From Houston to Holy Land: An Oleh's Journeys - The Musings of an Oleh Walking the Holy Land in Cowboy Boots

My disappearance

I want to try and do the impossible, or at least to me; I want to try and explain what it’s like to be depressed and bipolar in a foreign country, to be in an episode as an oleh.

I don’t know what the limit is for sharing.

I’ve written posts and blogged and revealed intimate details about my life before. There are always a few people that are shocked when I reveal something personal, when I share a little about the turmoil inside; but I always feel like I’m the kind of person who wears everything on my sleeves. My face betrays me, my eyes are too open, my soul somehow whispers to others in ways I can’t silence. I showed this post to my wife before publishing, and she wondered, how is it that I can say all of these deeply hidden things to everyone and not her first? I could only respond that I feel like the world is trying to strangle me, and in the few moments when the grip loosens I feel compelled to yell out everything I can before life kills me.

A week or so ago, I posted something on Facebook about being in the middle of a depressive episode, and I didn’t hold back. The post was up for about an hour, but the feedback was immediate and overwhelming. I got calls in the middle of the night from the USA, texts from friends, messages from those people you connected with in the past but time didn’t allow you to stay in touch with; and this was all while I was deep in the middle of one of the worst depressive episodes I’ve ever had, and the worst one since I made aliyah.

I couldn’t respond. I ignored the phone calls. My wife woke up in the middle of the night because they called her, afraid of what I might have done. I told her the usual lie that I was ok, that I posted something and immediately deleted it. I overshared, or rather, I shared and was unready for the deluge of responses that sharing would entail.

So what do I say? Where do I begin? Should I even say anything at all to account for my posts and sudden disappearance?

It’s been two weeks now since that post, and I’m almost out of the episode. There are moments where I still feel depressed, where my bed calls to me as the only safe place, but I can take care of myself again. This time reminds me of how I was after I had my last real breakdown before I was diagnosed, having to get back into the habits of a normal person. Making daily goals that are achievable, but so pathetic that you hate how low you’ve sunken. Nothing is more degrading to someone who defines himself by his achievements than to have brushing your teeth, showering, and eating become major accomplishments for a day. Looking into the mirror and knowing that shaving earns a golden star obliterates one’s soul.

I’ve written before about being bipolar, or at least shared it publicly on social media, but I don’t think I’ve ever really talked in-depth about what it’s like. Therapists always tell me to say that “I have bipolar disorder,” not that, “I am bipolar.” To make me reaffirm that I am not my disease. Someone is not cancer. Someone is not diabetes. Someone is not high blood pressure. So why should this be any different?

Sometimes it’s hard to make that distinction though, even when I desperately need to. For so long, I went undiagnosed and floundering in the ebbs and flows of mania and depression. I had nothing to point to whenever the gears in my mind started to catch, when the wires frayed; I could only assume that it was just me. I molded my personality around my disorder, or maybe it was the other way around; either way, it feels like it’s impossible to separate the two.

So, I want to try and do the impossible, or at least it seems so to me: I want to try and explain what it’s like to be depressed and bipolar in a foreign country, to be in an episode as an oleh.

These past two weeks have been hard, harder than the rest of my time here so far. I don’t want to go into details as to what made them hard, to respect the privacy of those involved; but needless to say I pushed my emotional reservoirs past their capacity.

At a certain point, the stress becomes unbearable, and some hidden switch in the recesses of my brain just switches off and an entirely new set of pathways starts flickering on. The depression that I manage to keep down with all the tricks and techniques of therapy and mindfulness bursts out, and it feels like you’re a passenger in an airplane that’s just taken a nosedive. You feel like you have absolutely no control. You can’t think clearly, all of the normal ways that a person perceives and responds to stimuli change. You become paranoid, you can’t believe anyone’s good intentions, you only see the darkness that you’re barrelling deeper and deeper into. It literally feels like something is slowly sucking out all of the light in your life, and you can feel the blood in your veins growing colder and colder.

All of the suicidal thoughts that you push away, the ones that you treat like birds passing by in the sky, become billboards that get larger and larger as you go deeper into the tunnel. Walking along you would see a bird and just acknowledge it was there, but move on. You used to be able to just shift your attention, but slowly all you can focus on is the pain and whatever solution you can apply to end the sadness that’s crushing you. The single bird is now hundreds of birds on every power line around you on fall night, cawing and blaring out the message: end it, end it, end it. You look around in your car and even blaring the horn can’t drown out the growing decibel level of the hordes of birds yelling directly at you.

