Called to reconnect to my native soil

Here I am living in my ancestral homeland. I have a lemon tree at the bottom of my steps that I pick from daily. There are pomegranate trees in the yard and grapevines up above. Today, driving in the north, I passed fields and fields of date trees. When I first returned home, I spent my mornings high in those trees learning about this land of honey. I arrived here, not because it was where I needed to be, but because I was called.

Called by my mothers, all the mothers who lived before me. Those who walked this land barefoot guided by the light of the stars. I was called by Rachel who died giving birth to her final son. I was called by the mothers who died in Europe in fires and in the cold of winter where they were starving and barely dressed.

I live in a world of trees. Pomegranate trees that ripen before my new year, and date trees that drip honey. I live on a land that cries to me at night and whispers to me in the day. I have birthed my children here and planted their placentas in the earth. I have two olive trees on my property that remind me always of Noah, and the ark, and reawaken the child in me who wants so deeply to still believe in peace.

I am here to continue what was almost lost. I am here because, as a child, my neighbor’s arms were tattooed with numbers like cattle. I am here because I grew up with a grandfather who had lost all of his siblings, all nine of them, to hatred and antisemitism. I am here because I want to protect my people: past, present, and future.

I live with the trees, and they follow my people’s traditional calendar. Pomegranates ripen just before our new year, the food we eat and bless. On the new year of the trees, I walk in the fields and gaze in awe at the first almond blossoms that always appear just on time.

We press olives for oil and each year it flows for our festival of light.

But I don’t feel like I am protecting anything when every day we are threatened by war. I feel like I have not protected my children’s innocence, when, for the past two years, they have mourned with friends who have lost brothers, sisters and fathers, when they have watched our neighbors learn to walk on prosthetic legs.

I did not feel like I was protecting my daughters when I held them in my bed after a member of our community was murdered in the woods next to our home, while talking to Gd.

I am here in this place, not because it is easy and not because I have chosen it, but because it has chosen me: to dig in my native soil, reconnect to my roots, break apart like a seed and be reborn so fruit can ripen where it truly belongs.