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Home

It’s a strange word to me right now.

I am now “home”. I’m back in Australia, back in my own room, back at work and, for the last few weeks, back at University. But with all that is going on in Israel right now, home does not really feel like home.

Since returning back from Israel, I have been told by many people that I got back ‘just in time’. I left Israel on Tuesday 11 July. By the time I landed in Bangkok on the Wednesday, 8 soldiers had been killed and two kidnapped in an ambush on the Northern Border by Hezbollah. Jump one more day, and this time I land in Melbourne to the news of the ‘big balagun’ that had begun between Israel and Lebanon. My phone rang off the hook all day. “Aren’t you glad you are home?’ most have asked. ‘Don’t you feel lucky?’ commented others.

Well, the answers to both questions is not really. Why should I feel ‘lucky’? Because I got out while others are still ‘stuck’ there? Because I was ‘lucky’ enough to be born in Australia while others were ‘unlucky’ to have been born in Israel? Because while I go to sleep at night and head to work in the morning knowing that I’m fairly safe, Israelis in the north go to sleep at night and head to work in the morning not knowing whether they will be spending much of this time huddled in a bomb shelter? I have so many friends in Israel who are not afforded the same luxury as me – that is, to jump on a plane and go ‘home’.

And I have not just left behind friends. I have left behind my brother, his wife and his three young children - the youngest of which only came into this world 3 1/2 weeks ago. I worry about the kind of world that he has been born in to. It saddens me that the day he returned home from hospital would have been spent in a tiny room waiting until it was safe to come out of the bomb shelter. Rabbi Fred Morgan spoke at the Blue Ribbon rally about the kind of world that the children are inheriting, and his words ring true when I think of my baby nephew, who was born under a sky of rockets flying into the northern towns of Israel.

Home.

For four weeks in Israel I thought a lot about the idea of a Jewish homeland, about the realisation of a dream in the land of Israel, and about the prospect of Aliyah in my future. As I raised my voting card to vote at the Congress, I thought about the parents and grandparents of my own grandparents, who saw a Jewish homeland only in the shape of that dream, and perished because there was nowhere for them to turn and no one for them to turn to. It literally pains me to think that this place, this safe-haven for the Jewish people is going through such hard times, especially after the wonderful four weeks I spent there.

But as I have always maintained, and am pretty sure I have mentioned a number of times throughout my 'blogging', the Jewish people, and in particular the Israelis, are a resilient people, and I have no doubt that they will make it through this difficult time. I just hope the end comes sooner rather than later.

And in the meantime, I will consider what it really feels like to be home away from home.