PELONI: This deeply personal reflection by Nikki Goldstein explores the ancient covenant, enduring connection, extraordinary resilience, and hard-won refuge translates the connection with the lands of Israel as being far more than a distant locality on a map: for Jews around the world, it is a home that history could not erase and a an answer to the promise of “Never Again”. Goldstein explores what it mean to feel at home in a country you’ve never visited – and why that feeling has taken on a sense of urgency for Jews since October 7, Bondi, and the rising tide of antisemitism.
Nikki Goldstein
Author of Conversations With My Rabbi
Click Image to Enlarge. Image created via AI.
Yesterday, a man boarded a flight from Dubai to Tel Aviv carrying an axe, or a knife (at the time of writing the weapon is not yet confirmed) and a murderous intent. But by the time the passengers had wrestled him to the floor of the cabin, the only thing that had changed in most people’s lives was a headline they scrolled past. Flydubai Flight FZ1073, diverted, the attacker restrained, everyone walked off that plane alive. A good news story, by all accounts.
Unless you’re Jewish.
If you’re Jewish here’s another story where Jews were threatened. Erasure on the attacker’s mind. Millions of Jew-haters around the world disappointed at a foiled attempt to get rid of a few more of us.
Yesterday, I noticed something about myself, reading about the attack. Sadly, I wasn’t surprised. Not even a little. Somewhere in the last three years since October 7th, my nervous system has recalibrated what registers as alarming when it comes to Jews and news and borders and safety. An axe or a knife on a flight to Israel barely attracts as column inches anymore. For the rest of the world it’s just more bad news about Jews, for us, it’s more ghastly proof we’re not safe.
I have never been to Israel. I have never walked through the ancient, cobbled streets of the Old City. I have never put a folded piece of paper into a crack in that famous wall nor prayed before it or touched it with reverence. I don’t have a holiday snap of myself bobbing improbably in the Dead Sea. And yet, when I read about the plane that was wrested back from a terrorist and brought under control at thirty thousand feet, I felt something move in my chest, a beat, a breath, a pang, the way it feels after a long trip when you’re on your way home. Yet this is not the home I currently live in. Not home I remember. This is something different. It’s a feeling for a home I’ve never seen and still somehow ache for.
Not long ago that craving for a home I’ve never visited didn’t make sense. I’ve stopped thinking that. After what happened at Bondi to my friend, Rabbi Eli Schlanger and the 14 other souls who lost their lives in a murder-spree, the kind that was averted yesterday, where a person who wanted to erase Jews went after them with evil intent, this now makes perfect sense.
What’s Actually Written Into Us
For many years when Jews talked about a connection to Israel, I thought it was purely sentimental. I believed it was nostalgia for a homeland our ancestors were once expelled from, as they have been from many other countries, since the Biblical Exodus. I was wrong. It isn’t sentimental. It’s structural. It’s written into the architecture of the religion itself, not stuck on afterward to make a modern political or national claim easier to argue.
Start with the Torah, because the Torah starts there. God’s covenant with Abraham in Genesis isn’t a vague blessing — it’s a real estate transaction with cosmic witnesses: “To your descendants I will give this land.” Not a land. This land. Named, bonded, promised before Abraham had a single descendant to inherit it. Centuries later, when Moses, at this stage 120 years old, climbed Mount Nebo to the top of Pisgah, God showed him the entire Promised land – stretching from Gilead to Dan, down to Judah and reaching the Mediterranean sea. Here was a map of the future for his people. Moses did not step foot on the land, but fulfilling God’s promise, his people did.
Every major festival in the Jewish calendar is agricultural, which means every major festival is also geographic and seasonal. Sukkot isn’t a generic harvest festival; it’s the Land of Israel’s harvest festival, built around crops and a climate that exist in one particular place. Pesach ends not with “we were slaves and now we’re free” as an abstraction, but with a direction: out of Egypt and into the land. The three pilgrimage festivals — Pesach, Shavuot, Sukkot — were, for most of Jewish history, literal pilgrimages, meaning Jews once organized their annual calendar around physically travelling toward this ground.
And then there’s the praying aspect. Observant Jews anywhere on earth, in any country, in any century, have faced Jerusalem to pray. Not symbolically faced it — physically oriented their bodies toward it, the way the needle on a compass points North. Synagogues are built with this in mind. You don’t orient an entire architectural and liturgical tradition toward a direction for two thousand years as a nice gesture. You do it because the place is understood, structurally, as the location where the connection with God is addressed.
I’m not trying to win an argument. Others will do that with much more scholarship and rigor than I could ever do. I’m writing this now because something changed for me personally: I’d been treating the pull toward Israel as an emotional glitch, something I was a bit embarrassed about given that I’d never actually been there. Then I understood that the pull isn’t a system malfunction. It isn’t a sentimental artefact discovered as the result of an increasingly hostile world, it’s something more fundamental than that. It’s part of an ancient system that’s functioning exactly as it was designed. The Torah doesn’t ask Jews to visit the land before we’re allowed to love it, the love is a condition of the covenant, passed down whether any individual Jew ever steps foot in the Holy Land or not.
