September 4 marked my husband’s and my first “aliyanniversary.” Indeed, it was exactly one year ago, Rosh Chodesh Elul on the Jewish calendar, that we followed in the footsteps of those original seekers, our biblical progenitors Abraham and Sarah, who left what must have been very comfortable lives in Mesopotamia in search of an unknown land that G-d would show them.
The precise words spoken by God to our ancestors were “Lech Lecha,” literally translated as “go for yourselves.” Leave behind all that is familiar and go for yourselves to make a better life. After all, what else could justify leaving everything behind?
Last year, roughly 3,000 years after that original signature odyssey, my husband and I made a similar journey. However, unlike our forebearers who headed west from their advanced civilization in the East, we headed east from the ultimate comfort zone of the West, a place filled not only with material advantages but also the advantages of language and culture, those critical basics that we take for granted until we find ourselves bereft of them.
Thus, we left our relatively easy existence back in Houston, Texas, to go and make for ourselves a new life in a land that is at once familiar yet foreign, welcoming yet challenging.
While our aliyah and subsequent adjustment to our new lives as new immigrants have been mostly smooth, our first year has nevertheless had its challenges, the first of which is the ongoing war that cannot help but affect the mood of the country. Yes, life goes on despite the knowledge of our suffering hostages and the periodic unfortunate and tragic loss of our heroic soldiers who are working to rescue them and protect the rest of us.
If that somber and heavy refrain isn’t always playing in the foreground, it certainly is in the background, tempering happiness in the same way that breaking the glass at the wedding tempers our joy. However, the loss of our Holy Temple took place thousands of years ago and requires imagination and memory to recall it, whereas the pain of our hostages demands only consciousness.
There is not a soul in Israel who is not cognizant of the suffering of our brothers in the hell of Gaza. This heaviness that weighs over our nation will not be removed until we make it past this long, painful chapter in our history.
DESPITE THE unstable situation, we know we made the right decision to come. Personally, I appreciate the feeling of belonging that only teaching in Israel allows me. Although I teach English, not politics, when Israel is in the news, and by extension under suspicion – as it has been nonstop coming on two years – my international classroom is not the place I want to be.
Honestly, from what I’ve seen in the news ad nauseam since October 7, there are very few colleges in the US where I’d want to be teaching these days. My sister-in-law works for Alums for Campus Fairness, an organization that serves to counter antisemitism and the demonization of Israel on college campuses by harnessing the unique power of alumni.
She tells me that the reality on campuses in America is much worse than anything we see in the news. Our plans to move to Israel preceded October 7, but how glad am I to be living here now.
Feeling safer in my classroom, despite the threat of missiles
Ironically, despite the threat of missiles, I have never felt safer in my classroom, surrounded by my fabulous students, most of whom are reservists who either carry or surely know how to fight. Back in Houston, on occasion, I’d imagine a mass shooter entering my college and feel helpless. Not so here in Israel with heroes all around me.
Perhaps even more importantly, I feel relief to simply be myself without having the need to defend, explain, or justify the right of our nation to fight back against our brutal enemies who project their genocidal fantasies onto us. In my Israeli classroom, I’m on the same page as my students when it comes to moral clarity and knowledge of good and evil.
So, when people ask me why I came during the war, as they inevitably do, I say that for me personally – as a teacher of international students – Israel is the best possible place I could be during this difficult period.
OTHER CHALLENGES faced during this honeymoon year have included the breaking of rules we’re unaware of and their pricey consequences. Not having received any mail for nearly eight months (due to inexplicable circumstances), we recently received multiple notices of traffic violations incurred to the tune of thousands of shekels and the threat of revoking driving licenses we’ve yet to receive.
Once time elapses, there is no ability to dispute the initial charges, only the fines that have accrued on top of the charges, and then only with the help of a lawyer. It doesn’t matter that we didn’t receive notice of the violation until seven or eight months after its occurrence. It’s a little Twilight Zonish, with an extra helping of insult on top of the first layer of injury.
Back in the States, we had the language, knowledge, and wherewithal to handle this type of situation. I knew how to go to court and could be heard in the case of what I felt to be an unjust ticket. My husband, an attorney, knew how to solve nearly any type of problem we could face. Here, in Israel, we are playing – or shall I say losing – a game we are simply not familiar with yet, and from what some natives tell us, never will be!
One friend calls it the aliyah tax – all those unexpected expenses that are just the cost of doing business here. You want to live in Israel? Nobody promised you a rose garden. Actually, I just want a fair shake for things like undelivered traffic tickets, maybe a break given my newcomer status?
However, as a colleague put it, “Kan zeh lo America (This isn’t America).” In other words, stop complaining! Get used to it! Be happy you have a car at all! When my cousins moved to Kfar Saba in the 1980s, they didn’t have phone service for three years, so how dare I ask for forbearance? In any event, I’m hoping that our aliyah taxes will go down as our sabra savvy increases. Perhaps.
Going on my second year as an Israeli, I look forward to new opportunities, both personal and professional. As an English teacher, each semester I expand my horizons with the new courses that I teach: English for engineers, English for social workers, and this fall, English for nurses at Laniado Hospital, just up the block from my home in Netanya. This keeps my professional life fresh.
I’m also looking forward to things I haven’t had enough time for during this very busy first year with all of its bureaucratic details, such as hiking and exploring different parts of this fascinating country. There is so much to see and do and learn. I also want to spend time improving my Hebrew.
I’m very fortunate to be able to work in English, but if I don’t want to remain a gringa, I’ll need to put in some more effort on the language front. Being a language teacher, I know what needs to be done. While my first year as an olah hadasha (new immigrant) has been full, sometimes too full, it has been a year fully lived with no regrets.
The writer is a recent new immigrant from Houston, Texas. Formerly a professor of English as a second language to international students at Houston Community College and the University of Houston, she is currently a lecturer of English at Bar-Ilan University and Ruppin Academic College.