Yes, Chef—Feeling Bearish in Israel

We used to go to the movies to sit in the dark for a few hours, enjoying popcorn and fantasy—maybe with a friend—to escape the world, recharge, and find inspiration. Now we plant ourselves in front of screens, small or large, and stay up too late bingeing on streaming content, trying to calm or redirect the endless flow of work, worry, and fatigue, and hoping for an ounce or two of joy.

Lately, I’m all in on The Bear. I worked in restaurants for years, and it’s thrilling to relive—vividly—the wonderful chaos of food service: yelling, hugging, crying, pushing limits, and forming a second family while getting an impossible amount of food from kitchen to table in an impossible amount of time. The Bear‘s take on all of this is very real—the rush, the anxiety, the love, and the hate. No job ever taught me more viscerally about life than a restaurant job.

The Bear reminds me a lot of Israel: Yelling, hugging, crying, pushing limits, and forging a second family. It’s the total stranger at the checkout line with whom I share deeply personal parenting advice; the news panel where normally thoughtful people get lost in the bedlam of screaming their ideas instead of debating them; the barista who compliments me on losing a little weight, then asks how I did it—before taking my order.

We all crave intimacy, connection—someone to ask how we’re doing, someone who steps into our spaces of pain and longing. That’s what The Bear does best, showing us magical, messy characters weaving a web of accomplishment and grace in lives on the edge of madness.

And yet, all that love and connection can’t fix everything. Chef Carmy—who founded the restaurant that is the namesake of the show in the swirl of family tragedy and his own personal odyssey—is not OK. I won’t spoil the plot, but it’s enough to say that in love, business, and the art of creating the prettiest, most audacious dishes in Chicago, Chef Carmy is stuck.

And so are we. So many of us in Israel are stuck, despite all the magic in our midst. And like Chef Carmy, we’re not OK.

We’re stuck with a dysfunctional government where personal ambition and ideology trump unity, or even basic competence. Stuck in the hell of Gaza, the hostages, the deaths, and the countless lives permanently altered. Stuck in a Middle East haunted by vicious, tribal hatreds masquerading as faith. Stuck in an economy where wages stagnate and the cost of living soars, while so much of our nation’s treasure—both human and financial—is invested in social, legal, and cultural dead ends.

The heat of the kitchen in which we are cooking and sometimes feel cooked is real, and all the while we’re trying to feed people—body, mind, and spirit. Everyone’s hungry for sustenance, for good company, for faith, and it can be hard to see how we will be able to provide these things. Amidst the chaos of our age, we’re like Chef Carmy: unsure what to do about the pressures of our personal tumult and communal responsibilities even as we try our best to provide what really matters for the people who are counting on us.

But take heart: we’re not even through Season Four of The Bear. There is still a lot of story to tell. Every one of the characters, Carmy included, is reaching for love, understanding, and truth. So are countless wise people in Israel. And so are all of us who still dare to hope for a better world—even when the questions about how to get there are hard to surface and the answers even harder to reach.

Back in the restaurants I both loved and hated, around 7:00 p.m., it would always feel like everything was about to fall apart. The window was full of untended orders. A tray of plates and glasses crashed to the floor. A four-top in the corner threatened to leave. But somehow, by 9:30 p.m., the chaos had lifted, and we were sitting outside the kitchen door on broken chairs with a beverage and a smoke, talking about how we had somehow fed the people. Then we would begin planning for the next day.

That’s life in a restaurant, and that’s what I hope for Chef Carmy and all of his friends: survival, resilience, reflection, satisfaction, and peace. And still—still—that’s what I believe is possible for this country, too. 

Yes, Chef: Someday soon on a cool evening, we will gather with the people we love—some of whom we haven’t even met yet—and laugh and cry when we talk about how we got unstuck and everybody got fed and we somehow made it through.