded the Jewish people to obliterate from the earth, and to the Nazis.

It’s not any less heated in the streets. At Ikea today, I saw a Shas billboard that advertised in Hebrew, showing a Shas ballot, “Your ticket on the Day of Judgement.” Everyone can palpably feel the tension in the air. Lacking a functioning government, or at least one without any real mandate from the public, is something I used to think was consigned to third-world dictatorships and the contentious democracies recovering from the Soviets or severe corruption. I ask different people, religious, secular, Jewish, not Jewish, what they think; and they’re all fed up. They’re fed up with political parties that hate them, or that they perceive to hate them, and they can’t understand how someone can have a different point of view. Either you’re a right-wing religious settler, a leftist terrorist-apologist, or you’re an Arab (a group that all of our parties, outside the Arab parties themselves see as at best a possible source of a few votes, or at worst a fifth column). No one wanted this election, we’ve spent hundreds of millions of shekels preparing for it (and it will really cost even more), and we’ve torn our country apart because a few men at the very top can’t come to an agreement; albeit, on an issue that strikes to the very core of what it means to live in a Jewish and democratic state.

So, given all of this tumult, why am I here?

It’s a good question, one that you have to preface with a lot of information and begs only more questions. It’s not just, why are you here? It’s:

Why are you there?

Why would you leave your home?

Why leave a good life?

Why would you leave your friends and family and journey across the ocean to a land you only know a week at a time?

How could you put yourself, and your wife, in danger of physical harm, financial turmoil, and the tumult of complete alienation in a world you have never known? Don’t you see the news about the rocket attacks? Don’t you remember the suicide bombings? The car rammings? The stabbings?

They said to us, “trust us, we’ve been there, we’ve lived there, why would you go when we fled?”

You don’t know the language. You don’t know how rude the people can be, how frustrating the bureaucracy is, how much you have to struggle to just stay afloat. You will never make as much money, you will never own a home; you may make it, but you will never belong.

So why am I here?

It’s easy to articulate the reasons why I should have stayed, but it’s near impossible to describe the reason I am here. It’s true, life here is hard, there is no getting around it. I live in the Middle East, in the middle of one of the most fought over areas of land in the entire history of the world. This place has been traded been back and forth between empires over epochs, it’s seen invaders and colonisers from every corner of the world. It’s still a scary place to live in, when you stop to think about it. The rail station right next to my ulpan, the school where Golda and I learn Hebrew, is named after eight victims of a nearby Hezbollah rocket attack from the 2006 Lebanon War. I can go on a tour to any major city in Israel and point to a spot where a Jew was murdered in our lifetimes because he or she was a Jew living in the State of Israel. As safe as you feel with all of the soldiers around, M16s or Tavors slinged on their shoulders, it doesn’t take away the fact that there’s a reason that they’re omnipresent, along with the armed guards at the malls, the museums, and even the bus stops.

I’m blessed to have found an apartment for a decent price in a neighbourhood that I love, but it’s not objectively the best place to live. I live in an apartment built with hundreds of others to rapidly absorb olim, immigrants from around the world. I can hear them speaking in Russian, Amharic, Spanish, and more when I go shopping at the grocery store. Food is cheaper for me, because I kept kosher back in the US, but life is more expensive here and salaries are lower. My building is old, there’s no elevator (I feel its absence every time I have to carry up a week’s worth of groceries up five flights of stairs), and I can generally feel the decades of its life as I walk around it.

Then there’s the language barrier. Nothing has been more frustrating and debilitating than not being able to express yourself. You completely take it for granted when you grow up in a place with only one language required and are forced to try and survive in a place with a tongue completely alien to your own. Sure, I knew how to read the prayers from the siddur, I knew enough phrases to keep up with a dvar torah in English, and I knew enough Hebrew phrases to spice up conversations whenever I travelled to Israel, but I never had to speak Hebrew. Part of what’s made me successful has been my ability to communicate, either as an attorney arguing in court, talking with clients, or networking; but it’s also the way that I’ve been able to really and intimately connect with people. I always thought that I could connect to someone because I really knew how to use my words, and I knew how to time it perfectly and make every word count in just the right way. Now, I have the Hebrew proficiency of a well-developed grade school student. I can engage in basic conversation and navigate the system, but it’s difficult to have more in-depth conversations. I thrive on complex and dynamic relationships, but those require a level of Hebrew I just don’t have yet. I used to measure my successes in conversation whenever I really changed someone’s life, now I feel great if I can give someone correct directions or answer everything clearly without the other person having to resort to broken English.

