Going home

Going home
[I originally wrote this as a blog entry for a special section on my journey with Nefesh B'Nefesh on a very special trip to Israel. The piece also appeared in the special Rosh Hashanah issue of the Heritage in 2008. Thank you, Nefesh B'Nefesh and all "my" olim, for giving my words wings.]

The full moon, cradled in the darkness on the other side of the cockpit glass, lit our way over the grey and billowing Atlantic. At 35,000 feet, the Boeing 777 seemed to float toward Tel Aviv. Its cargo was precious--two hundred twenty-five American Jews from 25 states, ranging in age from a one-month-old to a 71-year-old--all chasing a dream through the night sky to make aliyah to the Jewish homeland in Israel.

"Eifo anachnu achshav?" I tried out my Hebrew on pilot Gideon Livni.

"Somewhere over Atlantis," he said, gesturing over the vastness of the mid-Atlantic with a smile.

Our flight was something like a fairy tale: a magic carpet ride, a 2,000-year-old dream that in other times, other places, would never have stood a chance of coming true. For the Jews on the Monday flight out of JFK, it was real.

Since 2002, the organization Nefesh B'Nefesh has flown some 16,000 new olim to Israel, two thousand of them this summer. NBN works in close partnership with the state of Israel and El Al to ease the logistical and financial burdens of aliyah for Jews in North America and the United Kingdom. NBN co-founder Rabbi Yehoshua Fass calls it "a modern-day miracle."

These Anglo-American olim are making an "aliyah of choice," in which the persecutions and catastrophes visited on Jews in ages past play no part. The olim I met aboard the Aug. 18 flight embody NBN co-founder Tony Gelbart's description as "people who are not running fromsomething, they're running to something."

Rena Glazer and her husband and three-year-old daughter Ariana are making aliyah to Rehavia in Jerusalem from Oakland, Calif. Rena is the granddaughter of Holocaust survivors, and her grandparents were at the airport Monday afternoon for a farewell shaped by 60 years of history. For them in their youth, there had been no Israel.

Judy and Mort Zemel left Boca Raton, Fla. for Jerusalem after, as Judy told me, "moving in that direction for about four years." They've been renting in Jerusalem on a yearly basis, spent major holidays there, and traveled back and forth between Florida and Israel. "We love the country, so we'd like to make it official." Now that Jews have their own state after so many centuries of diaspora, for the Zemels aliyah is also "a way of showing thankfulness."

The couple are shomer mitzvot, which means they lead a lifestyle observant of the commandments. They studied with Rabbi Fass at the Boca Raton Synagogue, so they've followed Nefesh B'Nefesh from its inception, and two of their three adult children now in Israel made aliyah through NBN. Rabbi Fass "had really done his homework to make the organization economically viable, and we were very impressed by what he was doing," Judy told me.

In the U.S., Mort Zemel heads his own law firm, and Judy works in real estate. Since both their offices operate out of their Boca home and they're moving toward retirement, the logistics of aliyah have been fairly smooth. They have an apartment waiting, and they're looking forward to spending more time with their Israeli children and grandchildren. Their 16-year-old granddaughter is planning to go into the Israeli National Service.

Naama and Shai Zemach are another young couple from the San Francisco Bay area, on their way to Israel from the coveted suburb of Walnut Creek. Naama and Shai were both born in Israel, and wanted to go back "to give our kids that experience," Naama told me. Her husband runs a family business and she's the stay-at-home parent to their four children: Elad, who will be nine in October; almost-seven-year-old Yaniv; four-year-old Natan; and two-year-old Maya. When I met them at the NBN pre-flight ceremony at JFK, the boys were entertaining a small crowd by playing with their Yorkie, Pikachu. I don't know if Yorkies are Jewish under the Law of Return, but Pikachu is also making aliyah.

Although many of the olim are Orthodox whose return holds special religious meaning for them, our flight included Reform and Conservative Jews, and some for whom religion wasn't the point at all. I met several young people who will be joining the Zahal, the Israel Defense Forces--and they're only a few of the 150 olim this summer who will be signing up.

Many people would wonder why a beautiful and scholastically gifted 19-year-old from Los Angeles would choose to go to Israel to serve in the army. That question probably wouldn't even make sense to Danielle Sheldon. "Israel is the place where I feel most at home," she told me mid-way into our night flight over the ocean.

