I thoroughly enjoyed reading this! Great images as well and I 100% relate to your MIL. Making a choice to be a family is the best way to put it. I am a Christian and despite all I have seen from beautiful "trips," taken by Christians, I am more inspired than ever to take one to Israel after reading your post and just do everything. Thank you!
Israel is an amazing experience especially when it is multi-generational! Love seeing all the kids together and although not transitional yet, I wonder if it will impact anyone once you return home? Nesiya Tova!
Congratulations on holding the family together and creating that bonding experience! Not easy to do these days! I grew up a Jewish atheist until I was 29, I have family in Israel, and visited there at age 18 for two and half months and several times since then. It wasn't being there that gave me a religious experience or changed my religious beliefs, it was the red-pilling process going on in my life in my 20's, my worldview formation. The phrases "everything I've been taught to believe is false", and "all the mainstream narratives are lies" became real for me. I migrated from leftist atheist to libertarian, then to conservative, then to one-world government conspiracy theorist, then to Bible believer, and finally to Messianic Jew / Christian. Now I understand more clearly than before what being Jewish is all about. God revealed to all of humanity who He was through a people called the Jews and a place called Israel. That was His laboratory to demonstrate His love for all mankind, including you. You have an open invitation to experience the Creator's love for you, as much as any Jew who ever lived. Judaism is not an exclusive religion - it's for everyone. It's just that Gentiles have a different term for it - Christianity. Christianity is the same as New Covenant Judaism. You've gone through your own red-pilling process during the Covid years. I hope you'll continue your truth quest. You might not be done yet.
Gorgeous photos, loved how openly you share - sounds like it’s all about making the connections, enjoying family and opening your hearts - which is not easy, but basic, and yet we forget how important... keep having fun! Xo 🫶🏻
What about learning about Palestinians. Shocked and disappointed you have not included a palestinian in your educative experience in Israel. Makes it pretty one side.
What about the Palestinians Mrs. Sey? Have you learned anything about their fate under Israeli occupation? Very disappointing to hear about your evident fondness and support for Israel, a brutal, racist, colonial power, that should be treated as the pariah state that it is, just like South Africa was during its Apartheid period. Open your eyes and join the Boycott, Divest and Sanction Israel movement.
BDS applies the cancel culture to 8 million people. The cancel culture is the very thing that Jennifer's substack is all about! You're reading it, so you're evidently against cancelling Jennifer, but in favor of canceling Israel? Isn't that a double-standard? So cancelling is okay as long as you're the one who gets to decide who's cancelled and who is not?
BDS is a form of peaceful protest against a 56-year-old brutal military occupation, land theft, 21st century colonialism, systemic human rights violations, impunity, violations of Palestinian's right to self-determination and to live in their land in peace, without the constant abuse and threats perpetrated by the hyper militarized state of Israel. If BDS means "cancel culture" to you, so be it. To others it means a desperate attempt to stop the cruel Israeli juggernaut through peaceful means. What is truly amazing is that progressive, high-minded people that purport to care about health and wellbeing, completely ignore the evident racist and colonial nature of the state of Israel, since its inception, and act as if it was a normal, regular state, to visit, explore, have fun, recover from hangovers, and yes, of course, to have a learning experience!
