Category: Israel

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.

To the man with the plastic bag on the bus

I see you.

On a bus full of people trying their hardest to look away, I see you.

You have the same bag I’ve seen in the hands of released inmates from county jails, ex-patients coming out of long-term rehab or mental health commitment, and the homeless men and women I’ve seen wander a thousand streets. That clear plastic bag that holds everything you own, but not nearly enough of what you need. Some clothes. A bus pass. A comb and toothbrush. A single mug. Maybe some medication.

What I saw first was your boombox, complete with every kind of input and medium that I could have imagined existed post-cassette. MP3/CD/SD card/USB, and of course an extension cord to go with it.

I saw that boombox, which had to weigh a ton, and couldn’t help but feel the lightness of the iPhone in my pocket. Every single person looking at the two of us sharing a four-seat spot would have thought we were completely different. That there was no way that this disheveled man in second-hand clothes with all of his possessions in a shitty plastic bag could in any way relate to the button-down shirt and expensive leather booted man across from him.

Fuck, I wish they could have been wrong.

I know what you are going through. I had enough clients meet me with the same bags.

I know that there were times in my life I should have been in your place. Moments that I escaped hospitalisation because I had the privilege of wealth and education. Times where the only difference between staying at home and sleeping in a psych ward was that I had people who cared enough to make sure I got help. I dodged inpatient mental care not because I didn’t need it, but because I had the few things bridging the gaps that stopped me from slipping through the cracks into a dark and scary place.

Once you go, you can never answer the mental health safety questions at the doctor/interview/date differently.

So, man with the plastic bag on the bus, I see you.

I see more than your bag, I see past the walls you put up, I see past the darkness and through the fog that every other person created in an attempt to isolate you from the rest of the world.

I see your shirt, it says that we have to be happy.

I don’t see you smile, but I hope you do one day.

I see you my friend,

I see you.

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.

Finding security in a place that is never truly safe

Growing up in Houston, you get a certain level of tolerance when it comes to crime. It’s one of the biggest cities in America, but without real zoning laws, you have a blend of neighborhoods with different economic levels, you have schools close to strip clubs close to churches. That giant mishmash of peoples and business creates an environment where some of the richest neighborhoods are next to the poorest, and income inequality and all of the ills it brings stand in stark contrast (nothing like seeing a pawn shop five minutes away from a street corner where there are three Starbucks and an art film cinema).

In the six years I lived in Houston after I graduated college and came back home, I had a gun pulled on me, my apartment burglarized, my truck stolen, and had to talk/walk my way out of more than a few hairy situations. I remember wearing that like a badge on my sleeve when I talked to people outside H-town, like I was such a badass for coming from a place where the threat of danger was not an entirely remote possibility.

All of that was nothing compared to this place.

On one hand, I feel safer here than I ever did in Houston. On a Shabbat evening in Fondren Southwest, I always looked over my shoulder every hundred yards or so. I knew I didn’t have anything worth stealing, but I didn’t feel like having another gun pointed in my face. I don’t see the same little dropped baggies of drugs here, the needles in the street, or the gas stations I knew that I just couldn’t go to past a certain time. I can walk around here and feel completely safe at 3 am in the morning going to the gas station to grab an energy drink for when I wake up in four hours. I don’t see colored clothing and wonder what it represents, if someone runs with someone I don’t want to mess with. I don’t worry about if the guy I piss off in a store has a gun, or if the guy that cuts me off on my bike is going to go after me with a baseball bat. The only real crime in my neighborhood is the Russian mafia, and as a friend told me on my arrival here, just stay away from illegal casinos and prostitutes and I’ll be fine.

