A Love Letter to Israel

This past January, I had a wedding in New York. It was one of my closest friends who was getting married, and it was not a wedding that I could—or would—miss. But there had been a lot of chatter about war with Iran already for a month at that point, and I was really, really nervous about getting stuck in New York. I was flying without my husband, who was finishing up another round of reserves, and I was supposed to be in New York for all of three days to be back home in time for Shabbat.

Now, it wouldn’t have been the end of the world if I’d gotten stuck. I was staying with my parents, I would have had extra time with my siblings, nieces and nephews, and my grandparents, and maybe even have gotten to see a friend or two. Granted, I was also traveling without luggage, so I had all of three shirts, but hey, everyone has a washing machine, right? But I just did not want to get stuck. I did not want to be away from home if my home was under attack; I couldn’t imagine being in the US while my husband was home without me; and I really, really, really did not have enough clothes packed to be in New York for an extended stay.

Thank God, I made it to New York safely and then made it back home right on schedule. The war with Iran did not start for another month, giving my husband and me the time to go on our post-reserves trip to Rome. Before I flew, though, I was talking with a friend and I articulated how nervous I was to leave Israel, knowing that there was a very good chance that I might have some trouble making it home. As friends do, she tried to help me find something good to focus on: “Well, maybe if you do get stuck, it will help you realize how much you appreciate about living in Israel?”

What she didn’t realize, but quickly learned, is that I have never once lost sight of how much I love living here. It was nineteen years from when I first articulated that I wanted to make aliyah until I actually made it happen. It was years that I would come to Israel for visits and my heart would break every time I left. And now that Israel is finally home? My heart sings.

It took the Jews forty years to arrive in the promised land, and even then, the entire generation that had left Egypt perished in the desert. Only the women, the Levites, Joshua, and Caleb remained to enter the land. Even Moses, who taught us what it means to love this land with every fiber of one’s being, died in the desert, having seen the land from just across the river but never once stepping foot in it.

As a people, we were exiled from this land, not once, but twice. The second time, nearly two thousand years ago, was brutal. The Romans sowed the land with salt, rendering it unfit for agriculture, a death blow to a land that should be flowing with milk and honey. The desert expanded, swamps cropped up in the lowlands, and the song of daily life was extinguished, leaving this land to lay quiet as its people wept by the rivers of Babylon and Syria and Egypt and Libya and Turkey and Rome.

Our Hearts Were Always In The East

Our right hands never forgot their strength, and we never forgot Jerusalem, the beating heart of the Jewish people. Rabbi Judah Halevi, a Spanish Jewish sage who lived around the turn of the twelfth century, famously wrote poetry in which he pined for the Jewish homeland nearly a millennia after the exile. In perhaps his most well known line, he lamented, “My heart is in the east, and I am at the end of the west.” At the end of his life, Rabbi Judah Halevi left Spain to live in Israel. Legend has it that when he arrived in Jerusalem, he bowed down on the ground in gratitude to God, overwhelmed with having finally arrived, and he was immediately trampled by an Arab horseman.

In late 2015, there was a terror attack at the Gush Etzion junction. An American boy here on a gap year program, Ezra Schwartz, was killed in the attack, along with two other victims. Ezra was eighteen years old. At the funeral, his father said that if he had known before sending his son off to Israel for the year that this would be the result, he would have done it anyway.

It is not an accident of the calendar that Yom Hazikaron, Israel’s memorial day, is the day before Yom Ha’atzmaut, Israel’s independence day. We do not earn this land because it is easy. This beautiful land of ours is won because we want it so badly that we are willing to give body and soul for it. We have fought, and will continue to fight, for the right to live here, and we owe everything to those who made the ultimate sacrifice so that we can continue to live.

That’s not to say, of course, that Israel doesn’t have her flaws. As a modern country with modern politics, there are plenty of issues. There’s lots that can be said about the government, the bureaucracy, the traffic. But to be able to live in Israel, to see her for all of her flaws, and to choose her anyway? That’s love. That is the deep abiding love that the Jewish people have held onto since time immemorial. That is the love that sustained us through the darkest parts of our nation’s story. And that is the love that will continue to carry us forward through whatever awaits us in the future.