I'm sure your intentions are good, and you're just concerned about human rights, so I would affirm you in that. I just think that no nation is perfect, politics is always messy to some extent, and I wonder whether you are weighing both sides of the conflict fairly. I'm sure you're aware that virtually the entire Muslim world has been established by conquest (same as colonialism, just by weaker actors without an industrial civilization), killing, all manner of violent atrocities and forced conversions to Islam, and second-class citizen status of non-Muslims (same as apartheid) and absence of fundamental human rights and political rights. That includes huge portions of the Middle East, North Africa, sub-Saharan Africa, Central Asia, Southeast Asia, and parts of Eastern Europe. Israel wants to possess a small fraction of one percent of all the land area conquered by Islam since the 7th century, to live in their ancient homeland, where their history took place, where their temple stood, where their cities and archaeological sites are located, where the Dead Sea Scrolls were written and rediscovered. Where they can avoid dealing with ubiquitous anti-Semitism and pogroms all over the world, century after century with no letup. Is that too much to ask? By the way, Christianity is one of, if not the largest and most influential religion in the world, and its leader, Jesus, surely the most influential person who ever lived, said that the Jewish Bible was the Word of God, and it promised the land of Israel to the descendants of Abraham, Isaac, and Jacob, not Ishmael, Esau, or anyone else. This cannot be said about any other people group. Out of respect to both Judaism and Christianity, can't the world recognize that the Jews, who maintained their religion and ethnicity for over 1600 years of exile, should be entitled to live as a nation again, as they have continuously dreamed of doing, on a small plot of land where they had a nation from at least 1250 BC to 150 AD, 1400 years, which is longer than the English, French, or Germans have lived in their homelands? You may say, sure, that's not the issue, it's the occupation. First of all, their neighbors don't see it that way. They don't recognize Israel's right to exist. Their slogan is "From the river to the sea, Palestine shall be free", and their map of Palestine shows no Jewish state at all. Also, consider the Arab citizens of Israel. Their numbers have grown from less than 500,000 before the Jewish immigration in the late 1800's to over 2 million today, they have the highest standard of living and the highest standard of human rights than any country in the region. They are free to leave if they want, but they don't want to leave - numerous polls say they prefer to be ruled by Israel than by the Palestinians. During recent peace negotiations, there was discussion of a land swap where some Israeli Arab cities and towns would be part of a future Palestinian state in exchange for some Jewish areas becoming part of Israel. The Arabs were polled several times and overwhelming desired to stay residents of Israel, not by a small margin, but by anywhere between 4.5-to-1 to 10-1 ratios. I'm not saying Arab Israelis enjoy 100% equality with Jewish Israelis, but remember, they don't serve in the army, with few exceptions, and they are not as loyal to the country and people as the Jewish Israelis - far from it. So, what is the difference between the Arab Israelis and the Arab Palestinians? Why does one group have it relatively well and the other one is suffering? There's no difference ethnically - they are all Palestinian Arabs, so what you call apartheid can't be based on racial or ethnic animosity. The difference is that the Palestinian refugees sponsor terrorism and are ruled by terrorist organizations, funded by Communist China, Russia, and the militant Islamic Republic of Iran, and they carry out terrorist operations against Israel. They are the ones that voluntarily (for the most part) left their homes in 1948 and became refugees, after the Jews begged them not to leave and offered to split up the tiny land promised to them by the UK in the Mandate for Palestine, and give the Arabs most of the land, per the 1947 UN Partition Plan. Why are they still refugees after 75 years? After WWII, there were many more millions of refugees in Europe, and none of them were resettled back into their pre-war homelands - they stayed where they ended up after the war. They accepted it and moved on, despite the injustice of it. But in the case of the Palestinian refugees, the UN created a special agency for them, UNRWA, heavily funded year after year, that continually gives them money to maintain refugee camps in the West Bank, Gaza, Lebanon, and Jordan, in hopes of returning to their pre-war homelands. So the international community, including using some of your and my tax dollars, via the US contribution to the UN, is perpetuating the refugee problem, despite the fact that they are all ethnic Arabs from the same part of the world, speaking the same language - Arabic - unlike the WWII refugees, who had to stay in different countries which spoke different languages. I could do on and on, but in summary, when I look around the world at the huge human rights problems happening now, I think Israel is being unjustly targeted for criticism, and that therefore BDS is very