Last Shabbat of 2023. In the past year, I have changed in unexpected ways I’m unable to verbalize, which is a new phenomenon for me in English. I always know what to say, given some time, even when the circumstances are difficult. I suppose I never encountered something as hard as this, because I’ve spent over a month of my time attempting to explain and I’m still at a loss. Something about the horrors of war at your doorstep and people you thought were friends—or at least friendly—who turned very ugly. It’s two-fold: one builds on the other and multiplies in my mind exponentially, until the world is totally different than before 7 October. Before the veil lifted. I can say what’s happening around me, but I can’t accurately say what’s happening inside me. Not yet.
I’m very used to being mute or unable to say more than basic things in Hebrew, my adopted second language, which I’m only about 50-80% fluent in, depending on the topic. This year I learned a lot of Hebrew vocabulary related to war. I didn’t know the word for hostages before this year. I didn’t know the word for ceasefire. I didn’t know the word for escalation. Now I do.
I moved to Jerusalem this year, which was an enormous decision for me, and one I’ve been happy with, though I miss all my friends in the Golan and think of them almost daily. But things are easier here for me. More amenities. More English. Faster shipping. Better resources, both health-wise and for everyday life. Better food. Much closer to family. If it hadn’t been for the war, I’d have said this year was one of significantly less anxiety than many years past. Instead, it ended up the most stressful in memory.
I don’t know what 2023 has done to me. I can feel I am different, but uncertain how to describe or quantify that difference. It is not something understood yet in words. I understand it in emotions: Terror. Anger. Frustration. Deep sadness. Resentful staring at words I know are untruthful and in bad faith, everywhere, everywhere, everywhere I look. A core that melted under pressure and is forming into something as yet unseen, not yet hardened into shape. Unending love for my people, for my family, for my country.
I am not shocked by the outstanding way Israelis have responded to this war, always searching for how to help, how to inspire, how to bring a few seconds of joy in an entire day of bleak destruction. Every shop I visit has encouraging signs to lift spirits, to remind us we’re together, to say we will win together, that we stand strong because we have each other. Even my massaman curry dinner is delivered in a blue and white package displaying the Israeli flag. I ordered a bakery delivery last week and it included a hand-written note about how these times are hard and they appreciate I came to them to buy bread and we will see better times very soon, hopefully. Israelis are the best. Israelis are like no other people. I am grateful and proud to be one of them.
And I am bowled over by the world’s response to our tiny spark of a Jewish home in the midst of an enormous and dangerous Middle East. How people across the ocean, living in safe countries with safe neighbors, who’ve never visited Israel, feel they have a right to push us past our grief, past our pain, our fear, our crisis, and condemn us for protecting our families. How they are completely confident in judging what we should do. That we should accept a one-sided ceasefire while our enemies keep trying to kill us.
I haven’t seen a single soul provide a way for our families to stay safe after, as we lay down our weapons and wait for that inevitable moment when our deadly enemy raises theirs, as they’ve promised the world they will do.
I see people insist that they understand the historical context enough to make judgment on Israeli actions when there’s never been a war like this, for these reasons, waged in this way, with an enemy of this measure. I certainly don’t understand enough to make these calls they’re making for us from across the ocean, as though war is easy, and as though all ceasefires mean peace. And I’ve lived here a decade, and been aware of Israeli and Middle Eastern matters since childhood.
I was 100% against any hostage exchange, until it happened. I moaned about the precedent it would set. I was furious at the unbalanced numbers. We could not do this. I was certain.
And yet…from that first night, as I watched little children and women return to us, and heard their stories of the hell they went through under captivity, I could not be anything but relieved that the government understood the matter better than I did. Our people must be rescued. I am horrified. I cannot express it in clearer language than that. They must come home and the price can be high, because their safety will be worth it.
So that is something I learned about myself: I could flip so fast from being completely against this exchange to pushing for it to happen again, and again, and again, until everyone is home. I am sitting at home, relatively safe, and they are underground in Gaza, possibly in cages, possibly being raped, possibly being starved. All of this happened to hostages returned to us. We cannot rest until we have them all back. Screw precedent. These are our people. If no one else will fight for them, we will, because that is why the State of Israel exists.
Ten years in Israel. An entire decade of Israelis and Hebrew and the kind of wholeness that can only come from matching your soul to its home. If I weren’t in Israel right now, I think I’d be an even greater mess, and want to return immediately. I couldn’t go through this outside Israel. It would be intolerable. I have waited across the ocean many times as people I loved died and were buried. It is terrible. You feel so helpless and sad and alone. I think this would be similar, if I were not here—except at scale. This is the worst thing I’ve lived through, but I feel nothing but gratitude for the privilege of living in my ancestral land, following mitzvot from the Torah we can only perform here in the land of Israel, and being surrounded by people who may not know me but who understand me. That is something that would be impossible in my birth country. Here, I don’t need to know fluent Hebrew to be understood. I am understood before I say a word. It is that recognition, that kinship, that unspoken connection I cannot find anywhere but here.
So maybe I know, after all, what to say. I don’t know the person I will become but I know who I always will be.
I am an Israeli who would live nowhere else right now. I am a proud Zionist who sees how the term Zionism has been perverted, until the battle of semantics makes communication with people villainizing Zionism nearly useless. I am a Jewish person raised by Jewish people raised by Jewish people a hundred times over and more, back to the days of 2000 years ago when we were pushed from our homeland by actual colonizers, and who lived under other people’s boot, at their mercy for two millennia. And during those millennia, we prayed facing the east so we could pray facing Jerusalem. We sang psalms that lamented the loss of our home. Three times daily in prayer, we asked our God to return us from exile back to our lands. And every year we made a promise: next year in Jerusalem.
This year, I am in Jerusalem. Next year, I am in Jerusalem. This decade, I have lived in the land thousands of my ancestors cried to God to return them to, pledging devotion, pledging virtuous acts, if only they could step on Israeli soil again and kiss the walls of the holy temple. I live in walking distance from the Western Wall, two kilometers away. I live in a city that is very old and very new. Stones that I pass today can remember my ancestors. When it rains, I think of the water that fell on heads of people who gave me my blood, thousands of years ago. And that water absorbed back into the soil, carried out to sea, and evaporated into the sky, over and over thousands of times, until the clouds above and the raindrops that fall on me today recognize the descendant returned.
These things are true even if terrorists want to kill me. They are true even if the world lies about us. So if I cannot speak with the world, I will speak with the stones of Jerusalem and the clouds above me, and I will find myself sated and whole and known.
