אימה חשכה גדולה נופלת

With the recent kickoff of the third intifada, I have been wondering about our impending move.

There is something poetic about the mixture of emotions, their yinyang interactions and the paradoxical experience of feeling both at once.

Terror and yearning are estranged cousins. Both come from somewhere else, both inflame your heart with dreams, and both color your eyes and ears in a way that overtakes all of you. One does so for good, and the other....for worse.

I am at once terrified and enthused about our aliyah. It is the culmination of years, nay, generations of dreams; my heart is hollow here and feels its fulfillment in the confusing contradictions of a modern country with an ancient past, a country where you can never earn a living but everybody has a sense of being alive like no other place, a land where you can be attacked and vilified for your presence there, yet also serve as an example of what it means to be human in doing so.
And yet, the serpentine whispers of doubt encircle my mind when it is supposed to sleep, asking about livelihoods and survival, of safety and security, of visions for the future of my life, our family, our country and our people.

I read of Adele Chaya bat Avda, and heard her mother's searing words (http://youtu.be/--hm28A8jxw), and felt both terror of that being my beautiful child, terror that I could never be half the person she is (for being able to say what she did, and mean it, in her circumstances), and yet feeling the "feeling X" I described earlier - a need to be there, to be one of those whose life and presence means something by dint of its own existence, to be a Ben Yisrael as much as anything else.

My heart and mind are 5676 miles away in a place I don't know if I fit in to, yet desperately want to be in. My thoughts are preoccupied by rock throwers and shootings instead of sequesters and soda bans, my emotions tied up in thwarted kidnappings of soldiers and mothers instead of tax returns and NFL free agency. I worry about whether we will be זוכה to live in Eretz Yisrael and be able to keep the ברית that is the basis of haShem giving us the land, I worry of being able to feed my family with dignity, I worry of the future of a country that despite its infinite amount of shortcomings and idiosyncratic evils, is still the Jewish State and the flowering of a גאולה thousands of years after we were brutally sent away from Home.

And yet, I sit in New York City, scared witless and --itless, wondering if my dreams are a road to the future G-d wants to share with me, or a deluded path of self-destruction...