Not a ‘normal’ choice, but the only choice
10:38am, sitting in the plane, on the runway at JFK airport with a takeoff time of 10:40, the loud sirens from the Home Front Command app fill the air.
Most normal people would look uneasy. Many would reconsider. Some might even stand up, grab their bags, and step off the plane as the reality sets in about where this flight is headed.
But on this flight, as I looked around, I did not see fear.
I saw resolve.
Resolve in the way people sat in their seats. Resolve in the exchanged unspoken but understood glances. Resolve in the simple, steady knowledge that we were not running from something. We were going toward something.
We were going home.
In a moment when Israel is at war, uncertainty hangs heavy and the risks are real, every instinct of self-preservation would suggest distance. Stay away. Wait it out. Watch from afar. And yet, plane after plane continues to fill with people making the opposite choice.
To return. To stand with family. To be present, not peripheral. To trust, not blindly, but deeply, in God, in the strength of the people, and in the protection of those standing on the front lines, the soldiers of the IDF.
There is something profoundly Jewish about that choice.
Because our story has never been one of retreat.
We are the people who left Egypt and walked into the unknown, guided by faith and a promise. As we prepare for Passover, that story feels less like history and more like identity. We are not just remembering the Exodus, we are continuing it.
We are the people who fought giants, the people who carried memory through exile and returned to rebuild our home. The people who rose from the ashes of Auschwitz and chose life with a defiance that reshaped history. The people who built a country where none should have been possible, making the desert bloom, growing food from sand, not just surviving but thriving. We are a people who have done the impossible so many times that it no longer feels impossible.
This is what it means to belong to something greater than yourself. To a story that did not begin with you and will not end with you. A story that calls on you, especially in moments like this, not to stand at a distance, but to step forward and come home.
That is why no one panicked when the sirens sounded on that plane. That is why no one rushed the aisles or turned back.
We simply looked at one another, held that shared understanding, and then (most of us) slid our phones into airplane mode.
#OperationRoaringLion #OperationEpicFury #OurHome #WeAreOneFamily
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