Ani Olah Chadasha…Or Very Nearly Israeli

Six months ago I boarded a one-way flight at JFK airport in New York and arrived with five suitcases at Ben Gurion airport in Tel Aviv. At 54 years old, alone, unable to speak or understand Hebrew, and with no practical plan for how I would live here, I came home. This mystifies Israelis. 

“Why? In the balagan? You came?”

My answer: “When a building is on fire you run away. When it is your house that’s on fire, you run towards it. When that house is your home with your family still inside the flames, you run into the fire.” 

I am not unique. We all saw the kids sleeping in the airplane aisles; the pop-up missions of Jewish nonprofit and private leaders who knew that our home was on fire; businesses closing to convert their warehouses for “Blue Market” emergency relief services; mothers of eight putting aside the never-ending to-do lists to spend days packing first-aid kits for miluimniks; and thousands of WhatsApp groups of mothers and students, of grandparents and businesspeople collecting urgent needs: chargers, protein bars, helmets and safety vests….Our home is on fire! Help. 

Then the WhatsApp groups by profession: doctors; lawyers; professors who awoke to a nightmare when their trusted colleagues of decades could not say, “Yes, the girls are telling the truth.” (#BringBackOurGirls); and so many others. LinkedIn suddenly exploded with Jews-like-me who had never ever posted or talked about being Jewish or a Zionist (not knowing that merely saying, “I support my right to exist alive in my homeland” had become repulsive to my DEI colleagues.) New associations, charities, and industry groups sprang up out of the desert that had buried our cognitive dissonance to rally around a latent fact: we were not wanted. 

Then some of us sold what we could and packed what we couldn’t. Despite the post-Russian-immigration-gone-wrong near unscalable bureaucratic barriers to obtaining a teudat oleh, we left what we had known our entire lives and showed up, pitched a tent, and called it “ours.” 

Was this my plan all along? Certainly not after my first visit to Israel. In 1985 I spent six teenage-angst-filled summer weeks touring with the North American Federation of Temple Youth. Feedback to my parents was “Nice place to visit. Wouldn’t want to live there.” Any religious aspects of my tour seemed confusing and nonsensical. Frankly, most of the country seemed a little third world to me with many public bathrooms giving new definition to the slang “pit stop”. 

Most of the traditional stops to the Kotel and Yad Vashem and Masada were fine as attractions but I didn’t feel any real connection. The stop that had the greatest and longest lasting impact was in one of the military museums that merely displayed the last letters young soldiers wrote to their loved ones before they gave up their short lives in one war or another to secure a home for the Jewish people. I understood their sacrifice was also for me and mine. 

I left Israel, showed the slides to Mom (a lifetime member of Hadassah who had never been to Israel) and to Pops (whose feet had also never touched the land of Israel despite selling Israel Bonds for five years). Then I moved on.

My longing started three years later. As a first year young pup at SUNY Binghamton I met highly educated graduates of Modern Orthodox high schools and received the warm embrace of the local Chabad House. On the day commemorating Kristallnacht, “The Night of Broken Glass,” viewed by many as the starting date of the Holocaust, the Jewish Student Union was vandalized; I ran an emergency Vigil On Antisemitism that was covered by the New York Times.

During that year I was also introduced to and later accepted the idea that the Torah was given to the Jewish people at Mount Sinai. Hand in hand, the same Great Gift Giver in the Sky also gave the Jewish people, a ragtag wandering crew of newly minted monotheists, a home: the land of Israel. 

This notion did for me what Yad Vashem could not. As an American Jew I didn’t need a museum to remind me of the heavy price of my heritage. What a Torah lens gave me was a call home to the place of my inheritance.

My first attempt to come back to Israel was for junior year of college. Then I got sick. Very sick. And thus began a three-decade-long roller coaster where years of building companies, homes and friendship alternated with illness and its limitations, resulting in the subsequent unraveling of whatever I had built. During this time I had four amazing children. Professionally, I did some bits of “this and that” which seemed to have some impact with moments decorated by real fireworks. 

Fast forward to 2016. I found myself legally blind, on liquid only nutrition, dependent on an electric wheelchair, and left to die in the basement of a one-star nursing home.

The doctors advised: spend my time writing letters and making videos for my four children then ages 10-18. Instead I spent my time fighting; not with elegance and panache, but more with rage and single-mindedness.

The doctors said it was unlikely that I would live. They said I would never walk again. 

