Mission to Israel

The check-in line for the 1 a.m. El Al flight on Nov. 11 snaked around the JFK terminal and then extended in what seemed to be 15 different directions. Next to me, a frustrated man in his 60s asked the employee who was trying (and failing) to direct traffic if this was the first outbound flight to Israel since the start of the war. He’d been in a “holding pattern” for two hours, and had just been ushered toward another line to hold some more. Nearby, a policeman had given up directing traffic, throwing his hands across his chest defiantly. All around me, groups of people jutted out from their designated positions like tentacles on a moving jellyfish. There were yeshiva students returning to seminary. Families with small children returning home. An elderly Christian couple, who, when asked by staff whether they were flying “economy or premier,” replied: “We’re here for solidarity.”

“Economy or premier?” the airline employee asked again.

“Solidarity,” the man emphasized, appearing irritated. “We’re here to stand with Israel!”

And then there was the group to which my mother and I belonged: 30 Syrian Jewish women—mothers and daughters, grandmothers, sisters—who made the decision to fly from New York to Israel to assist in what way we could, to listen, and to see with our very own eyes what most of us had been watching obsessively on a screen since Oct. 7. The group’s organizers called it a “mission.” There had been a handful of such missions from Brooklyn in recent weeks. From Barkai Yeshivah. From two prominent synagogues in Midwood. From Flatbush Yeshivah. Our group was traveling with another from Magen David Yeshivah. Together, we buzzed through the terminal, an amalgamation of excitement and nerves.

“For which purpose are you traveling to Israel?” security personnel asked. Unable to find the words, my mother piped in from beside me: “Achdut”—a common Hebrew phrase whose literal translation means brotherhood. But like many evocations aired in the past month, its meaning had come to embody so much more.

“Achshav?” Now? His confusion bordered on amusement. You chose to come here now?

“B’seder,” he said, in the flippant way Israelis tend to receive information they don’t necessarily agree with. He waved us through with a smile. Yalla. Onward.

We disembarked 10 hours later. Bleary eyed, we waited for our phones and bodies to register the seven-hour time change. We boarded a tour bus and headed to our first stop, a welcome dinner hosted by a community woman who had made aliyah with her family a year prior, at her home in the German Colony of Jerusalem.

“Hineni,” said Kady Harari, our group’s leader, who took the floor as we tried not to appear too hungry. “You heard the call, and you answered. You’re here.”

The dining room table was a lesson in culinary fusion. There was the familiar food from home. (And when I say home, I mean Brooklyn, where we eat food traditionally from Syria and Egypt and Lebanon and Iraq.) And then there was the food more typically thought of as Israeli (which is a fierce gastronomic and cultural debate I’ll save for another time): fire-roasted whole eggplant served with tahini and pomegranate seeds, a punchy red cabbage salad, a robust hummus, and of course, fluffy rounds of pita.

The women broke off into groups and a subdued, introductory hum slowly churned into a lively static as we hurried to get to know one another better before the trip really began. It was the first of countless conversations we’d have over the course of the next week, wherein grasping for straws in humanity was a main and crucial incentive.

Did you leave a husband at home?

How many kids do you have?

Do you also put allspice in your chicken and spaghetti? I prefer it without.

Rochelle Dweck, a psychologist who deals primarily with trauma patients, spoke candidly about the challenges and limitations of her field that came so starkly into view after Oct. 7. She recalled sessions with ZAKA volunteers, Israel’s search and rescue organization tasked with sifting through the remnants of horror. Identifying live grenades. Picking apart the tiniest human remains, some so far beyond recognition they are still undergoing DNA testing. These are the people who do the thankless work of making sense of the dead so that we may go on living. Then Dweck instructed us to pair up, and ask our partners two simple questions: What do you hope to give? And what do you hope to receive? We were to remain quiet while our partner answered, but be cognizant of where our eyes drifted, what our bodies might say when words failed.

I tried to recall this exercise in empathy the following morning at the United Hatzalah’s headquarters in Jerusalem, as I listened along with a group to Aryeh Lerner’s testimony from Oct. 7. Lerner is a paramedic. He’s also a father to 11 children and has dozens of tattoos running up and down his arms. When he sways, the tzizit that hang from below his bright orange vest sway with him. At first glance, the contradictions in Lerner’s appearance don’t compute. But look a little closer, and he is the perfect embodiment of Israeli society, a portrait of nuance that continuously evades many in the West. Driving his ambulance south on that morning of Oct. 7, Lerner saved nearly 200 lives. He treated people from all walks of life, including Thais and Muslims. He witnessed atrocities that the human mind simply cannot comprehend. His eyes glazed over as he recounted them. A 1-year-old with no face, both parents shot in the back. A young child dismembered and rearranged, “like a puzzle.” A soldier missing both legs and an arm. A young soldier from Florida who witnessed the death of two friends and was so shocked that he was rendered completely unresponsive; when he did come to, he had to be tackled and medically subdued by a team of doctors. Just as important as saving a life was taking care of the dead. Lerner piled bodies into his ambulance. “If I had time to drink, I had time to save another life,” he said. He still had the smell and taste of blood on him when he returned home to his children hours later. When Lerner was finished speaking, we crowded around him, desperate to hear more, to feel more. At times it felt like my hunger for more information bordered on voyeurism at best, manipulation at worst. Lerner directed our attention toward his partner in the corner. “You want to talk to a real hero? There you have one.” Our group drifted toward him like a school of fish riding a current. But his partner didn’t want to talk—until he did, and then it became clear that he couldn’t stop.

