If this is arrogant, God, forgive me,

When you find your dream job in Israel months before even deciding to make aliyah, by sending them a video of your amazing students in action,

When your sisters both decide they’re going to live in Israel during the first year of your klitah,

When your olah visa makes it back to you from the consulate with three days to spare,

When you walk through the airport with an old friend and a new, dazed by the champagne that El Al gave you as you landed and the crisp efficiency with which you were handed your new national identity, signed up for a kupat cholim, and gifted your first sal klitah envelope of cash,

 

When the Israelis file off the plane saying, “mazal tov, welcome home” to your “olah chadashah” sticker, and the man at the Rav Kav office greets your day-old Teudat Zehut with “welcome aboard,” and everyone around you wishes you “Shabbat shalom” on Friday because you’re all in sync,

When you find the perfect apartment several blocks from the beach, with a landlord who talks like he's your sabbah, five days after landing in Tel Aviv,

When the girl on the bus who is asking for directions then asks if you’re Tel Avivi, and you suddenly realize the luck of parents who invested in your Hebrew education, 

 

When the Bnei Akiva kids dancing at your arrival shower you with candies and you feel like you’re welcomed by the ghost of your own childhood,

When you surge through the arrivals hall to embrace your family who has been waiting for and nagging you about your arrival for years, knowing that this is the final stop, that everyone who lives here is staying here, with no more shuttling between cities across North America, and that the rest will come, because this is home,

Then you fling off your American shame and admit: I think that despite G-d’s cosmic greatness, sometimes He watches over individuals, and nudges us to into the right life path. And we owe Him those lives back, lived in the best way possible.

I believe in all that has never yet been spoken.

I want to free what waits within me

so that what no one has dared to wish for

may for once spring clear

without my contriving.

If this is arrogant, God, forgive me,

but this is what I need to say.

May what I do flow from me like a river,

no forcing and no holding back,

the way it is with children.

Then in these swelling and ebbing currents,

these deepening tides moving out, returning,

I will sing you as no one ever has,

streaming through widening channels

into the open sea.

-Rilke