unfair. By the way, when BDS results in Israeli companies laying off hundreds of Palestianian Arab workers, as happened in 2015 with the Sodastream corporation, then surely that is a real form of "cancel culture", and it hurts the Palestinians as well as the Israelis. As far as the colonial nature of Israel, I don't like the colonialism of the US and Europe any more than you do. I've been an opponent of the US empire for over 40 years. It's really not a US empire at all, it's a world-government empire working in conjunction with Europe to dominate the whole world and create a tyranny without any human rights, even for Americans and Europeans. So I'm totally against the people ruling the US and Europe. But as you recall, Israel was only one of over 20 different Mandates after WWI, which included Syria, Lebanon, Iraq, and Jordan. Why are singling out Israel? How is Israel any more "colonial" than any of the other mandates? Are you calling for BDS on all those countries, too? Why not? How is Israel colonial but the others are not? Is it Israel's fault that most of the residents came from Western Europe and the US and possessed many of the same technical know-how, and were able to set up a Western-style country there? Besides, the West doesn't need Israel as a colonial outpost in the Middle East. It already invaded Iraq twice, Kuwait, Syria, etc. without Israel's participation. So I think the colonial aspect is overblown. I don't like the Mossad's participation in various scandals like Iran-Contra, etc., but I also don't like the CIA, MI-5, MI-6, FBI, NSA, etc. All that stuff is power politics at a very high level - that's not the fault of the Israeli people, just as Americans are not at fault for everything the CIA does. Bottom line is there are no angels among the nations of the world. Israel is just as flawed as other Western countries, which you probably also travel to from time to time on vacation. How do you think the world looks at America? What if they didn't want to come here for travel and vacations and trade because of the things we've done? Would you want the whole world to engage in BDS against the US, if it meant you or your friends and loved ones would lose their jobs? We certainly deserve it, for developing SARS-CoV-2 and transferring it to a lab in a hostile country with known lab leaks, resulting in millions of deaths worldwide, loss of freedoms, and economic damage. And believe me, that's not even the tip of the iceberg in listing the crimes of the US. We have aided the most brutal dictatorships in the world for over a hundred years, including the USSR, China, Vietnam, Korea, and many others, resulting in the oppression, torture, and death of millions of people. We are far worse than Israel.
About 40 or so years ago my parents went to Israel with my sister & her family, for her son my nephews Bar Mitzvah which took place at the Wailing Wall. They all came back "changed" in some way. Now understand, we grew up in an Orthodox Jewish household. But as us kids, 4 to be exact, got older and left the nest with our own families, religion somehow seemed not as0 important. But that trip to Israel somehow changed that for all who went. They came back with a deeper meaning of what it truly meant to be a Jew. But since I didn't go I missed that transformation. But I've noticed in the last 15 years or so, as I have gotten older, I will be 75 in a couple of months, that religious connection with my faith has definitely become a part of my soul, definitely within the last 3 years as I underwent life saving major open heart surgery. I think aging & facing one's own mortality has a way of opening our hearts & minds to the importance of connecting to a higher power. And giving us a new appreciation for something most of us take for granted, our g-d given life on earth with the belief, or at least the hope, of an afterlife. You may not now have a deeper appreciation for your connection to being a Jew. But I suspect over time it will just happen without you being so aware of its presence in your life. I think religion satisfies a basic human need that in some way we all come to accept.
Thank you so much for sharing your thoughts, feelings and experiences here. If you'd like to learn more about Judaism or Israel, I offer online spiritual coaching and Torah study sessions to men, women and couples. To find out more, visit https://rabbijohnnysolomon.com
My wife and I are going to Israel in October with a Catholic group (my wife is Catholic, I am not but attend Mass with her every week I can for all the family reasons you list above). I am very excited to attend the trip, even more each day. Thanks for your sharing.
As a reformed Agnostic, I hope that a small flicker of faith was stimulated during your trip. I do see God's work all around me, but I also completely respect your position. I just know I am happier in faith than I was without it, and if it turns out there is nothing more I know I have led a better, happier, more giving life by following my faith.
I thoroughly enjoyed reading this! Great images as well and I 100% relate to your MIL. Making a choice to be a family is the best way to put it. I am a Christian and despite all I have seen from beautiful "trips," taken by Christians, I am more inspired than ever to take one to Israel after reading your post and just do everything. Thank you!
