You've come to the right place.
Israel For The First Time
It's barely light as my son, Roni, and I emerge from the terminal at Tel Aviv's Ben Gurion Airport, glad to be breathing the fresh early morning air after 11 hours on the plane from New York. The airport seems more modern and more hectic than when I was last here — in 1987, three years before Roni was born — yet it has a familiar feel. We find the taxi stand, and within a few moments we are settled in the back of a white Peugeot, speeding along the main highway that leads to Jerusalem.
The sky behind the bare brown hills begins to lighten; we pass a few scattered settlements, catching glimpses of dusty streets with tile-roofed houses, low trees and scrub vegetation, the colors soft and glowing in the sunrise. Gazing out the window, Roni keeps up an excited commentary: how the scenery compares with what he expected (even more beautiful); how much the view resembles New Mexico (one of our favorite places).
He seems awed by the simple fact of finally being here, something we’ve been hoping and planning for since his Bar Mitzvah, seven months ago. I've had many internal doubts and anxieties about making this trip, feeling slightly guilty for allowing the terrible pictures of the Intifada to enter into my decision-making, while at the same time, feeling the weight of responsibility for my son’s safety and security. These first moments in the taxi, however, make me realize how glad I am to have followed my instinct: I feel in my heart that this is absolutely the right time for Roni's first visit to Israel.
I had also worried that the Israel I would find would be totally different from the Israel I remembered, when I lived and worked in Tel Aviv in the early 1970s. Both the country and I were both much younger then; more idealistic, more naïve. Certainly the world seemed — at least to me — much less complicated. I was fortunate enough to learn Hebrew with relative ease. The job I found, as a psychotherapist in Israel’s first community mental health center, deepened my identification with the country and the culture. From the moment I arrived in Israel, I always felt at home. Perhaps this was partly due to the fact that my parents had fled from Europe just before World War II, and I grew up surrounded by their foreign accents and their strong sense of Zionism.
But will my son — whose life experience has been, in many ways, very different from mine and whose sense of himself as a quintessential American teenager is so clearly apparent — will he feel the same sense of connection and comfort in this place?
We return to Jerusalem in time to eat dinner by candlelight in the grapevine-covered garden of a restaurant near the hotel.
Post your comment