Milk, Honey, and Crippling Bureaucracy

The Torah says the land of Israel is a land flowing with milk and honey. What the Torah does not mention is the line you have to stand in to get the milk, the form you have to fill out to get the honey, and the fact that both the milk and the honey are subject to a nineteen percent value-added tax that nobody explained to you because the explanation was in Hebrew and you were too embarrassed to ask the clerk to repeat herself for the sixth time.

I made aliyah three years ago. I am now Israeli, technically. I have a teudat zehut. I have an Israeli bank account that charges me fees for things I didn't know could have fees — there is a fee for having money, a fee for not having money, a fee for checking whether you have money, and a fee for the fee. I pay rent in a currency that has a name I still find hilarious. Shekels. I earn shekels. I spend shekels. I lose shekels. I hemorrhage shekels. My life is an unending shekel-related emergency.

But let's start at the beginning.

1:02 I was living in London. I had a job in finance. I wore suits. I had an umbrella collection. I was, by all external metrics, a functioning adult human being who had made reasonable life choices. And then one day — and I can pinpoint the exact day, it was a Tuesday in November, it was raining, obviously, because it was London — I thought: What am I doing here?

This is a dangerous thought. This is the thought that precedes every catastrophic life change in human history. "What am I doing here?" said the guy before he quit law school to become a clown. "What am I doing here?" said the woman before she left her husband for a yoga instructor named River. "What am I doing here?" said me, before I liquidated my pension, sold my flat in Zone 2, and announced to my bewildered parents that I was moving to the Middle East.

"Which part of the Middle East?" asked my father, a man who had spent forty years carefully avoiding the Middle East.

"Israel," I said.

2:02 "Why?" he asked, and the single syllable contained within it the entire spectrum of parental emotion: confusion, terror, disappointment, and the faint hope that this was a joke.

It was not a joke. I had been seized by something. Call it Zionism. Call it a midlife crisis at thirty-one. Call it the cumulative psychological damage of seven consecutive British winters. Whatever it was, it had me in its grip, and I was going.

2:34 The Jewish Agency assigned me a case worker. Her name was Tali, and she had the patient, gentle demeanor of a hospice nurse — which, in retrospect, was appropriate, because my former life was dying and she was there to shepherd me through the transition. Tali sent me a checklist. The checklist was eleven pages long. I printed it out and it looked like the terms and conditions for a mobile phone contract, except instead of agreeing to data collection, I was agreeing to abandon everything I knew and move to a country the size of New Jersey with the confidence of a continent.

3:10 The documents. I need to tell you about the documents. The State of Israel requires, for aliyah purposes, proof that you are Jewish. This sounds reasonable until you realize that "proof" is a concept that means different things to different clerks. For one clerk, a letter from your synagogue is sufficient. For another clerk, nothing short of a DNA test and a signed affidavit from Moses himself will do. My particular clerk — a woman in the London office who radiated the specific energy of someone who had given up on joy in 2003 — required my parents' ketubah, my grandparents' ketubah, a letter from a recognized rabbi, a letter from a different recognized rabbi confirming the first rabbi was recognized, and a photograph of me looking sufficiently Jewish, which is not an actual requirement but felt implied.

4:05 I gathered the documents. It took four months. During this time, I also had to attend something called an "aliyah seminar," which is a day-long event where people who have already made aliyah tell you what it's like. The people who have already made aliyah fall into two categories. Category one: evangelical enthusiasts who describe Israel in terms usually reserved for describing religious visions or particularly good drugs. "The energy," they say. "The spirit." "You feel so alive." Category two: haunted survivors who stare into the middle distance and say things like, "The banks. Watch out for the banks," in a voice that suggests they have seen things.

4:50 There is no category three. There is no calm, measured individual who says, "It's a country. It has pros and cons. The weather is nice." That person does not exist. Israel, I would learn, does not allow for moderate opinions. You either love it with the fire of a thousand suns or you are locked in a bureaucratic purgatory that makes you question the existence of a benevolent God. Often both simultaneously.

5:16 I arrived on a Thursday in July. July. Let me tell you about July in Israel. July in Israel is not a month. July in Israel is a punishment. It is God looking at the Chosen People and saying, "You wanted a homeland? Here. Have a homeland where the air is soup and the pavement can fry an egg and you will sweat in places you didn't know had pores." I stepped off the plane at Ben Gurion and the heat hit me like walking into a mouth. A big, wet, hot mouth. I had been in the country for forty-five seconds and I was already nostalgic for British drizzle. British drizzle! The thing I had spent thirty-one years hating was suddenly the thing I craved most in the world. This is what Israel does to you. It makes you romanticize rain.

6:07 The absorption center. They put you in an absorption center for the first few months, which is basically a dormitory for bewildered immigrants. My absorption center was in a city I won't name, but I will tell you it was the kind of city that, when you google it, the first autocomplete suggestion is "why." The room was small. The bed was hard. The air conditioning unit dated from an era when air conditioning was more of a philosophical aspiration than a mechanical reality. It hummed. It vibrated. It produced a faint breeze that could charitably be described as "not nothing" and less charitably be described as "a warm ghost breathing on you."

My roommate was a man from France named Jean-Claude, who had come to Israel for ideological reasons and was now questioning those reasons approximately every thirty seconds. Jean-Claude and I would lie on our respective beds at night, sweating in the dark, and have conversations that sounded like two prisoners planning an escape.