You signpost, you say things obliquely or covertly to try and cry for help, something to draw attention to how much you’re suffering. The problem is that when you pass the point where a friend’s message can’t shake you out of it, when you’re so deep in the hole that that almost nothing external can get you out. You ignore people, you don’t look at your friends’ messages and texts, you ignore calls from your family, you tell your spouse that you just can’t handle speaking to anyone. Their well-meaning love from thousands of miles away falls on ears deafened by the noise-cancelling headphones of despair. Every single person saying that they care, that they love you, that you give them strength feels like another person to disappoint, to let down, to make ashamed. Your warped thinking doesn’t allow you to see their love, their warmth; all you can see are people that you wish you didn’t have to bother, that you wish didn’t fret over you, that you think would be better off if they didn’t have that one pathetic friend that they have to worry about. You start to wish that you had no friends, no family, no one that gives a damn about you so that when you eventually decide to go, no one will be for the worse.

At a certain point, you’re not even sad, you just feel the absence of anything good or happy. This is where some people start to self-harm, just to feel something, anything to focus on besides the depression; better to feel the acute and distracting physical pain of a blade across the skin than the deeper existential despair of feeling like you are slowly dying. That didn’t happen this time, but it has in the past. The cuts make you feel like you can take control of some kind of pain, something immediate and obvious. Your thoughts are meaningless when confronted by the deep redness of your own blood and the physical anguish of each slice. Macabre as it is, watching the blood flow from a fresh cut and warm blood is like a blanket, something to put between your immediate existence and the existential doom around you.

You spend your days holed up in a room, stuck to your bed. You cover face with your blanket, trying to make a physical shield between you and the utter desolation that wants to smother you. You try and recreate the womb, the one place you were ever truly safe (but maybe that’s where it all started in the first place). You stop eating, or at least limit meals to when the pain becomes too much for you to say no. You stop bathing, you stop taking care of yourself. Slowly, you become closer and closer physically to the corpse that you feel like.

You feel like giving up. Whatever that means to you, whatever has to happen, you just want the pain to stop. Your warped thinking, your addled mind, pushes you to ponder extreme answers to temporary problems.

You spend days on the precipice of life and death, not knowing where you are. You feel utterly and completely lost, abandoned, and unsure of everything. You wonder, you yell, you curse G-d for what feels like a life destined for nothing but pain. You start to think that the endless cycles of sadness, normality, joy, and insanity will never end; you start thinking that the roller coaster will never end, that there will never be a moment of peace and calm. Who wants to live a life where tranquility is outweighed by the tug of war between mania and depression? Instead of the curse of knowing the day of your death, all you know is that the future is paved with more episodes of unknown length. I’ve seen many things in my life, I’ve stared death in the face, and nothing is scarier than not knowing whether the next month, the next week, or the next day will see the moment when you’re finally put into a straightjacket, hauled off to the hospital, and thrown into a padded room. It’s one thing to see the end, its an entirely different thing when you don’t know if you can even trust the things your eyes are seeing, whether the demon in front of you is really there.

Then, a small thing (it’s always a small thing), somehow manages to pierce the tiniest of holes in the dark canopy to let in just enough light to orient you. In my case, it was a few messages from a man from the East End of London texting me about my new job, and my inability to not read his texts without thinking of myself speaking in his very specific dialect. It’s a couple of emojis in a text from someone who’s only known you a week to somehow pull you out of it. You see that, and you grab for the light. You see the messages everyone else has sent and you see them for the ropes to the sunlight that they are. You slowly pull yourself up, you shake off the faulty mechanics of a depressed brain, and you start to see the light beyond the false firmament.

Just like that, you add another name to the list of people who’ve saved your life but don’t know it. Then, you add all of the names of the people that first reached out, the people you were to blinded by pain to see and add them. Slowly, the list becomes a web of names and faces of the people that love and care, the people that are there to catch you when you start to fall.

