Rabbi's Dispatch from Israel
Posted on 01/10/2025 @ 05:00 AM
Tel Azekah -- Recognized by the Council for Conservation of Heritage Sites in Israel. (Photo by AVRAMGR on https://en.wikipedia.org)
Pictured: Rabbi Zarren-Zohar & Avi Rosenberg's granddaughter Rina Fayga Rosenberg
Last Friday, I returned from visiting Israel for personal reasons.
Of course, anywhere I am, I still have my education mindset, especially in Israel, and I had many observations that you can read more about below.
Rabbi's Dispatch from Israel
“How was your vacation in Israel?” a friend asked.
Ha! I wanted to laugh. It was in no way a vacation, especially with the Houthi alarm service (not recommended on Yelp!) waking us up every night of Chanukkah between 2-5am.
How do people there deal with this?!?
And by this, I mean more than missile attacks from Yemen every night (though that is certainly a large piece of the horror).
We were staying in Beit Shemesh (midway between Jerusalem and Tel Aviv) where Avi’s child and grandchild are situated.
Pluses: A totally Jewish city, so December 25th was just another day. Not a smidgeon of Christmas anywhere to be found. That was novel.
So many people light their hanukkiot in glass boxes outdoors by their front door, which is unusual for an American like me.
I’ve never seen so many varieties of sufganiot (Israeli Chanukkah donuts)—Oreo cookie sufganiot, mmmm!
Minuses: Hills and stairs (I thought I was in such good shape…) Cold. Israeli drivers and rotaries / roundabouts, almost a contact sport…The Matzav / Situation.
What is the Matzav /Situation?
On the one hand, Israel is winning the war against Hamas, Hezbollah and Iran. They had all seemed ascendant, if not almost invincible, until fairly recently.
And this young generation of Israelis has responded magnificently in the war, with people comparing them to the founding generation of ’48, rather than what people thought would be the failed TikTok generation.
On the other hand, what does “winning” look like? Israel rules over the Gaza Strip, with no better solution in sight. Both IDF soldiers and Gaza civilians continue to die, with no end in sight. And the hostages- over 100 are still captive in unimaginably horrid conditions, with no relief in sight.
And let’s not forget the towns and areas along the Gaza envelope and Northern border where many Israeli homes and communities are destroyed, even though much of the immediate threat has been neutralized.
As Danny Gordis writes:
“The number of widows in their 20s with children here is …an unthinkable number. 40 something kids lost both parents in the attacks of October 7th. I mean this is a bruised, hurting, bleeding, limping society, and it's going to be that for as long as most of the people who are alive now, especially the 20s and 30-year-olds, they're going to carry this with them… Even after all the guns are quieted, those widows are still going to be widows, and those orphans are still going to be orphans, and the people with no legs are still going to be people with no legs. And the people with PTSD who number in the thousands and thousands and thousands are going to have lives that are going to be very curtailed for as far as the eye can see.”
Just to illustrate what he’s describing, one day Avi and I went to a restaurant in a little nearby moshav for brunch. The place was popular, so there were no seats at tables. We walked outside to sit on the grass and saw this nearby.
As we sat there, we read the (Hebrew) writing on the stone and realized this was a memorial to a 24-year-old named Karin Journo, a French-Israeli woman who had been murdered by Hamas terrorists at the Nova Festival. It told about her love of cooking, of dancing, of friendship, of laughter.
It listed her last words when she called her parents to say goodbye and described how she went to the festival in a cast (having recently broken her foot), insisting when her parents questioned her that she would dance in her wheelchair.
To read more about Karin, click here.
And then, if that wasn’t sad enough, along came a mother with her 8- or 9-year-old daughter. The daughter led her mother to the memorial stone, pushed a button on it, and stood there as they listened to Karin’s story being told.
I couldn’t take my eyes off of the mother’s face, because she was trying so hard to control herself in front of her own little girl.
How do you listen to the story of a young woman who was murdered while you stand next your child who will one day be a young woman just like her?
How do you explain to your child that there are people out there who are intent on murdering them?
How do you function day by day, living in a place surrounded by people who are intent on murdering you and your loved ones?
Tears are falling as I write this because… it’s just so horrible. So unfair. So evil.
I wanted to end this dispatch with a nechemta (the Jewish custom of adding a note of consolation at the conclusion of a particularly difficult textual passage), but it’s long as it is.
Please scroll down to my Dvar Torah below to find some uplift.
And while it feels pretty hollow to point to the fact that Israelis are “so resilient” and keep going out to restaurants and living life in spite of it all… it’s something.
