It had been seven years since I was last in Israel. So, when the opportunity presented itself for a short visit this month, I hopped a plane. My inner Zionist was rekindled in so many vital ways. I want to share that passion with you, dear reader, to hopefully inspire you to go to make your own pilgrimage to Israel if you’ve never been, or to go back if you haven’t visited in some time.
“We all stood at Sinai”
As I prepared to scan my ticket to exit the train station, an elderly woman stood trapped behind the closed gates. She failed to exit the turnstile quickly enough on her first scan and the device would not accept a second. Realizing her predicament, I spoke to her in Hebrew, inviting her to walk closely behind me as the two of us exited the station using my ticket. She put her arms around my waist and matched my steps to freedom. She trusted me to lead her through.
Later, while walking the streets of Jerusalem, my friend and I stopped to admire an outdoor garden and point of spiritual reflection (pictured below). The Hebrew says: “Everything that is planted sends out roots, of this you can believe!”
As we stood there, an elderly woman approached us and told us the story of her own family’s roots in Jerusalem. She spoke of her love for the city and about how each home in this old neighborhood of Ohel Moshe sheltered a long history of Jewish life. Speaking to us in the easier-to-understand Hebrew of senior citizens, she felt compelled to share her story with these two Jewish men admiring flowers planted in window boxes.
While strangers can often engage one another in conversation, there is a different quality to the dialogues in Israel. The assumption is made that “we stood together at Sinai,” that we have some common experience or history that binds us with a familiarity that stretches deep into the Jewish past.
As passionately as Israelis can fight with one another, as savagely as they can disagree over politics and religion, it seems more reflective of a dysfunctional family than a divided nation. Underlying the strange dynamic of the modern Jewish state is the awareness that even one’s adversaries are partners in the latest iteration of Jewish independence. Even as one side or another decries the failures and shortcomings of the nation, neither is willing to release its claim to the ultimate wellbeing of a Jewish neighbor. Of course, there remain challenges and significant outliers (it would be naïve to suggest otherwise), but the overwhelming experience is one of the interconnected embrace of Jewish community.
—Rabbi Ron Stern