Danielle was raised as a Reform Jew, and attended day school and high school at Stephen S. Wise Temple in LA. She describes herself as not religious, but "very much a Zionist." Her father was born in Israel and is a strong Zionist, and thanks to him and her day school education and her studies at the ulpan in Israel, she's fluent in Hebrew. 

Danielle said that her father and her mother and stepfather are proud and "wonderfully supportive" of her decision, but the hardest part for her will be leaving them and her younger sister behind to become what Israelis call "a lonely soldier"--one without a family to go home to on Shabbat and holidays. She translated the lyrics of the popular Israeli song "Pictures in the Album" for me: The song tells the story of a father who remembers how he held his baby son, and now waits for his son the soldier to walk through the door, where all the family is waiting and the mother has prepared all his favorite foods... "I won't have that," Danielle said.

But she will have her dream, the "amazing things awaiting me in my future." She's been to Israel five times, including a birthright trip, and another time as a participant on the March of the Living. She's also been an international student at Tel Aviv University, where she plans to work on her master's degree in security studies while waiting for IDF induction processing, which can take a year or more. She already has her undergrad degree from UC San Diego, with a double major in Middle East and international studies.

"It's imperative that there be a state of Israel," Danielle said. When she speaks about Israel and her life there, you can feel her determination and passion in every word.

She remembers once hearing an Orthodox rabbi say that Judaism isn't about belief in God--"Judaism is about my community." She thinks that for every Jew, there is "a connection to the state of Israel--without being religious--by virtue of being born a Jew." She even loves the new two-shekel coin (which has been mocked in the Israeli press), because it completes the series of currency based on that of the ancient Hasmoneans. "Some Israelis asked what would they want with it?" But for her, it's all part of the "beauty of living in the state of Israel," where "Jews are equal in the world."

Protecting a place for Jews in the world is also an imperative for Ben Friedman, a 22-year-old Brooklynite I talked with somewhere over the Mediterranean, when most of the people around us were asleep. Ben was also brought up Reform, and is leaving Park Slope's gold leaves for the IDF.

He majored in political science and Middle East studies at Pace University. On his trips to Israel, he's met a lot of people who've been in the Zahal, and their experiences caused him to feel the need to be part of it, too. "I want to help build up the nation," he said. He thinks he's one of a small but growing minority of young American Jews who understand "the complexities and the seriousness" of Israel's situation in the world and want to commit to bettering it. But unlike Danielle's, Ben's family consists of relatively uncommitted Jews, not strong Zionists. Until his parents visited him there recently, no one in his immediate family had even been to Israel before.

So how did Ben become an ardent lover of Israel? His family tree includes former Israeli defense minister Moshe Arens, who is a distant cousin, and the late screenwriter Ben Hecht, who was almost alone among Hollywood Jews during World War II in his vociferous support for the Zionist cause. Arens visited the Friedman family on trips to New York. And as a child, Ben saw posters of Hecht at home, although no one ever talked much about the famous writer who became his hero.

Ben strongly identifies as a political conservative, and he's "very pessimistic" about Israel's situation in the world and about the anti-Israel bias in the world press. But "things can always change. There's a very fluid political system in Israel."

He makes a forceful case for Israel's right to put self-defense ahead of ensuring public services for Palestinian enemies: "There's something very profound about the humanity of Jewish values, but I don't believe there's a Jewish value that says we have to take care of people trying to kill us."

And he's not afraid to put himself at risk to defend his country. "People like me, who are young and idealistic and strong, we need to come to Israel--there is something worth fighting for."

As we continued over the sea and the plane gently rocked me asleep, I started to feel as if I were also one of the olim, these brave and gentle and life-loving people who were now my friends, and that we were going home together. And I couldn't shake the mystical feeling of beshert, of a seeking for a destiny and finding it. And I couldn't stop thinking of the power of that something that binds Jews together, no matter what our birthplace or background, our sex or age or color, or our particular feelings about God. It's that power--of something--that caused a Jew to write, thousands of years ago, these words: "Now the earth was unformed and void, and darkness was upon the face of the deep; and the spirit of God hovered over the face of the waters." That spirit was protecting us on our journey home.