With the current state of the world — the war, the hostages, the antisemitism — I should have realized our family trip to Italy and Israel over winter break would be different. But I wasn’t prepared for how emotional it would be.
We started our journey in the Venice Ghetto, a relic in a city with fewer and fewer Jews. The two synagogues there, which are now more museums than shuls, take turns hosting Shabbat services and occasional weekday minyans. In reality, they are two museums that sometimes host minyans in a slowly dying community.
Our Shabbat in Florence, a few days later, highlighted this even more. On Friday night, we had the rare opportunity to daven in one of the most beautiful synagogues in the world. The grandeur was overwhelming. The synagogue was truly spectacular. And again, as I looked around, I realized that we had stepped into a museum rather than a synagogue of living Judaism.
As we navigated to our last stop in Rome, we stumbled across a plaque on the ground of the plaza where we were staying, Campo de Fiori. This is the plaza where over 500 years ago the Jews were persecuted and countless volumes of Talmud were burned. As in Venice and Florence, we were living Jews walking into history.
My family members, arriving from Israel and California, in their kippot, were buying kosher olive oil just steps away. My family of committed, observant Jews was winding our way through the tragedy and destruction of Jewish Europe.
How do we balance life and death in these cities? Our mere presence in these places demonstrated the triumph of Judaism alive in us and in those still living there today, juxtaposed with the horrific history of Jewish persecution throughout time.
Then we boarded a plane for Israel. There was excitement, anticipation, nervous energy and a yearning.
For our oldest son, it meant returning home. He has been living there on a gap-year program after graduating high school. For the rest of us, it was returning to our metaphorical home after what seemed like a lifetime away.
For the first time since Oct. 7, I felt at home. A weight had been lifted off my shoulders.
I’ve arrived in Israel countless times, as a young child with my family for my first visit, for my junior year abroad, as a staff member on countless Birthright trips and with my own family multiple times to begin their relationship with the people and land. But this landing was like none other.
Seeing only El Al planes on the runways, walking off the plane with my son’s hand in mine, looking at the faces of the hostages posted on the walls as I walked toward security — for the first time since Oct. 7, I felt at home. A weight had been lifted off my shoulders.
It was a weight I had not realized I had been carrying since Oct. 7.
I didn’t need to qualify myself in conversations. I didn’t need to think about how something I said would be taken out of context or misunderstood. I didn’t need to worry about hostage posters being torn down or about the anti-Israel graffiti I might see on my way to work at Berkeley Hillel.
It reminded me how lonely it is to be Jewish in Berkeley and in America right now.
In Israel, we met with friends. We heard their stories and shared with them some of our difficulties of living as Jews in America right now. But what was repeatedly acute and clear were the risks they take and the sacrifices they make on a daily basis. I knew this intellectually, but to hear from my peers, whose children and spouses are serving in Gaza, was an emotional reminder.
Israelis go to bed each night worried about the news they might receive the next day about their family members serving in the military. One of our friends told us that the only way she gets through each day is by imagining that she is standing under the chuppah at her son’s wedding.
She asked us to do the same, to visualize his wedding, dancing under his chuppah. Her husband joked that he is not sure how they will pay for the thousands of people she is inviting to their son’s future wedding. But it is her optimism for the future that carries her every day.
We need that optimism. It is what guides our family and friends in Israel as they pray for the release of every single hostage. It is what guides me as I have returned to my work on campus at Berkeley Hillel, back under the weighty cloud of loneliness, knowing that our universities and our communities can and must do better.
I can’t wait to dance with my friend at her son’s wedding.