As I was drifting off to sleep last night a thought popped
in my head. It struck me with a sense of intense importance. An importance only
endowed to emergencies of war, childbirth, and thoughts that occur in the murky
space between sleepiness and dreaming. I realized, considering last night’s
blog post, some of y’all might get a negative impression of Israel. Which is
fair enough. I wrote about a nasty incident of sexual harassment. Not fun.
However, Israel is my home and I love it here. I think it’s important
to say. There are a million reasons to
be critical about it. A trillion reasons to laugh about it. But for the life of
me I can never think of a single reason why I love it. I just do. I had a teacher once tell me that when a
person first gets married they have a long, long list of reasons why they love
their spouse. They love their spouses sense of humor, looks, table-manners,
etc.. But as the marriage progresses in
time, the list gets shorter and shorter until there is no list anymore. The
person just loves the other.
This struck me as such a lovely sentiment. I'm not married, but that’s
really how I feel about my home. I feel like adulterous every time I step on
and airplane. I feel such comfort in the hilly green beauty of Jerusalem and
the eclectic ocean front of Tel Aviv. I don’t actually know if it is
objectively beautiful. It’s just like a familiar face. It’s comforting. It’s
home.
And I know part of the problem is that so many different
people and peoples think the same thing about this tiny strip of land. So I
hope I never take for granted living here. And I pray I never stop being able
to be critical and more importantly, being able to laugh about it.
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