Today, I walk every day on the land of Israel. Babayit sheli. My home. Several months ago I wrote these lines about how it feels when I look around, and they remain true every day still:

“Living in Israel is like falling in love so fast and so hard that you can’t catch your breath. And at the most unlikely moments you look up and see him, and you actually feel your heart pause. And you say, ‘I can’t believe you’re mine.’

And yes! I know there are other people who feel that Israel is theirs. And I’m aware that arriving on a one-way ticket smack dab in the middle of an otherwise colorful life without a safety net or strategic plan may be a questionable decision to many. And no, it’s not all sunshine and roses. Before arriving, I had never actually heard what happens when homeland security sends an aerial invasion alert on my phone; I could not have described the sound of an interception of a ballistic missile above my head; I did not know that, once experienced, the multi-sensory assault of sirens followed by violent shaking of the building while shrapnel may be falling around me would never leave my bones. 

I also did not know that I would come so alive. It is as if I was a weed planted in the wrong soil for five decades. Having barely survived the soil transplant, every cell of my being started to grow and thrive- reaching down into the ground that is mine and up, up to the light that is our collection of possibilities. 

And so to another perek. It’s been over two months since the Times of Israel welcomed me onto their virtual pages. And I’ve spent all of this time thinking- how should I use this space and this time you’re entrusting me with? If you read the above, it seems like a lot of autobiography. As it must be. The story of Israel is the stitched together stories of many many people and families with history:  Messy. Imperfect. Incomplete. From over 70 different countries. Landing at all stages from the very young to very nearly not-dead-yet. Different languages and names and foods. Traumatized. Hopeful. Determined to not be defeated. We are the survivors and the children of those who have survived holocausts and expulsions, genocides and hatred… a deep, lasting hatred, the smell of which infuses the pores regardless of how many times we wash, rinse, repeat. For thousands of years we kept coming home. For eight decades we have come home to a modern state. An army. Planes painted with a Jewish star, flown by Jewish pilots. 

We are trying to build something that matters, the possibility of a tiny home that when we tuck our children in at night and say, “You are safe. You are home.”, we know this to be true. 

And we’re kind of like a third marriage that blends children and collectibles and the baggage that we just refuse to toss. It’s a balagan. We’re a very young country that has yet to even come up with the fundamentals any mid-level McKinsey associate consultant has a very slick slide show to guide you through: Your mission. Your vision. Your Strategic Plan. 

Who are you? What matters most? What do you value? What’s your North Star? Who do you serve? What are your priorities? Israel has barely considered the questions let alone answered them. It has been focused on basic survival in an inhospitable world. 

And yet, Israel must continue to grow as a country even though its citizens have very different answers on what matters most. But unlike, or maybe very much like an unfunded startup, Israel can not be willing to wait for perfection. Fail fast. Adjust. Go again. Be willing to stretch. Find your way. And what the people of Israel have accomplished in a microsecond of history is breathtaking. What has been built in the middle of, let’s say, suboptimal conditions for success is unprecedented. 

In these two months of contemplation, how did I decide that I may be able to offer a little value on these pages? I’ll tell you what I’m unlikely to discuss: politics and governments. I think there are plenty of voices on all sides. Controversy among Jews. I prefer to leave family matters only to family. The flaws and cracks and holes to be patched or covered or exposed. Not so interested.

I want you to have a few minutes each month to see Israel through my eyes: the people I love, the places I visit, the inevitable bumps and balagan swathed in the bubble wrap of hope and wonder. Living in Israel, magic happens to me everyday. The real deal pixie fairy dust with the princess who awakens after half an eternity of Disney sequels. 

I’ve been here just long enough to know that before anything, Israelis want to know where I’m coming from. So here is where I am coming from:

• Love every Jew. That’s it and it’s hard. But it really matters. (And shhh.. I did not say not to love non Jews- don’t put words in my mouth…I said love every Jew.)
• Unity is our only answer. It is a time-tested formula for our successes and devastating failures as a people. As one we will win. Without it, we have nothing. 
• We have to make room for each other. Start by taking away the “The” from before the name of a Jew (the charedim, the secular). Then we (in Israel) need to make room for diaspora Jews in authentic and inclusive ways. Each generation of an aliyah had to make room for the next. We must keep making space. When in doubt on how or why, see above.

Maybe I represent another wave that will one day have its own aliyah title: those who came after October 7, 2023, somewhere in the middle of an otherwise colorful and messy life, to protect and rebuild the home that has been waiting for us for a few thousand years. Maybe we won’t be a historical footnote. Either way I guarantee an adventure surrounded by giants and goblins, the magical and mysterious and plenty of pixie dust. 

So buckle your seat belts…. Ani olah chadasha!