Category: Israel

On Living With the Fear of Dying

So much is going on in the world that forces us to confront the darkness within men’s souls and the uncertainty of life. The war in Ukraine, the continued fight against the Covid-19 pandemic, countless regional conflicts, and the everyday murders and crimes in cities around the world. Here in Israel, we are experiencing the worst wave of terror attacks since the Second Intifida. In a week’s span, eleven people have been killed in separate attacks, with one of them being the worst single attack since the 2014 Har Nof attack in Jerusalem. We are living in a state of national anxiety, national uncertainty, national fear, and national grief. This is a small country, and every attack so far has occurred within a half hour drive from my home. One happened in Hadera while I was working just a short drive away.

This is real, it is in my face, it is on my mind, and the deaths weigh collectively on our souls. My boss told me today to expect less students for the next few weeks as people avoid public places. He took me aside to try and assuage my fear as a new immigrant faced with the reality of terror. I had to reassure and comfort several students who came in today who persevered through their sadness and grief to try and maintain some semblance of a normal life.

What do I say to them? How do I comfort someone was born here when I have only three years of life in this land? What do I tell my family? How do I look at myself and wonder if I made the right choice coming here? I love this place, I love these people; but the fear of dying because I went to a bus stop, or a mall, or took an evening stroll tends to override the power of patriotism and the conviction of my beliefs.

I don’t want to talk about the politics of what’s going on, because I don’t believe that it’s material at this point. We know why people commit these acts of terror. We know the realities on the ground. We know that something must be done; but yours truly and most of the Israeli and Palestinian world cannot come to an agreement on what that solution must be. We are the perennial Gordian Knot, and the object of increased scrutiny. There are many reasons why, but I don’t want to talk about them; not because I do not have a political opinion, but because I care more about what this means for my daily life and not for some grand scheme to solve a problem that seems to never end.

I was talking with a friend of mine last night, an American that I’ve known since high school; and it was difficult to tell him what was going on in my life. My job is going well, my wife and I are healthy, I am mentally stable, I have dreams and ideas on how to make my life better; but this situation looms over everything. It is hard to think about finding ways to enrich your life when you know that people are dying around you. It is difficult to plan and see yourself somewhere in a year when you don’t know if the next time you go into work or go shopping could be a tragedy waiting to happen. The fear is pervasive, and maybe the terrorists are winning if I can’t help but be afraid when I go outside.

So what can we do? As a nation? As a people? What can I do?

I don’t have an idea of some kind of grand scheme to solve the problems, I am just a simple oleh trying to make ends meet while finding my place here in my new home. I cannot preach about Zionism, about patriotism, or about national strength; not because I don’t believe in those things, but because I don’t believe that my voice is the right one to speak.

The one thing I can say is something that the Lubavitcher Rebbe always talked about. He always talked about bringing light into the world, and that small acts of compassion and devotion can bring a little illumination into this world and hopefully pierce the overwhelming darkness. The people killing innocents in the street want to achieve their goals with acts of murder, acts of terror, and with acts of hate. I believe that the only answer to this it counter them with the small acts of light we can do in this world. We must meet death with a commitment to life. We must meet terror with steadfast belief in the goodness of the world. We must meet hate with love and compassion.

These may just sound like platitudes, and they are; but they can change things. One reassuring word to a scared young woman counts in this world. One act of kindness make the burden of living with the weight of this situation a little easier to bear. One recommitment to believing why we are here and what we are meant to do can help us stand straighter when the weight of grief on our shoulders makes it hard to do anything but stay home and be afraid.

I will continue living here, despite what is happening here. You may worry for my safety, and my family’s safety; and for that I thank you. Some people reading this may completely disagree with me, and that’s also okay. I don’t want to fight with anyone, I don’t want to debate about my right to be here; I just want to believe that everyone deserves to live without fear of dying randomly on the street. I believe that there is still hope, that we can find a solution to all of this. I don’t know how we will get there, but I persist in that belief because I truly believe that all people in this world just want to live in peace.

