A man waves an Israeli flag at Damascus Gate in the Old City during Jerusalem Day celebrations on June 5, 2024. Photo by Chaim Goldberg/Flash90.
The fight for survival brings out the best in our people, who step up to the plate time and again to help their fellow citizens, their fellow Jews, yearn to make this nation thrive.
It’s 8 a.m. on a Monday, and I am making my bed.
At the same exact moment, my Ethiopian neighbor is hanging out her wash downstairs, the Russians on the floor below are making coffee, and three blocks away, my daughter is brushing her 5-year-old’s hair while the baby naps in his swing.
An ordinary morning in ordinary lives … except for the Israeli Air Force plane roaring overhead. It’s a sound we hear a lot this year, but we still pause every time in our bed-making, our wash-hanging, our coffee-making and our hair-brushing. As a reminder, here in Israel, we depend on the thousands of young people willing to do extraordinary things to keep our lives ordinary.
I went to the funeral of a soldier in the Israel Defense Forces a few weeks ago; thousands of people were lined up along the road to the cemetery, carrying Israeli flags through an eerie, almost otherworldly silence. Together, religious and secular, Sephardic and Ashkenazi, old and young, we bore witness to the family, to the savta—the soldier’s grandmother—crying for this lost child of her child. “Please,” I prayed that afternoon as the sun set over the freshly dug grave, “May there be no more funerals in this country for anyone under the age of 90.”
And what are they defending, exactly? A country the size of New Jersey that exists against all human odds; surrounded by more than a dozen sworn enemies, winning war after war even when they’re out-gunned, out-manned and out-moneyed. All the while making the desert bloom and building a First World country in a Third World neighborhood.
In the process, its citizens have somehow managed to invent everything from the cell phone, drip irrigation and the Disc-on-Key to surgical robots, and yes, even the cherry tomato. A country that for 76 years has welcomed home Jews from around the globe—Holocaust survivors and refugees from Arab lands, those from Ethiopia and the former Soviet Union, and today, with a flood of antisemitism ringing the “Time to Get Out Now” bell from France and across Europe.
Just this month, I read that there have been more than 10,000 requests to open aliyah application files since the Oct. 7 Hamas terrorist attacks in southern Israel with nearly 1,800 North Americans having immigrated since then.
Once here, it doesn’t take long to begin collecting your personal “only in Israel” list. The yeshivah guy who walked me three blocks out of his way to make sure I found my Hebrew class. The soldier burdened under her own backpack grabbing my suitcase and shlepping it up two flights of stairs. The driver I watched slam the bus into reverse when he saw the wallet a man had just left on the seat. The woman in a tank top and shorts jumping up to kiss the supermarket’s mezuzah.
Only in Israel.
It was my first Yom Kippur as an Israeli citizen, nearly 11 years ago, and I was walking home from shul when I spotted a man on a bench talking on his phone and smoking a cigarette.
“Oh, come on, buddy,” I mutter under my breath. “Can’t you give it up for one day?”
When suddenly, it hit me. “Wait a minute! This guy had the merit to be born here, whereas it took you 61 years to be worthy of it … and you know what? There’s only one Judge and guess what, sweetheart, it’s not you.”
Truth is, when you move here, you automatically merge your fate and that of your descendants with the fate of this land and the Jewish people—a people who at the end of the day is one big (albeit somewhat cantankerous) family. Your personal destiny clicking into the three-dimensional Jewish Homeland jigsaw puzzle designed, constructed and directed from Above.
And it’s only from here that you’re able to bless them at close range—the soldier in his army greens, the mom with her little ones on a summer outing, the Holocaust survivor in the wheelchair pushed by his Filipino aide. With blessings, too, for those we can’t see but who are family nonetheless, having taken up residence in our hearts, beginning with the hostages and each and every IDF soldier. Including the ones now flying over our heads.
This year, we immigrants have seen that in times of war, Israelis up their game. Barbecues for soldiers, socks knit by someone’s savta warding off the winter chill in less-than-5-star accommodations, massage therapists arrive on base to work the knots out of war-weary muscles, drawings and letters from schoolchildren.
We know these guys personally because unlike other countries, where only a small fraction of young adults ever wear a uniform, after high school, Israeli teenagers head to the army instead of college to serve their country—and the Jewish people. It’s simply what they do (though there’s nothing simple about it).
And here’s another trend: Since Oct 7, it seems there’s a baby boom underway here judging by all the big bellies and strollers on the street—many pushed by women well into their 40s, who thought diapers and midnight feedings were behind them.
Yes, the Torah does instruct us to “choose life,” but how many of us can recite the rest of that line? “I have set before you life and death, blessing and curse. And you shall choose life, so that you and your children may live.” (Deuteronomy 30:19). Maybe our Creator who gave us this land through miracle after miracle 76 years ago just wants to hear us say “Thank you” for this gift our great-grandparents could only have dreamed of.
Of course, this gift comes at a cost, one that Israeli families continue to pay. All we can do is pray that this debt is paid in full now so we—and our children and grandchildren—can live the kind of lives we promised back on that mountain 3,337 years ago in peace and protection under these brilliant blue skies.
Without one more grandmother having to cry at her grandson’s grave.
Those of us who have been given the awesome gift of being here know that it’s a privilege to make our beds, hang our wash, brew our coffee and brush our children’s hair in this holy land, and to be able to bless Jews at such close range. With every IDF plane passing overhead, we’re reminded that we owe our ordinary lives to G-d, who promised this land to the Children of Israel so long ago, and to the courage of thousands of young Jews.
May our lives—and the lives of all the babies being born here now—prove worthy of defending. Against those who attack us both here and far away, on college campuses, in the media, on city streets and in back-room political deals.
And through the way we choose to live our lives, may we make G-d and all our green-camo-clad heroes proud.
This column (unedited) previously ran on JNS.org