How do you bear the suffering?  

Heartbreak is what I feel when I connect to you now. Our sacred home of Jewish self-determination devolves daily into increasing domination and destruction, poisoning all who live on you. 

I cannot shake the ache of witnessing your soil soaked in blood, ashes, and rubble. I live with outrage of what is done in your name, in our name, in the name of our love of you.

It surprises me how intense my heartbreak is. My earliest memories of you are vague stories of my great grandfather dreaming of you from Russia. Emigrating to the United States in the late 1800s, he worked tirelessly to both support his family and raise money for a Jewish state. In 1928, he manifested his dream and arrived in Palestine, where he lived out his years, an ocean away from his family. A devout Zionist, his bones remain with you on the Mount of Olives. 

Unlike my great grandfather’s deep yearning, I was raised an assimilated Jew and proud Hebrew school drop out. As a social justice activist, I carried mostly critique for the State of Israel. Our people’s millennial longing to return to you, the land, did not yet resonate with me.   

I was 23 when we met and began our slow courtship. On a year-long fellowship in Israel, each morning, I entered a world I had not known, studying traditional Jewish texts in a beit midrash. In the afternoon, I volunteered at Rabbis for Human Rights, applying that morning’s learnings to the reality unfolding each day. Over time, I learned Jewish history and our people’s connection to you, from Biblical times through to the present. I discovered how this yearning to return to you has woven through our prayers across millennia and continues in our prayers to this very day. 

Having grown up in a Christian-dominant culture, being in the majority was thrilling. A calendar rooted in Jewish time—centering Shabbat........

© The Times of Israel (Blogs)