A Stranger in a Foreign Land

The best meal I had in Israel this trip was at a BBQ restaurant on the main avenue in Kiryat Shmona.

I

say "this trip" like it was an impulse vacation. It was and it wasn't. We came at the last minute, though it feels like we are always drawn here. During the trip we joined our friends that are here with the Atlanta Israel Coalition — a delegation of volunteers, self-funded, every dollar raised going straight to the communities that need it.

After the group disbanded, we took a train south to Be'er Sheva, where we'd booked an Airbnb as our base for the remaining days. Then we drove north, all the way up to Kiryat Shmona, because we'd heard things about this town and wanted to see it with our own eyes.

What we found: a man running a nonprofit who spoke about the future of the Galil like she was reading a blueprint she'd drawn herself. A municipal worker who described the rebuilding not as recovery but as improvement — "We are not going back to what it was. We are going forward to what it should have been." A man behind a grill turning out meat that would make any Texan in a smokehouse disappointed with their life choices.

We don't live here. Not yet. Aliyah is the plan, but the bureaucracy has its own calendar. We leave next week, and leaving is the hardest part. Kiryat Shmona felt like home inside of home — the place where, if you could choose any point on the map to spend the rest of your life, you'd put the pin.

We regretted booking the Airbnb in Be'er Sheva the moment we arrived up north.

We will be back.

This week's parsha is Shemot — "Names." The opening of the book of Exodus. And it begins, of all ways, with a list:

וְאֵ֗לֶּה שְׁמוֹת֙ בְּנֵ֣י יִשְׂרָאֵ֔ל הַבָּאִ֖ים מִצְרָ֑יְמָה אֵ֣ת יַעֲקֹ֔ב אִ֥ישׁ וּבֵית֖וֹ בָּֽאוּ׃

These are the names of the sons of Israel who came to Egypt with Jacob, each coming with his household:

— Shemot 1:1

A roll call. Names of people entering exile. There's a midrash in Vayikra Rabbah that says the Israelites in Egypt were redeemed because of four things — and one of them is that they didn't change their names. They held onto who they were. Reuven stayed Reuven. Shimon stayed Shimon. Four hundred years of slavery, and the names survived.

The parsha unfolds from there into enslavement, the decree to kill the baby boys, the birth of Moses, his rescue from the Nile by Pharaoh's daughter. Moses grows up in the palace, flees to Midian after killing an Egyptian who was beating a Hebrew slave, and marries Tzipporah, a Midianite woman. She gives him a son, and Moses names him:

וַתֵּ֣לֶד בֵּ֔ן וַיִּקְרָ֥א אֶת־שְׁמ֖וֹ גֵּרְשֹׁ֑ם כִּ֣י אָמַ֔ר גֵּ֣ר הָיִ֔יתִי בְּאֶ֖רֶץ נׇכְרִיָּֽה׃ {פ}

She bore a son whom he named Gershom, for he said, “I have been a stranger in a foreign land.”

— Shemot 2:22

Gershom. Ger sham — a stranger there. Moses is safe in Midian. He has a wife, a son, a flock to tend. He could stay. He could let the name be a memorial to what he left behind and build a comfortable life in a place that isn't his. A lot of people would.

Then the burning bush. Moses is shepherding his father-in-law's flock in the wilderness, and he sees something strange — a bush on fire that doesn't burn down. He could keep walking. He doesn't.

וַיֹּ֣אמֶר מֹשֶׁ֔ה אָסֻֽרָה־נָּ֣א וְאֶרְאֶ֔ה אֶת־הַמַּרְאֶ֥ה הַגָּדֹ֖ל הַזֶּ֑ה מַדּ֖וּעַ לֹא־יִבְעַ֥ר הַסְּנֶֽה׃

Moses said, “I must turn aside to look at this marvelous sight; why doesn’t the bush burn up?”

— Shemot 3:3

Asurah na — let me turn aside. And the next verse says God saw that he turned aside, and only then did God call to him from the bush. Rashi notes this: God waited for Moses to notice. The call didn't come until Moses chose to look.

Everything follows from that moment. God tells Moses that the suffering has been seen, the cry has been heard, and that God has come down to bring the people out — to a good and spacious land, a land flowing with milk and honey. The stranger in a foreign land is being told: it's time to go home.

On Wednesday — Hebrew Language Day — the Academy of the Hebrew Language announced that Israelis chose הביתה — habaita, "homeward" — as the Hebrew word of the year. Twenty-five percent of respondents picked it, out of ten candidates that included "trauma," "rehabilitation," "investigation," and "Rising Lion" (the name of the twelve-day war with Iran).

The word that won was the direction. Homeward. It was chosen because of the hostages who came home. Because of the families from the Gaza border and the northern communities who are coming home. Because after a year of hatufim — "hostages," last year's word — the country chose to name its next chapter with a destination.

There's something in the fact that this announcement came on Hebrew Language Day — a day honoring Eliezer Ben-Yehuda, the man who brought a dead language back to life. Hebrew hadn't been a spoken mother tongue for about seventeen hundred years when Ben-Yehuda arrived in Jerusalem in 1881 and decided it would be again. The language of Torah, of prayer, of study — made into the language of grocery stores and bus schedules and bedtime stories and, eventually, a country's word of the year. A language that came home.

Shemot is the book of exile becoming exodus. It starts with names entering Egypt and ends — four parshiyot from now — with the glory of God filling the Tabernacle in the wilderness. The journey between those two points passes through everything: slavery, plagues, the sea splitting, Sinai, the golden calf, and the painstaking construction of a portable sanctuary so that God can dwell among the people wherever they wander.

The whole book moves in one direction. Habaita.

We leave next week. We don't want to. The Airbnb is in Be'er Sheva, and our hearts are in Kiryat Shmona, and the bureaucracy will take as long as it takes. But Moses named his son "stranger in a foreign land," and then a bush caught fire, and then he turned aside to look.

The direction is set. The rest is paperwork.

Shabbat shalom.

— Uriel ben Avraham