For the first time since January 2020, I was going to Israel. With a rush, I realized how much had happened between my visits. There was Covid; the weekly judicial reform protests; the October 7 massacre and the hostages; fighting with Hamas, Hezbollah, the Houthis, and Iran; the devastation of Gaza; the absolute normalization of antizionism; and the call for a general election that may determine the fate of the country.
As the date of my departure approached, I found I had many feelings about this trip. One was pure elation. “Is it weird to say I’m jealous of myself?” I asked a friend. I would be participating in an academic workshop of like-minded scholars, the kind that makes the profession worth the mediocre pay, long hours, and job precarity, and I would be doing it on a kibbutz amidst the rolling Judean hills. Then on to the city I visit in my dreams, with its golden light on creamy white Jerusalem stone, the sound of the muezzin at Muslim prayer times, the sight of the kotel awaiting the hopes and prayers of the Jewish people. Finally on to Tel Aviv, where I would be seeing dear, dear friends, my cousins, and my almost 94-year-old aunt—who is utterly lucid but can’t hear a word I say on the phone.
Another feeling was fear. “I am very much hoping there’s no war, and you’ll see me back in the classroom in a week,” I told my students glibly, as though my inability to leave Israel would be the worst consequence of Iran resuming bombing. Every day that led up to my trip, I read the news carefully, wondering if it was really the right time to be going. When I called to wish him a shana tova, my eldest son told me straight up that I was crazy. Why would I intentionally go to a warzone? And then there was my husband: “We should probably get wills made up.” But I couldn’t live like my brother-in-law, almost sixty years old, hyper-Zionist, talking about buying a retirement home in Israel, without having ever stepped foot on Israeli soil. “I’ll go when it’s safe,” he says.
The last feeling creeping up inside of me was more nebulous, this sense that in the years that had elapsed since my last visit, it was not only the country, but also I who had changed.
Perhaps it was the date that drove it home for me. The day before flight, September 12, was the three-year anniversary of my mastectomy. In many ways, it was the surgery and not the discovery of the lump or diagnosis that stands out to me. Until the surgery, the cancer hadn’t seemed real. I didn’t feel sick and hadn’t witnessed a single physical change save a discreet lump. So calm was I that as I waited for the nurse to wheel me over to the anesthetist to put me to sleep, I felt completely normal, was, as it happens, reading as quickly as I could to find out how Ayelet Gundar-Goshen’s The Wolf Hunt ended. “Give me two minutes,” I said when she approached (she kindly waited as I read the last few pages). In fact, even as the anesthetist slipped a needle in my arm, I was chatting with her, hearing about her recent trip to Canada (she heard my accent and got excited). Only after I woke up—groggy, nauseated, foreign objects in my body, bloody drains by my sides, did it all fully hit me.
My husband, ever wise (he’s right, we should get new wills!), quoted Heraclitus upon hearing my muddled sentiments: “You cannot step into the same river twice.” Not only is the river, with its flowing water, its shifting rocks, its varied water creatures, always changing, but so is the person stepping into the river.
So, a new me will visit a new Israel. I can say with certainty we are both of us the worse for wear. But I will appreciate that I am here and so is Israel, and I will embrace us with the spirit of the season and the words of Psalm 27, as translated by Rabbi Yael Levy:
One thing I ask of the Infinite, One thing I seek
To dwell in the Presence all the days of my life,
To awaken to the beauty of each moment as I pass through this world
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