Category: zionism

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.