JERUSALEM—I wasn’t supposed to be here.
My summer itinerary was carefully planned: I’d start in London, then make a quick family stop in Israel for a cousin’s bar mitzvah, followed by two weeks exploring Europe. I had plans to visit the museums of Rome, the Holocaust memorial in Berlin; I had train reservations across Poland, an Airbnb booked on the Bay of Kotor in Montenegro.
I thought I had every day mapped out to perfection. Israel was meant to be a 48-hour stop before my real adventure began.
Shortly after arriving at Ben-Gurion International Airport at 9 p.m. on June 12—just hours before Israel launched Operation Rising Lion against Iran’s nuclear facilities—I realized that G‑d had different plans. Within hours, rockets were falling across the country. My sister, studying in a seminary in Safed in northern Israel, was texting about sirens. My cousins, who I’d come to celebrate with, were suddenly stuck like the rest of us. Ben-Gurion was closed indefinitely.
More than a week later, and I’m still here. And I wouldn’t want to be anywhere else.
The Rebbe, Rabbi Menachem M. Schneerson, of righteous memory, once spoke of the lesson in unity that can be learned from the Babylonian siege of Jerusalem in 587 BCE. In retelling the story, the Hebrew word the Talmud uses for “siege” is samach, which is normally used with the positive connotations of “support.”
During a siege, the Rebbe explained, “none can leave or enter,” forcing the city’s inhabitants together in unprecedented ways. What at first glance appears to be a tragedy, an event that is intended to lower morale and slowly cause the city’s inhabitants to lose hope, actually contains the seeds of healing through unity.
Living through the Land of Israel’s current reality, I can see clearly what the Rebbe was saying. We are in our own sort of siege, none of us able to enter or leave.
Every night when the sirens wail across Jerusalem, I make my way to the bomb shelter in my apartment building. What I’ve found in that underground space has been nothing short of remarkable. It’s a living example of Jewish unity.
There’s no hierarchy in the shelter.
The elderly man with his walker, the young mother with her toddler. The woman scrolling through her phone finds herself next to the Chassidic family reciting Tehillim (Psalms). There’s Chana, the marathon-running lawyer from South Africa, who told me, “There’s nowhere safer in the world than Israel”—a statement that might sound ironic coming from inside a bomb shelter, but is the kind of logic that only makes sense when you’ve been here long enough to understand that safety isn’t about the absence of danger. It’s about being exactly where you’re supposed to be.
There’s Rachel, who just wanted to know if her mother, in the north of Israel, was safe. There’s the Frenchman, who walks around offering water to everyone; there’s the rabbi who walks from person to person making sure they’re OK; there’s the woman who hands coins to the children to give charity; and there are teenagers who lock arms and start singing a Jewish tune.
These aren’t extraordinary people doing extraordinary things—they’re ordinary Jews doing what comes naturally when we remember we’re family.
The shelter reminds me of a sukkah—the temporary dwelling where our Sages say “all Israel are fit to dwell together.” The sukkah represents the Clouds of Glory that protected our ancestors in the wilderness. It’s true these concrete rooms are playing a role, but somehow it feels that our Divine protection is coming from elsewhere. Every conversation, every song, every small gesture of kindness feels palpably holy.
This understanding has transformed how I see my unexpected stay. Instead of watching this conflict unfold on a screen from my home in New York, in America’s safety, I’m privileged to be part of the response. I’ve helped a young man put on tefillin during a bus ride to Hebron, I’ve been able to hold a conversation with a frightened woman in a shelter and hopefully given her a moment of respite.
I’ve joked with store proprietors when they hand me my shawarma and thanked the bus drivers who don’t back down from their jobs. I’ve handed Shabbat candles to Jewish women hurrying home from their Shabbat shopping and helped fulfill a minyan of 10 men for someone to say Kaddish for his late mother.
I’ve had the privilege of writing stories for Chabad.org, including an interview with Rabbi Menachem Mendel Gluckowsky, the chief rabbi of Rehovot, who summed it up perfectly: “The Rebbe always said that ’peace’ agreements do not bring about peace. What we’re seeing right now is that the Rebbe also gave us ammunition to deal with this—namely, through spreading the observance of Torah and mitzvahs.”
My role here isn’t accidental.
For me, every day that I remain in the Land of Israel is another small declaration that the nation of Israel stands together. When rockets streak across the Jerusalem sky, leaving bright scars against the darkness, I’m not a tourist observing from the sidelines. I’m part of the story being written.
My European adventure feels like it belonged to a different person—someone who thought he could plan his summer without consulting the Almighty’s calendar. Those museum tickets and train reservations were never really mine to begin with.
What I’ve found instead is infinitely more meaningful: the privilege of witnessing Jewish unity in its purest form, of contributing to the spiritual response the Rebbe prescribed, of being present for our people during an important moment of time. I’ve discovered that being “stuck” can actually mean being exactly where you’re meant to serve.
Standing on my balcony in Jerusalem, watching as the Iron Dome and Arrow intercepts missiles overhead, I think about my great-grandfather who fled Poland in 1926, escaping that era’s existential threat to Jewish survival. Here I am, his great-grandson, choosing to stay in another. I am not a “stranger in a strange land” looking for adventure, but a Jew inhabiting a small piece of the world given to us by G‑d, “whose eyes are upon the Land from the beginning of the year to the end of the year.”
I am exactly where I’m supposed to be.
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