All we can do know is try and stick together, to comfort one another, and to find ways to share this burden together. Whether it’s giving money to the man on the street, helping people on the street, comforting those who are afraid, or doing mitzvot to try and bring some bit of holiness to this place. If we can talk about something it is manageable; and as Herzl said, if you will it, it is no dream. If we commit ourselves to making this a more beautiful world, that dream is still possible. Maybe I’m naïve, but I must have some bit of hope to cling to.

How do we live with the fear of dying? We must continue to hope and believe in the importance of life and the happiness that it can bring. I may be a dreamer, but I would rather live with this hope than succumb to a life of fear and anxiety. I came to this country to build a new life, and that’s what I’m going to do.

This post is in memory of those killed this past week and in hope that we see no more tragedies unfold in this beautiful and holy land.

Much love from the holy land; sadness, grief, and fear be damned.

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.

I do not understand/אני לא מבין

I do not understand.
Surrounded by a sea of words, sounds familiar, meanings hidden behind the mist.
Matters and subjects I know intimately made foreign by ignorance.
I miss punchlines, shared understandings, the feeling of
being part of something greater than oneself.
Eyes, mouths, and sounds blanket me in alienation.
I pick up a word, a morsel, only to have the slice taken from beneath my tongue.
Why do I subject myself to this?
This continued exercise in my general separation from society?
Must I bang my head against the wall again and again
until the words finally seep between the cracks in my skull?
I want to speak, to laugh, to express, to share, to love;
I want this probationary period of ignorance to end.
I almost hate that I heeded the call to return,
for it was spoken to me in a language unspoken here.
Am I doomed to slowly slowly?
Slowly slowly I am losing my will.
Slowly slowly I wish my ears did not hear.
Slowly slowly I am losing my connection to humanity.
I will do anything, slowly slowly, to end this partial existence.

Finding Home

It’s been a few days since I first got here to the land of Stars and Stripes, and in many ways it’s felt like stepping onto an alien world, albeit one where everything foreign feels slightly familiar at the same time. I take the wheel of my rental car and remember what’s it’s like to drive the open road, but I cannot help but marvel at the grandness of the highways and the speed at which I travel. I see signs and buildings that stir memories in my mind, but the sheer amount of space around me and the size of everything makes me feel like I am closer to exploring the moon than being back in the country I called home for twenty-eight years. It’s the strangest feeling, reconnection with derealization, walking on old steps you’ve tread before while seeing that maybe your feet just don’t fit in the grooves you’ve worn into them.

Being “home” in so many ways has only reaffirmed where I truly feel home. I already miss my apartment, my neighborhood, and all the sights and sounds of living in Israel. As relieving as it is to speak in English with everyone around me, I catch myself putting on Israeli music, comforted by the language I barely have a grasp of. My mind is no longer the same, it has been opened up to an entirely different world, and this old one seems so strange and foreign to me that I feel like the alien in the land of my birth. Imagine an astronaut, on a mission to make a new home on Mars, given a two week pass to come back home, only to realize that he pines for the red dust more than the rich soil of the Earth.

Perhaps the old saying is true, that absence make the heart grow fonder. I first knew that I was in love with the woman I would one day marry when we were apart, realizing in a moment that everything was better with her in it, and that I never wanted to spend another night away from her again. I realize now that I am no longer truly an American, or at least more than what it says on paper. When the heart and soul yearn and look east towards Zion and hope for the return, maybe I am truly an Israeli. I breathe in the air here and it does not fill my lungs, the water does not quench my thirst, and the soil feels lifeless underneath my feet. I long to be back home, to feel the connection between myself and the place I am meant to be in, to feel and see G-d’s presence in everything around me.

I’ve gone from the holy land, and I can feel the emptiness. Exile is real and I can feel it in my bones here, and it goes past the inconveniences of being in a place where there isn’t kosher food everywhere or that I can take for granted that the people around me share a common fate. The distinction runs to my very soul, and for the first time in my life I really feel it. I know that I was completely right to pack up my belongings and make the journey to Israel, to build something in the land. Everything outside of it seems so strange, even though most of it is the only things I’ve known for the vast majority of my life.

I am enjoying seeing my family, they are one thing that keeps me bound to the earth here and let’s me see through haze of this land. Blood is thicker than any amount of ocean between us, and they are what make this trip worth it. I love them with my whole heart, but I can finally admit to myself that I no longer love this place. This place is not home, and it never could be again. I have seen the promised land, and I can never go back to living without its light.

