We are living two different realities. That is the only way I can describe it. I started a series about this general topic awhile back. But this morning I had an “a-aha” moment.

I see your headlines as if I’m reading adult animation where the voice and character’s lips are just one second out of sync, “Most American Jews Disapprove of US Military Actions Against Iran.”

In the past twenty four hours I’ve been to shelter several times (it’s a blur- and I’m not complaining, thank Gd I have a Miklat!) I’ve been cleaning my apartment for Passover. I organized for the remaining deliveries of emergency food and household items to 39 local families with young children whose father has been gone for most of the past two years of their lives and they don’t have enough shekels for toilet paper.

I’ve pulled my 8 wheeled red beach cart along the streets of Netanya full of cutlery to be boiled at the corner Chabad so yearlong knives can be used for the upcoming week of Passover. The new food processor blades got shlepped to a different corner where the British expat Young Israel of North Netanya has an outdoor kelim mikvah that is mysteriously locked except during mikvah office hours. I bought my handmade in 18 minutes or less shmurah matzah from another corner where, in a suspicious transaction, a long white bearded man ducked behind a wall, looked both ways, and delivered me a nondescript cardboard box full of the goods.

When I was pulling my red cart along the residential Shlomo HaMelech Street, because every town of Israel has a road for King Solomon somewhere near the streets for King David and HaRav Kook, close to streets for Israel’s founders with very different political views- each getting an avenue in most every Israeli town—Jabotinsky, Hertzel, Ben Gurion. When I lived in America I can’t recall pondering the deeper meanings of “Cheltenham” when I travelled on Cheltenham Avenue in NE Philly. Not once in all my years.

And not once in the past several weeks of “This Iran” which is only different by personal stories from “my first Iran” (a year and a half ago when I spent my Freshman rush during 300 ballistic missiles in a shelter that turned out to not at all be a shelter with a window in the closet—ahh those were the days.) Or the second Iran, when I took two ballistic missiles on the unprotected beach and watched an interception over my former mahmad that wasn’t a mahmad on the 23rd floor (that’s a great piece if you want to read it.) Well not once have I put together this sentence or anything remotely similar in my head (I’m even chuckling trying to write it)—“I don’t approve of this war.”

I’m searching for a metaphor here because it’s so ridiculous to me. It’s like “I don’t approve of you eating.” Not eating this or that in this amount of quantity. You ingesting food offends me so you need to stop eating, no liquid nutrition or IVs, just stop all nutrients whatsoever. I don’t approve.

Do I have to point out the logical conclusion of not eating is certain death?

Okay so I don’t approve of someone else feeding you. Or it’s fine if someone feeds you, but not on my tax dollar. I’ll only pay funeral fees.

It’s just something (unless you’re a Canadian ad guy working on their latest tax dollar funded assisted suicide jingle) that no-one thinks of. Oh do I approve of my own right to exist? Or my neighbor’s right to live? And yet….

I am sure my Aha moment is connected to a call I had yesterday with a family member. Someone I love deeply. She started to talk about why as an American Jew she can’t possibly support the war in Iran (I mean it’s fine for Israel they have no choice, but it’s not America’s war…) I literally felt like I had an out of body experience. Here is this person who I love. Who is a Jew. Who I think would say she loves Judaism. I am sure she loves me. And it was if we were literally having one conversation where one spoke in Mandarin and the other in Tsalagi. And yes, follow the metaphor, they did not understand each others’ language.

And you know I’m working on my equanimity. I try to think of my words before they come tumbling out to never be retrieved again. I love every Jew and make space for many paths….and so when I could set aside any egregious bubbles just about to break the water’s surface and erupt into a full raging boil. And I could close my mind for a second to defending rational, basic political constructs or qualifying military aggressions. When I closed my eyes for a minute to breath in harmony and find the words…I felt overwhelming sadness.

And I think I said it out loud. I am sure it was at least a whisper, if not more, though after the long mutual pause we took the conversation on an immediate detour…..

When did being an American become more important to you than being a Jew?

For my entire life —until arriving in TLV on a one way ticket from EWR with five suitcases weighing 32 pounds or less…or was it kilos? Already I can’t remember—I pondered the philosophical question, “Am I an American Jew or a Jewish American?” Which was the essence of my definition, as a Jew or as an American? Well, of course, in my smugness I was an American Jew. American was my modifier, my essence was as a Jew.

Even though I’m only Nearly not authentically an Israeli, I have never even pondered this question. Am I a Nearly yet not completely Jewish Israeli? An Israeli Jew? A US passport holding expat Jewish Amerikai living in Israel? Perhaps the questions of sentence structure overwhelmed me when I’ve been running to shelter in 90 seconds or less because a missile from Lebanon doesn’t have the luxury of time to set off the now multiple, thus confusing almost to ignorable levels except for the deafening 2 am alarms that turn out to be a waste of an interrupted dream about Hugh Grant in his Music and Lyrics days because we didn’t even get a cluster bomb in Netanya this time.

Or maybe I just don’t care.

We are watching the same movie. Yet one of us is watching a horror show. The other is bingeing a based on true story of inspiration, grit and ultimate redemption docu-drama told in 90 minutes that sure seems faster or longer or maybe less.

And even more importantly: we are not shocked, dismayed, confused or trying to sit with a gray washing of two people’s realities could be true at the same time if we just make space for differing political perspectives.

For us, we are merely assisting the inevitable.

We have a clarity of mission because we have a clarity in who we are. We have a clarity of national purpose because we understand our personal identity.