Not Just Coming Home. Building Something Out Of Nothing
There’s a part of the Israel story that stops at “the Jews came home,” as though the achievement was simply arriving somewhere and finally letting go. That version undersells it badly, and I think it’s partly why people underestimate the fervor with which diaspora Jews view Israel.
The land that generations of Jews prayed toward wasn’t waiting there, fecund, fertile and rich, ready to supply milk and honey for generations to come. Much of it was swamp, malarial marshland, arid tracts and desert — inhospitable ground that multiple empires before the modern state had looked at and more or less written off. What exists there now is not an inheritance that was handed down. It was built, by people, out of very little, deliberately, remarkably, with blood, sweat and tears and absolutely no guarantee it would work.
Israel recycles something close to ninety percent of its wastewater for agriculture, the highest rate of any country on earth, in a region where most of its neighbours struggle to recycle a fraction of that. Desalination plants, including what was until recently the largest in the world, now supply well over half the country’s drinking water, out of a sea too salty to drink and a bright sky too unwilling to release its nectar to rely on. Drip irrigation — the technology that allowed arid land to grow crops using a fraction of the water older methods wasted — was invented there, in 1959 by Simcha Blass an engineer who noticed a leaking pipe was making one patch of ground thrive while everything around it remained parched, and thought: what if we did that on purpose, everywhere. The term “Start-Up Nation,” coined in 2009 by Dan Senor and Saul Singer, stuck because Israel boasts the highest concentration of startups per capita in the world and a booming high-tech economy. It produces a wildly disproportionate share of global innovation for a country with a population smaller than New York City, built by people whose grandparents, in many cases, arrived with nothing but tattered clothes and broken souls that they’d managed, against all odds, to keep alive and a stubborn refusal to be erased from the history books.
That’s not a people who were handed a perfect homeland tied up with a bow and ready-made. That’s a people who turned a dust-bowl, with a million and one problems, into a civilisation, and in my mind, there’s something dogged, resilient and defiantly Jewish about that story — because it’s a mirror of so much of our history. Take what you’re given, even when what you’re given is almost nothing, and turn it into something. As my mother used to say, “Get what you get, and don’t get upset.” We have a way of turning dust into food and lack into prosperity. It’s the Jewish way.
Never Again Isn’t A Slogan. It’s A Location.
I’m not an expert on Israel, far from it. But I can speak from the authority of a person who has been close to a terror attack – not something most Australians, or Western people can own. I lost my dear friend and rabbi at Bondi Beach, at a Chanukah gathering that was supposed to be joyful, to a man who wanted Jews dead simply for being Jews. I’m not the same person I was before that happened. None of us who were close to it are.
So, when I reflect on Manchester, which happened on this very day one year ago, where a synagogue was attacked during Yom Kippur services, the holiest day on our calendar, and two people were killed while they were praying for forgiveness — and then, yesterday, about a bloody attack on a plane headed for Tel Aviv, I don’t experience these events as three unrelated news items from three unrelated places. I experience them as one continuous story. The story doesn’t ever seem to end. It just changes location.
“Never Again” was uttered in the shadow of the Holocaust as a promise, and for decades plenty of people, myself included at various points, were able to treat it as mostly historical — a vow about the past, a thing we say at memorials or whisper to ourselves as a kind of bulwark against the darkness. I don’t have that luxury anymore. Actually, I’m not sure any of us do. When we break it down, “Never Again” means a lot more than the slogan lets on. It was never simply “let’s remember this happened.” It was “let’s make sure Jews are never again a people with nowhere to go.” That is, simply, what the State of Israel is for. Not a nice idea. Not a cultural project. An insurance policy written in blood and law, because every other version of safety Jews tried in Europe for two thousand years — assimilation, obeisance, excellence, usefulness, silence — turned out, eventually, not to be enough.
I understand that Israel is not simple. It’s a country at war with most of its neighbours, making decisions under conditions none of us watching from a comfortable distance should pretend to fully grasp, and I’m not here writing an essay about its government or its military strategy — that’s not my expertise and it’s not what this piece is about. What I’ve been saying to friends across dinner tables, in conversations on the internet and in pieces like this for the past three years is that the less safe the West starts to feel for Jews, the more my own body wants Israel to exist… kind of like the way you want to run around your house and lock all the doors and windows when you think you’ve heard footsteps outside.
When my grandparents were fleeing Germany in 1939, England, where my grandfather had been studying medicine for several years, wouldn’t have them. They came to Australia, a long way from sophisticated and urban Berlin, as a last resort but forever loved this country for the sanctuary it provided. My mother, the child of refugees, has had a lifelong recurring nightmare that she’ll be left by the side of the road clutching a tiny suitcase in her hands. For me that desire to feel safe isn’t about politics. It’s about having somewhere that doesn’t have a locked door. We cannot tell another generation of Jewish children there’s no room and we’re leaving you by the side of the road.
