Making it in Israel (my heroes)

I guess in a way it was easy for me to start a new adventure in Israel. After I went to the dig in 2005, I had a house to go to, knew people on my Moshav, and felt like I had a place here. Despite being an outsider, not really speaking Hebrew, not knowing all that many people who still lived here, I still had somewhere to go home to. During the last couple years, I went to Ulpan, joined the army, went digging, and put together all the pieces of my life. Thinking back, I guess I really had it easy. Even though my house didn’t have windows when I arrived and was undergoing a huge renovation, and I spent a couple months sleeping in a tent and sleeping bag, because we didn’t have windows yet, I still didn’t have to pay rent or feel pressured to make things work.

My heroes are my friends who I see slogging it out on a daily basis to make the dream of aliyah work. Its hard to impossible to stay in Israel without adapting and integrating, things made much harder while putting themselves through school, working and always juggling a dozen things. The fact that they pull it off is a huge inspiration to me, it really shows that with effort, determination and desire, you can accomplish anything. I have such enormous respect for the people who are making a go of it with their best foot forward, I think that a couple years of struggling, directed in the right direction can pay off with huge dividends later on in life. Maybe an Oleh without that initial struggle doesn’t really understand what it’s like to truly be Israeli and is still living in tourist mode. Deciding you’re going to go ahead with making the radical change of coming to Israel, and making it work no matter what is amazing. It really makes you part of the whole, like it says in the Salach Shabati movie, “I may have it hard now, but just wait till I am the old hand and new people come to Israel, I am totally going to have fun with them”. Before you know it you become a real part of society and are a major part of making it better.

Kol Hakavod.