The drive south on Maariv Shalosh highway was quiet. Army tanks rolled to the right and left of us, cigarettes dangling casually from soldiers’ hands. We inched toward Sderot and an eerie calm settled over the city. Sderot, which had a population of about 35,000 people before Oct. 7, was nearly totally evacuated. A recent count estimated that on the day we arrived, five weeks after the start of the war, only 5,000 people remained. Signs of life interrupted were everywhere: deserted playgrounds, withering plants, sukkahs still standing—a cruel reminder of a joyous holiday turned dark. Scorched earth where the city’s police station once stood; the scene of intense fighting between Hamas and Israeli police where 40 officers lost their lives. Our guide pointed toward a white stucco freestanding structure, smaller than a Kardashian’s closet. We would almost certainly hear sirens and when we did, we had seven seconds to run into the shelter. Yes, all 35 of us.

Walking through an active war zone is strange, for obvious reasons. Reality bears no routine and fewer expectations. The places and spaces people left behind look like relics in a museum, frozen in time, like someone pressed pause on a video game. It also lends you a heightened sense of awareness. You begin to notice things. Like the elderly man idling by, wondering what on earth we’re doing here. He looks like he wants to talk and so you do, and you learn that on Oct. 7 his home was invaded by terrorists. He recounts his confusion on that day, the horror, and you note that he still looks a little bit confused and horrified. His wife is sick with cancer and he won’t leave their home; he refuses to. You notice that the air near Nahal Oz still smells of burning. The hundreds of destroyed cars piled like ragweed. You notice the little things, too. The childlike fingerprints on the dirty walls of a bomb shelter. The cheery green welcome gate to the Kfar Aza kibbutz: “Bruchim haba’im!” A dirty blue tin of Danima butter cookies on the floor of a ransacked home. A broken Hobby Life toddler stepstool. A collection of keys rendered useless. A toddler’s bike. A trampoline. A single plastic chair set beneath a tree. Vegetation bursting with life in a place where 58 people suddenly lost theirs, another 18 kidnapped. The countless pairs of shoes, strewn everywhere. Empty vessels. Brightly colored soccer sneakers. New Balances. Nikes. Air Force Ones and Jordans.

“Please refrain from taking pictures,” a ZAKA volunteer stressed. “This is not a tourist attraction, these are homes.” Or they used to be. Now they were blood-stained floors and charred door handles. Every so often, the silence was punctuated by a loud boom and the floor shook with the sound of artillery flying from Israel into Gaza. At first, we dropped to the floor in shock and a volunteer joked that they had diapers if needed.

I’ll admit that before I stepped foot in the kibbutz, I found it unthinkable that any Israeli would elect to live there, a bias that I assumed would be confirmed on this trip. Instead, the opposite happened.

For every soldier on the border with Gaza there is a Jewish mother who hands them a sandwich. Sometimes we handed them cigarettes and it felt like penicillin. On the way to Kibbutz Be’eri, our bus made a U-turn. ZAKA volunteers had discovered an undetonated grenade inside one of the homes and it was too dangerous. We drove toward the site of the Nova music festival, images of cars and bodies lining the street splice and short circuit the brain, standing in stark contrast to the now deserted highway. At sunset we said Kaddish for the 360 partygoers murdered in cold blood. The field we stood on was laid bare and open; that anyone managed to hide seems like a miracle. A special unit officer put on tefillin for the first time. Others requested tzizit. They were still recovering bodies, if we could believe it.

