My grandfather was also named Joseph. Slightly before the founding of the State of Israel he arrived from Iraq, part of the great return. But economic hardship- the same pressure that once drove Jacob’ s sons to Egypt- pushed him onward. He left a young wife and two small children to seek livelihood in Brazil, joining many Iraqi Jews who traded in textiles there. What was meant to be temporary became permanent. He built a new life, a new family, and never returned.
It would be easy to judge in retrospect. But perhaps it was precisely this willingness to go into the unknown to provide- to become, in a small way, a mashbir for his family- that echoed in my father. He served twenty years in the Israeli Air Force as an airplane mechanic, laboring hard to support us. And yet something in our family story remained incomplete, a longing that was never fully resolved.
I was born in Israel in 1993. At eighteen, like my grandfather and biblical Joseph, I too left Israel. I wandered for years around the world in search of meaning, studying the spiritual traditions of east and west, only to return- as so many of our ancestors have- to the most self-evident truth: belonging to the Jewish people.
And now, I could mourn the fact that I am not raising my family in the Land of Israel in the physical sense. But I am not sad; I know this, too, is from God. There is work for me to do where I am placed.
I also know in my heart that from the perspective of the Jewish soul throughout history, we have been everywhere. We have watched empires rise and fall.
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