I had pretty much everything you could ask for back in the States. I had a car (G-d I miss my pickup truck), my wife and I had good jobs, and we never had to worry about where our next rent check was going to come from. I had enough money to put a down payment on a good home. More so, I had an amazing community. I lived in Fondren Southwest for 7 good years before I made aliyah. Slowly, I formed a really amazing core group of friends that I knew that I could count on. After my bipolar diagnosis, and after I went through some really horrible times, I had people that could support me, hold me up, and that I could talk with openly and freely. Almost all of my family is in the States, and I could always just get in my truck and start driving if I needed to. Now, I have to play WhatsApp tag with my dad because of a nine-hour time difference. I found out today that it’s easier for me to get to the southernmost point of Africa than it is for me to get back to my family.

So why the f**k am I here?

Strangely enough, it’s because of tomorrow. For all of the insanity, the balagan, it’s going to be tomorrow and the weeks to come, I came here to this country for tomorrow. I left behind my old life, my family, my friends, the country I was born in and still love because tomorrow I get to vote in the elections for the twenty-second Knesset of the State of Israel. After shacharit, morning prayers, I will walk down the street to a yeshiva, go into the voting booth, pick my little piece of paper, put it in the envelope, and put in a box with the rest of the votes of my neighbours.

You’re probably asking yourself, what the hell is so special about putting a piece of paper in a box that made you give up your prosperous life in America for a risky, slightly dangerous, expensive, crazy, dysfunctional, almost-insane place like Israel. Well, to me, it’s obviously more than just a tiny piece of paper.

In America, I was the Jewish guy, the one guy who kept kosher. If I saw another guy with a kippah on his head, I immediately tried to figure out if I knew him from somewhere. I knew every kosher restaurant, and their owners too. We had a handful of Orthodox synagogues in a city of millions, and I knew where each one was and when they had prayers. Now, I live in a city with so many kosher restaurants I am constantly learning about new ones, and that is just in my city. It’s not just me that wears a kippah, it’s the guy working at the grocery store, the janitor, the policeman, the bus driver, the soldier, the guy at the post office, the government minister. It’s the Prime Minister of my country wearing a kippah at the Kotel, at a synagogue, and wearing it openly and proudly. There are more synagogues within walking distance of my apartment than there are in the entire city of Houston, and I would guess that there are more in a 30 minute driving radius than in the entire state of Texas

It’s more than just than the external though. When I was living in chutz l’aretz, outside the Land of Israel, when I was in my synagogue, and I was praying, I prayed for the reestablishment of the Kingdom of David. I prayed for the Ingathering of the Exiles. I prayed for the resumption of Jewish life in the Land of Israel. I still pray for those things, but now I pray for my government to become the Kingdom of David. I pray that those in galut, in exile, join me in Israel. When I pray for the State, I pray for a Jewish State and that my brothers and sisters should come home. I used to pray that I could be in Israel, and now I’m actually here. For two thousand years, Jews have yearned to be here. They have prayed to return to Zion, countless numbers of our people died praying and hoping that they would one day see this place; and if not for them, then that their children would one day merit to see a Jewish state. After seeing Jewish life in America, I knew that the future of the Jewish people was in Israel, and not anywhere else. Generations have been lost to intermarriage, assimilation, and untold numbers of people don’t even know that they are Jews. Worse, sectors of American Jewry are eating themselves alive, either by demonising Israel and their connection to the land, or they openly embrace the path towards the dissolution of Jewish life in America. The story of Jewish life and the Jewish future is being written here, everywhere else I sadly believe is nearing the end of their chapters.

Here, you can live completely Jewishly without reservation. This is a place where we are on the forefront of everything to do with Jewish progress. We are asking here, for this first time in millennia, fundamental questions about what it means to be a completely independent Jew living in a Jewish state. It’s not always easy or clean, but it is the only place where these kinds of conversations can take place. You cannot talk about what it means to have a government that observes Shabbat in the United States. You cannot try to figure out how to deal with a mixing of Jews from around the world in the United Kingdom. You cannot deal with the implications of Jewish ethics and the army in France. Only here can we fully and unabashedly work out what it means to live in a completely Jewish society, while also respecting the rights of minorities here.

So tomorrow, when I vote, I will don my Shabbat clothing and say a Shehecheyanu, a blessing of thanks for an auspicious and special time. It’s worth writing it here in English to fully grasp what I mean. The blessing is: Blessed are You, L-rd our G-d, King of the Universe, Who has granted us life, sustains us, and enabled us to reach this occasion. I have but one life to live, and I want to live it to its maximum potential. I know that I can only do that here, in the State of Israel, and live my life Jewishly and without compromise. I can only explore my faith, my nationality, and my peoplehood to its fullest here. So, I will thank G-d tomorrow as I cast my vote, knowing that I will help shape the Jewish future, and the future of the world, with it.

At the end of the day, I want to be able to tell my, G-d willing, children and grandchildren that I gave up a golden land for this place. I will tell them that even though it was hard, and I missed my old life, there was no other place I would have rather lived. The only place that I could be was here, because here is the only place I can truly call home.

That is why I am here.