That’s where I am today, I am trying to reach for that light. I’m still not out of it, but I think that I’m on my way up. Life in Israel is stressful, aliyah is stressful, and being bipolar magnifies all of that times a thousand, but it’s not the end of my story. I will succeed in this country, I will fulfill my dreams.

Im tirtzu, ein zo agada. If you will it, it is not a dream.

I will flourish here, I will make this a better place, I will tell my grandchildren one day that their saba got through it all so that they would be able to live in Jewish country in our land. I will not let this stop me, I cannot.

I have to thank my friends and family who reached out and called, texted, and messaged me. I have to thank my spouse. I have to thank you all.

And I have to thank a man from the East End for saving my life, another hidden saint who will never know the kindness he did for me.

Love y’all.

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.

Let’s Help Make Miracles Happen

In life, you sometimes encounter people that fundamentally change the trajectory on which you were headed, they make you take the other road at the forks of great decisions. These people can be random, they can be the guy you decided to cut off on the highway that followed you at attacked you in a fit of road rage. They can be the person you meet that you end up wanting to share the rest of your life with and raise a family with. There could be countless people that help you make little decisions that end up changing your life. If our paths are preordained, than they are the little meters upon which the paths divide and your free choice comes into play.

I’ve met a lot of those kinds of people. People who hurt me and made me run away from the things that I thought were my dreams. People who gave me a helping hand when I was just one step away from the end of the path. The person who I met sitting across from me at a BBQ ended up being the woman I wanted to spend the rest of my life with.

Than there are people like Rabbi Yossi and Manya Lazaroff. They’re shaliachs, emissaries of the Lubavitcher Rebbe Menachem Mendel Schneerson and the worldwide Chabad-Lubavitch movement. Specifically, they’re the Chabad rabbi and rebbetzin that started the Chabad house at my old school, Texas A&M University in College Station, TX. I can say, without any doubt in my mind, that outside of my parents, these two people changed my life for the better more than any other two people in the world. I love my friends, my family, and the many mentors I’ve had throughout my education and career; but I can say that I am only where I am today and the man I am today because of their positive influences in my life as both a student and former student.

I think a little background about myself is necessary to give you an idea of what Yossi and Manya has to deal with they first me. I grew up Catholic, the son of divorced parents, and later rejected the church in my teens. I looked into different religions, and Judaism just clicked for me. I started keeping some things of what I thought Judaism meant (basically I kept kosher style and read a lot), and I emailed Rabbi Yossi before I started in the fall of 2008. He said that I was welcome to come by, but I don’t think that he or Manya had any idea what they were getting themselves into when they first let me in the door.

From the first time I met them to this very moment, there hasn’t been a single day that my life hasn’t been enriched by their presence, their support, their guidance, and their unbridled love for their students. In college, they not only put up with every question I had about Judaism, they created an environment where I was welcome to explore. There were moments when things got really intense, and they were there to listen to me. Here was this kid, not even a Jewish kid, not someone that their programming or anything intended to reach, but they took care of me.

When I needed someone to speak to me in a real and truthful way, Rabbi Yossi was there. One conversation with him, and a little while of being pissed off afterwards, made me realize that I had been deluding myself and not prioritizing the right things in my life. It’s one of those few times I can point to in my entire life where one single sentence from someone changed everything. I have my life today because I took his words to heart, I found out the drive within me to really live with Torah and Judaism.

After college, my mom died, and I was completely lost. Again, Rabbi Yossi and Manya were there for me. When I was sick and alone in my apartment, Manya made sure that I had a nice container of her matzo ball soup delivered to me. They made their home open to me when I needed a framework to put my life back together. They gave me opportunities to help others and guide students that were in positions like I was. They not only gave me the tools to build my life, they taught me how to be a better man in the process. Through their examples, I learned what it meant to dedicate oneself to a higher goal, what it meant to sacrifice, but also what it takes to gently nurture Jewish souls that are hidden and lost behind the packaging of the modern world.

I promise not to do this regularly, but I want to ask for your help. Rabbi Yossi and Manya are raising money for their Chabad House, and I want you to help along with me to improve Jewish life at Texas A&M University. Please visit http://jewishaggies.com/sharechabad and join me in donating. If you look at their social media presence, you will see student after student saying amazing things about how they created a home away from home for them in Aggieland, and how they helped them discover themselves. Rabbi Yossi and Manya do amazing thing, and I can tell you that I would not be alive if not for them, I would not be married if not for them, and I doubt I would have ever made it here if not for their love and support. Some of my happiest memories involved just being with them back in school, but also the friendship that they continue to give after graduation.

