On Tuesday morning this week, I stood amidst the ruined homes of young members of Kibbutz Kfar Aza, one of the kibbutzim overrun and decimated by Hamas terrorists on October 7, 2023. These small apartments had provided a way for the kibbutz to help young people get their start in adult life. Their location, closest to the western fence of the kibbutz, made them the first line of attack. Along with the murders, there was evidence of rape, and the brutality of the home violation — bullet holes in walls, ransacked belongings — is still visible in plain sight, as the kibbutz members have not yet returned to their homes and decided what to do with this area: create a memorial, rebuild, or something else.
From the same spot on that fence in Kfar Aza, I could see the northern Gaza neighborhoods of Jabalya, Beit Lahiya, and Beit Hanoun. If you enter these areas in Google Maps to try to calculate the distance between them and Kfar Aza (I just did), you’ll get an unusual response: “Can’t find a way there.” These neighborhoods have been emptied since the Israeli military response after October 7, thousands of homes damaged and destroyed. Standing there on Tuesday morning, I could hear the constant hum of aerial drones along with occasional explosions.
This was my first visit to Israel since October 7. The visit was organized by The iCenter and included over 70 Jewish educators from around the world. It was a short and intense trip: four days of meeting with Israelis, hearing their stories, listening. We talked with teachers at Sha’ar HaNegev regional high school about the challenges of supporting and educating children who have suffered incredible trauma — even as they, the educators, dealt with their own. In Sderot we listened to Youssef Alziadna, a Bedouin Arab Israeli who drives a minibus and heroically saved 30 lives of young people — many of whom he has known since they were young children — at the Nova Festival. We talked with educators and families from Kiryat Shmona, in the north of Israel, who have been living in hotels for the last 14 months, unsure when they can go home.
That theme, home, was what seemed to keep coming up for me again and again. Visiting Kikar Hahatufim (Hostages Square) Wednesday morning in Tel Aviv, I felt myself at the epicenter of a campaign that has touched virtually every public space in the country: machzirim otam habayta achshav, Bring Them Home Now. The hostages need to come home. The soldiers need to be able to come home. The people of Kfar Aza and Kiryat Shmona and all the other hundreds of thousands of displaced Israelis need to be safe to come home — just like the people of Beit Hanoun and Jabalya and Beit Lahiya and throughout Gaza. Everyone — every human being — needs to be safe, needs to be able to come home.
I have been to Israel many times, and I’ve lived in the country for two-plus years of my life. Visiting Israel always raises enormous questions about home for me — as I expect it does for many Jews (as it should, I believe). There is an at-homeness I experience in Israel that is just unimaginable for me in America, and at various points in my life I’ve thought about whether and how Israel could really be home for me. That internal conversation is always complicated and hard. But this trip it was even more so, because so many more people are experiencing their own displacement, their own not-at-homeness — even in, especially in, a place they think of as home. (This was only accentuated by the air raid sirens that greeted us 20 minutes after our arrival in Tel Aviv and woke us at 2:30 a.m. on Thursday night.)
The story of Joseph and his brothers is many things, but it is certainly a story about the complexities of family and home. It prompts us to ask questions like, Whom do we treat as family, and what does it mean to do so? How do we create and sustain a shared home together? And, perhaps most acutely in the story of Joseph himself, what spiritual capacities might we be capable of nurturing in those moments when we are far from home: alone in a pit without water, working as a servant in the home of a foreigner, forgotten in a prison in Egypt (or a tunnel in Gaza)?
While I have always admired people who do so, it has not been my practice to kiss the mezuzah when entering and leaving a place. But Tuesday morning in Kfar Aza, entering the shelled out childhood home of our tour guide Orit, I found my right hand instinctively rising up to the mezuzah on the way in and out. Without really even thinking about it, my body seemed to be practicing a kind of mindful awareness: You are in a home, a Jewish home, be mindful. There were family pictures, puzzles that over the years had been completed and glued together and hung on the wall, artifacts of a family’s life through decades of children and grandchildren.
Perhaps my hand was prompting my mind to pray: May Orit’s family, may all these families on all these borders, return home from their exile. May they, may we, experience healing. May they, may we, be safe. May they, may we, return home now.
