This is the first time that I have seen Aliyah from the other side. Not the emotional arrival at Ben-Gurion Airport, but the excited packing up in the USA. Our neighbor, Rachel Kastner, is on her way to Israel. After high school in Manhattan, after Columbia University, after she already began working in the movie industry in America, she heard the ancient command: “Lech lecha, go forward.”
At her going away party tonight, everyone had to wear blue and white. Rachel explained her experience this way:
“Over the last few weeks, I was not thinking at all about big ideals but only about little details. I am not involved right now in Zionism, in Judaism or Avraham Avinu, but in the weight of my suitcase, how I am going to buy a washing machine in Israel, and how I will find work after I arrive. I thought about Avraham Avinu and how he heard the same divine command and how he had to pack his tent and wander and search for food and water. The Torah also gives us details about the hunger and thirst, and all the hardships along the way.Because everything important and great that we do in life also consists of forms that we need to fill out and lines in which we have to stand and wait. If only we could feel meaning in the small details, too. It reminds me of the saying that G-d is in the details. Lech lecha. Go forward, despite the bureaucracy..."
B’hatzlacha, Rachel!
Translation by Yehoshua Siskin
