In October I will board a plane from Germany to Israel for a journey lasting barely four hours. I will be traveling for one reason only: to cast a single vote.

I will not be alone. Israel allows no absentee voting, so roughly half a million Israelis living abroad face the same choice this autumn: buy a ticket or sit the election out. Some are organizing charter flights. Others are sharing bookings online, comparing fares to Ben Gurion the way people elsewhere compare polling averages.

For a few weeks, democracy acquired an airfare.

When I left Israel, it was not because I had stopped believing in the country. It was because I had been given an opportunity to do something I thought mattered.

For years, I ran kosher restaurants in Europe. Most people would call that a career change. I never did. A kosher restaurant is more than a place to eat. It is where a community gathers after synagogue, where families celebrate birthdays and bar mitzvahs, where a traveler eating alone can sit down at a table and feel less alone. Every Friday afternoon, my kitchen raced the setting sun, trying to have every challah baked and every pot off the stove before Shabbat arrived.

My address had changed. My sense of belonging had not.

Leaving Israel did not mean leaving the Jewish people. If anything, it meant serving another part of it. The communities I cooked for in Basel were not an alternative to Israel. They were part of the same Jewish story. My move changed my address, not my allegiance.

That is why I listened carefully when, on a radio program on Israel State Radio in May, broadcaster Akiva Novick argued that........

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