I got a quick voice note from Manya before my surgery tomorrow (don’t worry I’ll be ok), and it honestly made all the fear and anxiety go away. They really care, and they really do make a difference; now it’s just up to us to support them. Again, visit the link above to make a donation and have it matched. Let’s make Chabad at A&M an even more amazing place, and I know more students lives will be enriched because of our efforts.

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.

Why I write and this blog’s master plan

So, I figured that 7 posts deep is probably too far in to be writing this blog without sharing with y’all why I’m doing this in the first place.

I’ve been a writer for a long time, with varying degrees of success and consistency. I’ve dabbled in spoken word as well, but I think that I might be a little more limited in that arena when the English-speaking percentage of the population around me has drastically shrunken. I’ve had a couple of other blogs before this, now languishing in complete inactivity due to my own lack of focus and drive.

But this time, it’s going to be different.

So why do I write?

I write because it’s the only true outlet I’ve found so far to relieve the burdens in my soul when they start to overwhelm my shoulders. I write because I can pour out everything I feel onto the page, words gushing out of me with reckless abandon. In my short twenty-nine years, I’ve seen and done so many things that I will never be able to forget, both for the good and for the bad. I can’t tell you about the countless nights I spent without sleep, unable to close my eyes without seeing the horrors of the day, writing away all of the pain in me. My phone is full of unfinished poems and essays, odes to sadness and despair, monuments to days of mania and nights of madness.

There also those rarer moments when I experience something so beautiful and profound that I have to write them down. My memory being what it is, I need to preserve those moments of happiness and hope for when the sadness returns, when my consciousness starts to disconnect from the world around me.

I also write because I want to share with you what I’m feeling, what I’m thinking, what I see, what I experience. I’ve heard a thousand times over that people with bipolar disorder feel things more intensely than the average joe. I feel sometimes like I’m one of those little shrimps with extra rods and cones that let them see colors we could never even imagine, but instead of a color palette, my emotional range is just extremely saturated with nuance and depth. When you have so much depth to your feelings, you can’t help but just want to express them.

So what’s this blog going to be about? Well, I can tell you that it won’t be only focused on one thing. I’m going to write about politics, about faith, about food, and maybe some poetry. I can also say that this blog about my journey through aliyah, but I don’t think that the journey will ever end. I think that I’ve been here long enough to realize that I will never stop discovering things here, seeing new things, experiencing life constantly as if every day was a rebirth of the entire world. It’s taken a long time for me to get to this place, both physically and mentally. I spent so much and sacrificed to come to this land, and I’ve finally reached a time in my life where I want to see the next day in a land I truly love.

Other than that, I can’t say where else this blog will take me. Everything I write is 100% me, the unfiltered, uninhibited, completely real me. I will never lie to you, never try to sugarcoat this place or myself, and I will never say anything that doesn’t reflect who I am.

So that’s why I write, what I’m going to write, and now I just need you. I need you to read, to digest, to see what I have to say. I want to connect with you, wherever you may be. My words come right from the soul, and they’re made for you. So, thank you for reading so far and for hopefully reading in the future. This blog is just beginning, and so is my journey in this holy land. I hope you can walk alongside me as I explore this beautiful place, and we can share a connection that will last longer than any words I pen.

Welcome (officially) to From Houston to Holy Land.

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.

Trying to make sense of the incomprehensible at Theresienstadt

Last week, I walked through a little town outside of Prague, home to a few thousand people living close to the forests of Bohemia. Old pre-war buildings lined the small streets. I sat in a little park and watched the people pass by. A woman walked her two young children home from school, the children pausing to look at me, a strange man with a little fabric disc on top of his head, strange strings peeking out from the bottom of his long coat. They passed in front of a rather unremarkable building, save for one word written atop the entranceway in Hebrew letters: Yizkor, Remembrance.

That little town is called Terezín, and it once housed the concentration camp I know by the German name: Theresienstadt.

