Travel Journal - Mission to Israel - June 2024

After yet another delicious Israeli breakfast, we started our fourth day with more volunteer work, this time in a vineyard on Moshav Gimzo, located between Lod and Modi’in.  Since many foreign workers left Israel after October 7, and Palestinians are not currently permitted to come into Israel to work, farmers are in need of help with their crops. Today we provided that help. Though I don’t think the farmer would offer us a permanent job, it was meaningful for him, and for us, to help.  While the grapes were not yet ready to be harvested (that will happen about a month from now),  the grape vines needed to be pruned, or as was described to us, we were giving the grapes a haircut.  We were each given hand pruners and we got to work.  As we worked, I couldn’t help but think of the well-known verse from Isaiah - Lo yisa goy el goy herev; Lo yil'medu od milhama - Nation shall not lift up sword against nation; they shall never again know war.  Those are the most well-known words of the verse, but I was also thinking of the words that immediately proceed them:  And they shall beat their swords into plowshares, and their spears into pruning hooks.  In some small way, the pruning hooks we used felt very symbolic of our hope for Israel’s future.

After our time in the field, we returned to Jerusalem and stopped at Har Herzl, Israel’s Military Cemetery.  It is always a powerful place to visit, but this visit was particularly striking as so we visited the graves of the 150+ soldiers that have been buried there since October 7th (out of the 600+ soldiers that have been killed).  Among those we paid our respects to were Anir Shapira, who lost his life throwing live grenades out of a shelter on the side of the road near Kibbutz Re’im on October 7th (a shelter we visited on our first day), and Ben Zussman, who penned a moving letter to his family before deploying to Gaza, where he was killed on December 3rd. Hundreds of graves of heroes who bravely gave their lives so that we could live, so that Israel could live.  We recited Mourners Kaddish for all of them and sang Hatikvah as Moshe our guide said so poignantly, “This is a holy place where we each ask ourselves, what do we want to live for… I’m so proud of the way we remember people here in Israel.”

It was now the afternoon and Shabbat was approaching, so we went for lunch and some time in the shuk (Mahane Yehuda) to feel the atmosphere and excitement of preparing for Shabbat.  One quick anecdote (these are the stories you hear while engaging in small talk right now in Israel).  I was buying a gift for my family at a Judaica store and I asked the shopkeeper, a young man with long hair and a plethora of tattoos if he happened to know people who were at the Nova Festival on October 7th.  He responded: “I lost 24 friends at that music festival.  I in fact was on the way to the festival myself.  Early in the morning I got in the car and started driving from Tel Aviv, but soon after my friend called and told me what was happening.  He told me to turn around immediately.”  Then he concluded: “I sell this artwork in honor of my friends.”  Needless to say, I bought several pieces from him.

We are now back at the hotel getting ready for Shabbat; which after a long, intense, powerful, and important week, we certainly need.