You should definitely do it!
Israel is an amazing experience especially when it is multi-generational! Love seeing all the kids together and although not transitional yet, I wonder if it will impact anyone once you return home? Nesiya Tova!
Transformational, but transitional!
Thank you so much for sharing this wonderful family story. You’ve made my day and reminded me of what is really important.
Congratulations on holding the family together and creating that bonding experience! Not easy to do these days! I grew up a Jewish atheist until I was 29, I have family in Israel, and visited there at age 18 for two and half months and several times since then. It wasn't being there that gave me a religious experience or changed my religious beliefs, it was the red-pilling process going on in my life in my 20's, my worldview formation. The phrases "everything I've been taught to believe is false", and "all the mainstream narratives are lies" became real for me. I migrated from leftist atheist to libertarian, then to conservative, then to one-world government conspiracy theorist, then to Bible believer, and finally to Messianic Jew / Christian. Now I understand more clearly than before what being Jewish is all about. God revealed to all of humanity who He was through a people called the Jews and a place called Israel. That was His laboratory to demonstrate His love for all mankind, including you. You have an open invitation to experience the Creator's love for you, as much as any Jew who ever lived. Judaism is not an exclusive religion - it's for everyone. It's just that Gentiles have a different term for it - Christianity. Christianity is the same as New Covenant Judaism. You've gone through your own red-pilling process during the Covid years. I hope you'll continue your truth quest. You might not be done yet.
Gorgeous photos, loved how openly you share - sounds like it’s all about making the connections, enjoying family and opening your hearts - which is not easy, but basic, and yet we forget how important... keep having fun! Xo 🫶🏻
Meeting you was a highlight!!
I'm very honored you gave me the time to chat and get to know you better, Jen.
What about learning about Palestinians. Shocked and disappointed you have not included a palestinian in your educative experience in Israel. Makes it pretty one side.
Family. The cutting edge of the real world.
What about the Palestinians Mrs. Sey? Have you learned anything about their fate under Israeli occupation? Very disappointing to hear about your evident fondness and support for Israel, a brutal, racist, colonial power, that should be treated as the pariah state that it is, just like South Africa was during its Apartheid period. Open your eyes and join the Boycott, Divest and Sanction Israel movement.
BDS applies the cancel culture to 8 million people. The cancel culture is the very thing that Jennifer's substack is all about! You're reading it, so you're evidently against cancelling Jennifer, but in favor of canceling Israel? Isn't that a double-standard? So cancelling is okay as long as you're the one who gets to decide who's cancelled and who is not?
BDS is a form of peaceful protest against a 56-year-old brutal military occupation, land theft, 21st century colonialism, systemic human rights violations, impunity, violations of Palestinian's right to self-determination and to live in their land in peace, without the constant abuse and threats perpetrated by the hyper militarized state of Israel. If BDS means "cancel culture" to you, so be it. To others it means a desperate attempt to stop the cruel Israeli juggernaut through peaceful means. What is truly amazing is that progressive, high-minded people that purport to care about health and wellbeing, completely ignore the evident racist and colonial nature of the state of Israel, since its inception, and act as if it was a normal, regular state, to visit, explore, have fun, recover from hangovers, and yes, of course, to have a learning experience!
