Tales Of A Wandering Jewess

Children Of Israel Are Never Alone

Hey, beloved tribe.

I woke up this morning feeling wonderful. The event with Dara Horn went so well last night. She was her hypnotically brilliant self and the moment the event ended, a TSUNAMI of raves just poured into my inbox.

This was especially gratifying because — as many of you are aware — I hit a low point yesterday morning, feeling that I just can't do this alone. But when I gave voice to my vulnerable and demoralized state, this incredible community responded, and how.

I am especially grateful to the wonderful, generous souls who bought books for tribe members who are experiencing a lean time right now.

I'm very grateful also to the Jewish Book Council for their partnership and collaboration.

Please continue to spread the word about the Never Alone Book Club and our mission to fight the marginalization of Jewish writers within the literary world at this political moment. There is no better community than ours, and I want every tribe member to experience the warmth, support and belonging.

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All right, so I promised a report about my trip to the UK and Israel, which was overwhelmingly wonderful yet not without its complexities. I know I won’t be able to cover everything today, but I’ll write what I can in the space that I have and then very likely create a part II on Monday.

I spent two days in the UK on the way to Israel, where I stayed in the impossibly charming town of Shere with a friend from high school, Lynette Nusbacher. She’s a brilliant and renowned military historian and strategist; per her firm’s web page, she has been Senior Lecturer in War Studies at the Royal Military Academy Sandhurst; Head of the Strategic Horizons Unit in the UK Cabinet Office; and the Devil’s Advocate to Britain’s Joint Intelligence Committee.

Lynette Nusbacher

She is also a walking treasure trove of Jewish knowledge and I felt I gained at least 10 IQ points just by spending two days with her.

Her town looks like this:

One highlight of my time there was seeing the play Faygele by Shimmy Braun, which is the story of a gay young man coming of age within an Orthodox Jewish family. I honestly have no words for how I loved this play. The writing, the casting, the acting, the direction: all of it felt flawless to me. It was an incredibly powerful story, though it wasn’t easy to watch. I could not recommend it more highly, I hope it gets the reception it deserves, and I also hope to feature playwright Shimmy Braun as a Jew Of The Universe in the near future.

After two days in the UK, I went on to Israel, arriving just in time for Shabbat with the family of my friend Deborah in Jerusalem.

It was inexpressibly great to meet Deborah, whom I’d previously known just through Facebook, in person, and to go straight from Ben Gurion airport to a delicious cooked-from-scratch meal in her warm, beautiful home with her absolutely wonderful family.

People say social media isn’t real life, but I suspect they’ve never been dropped into the Middle East and had dozens of doors flung open to them by wildly generous friends who tend to their every comfort.

Deborah had made vegan cupcakes in honor of my arrival, but by the next morning, miniscule ants had somehow managed to breach the sealed domed lid of the cake plate they were stored in.

Here is an actual conversation that took place in the face of her children’s dismay:

Me: “Hey, kids, listen — just brush the ants off. It’s no big deal.”

Deborah: “But there’s so tiny. They could easily miss a few without realizing it.”

Me: “Well, even so, the ants won’t actually hurt them, you know. It’s just extra protein, as they say.”

Her: “But they’re not kosher!”

Here was an amazing thing: though Deborah fed me like a queen and brewed me coffee in the morning and lent me a sleeping bag, sheet and towel for the IDF base, she had no spare bedroom, but it didn’t matter. I stayed with one neighbor the first night, another on the second. It is impossible to overstate the extent to which all Jewish Israelis feel like extended family. Every stranger is haimish; every brand new friend is a wonderfully generous and accomodating host.

The first night I was there, a warning siren went off, sending everyone in the building to the designated ground floor shelter, but I was sleeping like the dead and heard nothing, not even Deborah pounding on my door in an effort to wake me. Baruch HaShem, no Houthi rockets shattered the window above my head and the whole event was a surprise to hear about over my morning coffee hours later.

On my first full day in Israel, I walked two miles to the Kotel, where this non-believer left many heartfelt prayers at and inside The Wall, many of them on behalf of many of you.

My daughter called as I was walking back to the house, and in immediate response to my blissed-out “hello,” she said: “I can hear the Israel effect already.”

The next day I left for the IDF base, and that’s when the reality of flying into a war zone caught up with me. I was at Ben Gurion airport, where the Sar-El volunteers were told to convene, when another siren went off.

When this happens, they freeze the escalators, so that as a stampede of people struggling with oversized luggage are trying to rush down to the safe area on the ground floor, they aren’t in an even more dangerous situation.

This is how I came to be in the dead center of one of those escalators when there was a deafening boom that shook the building — a boom that was heard in Jerusalem even though the airport is in Tel Aviv. Imagine how it sounded from 350 meters away. I can’t possibly describe how frightening this was, given that I was trapped in a crush of people right next to a wall of windows.

Later I learned that a Houthi missile had reached the airport — one of very few that the Iron Dome had failed to intercept since the start of the war. And I just happened to be right there. What are the odds?

And on this dramatic note, I will pause for now and continue on Monday.

I hope you all have a lovely and restorative Sabbath!

I’m so happy to be back with you, and can’t wait to tell you the rest.

Shabbat Shalom.

Am Yisrael Chai.