Between Worlds

Two days after returning home, and I still don’t quite know where I am when I wake up. There is the jet lag, that particular disorientation of crossing an ocean, of moving between universes, and then there is something slower, harder to name. The sense that you were somewhere so completely, and now you are here, just as completely, and the two cannot quite coexist. As though the other place is already becoming a dream.

Every trip back to Israel feels like returning home to a place that is no longer entirely home, while leaving a life that is deeply mine behind. It is a crossing between worlds that never gets easier, no matter how many times I make the journey.

To be surrounded by the people who know me best, who have known me for decades, who recognize me almost by breath alone, and then to return to a life that often feels like a parallel universe, is a transition I never quite know how to prepare for.

No part of visiting Israel does not shake something loose inside me. It fills me, overwhelms me, comforts me, and unsettles me all at once. Something in the land, in the people, in the intensity of feelings, demands attention. It asks me to stop and look inward in ways that rarely happen anywhere else.

Sometimes it feels almost unbearable. Sometimes it feels almost addictive.

One afternoon, we drove out to visit friends who are grape farmers in a small village. They live in a beautiful, small house filled with memories and artifacts, objects that tell a life story without needing words. They moved through their land gently, as though the soil were something to be listened to rather than worked. They spoke softly. They cooked for us in the open air, and we sat on the earth, smelling the soil, eating what their hands had grown.

I watched those hands. Their quietness. Their dedication. The absolute absence of anything unnecessary.

Something in me remembered. Who I am. What matters. What I had forgotten to miss.

There was a morning with women I have known for more than thirty years, friends whose faces hold entire chapters of my life. We spread food across a table, everyone bringing something, and we sat for hours. We laughed until we cried. We cried until we laughed. The kind of morning that reminds you that being truly known by another person is one of the rarest gifts there is.

And the sea, it was there every morning outside my window. The scent of it before I even opened my eyes. The light moving across the waves. Just watching it was enough.

But my real ritual was the pool. There is something about swimming pools that has always spoken to me in a particular way, the stillness, the repetition, the way the water holds you and asks nothing. I swam every day. Something about those mornings in the water, the light moving across the surface, the quiet rhythm of it, stayed with me long after I left.

Long walks with my siblings. Conversations that could only happen in Hebrew, in that particular light, on those familiar streets.

I know I will spend weeks, perhaps months, unpacking what this visit meant. The conversations, the memories, the unexpected moments of recognition and loss. The things I understood only after they had already happened.

This visit held everything.

People deeply rooted in the earth who reminded me how simple and connected life can be.

Friends who grew up beside me and remain an anchor through every season of my life.

Family that is home in its purest form, the place where I can fall apart, be gathered back together, and begin again.

And something else that I am still learning to hold. This visit asked me to discover how far my heart can reach, where its edges are, what it can carry. I learned that not giving up, even when it is very hard, is its own kind of muscle. And that something is waiting on the other side of pain that you cannot know until you have walked through it.

So goodbye for now, beloved Israel.

I love you more than I know how to explain.

I cannot imagine life without you.

And sometimes I cannot imagine life with you.

Until next time.