Nof Yam, Israel

The other day I was driving, through Tel Aviv down the Ayalon in the direction of Jerusalem.   I was looking out the window at the beautifully landscaped slopes along the highway with blooming pink and. white oleander and I could feel myself taking in the beauty. All this spring as I’ve walked or traveled around Israel I have seen the greeness of the country side from the North to the Negev.  Along the main streets of the cities, too, there are fresh plantings with the feeling of caring evident here.  As I fill myself with this beauty and breathe it in I frequently say to others that Israel with its landscaped highways and flowering cities and hills sprouting green in the summer does more to bring beauty to its environ and its people than any other country I know.

Israel does not mean just the flower plantings or the wild flowers seen in the spring to me.  Of course, it means much more.  But maybe these flowers symbolize for me the caring that I feel here.  Israel is my home and when someone e-mails me and asks me either, “Why do you live there?” or “Why did you return there (after a vacation)?” I am dumbfounded and a bit overwhelmed by the question.  Why would someone ask that?  I know that the persons who have asked that have my welfare at heart during this difficult period, but I don’t really understand the question.  I respond to them simply that Israel is my/our home.  It is our home out of a free choice that my husband and I made several years ago when we came here on a Sabbatical.  We were not immediately aware that we were going to chose Israel as our “retirement” home, but something powerful drew us to this land.

During that first year here, we walked along the streets of Herzliya, enjoyed the scenes and people in downtown Herzliya especially the little shops and the occasional horse drawn carts.  We liked the bustling atmosphere and felt good when people talked to us at the bus stops or on the buses and we responded in our broken Hebrew.  People were interested in us and we in turn were interested in them and intrigued by the many facets of the life here.  People that we saw on the streets were serious and busy with their own lives but never too busy to talk to us and/or help us out if we needed to know where a particular store or place was.  During that first year, too we made several friends who were welcoming and helpful to the “green horns” from America.  These friends from that time are still our friends.

And so we kept coming back for summers, occasionally working, still enjoying the country and beginning to think of Israel as a more permanent living place.  Finally during our second Sabbatical we did make the decision to buy a place in Herzliya as we became more acutely aware that indeed this is indeed the place for us..  A few years later we did make the permanent move, having made what my husband terms “creeping aliya”.

Let me go back to the question: What does Israel mean to me?  As I reflect on our first year here I still have some of the same feelings.  Most strongly comes to me that Israel is a country of caring.  By caring, I mean people caring for others, families caring for other families, and most importantly people caring for their country and what has occurred here and what is currently happening  Maybe to be  more precise, Caring  for me means the warmth that I feel from others as they show their interest in how we are, how we are faring.  I was most touched by this when my daughter and son-in-law recently adopted a baby.  Prior to the adoptions there were so many inquiries about the why, when and how of it.  After the adoption people expressed so much true joy in the baby and to her parents and grandparents knowing how important this event was to us and how happy we were with the little one.  This was the caring I speak about. 

I see this caring in so many places in the country especially with young infants and children as they are out with their mothers or fathers or grand  grandparents playing with them, or pushing them in their strollers or just being with them.  In this country, too, people are with people, and seem to be involved with those they are with.  I love to see older couples taking evening strolls hand in hand.  I love to see older and younger couples shopping together and helping each other especially in the super markets.

But Israel is more than caring.  It is a country struggling and at times perhaps not knowing how we got ourselves into such a “mess” with who knows what solutions.  Perhaps it is this struggle that captures what Israel means to me.  Again the struggle between caring and “giving up” and perhaps the struggle the struggle that all of our ancestors and forebears have suffered, that is the struggle to survive and at times not knowing how to survive.  Assuredly in our caring, many mistakes have been made by our leaders as well as by our own so diversified population.  I suppose that in the end what Israel means to me is a worthwhile struggle that is for me my very existence.