Crossing Back

Reflecting on Israel

I'm at Ben Gurion, waiting for a midnight flight, and the airport right now is its own kind of Havdalah. Shabbat has just gone out and a whole country is quickly rushing back into the ordinary week. In an hour I’ll be flying out of it, up and west, my other home. Coming to this land, you make aliya, you go up. It’s a spiritual ascent. The word for leaving is yeridah, going down.

Last week I landed telling myself I’d win a colour back. Last year I wrote this country in the colours of grief, orange and yellow and a field of red, and I wanted to know whether a living place still owned the rest of the spectrum, or whether we’d quietly handed it all over to mourning. I now have my answer.

Gold, green, red, blue, white at work

Gold

Gold was the first night, in Jerusalem, at a table where Yaron and Jacqui Vital told us about the daughter that October 7 took from them. The day before, a young Hasidic man in Hezekiah’s tunnel taught me that this land is called Eretz HaTzvi because, like a deer's hide, it stretches to make room for everyone who comes home. Hold the difficulty and the joy at once, Gil Troy had told us our first morning, and by nightfall the country had proven him right. Gold is not the absence of grief, but the precious thing grief can’t put out.

Green

Green was Har Herzl, where families press living things into the soil over their fallen sons and stake the green tree of Golani above boys who were nineteen. It was to the market that same afternoon, loud and impossibly alive, because we bury our children on a green hill in the morning and somehow argue over green olives by lunch and don’t necessarily experience it as a contradiction. We experience it as Tuesday. It’s the thing we’ve always called resilience, which I finally understood to mean holding all of it at once and refusing to let any of it fold you.

Red

Red was the hardest day, the whole country bending south toward the wound, and it’s something neither Israel nor the Diaspora has yet recovered from. But even there it refused to stay simple. Sderot isn’t a sad city, it’s 40,000 people who cook and build and grow on the very periphery of the map. A woman whose husband was killed at his Sderot police station told us the lesson she carries is that we must all, simply, be good people. And in Kfar Azza, next to the Elkabets home left exactly as that morning left it, there were cranes and scaffolding, because these people have decided the blood is not the end of the sentence. Life comes back up through the red.

Blue

Blue was the sea and the sky and the flag, and then it was Keith Siegel, who spent 484 days underground without seeing any of it, and who survived by building a community in his head and speaking to them one by one, which may be the most Jewish thing I’ve ever heard. His wife Aviva gave us this: “The terrorists spend their days deciding who to hate. We get to decide who to love.” Blue turned out to mean the sky, and the distance between the people who stand under it without a thought and the people who were buried beneath a city, waiting to be allowed to look up.

White

White was yesterday, the White City - Tel Aviv - raised out of bare dunes, a secular crowd at the port singing the Shabbat in as a bride, a museum that has finally stopped telling the Jewish story as a long funeral. And it was a table again, a white one this time, where I was privileged to give a dvar Torah to a group of brave and curious and phenomenal Canadian educators that didn’t take long to write because the week had written it for me. Today we read the parsha that lists all forty-two places the Israelites camped on the way to the land, and Rashi says the stops are the story, that you don’t get somewhere in a single leap but always in stages, and that each stage counts.

And in the same portion, two tribes ask to live on the far side of the river, and are never condemned for it, and are asked for one thing in return: that living far away never harden into checking out, that when it matters, they cross back and show up for their people and their cause. That’s what I am taking home.

Most of Jewish history has happened on the other side of the river - in fact, I’m heading there right now. You’re allowed to live there. You just aren’t allowed to forget which way the bridge runs.

And so

They’re about to call my flight. I can’t fit the gold or the green or the red or the blue into my suitcase packed with sweaty clothes, too many books, gifts for my kids, and more Tel Aviv sand than intended, and I’ve stopped trying. What I can carry is the white blank page, and a promise to keep filling it, and to keep crossing back, and to bring my family next time.

And now, for a week spent hugging my wife and kids, getting my inbox back down to zero, and taking a week off from writing.

Thanks for coming along.