How I Learned to Stop Worrying and Love the Misrad Hapnim

I want to tell you about the five stages of aliyah. They are not the same as the five stages of grief, although there is significant overlap, and at least two of the stages are, in fact, just grief.

Stage one: Euphoria. Stage two: Confusion. Stage three: Rage. Stage four: Numbness. Stage five: A strange, inexplicable, possibly pathological love for a country that has done nothing to earn it and everything to discourage it.

I am currently in stage five. I got here approximately fourteen months ago, somewhere between my third attempt to cancel a Bezeq internet contract and the moment a complete stranger at a bus stop shared her sufganiyah with me because I "looked sad." I was sad. I was sad because of the Bezeq internet contract. But she didn't know that. She just saw a sad person and gave them a donut. This is Israel in miniature: someone will ruin your day and someone else will save it, often within the same hour, sometimes the same person.

1:01 But I should start from the beginning. My name doesn't matter. Where I'm from doesn't matter. What matters is that I was a person living in a country that worked — by which I mean the trains ran on time, the bureaucracy was navigable, and when you called a customer service number, a human being answered, and that human being was, if not helpful, at least identifiable as a member of your own species.

And I left that country. For Israel.

My therapist — my former therapist, because Israeli healthcare allocated me a new one, a woman named Dr. Katz who communicates exclusively through raised eyebrows and long silences — my former therapist asked me why. "What are you running toward?" she said, which is therapist for "what are you running from?"

1:50 The honest answer is: I don't know. The dishonest answer, the one I gave at aliyah seminars and to my parents and to the shaliach, was a polished narrative about identity, belonging, and the Jewish historical imperative. The real answer is somewhere in between. The real answer involves a moment in a synagogue when I was nineteen, and the light was coming through the window in a certain way, and the cantor was singing something ancient and aching, and I thought: There is a place where this feeling lives full-time. And I want to go there.

I did not understand, at nineteen, that "where this feeling lives" also has a housing crisis, mandatory military service, and a cockroach population that operates with the organizational efficiency of a small army.

2:40 The cockroaches. Let me tell you about the cockroaches. Nobody warns you about the cockroaches. The Nefesh B'Nefesh brochure does not mention the cockroaches. The shaliach, with her olive-wood cheekbones and her PowerPoint about the Start-Up Nation, does not mention the cockroaches. The cockroaches in Israel are not the cockroaches you know. The cockroaches you know are small, apologetic creatures that scuttle into cracks when you turn on the light. Israeli cockroaches do not scuttle. Israeli cockroaches stand their ground. Israeli cockroaches make eye contact. Israeli cockroaches fly. They fly. At your face. With intent.

3:20 The first time I encountered an Israeli cockroach, in my absorption center apartment in Ashdod, I screamed at a volume that brought my neighbor — a retired colonel from the IDF — to my door with a look of genuine concern. "What happened?" he asked. "Cockroach," I said. He looked at me. He looked at the cockroach. He looked back at me. And in his eyes I saw something I can only describe as profound cultural disappointment. He killed it with his sandal. He didn't even take the sandal off. He just lifted his foot and brought it down with the casual precision of a man who had seen combat and found this frankly beneath him.

"Welcome to Israel," he said, and went back to bed.

That was my first week. It was not the worst week. The worst week was week six, which is when I entered the Misrad HaPnim for the first time.

4:14 I have a theory about the Misrad HaPnim. My theory is that it was not designed by humans. My theory is that the Misrad HaPnim was designed by an advanced alien civilization as a test — a test to determine whether human beings have sufficient psychological resilience to survive contact with extraterrestrial life. The test is: Can you sit in a room with broken air conditioning and wait for four hours while a number system that follows no discernible logic slowly, methodically disassembles your will to live?

If you can survive the Misrad HaPnim, you can survive anything. First contact with aliens? Easy. Alien bureaucracy? You've already done it. The aliens want you to fill out a form in a language you don't speak? Been there. The aliens' computer system is down? Old news. The aliens' specific clerk for your specific case is on a break that will last until the heat death of the universe? Tuesday.

