Into the Desert

There is a piece of desert in me that has been there for as long as I can remember. Since the first time I stood in that silence and felt, inexplicably, at home.

In the desert I have loved. I have healed a broken heart. I have learned what longing really means.

This trip to Israel was just the boys and me. Three teenagers, suitcases, endless opinions, and 10 days together.

When you travel alone with kids, every decision feels a little heavier. Where to go. What matters. What is worth a full day of driving when there are so many easier options.

And from the moment I started planning the trip, I knew there was one thing I wanted us to do.

I wanted to take them into the desert.

Not because they asked.

Quite the opposite.

I wanted to share with them something that has been part of me for as long as I can remember. A place that has held love, heartbreak, healing, and longing. A place that has shaped me in ways I still do not fully understand.

I wasn’t sure they would get it.

I wasn’t even sure they would enjoy it.

But some things feel important enough to try anyway.

They didn’t understand why.

The beach was right there. Friends, family, the full days of Tel Aviv, the kind of days that fill you up without asking anything of you. Why stop all of that, pack again, drive for hours, pull them away from everything easy and familiar?

And honestly, I was afraid. What if it didn’t speak to them the way it speaks to me? What if we drove all that way and they just wanted to go back?

I packed anyway.

Traveling with teenagers is its own negotiation. What to eat, when to eat it. Who sits in the middle. Where everyone sleeps. Why is there no signal. The small frictions that can fill a day if you let them.

But something about the desert softened it. As though the vastness made the arguments smaller, or maybe just less important. As though there wasn’t enough room for both the bickering and the beauty, and slowly, without anyone deciding, the beauty won.

There were still moments when I had to step back and let them find their own way through something without me. That is harder than it sounds.

Our guide understood something essential about the desert.

On the first day, he spoke about the different expanses that exist here. The vastness of human time, people who walked these paths thousands of years ago. The vastness of geological time, layers of earth formed millions of years before any of us arrived. The vastness of the landscape itself, where nothing interrupts the horizon. And the vastness of the sky, which in the desert feels close enough to touch.

Something about that stayed with me for the rest of the journey. It changed the way I looked at everything that followed.

He guided us gently through all of it, through stories, silence, questions, and long stretches of simply looking.

And perhaps that is what the desert asks of us too: to stop trying to control every step and allow ourselves, for a moment, to be led by something larger than ourselves.

And then, slowly, something shifted.

Assaf, who was so afraid of rappelling, did it. Beautifully. Itay led us into conversations about God and the Roman Empire that I could not have planned if I tried. At night, we sat together in a circle, and each one of us said what we were grateful for: the desert, life, and being together. And under the stars, before sleep, we made wishes.

On the last morning, Uri turned to me and said: Ima, we are so lucky you didn’t listen to us, and we came here.

My eyes filled with tears.

How much I gained.

How much I learned.

How much I almost missed.

That night, I fell asleep in the same room as my grown boys, bed beside bed. I listened to them breathe.

I didn’t need anything more than that.

Them. Me. And the desert.