How Did I Get Here and Why is My Underwear Soaking Wet?

Ever have those moments where you wonder to yourself: “How the hell did I get here?” For some of us it could be after a promotion at work, or it could be after nailing a big win during a competition; for others it could be waking up on someone’s couch, a stranger’s bed, or maybe a park bench in a city you don’t live in. I’ve had moments like this before, ones where I had too look at a piece of mail to find out where I had woken up, or I was sitting in the Library after six hours of getting nothing done and wondering to myself where did the time go? During this particular sucker punch of self-reflection it was early morning and I was sitting in mud with water having already soaked through just about everything I was wearing including, yes, my underwear.

I should probably explain.

I was somewhere in northern Israel in the Upper Galilee region. It was the part of the day that the average sane person doesn’t see on a regular basis. The part where the sun hasn’t quite come up yet and only some birds are chirping; it was the kind of hour only seen regularly by insomniacs, fitness nuts, and the homeless.

Oh, and soldiers too.

I couldn’t tell when the sun actually began to rise, it had been raining and cloudy all week and the sky was blanketed with dishwater clouds swirling like they were being sucked up into a sky drain. The only indication that it that the new day was starting was the meek sunlight peeking through the clouds making everything above the horizon look like it was being run through a black and white filter.

My unit and I had been marching and conducting “operations” for three days already as part of our final training exercise in the army, I was currently resting, plopped down in the cold mud; the unit was strategically arrayed in a formation known to infantryman the world over as the “tactical rucksack flop”. It has the advantage of taking weight off of your feet and shoulders with the disadvantage of it being pretty damn hard to stand up afterwards (also it’s a terrible position tactically speaking). I had essentially traded the pain my shoulders from a pack that weighed in the excess of 50 kilograms for the shivers that were blooming through me as a result of the cold ground leeching what little body heat I had built up churning through the mushy ground.

Throughout my army service I would think: what would why my friends and family in New York think of if they saw me now? I imagined they were all warm and dry indoors, leading the life that the average person born and raised in New York lived.

So how did I end up with soaking wet underwear in northern Israel?

I’ve probably been asked “why did you come here” more than anything else by Israelis since I landed on August 19, 2009 (close second: Is College really like the movies?). For some Israelis, it’s the unthinkable, they just can’t comprehend what would cause someone to wake up and say “you know, life is too good here in New York( aka the promise land) I’m going to try something else.

So why did I make Aliyah? I can’t actually tell you which is harder: explaining why I wanted to make Aliyah, or thinking back to a time when I didn’t want to make Aliyah.

I was brought up in a Jewish/Religious household that blended the Jewish American optimism of Zionism and the children of Holocaust survivor’s paranoia that the Nazis might come for us at any minute. The first time I ever told anyone I wanted to make Aliyah I was 16, and my parents had just sat me and my brother down to talk for the first time about where we might want to go to college. I brought up that I had thought about joining the IDF. My mom, being a typical Jewish mother, tried reason: “well you wanted to be an astronaut till you saw the movie Apollo Thirteen.” My dad took a more subtle approach: he threatened to run me over in the driveway because “if you want to get yourself killed, I can at least save some money on college tuition”.

Cutting a very long story short, in the end “we” (they) decided that if I wanted to join the army, then I could do it after college. They talked a lot about getting an education and making sure that Aliyah and military service were the right things for me but they were probably just hoping that by the time I graduated there would be a girl, or a job, or a new video game that would have me forget all about it. To be fair, it probably seemed like a good bet at the time.

I spent my entire college career, from the day I started till graduation insisting that I was moving to Israel afterwards to join the army. People thought I was crazy, (but then after the economy collapsed in 2008 I wasn’t looking so crazy going into a job with such a high rate of acceptance). I spent my junior and senior years of college blissfully free of the stress my fellow students were experiencing trying find a job or get into grad school. By the end of senior year, while everyone was in suits and ties running from job fair to job fair with stacks of CV’s in hand, I wandered around campus in shorts and a t-shirt with vodka-tonic in a Starbucks cup.

In September 2008, my last year of college, I simply filed my paperwork at the Consulate in New York and waited for my Visa. On August 18th 2009 my parents drove me to JFK and me and a handful of suitcases took off for Israel.

But I still haven’t answered the question: Why did I make Aliyah? That’s the complicated question. Why did I leave everything I’ve ever known, everyone I grew up with, my friends, my family, and head off to a new country where I barely spoke the language? I could tell you it’s because of Zionism, or wanting adventure, or joining the army, or a million other reasons why.

In the end, I can tell you that I knew that I wanted to make Aliyah because during the Second Lebanon War and Operation Caste Lead, both which happened during my college years, I didn’t want to be anywhere else but in Israel. I wanted to be part of it, not just for the good stuff, like the beaches, and the night life, and the food and the culture; but also during the difficult times. I’ve stayed for the same feelings and the same reason.

In addition, my college experience was filled with the usual types of anti-semitism you find on college campuses: there were a few swastikas sprayed on campus buildings here and there, and the professors all took the usual anti-Israel stances, with one being an outright anti Semite and posited that Israel was the source of global conflict. I was harassed for wearing a Jewish star, I was called Nazi scum for Israel’s “crimes” once by someone who lived on my dormitory floor (I wasn’t even Israeli…at the time). If ever New York tried to convince me to stick around, these experiences went a long way towards convincing me that I had somewhere else to be.

Fast forward a few years and during the hardest parts of the Army, or the economic difficulties of being a young person in this country, I’ve always remembered the way those experiences made me feel, and how they were becoming more common and I knew I was in the right place.

During the Gaza Operation in 2014, I, like most other reservists, was very frustrated to watch what was going on from the sidelines. Friends of mine were inside Gaza fighting and the similar feelings from college started to creep up. But the difference was now there were other things I could do. I went to funerals for soldiers from my unit, I helped deliver packages to soldiers stuck on their bases for over a month, and most importantly: I was here. Through the heartbreaking news of casualties, and the wails of the rocket sirens throughout the country, it felt good to be a part of it, not in the “misery loves company” sense, but rather to stand together.

I know I must being doing something right because now people seem to have consigned themselves to see this idiot New Yorker with an American passport stay here of all places, and they ask me: “Do you still love America?”

Once when I was in the army I got called by the spokespersons unit to do an interview with an American news station that turned out to be Giraldo Rivera. He was with Fox doing a special on Israel, the Iron Dome system, and Lone Soldiers. During the interview Giraldo asked me if I felt more American or Israeli, it’s a difficult question of identity that I had struggled with for a long time. Am I ever going to be “Israeli?” What even makes me American? I was born there, I know the pledge of allegiance and the star spangled banner by heart, I love country Music, American beer, the fourth of July, the Superbowl, America’s funniest home videos. If anyone insults the US of A, I will proudly and stupidly defend her honor like only a registered Republican can (although even for us that’s getting a little harder these days). This answer all just seems to confuse them more. In other words, for her greatness and her faults, her ups and downs, for better or for worse,you don’t choose family and America is my family.

But then how does Israel fit in? If America was an accident of birth, then Israel was a choice, my relationship with Israel then, resembles a marriage. But just like the love and affection for a spouse doesn’t diminish your relationship with your family, then being Israeli for me doesn’t make me less American.

They edited that part of the interview out of the final cut that ran on Fox News.

The last eight years have been more than anything that I could have ever imagined and I owe it to the people who have made it such a wonderful experience. Here’s to hopping that the rest is just as fun and rewarding, with great people, new experiences…and dry underwear.