Can you still feel joy? Trying to enjoy vacation as sad news from Israel comes in - opinion

I’m writing this column from Lisbon, Portugal, where my wife, Jody, and I are on vacation, having a wonderful time while at the same time feeling deeply guilty.

This won’t be the first time we’ve traveled outside Israel since Oct. 7. Earlier this year, we visited our aging parents in California to introduce them to their great-grandchildren. That was a need as much as a want – who knows if or when there will be another opportunity? 

A month after that trip, we followed our jazz saxophone-playing son, Aviv, to Switzerland, where he was headlining five nights at Marian’s Jazz Room in Bern. That was more a want than a need, but we still had an “excuse” for leaving Israel in the midst of a war.

But Portugal – there was no imperative to follow the music or to that ensure my 92-year-old mother got to meet her offspring’s offspring’s offspring in person. 

No, this was a vacation of escape, a desire to breathe again, if only for a moment, which of course added to the feelings that we were doing something unpatriotic at a time when a Hezbollah attack had just been thwarted, Iran was still threatening retaliation, and when our hostages, those who are still alive, were still being held captive in horrific conditions.

We’re not alone in this mélange of emotions.

For most of the past 11 months, Israelis have gingerly walked along an unbidden, increasingly narrow tightrope. On the one hand, there’s the daily death toll which casts its gloom on everything, while on the other hand, my wife and I have been living a relatively “normal life,” taking care of our grandchildren, going out for dinners with friends, and even dancing at a wedding or two.

When I read the news, I sink into despair. Then we go to a rock and roll concert. Even then, it’s impossible to deny reality.

We’ve been going to the annual Hutzot Hayotzer arts and crafts festival in Jerusalem for some 30 years. Every night of the festival, a different Israeli rock band takes to the main stage in front of an ecstatic audience of thousands. This year, we caught a double concert of ’80s stars: T-Slam and Yehuda Poliker.

The musicians referred to the hostages several times in between songs. However, the segment that moved Jody and me to tears was a Poliker song with a video backdrop of the ubiquitous hostage posters that can be found on nearly every street corner in Israel, each image appearing one by one.

It’s hard to let go [freely] when the faces smiling at you are those who were brutally captured, raped, and murdered, including this week our friends’ son Hersh Goldberg-Polin. Even so, like Noa Argamani after her rescue, dance we did. 

The dichotomy of life in the Middle East never ceases to amaze

NOW HERE we are in Portugal for 10 days. I’m trying to give myself a break. Still, I find myself ping-ponging, one moment wanting to stay on top of every nugget of news, the next fantasizing about disassociating from anything Jewish or Israeli, of moving to Lisbon permanently and never mentioning Israel or Judaism again.

But then there’s the grandkids, the community we’ve amassed, the wonderful and fulfilling life we’ve built.

Perhaps that’s the nature of being a Jew in a world where antisemitism is resurgent, where Jews are canceled at literary events and booted out of professional associations: to live in that tension between joy and despair, to keep plugging away, knowing tomorrow could be worse, while at the same time never losing hope that the day after tomorrow will be, must be, better.

We’ve lived through tough times in the past. On the day we made aliyah in 1994, IDF corporal Nachshon Wachsman was being held captive by Hamas in an apartment north of Jerusalem. He was eventually murdered.

Two years later, suicide bombers became ever-present, and we were terrified to ride on public transportation, eat out in cafés, or even walk down the street without obsessively looking over our shoulders. 

We survived those, and we’ll survive this time, too. 

Still, it’s profoundly disorienting to have been thrust back into history so violently. In that respect, our current situation is in keeping with the Jewish past, where yidden celebrated at smachot (joyous ceremonies like weddings), made love, and raised children, all the while never knowing when or where the next pogrom was coming. 

A friend just got back from a month in Paris with his family. “Were you able to enjoy yourself?” I asked. “Yes,” he replied hesitantly, “but the heaviness was never far away.”

Shalom Hartman Institute Senior Fellow Yossi Klein Halevi described his concerns in a recent episode of the For Heaven’s Sake podcast. 

“What happens when you’ve already gone through 2,000 years of Jewish history, you finally come home… and the war against Jewish legitimacy and Jewish existence doesn’t end” as the early Zionists prayed it would?

Klein Halevi then offers an answer.

“I came here because this story matters to me more than any other story. Because this story is an extension of my own personal story. So, what happens to this story isn’t separable from what happens to me. I have to be here. I don’t have a choice. I don’t have anywhere to go. If, God forbid, this story fails, then my life has failed.”

And yet, Klein Halevi adds that he feels “this incredible privilege to be part of this. I’m in it, no matter what.”

That’s how I feel too, even as Jody and I sit in a Lisbon café eating Pastel de nata, a Portuguese custard tart, while pining for the delectable sandwiches from our favorite restaurant, Bruno, in Jerusalem. We’ll be back soon enough. To what, I don’t think anyone knows. But it’s still home, and for that I’m grateful. 

The writer’s book Totaled: The Billion-Dollar Crash of the Startup that Took on Big Auto, Big Oil and the World has been published as an audiobook. Available on Amazon and other online booksellers.