Maybe it’s the soldiers everywhere. Literally, they’re everywhere, guns and all. In the States, you see a soldier in uniform and assume he must be going to a base, or to a recruitment event, or something that would make him or her not wear jeans and a tee shirt. Here, you cannot go a day without seeing a soldier. It’s impossible, seriously; and they’re all kids. 18-21 year olds with M-16s and Tavors on their shoulders, on the bus, in the grocery store, talking without someone at a park. Or, for an even more jarring sight, they’re out of uniform but they still have their gun. There’s few things more jarring to an American’s view of the military than to see a girl in a miniskirt and graphic tee shirt with a gun that goes past her skirt buying the schwarma in front of you. Add on to that all of the armed guards at malls, bus stations, train stations, movie theaters, schools, government buildings, pretty much anywhere more than fifty people congregate at once. It’s inspiring to see all of these people serving and protecting us, and it definitely adds to this idea that I’m safe because, worse comes to worse, the guy next to me on the bus has a rifle capable of putting 30 plus rounds of ammunition in a bad guy and the training to do it.

But there’s a reason to it all.

Behind all of the visions of strength, of a people reinvigorated, there’s a reason our country sends the vast majority it’s young men and women to serve in the military, There’s a purpose for having my bag checked every time I go to the mall, or catch a train, or go into the airport lobby. There’s a reason that every 100 feet there’s a guy with a micro Tavor at my favorite mall that watches me walk from the McDonalds to my bus stop. In Texas, we had a bunch of guys who can shoot semi-decently and could take a half-day for a course carrying guns; but here, there are literally people trained how to assess threats, secure an area, and kill people everywhere.

There’s a train station near my old ulpan. I took it whenever we needed to get to Tel Aviv after classes, and when the rest of the public transportation was shut down a few months ago after protests following the killing of an Ethiopian Israeli man in my area. I always heard it being called Merkaz HaShmona, but I didn’t know why. I learned after ulpan that it’s full name is Haifa Center Railway Station of the Eight (rough translation order). The eight were eight railway workers that were killed when a rocket fell nearby during the 2006 Lebanon War. You can’t go around Israel without seeing memorials, buildings, and streets named after situations like this. People think of the territories nowadays when it comes to terrorism, but not very long ago, my city was a ghost town during the war. During the intifadas, several bombings here killed scores of people. Buses were bombed. Bus lines that I take today. Places that I go to shop were targets, people died on the streets I walk on because they were just like me: Jews living in our own land.

My wife told me today that we’re in the 60 second area, which basically means if Hezbollah decides to launch rockets towards Haifa, I have 60 seconds from the alarm to get to a safe place. I live on the top floor of a five-story building, and the only safe room we all have is a shared bunker in the bottom of the building. As hilarious as it is to imagine my ass running down five flights of stairs in my pajamas carrying my 40 pound dog with me, that shit terrifies me.

There are days that I wonder if I did the right thing bringing my family here. *feminism check, we made a joint decision and I mean to say how could I have consented to putting us in a situation where I have to see my wife run for her life for simply living her life in the place we know is our home* I wonder if an older house, which I could have put a down-payment on, in our old neighborhood would have been safer. The idea of being shot in a road rage incident, or a mass shooting, or by some violent crime just seems inherently less real and scary than the idea of dying because I took the wrong bus on the wrong day. Or that I couldn’t find a safe place if the rockets came. Or if someone decided that the mall that day was the day that he was going to stab someone and become a martyr, and I just happened to be walking in the wrong damn place.

This place dials the realness of everything up to eleven, and the idea of death is one of them. I know, I am still more statistically likely to die from cancer or some disease than terror or war; but I never had that fear in America. It was always some other place, or maybe it was just that the frequency of death and the number of people there allowed me to minimize and compartmentalize that danger.

