I just returned from my umpteenth trip to Israel, but this was different.

First because I put my out of office on and shut off my email notifications to have an actual vacation, but more substantively because this was our first family trip to Israel in 10 years with our four children, and my 10-year-old daughter’s first time, since the last time we came, she was 7 months old. For the last few years, every Shabbat, when our family does the “Rose/Bud/Thorn” ritual of what was good/bad this week and what are you looking forward to in the coming week, her bud has been, without falter, that she is looking forward to going to Israel (this started years before we had an actual trip planned). So, there was a lot of expectation built up going into this trip. It needed to be special, and so as two experiential educators (and with the help of AI), we got to work planning.

To start we had clear goals: spend as much quality time together as a family before our second oldest son drafts into the army as a lone soldier, create lasting family memories, something that feels precious as our children get older and start to leave the house, begin to bridge the Israel of my daughter’s dreams with the actual place and people that exist today, and see Israel in the aftermath of the return of the final hostage, Ran Gvili, z”l.

From the moment we arrived at Ben Gurion, Israel felt different without the hostage posters and yellow ribbons that had barely held us together over the past 2 years. Even the topics of conversation were back to the “usual”: the upcoming election, alleged corruption, divisions within Israeli society, and the disruptive construction of the light rail. Of course there were many reminders of the post trauma and arduous road to healing, stubborn bumper stickers that won’t come off telephone poles, tattered and half tied yellow ribbons frayed with the passing of time, frequent sightings of amputees, evidence of the lasting cost of the war, and stories of continued disruptions in the workplace and at home with “miluimnikim” still in reserve duty.

But my daughter, for whom this was her first time, was oblivious to most of this because everything was new. For her, the biggest change was going from 2D to 3D. She just took it all in. First, the Hebrew signage and Hebrew spoken everywhere. Then the visits to places she studied about in school but now experienced first-hand. Of course, we did not skimp on the culinary experiences to make it fully sensory. Every place we went she tried something new, from the lavish hotel breakfast buffets to Pitmaster (where she and her sister did a full rendition of Noa Kirel’s unicorn – camp Rikud style – in front of the entire restaurant!) even the kosher McDonald’s (which I managed to push off until the flight home, with a stop at the Ben Gurion terminal food court – because they had never had kosher fast food).

We made it a point to combine experiences and excursions with meeting friends and family. She met up with camp friends at their local playground, and they played as if they were right back in camp and no time had passed. She visited her counselors, who are spending the best year of their lives on a gap year in Israel. She met with her cousin, who is currently serving as a lone soldier, and she even met various friends of ours who have made Aliyah and are building their lives in Israel.

On our visit to the Kotel, I held back from sharing the complexities of this sacred site and my own complicated relationship with it. She asked me to open the mincha prayer in Sefaria (thank you, day school) and on her own stood right up at the kotel and uttered the ancient words of our people. On both sides of her were women, many pouring their hearts out with supplications to God. One particularly poignant was a young girl, only a couple of years older than her, weeping as she added her personal prayers. What could be troubling her at such a young age? I wondered what my daughter felt at that moment. When we left, she said she was surprised that she didn’t feel something special being there. I think she was expecting a “Har Sinai” moment with thunder and lightning, or at least an internal jolt. I reassured her that it was ok and that she had a lifetime to feel it and that for now it was enough to have been there, in the same place that millions of Jews have been over millennia.

Another special aspect of this trip was that one of our sons will be drafting as a lone soldier in the next couple of months, and he has been in Israel for the past year and a half, with plans to make Aliyah. With his impending service looming, it feels that every minute together is precious and fleeting. We are immensely proud of his choice and pray that his service will coincide with calm and peaceful days ahead. I was able to steal several special moments just with him, and I am in awe at the maturity with which he approached this decision, one that is incredibly intentional and against the grain of most of his North American contemporaries.

As I reflect on the overall week, while for me it was just another trip to Israel, there was something extra special about our experiencing it together as a family. My husband said that one measure of a good family is the extent to which they have inside jokes. Well, this trip did not disappoint. We shared some great laughs, and we now have material to last us for years, or at least until the next trip. But even more poignant was seeing Israel “for the first time” again through my daughter’s eyes. While most of us will not have the chance to re-live our first time, we can certainly bring our children and see it through their eyes.

© The Times of Israel (Blogs)