Baruch Hashem I’ve really been working on my book. And if you’ve ever been deep in the middle of a still unformed project, especially of the creative sort, whether you’re creating new no touch mop heads made out of a continual loop of 300 feet of American loomed cording, or you know, maybe a book for the sake of argument…when your mind and soul are deep in the middle of trying to riddle out how to throw that pot so it doesn’t collapse on the extra ridge of the new pottery form…you see most of your experiences in how they relate to your current creative juncture.

So I can’t catch you up on all of how my brain got here, I’ll have to leave something for when you read the book. But here are a few basic building blocks that clearly led me to The Twist from the Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy that despite many attempts over the course of my 56 years I’ve never been able to finish.

The cliff notes are this: the joke is that it was the wrong question.

I, like millions of Israelis and even Very Nearly Israelis, am not asking your question of whether I support America or Israel’s rights to instigate a war, or to defend ourselves during a war, or to support the spending of billions of dollars or shekels or even the virtually worthless forever spiraling rand in ammunitions to bomb sad defenseless factories for the design, building, fueling and export of ballistic missiles that explode into a fireworks of little baby missiles snuggly clustered together over their 1,000 plus mile trip until they land on the final destination- a daycare.

Instead I’m wazing from my address to Mendelson street where the Katz family from Connecticut is staying this week to sit shiva for their 22 year old son who came to Israel alone to defend their land and was murdered in Lebanon by some of those Iranian funded ammunition vehicles.

I am not at all saying I have it worse. Poor courageous me, so you don’t get a say. I am in fact saying the opposite.

My book organizes the Architecture of Purpose as it’s been shown to us for thousands of years since the giving of the Torah at Mt Sinai. This ladder is based on three main rungs:

The Work of Being Human. The purpose of humanity that we all share. To be decent. To be kind. To follow laws of morality that allow us to make space for each other.

The Work of Shared Responsibility. As a member of a family, a neighborhood, a culture, a country, a religion or a tribe.

The Work that is Uniquely Ours To Do.

And my aha moment came when I was reading about Israel being in the new list of the ten happiest countries in the world. I of course wanted to know why the researchers determined that those of us in Israel, in the middle of the war within the war where the missiles never stopped even when the almost always yet nearly never actually factual NY Socialist-Arab Times said there was no war, why are we so …happy.

Now I know this will be a shocker, sit down: The report is annually commissioned by the United Nations who, in this case, used Gallup for their data collection. So I went to read the report. Shocker one- this didn’t answer my question because the report on the 2026 happiest nations was all about happiness and social media and not about the actual study.

So I went to watch the report’s video summary. Shocker two- the UN representatives and their video editors managed to carry an entire research summary of the top ten countries while listing only nine of them. In fact, one highlighted researcher explained in his 20 second or less clip that living under violence – like for example Afghanistan- makes it impossible for people to be happy.

But somehow along my early research for the post that may or may not ever be written titled maybe “Why is Israel One of the Happiest Countries in the World?” I latched on to a new-to-me concept of A Culture of Resilience.

The answers were unexpected because the researchers were not asking: are you ecstatically joyful (though certainly many bomb shelter videos would give that a heck yeah!) The World Happiness Report uses a measure called the Cantril Self-Anchoring Scale. Participants are asked:

Imagine a ladder from 0 to 10 10 = best possible life 0 = worst possible life Where do you stand?

Imagine a ladder from 0 to 10

10 = best possible life

0 = worst possible life

That number = your life evaluation score. The higher that score, the more happy you are. Researchers are not asking is your life is easy, they are asking you to rate how satisfied you are right now with your life as a whole.

And what the top ten countries have in common the most is that they are Cultures of Resilience. Whether it’s Finland’s wars and poverty or Iceland’s isolation and harsh climate or Costa Rica’s economic struggles, or yes, Israel’s never-ending wars on seven fronts—all of the top ten happiest countries have had it hard. Some would say hard as the human condition.

So why did these ten countries after the hard seem to bounce back even better than before? Why did Israel make the top ten list only after really tough Covid years that were followed by threats of political upheaval followed by unthinkable national tragedy?

Before jumping to being a know it all and saying just read my book, I wanted to dig deeper. I learned that we have cultures of resilience because we have resiliency in systems. So I started to learn about systems theory. To all of my readers with PhD’s in physics or economics, please forgive what must be a kindergarten view of these big theories. But here’s my stab at it:

A system begins with a bunch of unconnected components—whether it’s cells or people or organizations. Those individual pieces come together and they interact. When they interact the system itself changes the individual and together- B’Yachad- they have properties as a whole that they do not have when alone. So a water molecule is not wet. You don’t have the sensation of wetness until a whole bunch of those molecules come together and mix it up in your faucet.

This is called emergence- the moment when the whole, the collective of individual components just minding their own business on any given day come together at a 80’s style discotheque and mix it up baby and then something happens. It’s not just mixing gin and vermouth for a martini, it’s the chemical reaction when you mix flour and yeast and water and create dough. It’s when neurons become a mind. When ants become a colony. Or when citizens become a nation.

So I can’t understand your answer—that you disapprove—because we’re asking different questions. I’m no longer an American Jew or a Jewish American. I’ve never considered whether I’d be a Jewish Israeli or an Israeli Jew. I certainly don’t think I’m better than you or different in my own right.

When, after over five decades and an incredibly disproportionate number of unwise decisions during those five decades, of feeling like the proverbial square peg in a round hole, I finally found the optimal controlled conditions to cause the chemical reaction that was meant to be all along…then…

Wishing you a beautiful and meaningful and peaceful Chag Pesach Sameach!

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