Living between pride and guilt

When we moved to Israel, it felt like a dream fulfilled — not just a personal milestone, but the culmination of something ancient, sacred, and deeply rooted. We were returning home. There was this indescribable pride in walking the same soil our ancestors walked, in watching our children become part of the Israeli story. I love that my kids speak Hebrew, that their school days are intertwined with the rhythm of the Jewish calendar, that we are contributing to the growth of a country reborn from ashes.

Aliyah was never going to be easy. My wife and I talked about it at length. We knew we were leaving behind parents, siblings, lifelong friends. But part of our hope, part of the dream, was that our kids wouldn’t have to make that choice. That they could simply live here, rooted and whole.

Since October 7th, something in me has only deepened: my sense of belonging, my sense of duty, my national pride. I want to be here. I want to raise my children here. I want to sacrifice for this place if that’s what it means to build and protect it. There is nowhere else I want to be.

And yet… at the same time, I carry a weight that’s hard to name. It’s the sound of my almost 4-year-old daughter telling me her legs feel “wobbly” after a siren. It’s the fact that her bedroom doubles as a bomb shelter and how she’s afraid to sleep in her room. It’s the way she clings to us when she hears loud noises, the way she won’t stay in a room alone “just in case the siren comes.” It’s the regression, the accidents, the anxiety that spills out of her little body in ways she doesn’t yet have words for.

And what crushes me most is this: I wish I could take it from her. I wish I could hold the fear, the confusion, the trauma so she wouldn’t have to. If I could carry it all on my own shoulders just to give her peace, I would. I hate that she’s the one paying a price for something she didn’t choose, didn’t understand, and didn’t deserve.

How do I hold both truths? That I’ve never felt more fulfilled… and that my daughter is scared in a way no child should be. That I love this place with my whole heart… and that my heart breaks watching how this place, at this moment, affects her.

I don’t regret our decision. I don’t question the love I have for this land, or the purpose I feel being here. But I am learning that pride and guilt aren’t opposites. They’re neighbors. They live side by side, sharing space in the same soul. And maybe that’s the cost of caring deeply for a people, for a future, for your own children.

Right now, my avodah (my sacred work) is to help my daughter carry what she shouldn’t have to carry. To be there for her as fully and patiently as I can. To hold her fears without rushing to fix them. To show her, day by day, that she’s safe, that she’s loved, and that we are here, always here, to help her through it.

And I hope, I pray, that as she, her sister, and b’ezrat HaShem, future siblings grow, they’ll come to see that Israel isn’t the cause of their fear, but the home that holds them through it. That it’s not the trauma, but the place worth healing for. That even in its pain, this land is filled with meaning, with beauty, with the deepest kind of belonging. And that we made this choice not to put them through hardship, but to give them something worth rooting their lives in.

That said, I’m still figuring out how to carry it all.