When we returned to our hotel in Jerusalem later that evening, the streets of the normally busy metropolis were quiet—as they were earlier that day in the south. Other than a few reservists in plain clothes who looked like they were given the night off, rifles swung over their solders like pocketbooks, my mother and I walked alone outside. It was 20 minutes to an apartment where a few displaced women and their children were staying. One of the women, Marcy, was from Maalot, a city five miles from the northern border with Lebanon, where Hezbollah has been testing their limits. She described how her community immediately activated when the rockets started firing, providing the army with what they needed: food and sleeping bags. She did some of their laundry. Marcy and the women from her community felt energized doing what they could before they were advised to leave their homes. Since then, many of their husbands had been called up for reserve duty. “Now,” she said in dismay, “I am the one being cooked for. School for my children is on Zoom. We are protecting ourselves physically but deteriorating mentally.” Another three women from Sderot described their lives in the deserted southern city as warm and full of Torah. Sofia recalled hearing whispers in shul on Oct. 7 of a terrorist having invaded the community. Then, that five terrorists were surrounding the shul. Then, learning that her son had been shot. And finally, that the man who would go on to save her son’s life was killed the next day. Aviva spoke next: “I live in Kiryat Shmona next to my best friends Syria and Lebanon. We’re very close, you see.” The room erupted in laughter, like the lid had been taken off a pressure cooker. Aviva lost her brother to terrorism in 1982 and her two sons are currently serving in the south. Simple pleasures like eating and listening to music are impossible to partake in. The sadness in the room feels heavy, but as Aviva wrapped up she said: “Thank God I am Jewish.” Who else opens up her home like this? She extended her arms in front of her, toward the beautiful and sprawling apartment. “There are over 100 apartments like this, filled with refugees from the north and south.” It was a juxtaposition that would prop itself up again and again over the next four days. Hundreds of thousands of civilians are displaced from their homes on or close to Israel’s northern and southern borders. In many cases they left with nothing and have yet to return, weeks later, to retrieve their belongings. They find themselves dispersed across the country. In beautiful apartments in Jerusalem. In hotels set among vineyards. On the coast of the affluent city of Herzliya. In scenic locations that propelled Israel, “startup nation,” into a top tourist destination.

In Cramim, the Isrotel, which bills itself as, “a luxurious spa and wine [hotel] in the Jerusalem hills,” 70 families, four widows, 200 children, and one 2-week-old infant were taking refuge from Shlomit, their community on the border of Gaza and Egypt. Kids ran around during a makeshift math lesson in a conference room off the lobby. A group of 22 first grade girls sat obediently in the hotel’s bomb shelter-turned-classroom. Among them was a young girl who lost her father. Two others have fathers who were in the hospital in critical condition. The women have become teachers, principals, administrators. Shiran, a young stylish mother of four, pointed out a 12-year-old boy who played with his friend on the floor. He lost his father on Oct. 7. Another man who was murdered was the community’s chazan on Yom Kippur. Before their displacement, these families lived in the southernmost part of the Gaza envelope, their community but 12 years old. When I asked what made her want to live there, she seemed puzzled by the question. “I’ve read history books about pioneers. People in Tel Aviv, they don’t have this opportunity. Nobody wanted this land. [The Arabs] didn’t want it. They said nothing would grow here. We were excited to take on this mission, to grow and to thrive here. Today we have so many hot houses, green houses, we grow everything. It’s so beautiful.” Her comments, made so plain, did not fall lightly on my ears. I noticed my body recoil a little bit. Me: an observant Jew, a Zionist, a product of a 17-year yeshiva education; I was taken aback. This was exactly the kind of rhetoric that would light up an Instagram comment section like a dumpster fire. I could see the sentences being written in my head:

Spoken like a true colonizer

This is the language of the oppressor! WAKE UP!

Thriving on stolen land, there is blood on your hands

[clown emoji, clown emoji, clown emoji]

I thought about how many opinions I’ve not voiced for fear of the social (bot) mob. On this war, but also on the topic of cronuts, the sorry state of the subway, Taylor Swift. And then I thought about the people on the other side of my opinions, those who would vehemently disagree with me, and how they too feel “silenced” or symbolically shadow-banned. Our beliefs are filtered through social media’s reactionary lens whether we choose to platform them or not.

What do you hope to give? And, what do you hope to receive? I didn’t yet have an answer to either question. But maybe facing the raw reality of my thoughts and emotions was a good place to start.

We continued to talk and walk around the hotel, cradling Styrofoam cups of instant coffee. I spotted a small toddler who looked to be around my son’s age teetering dangerously close to the steps. When I approached to ask where Mommy was, he instinctively reached his arms toward me to be picked up and I obliged, hoping he’d lead me to his mother. He pointed out a woman who shared his blue eyes. She casually thanked me as I handed him off, a far cry from the theatrical reaction I think I’d have if a relative stranger put my roaming 1-year-old back in my lap. There was a lot of pain and grief in the room, but also an incredible amount of trust. The babies could feel it, too.