5:16 My first visit to the Misrad HaPnim, I brought everything. Every document. Organized. Tabbed. Color-coded. I had a folder. A nice folder, from a stationery shop in my home country, because where I'm from, you bring nice folders to important appointments. The clerk looked at my nice folder the way you'd look at someone who brought a knife to a gunfight. "You're missing the Ishur from the Misrad HaKlita," she said.

I did not know what an Ishur from the Misrad HaKlita was. I had never heard these words in this combination before. It was as if she had said, "You're missing the Blorgenfraz from the Schnitzeldorf." I stared at her. She stared at me. Between us lay a chasm that was not linguistic but existential. She lived in a world where the Ishur from the Misrad HaKlita was a basic, obvious thing, like a passport or a pair of pants. I lived in a world where these words meant nothing.

"Where do I get it?" I asked.

6:19 "Misrad HaKlita," she said, which was helpful in the way that telling a drowning person the ocean is nearby is helpful.

I went to the Misrad HaKlita. The Misrad HaKlita needed a document from the Misrad HaPnim. This is not a joke. The Misrad HaPnim needed a document from the Misrad HaKlita, and the Misrad HaKlita needed a document from the Misrad HaPnim. I was trapped in a bureaucratic Escher painting, walking up stairs that led down, opening doors that opened into the same room, holding documents that required other documents that required the original documents.

I stood on the street between the two buildings — they were, naturally, on opposite sides of the city — and I laughed. Not a happy laugh. Not a funny laugh. The laugh of a person who has just realized that Kafka was not writing fiction. Kafka was writing a Misrad HaPnim field guide.

7:13 I solved the problem eventually. How? I did what every successful immigrant to Israel eventually learns to do: I found a guy. Israel runs on finding a guy. Need a plumber? Find a guy. Need your car fixed? Find a guy. Need a document from a ministry that requires a document from a different ministry that requires the first document? Find a guy. My guy was named Avi — half of all Israeli guys are named Avi — and he knew someone who knew someone who worked at the Misrad HaKlita who could issue the Ishur without the document from the Misrad HaPnim because "he owes me from the army."

7:51 Everything in Israel connects back to the army. Everything. "He owes me from the army" is the skeleton key that unlocks every locked door in the country. Your landlord won't fix the boiler? He owes someone from the army. You need a reservation at a full restaurant? The maître d' owes someone from the army. The entire country is a vast network of mutual obligations formed during three years of mandatory military service, and if you didn't serve — and as a new immigrant who arrived past the age of exemption, I didn't — you are operating without the cheat codes. You are playing Israeli life on hard mode.

8:30 Let me tell you about Israeli customer service. I hesitate to even call it "customer service" because the word "service" implies a willingness to serve, and the word "customer" implies that the person on the other end of the phone recognizes you as a human being with needs. Israeli customer service operates on a different philosophy. The philosophy is: You called us. This is already a problem. Whatever you want, the answer is no. If you persist, the answer is still no but louder. If you persist further, we will transfer you to someone else, who will also say no, but in a different accent.

9:13 I once spent three hours on the phone with my internet provider trying to understand why my bill had doubled. Three hours. In that time, I was transferred to seven different departments, disconnected twice, and at one point found myself speaking to a man who was clearly in the middle of eating lunch and did not stop eating lunch at any point during our conversation. I could hear him chewing. I could hear specific foods. At one point there was definitely a pickle.

"Your bill doubled because of the upgrade," he said, between bites.

"I didn't request an upgrade," I said.

"It was automatic," he said.

"Can I un-upgrade?"

"No."

"Why?"

"Because you've been upgraded."

This is Israeli logic. It is circular. It is airtight. It is infuriating. It is, somehow, also funny, in the way that very dark things are funny when they happen to you enough times that the only alternative to laughing is emigrating, and you've already emigrated, so.