I'm sure your intentions are good, and you're just concerned about human rights, so I would affirm you in that. I just think that no nation is perfect, politics is always messy to some extent, and I wonder whether you are weighing both sides of the conflict fairly. I'm sure you're aware that virtually the entire Muslim world has been established by conquest (same as colonialism, just by weaker actors without an industrial civilization), killing, all manner of violent atrocities and forced conversions to Islam, and second-class citizen status of non-Muslims (same as apartheid) and absence of fundamental human rights and political rights. That includes huge portions of the Middle East, North Africa, sub-Saharan Africa, Central Asia, Southeast Asia, and parts of Eastern Europe. Israel wants to possess a small fraction of one percent of all the land area conquered by Islam since the 7th century, to live in their ancient homeland, where their history took place, where their temple stood, where their cities and archaeological sites are located, where the Dead Sea Scrolls were written and rediscovered. Where they can avoid dealing with ubiquitous anti-Semitism and pogroms all over the world, century after century with no letup. Is that too much to ask? By the way, Christianity is one of, if not the largest and most influential religion in the world, and its leader, Jesus, surely the most influential person who ever lived, said that the Jewish Bible was the Word of God, and it promised the land of Israel to the descendants of Abraham, Isaac, and Jacob, not Ishmael, Esau, or anyone else. This cannot be said about any other people group. Out of respect to both Judaism and Christianity, can't the world recognize that the Jews, who maintained their religion and ethnicity for over 1600 years of exile, should be entitled to live as a nation again, as they have continuously dreamed of doing, on a small plot of land where they had a nation from at least 1250 BC to 150 AD, 1400 years, which is longer than the English, French, or Germans have lived in their homelands? You may say, sure, that's not the issue, it's the occupation. First of all, their neighbors don't see it that way. They don't recognize Israel's right to exist. Their slogan is "From the river to the sea, Palestine shall be free", and their map of Palestine shows no Jewish state at all. Also, consider the Arab citizens of Israel. Their numbers have grown from less than 500,000 before the Jewish immigration in the late 1800's to over 2 million today, they have the highest standard of living and the highest standard of human rights than any country in the region. They are free to leave if they want, but they don't want to leave - numerous polls say they prefer to be ruled by Israel than by the Palestinians. During recent peace negotiations, there was discussion of a land swap where some Israeli Arab cities and towns would be part of a future Palestinian state in exchange for some Jewish areas becoming part of Israel. The Arabs were polled several times and overwhelming desired to stay residents of Israel, not by a small margin, but by anywhere between 4.5-to-1 to 10-1 ratios. I'm not saying Arab Israelis enjoy 100% equality with Jewish Israelis, but remember, they don't serve in the army, with few exceptions, and they are not as loyal to the country and people as the Jewish Israelis - far from it. So, what is the difference between the Arab Israelis and the Arab Palestinians? Why does one group have it relatively well and the other one is suffering? There's no difference ethnically - they are all Palestinian Arabs, so what you call apartheid can't be based on racial or ethnic animosity. The difference is that the Palestinian refugees sponsor terrorism and are ruled by terrorist organizations, funded by Communist China, Russia, and the militant Islamic Republic of Iran, and they carry out terrorist operations against Israel. They are the ones that voluntarily (for the most part) left their homes in 1948 and became refugees, after the Jews begged them not to leave and offered to split up the tiny land promised to them by the UK in the Mandate for Palestine, and give the Arabs most of the land, per the 1947 UN Partition Plan. Why are they still refugees after 75 years? After WWII, there were many more millions of refugees in Europe, and none of them were resettled back into their pre-war homelands - they stayed where they ended up after the war. They accepted it and moved on, despite the injustice of it. But in the case of the Palestinian refugees, the UN created a special agency for them, UNRWA, heavily funded year after year, that continually gives them money to maintain refugee camps in the West Bank, Gaza, Lebanon, and Jordan, in hopes of returning to their pre-war homelands. So the international community, including using some of your and my tax dollars, via the US contribution to the UN, is perpetuating the refugee problem, despite the fact that they are all ethnic Arabs from the same part of the world, speaking the same language - Arabic - unlike the WWII refugees, who had to stay in different countries which spoke different languages. I could do on and on, but in summary, when I look around the world at the huge human