The U.S. continues to willfully deny that Jerusalem is Israel’s capital; it behooves us to not only acknowledge that Jerusalem is the eternal capital of Israel, but that Israel itself, Eretz Yisrael, is the capital of the Jewish world: Noisy, messy, complicated, far from perfect in its contemporary iteration, but forever the axis of Jewish history, ingrained with a sanctity that can never – will never – be displaced.
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Lest I give the impression that I am so ablaze with aliyah fever that I am leaving without looking back, I must confess: The ideals that I and my family (many of whom have preceded me on aliyah) hold dear need regularly to be propped up and stoked like a campfire. Besides the aforementioned challenges, and how hard it is to leave behind everyone and everything I know and so much that I love, there is another issue: Competing with the feelings of pride and exhilaration as we approach our departure is concern – read: fear – about the very real dangers that characterize life in Israel.
Unlike here, where terrorism rears its ugly head in periodic incidents but which few of us give a second thought to while walking down the street, there are attempts on Israeli lives every single day –thank God, most of them thwarted and unreported by any media outlet except perhaps JewishPress.com and Arutz Sheva. Our enemies are constantly devising new modes of attack that are increasingly difficult to prevent, such as the frightening rise in “vehicular terror” in which rampaging Palestinians use their cars as weapons.
Yes, I am afraid. And a fear that is rational, grounded in fact, as this is, can never be completely overcome.
Still, we in the Diaspora have now had to face the reality that we cannot take our safety for granted. For a new oleh from France, the security situation in Israel is probably an improvement on what exists back home. For those of us coming from the U.S., that is not the case. As disconcerting as a swastika on a shul is, a figurative knife in the chest does not scare me as much as one with a steel blade. The physical attacks against Jews here are still exceptional enough to make the news.
But many of the terrible things that happen in this world are utterly unpredictable. A plane full of passengers disappears without a trace. Another plane is deliberately crashed by a deranged pilot. A family is snuffed out by flames as they sleep. A little boy in an ice cream shop is mowed down by an errant driver. Young swimmers at the ocean’s edge are mauled by a shark. The bottom line is that Hashem holds each of our lives in His Hands. If it is Hashem’s will that harm befall a person, not the belly of a whale nor the most remote desert cave can protect him.
I want to believe we are safer here. It feels so. But that feeling rests upon the faulty premise that good and bad occur according to a set of rules and probabilities that we can predict with at least some degree of accuracy, like the weather.
So the fear that lingers must not carry the day. It is another piece of baggage that I will bring with me, like my preference for 2% milk and American notions of customer service.
Although I harbor my own fears about living in Israel, I don’t appreciate hearing “Aren’t you worried about…?” It’s disconcerting when others express doubt or negativity about this challenge that we are undertaking with passion and with all the strength and faith we can muster. I suppose that’s what people who quit Wall Street to open a bagel shop, or who go skydiving or swimming with sharks or, returning to my ba’al teshuvah analogy, who leave behind one life to take on a new, much more difficult one, encounter. How can anyone not get it? they wonder. This high, this sense of purpose, this stripping of layers to reach a deeper part of oneself.
