A Postcard from Israel

5/14/18

When your kids were little and they first started to dream of visiting Israel, today was the day they dreamt about. They dreamt about waking up on a kibbutz in the central Galilee to the sound of chirping birds. They dreamt about driving through the Jordan Valley and watching the landscape shift from farmland to desert. They dreamt about standing on top of Masada and climbing down the snake path, blinded by the sun. They dreamt about floating in the Dead Sea and smearing mud all over each other, posing for pictures, and screaming when the salt burns. They dreamt about journeying deep into the Negev to a beautiful secluded camp in the middle of nowhere, the very place where the Jewish people came into being. They dreamt about looking up and seeing a sky full of stars, the same sky that our ancestors gazed upon, with the same thoughts and worries. They dreamt about sitting around a campfire under that very sky, surrounded by the people that know them best and who they’ve grown up with, singing songs that they’ve known for so long that it’s like they never even learned them. They dreamt about what it would feel like to know that things will never be the same, without knowing what the future holds. 

Today was a postcard day for your kids. It was a photo album full of the kinds of smiles that are reserved especially for the precious faces of dreamers. It was a day that will be bookmarked among the many pages that have been and are still to be written. It's a day they'll revisit when they're unsure of what another day brings.

Life isn’t always a postcard and some days, however memorable at the time, get lost amidst the constant hustle of life. The fact that we, and they, already know this makes today even more special.