10:16 The food. I need to talk about the food because the food is what keeps you here. The food is the reason you don't get on a plane. The food is the chain that binds you to this impossible country. I don't mean restaurant food, although the restaurant food is good. I mean the everyday food. I mean the tomatoes. Israeli tomatoes are not tomatoes. Israeli tomatoes are what tomatoes were supposed to be before the rest of the world ruined them. They taste like the sun learned how to be a vegetable. You bite into an Israeli tomato and you understand, viscerally, why the spies in the Torah came back from the Promised Land carrying fruit. They weren't showing off. They were trying to explain something inexpressible. They were saying: You don't understand. The tomatoes.

11:01 Shabbat. Let me tell you about Shabbat, because Shabbat is when Israel becomes something else entirely. Friday afternoon. The chaos drains out of the country like water from a bath. The honking stops. The yelling diminishes. People go home. Families gather. The smell — challah and chicken and something spiced and warm — floats through every open window in the city. And even if you're secular, even if you don't light candles, even if you're sitting alone in your apartment eating cereal because you haven't figured out the social part yet, even then — even then you feel it. A collective exhale. An entire country pausing to breathe.

I was alone my first Shabbat in Israel. I sat on my tiny balcony and listened to the quiet and cried. Not sad crying. Not homesick crying. Something else. The kind of crying that happens when something you didn't know was clenched inside you finally unclenches. The kind of crying that is, really, a form of arriving.

12:08 An old man on the balcony next door saw me. "Ach, chadash?" he asked. New guy?

"Chadash," I confirmed, wiping my face.

He disappeared inside and came back with a plate. Chicken. Rice. Salad. A piece of cake that his wife had made. "Shabbat shalom," he said, and handed it over the balcony railing.

This is the thing. This is the thing that breaks you and rebuilds you. The country is impossible. The bureaucracy is satanic. The rent is extortion. The cockroaches fly. The customer service is a human rights violation. The driving will kill you. The government will drive you insane. The summers will melt you. The Misrad HaPnim will destroy you.

And then someone hands you a plate of chicken over a balcony railing and says "Shabbat shalom" and you understand that you are not a customer here, not a tourist, not a visitor. You are a person who has come home, and home is messy and loud and broken and beautiful and yours.

13:09 I stopped worrying. Not all at once. Not completely. I still worry about the bank fees and the cockroaches and the fact that my Hebrew makes me sound like a partially concussed kindergartener. But I stopped worrying about whether I made the right choice. I stopped worrying about whether this was a mistake.

It wasn't a mistake. It was the most irrational, impractical, bureaucratically nightmarish decision I have ever made, and it was not a mistake.

The Misrad HaPnim has a sign above the door. The sign says something in Hebrew that I initially couldn't read but now can. It says "Ministry of Interior." That's all it says. No inspirational quotes. No "Welcome." Just a bland, governmental label for a bland, governmental building.

But I love it now. I love it the way you love a scar. The way you love something that hurt you and made you tougher. The way you love something that is terrible and necessary and yours.

14:07 I love the Misrad HaPnim. I love the number system that defies mathematics. I love the clerks who don't blink. I love the fluorescent lights and the broken chairs and the fact that the air conditioning has never worked, not once, not ever, and probably never will.

I love it because surviving it meant I get to live here. And living here — with the tomatoes and the Shabbat quiet and the old men with plates of chicken and the Mediterranean doing its ridiculous blue thing every single morning — living here is worth every form, every line, every lost document, every impossible phone call, every cockroach, and every single shekel.

How I learned to stop worrying and love the Misrad HaPnim?

Easy. I stopped expecting it to be something it wasn't. I stopped expecting Israel to be something it wasn't. I stopped expecting my life to be something it wasn't.

And then it became everything it was supposed to be.

15:00 Also, I found a guy at the Misrad HaPnim who owes me from ulpan. Not the army, but close enough.

You always need a guy.

Welcome to Israel. Take a number. Bring a thermos.

It's going to be a while.

But it's going to be worth it.