rights problems happening now, I think Israel is being unjustly targeted for criticism, and that therefore BDS is very unfair. By the way, when BDS results in Israeli companies laying off hundreds of Palestianian Arab workers, as happened in 2015 with the Sodastream corporation, then surely that is a real form of "cancel culture", and it hurts the Palestinians as well as the Israelis. As far as the colonial nature of Israel, I don't like the colonialism of the US and Europe any more than you do. I've been an opponent of the US empire for over 40 years. It's really not a US empire at all, it's a world-government empire working in conjunction with Europe to dominate the whole world and create a tyranny without any human rights, even for Americans and Europeans. So I'm totally against the people ruling the US and Europe. But as you recall, Israel was only one of over 20 different Mandates after WWI, which included Syria, Lebanon, Iraq, and Jordan. Why are singling out Israel? How is Israel any more "colonial" than any of the other mandates? Are you calling for BDS on all those countries, too? Why not? How is Israel colonial but the others are not? Is it Israel's fault that most of the residents came from Western Europe and the US and possessed many of the same technical know-how, and were able to set up a Western-style country there? Besides, the West doesn't need Israel as a colonial outpost in the Middle East. It already invaded Iraq twice, Kuwait, Syria, etc. without Israel's participation. So I think the colonial aspect is overblown. I don't like the Mossad's participation in various scandals like Iran-Contra, etc., but I also don't like the CIA, MI-5, MI-6, FBI, NSA, etc. All that stuff is power politics at a very high level - that's not the fault of the Israeli people, just as Americans are not at fault for everything the CIA does. Bottom line is there are no angels among the nations of the world. Israel is just as flawed as other Western countries, which you probably also travel to from time to time on vacation. How do you think the world looks at America? What if they didn't want to come here for travel and vacations and trade because of the things we've done? Would you want the whole world to engage in BDS against the US, if it meant you or your friends and loved ones would lose their jobs? We certainly deserve it, for developing SARS-CoV-2 and transferring it to a lab in a hostile country with known lab leaks, resulting in millions of deaths worldwide, loss of freedoms, and economic damage. And believe me, that's not even the tip of the iceberg in listing the crimes of the US. We have aided the most brutal dictatorships in the world for over a hundred years, including the USSR, China, Vietnam, Korea, and many others, resulting in the oppression, torture, and death of millions of people. We are far worse than Israel.
Fabulous article. Loved every word.
About 40 or so years ago my parents went to Israel with my sister & her family, for her son my nephews Bar Mitzvah which took place at the Wailing Wall. They all came back "changed" in some way. Now understand, we grew up in an Orthodox Jewish household. But as us kids, 4 to be exact, got older and left the nest with our own families, religion somehow seemed not as0 important. But that trip to Israel somehow changed that for all who went. They came back with a deeper meaning of what it truly meant to be a Jew. But since I didn't go I missed that transformation. But I've noticed in the last 15 years or so, as I have gotten older, I will be 75 in a couple of months, that religious connection with my faith has definitely become a part of my soul, definitely within the last 3 years as I underwent life saving major open heart surgery. I think aging & facing one's own mortality has a way of opening our hearts & minds to the importance of connecting to a higher power. And giving us a new appreciation for something most of us take for granted, our g-d given life on earth with the belief, or at least the hope, of an afterlife. You may not now have a deeper appreciation for your connection to being a Jew. But I suspect over time it will just happen without you being so aware of its presence in your life. I think religion satisfies a basic human need that in some way we all come to accept.
Sorry,
Jewish BDSer
Thank you so much for sharing your thoughts, feelings and experiences here. If you'd like to learn more about Judaism or Israel, I offer online spiritual coaching and Torah study sessions to men, women and couples. To find out more, visit https://rabbijohnnysolomon.com
My wife and I are going to Israel in October with a Catholic group (my wife is Catholic, I am not but attend Mass with her every week I can for all the family reasons you list above). I am very excited to attend the trip, even more each day. Thanks for your sharing.
As a reformed Agnostic, I hope that a small flicker of faith was stimulated during your trip. I do see God's work all around me, but I also completely respect your position. I just know I am happier in faith than I was without it, and if it turns out there is nothing more I know I have led a better, happier, more giving life by following my faith.
😎 awesome, Thames you for sharing!
Fantastic.