Despite all the hardships, despite all the heartache, קטנתי מכל החסדים, I cannot help but wonder sometimes how it is that our generation is worthy of this incredible loving kindness that is the return of the nation of Israel to our ancestral land after so very many painful centuries of wandering bereft and alone, strangers in strange lands at the mercy of other peoples who so often treated our ragtag refugee nation with the utmost cruelty.
Each year I am awed anew at the zkhut, the great merit, granted to me and my family, to live in a generation in which the Jewish people is once more a sovereign nation in our historic homeland, how many of our ancestors had this dream and how beyond words it is that we were granted the hesed, the loving kindness, to realise it.
It is even beyond that though. When I think of my family who came here 70, 80, 90 years ago, how they suffered in a land that was at the time rough and ready in the extreme, how sometimes all they had to go on was their love of the Land of Israel and the people of Israel, but not even a home to call their own, not knowing where their next meal was coming from, whether they would find work, sick from malaria and other tropical diseases that once plagued those who lived here.
And here we are, a generation who can hop on a plane and come home to a country that has been built and developed with blood, sweat and tears and so much faith.
