The (Almost) Final Boarding Call

I am not a success story yet.  Mine is a story fraught with trepidation, with the unknown and the undiscovered.  After years of mental conditioning and preparation, the moment is quickly transforming from a far-off future endeavor into a present reality.  Will the reality be as great as the dream?  Certainly not, my rational mind responds, but then again, in the past few years I have garnered a greater appreciation for realities.  Dreaming is step one, but dreams are intangible until realized and that brings me to where I am today: less then two months away from my aliyah, a move which will carry me—alone—across six thousand miles, far away from my family and friends.  Moving to fulfill a dream most of the world views as insane—to live the rest of my life in a bona fide war zone, smack in the middle of its often depressing, post-national existence. 

The attack on Mercaz ha-Rav made it all real.  I kept imagining myself six months from then, answering a frantic call from my mother wanting to make sure that I and all I knew were alright.  Get ready, I told myself on that awful Thursday afternoon, because this will be an ever-present element in your daily existence.  We may not want to admit it, but no matter how sorrowful one feels for those suffering in Israel, we are still somewhat grateful to be able to step onto the curb of 34^th and Lexington or 185^th and Amsterdam where the buses are still running as scheduled and the kids are still playing rowdily in the schoolyard.  But this time, after receiving the text message with the tragic news, the distance was almost entirely swallowed.  After all, the homeland of the Jewish people—no—my home had been attacked.  The friends of children I will soon know, the parents of a population of which I will soon be a permanent part were screaming in pain.  That Thursday, Israel stopped being the “Jewish homeland” and became my house.  My backyard.  My yeshiva.  No more escaping outside into the normalcy of Manhattan.  No more departure dates.  That Thursday I finally understood that I had bought a one-way ticket home.

One of the most startling responses I received upon revealing my future plans was from an old high school classmate with whom I had lost touch.  I ran into her outside the Stern building and in the course of friendly conversation she asked me about my post-college plans and I told her about the upcoming aliyah.  Her eyes widened in shock as she replied, “Wow!  That’s, well, that’s fulfilling a life dream.  Good for you!”  I calmly responded, “Well, it’s the first step of a larger dream, yes.”  I certainly wouldn’t call making aliyah my ‘life dream’ because if this were my life’s fulfillment, that would imply that I’ve reached my apex at twenty-two—quite a disturbing thought.  No, this is the first stage in a larger vision for a life steeped in service of God and service of the Jewish people in a state I like to call “an opportunity but not a promise.”  For me, there is no more singing “le-shanah ha-bah be-Yerushalyim” at the Pesah seder and motsei Yom Kippur wondering when I’ll really mean it; no more voluntary exiles in Miami and Long Island; no more desperation and longing to be anywhere but here.

Standing on the threshold of a life-altering decision which will drag me across vast oceans and which will make me a foreigner in a land I have always called my “home,” is to be present in a complex reality.  Coupled with fears, doubts and occasional loneliness are thoughts, hopes and anticipation for the start of what I hope to be a fulfilling life.  The short period of irrational fear during which I couldn’t listen to the Israeli music on my Ipod or eat any Israeli foods, has been replaced by a degree of calm and excitement which has come as a result of beginning to realize a dream. 

It is finally happening.  It’s happening because I can’t imagine beginning the next stage of my life somewhere else; because I can’t imagine falling in love, raising a family or growing old anywhere but in the place God told me to live.  As the author Daniel Gordis puts it, “For after all, if there’s a place in this world that can make you cry, isn’t that where you ought to be?”  If there is place that can move and stir my inner being on a morning jog through its green hills; in a makolet buying toilet paper that specifies which Shabbat desecrations I will not commit by purchasing it; when I wake up in the morning happy because I live in the land I know I’m supposed to call home—how could I choose any differently? 

Jaimie Fogel is a Senior at SCW, majoring in Judaic Studies and Creative Writing