A long time ago, at the end of the last century, I remember a photograph of Theodor Herzl hanging on the staircase of the Colégio Israelita Brasileiro in Porto Alegre, Brazil, which always left an impression on me. It was a picture of him standing on the balcony of a hotel in Basel in 1897, his dark beard, his eyes fixed on a horizon that isn’t in the photo but exists within him, with the posture of someone who believes he is seeing something others haven’t seen yet. He was a secular man, shaped in the cafés of Vienna, who knew practically nothing about Judaism when he began writing about a Jewish State. What he wanted was a nation. What he envisioned was a place where Jews could, finally, be a part of the world while remaining Jews.

I don’t know Basel. But I knew antisemitism in Brazil. Not expressed hatred, but the strangeness of when there was Christmas everywhere except in my house, or in the acid joke about stingy Jews, or in the very Portuguese language that I love so much, which created its own verbs and nouns where antisemitism emerges almost poetically, like judiar, judiaria, judiação. In English, they lose their antisemitic magic, but believe this old Jew when he says they paved the way for my desire to live in a place where I would just be Me.

On the beaches of Israel, where I sometimes walk in the late afternoon, Israel feels, for a few minutes, exactly as it should be. People of all backgrounds, secular or religious, children running on the sand, the Hebrew language mixed with Arabic, Russian, and over a dozen other languages. It is no exaggeration. In its most recent editions, Ethnologue—a reference organization that acts as a global encyclopedic inventory of living languages—formally catalogs between 34 and 37 living languages in current use within the territory of Israel. In those moments, the country I chose still exists. The problem is........

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