Always moving toward the light
Remembering Israel then, looking at it now
I was standing in a packed shuttle bus on a recent trip to Israel. For a moment, my thoughts took me back to the first time I set foot into that remarkable country. I remembered that in May 1983, my heart was pounding as my husband Bruno and I walked down the steps of the plane onto the tarmac, then stepped excitedly onto a crowded open shuttle bus that brought us to the terminal.
My reverie faded. The present returned. Different time. Different Israel. This evening, once again I was on a packed shuttle bus, this one transporting me from Yad Vashem after the Yom HaShoah tekes (ceremony) down to the main road. The bus drove a few feet, then stopped. Security blocked the road. And there we sat, though actually I was standing. Going nowhere, I found myself people watching. Watching modern day Israelis, although some were clearly visitors like me. Surrounded by people of all flavors. Hebrew conversations filled the bus, but there were other languages as well.
People of all ages. Packed together. But happy packed together. Some were looking at their phones (no surprise there), some teenage groups were chatting, and I fixed my gaze for a bit on an older Israeli couple where the wife, clearly tired, placed her head on her husband’s shoulder while they both leaned against the closed door. The hour was late. A tinge of jealousy in my widowed brain. Lucky her, I thought. But I let that go and thought, lucky me. The wonder of a remarkable experience. Diversity mixed with similarity. Together we had shared the painful memories of the Holocaust and October 7, while now savoring the gift of the present on this packed, happy shuttle bus. Modern day Israel.
Years ago, one of my young Israeli grandsons asked me the year I was born. “1947,” I announced somewhat casually. “Wow!” he responded, quite excitedly. “You were born before there was a State of Israel!” I laughed at his surprise and his shock at my age. Yet he seemed to grasp the significance of the miracle of the modern State and that my own existence preceded it. For me? It took some time to understand it all.
Our brief conversation sent me back to my own childhood, where I recalled my innocent, somewhat simple-son-at-the-seder approach as a young girl and a young teenager to the whole miracle of the establishment of the modern State. Truthfully, I didn’t think much about it at all, and I wonder if some of my ignorance (I admit likely not all of my ignorance) was due to a lack of focus on the topic in my Jewish day school. I do, however, quite clearly remember the duck-and-cover drills we practiced in school where, in the 1950s period of the still-new Cold War, we were trained to effectively duck under our desks and cover our heads in case of an atomic attack. Hindsight, of course, allows for a clearer perspective on both issues.
Naturally I belonged to Bnai Akiva, a global religious Zionist youth movement that actively promotes aliyah, because all my friends joined Bnai Akiva. And of course I enjoyed three summers at Camp Moshava, a Bnai Akiva-sponsored camp in Wild Rose, Wisconsin, because all my friends went to Camp Moshava.
Ironically, during one of those summers, the girls in my bunk wrote a song during color war with the following lyrics:
“In Wild Rose, Wisconsin at Moshava,
“In the first cabin there is a great kevutzah [bunk].
“Nine girls are we, as proud as we can be.
“We have the name of Kfar Etzyon, well known in history.”
I confess somewhat sheepishly, in light of my youthful ignorant approach, that I never asked for any details about Kfar Etzyon. And with even greater amazement do I state that never in my wildest imagination could I have pictured that about 45 years later my oldest child and her family would make aliyah and live right there in Gush Etzyon.
My brain continued to miss the boat about Israel. Many of my friends enjoyed summer trips there after our sophomore or junior year of high school, either on youth programs or on vacations with their families. My parents could not afford to send me to Israel, and I have no memory of being annoyed or disappointed about missing out. It didn’t mean that much to me, and I simply did other things.
Years later, my husband admitted to me that he was bothered by the fact that we were the only couple among our friends who had not visited Israel. And that was about to change. I wasn’t involved much in planning the May 1983 trip, although the excitement was growing. Bruno handled almost everything, including the kind of tour we would join.
It was, I recall, an eye-opening, amazing first-time-in-Israel tour. One day, Bruno remarked casually that we were going off on our own for the day. He rented a car and told me he had a brief meeting with a gentleman in Efrat. “What? Efrat?” I asked with a mixture of surprise and shock. “Who could possibly be in Efrat?” My recollection is that he simply smiled.
Now if you have ever traveled to Israel, you know that getting to Kever Rachel (Rachel’s Tomb) these days is like driving through an armed camp. My daughter who lives in Gush Etzyon smiles and notes that only in Israel can you go to Rachel’s Tomb on the way to the Malcha Shopping Mall, a fun perk of modern Israel. But Bruno wanted to stop at Kever Rachel on the way to Efrat. Logical, of course. “And Rachel died and was buried on the way to Efrat, which is Bet Lechem. And Yaakov set a pillar upon her grave; that is the pillar of Rachel’s grave to this day” (Bereshit 35:19-20).