7:09 "Do you think the bus to the Misrad HaPnim is air-conditioned?" Jean-Claude would ask.

"Nothing is air-conditioned," I would reply.

"The mall is air-conditioned."

"The mall is air-conditioned."

We went to the mall a lot.

The Misrad HaPnim. The Ministry of Interior. I need to pause here and compose myself because even saying the words sends a spike of cortisol through my body that could fuel a small rocket. The Misrad HaPnim is where you go to get your teudat zehut — your national ID card — and it is, without exaggeration, the single worst place on planet Earth. Worse than the DMV. Worse than an airport during a blizzard. Worse than that dentist's waiting room where they play smooth jazz and the magazines are from 2011. At least the dentist's waiting room has magazines.

7:58 The Misrad HaPnim has nothing. It has fluorescent lighting that makes everyone look like a corpse. It has chairs that were designed by someone who actively hated the human spine. It has a numbering system that operates on dream logic — numbers are called in an order that follows no mathematical sequence known to man. 547, 219, 803, 42. You cannot predict your number. You cannot strategize. You simply wait, and hope, and slowly lose your grip on linear time.

I went to the Misrad HaPnim four times before I successfully obtained my teudat zehut. The first time, I was missing a document. The second time, the computer was down. The third time, the specific clerk who handled my specific type of case was on her break, and her break lasted from when I arrived to when the office closed, a span of approximately six hours. I am not certain she was a real person. She may have been a bureaucratic ghost, invoked by the system to ensure that no process was ever completed on the third attempt.

9:12 The fourth time, I arrived at 5 AM. The office opened at 8. I was third in line. The first two people in line had been there since 3 AM. One of them had a folding chair and a thermos. He was a veteran. He'd done this before. He looked at me with my naive, un-thermos'd self and shook his head slowly, the way a Marine looks at a new recruit who has shown up to boot camp in loafers.

I got the teudat zehut. It was the greatest achievement of my life. Greater than my degree. Greater than my career. I had obtained a laminated card with my name on it, and it had only taken eleven weeks and four visits and approximately twenty hours of cumulative waiting and one full-blown existential crisis in a plastic chair under fluorescent lights.

And then came the real challenge: living.

10:04 Grocery shopping in Israel is an adventure in cultural re-calibration. First, the cottage cheese. Israelis consume cottage cheese the way other nations consume water. It comes in fourteen varieties. There is cottage cheese with olives. Cottage cheese with za'atar. Cottage cheese that is, as far as I can tell, just regular cottage cheese but in a fancier container and costs three shekels more. The cottage cheese section of an Israeli supermarket is larger than the entire cheese section of a British Tesco. This is not an exaggeration. I measured.

10:40 The checkout process. In Britain, you queue. You wait. You maintain a polite distance. You say "sorry" and "thank you" and "after you" with the mechanical precision of a well-oiled social machine. In Israel, the checkout line is a scrum. There is no queue. There is a mass of humanity pressing toward a single point, and the person who gets there first wins. I was not built for this. I was built for orderly queuing. I was built for apologizing when someone else stepped on my foot. I once said "sorry" to a shopping cart. I am not equipped for the Israeli checkout experience.

But you adapt. Slowly, grotesquely, inevitably, you adapt. Three months in, I stopped saying sorry. Six months in, I started cutting in line. Nine months in, I honked at an old woman who was walking too slowly across a crosswalk and felt nothing. Nothing. I had been absorbed. The Ministry of Absorption had done its job. I was becoming Israeli.

11:46 My Hebrew progressed from "catastrophic" to "bad" to "functional" to "good enough to argue but not good enough to win." This is the plateau that most English-speaking immigrants reach. You can navigate daily life. You can have conversations. You can understand the news, mostly. But the moment someone speaks quickly, or uses slang, or God forbid tells a joke, you are back to square one, nodding and smiling with the vacant expression of a golden retriever at a lecture on quantum physics.

The thing about Israel — and here's where the dark humor gives way to something else, something I didn't expect and still can't fully explain — is that it gets you. Not in a propaganda way. Not in a "the shaliach was right" way. In a sneaky, cellular, irreversible way. It rewires you. It changes what you consider normal. It changes what you consider home.

12:41 Home becomes a place where strangers tell you you're too skinny and try to feed you. Where taxi drivers give you life advice you didn't ask for but actually need. Where a seventy-year-old woman on the bus will look at your outfit and say, "No. No, this is not good," and you're not offended, you're grateful, because she's right, that shirt was a mistake.

Home becomes a place where the siren goes off on Yom HaZikaron and the entire country stops. Everything stops. Cars stop on the highway. People stand in the street. And you stand there too, and you're not performing grief, you're not checking a cultural box, you're standing there because you understand now, in your bones, what this place costs. What it has always cost. What it may always cost.

And you think about your flat in Zone 2, and the umbrella collection, and the pension you liquidated, and the sensible life you dismantled piece by piece and shipped across a continent.

13:38 And you don't regret it. Not for a second. Not even during the fifth visit to the Misrad HaPnim, which, yes, there was a fifth visit, because of course there was.

The Torah says a land flowing with milk and honey. What it doesn't say is that the milk is five percent cottage cheese, the honey is buried under eleven pages of paperwork, and the land itself will break you down, build you back up, charge you a fee for both, and somehow, against all logic and reason, make you love it.

Milk. Honey. Crippling bureaucracy.

Welcome home.