A Psalm of Hope and Despair

The tears started an hour before my ride to the airport.

After dozens of goodbyes and existential explanations, I wasn’t only emotionally and mentally depleted—I’d succumbed to a more common and unimpressive feat: self-doubt.

I stared at suitcases bursting at seams, demanding for their contents to be released back into closets and desks, placed atop bookshelves, nightstands. My flight’s return was set in three months, but I still hadn’t admitted my flex option purchase made it invariably open-ended.

I reminded myself of Psalm 126, Shir Hama’alot, the famed Song of Ascent:

When the Lord restored the fortunes of Zion, we were like dreamers

This trip, this period, this pain would pass.

***

When I began my B.A. at Harvard in 2017, I was obsessed with Israel. My undergraduate journey was preceded by an intensive pre-army program in Jerusalem, and I watched from afar as my friends donned heroic green jumpsuits, leaving me with nothing but world-class professors and facilities. I was one part immature, one part blindly idealistic.

Israel was all I talked about. Specifically, how I’d make my premature leave from Harvard to move there. I steeled myself with the words of the Psalm: Restore our fortunes, Lord, like streams in the Negev. My friends at Hillel constantly chided me for my inability to focus on the present. Even my non-Jewish friends internalized my obsession; my roommate made a chalk tally on our door titled Days Razi Has Made the Most of Harvard.

After my freshman year I cancelled my one-way ticket and decided to finish my degree. Redemption would have to wait. From Jewish events to song remixes, whenever I heard Hatikva, the Israel national anthem, I’d tear up. My years in college were exilic par excellence, and I waited, nervously, joyfully, impatiently, for the day I’d be reunited with the land of my people. The same psalm spoke, but with a later refrain: Those who sow with tears will reap with songs of joy.

***

Tens of documents, a flight across the ocean, and a few signatures later, I finally had the opportunity to answer the much-coveted question:

Why did you make Aliyah?

Slowly, but surely, I was asked this question dozens…hundreds…perhaps over a thousand times. From Shabbat meals to first dates, job interviews to drunk teenagers on public transportation. And yet, usually, if not exclusively, I shrugged, disinterested in the hackneyed choice of topic.

To me, I’d just moved on the heels of what felt like the easiest decision I’d ever made. After all, with the return to Zion, the Psalmist concurs:

Our mouths were filled with laughter, our tongues with songs of joy.

Sure, problems cropped up. The green jumpsuit wasn’t nearly as comfortable (nor as flattering) as it looked on my friends. Israeli politics were somehow more depressing than in America, and the cost of living in Tel Aviv was nothing to be envied. Through judicial reforms, ups and downs of dating, moving cities and jobs, a cleverer, and subtler question asked itself:

Why do you stay here?

But, true to form, through the years and questions, I’ve never really changed my response. Why did you move to Israel was always batted away, and even why do you stay here never amounted to a substantive critique worth truly exploring.

After all, what was my pessimism worth in the face of the most resilient nation in history?

***

My friend shot me a text—I’ll be there in fifteen.

How’d I arrive here? Was I making the right decision?

Cliched and simple questions assume sudden profundity in moments of anxiety. In many ways, I knew entirely why I was leaving. I’d spent too long in a country beset by internal rifts and existential worries, threatened by a multi-millennia hatred of the Jewish People and an endless government that somehow left us less safe with every passing day. Too long in a society confident that Jeremiah’s prophecies of destruction are anachronistic to our crippled State, convinced that the Psalmist’s world of near-impossible redemption bears the full truth.

The Lord has done great things for us, and we are filled with joy.

I taste the words, but they feel distant, foreign.

I sit in knowledge of existential threats to my country, steeped in nation-wide responsibility for children dying from Jewish planes and American bombs. I sleep hundreds of meters away from where Houthi drones explode into nearby Tel Aviv apartments, on the same beach where mere miles south, desperate fathers fight waves and riptides to bring food for children. A country, a culture, an ideology once so inextricably linked to my sense of self now feels so precarious, a tenuous existence, walking an impossibly thin tightrope headed into the abyss.

Restore our fortunes, Lord, like streams in the Negev.

My supplications are no longer framed in hope. They are mired in impossibilities, steeped in helplessness.

I heave my bag over my left shoulder, tightening the strap across my abdomen. I grab the second backpack and sling it over my chest. The two suitcases are next; I stoop to pick them up. Grabbing handles, I recite the extended mantra I’ve grown so accustomed to telling myself:

I’m leaving to get a break. I’m leaving to take the state of this country less personally. I’m leaving to clear my head. I’m leaving reserves I’m increasingly skeptical of. I’m leaving to avoid attack drones and incessant rockets, duck out from endless infighting and a collapsing republic.

I’m leaving to miss this country again. To long for its air, the holiness pregnant in its stones, the beauty contained in its life.

I’m leaving to return.

I walk towards the door, the last refrain from the Psalm guiding me.

Those who go out weeping, carrying seed to sow.

I look behind at an apartment, a life, a dream I’d spent my entire adult life cultivating, nurturing. This cursed war, with all its pain, death, destruction. Its guilt. Its burden. Its debt.

My fingers close around the latch, sliding the lock.

 Will return with songs of joy, carrying sheaves with them.

A tear falls. Then another. Perhaps Jeremiah’s world need not be ours.

The songs of Zion are more pertinent than ever, every psalm bursting with sadness, each verse brimming with beauty.