The thing is, I don’t have an answer to what to do with my feelings on death, with my fears. I don’t think you can. I chose this, I chose to live in a place surrounded by people that want to kill me. People that see a Jew and think that I deserve to die for living here. I moved here despite that, maybe even to say that I don’t care that you want to kill me. That I love this land, its people, everything it stands for more than I fear dying. I am not a violent person, I definitely don’t want to be a martyr or remembered for dying, but I know that if I had to die for reason, dying for who I am and being proud of it is ok with me. I’ve had times in my life where I wanted to die, where I didn’t care about living, and where I didn’t care if I died. When I’m here, I feel like my life, and at least living here, means something just by going on. If it were to end because of someone else, I could at least say I lived in a place on my own terms, and that I chose a place that I wanted to live and die in. I saw my life in America and I saw the line where it was going. House. Steady(ier) job. Family (G-d willing). I remember going to the cemetary where all of Orthodox Jewish funerals I had been to were, and I remember thinking to myself, this is where I’ll be one day. At first, I thought about how great that was that I was going to build such deep roots in a place. Looking back now, I can’t believe I ever thought that my life could have been limited to where I was. In just six months, I feel like I’ve lived more than I have in years.

I think that’s a part of becoming Israeli, learning to live with the uncertainty. In Judaism, we talk a lot about how G-d has a plan for us, and that everything is for the good, even if it’s hidden in tragedy. There’s a reason that they say this place runs on miracles. It takes a little faith just to make everything work here. Maybe this will be my test, something to help me learn to just trust that G-d has more in store for me than a life laid out for me by someone else, by custom, by someone else’s expectations. Maybe I just need to keep on taking one step at a time, keep on exploring and finding out what I really want from the years I have left in this world. It’s scary, but I would rather have a little fear here than feel like I lived an incomplete life. In the meantime, I’ll make sure to sleep in full pajamas and practice my dog-lifting so I don’t look like a half-naked crazy person if I ever have to make that run downstairs.

A New Year and a New Me

I am an oleh chadash, a new immigrant, here in Israel; but there’s something missing from that translation. An oleh is literally someone who ascends, and chadash means new. So I should really say, I am a newly ascended person, and not just a new immigrant.

When I was in the US, everyone that came to our shores was an immigrant, usually with something attached to that word that clarified their legal status. Often, it was whether they were documented or not, or whether they were a refugee, or whether they were actually only there for a temporary amount of time. I never used the term “new immigrant” for someone in the States, and I certainly never phrased their legal status in terms of physical ascension.

So why is it different here? The source of the word oleh is tied with the process of immigrating here, or making aliyah, both words describing going to a greater height, and the words have been used throughout Jewish history to describe things quite different than immigration. When a man is called to read the Torah, he is given an aliyah, and he often literally ascends from the ground floor where the parishioners sit to the bimah, the raised platform where the Torah is read. He is an oleh, he is someone who ascended to the Torah. When pilgrims would come to Jerusalem in the times of the Holy Temple, they would literally make aliyah, they would ascend to Mount Zion to offer sacrifices. Those pilgrims too were called olim. Today, when we say that someone is making aliyah, we are saying that he is ascending from the depths of the lands outside Israel to the heights of Zion. He rises from exile to the Holy Land.

But then there’s chadash. None of those people in the Bible were called “new,” and we don’t describe someone today as being a “new” oleh if it’s his first time being called to the Torah. It is a term uniquely Israeli, and one I don’t see a parallel for in the rest of the world from a legal perspective, at least not in the United States. No one would say that Miguel, or Mohammed, or Sven, or Jacques is a new immigrant after his first day in the country; but I am still “new” six months in.

I think it’s because we are creating here new Jews, Jews that think differently and behave differently than they ever could have outside of this land. As a people and as a nation, we are making strides here that are impossible in the rest of the world; but it is also deeply personal.

I am new. I can explore parts of my personality, my life, and my soul with new lenses. I can create goals for myself and grow in a way that I couldn’t have back in the States. Since I’ve been here, I’ve alternately felt like I just got here but that I’ve been here forever, that I am a different person but still the same in many ways. I know that when I go back to visit, I will never be able to be the man I once was. Life here changes you in ways that are incomprehensible and unexplainable. Just for an example: I feel completely at home here but I miss where I was from. I have a sense of homesickness in a place where my home always was. This is a land where there 70 faces to the truth, and it’s hard to keep track of them all. I feel like I can be myself here, but I am also painfully aware of how different I will always be. I feel the welcoming arms of strangers that see me as reunited kin, but at the same time I feel like a stranger in my own country. I feel like a refugee who fled from a place where I lacked for nothing to a home where I need to build everything. I am constantly confronted by the fact that I have gone up the the mountaintop, but that I feel like it is too strange for me to understand even though the mountain has always been mine.

