I have heard American Jews enjoined to visit Israel as an obligation to visit the sick. A more meticulous analogue, I propose, is a reunion with a first, most passionate love.

What does the journey resemble? An encounter with the beloved, face to face. No letter, no e-mail, no phone call or photograph can compare to the presence of ahavat ne’urim, the love of one’s youth.

I arrived narrowed by the manifest evil of the world, but the beauty of Jerusalem and the sensuality of Tel Aviv were restorative. Despite the security guards everywhere, and the placard bearing the names of the young murdered in Cafe Moment, and the taut faces of people on the street, and the sorrow that cannot be assuaged, my soul knew its home and my body flourished.

Israel is over 50, and I am close, but I was mistaken if I thought my life was an increasingly hurried trajectory to the grave. At every turning I encountered myself — at 17, on my first enchanted trip; at 23, when I lived and worked there; at 36, when I came for a family celebration and stayed for the Gulf War. On every corner I met people who had accompanied me along the journey.

Israel is the corporate body of the Jewish people, the in-dwelling of the collective spirit, fatefully capacious and of supreme significance. What boundaries does the body need in order to sustain itself? This momentous question is the one being argued daily in the mouths of Israel’s citizens and through the bodies of the women and men and children who live there.

The struggle over how to love the land well engages each of us now. As for Jews who repudiate Israel: To hate the land is to despise yourself and the gift of being alive in a world before salvation. For we can refine the soul until the end of time, but unaccompanied by the body, we cannot represent God’s image. We were, after all, wrought of adamah, earth, and named for it. The land is the site of our return, and represents the state of our teshuvah, return, and so it behooves us to shelter and protect the place that bears the name of Jacob only after he wrestled with the angel and prevailed.

When you are young, you demand perfection of yourself and of those you choose to love. More than 50 years into our history as a newly sovereign people, we know: Redemption still awaits us, and the beloved does not need to be perfect to be entirely worthy of love.

On the dashboard of the taxi that takes me to Tel Aviv is a picture of a woman in her 20s. From the back seat I speak of where my spirit has been, and the young man who is driving says something about Cafe Moment.

“You still go to Cafe Moment?” I say, startled.

“My sister was in Cafe Moment,” he says. It is her photograph.

Long ago, I forsook tears as a luxury. But I cried throughout this trip, at the nobility of Israel, scorned by multitudes when her beauty is manifest.

We speak so intently of Jewish destiny that I do not notice my arrival. He comes around to help me with my bag.

“I want to tell you,” I try to find the words, “that in America we know what you are doing for us.”

I am crying. He is crying.

Do not stir up love until it please, says the Song of Songs, our ode to the physicality of devotion.

Readers, do not be afraid to go. You will return more ardent, more constant. You will know the paradox of love: That terrifying troubles whose end is unknown only augment attachment. To travel to Israel is a chanukat ha-neshamah: a rededication of the soul — and of the body that, breathing, is Your praise.

These words are dedicated to Limor Ben Shoham, 27, murdered on March 9, 2002, after the peace of Shabbat in Jerusalem.




Nessa Rapoport’s journey to Israel was occasioned by her work at the Mandel Foundation. © 2002 by Nessa Rapoport.