Sending love to my brothers and sisters across the sea, and to my friends and family here in the land of the free. I hope this trip continues to go well, because this sojourn has been fraught with crises of identity, and I want to be back to the space where everything in my life just fits into place.

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.

A Moment of Calm Before Shabbat

Sometimes even the holiest days of days can become routine, and sometimes you need a way to break out of it to really connect with Hashem. Let me give you an idea, a way, to break out of the mundane and really connect.

Even before candle lighting approaches, there is so much work that goes into getting prepared for Shabbat. The late night Thursday night shopping rush, pushing between people in the aisle to find the chili sauce, trying to find the perfectly ripe fruit to serve for dessert, trying to figure out how much chicken to get. Then theres’a the all-day Friday prep. Making sure all of my meat is properly defrosted. So much cutting and dicing. Counting down the minutes as a I fry another batch of schnitzel. So much effort for the day of rest before you can enjoy that moment of calm that eventually hits you sometime Friday night.

Even then, so much of the Sabbath follows the same routine. Eat a meal. Maybe with some guests. Probably eat too much. Hopefully there’s some Torah for the table, but sometimes it’s just a friendly meal between friends. Then there’s going to the synagogue, seeing the same people, making the same small talk and the same jokes. Prayer is almost always the same. Maybe you try to add some extra kavanah into it, or maybe you just try to get through everything. Saturday, it’s the same thing, but maybe with a nap, or maybe reading a book.

It’s all so routine.

If this year of our global pandemic, so much was interrupted in our lives, and this routine is no different. How many other people counted down the days until they could have guests again? Or waited until the synagogues reopened? Or worried about the dangers involved with going back to almost normal? Even now, I still wear a mask when praying inside, and some places want to see my green pass that shows I’m fully vaccinated.

Covid changed everything, but maybe that’s not the worst thing in the world.

One thing that I started to do after all of this happened, when I was barred from going too far from my home and we were forbidden from having guests, was to go outside and just sit. That’s it, just sit outside on the small bench in my landlord’s yard and really think.

It changed something for me.

I’ve been learning a lot of mindfulness exercises as part of my therapy program, and one of them focuses on just really becoming one with your surroundings. You go somewhere and sit (it doesn’t have to be outside but I prefer it), and get into a comfortable position. You practice controlled breathing, where you breathe in through your diaphragm for six seconds, hold for three, and then exhale for six seconds, ending with another three second hold. You do that a few times, and then you just get into a cycle of focused breathing without counting. Slowly, you feel the sensations around your body: what you’re sitting on, the smell in the air, the wind touching your skin, the warmth of the sun. Slowly, you expand your consciousness outwards, and hear the birds, people around you, and all if the movements in your area. Eventually, you try to phase as much of yourself out and let in as much of the world as possible.

Sometimes thoughts come up, and that’s ok. They can be annoying thoughts, thoughts of fear, or just distractions. Just acknowledge them for what they are and let them be. They have no control of you.

You are only in control of yourself and your mindset, and that you are becoming one with everything around you. You are becoming part of G-d through His creations, and you can feel the web that connects every bit of light in the world.

I challenge you this Shabbat or Sunday after church, or whatever day of rest you choose to have, to take a moment to just go outside and try the exercise I described. For me, it makes my Shabbat so much more enjoyable.

Often times, we can get so lost in the routine that is Shabbat or Chag. The meals, synagogue, napping, reading, or just spending time inside. Shabbat is a day of rest, but it’s also a day to connect to Hashem in a way that isn’t possible the rest of the week. Our soul is more revealed, and we are more receptive conduits for holiness on these days. Why spend all of that time cut off from the real world? You’re already cut off from the electronic, so focus on what’s really true and real in the world. Hashem isn’t found just in the synagogues or in our homes, He’s everywhere. Connecting to His creations through meditation and focusing on making yourself truly one with Him and the universe is so spiritually uplifting.

Thank G-d, I live in a land where the air I breathe and the earth I step on are imbued with holiness, so maybe it’s a little bit easier for me. When I feel the air on my skin, I know that this is the air I’m meant to breathe in and surround myself with. I know that when the sun shines on me here, it shines with all of G-d’s grace and compassion. I can truly empty my mind and make myself a vessel to fill with the sounds and presence of all of His creations around me.