We said goodbye to the women, swapping phone numbers and Instagram handles. We made tentative plans for “after the war,” an ambiguous time stamp I heard over and over during the week. From the barista at the Tel Aviv Museum of Art, where a formidable live exhibit to the hostages taken by Hamas was underway. From a religious man on day five of a hunger strike, fasting for their return. From cab drivers. From a bride at a wedding we attended on an army base near the West Bank city of Ramallah. From children. From an engaged couple in their early 20s in the rehabilitation center at Tel HaShomer Hospital, Gali and Ben. They dated for seven years; he asked her to marry him on a gondola in Venice in June. They each had a leg blown off when an RPG was thrown into the shelter where they hid with 30 other Nova festivalgoers. Fifteen were killed. “We are lucky,” Gali insisted. They moved up their wedding. They will not wait until after the war.

Our group sat outside Tel HaShomer’s rehabilitation wing, where each room had a back entrance open toward a garden. The outdoor corridor was lined with white plastic tables and chairs. Patients and their visitors ate and smoked and talked, before heading to physical therapy. Tamar, 23, was at the festival, too. She was shot in the stomach. She still remembered the face of the terrorist who asked for her name. She and her boyfriend hid in a home as she held her stomach to stop from bleeding out. Terrorists shot at them through a window and her boyfriend was struck. He died in her arms, where she held him for five hours until being rescued by the army. “I’m OK, because I’m alive,” she said, a mix of resolve and disbelief. “If I’m alive then I’m going to continue on living.” Yonichai from Ashkelon was my father’s age and had a big, crooked smile and five young grandchildren who will all grow up knowing him as I met him on that day: with his leg below the knee blown off from a rocket fired in his home city. The last thing he remembers was stepping out of his car when he heard the sirens. “Little by little,” he said in Hebrew, “I will get better.” But enough about that. He’d much rather show me pictures on his phone of his adorable grandchildren. All around us, there were whispers of horrific accounts. You should go visit this one. That one is telling his story. So many young men and woman missing limbs, confined to wheelchairs or hospital beds.

“After the war,” we will: visit again, rebuild, investigate, reconnect, marry, rebuild. Rebuild. Rebuild. But for the time being, Israel remains in a sort of arrested development shaped by the current war and the ambiguity of what tomorrow brings. At times, it felt like the country was divided into three of the five stages of grief: anger, bargaining, and depression. For every hostage poster that my city of New York has seen torn down, there are three billboards with a child’s face on them, 10 images projected onto buildings, countless yellow ribbons hanging from car mirrors. There is the reality of Israel that so many would rather conveniently not see. Of a vibrant and multipronged society now cloaked beneath fear and the duress of warfare. In what I’m sure could be characterized as moments of self-aggrandizement, I frequently thought of Matti Friedman’s book Who by Fire, an account of Leonard Cohen’s “concert tour” on the front lines of the Yom Kippur War. In 1973, Cohen took his khakis and guitar from his embattled personal life on an island in Greece to the Sinai, to (as Cohen wrote in an unpublished manuscript unearthed by Friedman) his “myth home.” There were no social media photo ops staged of his visit and no press briefings. Cohen ate rations and slept in a sleeping bag. He was in the desert to provide relief to the soldiers, but it was him who needed relief. It’s a sentiment shared by diaspora Jews across the globe, this pull toward a tangible piece of land, yes, but also to a “myth home.” We had come to Israel to listen, to cook, to dance with children and see with our own eyes the result of what a resounding swell of protesters justified as defensible—or worse, imaginary—violence. And we weren’t alone; hundreds of Jews have been running toward Israel, toward war, to feel peace.

In a dropped verse from the song “Lover Lover Lover,” Cohen writes:

I went down to the desert to help my brothers fight
I knew that they weren’t wrong
I knew they weren’t right
But bones must stand up straight and walk
And blood must move around
And men go making ugly lines
Across the holy ground.

It’s a verse that so powerfully underscores the beauty and tragedy of Israel, in all its complexity. And it’s one I’ve returned to repeatedly since landing back in the States and the world of online, where drawing lines in the sand is sport, and everything, and therefore nothing, is sacred.

When I reflect on the trip, that moment in the Kfar Aza kibbutz stands among the rest. The border with Gaza was in plain view and we were instructed to stay clear. There had been snipers along it just a day earlier. In the days and weeks after Oct. 7 there has been much commentary about how these Jewish communities in the Gaza envelope were full of left-leaning peace activists, an adage usually followed by: and this is what they got. The sense of betrayal falls beyond irony’s parameters; too gruesome, too unfathomable, too hopeless. Being confronted with the purity of that impulse didn’t dispel my anger, but it quieted it just enough for me to remember why I felt so deeply about Am Yisrael. We’ve been right, God knows we’ve been wrong, but as immutable as blood and bone, we “must stand up straight and walk.” Until next time.