We Weren’t The Ones Who Arrived From Elsewhere
The accusation, we call it a “blood libel” that sits underneath so much of the hatred I’ve described, (often dressed up as history), that Jews are European colonisers who pitched up in the Middle East and took someone else’s land, is a neat story but it has a fundamental flaw. It’s not true! And the evidence against it is not really in dispute.
Start with where Jewish ancestry actually traces. Genetic studies of Jewish populations around the world — research published in journals including Nature and the American Journal of Human Genetics — have repeatedly found that Jewish communities from wildly different countries, who’d had no contact with each other for over a thousand years, cluster together genetically, and cluster with populations from the Middle East more closely than with the European, North African, or other populations they’d lived alongside for centuries. An Ashkenazi Jew whose family lived in Poland for six hundred years and a Mizrahi Jew whose family never left Iraq carry a shared genetic signature tracing back to the same ancient region. That’s not folklore. It’s DNA.
Then there’s the part of the story that the “coloniser” framing conveniently skips entirely: the roughly 850-900,000 Jews who were expelled or fled from Arab countries and Iran between 1948 and 1972 — pushed out of Baghdad and Cairo and Tripoli and Aden, communities that had lived in those places for over two thousand years, in some cases since well before Islam existed. The majority of them resettled in Israel. Today, something close to half of Israel’s Jewish population descends from those Mizrahi and Sephardi communities — meaning half the country, often labelled “European colonisers”, never set foot in Europe at all. They were refugees going toward the region their ancestors were from, not away from it.
Jews are not a people who arrived in the Middle East. We’re a people who were exiled from the Middle East, repeatedly, by repeated empires, and kept finding our way back toward the place we’d long prayed toward, because we never believed, that leaving meant we’d stopped belonging. That’s not colonisation. Colonisation is a foreign power settling land it has no ancestral claim to and no history in. What happened in Israel is pretty much the opposite of that — an indigenous people, scattered by force across multiple continents for two thousand years, returning to the home its own religious texts, prayers, festivals, and genetics pointed to.
The Love That Doesn’t Need A Passport Stamp
Perhaps the hardest part to explain to someone who isn’t Jewish is the thing I started with: that I feel this, fiercely, for a country I’ve never set foot in. I understand why that sounds, from the outside, completely irrational. The person I am now, post-October 7th, post Bondi, post rampant global Jew-hate and in light of my family history and the history of an exiled people (now, hoping for a safe place for my child and future grandchildren), it’s the most rational thing I can imagine.
The closest thing I’ve found to a fair comparison, and I offer this with the greatest respect, (because I don’t want to reduce anyone else’s experience to a footnote in mine), is perhaps the relationship some Indigenous peoples hold with their traditional land, even generations removed from it, even when they’ve never physically stood on the specific ground their ancestors are from. That kind of connection to country isn’t sentimentality either. It’s identity, inheritance, and spiritual orientation all at once, carried in story and practice and blood memory long after geography and history tried to sever it. People who understand that relationship in their own context tend to need the least convincing about ours.
Everyone else — and I say this as a plea as much as a statement — must take it mostly on faith, because the thing I’m describing doesn’t fit neatly into a conversation at a dinner party. It’s not patriotism, how can it be when I’m not Israeli and have no passport to prove an allegiance to it as a nation. It’s not nostalgia, since I have no memories to be nostalgic for. By way of explanation, maybe it’s closer to what you feel about your own name — not something you chose, not something you can fully justify on demand, and not something you’d trade away for the comfort of being easier to explain…. Even if it’s a hard name to say and other people don’t like its sound on your lips.
Last night I was having dinner with my daughter and a young Israeli woman. She couldn’t believe that as Jews we’d never been to Israel. She said, “You will feel it in your soul, in your being when you’re there. You will never be the same again.”
Her words stirred something in me. They called up an Israel State of Mind, even though I’ve never set foot there. My mind is drifting to that place because of what the Torah wrote into me before I was born. It’s captivated by it because of what a handful of stubborn, brilliant people built out of swamp and desert when everyone told them it couldn’t be done. It’s searching urgently for it because of what happened at Bondi, and in Manchester, and on a plane this week that almost didn’t land safely, and because “Never Again” is no longer a line we automatically recite. Since October 7th 2023, Israel became a place I desperately want to exist, and I want it still standing long after I’m gone.
I don’t need to have visited Jerusalem or Tel Aviv to know, in my body and my soul, exactly where home is. Some belonging doesn’t wait for a stamp in a passport. Some of it was written in long before I arrived, in a book that’s been open on the same page for three thousand years, waiting for me to finally learn how to read it.
Conversations With My Rabbi Published by HarperCollins
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