But there was no armed camp that day or any day in those years. We simply parked the car and walked about 12 feet to touch and pray at Rachel’s Tomb, right there on the side of the road.
Next on the agenda was our stop in Efrat, then an Israeli settlement, that was co-founded by Rabbi Dr. Shlomo Riskin in 1983, the very same year as our trip. When we pulled into the gates, Bruno said the meeting would take only a few minutes and I could simply wait by the car. So I stood there, somewhat incredulous, looking out at some bare buildings, no houses or trees or grass or flowers or shopping areas, and wondered to myself: “Why, oh why, would anyone want to live out here?”
When I drive into a thriving Efrat today, I am forever reminded of that moment so many years ago and of the line from the 1989 movie “Field of Dreams,” when the main character is encouraged by a voice to build a baseball diamond in his cornfield. “If you build it, they will come.” If your dream is to create something real and meaningful, people will come. Efrat was Rabbi Riskin’s dream. And come they did.
As the years passed after that first trip, I became less of the simple son and a little more of the wise son regarding Israel. In the summer of 1987, when my husband was working for an Israeli company, we rented an apartment for us and our four children in Talpiot, a neighborhood of Jerusalem, and combined the six weeks with both work and play.
From that point forward, our lives were intertwined with Eretz Yisroel. Three of our children spent their gap year between high school and college studying in Israel, while a fourth child spent a semester there in her junior year of college. The country continued to evolve, to advance, to build, to thrive, often to struggle, to live through wars and an assassination and the intifada and terrorist attacks and bus bombings and hatred from its enemies, but still to overcome, to respect, to believe in itself, even when other countries did not.
In the years when my husband worked for that Israeli company, he savored his business trips there. On the other side of the ocean, my children and I waited for his return, first for the gifts that always emerged from his suitcase, second for the stories he joyfully shared, and third for the pizza from Pizzeria Trevi in Talpiot (now in Bayit V’gan), our favorite pizza to this very day. Shabi, the owner, upon Bruno’s instructions, would take two or three of his corn and onion pizzas, pile the slices one on top of the other in three stacks, freeze them, and wait for Bruno to pick up the frozen packages on his way to the airport.
When Bruno arrived at the store, Shabi would proudly announce for everyone to hear: “Three pizzas going to America!” I can still remember the Israeli aroma of Pizzeria Trevi filling our American home.
And my Israel education continued. On one of Bruno’s Israel trips, he brought home a watercolor painting that put into a simple silver frame. I never thought much about it until years later, when I looked carefully at the soldiers and all flavors of Jews dancing and praying and blowing shofar at the newly captured Kotel after the Six Day War. I finally got it. I reframed the painting with a more beautiful frame and gifted it to one of my married daughters. It hangs on the wall of her home in Israel.
I do not have enough space to list the changes and advances in the country over the last 25 or 30 years. But think about it: social service organizations, global tech powerhouse, modern buildings and hotels, the light rail, the metro in Tel Aviv, Waze, massive growth in public transportation, digitalization in everyday life, Iron Dome anti-missile defense system, Moovit, advancements in medicine. And I challenge you to find a better shwarma or falafel anywhere in the world!
When I returned home from this last visit and friends asked me how the trip was, my response was automatic: “Great.” And then I would laugh. Only a Jew visiting Israel, a country at war, can describe such a trip as great.
In Exodus 32, line 9, HaShem describes the Israelites to Moses as a “stiff-necked people.” Despite all the Almighty’s miracles, the people were often stubborn and rebellious. But today’s Israelites in modern Israel have evolved. I prefer the image of a strong, non-bending neck to describe Israelis as resolute, strong-willed, resilient, actually beyond resilient, a determined people who embrace life at all costs and move forward, despite the enemies and the battles that try to drive them into the ground or into the sea. Resilient is who they are.
In the Gallop Poll’s 2025 World Happiness Report, Israel is ranked the eighth happiest country in the world. Imagine that! Despite the horrors of October 7 and its ramifications until today and despite the enemies that surround them, Israelis are in the top eight happiest countries out of the approximate 195 countries around the globe. And what are some of the reasons listed? Of course: strong social connections, a sense of national purpose, and a resilient spirit in the face of challenges.
That was the positivity and resilience I felt on that crowded shuttle bus leaving Yad Vashem that night. Physically we were at a standstill, but philosophically the Jewish people in general and Israelis in particular embrace life and joy, even when confronted with the darkness of death. They move forward with resolve toward the light, forever toward the light, yesterday, today, and always.
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