We visited yesterday with some of my wife’s Israeli relatives who are in the states for a couple of months to see their grandchildren. They are an older couple approaching their seventies. He is a retired judge who has been in Israel his entire life and fought at the Suez Canal in the Yom Kippur War in 1973.

I had kind of expected it, but it still suprised me a little when he said “I would love to move to America”. He said that he really wanted some quiet – in Israel it is nothing but Jews fighting Jews and Jews fighting Arabs. He sees America as a place where these things don’t happen, a place where he can sit down and enjoy his retirement without having to worry about everything going on around him.

He was surprised when I told him that America is no Gan Eden for the Jewish people – here there are still fights between Jews, assimilation is bad with the Jewish intermarriage rate is over 50%, you are living in a non-Jewish country where it is nearly impossible to avoid all of the Halloween/X-mas/New Years celebrations going on all over the place. He was taken aback by this – someone who has lived their entire life in Israel would definitely find it hard to comprehend what it is like to be walking around for a month with X-mas jingles being played left and right.

It seems that when I get into a conversation like this with someone, each party goes in with a preconceived notion about how “things are going to be so much better once I make aliyah/yeridah”. I have had Israelis look at me like I was crazy – “Why do you want to come here when you are already in America? I would love to live in America”. And I look at them and say “why do you want to come to America? You are already living in Eretz haKodesh”. They say “Wars, fighting, discomfort”; I say “Kedusha, Torah, Aretz, Chagim, Shabbat”. Sometimes it really seems like we are speaking different languages.

Yet I know exactly what they are talking about. There are definitely going to be some things about America that I will miss. There are going to situations where I will say to myself “this was so much easier to do in the US”. At one point or another I will miss Galut. On the other hand, I am really looking forward to living in a place where everyone around me know about all of the Jewish holidays (not just cursory knowledge of Rosh haShannah and Yom Kippur), where you can feel the anticipation of Shabbat around you, where my neighbors all share my religious (to one degree or another).

I just hope that I will always remember what goes in the sand and what goes in the stone.