Why Am I back?

By: Moshe Gerstley

I’ve just completed a dynamic few months interning at the Jerusalem Post, penning several published pieces, including two op-eds. I got used to a fast-paced newsroom and studio, and got to learn from some really incredible people. I did so with the stated intent – stated, at least to most people – of remaining in Israel after the summer to study at an American college in Israel. I’d do so, well, because I want to. I believe Israel is our people’s future, something we don’t have here, and I believe I’m at my best there. It’s a place where life feels consequential – because it is.

Where what would be menial here is monumental there. Where writing a paper here is just that – writing a paper, but there it feels like any job is there: building a world. I want to raise my kids there. I want to continue my education there. I may return next semester, and I want to play a role in the future of global Jewry, which, for better or worse, isn’t here.

Life is better there. The people, the food, the culture, the energy, and the meaning. It’s my world. I feel my purpose and my calling are there.

I feel, so often, an Abrahamic call of “lech lecha” – not just to leave his father’s household for the holy land, but to leave a way of measuring a life. 

In the U.S, much is binary: in or out, in line or out of line, the right list, the right label, the right optics. It’s not the people; the five towns are filled with some of the most generous, loving people I’ve ever met – it’s that much of the architecture of Chutz LaAretz rewards the superficial, and inadvertently punishes anyone who steps outside its frame. 

Israel, for all its chaos, doesn’t ask one to perform. It asks us to simply be. That’s the freedom I’m chasing as much as any spiritual one. 

They’re the same thing, really.

Days there are full of giving, of Torah, of life. And even when it isn’t exactly electrified with religious vigor, one could get through it, because the pain feels like it means something – like getting through it was for something greater, not just empty, fading hurt. 

And yet, with all that idealism and yearning – and I could write forty more pages of it – I have to confess: I’m writing this from a couch in Woodmere. I flew back on a ticket I booked the same day, to many people’s surprise. I’m here. In the U.S.

It’s nice. The wide streets, the neon lights, the skyline, the escape – it’s nice. But for the first time landing back here, it’s just… alright. I don’t feel the same push and pull I always have. I just feel something like regret.

So why am I here? Why am I back? Because over the last few weeks – after months of planning, months of excitement for a plan I’d built and was ready to live – a few painful experiences and heartache left me exhausted, and I fell back to the place I first called home.

I sought peace in the place I lost it.

But I clung. I clung to the TopGolf outings with my close friend, the conversations at the park with another, or a chat over coffee, family time, the bliss of driving over the G.W. with the windows down, music blasting. I love that. I always will.

But now, even doing those things, something deep inside stops me and reminds me there’s so much more to life.

Sitting by the water this week, I asked myself: why? Why am I back? How did I end up here, after doing so much to be there? I had good avenues there – professional, academic, spiritual, social – and I pivoted anyway, almost at the last second.

One of my rebbeim calls me a “donkele,”  a nickname that’s since been adopted by pretty much everyone in my life. 

It comes from a short mashal: the tale of a donkey stuck between two stacks of hay. Uncertain, the donkey endlessly deliberates over which pile he’d rather eat, and in the end, unable to decide, he starves and dies. 

It’s a funny story. It’s also, uncomfortably, true about me.

So, being the donkele that I am, I’ve gone back and forth endlessly – never quite able to sit down and jump in.

I used to think the donkele was just about me. I don’t think that anymore. I think an entire generation of us is standing between two stacks of hay: one is everything we were built for here – the stability, the status, the well-worn path. The other is harder to name but easier to feel – a life that costs more and means more, all at once. We’re not lazy or indecisive by nature. We’re just the first generation with the actual option to walk toward the second pile – and it terrifies almost everyone who raised us.

Then, about two weeks ago, after just a few conversations with someone, I felt certain – completely, clear-eyed certain – about something, for the first time in a long time. I’d have done just about anything to get there.

And when that fell apart, and it turned out that path wasn’t possible anymore, I started questioning everything. Nothing else I’d built had that same confidence behind it, and I didn’t know what to do without it.

So I backtracked – even on Israel – and I was lost. I panicked, went back to old habits: calling everyone I know for advice, reading signs into everything in front of me. (Bad move. Don’t do that.)

On the advice of one of my closest mentors, I finally let myself feel that maybe I’m not ready.

Some version of that life – the one I picture with a rebbe in French Hill just outside the Old City – is real, and reachable. Just maybe not yet. Maybe I need some time.

That’s harder to sit with than anything else. So being here, painful as it is, might be exactly what I need.

So why am I back? I’m not, really. Maybe my body is. My mind, however, hasn’t left Yerushalayim yet. I hope it never does.

“If I forget you, O Jerusalem, may my right hand forget it. May my tongue cling to my palate, if I do not remember you, if I do not bring up Jerusalem at the beginning of my joy.”

So to the people who want it all clear from me – I’m sorry, I don’t have that. I’m starting to think that’s not a failure though; it’s just an honest response to an impossible choice. I might book a flight back any minute now. I might not, for a while. That’s not flakiness. That’s what it looks like to actually be free – to stop needing everyone’s approval of the timeline before you trust your own pull.

And to anyone reading this who feels that same pull, quietly, in a house in the Five Towns or wherever your version of it is – you’re not alone in it, and you’re not crazy for feeling like the life you were handed doesn’t quite fit. More of us are waking up to this every year. Not because we’re rebelling against anything, but because we finally believe there’s somewhere that doesn’t ask us to shrink to fit in.

A place, rather, to just be. 

To be a Jew – in Judea.