What I Really Miss About Israel, My Heart and Home

Bear with me… I want to tell you about what it feels to be far, so far away from Israel, my heart and home…

Each year from the 3rd week in December to the 2nd week in January, I ask myself the same 3 questions:

1. Why is it so cold in Pittsburgh?
2. Why is it so quiet?
3. Why am I still here?

I’m talking about life in exile as an Israeli expat.

In Israel, December 25th is just another day. But in Pittsburgh, where I’ve been living for the past 14 years with my family, December 25th is like entire world. It’s like 3 weeks or so of “shut down.” Coupled with our “lockdown” – the silence and disconnect are even more unbearable.

Bear with me, I want to tell you about the familiar feelings of home in a pandemic:

• how the Jewish holidays of Tishrei that kicks off the Jewish New Year of Rosh Hashana is a different kind of spiritual “shutdown”
• how Shabbat is treated like a national sacred holiday
• It was only during a Wild Writing session when Laurie Wagner read the poem by Lynn Unger, “Pandemic” and the opening lines that touched my heart: “What if you thought of it as the Jews consider the Sabbath -…?” Suddenly I felt as if my spiritual and ethnic fused into one. Someone recognized me. Saw me. That was powerful. That rarely happens in the States.

My husband, an essential worker and native-born Israel, is surrounded by Christmas themed music at his store from Thanksgiving on. He’s already become numb to the jingle-jangle. People I very rarely see nowadays will wish me “A Merry Christmas.” This is the one holiday that brings people in America together.

In America have to silently advocate for myself. Tell people who aren’t Jewish how important the Shabbat is. Or I just shut up.

Bear with me…I want to tell you about how my longing for Israel has been in full swing ever since our global pandemic began.

Every time I hear of another person I know (or don’t) who are either making aliyah or an Israeli expat returning to Israel, (I know personally or don’t) or the record-breaking numbers of North American olim making aliyah to Israel during a pandemic, a piece of my heart breaks. It reminds me of the moments when I first emigrated to Israel in 1990 – a life-changing event that ultimately led me to write my memoir Accidental Soldier: A Memoir of Service and Sacrifice in the Israel Defense Forces.

“Come home to Israel,” the voice keeps saying. “Come home to Israel.”

For months and years I have poured out my heart to my Israeli husband about the decision whether to return to Israel.

“I miss Israel,” I’d say. Or, “What the heck are we doing here?”

At some point, we’ll have the “Israel conversation” again. Most recently, I was able to share the things we both miss.

I’ve started with the prompt, “I miss Israel” in my journals and in my Wild Writing sessions which eventually gave birth to a published essay I wrote entitled “The Israeli Cooking Project: How I Was Able to Bring My Daughter Closer to Her Roots” telling the stories between Israeli cooking and our expat identity.

In Israel, the Jewish state, I was part of the majority but here, I am just a lonely American Israeli trying to raise her family Jewishly. With time, that came to mean embracing values as an Israeli.

Often I’ve been asking myself, “why am I longing to come home to Israel?” “Is this a passing phase?”

I’m learning that people make up a culture, a society, a nation.

In America, diversity is paramount. This includes the geographical distance even between neighbors as I’ve been writing for my upcoming memoir Sand and Steel: A Memoir of Longing and Finding Home and how that plays out in relationships to each other and with our homes.

These are the things I’ve been missing about Israel like…

• the smell of the orange groves in bloom on our kibbutz
• having vegetables for breakfast
• the solidarity of how the entire country slowly shuts down for Shabbat and on the Jewish holidays
• family (need I say more?)
•  the directness and intensity of people and how quickly they “get you.”
• being part of a majority
• Not being anonymous
• how calendars have the Jewish holidays. Why do I need to know about Boxing Day?
• how people respond with “Baruch Hashem” or “Bless G-d” when you ask them how they’re doing
• the warmth and sun all year round
• signs in Hebrew
• roundabouts
• falafel on literally every street corner
• not feeling afraid to walk at night
• the feeling that the country has your back
• open-air markets where you can actually barter and negotiate prices
• the freedom that kids can walk around on the kibbutz barefoot
• going to the kibbutz kolbo (supermarket) and hearing only Hebrew
• Sephardic synagogues
• Israeli street food I’ve come to love: malawah, futeh, majadra, sabich, halva that fill me with home
• Egged busses passing through the deserts
• Our pomegranate trees in our kibbutz backyard

None of these things I miss about Israel exist in America so I’ve had to create a “mini home in Israel.” In America, we have no statehood.  In the 5 years since we’ve become more traditionally observant, I’ve been trying to figure out if we could ever find a home in Israel that would bring us “home.”

Bear with me. I want to tell you how coming home to Israel isn’t just fulfilling a longing; coming home a powerful concept within itself.

My memoir Sand and Steel is a story about reconciling the many versions of home. During our pandemic, I’ve felt a special kind of homelessness. Yes, I know my roots, but in a pandemic, I feel far, very very far away from my heart home.

The Pittsburgh, the America I’ve been coming to know even more during a pandemic can’t give me what I need right now in the way that I want.

Bear with me… I want to tell you that Pittsburgh, the America of my mother country that I’ve been coming to know during a pandemic can’t give me what I really need right now.

I need one thing right now: the emotional safety and solidarity of a Jewish homeland.

4 MONTHS TO PUBLICATION OF MY EXPAT MEMOIR!

Sand and Steel: A Memoir of Longing and Finding Home will be released by Mascot Books in April 2021. It’s a story about reconciling the many versions of home. The core of this book — what it will help people do is to realize that home is everywhere you think and feel.