Tears and hope, fears and resolve, profound sadness and fierce determination – that is the mood in Israel this week

I arrived in Israel with a group of thirteen rabbis from Southern California representing every stream of Jewish life, at 4 AM last Monday morning, and by mid-morning were gathered at Hadassah Medical Center to begin our rounds of bikur holim – visiting the wounded civilians and soldiers who have put their lives on the line each and every day to insure the Jewish future in our ancient homeland.

Sami, a Druze from a village in the north, as his girlfriend (also a soldier) told us how he had saved the lives of a dozen Israeli soldiers in heavy fighting in Jenin – shyly denying that he is any kind of hero “I’m just someone who knows that what must be done, must be done, and I still have faith in the future Jews and Arabs will create together.”

The wonder of Hadassah and Israel – this small island of sanity in the midst of the insanity of terror and war. That very moment in the ICU, they were treating four wounded Palestinian terrorists in the same emergency bay as two Israeli soldiers from the same incident.

This is also the reality of Israel today – in every home, every ring of the phone brings a moment of panic and dread to the pits of every parent’s stomach; where Yom Hazikaron – the Day of Remembrance brought a deep and abiding melancholy as every single citizen contemplated the steep price in young lives that will never see the future.

We listened to the words of sorrow spoken by a young wife at the funeral of her husband who graduated from that same school and was killed in Ramallah only a week before. “I sit and wait, and my heart breaks as it knows you will never again walk through the door.” They had just recently gotten married, and in place of joy, she is wearing the black of mourning.

Mariel – 17, says life is not the same as it once was. “I love to go out, to go to the mall, to sit with my friends, but every time I leave my house this past year I am scared – the bus, the café, the clubs, all in a moment can turn to a place of death.”

And we were privileged to be part of the Independence Day celebration at Mount Herzl, where Avraham Burg, the head of Israel’s Knesset spoke on behalf of the entire country while surrounded by children representing Israelis whose families had come from throughout the world to rebuild a Jewish home in our ancient land. “This year we know how long the road to our dreams truly is,” he said. “And we learn once again that our fate is in our own hands. Yes, we will be victorious, but it is the Shalom after the victory that matters most. That is the vision of Zionism. Perhaps it seems far away and impossible right now, but we will always choose life, our hands will always be open to peace, our democracy will be a model to all the others around us of how we live together as one people even with disagreements and differences. We pray as Jews have always done, for peace and blessings, life and faith in the future.”

They live the dream every day. They build the dream with their everyday lives – with the simple acts of having children, going to work, building this Jewish land with faith, and love and passion.

I watched these young people with the courage of their youth, and I couldn’t help the tears from flowing. In the end they sang these words as a tender song of hope – “It’s still not just a dream that we will see the last war, and return home surrounded by all our friends. Ani maamin – I still believe.”

“Where there is no hope, you must invent it,” wrote Camus. Irony was everywhere for us on this trip. In 1923 Hitler planted the seeds of his madness to rid the world of every Jew while sitting with a small group of conspirators at the Hofbrauhous – a beer garden in Munich. 80 years later, we 13 rabbis sat in that very same beer hall saying am yisrael khai – Hitler is long dead but the Jewish people lives.

Bokhim, bokhim, bokhim, ve-hamshikh ha-lah. We cry, we cry, we cry, and then we continue to create Jewish life, together.