Take some time and try, see if it works for you. If not, that’s ok, it’s not for everyone. I just wanted to share something that helps me break up the mundane, even when the day is holy. Let yourselves live in the world, and remember that G- d is everywhere, and man, are his creations amazing.

Shabbat shalom from the holy land, much love.

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.

Mourning while depressed over a city that stands again

Like the study of Judaism and Torah, life in Israel this past year has made my mind adapt to try and make sense of both something being both black and white, right and wrong, and seeing the spectrum of what is really True. For example, in Torah, we learn that everything from Hashem is given to us for a good reason, even the suffering we experience on a daily basis. It’s our job to try and make sense of the disparity between an all-loving G-d and with one that is also wrathful and vengeful. We must look and make sense of the world, all while acknowledging our own finite inability to understand the reasoning of the infinite.

Here in Israel, the challenges are little more in your face and less existential. How do we strive for peace and equality when we can hate and be as bigoted not only to non-Jews, but among ourselves? How can we reach out our hand to our brethren in the diaspora while disparaging them here for not being sabras? We make fun of Russian accents, we treat Ethiopians with suspicion, and Mizrachim are still mistreated, generations after they were forced to live in camps and give up their cultures.

Last night, as there have been for weeks, protests have rocked our major cities against corruption, against a flawed governmental response to covid-19, against the coalition, against the prime minister, against the police, and against a period in Israeli history where many people feel that there is no forward momentum. Thankfully, the police response has not been as brutal as it has been in America (I believe), but counter-protesters have taken on that role and brutally attacked peaceful protesters. Macings, stabbings, bottles thrown, and too many people coming home after these events covered in their own blood or the blood of another.

Do we not understand the times we live in? Do we not understand what today was supposed to mean? Do we not remember what hatred between brothers does to our people?

I am reminded of Menachem Begin, yelling from the shelled Altalena to Ben Gurion and the soldiers of the Palmach on the shore to stop shooting, that they were in the fight for independence together. He yelled at his own men not to fire back. Later, addressing the fledgling nation via radio about the now sunken ship, Begin promised that he stood by the idea that he would never order another Jew to fire on another Jew, and that civil war was brought us to lose our holy Temple.

I idolize Begin as the greatest prime minister this country has ever known, but I believe his words might fall on deaf ears today. We have become so polarized in our hate, so entrenched in our ideologies, that we refuse to see that we must stick together, especially in these times of national crisis.

So where does that leave me today? I read the morning news like I do every day, saw that some arrests had been made against counter-protesters, but also that the police were thinking about banning all protests as a safety measure. Oh, how far have we fallen that our hatred even takes away the last vestiges of freedom we have already not curtailed to the virus.

I spent today in a state of trying to just stay above board. I’ve had a good couple of weeks, and for that I’m grateful; but nights, along with fresh news from America, always bring me back to a depressed state where I wonder if its even worth going on when the world around us is slowly burning itself to embers. I couldn’t watch holocaust films because I knew that this small grasp I have on happiness, or at least stability, would be entirely lost if I’m reminded even more of how we as Jews experience time. It is not a straight line, it’s not a circle, but a continual spiral going forward, with every event being relived on the day as if we were there. I could have take the bus to Jerusalem, seen the Kotel from afar, but still known that there was fire, and blood, and bodies around me as there were when the walls fell. Tonight, as there was last night, there may again be blood in the streets of Jerusalem. There will be baseless hatred in Tel Aviv. There will be a darkness as our nation rips itself apart like we did nearly two millennia ago.

For my part, all I can is try and continue to go forward. Make my small space of peace, hold on to whatever I can to make the pain inside of me go away and not let the sheer horror of the world make me want to close my eyes forever. There is so much loss in this world, so many sick, and dying, and alone that it makes one’s thoughts automatically turn to the end. The only thing that I pray for nowadays is that it all eventually ends, and we can go back to at least something we had before. These times are not as horrible as the sacking of our sacred city, but the causes are all to similar. Hopefully, the time between the fall and the ascent won’t be so long and full of suffering.