I just brought my big suitcase downstairs to start packing. For a long trip, I tend to start throwing items in as I think of them, a week or so before I travel, and then scale back the night before. It’s a ritual I love — but this time, standing over that open suitcase, I felt something I don’t usually feel: a low hum of anxiety beneath the excitement. Because we are going to Israel in 6 days.
This trip has been postponed and rescheduled a few times. The October 7th Massacre and the conflagration that ensued threw us off the tracks. It was deeply disappointing to pull the plug on our best-kept plans. More to the point, what led to the cancellation was so sad and so tragic. But the airlines weren’t flying, and the missiles were. We mourned the trip even as we mourned so much more.
As the crisis in Gaza mitigated, we decided to regather our travel group and try again. There were eager travelers still waiting in the wings. Now we have 35 people flying off 6 days from tonight. As we began planning this trip, I thought it was brave and funny, in that Jewish-humor way, to name our juggernaut The Hell or High Water Israel Tour. Little did I know that current events on the eve of our trip would require waders…
There is no clarity from Washington or Jerusalem about what comes next. The administration has not explained what it wants, what it will accept, or what it is prepared to do. Is the goal regime change? Nuclear disarmament? Getting rid of Iran’s ballistic missiles? Some diplomatic breakthrough no one has yet articulated? No one knows. Least of all the forty Hell or High Water travelers from Temple Beth Avodah, who are watching the news with focused dread.
Here is the truth of it: most of us in this country live at a comfortable remove from the world’s violence. We grieve Ukraine. We agonize over Sudan. These are real moral wounds. But they do not, most days, touch us directly. We live in what I’ve come to think of as a blessed and insulating bubble — protected by geography, by privilege, by sheer distance from the fire.
That bubble does not travel to the Middle East.
And so here I am, folding shirts and sorting socks, doing the ordinary things one does before a journey — as if everything were ordinary. Only it isn’t. My hands move through the motions of normal life while my mind tracks flight paths, geopolitics, and the unpredictable calculations of men not known for restraint. I am, I’ll admit it, a little dizzy. The world is brewing something enormous, and this time, I will be standing close enough to feel the heat.
And yet.
Our trip will offer what no news cycle can: the chance to stand inside the story, not just read about it. To walk the land. To hear the people. To touch what is ancient and find it startlingly alive. To sit with a bus full of seekers — first-timers and veterans alike — and feel the strange, irreducible weight of belonging to this people and this place. I have made this journey more than a dozen times. It never stops being extraordinary.
As Hillel put it with characteristic impatience: If not now, when? Not next year. Not when conditions are perfect, because conditions are never perfect. The only scenario in which we do not board that plane — God forbid — is if El Al stops flying. That’s it. Short of that, unless Robert Kraft is feeling unusually generous (anyone have his number?), the HHW team is wheels-up in six days.
I will keep praying that cooler heads — somewhere, somehow — prevail. That the men with their fingers near the triggers pause long enough to imagine what comes after. I can’t control any of it. What I can do is close my eyes and picture the stars blazing over Mitzpeh Ramon, the strange, heavy silence of the Dead Sea, the smell of falafel on Ben Yehuda Street, and the feeling — enormous and quiet at once — of being exactly where history placed you.
Kadima. Forward.
Before Shabbat 