Throughout our journey in Prague, I took lots of pictures and posted them immediately to social media (what do you expect, I’m a millennial). My wife and I really enjoyed Prague, especially the Jewish history of the town. The old Jewish Quarter is one of the biggest tourist attractions in the city, and the Alt-Neu (Old-New) Synagogue is the oldest continuously used synagogue in Europe. We encountered plenty of Jewish tourists as we visited the old synagogues, the cemetery, and the few kosher restaurants; but I was overwhelmed by the amount of non-Jews exploring the remains of a once vibrant community, home to some of the greatest rabbis in Europe’s history.

It was surreal, to be both the tourist and the subject of tourism. To go into a synagogue that was once used for so many life events only to be turned into a museum of Judaism, or a memorial to the victims of the Shoah. One particular synagogue had all of the names of Czech Jews murdered by the Nazis and their collaborators, and the sight was staggering.

But that was nothing to seeing the real thing in person.

To be honest, I didn’t know what to expect, how I would feel. What would go through my mind as I walked through the places where tens of thousands met their deaths, and even more waited to be sent off to the death camps. I didn’t know if I would be able to hold it together. Honestly, I was afraid of it all. As a bipolar person, speaking for myself specifically, I feel things more intensely than the average person. My emotional sensitivity is always jacked up to 11, and I didn’t know how confronting all of the death, the suffering, and my identity’s connection to all of that would affect me.

What I definitely did not expect were the stares. Out of the hundreds of visitors that day during the few hours we were there, I didn’t see a single other obviously Jewish person, save for one guy who I knew was Jewish from a chance encounter earlier in the day. My wife, in her wig and hat, can pass as just another tourist, but my kippah and tzitzit mark me from a hundred feet away as an Orthodox Jew; and let me tell you that I could feel the stares from that far away. Huge groups of teenagers, speaking English, French, German, Czech, passed us by and every one of them stopped talking for a moment to see me. I felt like every single pair of eyes was on me, probing me, wondering what I was thinking. I couldn’t help but look back at some of them, and whenever we locked eyes, a flood of emotions flashed back and forth between us. From them, I felt shock, curiosity, uneasiness, tension, and sometimes a tinge of guilt. All they got from me was hardness, eyes made empty of light by the sight of ARBEIT MACHT FREI on the top of the gateway, harshened by the sight of the pits where they shot and buried thousands of my brothers and sisters, drained by crematoriums where they burned the bodies and scattered their ashes in the river. Could I ever drink from the water there ever again knowing that its soil must still have the essence of the Jews of Bohemia in its banks?

The shooting gallery where executions took place

Even now, it’s difficult to put into words what I felt. There was the annoyance and anger as my tour guide, in her little scripted walk, kept on saying “the Jews” as if we were an ancient object and not a living person standing right in front of her. I can tell you about the rage I felt when I saw people laughing or smiling in a place made bitterly holy by the thousands of martyrs slain on its grounds. Or about the tears I shed as I placed rocks by the memorials, the mass graves, and as I lit a candle on the car of one of the ovens to remember at least one soul devoured by the flames of that dreadful stone building. I felt disbelief that people could still live there, in a place so associated with death and misery, that children could play just a short walk from where countless children met their deaths from starvation, from disease, and from torture.

But I can’t really express what I felt as I walked the grounds of the camps, this overwhelming numbness to it all. Maybe it was my mind’s way of protecting me from it all, from having to process it all emotionally. It was hard to speak there, I felt like my throat closed up to avoid having to breathe the air that still held the cries and screams of Jews facing the insurmountable and the unthinkable.

Beds from one of the barracks used to hold Jews and political prisoners

I’ve been to funerals, I’ve buried my own mother, I’ve buried friends, I’ve seen children’s caskets lowered into the earth, but the sadness and despair I felt there were incomparable. With a funeral, there’s an order, something created to give you closure, something to comfort you. At Theresienstadt, all you’re left to see is that was left over from the killings, it was something we were never meant to really see. Theresienstadt was supposed to be the model camp to show to the world that the Nazis were treating us humanely, a temporary charade. The reality is that tens of thousands of my people were killed in this camp, or waited to be sent to their death in another camp, and we have no way to remember them other than visiting these horrible places.