So as this new year approaches, I want to bind my own personal novelty with the newness of this year. This is my first Rosh Hashanah in Israel, the start of my first year as someone who has returned. I’ve learned so much since I’ve been here, I’ve made amazing friends, and I’ve become a little more Israeli along the way. I still have so many dreams to fulfill, but I know that I must make goals to make those dreams more than just wishes and fantasies. I will need your help, and all I ask is for you to keep reading and maybe comment once or twice. If you feel like asking me to write about something ask, and please complain when I don’t write enough. I have a once in a lifetime chance to be new in a place greater than anyplace I have been before, and I don’t want to waste it.

May this next year only bring us good and sweet things, and in a revealed way. May we all increase in our love of one another, and all find love for ourselves. Shana Tovah y’all, see you in the year to come.

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.

A Woman’s Cry and a Prayer from a Face

There is tension in this land, an undercurrent that I can feel in my daily walks around the city. In a place dominated by the most focused on conflict in the world, so many things in our regular lives go under the radar, only to be noticed by the occasional flare up or word that rings too harsh. All of my friends and family ask about the conflict with the Palestinians, whether I am scared of Hezbollah, what I think about Trump’s embassy move, or what I think about Bibi. Nobody on the outside sees the problems we try to ignore, the unglamorous sides of living in the holiest place in the world.

This blog is not about bashing Israel. I love this country. I gave up an amazing community, closeness to my family, the best friends a man could ask for, a steady income, and the support network I built for years; and I gave all of that up just to have hope in this place. People warned me that this was a hard land, and that it spits out people. They told me that you cannot live on idealism alone, that you had to harden yourself for everything this country would throw at you; but I can’t live like that. This blog will be my attempt to document and process what I see and feel around me, living as an oleh chadash, a new immigrant, and share with you both the beautiful and the horrible sides of living in my new home.

I was at Merkazit Hamifratz the other day, the main bus/train hub that connects Haifa with the Krayot, the suburban cities further to the north. I live in the Krayot, and stopping at this bus stop is part of my everyday commute. As usual, there was the afternoon crowd waiting to go home, all us of us lined up along the area where we wait for the metronit, the designated buses between the Krayot and Haifa. My Hebrew isn’t good enough for me to understand everything that goes on, but I didn’t need it to see what was happening in front of my eyes that day.

A crowd had formed around a few Ethiopians. Haifa is a mixed city, where Jews, Arabs (Christian and Muslim), and olim from around the world live. I could see a woman in traditional Ethiopian clothing yelling and crying, and a young man in a tee shirt with his back up against a wall, pinned by a bus official standing in front of him, the official’s arm outstretched with his hand against the wall. I have no idea what the argument was about, but it wasn’t the first time I’ve seen Ethiopians here surrounded by angry crowds, and officials containing them. I looked at the young Ethiopian man. He couldn’t have been much older than eighteen. He was a tall guy; but the other man was even bigger. There was less than a foot separating their bodies, their faces, separating the powerful from the powerless. I could see the young man face away, with the same look I saw too often in the young African American men in similar situations in the states. The same look of defeat, of humiliation, of just wanting to get out of there. There’s a difference between the eyes of a man who’s resisting, a man who’s known what he’s done, and the look of a man who feels powerless. He had the look of a men robbed of agency, stripped of his humanity, surrounded by a crowd of people who only saw him as a potential, or inevitable, criminal. The same held true of the woman, she was like so many desperate faces I had seen back in the states. Mothers, grandmothers, givers, caretakers, women who wanted to protect but needed help, who were ignored, who were fought, who were distrusted because they looked different.

