By Malkie Gordon Hirsch Magence
We arrived in Israel a little over a day ago and so far, we’ve stayed in two hotels and done two tours. The first was the Kotel tunnel tour and the second was a tour of the Old City of Jerusalem. In between all this excitement, I visited a family friend in the Old City where I had spent many Shabbosim during my time in Seminary approximately 25 years ago (“Surprise! Remember me? No?!), and also hit up the mall food court, and dined on shawarma at a gas station where I pointed out to my children that there might possibly be more cafés and restaurants and eating establishments in Israel than actual people.
We must have hauled about fifty pounds of clothing as we visited our children and grandchildren who live in tiny apartments and I quietly wondered where they could possibly fit all the stuff we brought.
Jetlag has been a wonderful addition to this crazy adventure of taking our kids out of school for a couple of weeks to visit a place they had never been simply because we felt it was time they experienced a vacation in a place other than Florida.
It’s only been a short time since we landed, but I already love the experience of living vicariously through their eyes as they soak up the sights, sounds, and smells of Israel, experiencing this land of old and new living side-by-side.
Especially since it’s Chanukah, and for the first time in their lives they are seeing truckloads of doughnut deliveries to the Me’arat HaMachpelah while they stood there handing out pizza vouchers to the chayalim in Chevron, thanking them for their service while soaking up all the history of our people from the time of Avraham Avinu until the present.
I love that they try to speak Hebrew and how quickly they are catching on to the language, albeit with some English words tossed in (Ani rotzeh hungry, Ima.) And I especially love that they don’t have to feel nervous and can fully embrace their Jewishness and can feel an enormous sense of pride in that fact. Here, they are like everyone else, and I think they love that fact.
Traveling around and being greeted with a “Chanukah sameach” everywhere we go is something I can easily get used to. If anything, it grows on you, and by the time we’re back in the States, I’m sure it will feel weird when the clerk hands me back my credit card with only a “Thank you” as a greeting.
As I write this at different points of the trip, things keep happening and I try to make a mental note of the goings-on that I think you would enjoy. I think I’ve accumulated a nice mishmash of travel anecdotes that I’ve found both amusing and entertaining. And there may be a mussar haskel embedded in there somewhere too.
One of the things that worried me before the trip began was the possibility of an air raid at a not-so-convenient time. As if there’s ever a convenient time for an air raid. All I kept hearing was, “A siren in Jerusalem is rare. It barely ever happens, so don’t worry.” In my life, that translates to, “Keep the robe beside your bed, the slippers by the door, and get to the safe room within 90 seconds.”
I thought about explaining the protocol to the kids, who had never been through a missile attack, and I didn’t have to until we arrived in Modiin and our relatives described their previous week’s nightmare of being woken at 3 a.m. each night to rush into the safe room that doubled as a child’s bedroom, making it nearly impossible for both parents and children to get back to sleep.
The kids asked me questions about why the terrorists in Gaza and Yemen fired rockets and missiles at Israel, and I tried to normalize something that is definitely not normal and something I definitely did not want to have to explain. Life has a way of throwing curveballs, and when we finally reached that wonderful REM stage of sleep, we heard a British woman’s calm voice telling us to get to the stairwell as soon as possible.
Like a runner training for this all my life, I got fully dressed with a robe on top of my pajamas and a tichel on my head and still had a minute to spare. However, I then had to wake up some sleeping children who did not really want to wake up and get out of bed.
We finally made it to the stairwell, and that’s when I realized that some people were not thinking at all about the possibility that this kind of situation would happen. The first indication was how they walked into the mamad.
Some people would walk in still trying to put on their pajamas, others grabbed bathrobes hanging in the hotel closet, and some just wrapped the hotel bedding around themselves, covering up as best they could. We remained in the mamad for a few minutes, then resumed our much-needed sleep. As everyone quietly shuffled back to their respective quarters, I realized that I could recognize each person based on the Disney characters they had on their pajamas.
Another unexpected adventure was our nightly hunt for our missing menorah. We had bought something inexpensive for the hotel, knowing it would be among the many others that belonged to the hundreds of guests who also thought it was a great idea to go away for Chanukah. The only thing we didn’t plan on was that our menorah would be taken away night-after-night by another family that had arrived to light candles before us, leaving us bereft of our menorah.
The first time it happened, we bought another menorah and figured we would just bring it back with us each night to prevent it from happening again.
But the next night we lit it and left it to burn. Then arrived the next morning to retrieve it only to see that it was gone. When we came downstairs the following evening to light it again, we saw that another family had already used our menorah.
At this point, we have become pretty adept at searching the floor for spare candles and assembling a secondhand menorah with scraps, which allowed us to fulfill the mitzvah of lighting Chanukah candles. Still, I know this will be a story we can laugh about for years to come.
As I write this, we are halfway through our trip. We’ve had a jam-packed itinerary, visiting many sites we thought were essential for the kids to see on their first trip to Israel, and making the experience more fun by having the Modiin kids join us for many of the tours.
We’ve been to the Kotel and the Old City, got a history lesson on Har Herzl where we paid our respects at the grave of a close friend’s son, who sadly died in battle this year. We also attended the memorial service for a soldier who was killed a month ago. We davened in Hebron, packed boxes of dry goods for families in need, helped construct houses out of chocolate at Kibbutz Tzuba, and did a woodworking class in the Gush. We participated in an archaeological dig at Kibbutz Beit Guvrin and visited the Biblical Museum of Natural History in Beit Shemesh.
We observed the yahrzeits of our grandparents, who died on the third and sixth day of Chanukah, by visiting the cemetery. We took the kids on a tour of the shuk on the absolutely busiest day of the year: Erev Shabbat Chanukah. A place that more resembled a mosh pit than marketplace. We had pizza parties, food court crawls, Chanukah parties, and a few days of activities before we had to say goodbye. It has been the type of trip I hope the kids can reflect on years from now and hopefully appreciate.
Nestled within this departure from our daily lives has been the bonding between my younger kids and Jeremy’s older kids who live here, a new level of friendship and familiarity that could never have been achieved with quick trips with no real chance of bonding.
Above all else, all the fun activities planned and enjoyed while here might be the most valuable part of our trip. And I learned that letting go, being spontaneous, and learning to appreciate the little things creates lasting memories for a lifetime.
Malkie Gordon Hirsch is a native of the Five Towns community, a mom of 5, a writer, and a social media influencer.