Near the crematorium, there was a memorial cemetery for the victims, and monuments. They were for the people that they knew that died there, but at the end of the cemetery there were graves unlike any I’ve see before. There were all black, set on a slanting hill, literally standing in contrast with the greying tombstones in the regular cemetery. They were the graves put up by surviving family members who never knew where their loved ones died, or when, or how. They just knew that they were gone, and they needed something to at least focus on as a place of mourning and sorrow. I think that is what that whole place was like. We as a people lost so many, just completely lost, people and communities. Entire villages lost to the flames, devoured by the monsters. It is something so unfathomably large, horrible, and inescapable that we have to focus on something tangible just to be able to process a fraction of the trauma, whether it’s a stone monument, a grave, a tree planted in remembrance, or even the killing grounds themselves.

This is the place where thousands of men, women, and children were erased from this world

Tree planted by the survivors of Theresienstadt

I’m still processing what happened there, what I saw. In my 29 years, I’ve seen things that will forever be burned into my eyes. I am not trying to brag, and honestly I would give up many of my better memories to be able to forget some of the horrible ones. I’ve lived on the edge of death, on the edge of sanity, and through deep and profound loss. I’ve seen and heard things that no one my age should have seen by now, things that no man should have to see, stories that I must bear for the rest of my life. This place stands apart, a place filled with death, with stares, with hardness, and with feeling so lost in the deaths of millions. There are times I’ve felt small because of the grandness of the world, but this was one where I felt emptied by the vastness of the suffering. I don’t know if I could ever go back, but I think everyone should go at least once in their lives.

I do know that visiting that place made me realise even more that I need to be here, living my life to the fullest. Too many good people, innocent people, Jews of every age and background were murdered, slaughtered, butchered, erased. I need to live my life for them, for the Jews of Theresienstadt, for the six million, and for the countless future generations stolen from them. I need to live proudly, in a Jewish country, and shape the world so that their fates are never repeated. I need to live so that they are never forgotten, so that those buildings in Terezín will never become just buildings.

I can’t find the right words to end this, so I’ll end this with a poem from a boy named František Bass, born 4 September, 1930, held in Theresienstadt, died in Auschwitz on 28 October, 1944, age 14.

A little garden,

Fragrant and full of roses.

The path is narrow

And a little boy walks along it.

A little boy, a sweet boy,

Like the growing blossom.

When the blossom comes to bloom,

The little boy will be no more.

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.

Forgiving Yourself and Others

As Yom Kippur, the Day of Atonement, the holiest day of the year in Judaism approaches, all of the Jewish people turn inwards in self-reflection. In Israel, everything is coming to a halt. Ben Gurion airport, our only major international airport, is closed, television and radio stations have ceased broadcasting, and roads are closing down. Tomorrow, roads will be empty except for emergency vehicles and bicycles, and the majority of Israelis, secular and religious, will fast.

I only wanted to add something to the millions of facebook posts, blogs, and social media bites to the theme of tomorrow. All year, we’ve made mistakes. We’ve wronged others, acted unkindly, hurt one another, and said things that we cannot take back. We’ve neglected what is important and wasted time on the trivial, and we’ve treasured the crass and forgotten the real value of what’s important. We’ve done these things to others, but we’ve also done them to ourselves. As easy as it is to go through the prayers and see all of the wrongs man can inflict on his fellow, unseen is the savagery we can do to ourselves.

The beautiful thing about Judaism is that we don’t say to ourselves that our sins are a badge of shame to be worn on our chests, they are merely lines on a ledger; and with a new year that ledger is wiped clean. We have stood before the Judge of Judges, and now we are awaiting his verdict. Come what will, the future will still be waiting for you come Thursday. Let your fast and afflictions tomorrow be what they were meant to be, things to keep you focused and clear. You’re not being punished with hunger, you are hungry so that whatever effort you might have put on food is now spent reflecting on how you can improve.

Remember too that you are often your biggest victim, so make sure to keep yourself in the list of people to ask for forgiveness from. There’s nothing to be ashamed for when you realize that maybe you’ve been too hard on yourself, that you haven’t been honest with yourself, or that you haven’t loved yourself as nearly as much as you deserve. So much of the conflict isn’t the world today boils down to a lack of love for one another, and it’s impossible to love someone else truly if you can’t learn to love yourself.

Wishing everyone a easy and meaningful fast, see you on the other side, and let’s make this the year that love triumphs over hate.