You can tell so much by the tone of a cry. I remember hearing a woman cry at the funeral of her three year old son, and I remember thinking that I had never heard anything so striking, so penetrating, so entirely filled with pain and frustration that all of her endeavours were for naught. This woman’s cry pierced me like her’s. Surrounded by angry strangers, in a place where she was supposed to be welcomed, instead feeling as foreign as an enemy in our midst. It was the cry of someone pleading for the help she deserved and receiving the treatment she expected. The endless struggle for equality only to be let down by the people that are supposed to be there to protect you. Her Hebrew switching to Amharic, and back again, trying to get someone to see what was wrong. There is nothing like hearing a woman’s cry of defeat and hopelessness, doing everything she can for people to see and actually listen to her.

In the middle of this month of Elul, a month of reflection, this will be the moment I reflect on. Every day we blow the shofar to wake up our souls to return, to prepare ourselves for the King to judge us as worthy or lacking. That woman’s cry was more powerful than any burst from a ram’s horn that I have ever heard, and the look on that young man’s face said more to me than any penitential prayer has ever spoken to me. They were my call from heaven to pay attention to those around me, and to fight for what is truly important in this land. Not that we should build on every inch of it, or that we should be so strong that our enemies tremble at the mention of our swords, but that no mother and no son should live among their own people and feel like a stranger. That we lost our Temples because we hated each other with out reason, that we burned our stores while the Romans were at the gates.

Our country prides itself on being a beacon of hope to a wandering people, a shelter to a nation hunted and pursued, and as a model for the future of a people reborn from the ashes. All of those hopes and dreams brought me here, but that woman’s cry keeps me here; that young man’s closed eyes and fear tell me to that there is work to be done. They told me when I came here that life would be hard, that you can’t eat Zionism. I’ll tell you something more: you can’t keep this place alive with just Zionism, you need the love that the harshness of this land often robs us of. You need the love of the widows, of the orphans, of the strangers. You need the love of a father and mother to their children, and the children for them. You need to see the men and women standing next to you as more than religious, secular, Ashkenazi, Ethiopian, Russian, gay, straight, or whatever. They are our family, no matter how distant. Don’t just listen this month to the shofars and the lectures about what you need to do, listen out to the cries for help from those around us. I am no prophet, no sage, no rabbi, but I believe that G-d’s call comes through his people, and not just through an animal’s horn. Listen, see what you can do, and then fix this world. Make the connection between one another, and let that connection flow towards the heavens. This is hard place to live in, let’s not make it worse by devouring ourselves from within. I was told once that you can never intuit what happens to a broad segment of a population from one event. It’s the same voice that told me that I can’t assign guilt from a section of a videotape, or from one part of a speech, or from one rash action by one person of authority; but we all know that’s not the truth. When we know that there is a history of persecution, when we know that the statistics point to discrimination, and when we hear countless people tell us, beg us, to see what is front of our eyes that anything else is to at best lie to oneself, and at worse to be cruel to the kind.

G-d willing, I will see that young man and that woman again, but with smiles. I hope to hear the special kind of laughter I hear between the Ethiopians here, a laughter filled with joy and happiness just to see one another. Their community has such warmth and love that its hard not to smile with them when I see friends surprisingly encounter one another on a bus. I want to see that young man standing tall and proud, the master of his own fate in his own country. I want that laughter to erase the memory of that cry, because until I hear it, I will feel unsettled in the land that I am supposed to transform with my presence. I fear that there will be an asterisk next to my name in the Book of Life, telling me that I still have work to do. I know that I only saw one moment, and that even this problem is immensely complicated, but I know that a little more love in the formula just might make a difference. Until then, I will think about those two men and women in this imperfect land, two people deserving more from a people aiming for salvation in what we believe is the center of the universe. Forgive me for the sin of not knowing enough to help then, it is a shortcoming I will not allow myself to repeat.