Altneuland

Theodor Herzl called his great Zionist novel Altneuland.

Old New Land.

I’ve always loved the title. It captures something that can only really be understood by standing here. Israel is ancient and astonishingly young at exactly the same time. Every stone whispers yesterday while every street corner argues about tomorrow.

Over the past week I’ve had the privilege of studying at the Shalom Hartman Institute with rabbis, educators and Jewish thinkers from around the world. Together we’ve immersed ourselves in some of Judaism’s biggest questions. What does it mean to be human? What does covenant demand of us? How do we build a society that reflects our highest values rather than our deepest fears?

The learning has been extraordinary.

But Israel has a way of reminding you that not all learning happens in the beit midrash.

Some of the deepest lessons have come over burgers on the Tel Aviv beach, during slow afternoons on a kibbutz and over coffee in Jerusalem that somehow stretches into hours.

Through someone very dear to me who now wears an Israeli uniform, I found myself welcomed into the world of young lone soldiers. It was a gift I neither expected nor deserved.

They came from Melbourne, Budapest, Teaneck, Johannesburg, Buenos Aires and La Paz. Different accents. Different stories. Different expressions of Jewish life.

Some were Jews by birth. Others were Jews by choice. Some had grown up in Orthodox homes. Others had found their own path into Jewish life. Some were deeply observant. Others unapologetically secular.

What united them was not uniformity. It was responsibility.

Each, in their own way, had answered the call of this generation and, in many ways, the call of generations before them, to help ensure that the Jewish people might once again live free in our own land.

Despite what many choose to see from afar, I did not encounter a generation consumed by hate. I encountered a generation choosing hope.

Young men and women carrying extraordinary burdens with remarkable humility. Willing to question. Willing to disagree. Willing to laugh. Willing to grieve. Above all, willing to keep building.

During my time here, I found myself returning often to Yehuda Amichai’s poem The Tourist. In it, he gently reminds us that visitors to Jerusalem are often captivated by its monuments while overlooking the ordinary people whose lives unfold beneath them.

More than fifty years later, I wonder how he might write that poem today.

Perhaps the ordinary Jerusalemite would no longer be carrying home groceries from the market.

Perhaps they would be an eighteen-year-old adjusting the straps of an army kit bag before heading back to base. A medic catching a bus. A university student hurrying home for Shabbat. One of the countless young men and women quietly writing the next chapter of the Jewish story.

The stones still matter. They always will. But they are no longer the whole story.

Standing beneath Roman arches, Crusader stones and Ottoman gates, I found myself thinking less about the empires that once ruled this land than about the generation shaping its future.

That is Herzl’s old new land. Not a museum preserving the past. Not a modern state disconnected from it. But a place where history and hope meet every single day. None of this ignores the brokenness.

There is more pain here than I can begin to comprehend. Families whose lives have been shattered. Communities still rebuilding. The ache left by hostages and by war. Deep political divisions. The moral burden that so many carry every day. No honest visitor could pretend otherwise.

And yet I leave carrying more hope than when I arrived. Not because the problems are smaller. Because the people are greater.

I have met a generation that refuses to surrender to cynicism. Young men and women who carry impossible burdens and still choose to build. They choose responsibility over resignation. They choose peoplehood over despair. They choose hope, not because it is easy, but because they believe the future is still worth building.

Herzl called it Old New Land. Standing here, I finally understand why. Every stone still whispers yesterday. Every street corner still argues about tomorrow.

And between them walks a generation determined to ensure that the Jewish story does not end with memory alone, but continues to be written with courage, responsibility and hope.

The real wonder of Israel is not its ancient arches. It is the people still walking beneath them.